GFI Max Expands Community Team with Three Channel Veterans

GFI Max is expanding its community team, the company announced today, as it also launches its world tour of user conferences to serve the company’s 10,000 managed service provider (MSP) user partners. GFI Max has hired Kelly O’Bray and Nadia Karatsoreos as community managers and Jessica Schroder as vendor alliance manager.

“I'm really excited about what we've built and the hires we’ve made to build this community team,” GFI Max Director of Partner Community Dave Sobel told MSPmentor about the new hires on his team. “We are investing big. The people I’ve brought onto the team are all channel people. I want to build a team that understands how MSPs work and will be invested in their success.”

O’Bray brings nearly eight years of experience in managed services sales and partner development to his new role. He joined GFI Max in the company’s acquisition of HoundDog Technology. He is also an industry representative of the CompTIA MSP Partners Community Executive Council. Karatsoreos also brings more than eight years of community and channel experience, having served as partner development manager at both Level Platforms and JetStream. She was also named to CRN’s 2014 Women of the Channel and has received a certification from CompTIA in channel management.

Schroder’s new role as vendor alliance manager puts her in charge of channel relationships with other vendors, both within the GFI Max community and at Max 2014 customer events. Schroder’s responsibilities will include developing deeper relationships with vendors to foster better technical integrations within GFI Max’s product set, greatly improving the solutions available to MSPs that use the platform. She previously served as a director of marketing and events for The ASCII Group.

For instance, GFI Max announced an integration with data backup and disaster recovery provider Datto at that company’s conference in June. GFI Max’s new hires provides the company with dedicated resources to continue to develop those kinds of relationships, Sobel told me.

“MSPs are already struggling with a proliferation of vendor relationships they have to manage,” he said. “Each MSP needs to manage between three and five more vendors than they used to have to manage. If vendors are able to work more in concert to helps ease the load for MSPs,  that can help them drive higher revenues and build better businesses.”

GFI Max will be holding its North America users conference in Orlando, Florida, Sept. 8 to 10. It’s Australia conference is scheduled for Sept 1 and 2 in Gold Coast, Queensland. Additional conferences are scheduled for London, England on September 22-23, and in Dusseldorf, Germany on September 29-30. More information on the user conferences is available at http://conferences.gfimax.com