By Alex Scroxton
10 July 2008
Bernadette Wightman has been officially appointed head of Cisco’s UK channels after it was revealed John Donovan
was moving to the UK
enterprise and midmarket side of the business to try his hand at direct sales.
Wightman joined Cisco in 1999 as a BT channel account manager,
before moving to head up Cisco’s SMB operation in 2005.
An internal management restructure within Cisco’s British
operation has also seen UK
managing director Duncan Mitchell move to a new position inside the vendor.
Donovan recently told MicroScope that there had been management
issues in Cisco’s channel in the past but reaffirmed Cisco’s commitment to work
with its very broad reseller base as the networking industry leads the global
business world into the age of collaboration.
He predicted that partners would increasingly set an example by
working together on project implementations.
“As technology broadens the amount of partners that can be all things
to all people will be very small and someone who is good at technology A will
work with someone to do technology B,” he said.
The channel will largely expect Wightman to maintain this focus,
although some resellers have previously said they were sceptical about Cisco’s
moves towards Web 2.0 style functionality. More importantly, however, she will
face one of the UK’s
largest and most diverse reseller communities, and one that is notorious for
answering back.
One partner remarked: “The impression I’ve had is that Bernadette
is John’s protégé, so it’s not a big surprise to me and I don’t think you’ll
see any major changes. She’s done a very good job in SMB.”
