Cisco Canada has a new channel chief.

A blog post from Cisco Canada president Nitin Kawale Monday introduced Mike Ansley, formerly head of Cisco’s vice president of Cisco Canada’s solutions sale group, as the company’s new partner leader in this country.

Ansley steps into the role of channel chief held since April 2009 by Donna Wittmann, who moves on to a role as “the leader of Worldwide Partner Led Named, Kawale’s post said, where she’s focus on growing sales to mid-sized customers through partners. In her new role, Wittmann will report to Andrew Sage, vice president of worldwide partner-led and (as Kawale astutely points out) also a former Cisco Canada exec.

Read on for some more details on the announcement from Cisco.

Kawale’s blog post offers the following rundown of Ansley’s career at Cisco Canada.

Mike Ansley, vice president of solutions sales for Cisco Canada and a tremendous leader within the Cisco Canada organization, assumes leadership of our Canadian Partner organization. He will continue to drive partner success through an integrated solutions-focused sales model that incorporates Cisco’s architecture strategy. Mike rejoined Cisco Canada in 2010, but is no stranger to our company, having previously held various international senior management positions within Cisco from January 1996 to May 2004.

Meanwhile, Kawale tells Canadian partners to “stay tuned for the future announcement of our new solutions leader” who will be taking up Ansley’s previous role.

And of Wittmann’s new worldwide role, Kawale writes:

In her new role as the leader of Worldwide Partner Led Named, Donna will have responsibility for Cisco’s efforts to accelerate sales to mid-sized customers through our partners’ sales and engineering community with innovative new strategies, tools and programs that support collaborative selling.

Wittmann’s return to Canada (where she had previously served as Xerox Canada’s channel chief) may have only lasted a little over two years, but she definitely leaves her mark on the Cisco Canada channel community, leading the company’s partner community through a strong period of growth and introducing a number of new made-in-Canada partner initiatives.