Presidio Snags Ex-Dimension Data North America President For Regional Leadership Role

Former Dimension Data North America President Waheed Choudhry has landed a job overseeing operations for $2.7 billion solution provider Presidio's 11-state Western region.

Choudhry started with New York-based Presidio, No. 21 on the 2017 CRN Solution Provider 500, in July, according to his LinkedIn page. He left Dimension Data in January 2017 as part of an exodus of high-ranking executives from the Johannesburg, South Africa-based company, No. 10 on the 2017 CRN SP 500, sources told CRN at the time.

"Waheed is widely recognized for building and mentoring high-performance teams centered on a customer-centric culture," Presidio wrote on its executive leadership team page.

[RELATED: Sources: Dimension Data Executive Exodus Continues, With North America President And SVP Of Human Resources Out]

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Choudhry's hire comes two months after Presidio CEO Bob Cagnazzi said the company was examining white space areas on the West Coast for geographic expansion. Cagnazzi told Wall Street investors in May that Presidio has been very good at tuck-in acquisitions that really add value right out of the gate.

Presidio has acquired a handful of smaller solution providers in recent years, including Cisco networking specialist Netech and cloud consulting, engineering and integration firm Sequoia Worldwide. Presidio executives weren't immediately available to comment on Choudhry's hire.

West is one of Presidio's six geographic business units, and includes eight offices across Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. Choudhry is one of five presidents to supervise a geographic region for Presidio, according to the company's website.

Choudhry had been with Dimension Data since the company's April 2014 acquisition of Valencia, Calif.-based Nexus, No. 78 on the 2013 CRN SP 500. He joined Nexus in 2004 as a regional sales manager and worked his way up to the president and COO role, which he held from 2011 until the company was acquired by Dimension Data.

At Dimension Data, Choudhry said he achieved a growth target of $2 billion for the company's U.S. and Canadian sales and solution organization, according to his LinkedIn page. There, he led a team of more than 400 sales professionals around various verticals, and managed strategic partner relationships with Cisco Systems, EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper Networks and Deloitte.

Prior to that, Choudhry said he organically grew Nexus' revenue from $225 million to $600 million and boosted EBITDA from $9.6 million to $30 million during his tenure as president and COO, his LinkedIn page states. He achieved that largely by boosting Nexus' Cisco bookings from $162 million to $340 million during that period.

Choudhry said he launched Nexus' brand in the Northern California market at the start of his tenure with the company, growing revenue from zero to $50 million in just three years.

Choudhry departed Dimension Data around the same time as Denise Messineo, senior vice president of human resources. One month earlier, Dimension Data Americas CEO Mark Slaga and CFO Eric Gibson left the company, while global CEO Brett Dawson resigned suddenly in June 2016.

Presidio began trading as a public company in March 2017, making it the first major solution provider to launch an initial public offering since CDW in June 2013.

In its first quarter as a publicly traded company, Presidio saw cloud revenue grow 52 percent to $119 million, while security revenue jumped 85 percent to $89 million. But the company's largest revenue segment – digital infrastructure – declined 8.6 percent to $420 million.

The company's decrease in digital infrastructure revenue was due to lower sales from government customers, particularly in the federal government, as well as the shift toward software subscriptions. However, Cagnazzi said in May that digital infrastructure sales should bounce back in the current quarter, and be a low-single-digit growth area for Presidio over time.