Ed Brill

Back in February, I blogged that my role this year at IBM Lotus would be expanding, with additional worldwide sales leaders being added for Lotus Notes and Domino.  It took a few months, but yesterday we announced internally that David Via and Gary Kearney have joined my team and are quickly getting up to speed.  David started in last month with some presentations at internal Lotus training events, and he will head to Japan later this month to continue that effort.  Gary is in transition out of a role in IBM Global Business Services, and was at The View's Admin2008/Developer2008 with me on Thursday last week to start meeting customers and partners in the Lotus world.

David's name may be familiar to some of you, as he has been in the Lotus community for 15+ years.  Most recently prior to joining IBM, he was with Wolcott Systems and was a contributing analyst to Ferris Research.  In his first two years within Lotus, David was a key member of our competitive engagement team, working on key IBM Lotus wins and defends.  Some of you may have seen David present at Lotusphere 2008 (along with Charlie Burke) on "recipes from the kitchen of a collaboration bake-off".  It's great to have David's depth and breadth of expertise on the team.  He is already plugged into some of our key 2008 efforts, including Project "Atlantic" (SAP integration).

Gary's name will be new to 99% in the community.  I made a deliberate and conscious decision to hire someone from outside the Lotus team, wanting to bring in a fresh viewpoint to counterbalance any inevitable eye towards history that David and I might apply to situations.  Gary's been a really successful IBM product sales leader, working in several different parts of the organization for over 12 years.  He came highly recommended, and says he is pretty excited to get involved in an end-user product like Notes.  In addition to core Notes/Domino, Gary will also be working with the Lotus Symphony team as they get closer to general availability of their first release and develop references, deployments,and roadmaps.

IBM typically doesn't spend a lot of time advertising our organization chart externally.  Gary, David, and I work with thousands of IBMers around the world who are directly or indirectly responsible for Notes/Domino sales to customers, along with partners and directly with customers.  It's great to have the additional resource, especially with the continued revenue growth IBM has been reporting in this product family.

I'm not sure how quickly either of them will be guest blogging on edbrill.com, but I look forward to sharing additional perspectives from them with you all in the coming weeks.