Infoblox Hires Former Polycom Executive As New VP Of Worldwide Partners

Network management and control vendor Infoblox is funneling further investments into its global channel program, announcing Tuesday it has hired Chris Jones as its new vice president of worldwide partners.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said that the former Polycom executive will be responsible for leading the global partner organization and working closely with Infoblox's sales teams to grow and scale its business through partner programs and initiatives.

"One of my top priorities as new VP of worldwide partners is enhancing the worldwide partner program to expand benefits and enablement for our valued partners," Jones told CRN. " We'll be launching this revamped program early in our new fiscal year which begins on August 1. The program reinforces our commitment to our partners with increased investment and focus on partners' go-to-market efforts."

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Jones joins Infoblox from Polycom, where he was president of the Americas sales and global partner organization, and responsible for over half of the company’s revenue. Before Polycom, Chris ran the partner organization and commercial sales for Juniper Networks, as well as the global partner organization for Cisco WebEx.

According to Jones, the new program will reward partners for their investment in certifications – so partners who invest in certifications and training will receive increased benefits. Partners can also take advantage of updated online sales and technical pre-sales training on all Infoblox products for accreditation, said Jones.

"Another goal is reinforced commitment to our channel through increased investment and focus on partners' go-to-market efforts," he said. "We'll aim to accomplish this by honing in on three fundamental principles that are core to our strategy: growth, simplicity and profitability for our partners."

Infoblox on Tuesday also announced it is opening further opportunities for its channel program through making its network infrastructure protection solutions available to Westcon-Comstor. Infoblox said that the addition of its core network services offerings to Westbon-Comstor's security solutions practice enables solution providers to offer a complete network management and control solutions portfolio, "while increasing their reputation as trusted business and IT partners for their customers’ network infrastructure," according to a company statement.

"Adding automated core network services across the data center, virtualized environments and the cloud opens up new opportunities for solution providers to be successful,’ said Carol Giles Neslund, vice president and general manager of the Westcon-Comstor Security Practice, in a statement.

Looking to the year ahead, with DNS security becoming an increasing issue, Jones said he hopes to provide partners with something "new to discuss and differentiate themselves in the crowded field of security" with expertise and new offerings, as well as by investing in emerging fields like IPv6, IoT and mobility.

"I hope to drive sales through driving engagement with our sales teams to work with our partners to help customers mitigate risk - especially with hackers increasingly leveraging DNS to steal sensitive data," he said. "We are a partner-driven company with 95 percent of our business driven by partners and are first and foremost, committed to our partners and building collaborative relationships them."