TalkingHeadz Podcast with Rory Read, CEO of Vonage
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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By Dave Michels
Dave is an independent analyst and founder of TalkingPointz which is focused on enterprise communications. In addition to this (free and paid) content on TalkingPointz, he contributes to industry sites, can be found at major industry events, and provides advisory services to vendors and financial analysts.