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Five9 Announces New VP of Marketing
Five9’s (News - Alert) expertise in the hosted call center space has allowed them to become a leader in the space and the company has seen continued expansion throughout 2011. Earlier today, Five9 announced that they would be welcoming Ken Osborn as the company’s new Vice President of marketing.
Osborn has over fifteen years of experience in cloud and hosted computing solutions and demonstrated expertise in CRM and ERP software. Prior to joining the Five9 Team, Osborn worked for salesforce.com and led marketing initiatives for the Service Cloud division. In his new role, Osborn will continue to spearhead marketing initiatives as Five9’s rapid expansion into new markets continues.
The acceleration of Five9’s growth in 2011 has been due in large part to a funding injection of $8.6 million dollars that occurred in January 2011. The equity funding was led by Adams Street Partners and included capital from Hummer Winblad (News - Alert) Venture Partners and Partech International. This capital brought the total funding for Five9 to around $37 million and has allowed for several expansion and hiring campaigns including the one that recruited Osborn as the new VP of marketing.
In the release accompanying the news, Osborn said, “Five9 has a proven track record delivering real business value to call centers of all sizes because of a laser focus on building a scalable cloud-based solution for the complex call center infrastructure. I am excited to join the definitive industry-leader, and build on Five9’s impressive momentum, demonstrated by its current revenue growth of over 50 percent year-over-year.”
Osborn’s evangelical attitude towards the cloud allowed him to lead efforts in the marketing campaigns for salesforce.com’s Service Cloud marketing campaign substantially growing the market awareness of of cloud computing for Customer Service and Support organizations. Osborn also spent a number of years at SAP (News 
- Alert) working on Business ByDesign, as well as TriNet.
Five9’s CEO, Mike Burkland, suggested in the release that the addition of Osborn will help the company continue to lead the charge in the hosted call center space. “We have invested substantially in building an award winning technology; the leading cloud-based platform blending inbound and outbound call center activities. We have significantly grown our customer base to over 1,000 customers, and proven our solution in both small and large call centers. We are excited to add someone of Ken’s caliber, with outstanding market success in cloud computing solutions for industry leaders such as salesforce.com.”
Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Rich Steeves
