HP Snags Cisco Executive For VP Sales Job

HP has snagged a Cisco executive as its new vice president of U.S. sales to lead the sales offensive for its HP Networking Division.

Mark Stephenson, a six-year Cisco veteran, is now leading the HP ProCurve sales charge with a laser-like focus on getting HP and its partners to show up and fight for every networking solutions sale against Cisco.

Hewlett-Packard Senior Vice President and General Manager Marius Haas, who oversees HP's ProCurve networking division, said Stephenson started at HP two weeks ago and met with a number of HP partners at the HP Americas Conference last week.

"We're excited to have him on board," said Haas. "He's obviously an excellent addition to the team. Nothing beats getting in front of 2,000 partners your first week on the job."

Bob Venero, the president and CEO of Future Tech Enterprise, a Holbrook, N.Y. VAR 500 power, said Stephenson brings "domain knowledge" of Cisco that will be key to helping HP and partners beat Cisco in the sales trenches.

"If you bring on Cisco people you have a much better opportunity to win," said Venero. "The best way to know your competition is to have someone that was your competition be part of your team."

Stephenson has deep knowledge of the Cisco sales structure, particularly in California, where he was most recently operations director Northern California. In that role, Stephenson was driving enterprise global sales teams with a group of 45 regional and engineering managers and client executives. The Stephenson team was involved with major enterprise customers, including 25 health-care customers (Kaiser), high tech customers (VMware, Intel, Oracle), Financial (Visa) and retail (Safeway).

Next: HP's ESSN Group Goes After Cisco's margins

Fueled by its $2.7 billion acquisition of 3Com, HP's ESSN group is aiming to take a big bite out of what it calls Cisco's 80 percent margins in networking market.

ESSN Senior Vice President Randy Seidl, for his part, has touted a "new management structure" aimed at helping HP and its partners gain traction in the networking market. He said the aim is to get more "feet on the street with sales resources, partner resources, (and) solution architect resources."

HP also recently hired Janet Waxman, the former vice president of Infrastructure Channels and Alliances at market researcher IDC, Framingham, Mass., to lead channel strategy for ESSN Americas.

Waxman, who will report to ESSN Vice President Channel Sales Frank Rauch, is working on "evolving the channel strategy for ESSN." Specifically, Waxman will be looking at "channel coverage, competitive differentiation, channel alignment and portfolio programs."

Rauch said the addition of Waxman is aimed at taking ESSN's channel strategy to the next level and is a "testament to HP's appetite to invest in the channel and to attract top talent to our channels organization."

The HP changing of the guard also comes with the recent departure of Karl Soderlund, HP's top Americas ProCurve Sales and Marketing executive, who has jumped ship to take a job as senior vice president of worldwide sales and business development with Certeon, a hot virtual appliance WAN optimization and application acceleration company based in Burlington, Mass.

Soderlund could not be reached for comment. But Haas confirmed Soderlund's departure and said the decision was entirely Soderlund's.

"He decided he wanted a change," said Haas. " We wish him well. He was a valuable part of the team."