Vonage Channel Chief: Partners Driving Additional Revenue Sources
CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — Since joining Vonage last November, Mario DeRiggi has been on the road nonstop spreading the message of why his company should be the lead partner for both the channel and customers.
Previously with Windstream, DeRiggi was appointed senior vice president of national channel sales and operations. He is charged with further advancing Vonage’s partner program.
Vonage’s Mario DeRiggi
As executive vice president at Broadview Networks (now Windstream), he drove UCaaS, cloud and managed-services sales among enterprise customers across all sales channels, as well as go-to-market strategies, channel sales support, technical service, training and customer support.
Last month, Vonage rolled out its first integrated Vonage Business Cloud and NewVoiceMedia offering, which follows Vonage’s acquisition of NewVoiceMedia for $350 million last September. Designed as an expansion of Vonage’s flagship cloud-native platform, CX Cloud Express is a customer relationship management (CRM)-integrated contact center service to help businesses deliver “great customer, agent and employee experiences.”
In a Q&A at Channel Partners Conference and Expo, DeRiggi talks about his work with partners and his plans for the months ahead.
Channel Partners: What have you been up to since joining Vonage?
Mario DeRiggi: For the last few months that I have been at Vonage, it’s been very fast-paced. So for me personally it was going out and making sure I had the right team in place to manage the direction we want for the channel and we do. We have a fantastic team in place. But other than that, it was really re-engagement of the partner program and getting deeper around a consistent message on why Vonage. We needed to do a much better job of going out and telling our partners, and enabling them on why Vonage should be their lead, what differentiates us. So we started off by scheduling 10 partner kickoff meetings; we have already completed New York City and Boston, and we’re working our way out west. We’ve had an unbelievable showing of partners at each one of our events and what we’re trying to do is give them the understanding of who is Vonage today, why are we different. We’ve spent the last few years putting together a …
