Brocade Names New Global Channel Chief

Spicek will be returning to her native Germany to run Brocade's EMEA OEM business unit. New to the channel chief role is Regan McGrath, formerly Brocade's vice president of Americas sales and now vice president, global channel sales and marketing.

McGrath is a tech veteran of more than 25 years and has spent 12 of them at Brocade. Tom Ellery, former vice president of sales for Brocade's enterprise LAN business, has taken over McGrath's Americas sales post.

[Related: Brocade Greets 'Year of the Channel' With New Partner Incentives ]

Elsewhere, Phil O'Reilly, formerly Brocade's vice president of integrated marketing, is now vice president of sales, Ethernet fabrics. O'Reilly joined Brocade in 2010 from Juniper, where channel partners knew him as senior vice president of enterprise sales, Americas.

Finally, Charlie Foo, most recently senior director of Brocade's Partner Business Group for the APAC region, is now vice president of the APAC region, based in Singapore.

Ian Whiting, Brocade senior vice president, worldwide sales, said the three executives represent "the best of the best within our sales organization."

"As we continue to advance toward a channel-led sales model to grow Ethernet market share globally, we need a strong sales leadership with experience in all aspects of the sales cycle and go-to-market strategies to fully capitalize on growth opportunities within service provider, campus LAN, enterprise data center and storage networking environments," Whiting said in a statement.

Under Spicek, Brocade significantly expanded its Alliance Partner Network program, luring partners with pay-for-performance-based revenue incentives. About 65 percent of Brocade sales now go through partners, and during Brocade's sales kickoff last fall, its sales force was charged with getting that number to 80 percent by the end of the year, Spicek had told CRN.

Spicek became Brocade's global channel chief in January 2009, about a month after Brocade completed its $2.6 billion acquisition of Foundry Networks. SAN products still dominate Brocade's field presence, although the company has continued to broaden its Ethernet networking and data center fabric offerings. A year ago, Brocade introduced CloudPlex, its strategy for combining compute, storage and networking components into a converged architecture.

Brocade reports second fiscal quarter results Thursday.