CA Taps New Channel Executive

Kafkarkou, who has previously served as a general manager of indirect sales overseas in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, replaces Mark Milford, former senior vice president and general manager of North American channels, who departed unexpectedly last week. Kafkarkou will be based in the United States and will report to Gary Quinn, executive vice president of sales and field operations at CA. Chris Devlin, who joined CA in 1996, and most recently was senior vice president for storage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, will replace Kafkarkou in Europe.

Kafkarkou said his main focus will be to grow the company's channel business and engage partners in more business transactions through programs such as the new "channel preferred" model for CA's BrightStor storage business, which teams CA's partners with its direct sales force and compensates CA salespeople for selling through the channel rather than direct. CA said earlier this year that it planned to implement the channel preferred model to others CA brands, and Kafkarkou has implemented "extensions" of the new channel preferred model in Europe with CA's eTrust and AllFusion ERwin product lines.

"We have a plan and we've progressed. We'd like to be further along with it, and that's my focus," Kafkarkou said in an interview with VARBusiness. "We've made a lot of progress in North America with BrightStor, but we need to do more. We don't do a particularly good job as a company articulating CA's strengths as a storage management company."

Storage spending, however, has weakened as competition has increased. Despite the tough environment, Kafkarkou is optimistic about storage and said CA's storage business will be better in the upcoming second quarter than it was in Q1. And Kafkarkou is also setting his sites on Veritas, CA's main rival in storage software.

"Is there a dogfight with Veritas in the backup and recovery market? Absolutely, and they have more market share than we do," he said. "I suggest in a year or two, however, we should review that analysis. Plus, in the area of storage management, I think we're by far in the lead."

Kafkarkou said he will devote much of his time to implementing the channel-preferred model in other business units such as eTrust and try to attract new partners to CA. "We probably has 50 security enterprise solution providers in North America, but only 20 to 25 are active and certified," he said. "We have to have a good network of security solution providers across North America to move to the next level. The opportunity for them is huge. For example, CA doesn't have a security audit service for our customers, and we never will. That's a huge opportunity for solution providers."

CA's new channel chief also said he's committed to reversing the company's poor reputation with partners and making CA a premier channel company. "I think what we've seen initially [with the channel preferred model is our partners pinching themselves because two or three years ago, we screwed the channel," Kafkarkou said. "But we've evolved from that point. And we're just warming up."