Watkins brings a proven track record of over 25 years of sales management experience and joins Opengear following a Sales Director role at Server Technology where he developed and led sales of power distribution and monitoring solutions for the critical facilities market across EMEA.
“Opengear is an innovative company that delivers unique products to customers keen to streamline and improve management tasks and I look forward to helping to develop both direct engagements and a stronger channel focus,” explains Watkins, who has held senior roles within several specialist data centre organisations, including AFCO Systems, where he forged his extensive experience in the sector.
Watkins will lead a team that has beaten expectations in 2012 posting 78% year on year growth as well as increasing its channel footprint across Europe. To further capitalise on demand, Opengear has appointed TD Tech, a division of Trend Distribution AS (TD Nordic) to offer Opengear solutions across the Nordic region. The deal strengthens Opengear pan-European channel position and builds on existing agreements with distributors Hardware.com and the SPHINX group.
“To succeed in the today’s economic climate, organisations must look at innovative methods of meeting remote support and management requirements while reducing costs,” explains Robert Waldie, Business Development Manager for Opengear EMEA, “This has prompted customers from the distributed enterprise to the data centre to adopt smart remote management technologies that streamline and automate many of the time consuming and expensive management and problem remediation processes, reducing both OPEX and infrastructure downtime.”
“These drivers combined with a broad portfolio of innovative products are reasons for our strong growth and having a proven sales executive such as Derek on board will allow us to continue our record growth through 2013,” Waldie adds.
Opengear’s range of remote management appliances are deployed worldwide to securely manage a wide range of critical network, IT, telecommunications and power infrastructure from vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, HP, Check Point and APC.