Meet Gavin Welch, Cloudera’s Partner Manager of the Year! Gavin leads the hardware alliances team and has made big strides in Cloudera’s relationship with Dell/EMC, launched a new strategic partnership with NVIDIA to help GPU acceleration for CDP-PvC Base, and recently became a first-time dad. Gavin’s the all-star quarterback everyone wants on their team, the guy you always see active on Slack in the middle of the night, and the same guy that’s chipper after a long call with legal, trying to get his partners all their asks. He’s constantly striving to take our partnerships to the next level and we’re happy to see him getting recognized on the main stage!
Since this is “Coffee with Cloudera”, tell us what’s your favorite coffee drink or “pick me up” in the morning?
I have always been a coffee shop guy. Pre-pandemic, I’d go to the local coffee shop or Starbucks down the street from my house every morning before work and order a black coffee. Obviously, the Pandemic changed that and we got a Nespresso machine. Now I’m all about the brown capsule. I don’t think I will go back. I love it, and it saves me money.
What is your role as a Partner Manager?
I am responsible for our IHV (Independent Hardware Vendor) ecosystem. Meaning I help develop the sales strategy and go to market with partners like Cisco, HPE, Dell, and Nvidia. I also help manage the day-to-day operations, engineering engagements, and marketing strategy along with a team of Clouderians.
Speaking of Dell, what’s made our relationship with Dell successful?
Dell is all in with Cloudera, which makes partnering with them a real joy. We are aligned in all aspects of the business and they have really leaned into the Hybrid and Private Cloud market opportunity, so our messaging is consistent. Plus we really do not have any competitive overlap which can be rare in the partner community. In fact, they are Cloudera’s Partner of the Year. Go, Dell!
What’s your vision for Dell and CDP in FY22?
The ultimate vision is to create a unified joint solution, aimed at acquiring new customers.
I can’t speak to this too much, but the plans are getting formulated right now. Stay tuned…
This year Dell has doubled the amount in the pipeline of new and expansion opportunities, what are a few things Dell has done to achieve this?
They are committed from an engineering perspective. They have created reference architectures for our products and entered into a certification program to certify Isilon on CDP. In 2020 we also put a huge emphasis on sales enablement. CDP is a complex technology and we have pivoted from the Hadoop company to the enterprise data cloud company, and aligning on that narrative has been essential to our success. We have also gotten creative with our marketing campaigns in the new normal. Whether it’s doing industry studies with large analyst firms or virtual wine tastings and customer webinars, we have found ways to reach customers with our joint offerings.
What do you do for fun?
I play a lot of Golf. I am still not good but I enjoy playing. Fortunately, it was something I could continue to do during the pandemic. I also enjoy collecting Vinyl records and spending as much time with my family as possible.
If you are interested in learning more about our other partners or team members, check out some of our other interviews.
Coffee with Cloudera – Ali Bajwa
Coffee with Cloudera Partners – IBM
Coffee with Cloudera – Cindy Maike
Coffee with Cloudera Partners – Intel
Coffee with Cloudera – Vinita Srivalsan
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