VMware's Co-Channel Chief Jumps To Salesforce.com As Partner Organization Shakeup Continues

Todd Surdey, a five-year VMware veteran who's been serving as the vendor's co-channel chief, has resigned to take a senior leadership role at Saleforce.com, CRN has learned.

Surdey told CRN on Wednesday that he's joining Salesforce.com as senior vice president of worldwide sales for its platform business, which includes Force.com and Heroku.

Newly appointed channel chief Ross Brown confirmed Surdey's departure in an internal email sent to VMware's Global Partner Organization last week, which was viewed by CRN.

[Related: VMware Appoints New Channel Chief To Replace Departing O'Callaghan]

Surdey was named VMware's co-channel chief and vice president of strategic alliances and emerging partners in October of last year.

VMware was not immediately available for comment.

VMware named Brown, a 24-year channel veteran who's previously worked at IBM, Citrix and Microsoft, as its new channel chief earlier this month. He replaced Dave O'Callaghan, senior vice president of global channels and alliances, who'd held that role since early 2013.

Surdey's direct reports will now report to Brown -- except for Loretta Brown, vice president of OEM alliances, who will report directly to VMware Chief Operating Officer Carl Eschenbach, according to the email.

Surdey joined VMware in 2010 as global vice president of emerging business and products sales, a role he described in his LinkedIn profile as akin to an interim COO leading the incubation and integration of VMware acquisitions.

Since then, Surdey has focused on getting VMware partners up to speed with its software-defined data center vision, in which networking and storage are virtualized along with servers, as well as driving partner sales of VMware's vCloud Air public cloud, mobility and hyper-converged offerings, according to his LinkedIn profile

Before joining VMware, Surdey spent six years at SAP, where he was global vice president and general manager of software sales, according to his LinkedIn profile.

PUBLISHED AUG. 19, 2015