Kaaren Lewis (F5 Networks)
Kaaren Lewis has been appointed as director of channel sales across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) at F5 Networks, replacing the recently departed Rodney Thorne.
Lewis joins the vendor with the remit of expanding channel capabilities on both sides of the Tasman, spanning partner strategy and execution.
The addition of Lewis comes amid a double hire for the vendor locally, with Jade Meara also joining as head of marketing across A/NZ.
“We are proud to have Kaaren and Jade onboard to help drive growth in A/NZ through their strong technology and leadership expertise,” said Jason Baden, managing director A/NZ at F5 Networks.
“As organisations are moving into increasingly multi-cloud environments, our go-to-market approach needs to adapt to the new ways customers consume technologies today, and cater to their security and application service needs for tomorrow.
“Kaaren and Jade will be vital in helping F5 on this journey towards providing secure, flexible and easily consumable application services.”
Lewis joins F5 four months after exiting as director of channels and alliances across A/NZ at Commvault, following a global restructure which resulted in partner-facing roles move to Asia Pacific.
With more than 25 years of experience, Lewis has held key channel and sales roles across Australia, working for vendors such as IBM, Hewlett Packard and Dell.
More recently, Lewis ran channel operations for Canon Australia, before joining Commvault in June 2017.
“For the A/NZ channel, moving to an application-first era means the need to develop new business models, provide new security expertise, and overall be able to deliver the right solutions and frameworks to build and deliver apps that are faster, smarter and safer,” Lewis said.
“2019 is going to be a big year for F5 and my focus will be on helping the A/NZ channel community share this potential for growth.”
Lewis replaces Thorne in the role, who was appointed as director of channels across Asia Pacific at Cybereason in late November.
Meanwhile, Meara is tasked with driving marketing strategy and efforts across the region, joining F5 from Nutanix.
Leveraging over 12 years industry experience, Meara has also held marketing roles at Ingram Micro, IBM, Konica Minolta and Pure Storage.
“I am looking forward to working with the F5 team as we look to help customers take their digital journeys one step further in the application capital era,” said Meara.
“F5 is going through exciting changes with a lot of potential for growth in the A/NZ market, and I’m excited to be driving this with the team.”
The double appointment comes nine months after Baden exited his role as country manager of Brocade across A/NZ to take up the leadership role of F5 locally.
Baden replaced Rob Malkin, who vacated his position after almost two years and has subsequently assumed the local leadership position at Commvault.
Following the change, Baden has been tasked with leading the vendor’s operations across the local market, leveraging more than 15 years of experience across IT and telecommunications.
