Ray Villareal, a former WebEx executive and startup CEO, has joined LifeSize as its new vice president, Americas and head of global services, the video and infrastructure company said Monday.
Villareal will lead LifeSize's Americas team and also spearhead its global services operations. He replaces Joe Vitalone, who had the Americas role before leaving LifeSize back in May to return to ShoreTel, and he reports to LifeSize CEO Colin Buechler.
Villareal is "a perfect match for our culture of innovation and commitment to growing businesses of all sizes through video communications technology," Buechler said in a statement.
[Related: LifeSize Tackles 'One-Size-Too-Big' Issue for Videoconferencing Solution Providers]
Villareal spent three years as vice president of field operations and marketing at WebEx, the collaboration platform acquired by Cisco in 2007. He was later senior vice president, field operations for software company SumTotal Systems, and spent the last three years as an advisor and independent consultant to companies such as VMware, Plantronics, X1 Technologies and VSee. Earlier in his career he held enterprise executive positions at Compaq, and was CEO of two startups, Hellobrain.com and Omniva Policy Systems.
Despite the industry growth in enterprise video, LifeSize has had a slow year, not helped by corporate turmoil at parent company Logitech, which is in the midst of laying off about 13 percent of its workforce. LifeSize accounts for about 8 percent of Logitech's overall net sales, and in Logitech's most recent quarter, LifeSize posted year-over-year quarterly sales gains of 1 percent, helped by strong growth in the Asia Pacific region but what Logitech described in an August 6 Form 10-Q as "weak sales in the Americas and EMEA regions."
Founded in 2003, Austin, Texas-based LifeSize was acquired by Logitech for $405 million in 2009.
Both LifeSize and Logitech have been through significant executive changes in the past year, with Buechler replacing LifeSize founder and CEO Craig Malloy in January. Among its more recent priorities, LifeSize has sought to broaden it purview to include video infrastructure for virtualized and cloud environments and capitalize on the mobile video technology it gained through the July 2011 acquisition of Italian company Mirial.
PUBLISHED SEPT. 10, 2012
