Storage News
New Ctera CEO Oded Nagel: ‘We Will Focus On Partners, Partners, Partners’
Joseph F. Kovar
‘We believe that the best way, and let’s say the most scalable way, [to compete] is to go full channel. And we’re going to invest more in channel building. We are going to launch a new partner program where we’re extending and expanding our partnership with our strategic partners,’ says Oded Nagel, Ctera’s new CEO.
Making Room For Change
Ctera, a leading provider of edge-to-cloud global file services, Wednesday unveiled a new executive team tasked with helping the company achieve its next stage of growth after a year in which it grew its revenue, all of which comes from subscription licenses, by 40 percent over 2021.
The changes at the top include Oded Nagel, who moves from chief strategy officer to CEO; Michael Amselem from sales vice president to CRO; and Saimon Michelson from vice president and field CTO to vice president of alliances.
At the same time, Liran Eshel, who co-founded Ctera in 2008, is giving up his CEO seat to become the New York-based company’s new executive chairman, where he will focus on Ctera’s key strategic initiatives.
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Nagel, in an exclusive meeting via a videoconference call with CRN from Israel, said the moves come as privately owned Ctera had a very good 2022 but now the time is right to take the company to a new level.
“[Liran’s] going to be working on positioning staff, thinking about how to position the company in different ways, and more things that require [in-depth] discussion on where we want to be, and not really [having] an active role in managing the sales operations, the sales team, the engineering,” he said.
This is an important move for a company that depends on channel partners to sell subscription licenses for all of its revenue, Nagel said.
And, he said, this is being done in a very competitive global file services market where Ctera is not only facing focused competitors like Nasuni and Panzura, but also large established legacy NAS vendors like NetApp, Dell Technologies with its EMC line and Microsoft.
“We believe that the best way, and let’s say the most scalable way, [to compete] is to go full channel,” he said. “And we’re going to invest more in channel building. We are going to launch a new partner program where we’re extending and expanding our partnership with our strategic partners.”
Here is more about Ctera’s plans from its new CEO.
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