CRN Exclusive: IoT Company Globetouch Hires Riccardo Di Blasio, A Former VMware Sales Exec, As CEO

Globetouch, an IoT connectivity solutions company, announced on Wednesday that is has hired former VMware executive Riccardo Di Blasio as CEO.

Di Blasio, who has worked in executive sales and marketing roles with VMware and EMC, told CRN he would focus on scaling Globetouch's business out and reaching new key customers in the Internet of Things market.

"My mission is scaling out the business to the next stage," he said. "We have already written the business playbook; we know our use cases and our players. We'll be touching all areas for scaling out – and our sales and marketing team will be a key engine behind this."

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Oakland, Calif.-based Globetouch, founded in 2014, offers IoT connectivity solutions in conjunction with network operators for enterprises, operators, and connected device OEMs.

The company's flagship offerings include connectivity product GConnect, and management solution GControl, which is built on a cloud SIM scalable architecture. Globetouch also offers an IoT analytics and orchestration tool, GFusion.

"In terms of market potential, automotive is the lowest hanging fruit right now," said Di Blasio. "There's a huge potential for millions of connected cars to be deployed across every single company. Drones, trains and the transportation spaces will also make up a gigantic addressable market."

Di Blasio most recently worked at storage infrastructure start-up Cohesity as COO. Before that, he led worldwide sales for alliances at EMC, and helped build the company's worldwide cloud service provider program. At VMware, Di Blasio led global sales and marketing organizations for vCloud, commercializing the platform through an ecosystem of service providers and end users.

Di Blasio said that his "bread and butter is go-to sales and marketing," and building up a channel will be an essential part of his overall strategy to scale out Globetouch's business.

"I realize the channel is the most important pillar of our strategy in scaling up our business," he said. "Telecom providers will be the key focus for us … the have the number one reach in terms of customers, with end users and enterprises."

"We also want to target all the different players, including system integrators and the people deploying sophisticated IoT solutions," Di Blasio said. "We want to recruit and start working together with this ecosystem of IoT pure players."

John Jiang, president at Globetouch, told CRN the company would continue to make a mark in the IoT space through its unique ecosystem of operator partners.

"Traditional IoT connectivity players leave the control to mobile operators, but we put our clients in control, and that's unique in the market," he said.

The company said its former CEO, Ori Sasson, will "continue to support Globetouch as vice chairman."