Bill Petro has been a widely-recognized technology leader with expertise in sales enablement, marketing, and product management at industry-leading companies including Hitachi Vantara, Cisco, EMC, and Sun Microsystems, plus five technology startups. He has leveraged expertise in cloud computing, automation, data center, information storage, analytics, and social technologies to help companies achieve their strategic goals and gain breakaway success.
Bill served as the Director of Partner Enablement for the Americas at Hitachi Vantara where he was responsible for training programs for Global System Integrators and Regional System Integrators, Distributors, and VARs. Working with the Global Sales Enablement and the Strategic Partners & Alliances organizations he drove solution awareness and sales tools utilization. He customized sales plays and blueprint content to create unique value propositions for each partnership.
Prior to this, Bill was Director of Global Sales Enablement and Training at Cherwell Software, a startup in the IT Service Management market, acquired by Ivanti. He developed the worldwide sales enablement program, delivered related training to Field Sales to drive sales productivity through effective sales processes, tools, and skills training. He was responsible for driving sales productivity with global account executives, pre-sales, partners, inside sales, and BDR teams to increase sales effectiveness.
Previously Bill served at Cisco Systems as Senior Manager, Sales Enablement Lead for Data Center Architecture. This portfolio includes Compute, Networking, Hybrid Cloud, Solutions & Applications, with attention on emerging markets in Big Data/Analytics and Security. As part of Cisco’s Worldwide Sales & Partner Training organization, he developed the plan to drive seller readiness while collaborating with key stakeholders, to ensure sellers have the skills and knowledge necessary to support the Worldwide Architecture initiatives and Product Launches. In addition to the overall enablement strategy, he defined function-based Learning Maps to support comprehensive enablement in support of Cisco’s Data Center businesses. Bill oversaw the content development and delivery strategy and ensured consistent messaging integration into all Sales communities and enablement programs.
Before this, he was Senior Manager, Cloud Sales Enablement and Business Development where he drove sales and partner enablement for the Cloud Management software portfolio, including the Self-service Catalog Portal and Orchestration engine, at Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Group. He owned cloud enablement from strategy to execution, developing the program, compiling the content and delivering in-person and webinar classes. Previously while in Product Management, he directed the Go-To-Market Program for the cloud portfolio. Before this role he was Senior Business Development Manager at Cisco’s Advanced Services for Data Center practice, specializing in Cloud Computing. At that time he focused on long-term strategic opportunities and early adopter solutions, exploring business involving cloud architecture and virtualization service solutions.
At EMC Corporation, now Dell, he served as Field Marketing Executive and Senior Sales & Partner Development positions and promoted their offering by building a unique value proposition and delivering it around the world. He trained sales reps and partner reps in how to identify and manage opportunities to improve forecasting and speed time to revenue. He enabled channel executives to strategize and prioritize initiatives with resellers to optimize mutual sales goals. As an in-demand speaker to executive-level customers, he helped craft custom solutions for their business challenges.
Before EMC, he held executive Marketing and Business Development positions at two software startup companies: DMW Worldwide specializing in security software and telecommunication company billing, and USA.net pioneers of SaaS email.
While at Sun Microsystems, now Oracle, Bill held senior positions in Product Management, Product Marketing, and International Market Development during which time he helped rebrand the Solaris operating environment as he managed the systems and storage management product portfolios. He repositioned Sun’s Enterprise Management Software portfolio through a worldwide launch tour. He launched JavaTM technology internationally as well as desktop, server, and supercomputer product lines, meeting with Press and Analysts.
Bill has been a featured speaker at numerous industry, government, university, and technology events internationally. He has done presentations at:
- CiscoLive, San Diego
- VMworld, San Francisco
- EMC World, Las Vegas
- JavaOne Conference, San Francisco
- Java Day Seminars, EMEA
- CIO Forums and Telcom Conferences, Singapore
- Telco Summits, Latin America
- Strategies for Public Sector Transformation, Victoria, BC
- Enterprise Computing Seminars and Network Business Seminars, Asia
- Networkers Conference, Namibia
- i2u UniForum, Milan
- Celebrate Technology, Colorado Springs
He has briefed business, government, military, and education leaders in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, has spoken at Universities in Colombia, Malaysia, and Taiwan, and done Venture Capital briefings in Silicon Valley.
Bill has served on the Board of Advisors for the College of Business and Administration at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs as well as the Board of the Colorado Institute of Technology Transfer and Implementation (CITTI).
He earned a Bachelor’s Degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and has done post-graduate work there and at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
He blogs on Technology Trends, Popular Culture, and History.
Standard disclaimer: his blog articles do not represent his employer and are his own opinion.
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