New Sales Executive Team at NetApp

Less than a year after joining NetApp, Inc. as president, César Cernuda has announced changes to the go-to-market model and global sales organization that will help steer the company into its cloud-led future.

He is instituting a customer- and partner-centric strategic and operational evolution that will allow NetApp to move to a customer engagement model focused on driving deeper specialization and delivering hybrid cloud expertise powered by digitization. The changes will see the company ramp up its efforts to drive consistency and simplicity across its global sales organization and more aggressively address key markets and segments while reaching new customers and partners.

“With today’s relentless pace of change, speed is the new scale. And that’s what organizations are demanding as they try to put their data to work to keep innovating and stay ahead of the digital curve,” he said. “We are implementing these changes to better serve their needs. We will soon deliver a personalized, data-driven engagement model that allows our current and future customers to move at warp speed and aligns with the new way they want to engage with their solution partners.“

The evolution offirmp’s sales organization will also result in changes and additions to the sales leadership team, effective May 1, 2021:  
• NetApp veteran and former SVP, blobals, verticals, and Pathways, Rick Scurfield will serve in the company’s newly established role of chief commercial officer. He will be responsible for building a new GTM motion and strategy including direct sales and channel coverage and will drive the transformation of digital and virtual sales teams and sales operations to better enable sales force and worldwide partnerships. He has led sales organizations for more than 20 years, most recently growing and leading sales teams supporting largest global accounts, vertical segments, global pathways, and the US Public Sector.
• Max Long, former SVP, chief customer officer at Adobe, will be joining as new SVP, North America. Leveraging his 30+ years of experience building high-performance sales teams and leading business transformations. He will continue the focus on aligning NetApp’s business objectives in the US and Canada driven by its customer’s business requirements. He will lead direct sales, channel sales, and demand gen teams.

• Alexander Wallner, also a NetApp veteran who most recently served as SVP, WW enterprise and commercial field operations, will take on the newly created role of SVP, International. He will lead the execution of all GTM activities for the EMEA, APAC and Latin America regions. Focusing on increasing the footprint of NetApp as the partner-of-choice for its international customers, he and his team will help customers address their data challenges with hybrid multi-cloud solutions including data center architectures and superior cloud software portfolio.

“Rick’s and Alex’s proven leadership and in-depth knowledge of our industry, our customers and our partners combined with Max’s track record of leading enterprise sales teams to success at scale will be instrumental in helping organizations everywhere unlock the best of today’s hybrid multi-cloud world, wherever they are on their digital transformation journey-on premises or in any cloud,” added Cernuda.

The evolution of the NetApp data-driven GTM model and cloud-led sales organization is expected to be a continuous process starting in 1FQ22.