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As the hottest upstart in the wireless networking space, Ruckus Wireless is adding new solution providers at a clip of about 600 a quarter, worldwide. That type of expansion meant it was time to reshuffle its executive team and add significant channel resources, according to the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company.
Among several executive additions to Ruckus, which is said to be lining up bankers for its long-expected IPO, is David Zimmer, a longtime networking and storage channel chief who signed on as Ruckus' senior director, worldwide channels in April.
Zimmer was most recently senior director, North America channel sales for the Huawei Symantec venture, but is perhaps best known for the five years he spent at QLogic as senior director, worldwide channel sales and marketing, from 2002 to 2007. After that came channel chief stints at Pillar Data, DataDirect Networks and Dot Hill, and earlier in his career, Zimmer spent eight years as a channel operations manager at Cisco.
[Related: Ruckus Goes High And Low With New Wireless Access Points]
Zimmer's connection to Ruckus is Denis Maynard, now Ruckus' vice president, worldwide sales and field operations, with whom Zimmer worked first at Cisco and later at QLogic.
"He gave me a call, we chatted about some of the exciting things that were happening here," Zimmer told CRN. "This is an exciting place with regards to the growth and the new market opportunities at a time when most places are seeing stagnant or declining growth. This is a company like in the old days of the industry, from my perspective."
Ruckus has had channel chiefs before; its first, officially, was John Sampson, who exited Ruckus in 2011, and then the role was under Ron Gill, who was recently promoted to Ruckus' vice president of sales, Americas. But Zimmer, who reports to Maynard, fills a crucial role Ruckus hadn't quite filled previously: a dedicated manager for channel resources who oversees all of Ruckus' regional channel leads.
"We've grown our channel base, and up to now, we left it up to the regional guys in sales to understand who best to work with in each region -- they've been responsible for deciding and signing up partners in their region," said David Callisch, Ruckus' vice president of corporate marketing. "But we have so many channel partners now that we need to systematically leverage that channel, and we need to do that from a sales perspective and a marketing perspective."
