Extreme Networks has appointed James Owens as its new regional director.
Owens was previously the Asia-Pacific sales director for Oracle and has also worked for Cincom Systems as its sales consultant.
Some of his objectives with the networking vendor include expanding the business in Australia through supplying partners with leads, marketing tools and technical support.
Owens said one of the biggest challenges for the vendor at the moment was generating awareness of its product offering and value proposition.
The vendor is also looking to expand its partner base, particularly within the enterprise and datacentre space.
“We're looking to make a paradigm shift from networking specific partners to more of a solutions-based partner within the system integrator community,” Owens said.
“We're looking at system integrators with competencies in areas like education, health and public services.”
The vendor’s visiting chief marketing officer, Paul Hooper, added one of its biggest revenue inhibitors, was not its technology, but the awareness in the market.
“We enable partners to make a much more profitable business with the portfolio and also our product is based on a modular operating system that is very extensible,” Hooper said. “The partner not only has the opportunity to sell product and provide the initial installation, but they also have the opportunity to work with their customer on how to improve their network capabilities.”
Globally Extreme has 700 partners and 200 in the Asia-Pacific region.
Hooper highlighted private and public cloud computing, wired and wireless convergence as well as data, video and voice convergence as some of the hottest trends happening in the market.
“There isn't an investment today that isn't considering a flexible or scalable architecture that allows them to expand into private or public based cloud,” he said.
“We're starting to see a push on how the networking is really going to become a substantial mission critical component that people didn't think about 20 years ago.”
