Microsoft's channel chief role is set to transition from Gavriella Schuster to Rodney Clark, ChannelE2E confirmed through multiple sources ahead of the Microsoft announcement.
Clark currently is corporate VP of IoT and mixed reality sales at Microsoft. Schuster is corporate VP for Microsoft's One Commercial Partner program.
Microsoft officially announced the channel chief transition a few hours after ChannelE2E's report on the news surfaced. Schuster shared her perspectives about the transition on LinkedIn.
Gavriella Schuster: Empowered Partners for Cloud Services
Schuster is widely credited for building Microsoft's recurring revenue and cloud partner strategy -- which has increasingly engaged MSPs across the Microsoft Office 365 and Azure platforms. Among the proof points:
- Fully 58 percent of the world's Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs for 2021 rank Microsoft as the top technology company empowering their businesses, according to just-completed ChannelE2E research that will be released in April 2021.
- Dozens of Microsoft Azure Expert MSPs rank among the world's Top 250 Public Cloud MSPs, according to ChannelE2E research.
Still, Microsoft also suffered from occasional channel conflict concerns, along with partner perk dustups that Schuster also had to address.
Microsoft VP Rodney Clark: Alliance and Partner Experience
Clark's experience, meanwhile, extends from SMB technology relationships to enterprise alliances. He previously was GM for Microsoft's global small and midsize business organization, GM for public sector and GM for Microsoft's Samsung alliance -- which involved a tricky balancing act of partnering and competing with the mobile device giant.
Clark is expected to play a central role at the Microsoft Inspire 2021 virtual worldwide partner conference, which is set for July 2021.
