Ray Villeneuve CEO of Liaise

Collaboration software company Liaise has named veteran technology executive Ray Villeneuve as CEO of the company. Sidney Minassian, who co-founded Liaise and served as CEO since the company’s inception, continues to serve on the executive team as Chief Liaison, responsible for strategic partnerships and business development and remains a member of the board of directors.

“Ray is just the person we need to take Liaise to the next level,” said Minassian. “We looked long and hard for an executive with the right combination of skills, experience and character to move Liaise past its startup phase and into the big leagues. We’ve found that combination in Ray and we’re elated he has joined us.”

“Liaise continues to exceed our high expectations,” said Bill Bartee, Liaise Chairman and General Partner at Southern Cross Venture Partners. “With its technology foundation and market direction firmly in place, we needed someone of Ray’s caliber to guide Liaise to its full potential. He is already contributing to the success of the company and we know Liaise is in good hands with Ray.”

Villeneuve joins Liaise after more than 20 years of executive experience leading Silicon Valley technology companies. Before joining Liaise, Ray served for six years as CEO at MonoSphere a predictive analytics software company focused on optimizing IT infrastructure. While there, he conceptualized the product, built the development, sales and marketing organizations, secured capital investment and brought products to market directly and through channels before successfully leading the company’s acquisition by Quest Software.

Previously, he was vice president of marketing at NetApp, the NASDAQ 100 global leader in networked storage and software. He was also CEO of MindShare Associates, a national technology sales and marketing services company and vice president of worldwide field operations at Acuity, which was acquired by Avaya. He also held executive positions at Auspex Systems, Silicon Graphics Inc. and General Electric Calma. He earned MBA and BSME degrees from Temple University Fox School of Business and the University of Michigan, respectively.

“Liaise has developed a truly breakthrough solution that goes to the heart of a problem business people at all organizational levels struggle with everyday – staying on top of critical business issues and actions contained in email and other messaging systems,” said Villeneuve. “I’m very pleased to join co-founders Sidney Minassian, Alon Novy, and the rest of the team in helping bring this highly-regarded platform to market and accelerating the growth of this exciting new company.”

Liaise’s collaboration solution, currently in private beta, won the People’s Choice award at DEMOfall09 as the best enterprise product, and is preparing for the commercial launch of its solution in early 2010.