BlackLine appoints Mel Zeledon as new channel VP

BlackLine has appointed Mel Zeledon as its new senior vice president of channels and alliances, a role which will make the cloud software veteran of 35 years responsible for leading all partner ecosystem programs globally.

In Zeledon's new role, he will oversee all alliance, reseller and outsourcing partnership initiatives as BlackLine continues its work in the finance and accounting spheres.

Zeledon's last role was vice president for global channels at Workday, a financial and HR security-as-a-service (SaaS) company. Here, he overhauled their partner programme, growing annual sourced revenues as much as 40% year-over-year during his tenure.

Before Workday, Zeledon was at IBM, where he was vice president of channels and mid-market for six years.

Here, he drove more than US$500 million per year in worldwide revenue through channel and alliances business partners for the Business Analytics brand.

"Mel has a successful track record building, scaling and leading partner programs globally for a wide range of technology firms, from start-ups to large Fortune 100 companies, as well as across the gamut of channel and alliance partners including global consulting and advisory firms, resellers,  systems integrators, managed service providers and independent software vendors," says BlackLine president and chief operating officer Marc Huffman.

"We expect his extensive experience to be invaluable as we scale strategic partnerships from both a go-to-market and customer success and retention perspective.

Zeledon, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Costa Rica, was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University, where he earned a Master's Degree in Computer Science.

He reports to Mark Woodhams, BlackLine's senior vice president of global sales, who joined BlackLine following a long and successful career at NetSuite.

"It's exciting to be joining a fast-growing company with a huge, untapped market opportunity that is also absolutely committed to scaling high-quality partnerships to grow and enhance customer experience and success," says Zeledon.

"I look forward to leveraging BlackLine's partner ecosystem to continue to enable customers to achieve their business objectives by helping them take advantage of best-of-breed cloud accounting software tools, along with complementary partner solutions and services.

In addition to the companies above, Zeledon has also served in partner ecosystem leadership positions with Adaptive Insights, Cognos, Hyperion Solutions and Siebel Systems, in many cases partnering with other tech industry leaders such as SAP.

Earlier in his career, he established and ran an Oracle Corp. subsidiary in Central America.