Srikanth Natarajan has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry in India and the Asia-Pacific region. He has expertise in business development, strategic partnerships, channel marketing and large account management, and global enterprise account management. During the course of his career, he has worked with organisations such as Dimension Data India, Cisco Systems, Zenith Computers, Idea Device Technologies and Microland.

At present, he is director, channels and alliances, India and SAARC, at Brocade, a leading player in the IP and software networking segment. He is responsible for building its channel market strategy, establishing channel engagement operations, driving partner enablement and recruitment. He leads Brocade’s product portfolio in areas like Ethernet fabrics, storage area networks, software defined networks and network functions virtualisation.

Talking about the key focus areas for the company, Natarajan says, “Building an ecosystem of partners in an already crowded market, getting relevant partners to work with Brocade and making our partnership with the channel successful are some of the key areas of focus for us.”

Natarajan takes immense pride in being a part of Brocade, which provides reliable, high-performance network solutions to help global organisations transition smoothly to a virtualised world. He terms his current job profile as exciting and engaging, as it provides him an opportunity to meet established system integrators and work with different industry partners to bring about a transformation in the data centre space.

As a professional, Natarajan counts his biggest strengths as his in-depth industry knowledge; his expertise in dealing with channel partners and acting as a trusted business adviser; and his strong people’s skills. As a manager, he believes in an open and transparent style of management. His focus is on getting the work done by empowering his team. He lays emphasis on end-results and encourages feedback from the team.