Channel director back on board at Dell

Geoff Wright has taken up the reins as Dell's ANZ channel director, replacing Peter Murphy.

Wright was previously with Channel Enablers, which provides training, development and consulting services for channel sales teams.

He held a number of roles with Channel Enablers during nearly 13 years with the company, including senior vice president, EMEA and APAC and executive vice president for APJ and EMEA. Most recently he was an executive consultant with the company.

Wright's 27-year career in IT also includes nearly a decade with Microsoft, including two years as director of channels, SMB and anti-piracy with Microsoft Australia.

Wright joins as Dell continues its push to be more 'channel friendly'.

The company signed Ingram Micro as its first Australian distributor late last year, with the distributor handling Dell's enterprise portfolio.

Before his departure, Wright's predecessor Peter Murphy told ChannelLife that Dell was looking at the possibility of introducing a distributor in New Zealand as well.

Dell is also funding several heads into channel partners in Australia, with Murphy acknowledging late last year that work still needed to be done to build trust between the channel and Dell.

"Dell's heritage has been direct engagement with customers, and as we begin to embark on a partner-lead strategy, clearly there is some level of relationship we need to build with the partner community and some trust we need to generate in order for them to build a business around our technology platforms," Murphy said.

Channel Enablers' profile of Wright says he has a 'depth of knowledge concerning the markets and challenges of our customers across the world, in work that has ranged from high level strategic channel re-engineering projects through to building sales teams as organisations adopt channels as a go-to-market model, executive mentoring and the development of skills within channel teams'.

Murphy's New Zealand replacement James Arnold also has a channel background, having been Dell's first New Zealand channel manager back in 2010 and establishing the vendor's channel presence for the first time in New Zealand. He also served time as Lenovo's New Zealand distribution channel manager.