Symantec has named two new key players in its Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) leadership team, following the acquisition of Blue Coat Systems last year.
ARN can reveal that Symantec A/NZ managing director, Ian McAdam, will lead the combined entity in the local region, with the former Blue Coat A/NZ head of channels, Joe McPhillips, stepping up to take charge of the local partner ecosystem.
While both appointments will not become official until the end of March, ARN understands that the pair are already operating in their new positions in preparation of the official start date.
McAdam has run the A/NZ business since June 2015 and shepherded the local entity through the acquisition of Blue Coat and transition to the combined business. Prior to joining the cyber security vendor, McAdam was vice president of applications at Oracle A/NZ.
Previously, he held senior leadership positions at eCommerce company, eServGlobal, as well as performance management solutions company, Mondello Worldwide, and enterprise software vendor, ABB.
“Channel partners play a critical part in the Symantec ecosystem and having just launched the new Secure One channel partner program, Joe will truly lead the way in providing our partners with more opportunity for greater growth and profitability,” McAdam told ARN.
Meanwhile, McPhillips has been in charge of Blue Coat’s local channel since September, 2015, joining from Intel Security where he was sales director for the company’s next generation firewall business in Asia Pacific.
Prior to this role, he held executive channel and alliance positions at Riverbed, Symantec and CommVault.
“I’m thrilled at the opportunity to lead our Channels business at Symantec. I’m also passionate and excited about our new partner program,” McPhillips said.
“I’m looking forward to delivering predictability and profitability to our channel partners by providing solutions that solve the world’s biggest cyber security problems.”
The appointments come shortly after the vendor launched its combined channel offering, unifying the two companies' partner programs.
Prior to the launch, McAdam told ARN that in order for the company to have a holistic approach to the cyber conversation, it was talking to customers about the combined technology suite and its relevance to end-users.
“We did have two different partner communities which had very little overlap and the number of conversations that are now addressing both sides is only reinforcing what I hear from the customers that there is a form of consolidation occurring,” he said.
In addition to the annexation of Blue Coat Systems, Symantec released its latest endpoint solution in November 2016, with the vendor telling its partners that opportunity was turning to monitoring and managed services and it was gearing up to help partners capitalise on this trend.
“We are elevating the skills of our people to enable the partner to deliver higher value services in first of all rolling out the infrastructure and then managing the response,” Symantec cyber security strategy manager APJ, Nick Savvides said at the time.
“I think that's a great opportunity for partners. If a partner is getting $100 to roll out a server, then they can get $200 for doing remediation."
