After opening its Americas headquarters in the U.S. a little over a year ago, Res Software has hired Gene Bonacci as its first vice-president of channels and strategic alliances for the Americas.
Res Software is a workspace management software vendor based in Amsterdam that delivers its solutions solely through the channel. In an effort to further its expansion into the North American market, the company opened an Americas headquarters in Philadelphia last January. This office is responsible for serving the North American channel and end-user communities. The company also formed a distribution agreement with Arrow ECS last summer.
Jim Kirby, president of Res Software Americas, said while the company’s North American presence is still relatively new, from a global perspective, it deals with 18 distributors and a “fast growing system integrator community.” With this observation, the company saw the need to create a channel chief role.
“We needed someone to help scale the business in North America and someone who could really own our relationship with Arrow ECS so we can accelerate into this market,” Kirby said.
Prior to joining Res Software, Bonacci served as global vice-president of strategic sales at Wyse Technology, a vendor of cloud client computing solutions. His more than 15 years in the technology industry also includes working at Symantec as its global director of sales and endpoint virtualization and at Appstream, as its global vice-president of sales. Appstream was acquired by Symantec in 2008.
Bonacci said his role at Res Software will focus around three initiatives: to extend the company’s investment in its channel communities, build a federal government practice and relevant partnerships and invest in a dedicated team to support the channel.
In addition to targeting resellers who are who are successful in the cloud computing and virtualization spaces, Bonacci said he will also focus on creating a partner community that ensures “broader coverage” and making sure the company has the “right partners” in Canada and the U.S.
Kirby said thanks in part to the company’s distribution partnership with Arrow ECS, the company has access to partners across North America that can sell its products.
“In the past few months we’ve about doubled the size of our partner network,” Kirby said. “We’re not forgetting about our partners, but we’ll spend the most of our time with gold and platinum-level partners.”
Having recently undergone a re-branding of its products, new pricing and packaging changes, Kirby said its Virtual Desktop Extender product, which enables businesses to enhance remote and virtual desktops with applications that run locally and merge them into remote or virtual desktops for a single desktop experience, can be resold by Arrow ECS’ value-added reseller (VAR) community, even if they’re not authorized.
Res Software has also introduced modular bundling options for its products to make it easier for partners to sell to customers and end-users to consume, Kirby said.
“The modular formats and modular pricing options with our products make it easier for partners to sell and for consumers to move to a dynamic desktop environment,” Kirby said.
A few months ago, the company re-branded its flagship PowerFuse and Wisdom software solutions to make it easier for customers to understand. PowerFuse had been renamed to Workspace Manager and Wisdom is now called Automation Manager.
“We wanted to get some more functional naming to express what the products actually did so customers would understand them better,” Kirby said during a previous interview with CDN. “We also did repackaging using a modular product strategy so it’s easier for partners to price and sell. We’re going to be working with Arrow ECS to find more partners but if Canadian VARs want to contact Gene, please do.”
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