UJET Hires Cisco Alum to Lead Channel, Renew TSD Footprint

Cloud communications and channel veteran Geoff Works has joined contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider UJET to reestablish its place in the technology advisor channel.

Works announced that he is now working as vice president of global channel sales for San Francisco-based UJET. He succeeds Steve Infante, who left for Nice in December. Works joined UJET in May and has notched a little more than a month under his belt with his new employer.

Works in an interview with Channel Futures said UJET has tasked him with driving adoption of the vendor's platform in the SMB and mid-market enterprise space. UJET is known as the platform that sits underneath Google Cloud's CCaaS offering, which is geared toward larger enterprise customers. Works and his team are eyeing businesses with between 50 and 1,500 contact center agents, and they will use the channel to get there.

UJET's Geoff Works

Works said UJET for now will focus on its relationships with Intelisys, Telarus and Avant, dubbed by some as the "big three" TSDs. He'll also seek to build focused relationships between UJET and some of the CX-focused partners that sell through those three TSDs. "Focus," Works said, will be the operating principal in his strategy.

Who Is Geoff Works?

For the last five years Works was heading up Cisco's efforts to bring its Webex UCaaS and CCaaS offerings into the agent model, concluding as head of channel sales for Cisco and Webex. He told Channel Futures that he and Cisco parted amicably.

Cisco had brought Works in part for his deep relationships in the technology services distributor (formerly known as master agent) and technology advisor (agent) side of the channel, and UJET will similarly bank on his knowledge of the space.

Prior to Cisco, he led West enterprise sales for Five9 and was senior vice president of sales and activation for ShoreTel.

Why UJET?

Works pointed to three reasons he joined the nine-year-old company.

First, he said the vendor's culture made a good impression on him and made him feel supported by leadership.

"I sensed a true team camaraderie that doesn’t exist everywhere and that was very attractive to me," Works told Channel Futures.

He also credited UJET for its architecture around contact center and artificial intelligence. He said the ideal UJET customer is looking for "tight CRM integration" and "easy-to-implement" AI functions..

"As I dug into the overall solution, UJET is extremely well positioned to natively leverage generative AI capabilities to enhance our customers' contact centers, as opposed to others who are trying to “bolt on” AI capabilities to their more legacy solutions," he said.

Works said he also saw a higher prioritization of professional services and implementation compared to other providers.

Lastly, Works said said he saw untapped potential to deepen UJET's footprint in the agent space.

"UJET is a well-known CCaaS player in the industry, who hasn’t quite been able to figure out and truly tap into the potential of leveraging the power and scale of the technology advisor community," he said. "All I see is tremendous upside to really providing focus and an overall strategy on tapping into the tech services distributor (TSD) and technology advisor (TA) community."