I’m pleased to announce the appointment of Donna O’Hear to the position of Senior Director, North America, Vertical Channels. In this role, Donna will bring her expertise to help lead Symantec’s channel efforts in the federal, state and local government, healthcare and education markets. She’ll be taking on this unique role as we’re making continued investments in the channel in the vertical space, and we’re confident that her years of leadership experience in addition to our commitment to grow and evolve our program will help make our partners successful.
Donna has more than 20 years of experience developing strategies and leading teams to accelerate revenue and increase profits for IT products and services through OEM, channel resellers, systems integrators and service providers. She is also an expert in federal contracting, financing and leasing. Donna joins us from Avaya Government Solutions, where she led a team responsible for partner enablement, growth and profitability for the federal market. She has also held channel roles at Harris Corporation, Cisco and GE Capital.
This role is unique in that it’s focused on working to evolve our channel programs to be more targeted and effective, providing value into the vertical markets. Understanding the unique nuances of each of the industries, how they tie back to Symantec solutions, and how Symantec can help our partners add value in those industries via the right coverage model and enablement will be key.
I’m excited for Donna to join the Symantec team and I’m certainly not the only one. Rob Potter, Vice President, Federal at Symantec shared with me how he’s looking forward to working with Donna due to her excellent track record in key vertical markets. “Donna has a wealth of experience making channel programs successful,” he said. “At Symantec, she will be the conduit for our teams to engage with organizations in these key verticals. This is great news for our partners focused on vertical markets and another example of our continued commitment to the channel.”
My colleague Greig Patton, Vice President, Enterprise at Symantec also had this to add: “Donna has robust experience across these industries, relevant channel management experience and really strong technical knowledge. She’s at the intersection point of where Symantec, our partners and vertical markets will meet to help our partners become even more effective.”
This is an exciting time for Symantec and our partners. We’re seeing considerable interest from organizations in healthcare, education and government, which have expressed a renewed focus on the importance of IT and security. We will continue to invest in this space, and develop new programmatic elements and resources in the future.
