Gavin Moore is Vice President and CTO for EMEA and LATAM at NetApp. He has worked as Customer and Employee Experience Leader and Technology Product Strategy at Oracle for 18 years.
What does your position entail?
My role as CTO and VP for EMEA and LATAM at NetApp is to help define and agree the strategy of our organization and how we go to market, how do we bring all the different parts of the organization all pointing in the right direction, so that we all execute as one.
Can you explain how your company works with channel partners?
Partners are essential to our business because our partners tend to have the full scope of the entire solution they are working on with a customer, while our part may only be one element of the solution. Our partners are therefore essential to help us be involved in the full solution with customers. Also, they bring us a huge amount of business and we bring a huge amount of business to them, so it is a very supportive mutually beneficial relationship.
What is your management philosophy?
My view on management is that I like to hire the best people, point them in the right direction and then get out of the way.
Do you work differently with channel partners in Latin America compared to other regions?
Yes, because we don’t have a strong physical presence in LATAM so we rely on our great partners to represent our business in the region.
How do you ensure channel partners flourish in a highly competitive market?
We provide them with as much technical support as possible so anything they need from a technical point of view in terms of enablement or additional help with their end-customers, providing whatever resources are required.
We do our best to offer the best commercial terms to make it as attractive as possible for our partners to work with NetApp.
We also have a variety of support mechanisms so that during any customer engagement where a partner needs help with the basics of the commercial transaction or technical help, we are there on hand to give them any help they need to be successful in that engagement.
What are the latest trends you see emerging across the channel?
With all the different possibilities that companies have now to deploy IT – applications; infrastructure; etc, there are a wide range of different scenarios and options for companies and customers to deploy the applications and infrastructure, including using the public cloud or on premise. Given this situation now, I think partners have become increasingly important because companies need additional help and advice on all these different scenarios. Implementation partners are vital to customers everywhere now because of the potential complexity with deploying IT, and implementation partners are crucial to make sure that the solutions are as simple as possible to implement and then manage afterwards.