Adtran Loses Veteran Channel Chief

Steven Harvey, vice president of enterprise networks and competitive service provider sales at Adtran, told CRN Monday that he's leaving the company this week to take on a new role at another company. His last day at Adtran is Wednesday.

Harvey declined to name the company he's moving to until details are finalized later this week.

Harvey is being replaced by Adtran insider Ted Cole, who was named vice president of channel sales for the Huntsville, Ala.-based company's Enterprise Networks Division. Cole previously served as senior director of sales at Adtran, a role in which he oversaw sales of enterprise products to service providers.

Harvey has overseen Adtran's partner program for nine of the last 11 years. He ushered in recent updates to the vendor's Advantage Partner Program, including the launch of a deal registration program that offers back-end margins of 3 percent to 8 percent on top of the average 15 percent margins that partners get up front.

Under Harvey's direction, Adtran also has invested more than $1 million to build a telesales group within the channel organization to recruit new partners and uncover channel sales leads. The nine employees added to staff the new team amount to a 33 percent increase in channel personnel at the company.

In addition, Adtran recently rolled out partner resource management software from BlueRoads, which provides automation for the new deal-registration program and includes a "guided selling" option that gives solution providers suggestions for selecting and selling the appropriate products to fill a customer's needs.

Adtran's channel push comes as the company ramps up on its new VoIP product line, launched last year, and seeks to recruit partners with the skills to support its young IP telephony and internetworking product lines.

Solution providers said they don't expect Harvey's departure to derail Adtran's channel efforts.

"I doubt it will have any direct impact on our business. ... Most of my contact with them is through the regional people," said Frank Dolik, president of D&A InfoTech, a solution provider based in Mount Prospect, Ill., that doubled its Adtran sales last year. "They've been pretty proactive about improving their partner programs over the last few years, so I would expect that to continue."