Paul Eccleston has been elevated to Senior Vice President of EMEA at Exclusive Networks, a role he will fulfil alongside his duties as UK&I MD.
The industry heavy hitter has also been appointed to the global security VAD’s executive committee.
The Nuvias founder and SCC, Tech Data and Computacenter alumni has a “proven track record in growing and scaling organisations” according to Exclusive CEO Jesper Trolle.
He joined Exclusive as UK&I MD in September 2022 and has been running its EMEA business on an interim basis since the start of 2023.
EMEA contributed €1.82bn – or 78% – of Exclusive’s total €2.3bn gross sales in its first half.
EMEA sales grew 19% year-on-year during the period, although regional growth slowed from 27% to 12% between Q1 and Q2 as Trolle acknowledged that growth was returning to “normalised” levels following a “surge in demand for cyber technology in 2022”.
Cybersecurity ‘highly resilient and hugely relevant’
Security vendors have not been immune from the spending slowdown in 2023, with many being forced to downsize or rein in growth forecasts. Last month, one of Exclusive’s key vendors, Fortinet, suffered its worst ever stock decline as it cut its annual sales forecast.
Despite this, cybersecurity spending will remain “one of the fastest-growing sectors of the tech industry” in 2023, according to Canalys, with spending set to rise by 13% to $223.8bn.
Eccleston – whose former firm Nuvias recently joined forces with Exclusive’s closest competitor Infinigate – agreed, billing cybersecurity as “highly resilient” and “hugely relevant”.
“I’m excited by the opportunities that lie ahead as we continue our growth journey,” Eccleston said in a canned statement.
“Paul has made a significant contribution to the business since he joined last year and I am delighted he has now taken up the role of SVP EMEA,” Trolle added.
“He’s a highly accomplished and entrepreneurial business leader with a proven track record in growing and scaling channel organisations, especially in the areas of cybersecurity, enterprise software, SaaS and cloud technologies. I’m really looking forward to working with Paul in his new role as we continue to evolve, transform and further scale our business across EMEA.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
