Winds of change at Sabio as Gale takes on CEO mantle

Jonathan Gale takes over as group chief exec from Andy Roberts who becomes vice-chairman

Avaya partner Sabio has welcomed Jonathan Gale as its new group CEO.

He replaces Andy Roberts, who has held the mantle since 2016 and who moves into a vice-chairman position at the company.

Gale's (pictured) most recent role was as chief exec of cloud contact centre NewVoiceMedia, which he headed for seven years until it was acquired by Vonage for over $750m (£570m) late last year.

He has also been SVP of product at Mimecast and ran Symantec's product management and business development unit.

"We're really excited about the appointment of Jonathan. He's going to bring some additional skills and capabilities into the business," Mike Andrews, VP of commercial strategy at Sabio, told CRN.

"We're really excited about how that's going to enable us to ensure that our clients can embrace the latest innovation and technologies from our partners, and also technologies that we develop ourselves to help them continue to redefine great customer experience.

"Andy is completely a part of this whole process. He's transitioning into the role of vice-chairman and continuing with his inorganic growth activities and continuing to support the transition of leadership over to Jonathan."

Horizon Capital (then called Lyceum) shelled out £28m for a 56 per cent stake in the contact centre specialist in 2016, and has since gone on an M&A spree, making six acquisitions.

It generated £71.8m for its fiscal year ending 30 September 2018, which represented a 45 per cent growth on the previous 12-month period.

Though it has locations in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Malaysia and Singapore, the UK still generates over 50 per cent of its top line.

"We're really keen to double down in a number of those areas and really continue to maintain our growth and our leadership position across those territories," Andrews said.

Gale said of his new position: "I am delighted to be joining the outstanding team at Sabio and working with our incredible customer base to lead them through this unprecedented period of customer experience evolution.

"Our focus is on enabling our clients to fully embrace and maximise the value from the very latest technologies such as AI-powered self-service, truly channel agnostic customer engagement tools and endlessly scalable and elastic cloud platforms.

"I look forward to working with everyone at Sabio, our clients and our partners to help redefine world-class customer experience."