AppSmart Expands Executive Team With Former Ingram Micro Cloud Leader

The channel-enabling startup, a subsidiary of AppDirect, helps telecom and cloud services partners bring digital services portfolios to their SMB customers. Renee Bergeron, who built Ingram Micro’s cloud business, has taken charge of business strategy and sales as the company looks to scale.

AppSmart, a startup ready to scale a business that helps channel partners and technology advisors effectively serve the SMB market, is building out its leadership team.

The subsidiary of AppDirect recently brought aboard Renee Bergeron, who previously launched and led the global cloud business at distributor Ingram Micro. As AppSmart’s new senior vice president and general manager, Bergeron will take charge of strategy, sales, marketing, service delivery and business development.

The hire of Bergeron and some other executives comes a few months after AppSmart, which spawned from the merger of two of its parent company’s acquisitions, purchased Telegration, a Detroit-based master agent.

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AppSmart is seeing a surge in partners signing on to its B2B platform as small businesses increasingly look to the channel to deliver packages that incorporate telecommunications, cloud services, IoT, security and other products, Bergeron said.

“We really see convergence of all of these different types of technology into a digital service portfolio,” she told CRN.

AppSmart was created last year when San Francisco-headquartered AppDirect unified operations for NeoCloud, a Raleigh, N.C.-based cloud services provider primarily focused on Google Cloud, and WTG, a master telecom agency based in Southern California.

The unorthodox vision was to unite those two companies as a B2B service that focused entirely on helping solution providers deliver comprehensive telecom and cloud solutions through AppDirect’s marketplace platform.

Telecom sub-agents who once worked with WTG and Telegration, MSPs and cloud resellers working through AppSmart can access a curated Software-as-a-Service marketplace, support services and enablement opportunities. They can deploy solutions directly from the AppDirect dashboard that also puts at their fingertips billing, information, quotes, tickets, and other management tools.

That enables those partners to be the single provider delivering not only a specific technology solution to solve an immediate challenge, but a broad set of digital services, she said.

“They come to AppSmart and find the solutions they need to solve their customers’ business problems,” Bergeron said.

AppSmart is not only seeing growth in its business, and its base of partners, but also across the marketplace portfolio. The platform has swelled to offer solutions from more than 700 vendors, from voice and Internet connectivity, to SaaS, IaaS, cloud security and Internet of Things, Bergeron said.

Also joining AppSmart as part of the executive expansion is Brian Leonard, who will take charge of events, digital, demand generation, brand and product marketing as the company’s vice president of marketing.

Leonard previously ran global cloud marketing strategy at RapidScale through that company’s acquisition by Cox Business, and before that he ran marketing at Intelisys.