HPE, TD Synnex Vet Joins D&H Canada’s Channel Team

‘Simply put, I think D&H has a winning formula right now. I’ve witnessed it firsthand as a vendor. And now I’m joining D&H at a time of growth. When you think about the company, 106 years in business, 18 years now in Canada, we’ve enjoyed 28 percent growth in the last three quarters, 41 percent in the last 90 days. So clearly we have some Mojo going on right now, and I’m excited to be a part of it,’ says Rob Brown, D&H Canada’s new vice president of sales.

D&H Distributing this month welcomed a new senior executive to help expand its Canadian business, which as of late has shown above-market growth.

Rob Brown, a 22-year channel veteran of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Tech Data, is now the new vice president of sales for D&H’s Canadian business.

For Brown, who left Tech Data in 2014 as senior manager of U.S. SMB sales to join HPE where he served most recently as director of North American distribution channel sales, the move to D&H came about because of his perception of the distributor in the market, he told CRN.

“Simply put, I think D&H has a winning formula right now,” he said. “I’ve witnessed it firsthand as a vendor. And now I’m joining D&H at a time of growth. When you think about the company, 106 years in business, 18 years now in Canada, we’ve enjoyed 28 percent growth in the last three quarters, 41 percent in the last 90 days. So clearly we have some Mojo going on right now, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Distribution rivals Tech Data and Synnex merged in 2021 to form TD Synnex.

Peter DiMarco, general manager of D&H’s Canada business, told CRN that Brown’s experience in building sales teams and years of experience in distribution is a requirement for D&H as it moves to its next level of growth.

“We’re on a hypergrowth path right now,” he said. “Our business is up 24 percent over the last half of last year, and the last quarter was up 40 percent, and that’s specifically for Canada. So we’re seeing tremendous growth. And we need a leader to come in and build a talent plan and operating plan that helps us scale with our customers.”

As much as sales is about relationships and talent, it is also about operations and processes, DiMarco said.

“Rob’s got a ton of experience to help us build what I call an advanced sales motion,” he said. “As we began our journey in Canada, we were predominantly focused on partners serving the SMB space. Now we’re getting a lot of interest from partners serving the higher end of the midmarket as well as the public sector market. Those markets need an advanced sales motion as it relates to relationships and business planning. Rob has those skills and is really going to work on helping develop how we go to market.”

Brown also has solid experience in advanced solutions including data center, networking, and security, DiMarco said.

“Having someone from HPE with that experience gives us the depth of knowledge to help us grow and scale those categories,” he said. “The good news for us is our product business is growing 100 percent year-on-year over the last couple quarters. Rob’s really going to help us expand into that category to sell more complete solutions and help with our pre-sales process. [Also], many partners have said they want to do more with D&H. They want us to invest in them, and they want to invest time in D&H. Rob has the skillset to bring it all together.”

Brown comes to D&H Canada during a time of macroeconomic and political changes in the North American market, particularly the Trump tariffs.

Brown, when asked about the impact tariffs are having on D&H Canada’s business, said it has not had much impact on the company so far.

“Here at D&H, there’s some segments that are soft,” he said. “I think public sector is probably going to suffer the most potentially over the next 12 to 18 months. We just haven’t seen a softness in our business relative to tariffs, yet we’re growing at far greater rates than the market. We need to be cautious, and we need to work closely with our vendor partners on whatever impact could be down the road. But so far, our business has been able to sustain any impact.”

Brown said there has been speculation around a slowdown in Canadian government spending even as it moves to increase spending on national defense.

“So we might see a shift in spend versus a decline in spend,” he said. “That’s purely speculation, and time will tell. Based on the various conversations I’ve had in the market, there seems to be a bit of a cautious approach to spending in government, and we’ll have to watch how that plays out.”

D&H is also hiring, Brown said.

“In fact, it’s another reason why I joined the company,” he said. “It’s really exciting to be attached to a company which is growing as fast as we are, both with the revenue and the addition of people to our team. So yes, D&H Canada is definitely on a hiring spree.”

The Canadian solution provider market is not the same as the U.S. market in many ways, DiMarco said.

“What I really love about Canada is the closeness,” he said. “There are great relationships across the customer community and the vendor community, and many of our associates have great tenure in the industry, whether it’s distribution or the reseller channel. So the ability to impact change is far greater in Canada than it is in the U.S. And to me, that’s a really big advantage.”

Another big difference is the focus in Canada on the midmarket and SMB space, DiMarco said.

“We don’t have the breadth of enterprise or Fortune-level companies seen in the U.S.,” he said. “And so we can spend a lot of time enabling partners to focus on midmarket partners, maybe 300 or 400 users, and sell total solutions, everything from the edge or the endpoint all the way to the workload that sits in the cloud. In the enterprise business, that’s a bit more challenging. The margins are under more pressure And so in Canada, there’s a greater opportunity to get deeper and wider into that space.”

However, given that D&H in the U.S. does not have a big focus on the enterprise, its Canadian business can take advantage of the distributor’s U.S. experience, DiMarco said.

“The good news is, the playbook, the processes, the investment strategies that we built in the U.S. to build out our commercial business apply 100 percent to Canada,” he said. “D&H as a whole isn’t overly dependent upon the highest level of the enterprise space, whereas other members of the channel, maybe. A lot of the processes and tools that we executed in the U.S. over the last 10 years at D&H, we’re now rolling out in Canada. … But all of our market-facing resources, be it technical or sales, will be invested in Canada.”