Dell EMC Hyper-Converged Sales Leader Jumps Ship To Pivot3

Fast-growing hyper-converged infrastructure specialist Pivot3 has nabbed longtime HCI and converged infrastructure sales guru Dan Flood to lead its U.S. sales charge.

Flood told CRN that he plans to leverage his more than 18-year career at Dell, EMC and VCE to drive Pivot3 sales through the channel as well as onboard net new partners.

“Rest assured, I am going to be leveraging my 18-and-a-half-year rolodex of channel relationships to add new partners to our list,” said Flood, vice president of U.S. sales for Pivot3 in an interview with CRN. “I spent my entire career in the enterprise and commercial data center market. What I’d like to bring to Pivot3 is vast data center experience. I would argue that EMC, VCE, Dell EMC was probably the best environment to grow up in from a sales development and training program standpoint.”

[Related: Pivot3’s Ron Nash On Beating Nutanix, IoT And Hyper-Converged Momentum]

Prior to joining Pivot3 this month, Flood served as vice president of sales for Dell EMC’s Modern Datacenter Division for the Americas Global Accounts team – a $1.2 billion sector that represented Dell EMC’s storage, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud portfolio. Flood spent two years at VCE, a joint venture between VMware, Cisco and EMC, where he helped grow the converged infrastructure star into a more than $1 billion business as a regional sales director.

Flood is now tasked with leading Pivot3’s U.S. sales team to drive growth in the enterprise and commercial data center markets as well a growing the company’s channel program. His new position brings Flood back to a familiar place where he began his career as a sales associate for EMC in 2000.

“When I was a young sales person at EMC, I was the first ever commercial sales rep when we started that commercial organization and we were 100 percent channel-only business,” Flood said. “So very early on, I realized the value that channel brings. I’m focused on being a 100 percent channel driven business.”

Dell EMC is the hyper-converged infrastructure market share leader. Pivot3 is a consistent HCI player who is making waves in the space through its video surveillance and Internet of Things capabilities, said Flood.

In Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Pivot3 was named a ‘Challenger’ in the HCI, ranks alongside much larger players such as Huawei. Pivot3 has a large installed base including defense and intelligence agencies, as well as state and local governments. Pivot3’s Acuity platform features policy-based QoS software and serves multiple, mixed-application workloads on HCI.

In his 20 years in the IT industry, Flood has managed sales teams and general business operations for solutions and services across storage, server, network, converged infrastructure, HCI and hybrid cloud markets.

Michael Tanenhaus, CEO of Mavenspire, an Annapolis, Md.-based Pivot3 partner said he believes Flood can make the Pivot3 brand more visible in the HCI space.

“It makes great sense for Pivot3 to have somebody who’s been there, done that, in terms of putting in the work to create and own a brand in this converged and hyper-converged space,” said Tanenhaus. “To really be able to drive the message of what makes Pivot3 different, not what makes it the same.”

Tanenhaus said his company saw significant growth in 2018 of customers seeking Pivot3 for hyper-converged developments around video surveillance. “We saw a big resurgence when having conversations not on Pivot3 as a challenger in the general purpose hyper-converged market, but we really saw a huge surge back to their roots in the video surveillance hyper-convergence market,” he said.

Flood believes he can take Pivot3 to the next level by leveraging these types of IoT and video surveillance capabilities.

“I was on multiple sales calls this week and the amount of customers looking at putting video surveillance workloads on hyper-converged for the mission criticality of data surveillance, video surveillance, IoT, smart cities, etc. -- along with the ability for them to consolidate the remote application servers on the same platform – is huge,” said Flood. “It’s a very unique and interesting value proposition. We can give them one shared platform.”

On the channel front, Flood said he plans to recruit net new partners to jump on board the Pivot3 train. “I have some very deep relationships with a lot of the large national VAR players that are focused on the data center. I’ve already have had some meetings with VARs that are national players that would love to work with us,” he said. “I think we’re going to open up some new revenue streams for a lot of channel partners when they discover what Pivot3 brings to the table around consolidation of mixed workloads with IoT and video surveillance.”