Bekker's Blog

Blog archive

Huddleston Joins Twilio

Ron Huddleston is joining cloud communications platform company Twilio as chief partners officer, the San Francisco-based company announced Monday.

Huddleston, who ran Microsoft's One Commercial Partner organization from its creation a year ago until going on what Microsoft officially described as an indefinite family leave two months ago, will be tasked with building out an ecosystem for ISVs, systems integrators and resellers at Twilio, a 10-year-old company that went public in June 2016.

"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," Twilio COO George Hu said in a statement. Huddleston helped build a developer-focused channel at Salesforce around AppExchange and previously held senior channel roles at Oracle.

"Twilio has the potential to revolutionize the communications industry in the same way cloud computing redefined the software industry. This is a massive opportunity for all types of partners to build new fast-growing businesses and continue to innovate for their customers across every industry," Huddleston said in the announcement.

The partner and developer evangelism role for Huddleston comes at a key time for Twilio, a 900-person company that is eager to show investors it is broadening its base of partners and customers. Twilio makes platform products that give developers APIs to allow them to embed communications technologies like voice, video, messaging and authentication into their own apps.

The company had a rough November, as investors punished the stock for the first full quarter of declining revenues from Uber. The ride-sharing app company decided last May to take more of the communications functionality of its apps either in-house or to use Twilio competitors in other geographies. Twilio's biggest customers are WhatsApp and Uber, which accounted for 6% and 5% of the company's revenues in the third quarter, respectively.

The danger of customer concentration is expected to be reflected in Twilio's fourth quarter results, which the company releases on Tuesday. Uber had accounted for 17 percent of Twilio revenues in Q4 2016, setting up a tough comparison.

At Microsoft, Gavriella Schuster replaced Huddleston as corporate vice president for One Commercial Partner in December, reporting to Judson Althoff, executive vice president for the Microsoft Worldwide Commercial Business.

Through conversations with Althoff, CEO Satya Nadella and former COO Kevin Turner both before and after he joined the Microsoft Dynamics team in the summer of 2016, Huddleston helped define a new structure for Microsoft's massive channel operation. Starting with the creation of OCP in January 2017, Huddleston integrated developer evangelism much more tightly into partner operations and began work on industry maps/solution maps/catalogs, which are regional lists of go-to partners for different solution areas. The OCP structure also included a major realignment of partner-facing job roles within Microsoft in the areas of build-with, sell-with and go-to-market.

Posted by Scott Bekker on February 12, 2018


Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.