Last week, Vance Raeside was appointed as 8×8, Inc.’s Director of Federal Sales for the Washington D.C. area. As Director, Raeside will be in charge of handling all direct and indirect sales activity with federal, state and local government agencies. 8×8 is a leading provider of innovative cloud communications and computing solutions.
“Vance’s deep knowledge of the IP communications industry coupled with his outstanding track record in federal government sales is a tremendous asset for 8×8 as we expand our presence in the public sector,” said Kim Niederman, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at 8×8. “With government agencies at federal, state and local levels adopting cloud technologies at unprecedented rates, 8×8 is well positioned to meet this growing demand with a wide range of cloud-based SaaS and IaaS solutions.”
With almost twenty years of telecommunications sales experience, Raeside is a tremendous asset to 8×8. His broad ranges of expertise include 13 years selling into the public sector as Manager of Federal Sales at Shoretel, Inc. and Manager of Business/Systems Integrator Partners for Nortel Government Solutions. Raeside developed and launched the company’s go to market strategy for sales to the U.S. Federal government that resulted in the creation of 60 new federal channel partners and the initiation of the new GSA Connections II and Networx contracts for Shoretel. At Nortel, Raeside supervised relationships with strategic partners and systems integrators including SAIC, RONCO and General Dynamics. Raeside met more than $36 million in sales quotas.
“I’m thrilled to be joining a company as nimble and highly regarded as 8×8, especially in light of the Federal Government CIO’s statement earlier this year that an estimated $20 billion of its $80 billion in IT spending is a potential for migration to cloud computing solutions,” Raeside said. “It’s amazing what 8×8 has accomplished in a very short period of time — from successfully penetrating the SMB market with VoIP and UC solutions to moving upmarket into serving the enterprise and government sectors to introducing a complete suite of cloud hosting solutions. This is fantastic time to be part of the cloud revolution and I’m proud to be associated with one of the industry’s premier service providers.”
8×8 secured joint collaboration with its teaming partner Level 3 Communications in addition to its several existing federal government deployments. 8×8 recently announced that it had been selected by the City of Garden Grove, California to provide cloud-based disaster recovery services for its VMware vSphere virtualization platform.