Cloudli Communications Names UCaaS, Telecom Veteran Jamie Minner CEO

'We have to hold true to our identity and not become like every other UCaaS provider where the bigger you get, the more you have to cut costs,' he says. ‘We’ve got to find a way to scale that white glove kind of [service]. Kind of the American Express of UCaaS, if you will,’ the UCaaS specialist’s new CEO Jamie Minner tells CRN about his appointment and plans for 2024.

UCaaS specialist Cloudli Communications named telecom industry veteran Jamie Minner as its new CEO on Monday as the company prepares for transformation in 2024.

“I don’t want to get too big for our britches, but I don’t want to come across as being too small. I want to go after the micro-SMB to small business. That doesn’t mean we can’t service enterprise customers, but we’ve got to get really good at the small business and then be their partner,” the new CEO told CRN about his plans in his new role.

Minner succeeds former CEO Gavin Macomber, who left the company, a spokesperson told CRN. Macomber led Cloudli for more than three years and oversaw the acquisition of Omnivigil and ConnectMeVoice during his tenure.

Minner comes to Cloudli from fellow UCaaS provider Sangoma, where he served as the company’s chief revenue officer.

Minner’s initial priorities include a heavy focus on product.

“We’ve got to identify what we want to be. We’re a UCaaS provider and we’ve got to expand that product base to our partners and our customers. From my point of view, partners want three things: They want a safe pair of hands to take care of their customers, they want innovation so they can sell new stuff to their customers, and they want to be paid. We’ve got to give them those three things,” Minner said.

The 100 percent channel-focused company will be consolidating its platform down to a “market leading” UCaaS product and will layer in other offerings, including SD-WAN, access and security over the next two quarters so that Cloudli can go deeper with customers, he said.

“Adding SD-WAN, adding security, adding access, all allows us to go back to our existing base of customers and provide them with more products,” he said. “That’ll be a priority.”

Unlike other players in the UCaaS market, Cloudli owns its platform and isn’t at the mercy of another vendor’s platform, like competitor Nextiva’s reliance on Cisco Systems from a UCaaS perspective, Minner said.

“We can move at our own pace, we can dictate our product roadmap and we can plug other products into our ecosystem,” he said.

Also on his priority list for 2024 is go-to-market and ease of doing business.

“We’ve got to know where we fit in the market and right now, a lot of our competitors are trying to go up market … but when you start looking at Cloudli’s products and the ability to automate some of the provisioning processes, we can cut down on our customer acquisition costs and stay in that micro to small business market. We need to know how we best fit there, and we need to know what partners best fit there,” Minner said.

The ability to advocate and resource for the customer and handle installation and training will help Cloudli “rise to the top” in the crowded UCaaS space with the company’s small business customer base, Minner said.

“We have to hold true to our identity and not become like every other UCaaS provider where the bigger you get, the more you have to cut costs,” he said. “We’ve got to find a way to scale that white glove kind of [service]. Kind of the American Express of UCaaS, if you will.”

Minner most recently spent more than a year as CRO of Sangoma growing the company’s channel presence. He also helped unify Sangoma’s teams across multiple organizations and geographies. Prior to that, Minner served as CRO for NetFortris for more than a year. He also held management positions at telecom service providers TPx, Momentum, Comcast and Cbeyond.

Montreal-based Cloudli Communications is owned by CPS Capital, a Toronto-based private equity firm.