Highly respected marketing and product executive, Jim Kruger, named Intermedia CMO
2017-05-02
Intermedia, a leading cloud business applications provider, announced today that Jim Kruger is joining the company as its new Chief Marketing Officer, effective May 15, 2017. Kruger comes to Intermedia from Polycom Inc., a leader in Unified Communications and Collaboration, where he most recently served as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President, overseeing all facets of global marketing.
"Jim's experience is perfectly aligned with our approach. He is a smart, analytical, creative, and impactful leader with experience marketing to, and through, the channel. He has an extremely successful track record with both large enterprises and SMBs, across a wide range of vertical industries. In addition, he has scaled a Unified Communications business and, like Intermedia, works closely with Microsoft® as a preferred Office 365® partner. Jim's broad and extensive knowledge will be a tremendous asset to the company and instrumental in continuously driving our brand and presence in the industry," said Michael Gold, CEO at Intermedia.
Kruger has spent the past 16 years with Polycom, where he has held various product and marketing leadership roles of increasing responsibility. During that time, Polycom's revenue has grown from $373 million to $1.3 billion, with an ecosystem that now surpasses 400,000 customers and 7,000 partners. While serving in a product marketing and management role for Polycom's Voice division, he led the largest and most successful solution launch in the company's history. Polycom's Voice product line continues to be the company's fastest growing business today. He was also instrumental in the success of Polycom's 2011 rebranding, resulting in the strong name recognition that the company has achieved. Most recently, Kruger led all aspects of Polycom's marketing, including product, services, brand, field and internal/external communications, managing an annual budget of $60 million and a team of 160 global marketing professionals.
Prior to Polycom, Jim directed marketing and product management for Palm's wireless internet service and served in several senior marketing roles at GTE (Verizon) Wireless. Kruger earned an MBA in Marketing from California State University East Bay and a bachelor's degree in Social Science from University of California, Berkeley.
"I am really excited to join Mike and an incredibly impressive Intermedia team. At Polycom, we partnered with Intermedia, so I have had a front row seat to see how they run the business, and how much customers and partners love working with them. Intermedia has built a thriving, differentiated cloud business with a robust and compelling product suite, an award-winning support organization, and a stellar reputation in the channel. With the support of Madison Dearborn Partners, the company's existing growth mindset, and the huge opportunity the cloud presents, Intermedia is positioned extremely well to accelerate its growth and profit trajectory. I believe strongly in the vision and the opportunity ahead, and I look forward to being part of this journey," said Kruger.
Intermedia has built a $200+-million business around delivering a broad and tightly integrated suite of highly supported cloud business applications for customers and the partners that serve them, spanning from email and productivity, to Unified Communications and voice, to backup and security services. As a result, customers gain incremental value and channel partners can differentiate their offering by selling under their own brand.
"Intermedia's Cloud Voice business is growing faster than leading pure-play public companies. Already a leading Cloud Voice provider, Intermedia is investing heavily in this aspect of the business. With Jim's Unified Communications experience with both voice and Office 365, we are well positioned to continue scaling these critical areas of the business," concluded Gold.
About Intermedia
Intermedia is a one-stop shop for cloud business applications. Its Office in the Cloud™ suite integrates the essential IT applications that companies need to do business, including email, voice, file backup and sharing, conferencing, instant messaging, identity and access management, mobility, security and archiving - all delivered by a single provider and integrated into one control panel. Intermedia services offer enterprise-grade security, a 99.999 percent uptime service level agreement and award-winning 24/7 support, as certified by J.D. Power and TSIA.
Intermedia's 750+ employees serve more than 85,000 businesses and 6,000 active partners, including VARs, MSPs, distributors and telecoms. Its Partner Program lets partners sell under their own brand with control over billing, pricing and other elements of their customer relationships. Intermedia is the world's largest independent provider of Exchange email in the cloud and a leading cloud voice provider. For more information, visit Intermedia.net.
For more information, visit Intermedia.net.
Contacts
Melanie Lombardi
Intermedia
650.285.5857
[email protected]
Katie Holloran
LEWIS for Intermedia
619.308.5222
[email protected]
Office in the Cloud is either a trademark or registered trademark of Intermedia.net, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft and Office 365 are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
J.D. Power 2016 Certified Assisted Technical Support Program, developed in conjunction with TSIA. Based on successful completion of an audit and exceeding a customer satisfaction benchmark for assisted support operations. For more information, visit www.jdpower.com or www.tsia.com.