Steve Kaplan

Email: Click Here
Other Website: http://www.bythebell.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/roidude
Linked-In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevekaplan

I’ve long been an IT channel champion. In addition to writing a column for three different channel magazines over the years, I co-founded, ran and sold a couple of channel businesses.

The first, RYNO Technology, was named the first Citrix Partner of the Year for the United States. It was acquired by (ultimately) MTM after 14 years. The second, AccessFlow, was named the VMware Rising Star of the Americas after our second year in business. We sold it to (ultimately) Presidio just after our 3rd anniversary. I was VP of Cloud and Virtualization at Presidio until joining Nutanix in March of 2013.

For those of you who don’t know Nutanix, it is a 5 year old start-up that pioneered bringing web-scale converged infrastructure to the enterprise.  Nutanix is the fastest-growing infrastructure company of at least the past 10 years, and is massively disrupting the $70B data center server and storage market.

Forbes recently named Nutanix as tied for the top cloud start-up at which to work out of around 100 companies. Nutanix is in the fortunate position of being able to attract top talent (10 VCDXs work at Nutanix) – and yet they asked me to start up and run channel sales.

I’m not just being falsely modest here. Nutanix was my first job of any kind with a manufacturer. And while I know what I wanted to see as a channel partner, I really had no idea of how to build a successful manufacturer channel practice, let alone one that would support one of the fastest-growing IT companies of all time.

Fortunately, I was able to quickly bring on three absolute top-notch folks with extensive experience in building channels. They’ve done a fantastic job in constructing a Nutanix channels organization that I feel is on the path to becoming world-class.

My role, besides supporting the channels team, is to assist our channel partners in taking their businesses to vast new heights despite the massive disruptions currently taking place inside the datacenter and in the channel. As part of this effort, I decided to launch this personal blog as a forum for discussing thoughts and observations regarding the rapidly changing channel dynamics.

I welcome any comments, questions and even guest blogs.