Polycom Confirms New North America Channel Chief

Dan Sibille became Polycom's vice president of North America channels earlier this month, and will cover all aspects of partner development with Polycom VARs, solution providers, distributors, systems integrators and call control vendors in the region. He reports to David Ruggiero, Polycom theater president of North America, himself a recent Polycom hire.

Sibille was most recently director of Americas channels for Polycom video rival LifeSize Communications, and has been in the industry for 27 years. Before LifeSize, Sibille held various channel and sales leadership roles at at Extreme Networks, Internet Security Systems and 3Com, among other companies.

Ruggiero said that Sibille's channel experience and focus on unified communications will accelerate Polycom's channel growth.

"I'm thrilled to have Dan join Polycom to help us empower our channel partners to sell the Polycom RealPresence Platform and penetrate new market opportunities for video, including social media and mobile," Ruggiero said in a statement.

Sibille joins Polycom at a critical time in the growth of its video and UC practices, as it goes toe-to-toe with Cisco in the enterprise video space, faces an onslaught of smaller competitors like LifeSize, and has revamped its channel program to offer more lucrative partner loyalty rewards to VARs.

Polycom throughout 2011 has been aggressive with growing its software and services strategies, as well as beefing up RealPresence, the software infrastructure, formerly known as UC Intelligent Core, that powers its telepresence and video products. The company has also been a particularly active acquirer, having bought video content management specialist Accordent Technologies, the video business of strategic partner HP, and most recently, video collaboration upstart ViVu within the past eight months.

Sibille and Ruggiero join a growing list of executive appointments made at Polycom following CEO Andy Miller's ascent to Polycom's top job in May 2010. Gary Testa, vice president, Global Cloud and Service Provider Solutions Group, and Kate Hutchinson, chief marketing officer and executive vice president joined in May, Tracy Newell, executive vice president, global sales, joined in July, and Navin Mehta, senior vice president, global services, joined In August.

Elsewhere, a LifeSize Communications spokesperson confirmed Sibille's departure, and that Sandra Hill is now LifeSize's director of channel programs for the Americas. Hill, who was most recently director of channel development for the vendor, was named to the role officially the week of Nov. 7.