New Cisco US, Canada Channel Chief: Not Just A Caretaker

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Cisco's new U.S. and Canada channel chief, Jim Sherriff, will spend a lot of time over the next two months meeting with Cisco partners. Above all, Sheriff says, he'll be listening.

"The next 45 days I'll be starting to test some of my theses with partners -- some of the operating principles I have and the change agendas I'll be driving," Sherriff said in an interview with CRN Thursday. "I'm not coming in with the assumption that I need to make radical changes, but I think Keith [Goodwin] brought me in under the assumption that it wouldn't be just caretaking."

What might those theses be?

"Three to four days into this new role, I'm a little reluctant to go on the record because I might end up embarrassing myself," he said. "But there are a number of things to do in any kind of business, and I'll be looking at addressing partners needs, problem solving around resource constraints and looking at how I can free up resources."

Sherriff became Cisco's senior vice president, U.S. and Canada partner organization this week and his appointment was announced earlier Thursday by Keith Goodwin, senior vice president, worldwide partner organization. He succeeds Wendy Bahr, now senior vice president of global and transformational partnerships, who had headed U.S. and Canada channels since January 2008.

Before joining Cisco in 2001, Sherriff spent 19 years at HP and then two years as CEO of Stonebridge Technologies, a 700-person, Dallas-based solution provider. At Cisco, he was senior vice president of the company's enterprise segment, and for the past two years has been chairman and CEO of Cisco China, in charge of Cisco's business strategy in the country.

He described leaving China as "bittersweet" and described his experience there as most intellectually stimulating of his career.

"It's like golf: just when you think you've gotten good at golf, you have a bad game," he said. "Just when you thought you'd figured it out, you realize you still had a lot to learn."

According to Sherriff, he had been planning a return to the U.S. within the year for family reasons, and taking over the U.S. and Canada channel role presented a good opportunity. U.S. and Canada channels represent about 50 percent of Cisco's overall global channel community, and a lot's changed about Cisco and the breadth of its technology focus -- as well as its competitors -- in the past two years.

"I'd put what we're doing around virtualization and infrastructure as the most dramatic. But even in the collaborative market space, with video becoming so much more a part of a solution, there's so much there," he said when asked about what he saw as some of the the biggest differences from two years earlier.

NEXT: Sherriff's Team And Partner Reaction

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