CA Technologies has introduced David Ridout as the new country manager and vice president of sales for Canada. And chief amongst his priorities on the job is building up the company’s business through the channel.

Ridout, who was promoted from sales director for Western Canada, is looking to continue the “significant” growth the company has seen in Canada in recent quarters. The company’s Canadian operations had a “great fiscal 2011,” which wrapped up March 30, and Ridout’s major goals include “expanding our customer base, our existing customer relationships and our channels as well.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is looking to significantly increase its channel ranks.

Instead, Ridout said his preference is to build the base of business it has with existing partners.

“We’re always looking at new relationships, but we’ve got some very strong partners here in Canada and we want to continue to do that and continue to grow their business,” Ridout said.

Those partnerships include with “alliance partners,” the Deloittes, Accentures and IBM Global Services of the world, as well as managed service providers and more traditional resellers or solution providers.

Chief amongst its growth opportunities is – what else – the cloud. Ridout said that because so many of the company’s enterprise and public sector customers are looking for new solutions in the cloud, resellers should look at new ways to help those customers manage, secure and automate cloud solutions.

“We’re spending a lot of time with our partners, getting them trained up to bring those new solutions to market,” Ridout said.

In the last 18 months, CA says it has invested $1.5 billion in cloud-based technologies, both in research and development and in acquisitions.

Ridout hinted that the company would be launching a new channel program very shortly, in part to help address the changing need of partners vis-à-vis the cloud.

Ridout has a 17-year background in business and sales management, the last three of which have been with CA. Prior to that, he headed up business development and marketing for Primus Knowledge Solutions and most recently was vice president of worldwide sales at WatchGuard Technologies,

Ridout takes over the top role at CA from Jimmy Fulton, who has been promoted into a role running CA’s mainframe business for North America, a role that will take him back to his native Atlanta. “Jimmy did a fantastic job here in Canada,” Ridout said.