Internap has appointed Patricia Watkins as vice president of global channel sales.
In this role, Watkins is focused on growing Internap’s channel business by increasing partner productivity with new incentive programs and improved relationship management, as well as expanding the company’s breadth of partners to meet growing demand for its high-performance, hybrid infrastructure solutions, including OpenStack-powered public cloud and bare-metal cloud, high-density colocation and managed hosting.
“Increasing sales with channel partners is a critical driver of Internap’s growth strategy. Our unique capabilities combined with channel-friendly policies and programs will enable us to rapidly expand into new markets and reach new customers,” said Michael Ruffolo, president and CEO of Internap. “Patty’s proven track record of success building channel partner programs and developing long-term partner relationships will be critical to expanding this important route-to-market and ensuring partners have the right tools to attract and retain customers seeking high-performance infrastructure solutions.”
Watkins brings to Internap more than 20 years of experience leading both direct and indirect enterprise sales organizations, strategic alliances and business development for some of the world’s largest technology companies. At Internap, she reports to Peter Bell, senior vice president of global sales. Previously, Watkins served as vice president of sales for Avaya, a provider of cloud-based business collaboration and communications solutions. Watkins also held numerous sales and business development leadership roles at Hewlett Packard, most recently as a data center and cloud sales leader, where she successfully launched the Americas SaaS initiative. Watkins also held sales management roles at AT&T, NCR and Teradata.
“Companies across industries – from ad-tech to e-commerce and financial services – are increasingly relying on IT infrastructure to deliver the speed and reliability needed to support business-critical and data-intensive applications,” said Watkins. “With Internap’s full range of high-performance cloud, colocation and managed hosting solutions, we’re uniquely positioned to help our channel partners address this underserved customer demand.”
