New Virtana Channel VP Wants More Cloud MSPs

Bob Kilbride aims to develop a partner program and expand alliance partnership as he adjusts to his new role at Virtana.

Cloud monitoring and analytics vendor Virtana is expanding its partner reach, and the company’s new worldwide vice president of channels and alliances, Bob Kilbride, is leading the way.

He joined the company in February after most recently serving as head of channel sales for cybersecurity startup Perimeter 81. Now he’s focused on taking Virtana’s channel strategy in a new direction.

“We are now transitioning from an organization that has worked with partners who are solely focused on data center and private cloud to partners who are focused on hybrid and multi cloud and public cloud,” Kilbride said.

It’s a natural progression for the enterprise-focused organization. Historically, it has focused on optimization and management of data centers, private cloud infrastructure and workloads but added hybrid environments in recent years.

“It’s a combination of continuing to support our existing partners and enabling them for the new but also bringing on a new set of MSP partners that are more cloud-focused,” Kilbride said.

Kilbride is focused on getting more public- and multi-cloud focused MSPs on the roster. One of those new partners added is cloudEQ.

“One of the reasons we went with Virtana is because they were really easy to work with. And collaborative on some of the idiosyncrasies or nuances that we were looking for in the space and the changes that we wanted to the platform. So, the relationship was symbiotic in that way, and allowed us to really kind of customize a little bit of the platform for their benefit as well as for ours,” said Sean Barker, CEO of cloudEQ.

Along with adding more MSPs, Kilbride aims to build a new partner program.

“We haven’t had a true MSP/service provider program. So, I’m looking at building that program for our partners that is going to be really driving value for them. … My goal is to build a world-class, hybrid cloud management program for MSPs,” Kilbride said.

Expanding alliance partnerships is another priority.

“What we’re looking to do is continue to align with partners like Dell and AWS, and also expand those partnerships. We’re a multi-cloud platform. So we have functionality for [Microsoft] Azure, [and] will have functionality for GCP [Google Cloud Platform]. So we’re going to expand our alliances to cover those types of partners as well.”

When it comes to adding value to the channel, Kilbride is looking to do it from the inside and ousidet.

“The outside value is what I just described, enabling partners to build a service around our solution, enabling our partners to build our solution. The inside value is our sellers seeing the value in the services that the partner is delivering.”