Karen Armor comes to Goliath looking to continue their channel’s recent growth by segmenting the channel more effectively and increasing enablement resources, including the hire of a channel manager.

Philadelphia-based Goliath Technologies has appointed Karen Armor as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales. Armor was most recently Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at 5Nine, which was acquired by Acronis last December. Her job at Goliath will be to help spearhead the company into its next phase of growth, and critical to that will be continuing Goliath’s recent expansion of its channel business.

Goliath has been providing proactive, end-to-end IT performance monitoring within the end user computing market since 2010, with a decided though not exclusive focus on the health care segment within that space.

Armor joined Goliath on April 13, completing a restructuring of the C level suite under CEO Thomas Charlton. Stacy Leidwinger recently joined Goliath as the company’s first Chief Marketing Officer, and Donna Grare, who had worked with Charlton before, came on board as Executive Vice President and CTO. The changes are all part of the company’s desire to get to that next stage of growth

“We have a company strategy and products and partnerships in place to raise us to an inflection point to increase the speed and scale of business,” Armor said. “The goal is to expedite and enhance things that were happening. I see myself as another oar in the water to make the boat move faster. We don’t need to build a new boat.”

The channel business at Goliath has historically been significantly smaller than the direct, but it has already seen a major rise over the past year, and the plan is to enhance that further.

“What we have seen is a doubling of channel business over the previous twelve months,” Armor said. “That’s because of partnerships with companies like Cerner, MTM and Tech Mahindra.”

“We are looking at doing more things with the channel, and it will become more interesting and more clear as we go along,” she added.

Armor emphasized that Goliath will continue to bring more coordination and management to the channel than in the past, where things were, she said, more opportunistic and deal-based.

“We want to look more at how we segment, and make sure that it is more than opportunistic, and increase our resourcing for the channel accordingly,” she said. “Our programs will take on additional speed, segmentation and enhanced enablement. I have experience with these types of partnership in my past, particularly with MaaS360. Strategic partnerships like the one with IGEL are important, and we are also taking a refreshed look at MSPs and traditional resellers.”

Armor said that Goliath has been looking closely at how they fit MSPs in. Their software was originally developed for service providers, and contains the kinds of features and functionality MSPs expect. It is also sold to them through subscription pricing that fits their business model, as well as on a white-labelled basis if desired.

“Our MSPs aren’t necessarily health-care focused, but they do have deep focus in Citrix and VMware Horizon,” Armor noted.

A new channel manager role, reporting to Armor, is being created as a part of that strategy.

“We will leverage that person to do proactive outreach and additional enablement,” she said. “I want to make sure we are doing broad-based enablement around CItrix and VMware. That’s a key part of having a very focused strategy rather than what has been opportunistic in some ways.”

Nine days into the job, Armor said specifics of the channel plan are still being developed, but some things are already apparent.

“There is expansion opportunity within our existing partner base for sure,” she indicated. “We want to make sure we do the right thing around our existing partners. However, we absolutely will be recruiting new partners as well.”

Armor joins Goliath right in the middle of a pandemic which has forced a much higher degree of remote work, for which she said their offerings are well suited.

“Long before this pandemic, we were doing fantastic things around enabling remote work, and so what we are doing now there is an amplification of things we were already seeing and doing. We have to be sensitive to the new realities, but this is a place we have been, and we have deep partnerships and strong customers around this already. The adjustment we have to make now is to understand that some of those challenges are amplified.”