Symantec Corp.
Cupertino, Calif.

Customers: Tarrant County, Texas, and the state of Iowa

How the customers benefited: Hart led a team that helped Tarrant County, Texas, implement antivirus and intrusion protection software to reduce the customer’s exposure to malware and block potential data breaches. He also led a team that helped Iowa deploy a standard approach to security across several state agencies using the company’s products. Hart also worked closely with a logistics partner, Insight, to help Iowa develop a statewide approach to procurement that involved aggregating multiple smaller purchases from disparate agencies in a way that produced greater efficiencies and substantial cost savings.

What makes him a leader: Hart has a sixth sense when it comes to customer needs. As a seven-year veteran of Symantec’s Public Sector Channel organization, he works with Symantec’s channel partners to make sure they understand the company’s products and how they can help customers.

Hart established programs tailored to Symantec’s public-sector customers — such as the Government and Academic Authorization Program and the State Master Aggregator Contracts — to meet the unique needs of government and academia. Furthermore, Hart incorporated feedback from public-sector clients to Symantec’s Partner and Opportunity Registration programs.

Hart helped establish a distinct pricing and licensing program for Symantec products and solutions targeted to meet specific needs of customers in the state and local government and education communities. Seeing a need for greater synergy among Symantec resellers, Hart facilitated cooperative arrangements that brought partners with high-end technical skills and small and disadvantaged business status into the fold so they could team with companies holding existing state contracts. This effort resulted in successful partnerships on enterprise opportunities in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, New York, Ohio and Texas.