IBM welcomes back Gill as UK channel lead

IBM has shuffled its UK channel executive team with the introduction of former Nutanix staffer Andrew Gill. He becomes the firm’s vice-president for Ecosystems UK & Ireland, coming on the back of a three-year stint as channel director at Nutanix.

Gill is returning to IBM, where he has previously spent 26 years with spells in the systems and services teams as well as working with the channel. He comes into replace Alison Say, who left the business a few months ago to take up a position as senior director, GSI and advisory partners at Microsoft.

Gill’s brief will be to support partner growth, enabling them to take advantage of hybrid cloud and AI, and will cover Partner Plus in UKI, the vendor’s ecosystem that brings together all partner types to share best practice and encourage collaboration.

He said the firm was able to help partners tap into the growth areas of the market, including AI, and he was returning to Big Blue at an interesting time. His brief also includes enabling more partners around watsonx, IBM’s generative AI platform, with the aim of making it easier for the channel to design, deploy and support AI across their customer bases.

“IBM is incredibly well-positioned to capture the surging enterprise demand for hybrid cloud and AI technologies in the UK & Ireland market. The ecosystem is critical to IBM’s future success and I am fully committed to building on the momentum of IBM’s Partner Plus Program to deliver exceptional client value, business outcomes and mutual success with our partners,” said Gill.

Eliot Frederiksen, general manager for technology at IBM UK&I, said the company had looked to fill the role with a candidate with a strong channel background.

“Andrew is among the most experienced channel leaders in this market, with deep expertise across hybrid cloud and AI, and we are very excited that he has returned to IBM to drive our ecosystem growth. IBM is committed and significantly investing to help our partners meet growing demand from clients for hybrid cloud and AI solutions through our watsonx AI platform, and there is no better person to lead this effort,” he said.

Gill is joining IBM at a time when the vendor has been actively supporting its channel with programmes and moves including Partner Plus. The firm launched the ecosystem 18 months ago, but indicated at the start of the year, after it had been running for 12 months, that it had rejuvenated the relationship between the vendor and its channel.

Back in January, IBM’s channel team indicated one of the benefits of the introduction of Partner Plus had been to attract more into Big Blue’s channel fold, with the firm revealing thousands of fresh partners had joined since the programme was launched.

A job listing on LinkedIn indicated Nutanix was in the process of bolstering its own channel leadership team, looking for a candidate with around a decade’s experience and an ability to support partners and manage the vendor’s UK&I partner team.