The VAR Guy

Sophos has named Steve Hale as its new vice president of global channel sales, The VAR Guy has heard (and LinkedIn has fully confirmed). Hale is a familiar name to savvy channel partners — having held key channel posts at Novell, F5 Networks and Microsoft. Hale joins Sophos at a rather intriguing time. Here’s why.

Sophos recently acquired Astaro — a channel-centric security company. Moreover, Sophos itself was acquired last year by a private equity firm. Some pundits wondered if Sophos would (A) lose its channel focus or (B) abandon its growth strategy under the private equity firm’s ownership.

Apparently, those fears were unfounded. The Astaro acquisition coupled with Steve Hale arriving as global channel chief shows that Sophos — and its owners — remain focused on channel-centric growth.

That’s all The VAR Guy has to say about that… at least for now. Our resident blogger hopes to catch up with Hale in the next few days…

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