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VMWare champion joins Stratus


Johannesburg, 26 Sep 2012
Brendan Widlake will help grow the Stratus brand and local operations across Africa.
Brendan Widlake will help grow the Stratus brand and local operations across Africa.

Stratus Computer Technologies recently appointed Brendan Widlake, formerly of VMware, as its new Business Development Executive.

Widlake was an early employee with the local VMware office and spent four-and-a-half years as the Regional Partner Manager, structuring, building and managing the VMware Partner ecosystem and team. He was a member of the VMware Southern Africa and Northern EMEA Extended Management teams and responsible for local product go-to-market strategies and Channel Sales Operations. As his title suggests, Widlake will be responsible for business development, leveraging his extensive relationships, network and market awareness across Africa to help grow the Stratus brand and local operations.

Stratus is well known within the banking, payments and settlements industries for offering its customers Absolute Availability on these critical applications through its unique fault-tolerant ftServer range. Widlake will be taking this value proposition to new market segments, customers, partners and territories.

"I've worked with Stratus as a VMware Alliance Partner for many years and have always been impressed by their unique ability to deliver Absolute Availability to customers," says Widlake. "As customers expand their virtualised environments to business-critical applications and more service providers in the local and African market start offering cloud computing services, so the need for computing infrastructure being available all the time becomes critical. We are able to help these cloud providers guarantee uptime and service level agreements to their customers."

Widlake continued: "I will be focusing on some of the sectors that Stratus has not traditionally been focused on. I also have a strong background and belief in channel sales and strategic partnerships, which is why I'm going to start by expanding both our Stratus Reseller Partner network and key strategic partnerships with select software vendors across the continent."

Widlake started his IT career in 1998, and in 2000 he joined one of South Africa's major technology players, Dimension Data, and held a variety of architecture, services business development and sales roles over a seven-year period. A further sector sales manager position at NetApp and channel responsibility at VMware followed. Most notably was the growth and success of the VMware channel across the 33 countries in southern Africa. During his tenure with the company, Widlake championed the South African leg of VMware's well-known Partner Exchange and Solution Track events, and led the channel team that grew the organisation's reseller base from 40 to over 1 000 with a revenue increase of over 2 200%.

"I believe I'll complement the already successful local Stratus team and see large opportunity for growth throughout the African market. Our unique, proven solution offering differentiates us significantly and we currently underpin many of the critical applications in South Africa's corporates. We are also the only technology vendor that is prepared to offer an uptime guarantee (currently $50 000) when running VMware on our enterprise-class servers; a bold guarantee in helping our customers achieve Absolute Availability," concluded Widlake.

Brendan Widlake has a range of industry specific vendor qualifications and has completed the Management Development Programme through Manchester Business School. He is currently pursuing his Bachelor in Management Leadership through the University of the Free State Faculty of Business.

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Stratus

Stratus Technologies is a privately held company, owned primarily by Investcorp, Intel Capital, MidOcean Partners, and NEC. The parent company, Stratus Technologies Bermuda Holdings, is incorporated in Bermuda. Originally founded in the computer heydays of the 1970s as "Stratus Computer", the company has been committed to the art and science of fault-tolerant computing from the start.

Today, by integrating around-the-clock monitoring services with resilient technologies, Stratus delivers uptime assurance to businesses and organisations around the world. Visit stratus at www.stratus.com.

Editorial contacts

Alex de Coning
Cerebra Communications
(011) 465 5709
Alex@Cerebra.co.za