Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, has promoted Elie Dib to the position of Senior Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey and North Africa (METNA). This announcement positions Elie at the head of Riverbed’s regional operations and he will now engage with the sales, technical and channel teams to strengthen the company’s position as the key technology provider for the hybrid enterprise in the cloud-first era.
Elie will report to Kristian Thyregod, Senior Vice President, EMEA, at Riverbed, who said, “Through his tenure with Riverbed, Elie has held executive roles that span both the channel and the enterprise. With his proven track record, keen understanding of our technology, and strong ties with our customers as well as partners, he is the ideal candidate to lead the regional team.”
Drawing from his previous experience as Riverbed’s Head of Channels in the METNA region and subsequently as its Managing Director, Elie will base his strategy for the region around two key areas – direct sales and partner driven. For the former, he intends to introduce new leadership roles and responsibilities within the team and at the same time, assure partners that Riverbed’s sales model will remain 100% channel driven.
From a channel perspective, Riverbed’s focus over the last two years has been on developing its distribution network. Having successfully accomplished this by deepening ties with existing distributors and signing on a new specialty distributor, the company will now turn its attention to partners. “We want to develop a set of focused partners who will invest to develop the highest level of sales and technical proficiency on our portfolio. Our aim is for these partners to incorporate Riverbed’s market leading technologies into their integrated frameworks to create comprehensive solutions for customers,” said Elie Dib.
Under his new role, Elie will see his territory expand as he will now be responsible for Riverbed’s business in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Commenting on this, Dib said, “I am keen to replicate the ‘customer-first’ culture we have developed in the region in these new territories. We built solid foundations for our business in 2016 and are now ready to expand upon and reap the returns on those efforts.”
Within the region, the company’s focus will continue to be on its Riverbed SteelCentral and Riverbed SteelFusion product families which address the needs of network visibility and branch IT respectively. However, Elie is keen to raise customer awareness around Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) and the Riverbed SteelConnect solution, which was introduced last year, to create market momentum in this rapidly emerging area of technology.
“It is an extremely opportune time to be at the helm of Riverbed in METNA. Several strategic initiatives that we outlined and implemented a couple years ago, have now been successfully executed. We have the strong regional presence of a seasoned team, a finely-tuned distribution network, and a portfolio of solutions that address some of the most pressing IT challenges that enterprises face. I want to thank our customers and partners for their support and assure them that we will only continue to meet and exceed their expectations,” Elie Dib concluded.