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Hilton takes first M4 exit, zooms away from cloud provider Rise

Now head of channels Sue MacDermott will drive sales

Cloud and hosted IT player Rise - the indirect sales arm of Fasthosts Internet Group (FIG) - has parted company with boss Alex Hilton after a couple of years of service.

Channel veteran Hilton made the decision to end the "ridiculous" 60-mile-plus commute from his home near Reading to the Gloucestershire-based offices, said FIG group CEO Andy Burton.

"He was looking for a change; it is something we had chatted about, there is nothing sinister here," he told The Channel.

Head of channels at Rise Sue MacDermott will fill Hilton's boots – at least for the interim period.

Rise sells cloud services and hosted virtual machines through a network of around 160 resellers in the UK.

Burton claimed the IT industry is in a "state of flux" as customers turn attention to an off-premise delivery model that carries lower upfront investment costs.

In July research from FIG, roughly half of the organisations surveyed that are gradually migrating to the cloud leaned on a cloud service provider and 23 per cent used an systems integrator to advise on the move.

"Customers say they need assistance, but the channel needs the technical skills to start migrating them from an on-premise model, and those that do are in a better position than transactional businesses," said Burton.

In the year to 31 December 2011, FIG grew turnover 7.6 per cent to £36.2m but operating profits slipped 5.8 per cent to £7.7m due to increased investments in customer marketing activity.

Channel veteran Hilton, who is a non-exec director at FAST, was previously a group manager for software asset management at Microsoft and a director at FrontRange before he joined Rise.

Hilton was unavailable for comment at the time of writing. ®

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