Joe Rittenhouse, president of business development and managing partner at Converged Technology Professionals, of Crystal Lake, Ill., in the wake of Toshiba America Information Systems' exit from the telecommunications market in North America. That action opened the door for unified communications specialist Teo Technologies to launch a new partner program aimed at winning over Toshiba channel partners.

"Toshiba is just another example of a technology player that is realizing that making a transition to cloud is not just an important offering, it's an absolute necessity -- especially in the SMB marketplace where most of their base resided."