Vonage Hires Intelisys Alum to Lead Alliances

Tech sales and channel veteran Michael Raspanti is joining Ericsson-owned Vonage to head up the cloud communication provider's alliances.

Raspanti announced Wednesday that he has joined Vonage as vice president of alliances. He started the job on Monday. He will report to Kristy Thomas, who joined Vonage in the summer as senior vice president of global channels and alliances.

Raspanti most recently oversaw sales in the Northeast for tech services distributor Intelisys. He worked for four-and-a-half years at Intelisys, where Thomas also worked.

Raspanti in the new role will oversee alliances with some of the vendor's largest technology partners. That notably includes Salesforce, which in 2021 awarded Vonage a Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for Customer Success. Vonage integrates its cloud contact center offering with Salesforce and recently joined Salesforce's BYOC for CCaaS pilot program.

"It's an opportunity to expand my skill set moving into a little bit more of a strategic role. Vonage has a pretty unique relationship with Salesforce, and being able to work on that relationship and hopefully grow it was extremely attractive to me," Raspanti told Channel Futures. "The alliances route to market has been pretty successful for a while, but having capacity to focus on that was really interesting to me as well."

Related:Vonage Hires Intelisys Alum to Lead Alliances

Vonage's alliance partners also include AWS, as well as CRM providers HubSpot and Zendesk.

Raspanti said leaving Intelisys was a difficult decision. He said he believes the TSD made a good move by bringing on new president Ken Mills.

“It was a very tough decision to leave Intelisys; however, this new opportunity within Vonage offers me the chance to grow professionally and take on some exciting new challenges that align with my long-term goals," Raspanti said. "Additionally, getting the chance to again work with Kristy in addition to the rest of the team here that’s already in place, was too much to pass up.”

Prior to working at Intelisys, Raspanti was a Northeast channel manager for CenturyLink. He also worked in sales at SingleHop and Level 3.