A CEO’s Summer in Silicon Valley

A CEO’s Summer in Silicon Valley

This summer Channel Mechanics CEO Kenneth Fox, packed his bags and traveled to California with his family to spend the summer in Silicon Valley meeting with customers, prospects and partners.  A lot of meetings took place…we actually lost track and aren’t sure if he managed to take any time off…as he discussed how our channel enablement platform is being utilized to take channel offerings to the next level. Read about his experience here.

A summer in Silicon Valley

What have Cisco, Dell, Oracle, Extreme Networks, NCR, NetApp, Maytronics, LG Electronics, Huddly, CafeX, Yagna, Palo Alto Networks, AT&T, CradlePoint, EIMS, Entando, DotProduct, BigSwitch, Zyme, Comstor, ScanSource, D&H Distributing and many more got in common? They all engaged with Channel Mechanics in the past 3 months!

Relocating to Silicon Valley for a number of months enabled me to spend quality face-to-face time with many of our customers, meet new customers and form great new partnerships. The true value of being onsite and siting across the table to discuss current projects, cannot be overstated. From building deeper relationships to quickly understanding their channel program requirements, really made a difference and accelerated time to market for both our customer and Channel Mechanics.

Living in Santa Clara meant I was within a short drive to most of the companies we work with and enabled meeting every week with little to no forward planning. Having recently started work on new initiatives with the Cisco Networking Academy team, the Cisco Worldwide Distribution team, the Cisco IT team and others within Cisco, it was important that I spend time with all the key stakeholders to ensure these projects moved forward with as much momentum as possible.

Similarly, Channel Mechanics are working closely with Extreme Networks to deliver on a number of their key channel programs. Accompanied by Phil Wright, our US General Manager and George Bennett, US Sales Leader, we had many working sessions in the Extreme Networks San Jose office on how best to execute new channel programs and support Extreme on transitioning their newly acquired partners from recent acquisitions.

In NCR we spent time meeting their new Channel leaders to work on mapping out channel strategy and operational implementation solutions. These are just some good examples of companies and teams we spent time with in the Bay area. As members of CompTIA we took the opportunity to attend ChannelCon 2017 in Austin Texas to participate in the three-day channel focused event and hear first-hand from partners, distributors and vendors about their experiences and requirements from their day to day work in the channel.

As we say in Ireland #NothingBeatsBeingThere! Meeting all the different people and teams in person results in more productive working relationships so when we all return to our desks we can easily jump on a WebEx, GoTo, Skype, Zoom, Chime or simply pick up the phone and talk through various projects with a better understanding from both sides.

From a personnel point of view, the summer in Silicon Valley trip meant a lot of very early starts and long days to cover European and US time-zones. It also meant waking up every day to guaranteed sunshine, lots of face to face customer interaction and endless possibilities for new projects, customers and partnerships which were hugely rewarding. Our weekends were packed with adventure from Yosemite to Monterey and every water park and shopping mall in between. My family did not want to come home but unfortunately the school year beckons and needless to say we are already planning the next trip!!!

Kenneth Fox, CEO of Channel Mechanics