Channel Chatter:Wallace Departs Seagate For Hitachi

In his new role, Wallace will be responsible for developing Hitachi's strategy for channel programs, channel structure and developing a value proposition for solution providers to engage with the storage division of the $60.1 billion diversified Japanese conglomerate.

Speaking from his Santa Clara, Calif., offices on the first day of his new job, Wallace said he was recruited to fill the new position within Hitachi because of the company's interest in making a transition from a predominantly direct-sales model to one more reliant on a network of solution provider partners. The company is engaged in a pitched battle with EMC and IBM in the high-end of the networked storage space and has been slower than its rival to embrace a more balanced sales strategy. "What I saw here is a company with great technology but it needs someone to translate it into 'channelese,' Wallace said. "We don't have a compelling enough channel proposition."

It will be up to Wallace to change that proposition and engage partners. EMC has spent the better part of the last year further penetrating the channel and recruiting storage VARs and integrators to sell its low-end Clarion products as well as its higher-end storage hardware and software management tools.

For Wallace, he is leaving the land of low-margin disk drives for desktop and Intel-based servers and entering a market just as competitive but certainly one more margin rich. Wallace plans on spending the next day 90 days assessing Hitachi's partners and visiting partners to determine their needs as he builds a blueprint for the company's new channel strategy. Hitachi Data Systems currently has a basic tiered "one size fits all" channel program in place, but its executives are anxious to further segment the market.

Hitachi Data Systems will also be recruiting channel professionals to flesh out Wallace's team in the United States and around the world. The company recently hired Steve Block, former Logitech channel executive, to head up channel marketing for the U.S. As part of its fledgling channel efforts, Hitachi is also examining how it compensates its direct sales professionals for sales made through partners, a move that many see as a prelude to a deeper channel engagement.

In his new role, Wallace will report to Rachel Young, Hitachi Data Systems senior director of global integrated marketing. Young works closely with Scott Genereux, HDS' marketing vice president.

During his tenure at Seagate, Wallace is credited with championing the channel cause and played an instrumental role in formulating the company's first official channel program. It wasn't long after that in 2001 that Wallace and Seagate captured first place in VARBusiness' Annual Report Card competition. It was a sweet victory for Seagate, which often found itself in second place, behind disk drive maker Western Digital.

As far as technology, EMC and Hitachi have taken radically different engineering paths in an effort to take on the enterprise space. On the high-end, EMC recently launched its new Symmetrix DMX subsystem, which introduced an architecture that is purely hardware based. Internally, the DMX products have multiple point-to-point connections -- with each piece of data getting its very own highway between the back-end controllers and the front-end controllers. EMC's strategy is to overtake the competition with speed.

On the other hand, Hitachi Data Systems uses an engineering approach to offer customers a high-end product that internally uses both hardware and software to beef up a customer's ability to connect multiple disk arrays and servers to Hitachi's high-end systems. Internally, the boxes use a switch-based architecture, likened to a road system with multiple, interconnected highways and mulitple on-ramps and off-ramps. It also uses a sophisticated virtualization firmware that radically increases the number of ports to the system on the fly.

--Sonia Lelli contributed to this story