Evan and Davechat with the recently named CEO of Vonage, Rory Read.
In this podcast we get to know the new dude in charge at Vonage. Rory Read joined the Company as CEO and a member of the Board of Directors in July 2020. He was previously Chief Operating Executive for Dell Technologies, and also served as CEO and President of Virtustream, a Dell Technologies business. Rory also served as Executive Vice President of Dell Technologies Boomi, a SaaS integration platform provider. Rory played a lead role in the $67 billion merger of Dell and EMC. As President of Dell Worldwide Commercial Sales, he built and managed Dell’s best-in-class sales engine, and delivered the strategy for Dell’s global channel, partner and direct sales efforts.
Before joining Dell, he served as CEO, President and member of the Board of Directors of AMD. Prior to that he was COO and President at Lenovo. Earlier, Rory spent 23 years at IBM, serving in various leadership roles.
In our effort to get to know Rory we cover a lot of ground in this podcast. We cover his journey to Vonage including IBM wingtips and appreciation for art. We cover the PC world including Lenovo, Dell, AMD, and VMware. Vonage is looking to sell off its consumer business, so we asked him what he really thinks about consumers. Oh yeah, we also get into Vonage a bit. He mentions some 40 rules he intends to follow, and how we should gauge his success. I’m a bit suspicious Rory because he makes the past 4 months in his new role sound fun. Actually, it probably was. Anything would be fun after so much time at IBM and the PC industry.
We are pretty excited for him. Vonage has all the enterprise comms pieces (UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, AI, and Video/WebRTC). I think it’s actually the CPaaS angle that will enjoy the most growth. Vonage got into that when it acquired Nexmo, but the Tokbox acquisition makes it even better. Vonage used its APIs to create its new UCaaS offer – that’s truly an API-first model to communications. UCaaS and CPaaS are clearly merging, but CCaaS too is becoming API first as the void between packaged applications and build-your-own closes.
It’s nice to have senior leadership positions and several prestigious companies, but let’s hope that it’s his work at Vonage that tops his professional accomplishments.
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