Opengear announced the appointment of Mark Hughes to the position of Channel Manager for EMEA.
Hughes will head up efforts to expand Opengear’s channel landscape across EMEA, with the aim of recruiting five to six resellers in each of Opengear’s key country markets within the region.
This effort is designed to reinforce Opengear’s presence in EMEA and will increase its core, strategic channel community to 50, with a number of other specialist relationships across EMEA.
In building the channel community for Opengear, Hughes will work closely with Exclusive Networks, a value-added distributor (VAD) that has covered southern Europe for Opengear since June 2019, and has now expanded that relationship to also cover the DACH region (Austria, Germany and Switzerland) and the UK as of January.
Hughes has extensive experience working with, recruiting and enabling channel members in the out-of-band and IT infrastructure markets. Immediately prior to joining Opengear, he was the EMEA Partner Manager for Out-of-Band remote network management products at Lantronix. Other past roles include more than six years as Global Partner Development Manager at Hitachi Data Systems and seven years as Channel Development Manager at IBM.
Hughes said: “I’m delighted to be joining such a successful company and I’m looking forward to helping the business grow further both by developing our existing network and by connecting with and onboarding new channel members.
“My focus will be on building a close-knit, value added channel community, and developing relationships based on loyalty and mutual understanding to benefit all parties including the end customer.”
Hughes joins Opengear at a time when the company is already experiencing strong growth across EMEA.
“We are looking to take business growth to the next level in EMEA by creating a structured distribution and reseller channel”, said Alan Stewart-Brown, VP EMEA, Opengear “Mark’s extensive industry connections and his in-depth experience and expertise both in business development and in building dynamic fast-growth channel and partner networks across the region make him ideally suited for this role.”
