Nextiva has hired its first chief revenue officer (CRO) with his eye on channel growth, and released a new cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS).

As CRO, Scott Armour will be responsible for creating a global revenue strategy and overseeing the organization’s sales teams. He previously worked as Oracle Digital’s senior vice president.

Nextiva’s Scott Armour

Armour tells Channel Partners that as CRO he oversees all Nextiva routes to market, including its channel program.

“Nextiva and our partners [have] achieved amazing things since our channel program launched and partners will continue to play an important role in Nextiva’s future,” he said. “Channel remains central to our growth strategy and I will work with partners to assure Nextiva’s channel program, and our sales motions, support that theme.”

Armour will create a revenue strategy and execution plan to help the company grow by double digits in the next five years.

“Nextiva accomplished a lot over the past 10 years as a leader in a fast-growing market,” he said. “My focus is to bring consistency, predictability and scale to Nextiva while maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit and fanatic commitment to customer success that define our brand.”

“We are thrilled to welcome Scott to the Nextiva family,” said Tracy Conrad, Nextiva’s president. “Not only does he bring experience building and scaling sales teams, but he also represents the type of character best suited for Nextiva. He recently finished hiking the entire Appalachian Trail with his son, a feat that comes with incredible stories of resilience, dedication, and focus: three attributes that will serve Scott well in his career here.”

Also announced this week, Nextiva Contact Center is available for companies of all sizes. Charles Ingram, Nextiva‘s chief product officer, said the CCaaS gives partners the ability to offer a multichannel system to customers that will “bring them into a new generation of contact center.”

Nextiva’s Charles Ingram

“This will open up partners’ businesses to progressive clients who are looking to streamline their communications and workforce,” he said. “Since contact-center customers can manage chat, phone, email and more from one portal, this is appealing to larger organizations who have an influx of communications from all channels, thus opening the door to more enterprise-level opportunities.”

Nextiva Contact Center gives the company, its partners and customers a “huge competitive advantage” thanks to this omnichannel solution’s feature set, Ingram said.

“The solution is ahead of the game when compared to many CCaaS options on the market,” he said. “Some of our customers’ favorite features include speech-enabled IVR, predictive analytics-based routing, 360-degree customer journey analytics, workforce automation (WFO) and outbound campaign management. The combination of Nextiva’s amazing service, VoIP and contact center gives customers more options in communicating with their contacts.”

Last summer, Nitel entered a strategic partnership with Nextiva to provide agents and customers with a comprehensive offering for their network and UC needs. And this week, Ira Feuerstein, Nextiva’s vice president of strategic partnerships, said Nextiva and Nitel have completely interconnected their networks, which means partners can tell their customers they can “implement a solution for them that’s going to be hands down the best in the industry.”