Les Williamson
Les Williamson has vacated his role as vice president of Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) at Citrix, 18 months after his appointment.
ARN can reveal that the Melbourne-based executive has exited the position he assumed in February 2017, effective immediately.
Williamson was charged with executing the vendor’s corporate cloud strategy, alongside delivering consistent growth across all sectors of the local business.
“Les Williamson, who led the Sales team in Australia and New Zealand, has decided to leave the company and pursue other interests,” a spokesperson for Citrix told ARN. “Citrix would like to thank Williamson for his contributions to the business.
"Citrix remains committed to our customers, partners and the A/NZ market and will ensure a smooth transition. We work closely with our customers and partners to ensure there is no impact to the business.”
Prior to joining Citrix, Williamson spent more than 14 years at Cisco, in a variety of local and regional management roles.
Key positions included more than two years as vice president of Asia Pacific, with Williamson reaching revenue of US$2 billion across enterprise, channel, government, telecommunications and commercial markets.
Furthermore, Williamson also ran the local business for Cisco from March 2007 until October 2011, surpassing top line revenue of US$1 billion in the process.
From a channel perspective, little is expected to change for Citrix in the local market, with the vendor recently overhauling its distribution strategy in Australia.
As reported by ARN, Citrix parted ways with Tech Data to streamline distribution strategies.
Consequently, Dicker Data was appointed as the distributor for the Citrix reseller business locally, joining Rhipe with access to the Citrix Solution Provider (CSP) portfolio.
Specifically, the CSP program is designed for service providers who provide and/or resell hosted software services to end-user customers.
The decision followed a nationwide distribution review for the vendor, which only involved the Australian market.
Williamson’s departure also follows news that David Nicol has been appointed as managing director of BlackBerry across A/NZ, as the vendor deepens engagement across the channel.
Nicol was previously director of cloud services and new business at Citrix since January 2017, having joined the vendor in May 2013 as the director of field sales, before becoming director of workspace product sales in 2015.
