Employee Spotlight: Nithaya Thavisouk

Each month, we will be featuring a different employee in our Employee Spotlight series. This series was born with the belief that your life experiences make you the unique person you are today and influence what you bring to the amazing culture here at Actian. We have chosen to feature those incredible individuals with a blog post dedicated to them.

This month, I sat down with our long-time Senior Manager of Regional Sales, Nithaya Thavisouk.

Originally from the south of France, Nithaya moved to Paris to study business at Institut Supérieur de Gestion.  After graduating in 1996, Nithaya began her career as a trainee in marketing under Pervasive, where she worked for close to four years. After a brief time away, she rejoined Pervasive under the sales department. When Nithaya first joined sales, she never imagined it would be where she made her career. By nature, Nithaya is shy – something that she has worked hard to overcome and mindfully pushes herself outside of her comfort zone daily. When she rejoined Pervasive, she had a few options for roles, including going back to marketing. As much as she enjoyed her role in marketing, Nithaya believed that joining sales would help her be more well-rounded in future roles.

With the acquisition of Pervasive in 2013, the products and territory Nithaya supported has evolved. Today, her territory includes Northern and Southern Europe, some of Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa and covers products including Zen, NoSql, and Actian X. But Nithaya’s role is more than sales – she’s a relationship manager. As a member of the renewals team, Nithaya handles renewals, getting compliances, but most importantly interacting with her customers. In Nithaya own words, “What I like in this position is I am working internationally. I really like working with different cultures – you aren’t doing business the same way in Northern countries than with Southern countries, than with Africa, or the Middle East.”

That sentiment also rings true in her personal life. Nithaya has always had a passion for travel. In college, she studied abroad in both the US and Japan. As a mom to four kids, she also makes it a point to expose her children to other cultures. As a family, for shorter school holidays, the family travels around Europe. During the summer however, Nithaya, her husband, and children take larger trips abroad – so far having been to Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, South America, and the US. Another area of interest amongst Nithaya and her family is a love of music. Nithaya and her husband are in a Latin band, that takes French songs are rearranges with Latin flavor. Although they all work, they still perform when they have time, whether it be in bars, restaurants, or private parties. Most notably though, was there 15-day tour in China, where they performed 7 concerts, in five cities, through the French Alliances.

Today, Nithaya works remotely out of Paris, France. But being remote does not mean she is any less connected to ActianLife and culture. In her day to day role, Nithaya interacts a lot with people in Austin, Palo Alto, the German offices and UK.  In addition to that, she and the other remote team out of Paris try to get together once a month at the business center, so that they can have lunch together and spend the day together.

Actian values the tenure and contributions of Nithaya over the past 20+ years! We look forward to her continued success as part of the Actian family.

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

Rae is the Director, Employee Experience at Actian, focusing on bringing the employee experience to the next level. She is committed to developing strategic programs that help employees feel more empowered in their roles. Rae has a background in People Operations, focused on up leveling and implementing best practice and process adoption across global organizations.