Alessandra Fitzpatrick

Vice President

Alessandra (Sandy) Fitzpatrick was one of the three founders of Canalys in 1999. Sandy runs the company's consulting and enterprise departments. The latter is responsible for delivering a comprehensive set of services looking at all aspects of the enterprise infrastructure market, including Channels Analysis, Unified Communications Analysis, Enterprise Security Analysis and Enterprise Networking Analysis. Sandy also heads the worldwide IPTV Analysis service.

Sandy is responsible for Canalys' rapidly expanding global consulting department. Recent projects have included topics such as: market entrance for unified communications products; country-specific channel approaches for IP telephony; the readiness of voice resellers to sell IP-based solutions; wants and needs of storage and server channels, advising resellers on the transition from selling products to services; and providing competitive analysis of IT vendors' channel strategies.

Prior to joining Canalys, Sandy was the European market research manager for Cisco’s SMB Unit, where she was responsible for providing insight and analysis into market and distribution challenges to be faced in the SMB arena. She was also a contributor to the analytical metrics used to measure Cisco’s success in the SMB space.

Sandy joined Cisco from Gartner, where she was programme manager of Dataquest’s Network Distribution channel programme. During her time at Dataquest, Sandy achieved recognition in her field as a distribution expert frequently quoted by the press on networking channel issues. In addition, Sandy was active in consulting and advisory work for industry executives on distribution trends and pioneered research into the SMB opportunity for networking vendors.

Prior to Gartner, Sandy worked for Madge Networks where she was responsible for account management and channel support programmes for southern European distribution partners. She also managed and motivated a multilingual sales team.

Sandy has an honours degree in European Business Studies from Brunel University, and her postgraduate studies include a Diploma in Management, a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, as well as an MBA from Brunel University. She is fluent in English, French and Portuguese and has proficiency in both Italian and Spanish.