Former Microsoft OCP Head Huddleston Takes Job at Twilio

**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in January.**

Ron Huddleston, the former corporate vice president of the One Commercial Partner (OCP) organization at Microsoft, who was said to be on an indefinite family leave in mid-December, has surfaced as the new chief partners officer at Twilio, the company announced Monday.

In his new role at the cloud communication platform company, Huddleston will be responsible for scaling the vendor’s Twilio Partner Program by bringing in enterprise partners and resellers. Huddleston will help build Twilio’s partner program based on two pillars: the company’s developer heritage and his ability to drive partner success through a transformed communication strategy, the company said.

Twilio’s Ron Huddleston

“As the leading communications platform for developers, we believe Twilio has unmatched potential to be the heart of an ecosystem for ISVs, SIs, and resellers in a massive market opportunity,” said George Hu, chief operating officer at Twilio. “Ron’s experience is unparalleled when it comes to building a thriving partner ecosystem and I look forward to him accelerating Twilio’s momentum across all partner business models, geographies and the enterprise opportunity. We are thrilled to welcome Ron to the team.”

In business since 2008, Twilio’s a cloud communications platform allows software developers to programatically make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages using its web service APIs.

IDC forecasts the worldwide voice and text messaging communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) market to grow from $867 million in 2016 to $8.2 billion in 2021, noting that CPaaS marketing is transitioning from hyper-growth startup phase to critical-mass phase. Market growth will be driven by enterprise demand for mobile enablement, cloud consumption and differentiated customer experience, Mark Winther, group vice president and consulting partner, worldwide telecom at IDC wrote.

Huddleston left Microsoft in December after a stint of less than two years, which included being at the helm of One Commercial Partner, a revamp of the company’s sales model that debuted at Microsoft Inspire last July. Huddleston told us that he left Microsoft to care for a family member who was was ill — a situation that prompted him to move to California.

Prior to Microsoft, Huddleston held two senior executive positions at Salesforce between 2009 and 2016, and was at Oracle for about five years.