TalkingHeadz Podcast: Recent Episodes
Dave Michels
This podcast features the movers and shakers of enterprise communications. We also have great guests. In each episode Dave Michels and Evan Kirstel speak (similar to messaging, but verbal) with various guests about enterprise communications.
In this episode of TalkingPointz Talking Headz, David Danto and Dave Michels, joined by Metrigy Research’s Irwin Lazar, dive into the hot topic of Amazon’s recent push to bring employees back to the office full-time. They unpack the real motivations behind the memo, revealing its connections to industry-wide layoffs and corporate real estate pressures and other explanations. This candid conversation offers a fresh perspective on what the return-to-office push from Amazon’s CEO is truly all about..
I was conflicted when Scott Wharton announced his plans to leave enterprise comms to save the world. I was elated the world would now be saved, but what a loss. It was like one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for episodes of the Twilight Zone. - Dave Michels.
Scott Wharton is a seasoned expert in enterprise comms and video, with a notable career spanning influential roles at Broadsoft, Vidtel (a company he founded and sold), and Logitech.
His vision and leadership have always aimed to revolutionize the industry by enabling seamless communications across modalities and platforms. His insights into the complexities and missed opportunities within the enterprise video space continue to shape the industry's ongoing discourse, highlighting the challenges and potential for future advancements.
At Logitech, he worked to mitigate the impact of the industry's trend towards platform-specific ecosystems. Wharton's commitment to innovation and user-friendly solutions remains evident in his current role as CEO of Tandem PV, a solar energy company.
Microsoft’s ambitious plan to unify device ecosystems under one platform has hit several delays. Originally intended to create a unified version of Android for all Microsoft Teams Room (MTRoA) devices, the rollout has so far been non-existent. In this podcast, Dave and David discuss potential reasons why it's taking so long.
Recorded August 2024.
Microsoft has a new operating system, it's based on open source Android, will appear first in Teams meeting rooms, and it's called MDEP.
The latest TalkingHeadz podcast has Dave Michels and David Danto chatting with with Microsoft’s Ilya Bukshteyn exploring the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP.) This will be a customized Android distribution aimed at enhancing device interoperability and security through centralized updates and rigorous standards. It addresses challenges like inconsistent Android versions across OEMs, emphasizing long-term benefits such as improved stability and reduced maintenance. While MDEP is poised to become integral to Microsoft Teams device certification, ensuring a cohesive ecosystem for users and partners alike, it has questions and challenges. These include some confusing aspects and some industry reluctance. These factors - both exciting and challenging - are thoroughly explored in this extensive conversation.
In this engaging episode of TalkingPointz - Talking Headz, hosts Dave Michels and David Danto chat with Kevin McMenamy, the CTO of Neat, to delve into his fascinating journey through the video conferencing industry.
Kevin shares insights from his early days at Cisco, where he contributed to pioneering video technologies like IP telephony video and telepresence, to his current role at Neat, where cutting-edge video solutions are developed. The conversation covers the evolution of video conferencing, the challenges and triumphs of integrating multiple firms into Cisco, and the vibrant, innovative culture at Neat that keeps Kevin passionate about his work.
This episode offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at the industry's transformation and the key players driving its future. Tune in to hear about the technological advancements that shape how we connect globally and the personal stories of those at the forefront of this revolution.
Dave Michels and David Danto dive into the Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) ecosystem, examining its evolution, current dynamics, and future implications. They highlighted Microsoft's milestone of surpassing 1 million MTR installations and discussed the market impact of Cisco joining the ecosystem, potentially disrupting vendor success and market strategies.
It's an impressive ecosystem of vendors that has expanded over the years to meet the growing needs of the Teams community. However, one of the last vendors to join the ecosystem, Cisco, is also one of the largest.
The inclusion of Cisco, described as a significant and potentially disruptive addition, will likely have an impact on the ecosystem. Something just might have to give? The Dave's discuss the possible shake-out that could occur.
In this episode of Talking Points Chatz, Dave Michels and Dave Danto discuss
the high turnover rates among C-suite executives in various industries,
particularly in the tech sector. They note that numerous high-profile
leaders, including the CEOs of Nice, AWS, Twilio, and Bandwidth.com,
have announced their departures recently. Danto highlights that a record
number of CEO changes have occurred in the US, attributing it to
factors such as the stress of navigating companies through the pandemic
and current economic uncertainties. Michels and Danto explore the impact
of AI, financial instability, geopolitical tensions, and the breakdown
of trust within organizations. They conclude that these challenges are
creating a "perfect storm" of uncertainty and stress, likely making this
high turnover the new normal.
Microsoft announced it was what we beleive to be the first Meetings provider to reach one million connected meeting rooms. Just for fun, it also dropped that it has 20 million PSTN users! HUGE. The two Daves discuss the accomplishment, what it tells us, and what it doesn't reveal.
Episode adapted from this video discussion: https://www.youtube.com/live/MhW_ETMfF8c?si=88DOkXsa0jrLV4ak
TalkingHeadz is a series of interviews with the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with Brad Hintze, EVP Marketing at Crestron.
Brad beleives that the foundation for marketing success is contingent on the combined strength of one's ability to: a) build (and ship) fantastic products, b) clearly communicate why one's product is excellent, and c) create the right tools to win more customers.
While that may sound interesting to some, it's 1 Beyond that got us hooked. Crestron has a built a strong collaborative reputation with its Flex video conferencing systems, and that story got better about a year ago when it acquired 1 Beyond.
1 Beyond has been in business for 20 years, but the past seven have seen exceptional growth. The story got even strong with the when it opted to acquire 1 Beyond. Crestron was demonstrating its new capabilities earlier this year at ISE Barcelona, where seven One Beyond cameras collaborated so effectively that any meeting can become compelling.
Crestron's Flex solutions integrate video conferencing, wireless presentation, and smart room control. The company works closely with Microsoft Teams and other platforms as well, and 1 Beyond isn't it's first date to the rodeo either: Crestron has announced partnerships with Huddly, Shure, and Jabra too.
Prior to joining Crestron, Brad served as the Vice President of Consumer and Brand Marketing at SnapAV, where he designed and led marketing efforts and strategies. Before assuming that role, Brad held the position of Senior Director of Product Marketing at Control4 where he was responsible for directing product marketing strategy and development.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with David Petts, SVP Cloud to Cloud Business Group at Mitel.
Our podcast was recorded just a few days after Mitel announced its acquisition of Atos Unify. We do discuss it, but there's more unknowns than knowns.
David Petts is a seasoned sales and customer success executive with a proven track record of driving revenue growth and profit improvements across multiple product segments. With extensive expertise in enterprise servers, PC's, systems management software, business mobility, unified communication, and content licensing, David has a comprehensive understanding of the technology industry.
David is well-versed in adapting go-to-market strategies to the specific dynamics of different geographic. David is a team-oriented leader who values collaboration and is dedicated to achieving success for both his team and the company.
Mitel is a leading global provider of communications and collaboration solutions. Founded in 1972, the company has a long history of innovation in the telecommunications industry and has grown to serve customers in more than 100 countries around the world.
Mitel's product portfolio includes a wide range of solutions for businesses of all sizes, from small and medium-sized enterprises to large enterprises and government agencies. In addition to its core products, Mitel is also known for its commitment to customer service and support.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with Michael Beckley, Founder and CTO of Appian.
Appian is the unified platform for change. It promises to accelerate businesses by discovering, designing, and automating important processes. The Appian Low-Code Automation Platform unifies key capabilities needed to accelerate workflow.
As CTO, Michael drives the technical vision for Appian. He leads Appian’s product and solutions marketing teams, and oversees customer initiatives worldwide. Michael serves on the Industrial Advisory Board for the University of Virginia’s Computer Science Department and is a graduate of Dartmouth College.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with Raluca Monet of Google's Chrome Enterprise Recommended (CER) Team.
Chrome is a very popular internet browser, but there's more to than many realize. Chrome Enterprise offers organizations a number of advanced features. Chrome Enterprise Recommended recognizes solutions that leverage Chromebooks, Chrome Desks, and ChromeOS.
Chrome Enterprise offers a number of management and security features that can benefit a variety of use cases. There are several CER programs, and in this episode we dive into CER CCaaS.
Although Chrome can work with several premises-based solutions, the CCaaS sectors have embraced the browser over traditional software clients. Once the agent's desktop is on a browser, why bother with a full PC? Chromebooks are less expensive to purchase, secure, deploy, and maintain.
Raluca works directly with CXO level executives to improve profitability and create sustainable growth for corporations. Raluca’s areas of expertise include strategy formulation, organizational transformation, operational strategy, profit improvement and performance measurement. She joined Google in 2015.
The 2022 Season Finale of TalkingHeadz features Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-Founder of Twilio.
Jeff is always clear, articulate, and friendly. I'm proud to say Twilio was born during my shift as a telecom analyst, and it's been exciting to watch it grow and transform.
Jeff presented to analysts before the recent Twilio Signal Conference. He claimed that Twilio is always ahead of the industry. That's a bold (fighting words) statement, but he backed it up with a common sense observation. Twilio's customers create solutions that, in general, can't be purchased (yet).
Lawson and Twilio more or less created the CPaaS category, an enterprise comms sector that is becoming a little crowded. That's probably one of Twilio's motivations to go broader and become a customer data platform (CDP) provider.
CDP may seem totally unrelated to CPaaS, thus many perceive the change as a pivot. While there's some truth to that, Jeffs sees it as more of a logical extension. A lot of the CPaaS use cases support marketing, but they tend to be transactional rather than strategic. Twilio wants to better activate the information on customers that enterprises have, and the first step is to create a consolidated view.
Regardless of how you spin it, this public, multi-billion dollar company is once again a startup that's defining (or converging) a new category. Check out this interview to get a better idea of what is on Jeff's mind.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with Sid Rao, the GM of Amazon Chime SDK.
I fondly remember Biba, a WebRTC video/messaging startup . There was a lot of excitement over WebRTC about ten years ago. Biba was acquired by Amazon and relaunched as the Amazon Chime app in 2017.
Chime was a lot like Webex and Zoom, but worked entirely in a browser. Both Vonage and CenturyLink (now Lumen) were early resellers of the meeting application. The app worked well, but wasn't a bit hit. Vonage moved to its own video solution, and CenturyLink turned to apps such as Zoom and Teams.
AWS discovered that its customers were more interested in Chime's underlying WebRTC than the meeting app. Amazon created WebRTC APIs, effectively making WebRTC a service rather than a tech stack. This model was a better fit for AWS, so at its reInvent conference in 2018, AWS launched the Chime SDK.
Then came the pandemic and a boom in most things video. AWS customers and partners used Chime to create all kinds of solutions. K-12 education, for example, needed video for remote education. Chime obliged, and did so with simple hardware requirements for end users. Blackboard presented its success story at reInvent 2021.
As for the original Chime app, it's been getting better thanks to new capabilities of the Chime SDK. The Chime app isn't particular popular,, nor marketed. It does well within Amazon, both as an internal meeting and chat app and with many of AWS's large customers.
Most TalkingHeadz episodes are interviews, but in this episode we Dave and Evan cover current events.
TalkingPointz Insider Reports publish the first week of every month and cover the enterprise news that mattered the prior month. In this podcast, Dave and Evan discuss the most recent Insider Report covering the news of October 2022.
The October 2022 Insider Report was published on Nov 2.
Most Insider Reports are about 10 pages long, but designed for easy skimming. This podcasts only covers a condensed selection of topics.
Subscriptions to Insider Reports can be purchased here. A personal subscription is $588/year.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we chat with the CMO of NICE Ltd, Einat Weiss.
This podcast is a rare opportunity to hear directly from Einat who seems to prefer to communicate through others and results. Her fingerprints are all over the company's messaging across divisions and its digital doorsteps.
Einat has over 24 years of experience spearheading messaging, digital transformations, marketing strategies, and brand recognition. She joined team NICE in 2018, and has held the CMO position for over four years. The same four years that NICE has blossomed into a comprehensive provider of customer engagement solutions.
Einat holds an MBA, Marketing degree and a BA in Computer Science. Prior to joining NICE, she held marketing positions at BMC, SAP, and Alvarion.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with the new CEO at Avaya: Alan Masarek.
Many people in the industry met Alan while he was the CEO of Vonage. Alan was one of the more accessible of the comms CEOs to customers and analysts. It's not clear if his experience at Vonage or his bicycle ride across the US was better preparation for his new job.
Some might say that Avaya doesn't have a cloud, but Masarek certainly arrived under one. His appointment in late July coincided with a disastrous quarter (which still hasn't been filed), and that was just weeks after a major fund raising round. The cloud over Avaya is so dark, it's very survival is questionable.
A major change at Avaya was clearly needed, and Alan appears to have the credentials, experience, and vision. The question is if he will have enough time to right the ship.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evanrealize that NEC is one of the largest companies in enterprise communications, and when it comes to the NEC family of UNIVERGE products, there's a good chance Ram Menghani is involved.
Ram has broad experience in all aspects of product and business development. He's been with NEC for over 21 years. We suspect he has worked for other companies, but he doesn't list any on LinkedIn. He has reason to call at least three countries home which makes him an SVP of the world.
In this discussion we get into the broader NEC line for UCaaS solutions and how it's partnership with Intermedia is so unique.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evandiscuss the rebranding and differentiation of GoTo UCaaS with its CMO Jamie Domenici.
In 2016, LogMeIn acquired the GoTo Family of Products from Citrix. Both are strong brands and there must of been some struggle about branding. That ended earlier this year with the relaunch of GoTo UCaaS -- spearheaded by Jamie.
Jamie Domenici serves as GoTo’s Chief Marketing Officer. She is responsible for overseeing the full marketing organization consisting of Customer, Product and Acquisition marketing teams as well as Marketing Operations, Corporate Communications, Brand & Creative and Web & Ecommerce teams.
She is responsible for deploying GoTo’s brand messaging and architecture, driving demand for its suite of products via paid and organic channels to new and existing customers, and enhancing our web properties to tell the GoTo story and better enable self-service transactions.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evandiscuss the contact center, video, UCaaS, and life as an entrepreneur with Joe Manuele, CEO and Founder of No Filter.
Prior to No Filter, Joe served as SVP Corporate and Business Development at Dialpad, where he landed after Dialpad acquired Highfive. How Joe ended up running Highfive is covered in this podcast, but he started there as a board member representing NTT.
Joe has over 25 years of IT and communications experience in the enterprise and global carrier markets, gained at organizations including Avaya, Cisco, Actelis Networks, and Dimension Data. Joe served as Group Executive ̶ Communications at Dimension Data and NTT Global where he was responsible for its global UC and Collaboration business unit.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evandiscuss how contact center can better see the path, or light the path with Janelle Raney, CMO of Pathlight.
Prior to her arrival at Pathlight, Raney served as Head of Product and Industry Marketing at Zoom Video Communications where she built and led the product marketing, market intelligence, analyst relations, and vertical solutions teams. Prior to that, she served as Head of Product Marketing, SaaS Division, Document Cloud at Citrix where she built an experienced team and set the global go-to-market strategy for ShareFile, GoToMyPC, RightSignature and other initiatives related to productivity and collaboration.
Pathlight is a Realtime Performance Management (RPM) platform that allows large, customer-facing teams to move faster than ever before. By consolidating performance data, coaching, and communication in one place, the platform empowers data-driven management at every layer of the organizational chart. Based in San Francisco, CA, the company is backed by such investors as Kleiner Perkins, Quiet Capital, Jeremy Stoppelman CEO of Yelp and Dylan Smith co-founder and CFO of Box, among others.
Daveand Evandiscuss how Crexendo is providing new options for enterprises and service providers with Jon Brinton, CRO of Crexendo. Jon triumphantly stepped in after a last minute scheduling change.
That was probably for the best. Evan and I have known Jon for a long time, and those conversations always go a little smoother. Turns out he knows a few things about Crexendo too. Not to mention he shed some light on Mitel and Intertel history too.
Crexendo Inc., is a full-service cloud communications provider that delivers critical voice and data communication services to small, medium, and small enterprise markets. Crexendo made a bold move last year with its acquisition of NetSapiens. A communications platform that is rapidly growing. It powers service providers around the globe, including Crexendo.
Daveand Evandiscuss how Balto can improve CX with automated coaching with Founder and CEO Marc Bernstein.
Marc Bernstein is the Founder and CEO of Balto, which offers real-time automated guidance for contact center agents.
Like most founders, Marc has made his share of mistakes. In particular, he noticed as a technology sales rep, that many of his mistakes were preventable - not to mention costly. Marc thought there should be a better way, that tech maybe tech can help. That’s when Marc realized he needed to start Balto. Balto listens to the call and offers real-time and post-call services.
Marc graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in Marketing, Psychology, and Entrepreneurship, and is on a mission to transform how organizations communicate with their customers.
Daveand Evandiscuss life in the UCaaS driver's seat with Dave Sipes, the CEO of 8x8. We cover XCaaS, the economy, Teams, stadiums, and much more.
Many of us met Dave during his 12 year stint at RingCentral, ending with the role of Chief Operating Officer. It was an extraordinary period for RingCentral. Dave led innovation, engineering, global sales, marketing, customer care, international operations, corporate development, and business development. Dave left RingCentral in June of 2020 ... and emerged as the CEO of 8x8 in December of 2020.
Before joining RingCentral, Dave was co-founder and COO of Branders.com, the nation’s largest online B2B seller of promotional items. Prior to that, he worked in brand management at PepsiCo and was a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton in their marketing intensive group, providing strategic guidance to marketing and media companies such as Heinz Company, Callaway Golf, and Universal Pictures. Dave also serves on the board of directors of PandaDoc, an all-in-one document automation company that streamlines the process of creating, approving, and eSigning proposals, quotes, and contracts.
He holds a master’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in marketing from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of California, Berkeley.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evandiscuss how carrier services can improve services such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom with Dawn-Marie Elder, GM and COO of SIPPIO.
SIPPIO offers a single platform and automation for DRaaS (Direct Routing as a Service), Operator Connect, and Zoom Cloud Peering, These are all cloud-native services on Azure. In this podcast we learn more about SIPPIO and Dawn-Marie, and even uncover a few unmentionables.
Dawn-Marie was a pioneer in cloud sales with Microsoft's launch of BPOS (now Microsoft 365). At Avaya she got exposure to Telephony and digital transformation.
Dawn-Marie lives in North Carolina. In addition to COO, her other titles include Mother, Wife, and Chief Gardner.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evandiscuss employee engagement with Gideon Pridor, CMO and Chief Storyteller of Workvivo.
Gideon drives marketing strategy and execution for technology start-ups with a penchant for international business development. Before Workvivo (and a well-deserved sabbatical) Gideon was VP Marketing at TravelPerk, One of the world’s fastest-growing SaaS companies, Perfecto (acquired by Perforce), and others.
Gideon is a frequent speaker at industry events, an HRtech enthusiast, and a startup mentor helping companies build their story and tell it to the world.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evandiscuss the lack of creativity of sports in El Salvador with Brian Beutler, CEO and Co-Founder of Alianza.
Brian claims to enjoy creating innovative solutions to big problems, so opted to start Alianza in 2009. In 2020, Alianza acquired Counterpath and Message Hopper, giving it a fairly broad portfolio to offer its service provider customers.
Alianza offers a full stack cloud communications service that empowers service providers to create and deploy their own communications offerings. Cloud communication products include voice, video conferencing, text messaging for businesses, residential phone service, and standalone UC softphones.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evantoss questions back and forth with Josh Little of VolleyApp.
Josh is a serial entrepreneur. "I am a maker who is prolific at creating original works that I am proud of and are worthy of remark." He has started and exited several companies, and he loves to make things happen.
Asynchronous communications are all the rage. SMS, WhatsApp, Slack and more are often easier and preferred over a phone call. But text messages have their own set of issues. Confusion is all too common. Voicemails can be more clear than text, but are also limited in their own way.
An emerging option to consider is asynchronous video. Each user records a short talking head video and shares it with other(s ). Recipients can respond in turn with their own video clip (TalkingHeadz!). Volley offers an enterprise-grade async video service. It can be used on its own, or in conjunction with messaging apps such as Teams and Slack. And, it's free!
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evangrill Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca, about AI.
As a seasoned digital marketing and SaaS leader with over fifteen years of extensive experience bringing products to market in emerging categories, Gregg's led large teams and worked with the world's best enterprise brands. Most recently, Gregg led Salesforce Marketing Cloud's social marketing product line, where he integrated $1 billion of M&A investments into the Salesforce product portfolio.
Before Salesforce, Gregg drove product strategy and development for Salesforce Chatter, helping define the nascent category of enterprise social networking and rolling out one of Salesforce's most successful products. Earlier in his career, Gregg was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and worked in sales, marketing and product roles at several startups. He graduated from Stanford University and holds a Master's degree from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests. In this episode Daveand Evanhangout with Ujjwal Singh, Head of Workplace from Meta.
Ujjwal Singh is a product and engineering leader with a focus in enterprise and SaaS technologies. He is the Head of Workplace, Meta’s business communication platform.
Ujjwal is responsible for Workplace’s tech, engineering, design and research teams, as well as partnering with sales and partnerships to ensure the growth of the business. Before Workplace, Ujjwal helped found Facebook’s New Product Experimentation group, helping foster new ideas and business development.
Previously Ujjwal was a partner at Area 120 and a senior engineering director at Google where he helped start the Hangouts project and worked at YouTube. He was also the CTO of GoFundMe. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ujjwal enjoys working with early stage companies, running, and traveling, and currently lives in London with his family.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests too!
In this episode Daveand Evandiscuss trends and possibilities of conversational AI platforms with Dan Miller of Opus research.
Dan Miller founded Opus Research in 1986 and helped define Conversational Commerce.Dan held management positions at Atari, Warner Communications and Pacific Telesis Group (now part of AT&T). He also served as Editor-in-Chief of The Kelsey Report, where he also oversaw the launch of advisory services on local online commerce, voice & wireless commerce and global directories.
Dan received his BA from Hampshire College and an MBA from Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast that features the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests too. In this episode Daveand Evandiscuss the importance of brand with Michael Gold, the CEO of Intermedia.
Michael Gold joined Intermedia in 2011 which may have something to do with its revenues increasing five fold since. The provider also transitioned from an email and web hosting services to a channel-first UCC provider (voice, video, chat, contact center, email PLUS services such as file sharing, backups, security, archiving, and more.
Intermedia is the only cloud company to have earned J.D. Power-certified technical support 6 years in a row. In 2020, Intermedia became the exclusive worldwide cloud communications provider for NEC.
Gold has 20+ years of senior management experience in software, cloud services and channel development. Before joining Intermedia, Gold was CEO of Zlago. he was also an SVP at Parallels. Gold holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and an MBA from Stanford University.
TalkingHeadz is an ongoing interview podcast that features the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests too. In this audio-only episode Daveand Evandiscuss the importance of video with Michael Litt.
Michael Litt is CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, a global video creation, hosting and analytics platform for businesses.
In this TalkingHeadz podcast Dave and EvanGo deep, well beyond the app layer, with Cullen Jennings of Cisco. This is the final episode of 2021.
Cullen Jennings is the CTO for Security and Collaboration Business at Cisco. How do you become the technology leader at a technology leader? Practice! Cullen is Cisco Fellow (1 out of 19) with over 30 years of experience across startups, large organizations, and Internet standards. He has a thing for disruptive, real-time technologies.
Cullen holds over 100 patents. Cullen is a member of the IEEE and ACM and has published numerous technical articles. He was heavily involved in making WebRTC the standard that has enabled browser-based communications. Cullen tends to have his hand in a lot of standards and solutions impacting real-time communications. Just weeks ago, the new Cisco Webex Hologram solution escaped from Cullen's lab.
This podcast has a few more acronyms than usual, but will also leave you ROTFL.
Follow Cullen here:
- Github
- IEEE
In this TalkingHeadz podcast Dave and Evanhave One Talk with Alex Doyle of Verizon.
Alex is the Executive Director, Advanced Communications Products at Verizon. If you thought 5G was advanced, you are missing out on all the great solutions Big V has for collaboration, call centers, and UCaaS -- including its own mobile-first One Talk. The products and solutions delivered by Alex and his team support Verizon’s small to global business customers and governments.
Prior to Verizon, Alex was a member of the founding team at BroadSoft (acquired by Cisco), Director of Service Provider Solutions at Polycom, and VP Marketing at cloud video conferencing provider Vidtel. Alex began his career at Nortel, where he was responsible for product development for Nortel's mobile switching system solutions. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a MBA from Johns Hopkins University.
Dave and Evanmeet with Philipp Heltewig, Co-Founder and CEO of Cognigy.
Philipp is a German-Australian entrepreneur with profound technology experience working for companies in Europe, APAC and North America. He had the foresight to start up a conversational AI technology company in 2016. Long before anyone was talking about conversational AI.
Since its founding in 2016, Heltewig has been the CEO of Cognigy. The company focuses on the automation of customer and employee services through Conversational AI. Cloud or premises-based, text or verbal, as well as employees or customer interactions.
In this podcast you will learn more about how and why Cognigy stands out in a sea of conversational AI companies.
Dave and Evanmeet with Justin Mitchell, Founder and CEO of Yac.
Sometimes voicemail can convey a message better than text, but voicemail isn't really a conversational tool. The answer is conversational voicemail.
Yac provides conversational voicemail, and if you don't know what this, listen to this podcast.
The reason enterprise chat has become so popular (and why email remains so popular) is because people really like async communications. Orlando based Yac brings back to async comms what chat apps leave out - voice. Yac works by itself or can complement apps like Slack.
We all know that text has its limitations. For example, all caps just isn't the same thing as really shouting -- and sometimes shouting is necessary. Sure you can leave a loud voicemail. That's the message, but it probably won't result with an interactive or conversational experience,
Put more emphasis on the conversational aspect than the shouting part and you have Yac. It is just in time because distributed teams are all the rage and nothing goes better with rage than all caps - I mean Yac.
Justin started working in startups at 16. At 19 he co-founded and launched his first company and 2 years later helped it IPO on the NASDAQ. He bounces between design, engineering, and marketing on his breaks from working on 27 patents.
Dave and Evanmeet with Martin Taylor, a Co-Founder of Content Guru.
Content Guru is a leader in cloud-delivered customer engagement. Its Storm CCaaS solution is well known in Europe and expanding in North America. That's one of the topics we cover in this podcast. We also get Martin to explain the brands in his life: Redwood Technologies, Content Guru, and Storm.
Martin Taylor has been tinkering with technology since he was a child. “I was writing computer games when I was 10,” he says. He started Content Guru with his brother Sean in 2005, offering contact center technology as a service.
Martin has somehow managed to have one job since 1993. Even though his role, the key products, industry, and brand has changed. Perhaps this is why he's responsible for strategic market development. Actually, he has lots of tiles including Deputy CEO, Global CMO, and Co-Founder.
In his spare time Martin is a keen runner, having once been the Berkshire cross country champion and competing, along with Sean, in the English Schools Cross Country Championships.
Dave and Evanmeet with Michael Tessler, Managing Partner of True North Advisory, but better known as Co-Founder and CEO of BroadSoft.
Mike has a mystical fun yet wise vibe going for him. BroadSoft is a pretty impressive name to have on your resume, and a lot of people have it. MIke actually created and built it. I consider BroadSoft to be the most influential company regarding VoIP and cloud communications.
When Mike and Scott started, VoIP really didn't even work. There was no UCaaS or Cloud yet. That's exactly what they built. Michael scaled BroadSoft to 2K employees and served customers in over 80 countries. Cisco acquired BroadSoft in 2018, and almost exactly two years later Mike and Co-Founder Scott Hoffpauir left to start yet another venture.
Mike, Scott and a small cast of legendries are now running an advisory firm called True North. I forgot to ask about the name, because at the same time Michael moved south. Hmm.
They are using their industry experience and network of global contacts to help emerging companies become the next BroadSoft. ,
Dave and Evanmeet with Hugo Feiler the CEO and co-founder of Minima. A base layer protocol that brings blockchains to smartphones.
Minima is the world’s first truly decentralized blockchain protocol that runs in full on mobile phones. Minima has created an ultra-lean blockchain protocol that fits on a mobile or IoT device, allowing every user to run a full constructing and validating node. It creates the possibility of operating a network that is decentralized, scalable, and inclusive, while remaining secure and resilient. A network that guarantees anti-censorship and no overarching authority.
Prior to launching Minima, Hugo created global advertising campaigns for companies including Vodafone, Toshiba and Sony Electronics. He was previously General Manager of marcomms at Sony Europe for its computer and audio divisions.
It's not all fun and games when the net is down.
Dave and Evanmeet with Mo Nezarati, President of Voice at Subspace.
A funny thing happened to the folks at Subspace when they set out to improve gaming, they discovered how to upgrade the entire internet. Subspace harnesses the power of games to improve real-time apps.
Latency and other network issues deprive us all from the online experience we deserve and expect. The obvious solution is to build a high performance, global platform that can personalize network performance for our specific situation - that's what Subspace did. It uses gaming data to fix the performance of real-time applications around the globe.
Mo is a voice pro. He has technical chops and understands the business side too. His career experience includes 26 years at Esna, a company he co-founded. Esna was acquired by Avaya in 2015, and that's where Mo launched Zang. That service is now known as Avaya OneCloud Spaces and CPaaS, and are among Avaya's most significant recent launches. He did a short tour at Sangoma after Avaya and landed at Subspace about a year ago.
Dave and Evanmeet with Ray Pasquale, CEO and Founder of Unified Office.
Unified Office is a next-generation IT managed services provider focused on the Small and Medium-sized Business (SMB) market. Unified Office was built from the ground up focused on delivering business class communications services on the latest mobile devices. We take the latest in communications technologies and make them readily accessible by integrating them into an easy-to-use, scalable, virtualized service that extends from the desktop to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones called Total Connect NowSM. This offering allows people to stay connected to their business, anytime and anywhere, in a hyper connected world of business that operates in real time.
Dave and Evanmeet with Brett Shockley, CEO and Co-Founder of Journey.ai.
Brett's journey, prior to Journey, included being the CTO role at Avaya. He was responsible for Avaya's mergers, acquisitions, major partnerships, corporate strategy, and emerging products including Avaya Labs. Before Avaya, Brett was the VP & GM Customer Contact Business Unit at Cisco. He has extensive experience with the contact center industry, and is a tireless customer advocate.
Brett also founded Spanlink Communications and Calabrio. He is also on the board of eGain Corp. and Spok Holdings, Inc.
In addition to holding a patent for a telecommunications device, Shockley has an MBA in Marketing from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology.
Dave and Evanmeet with Darren Schreiber, the co-Founder and CEO of 2600Hz. With nearly two decades of telecom experience under his belt, Darren’s core focus is on distributed computing and communications technologies.
His contributions to the open source telecom community are immense, including co-authoring the FreeSWITCH books and mentoring at universities and workshops. He previously ran a large managed services operation, and he worked at one Bandwidth.com.
You may or may not be familiar with 2600-Hz, but you have very likely heard of its customers. Its technology is used by many well known service providers, carriers, and enterprises.
In this podcast we learn more about the company, its KAZOO product, and the shifts and trends occurring in communications.
Dave and Evanhost their first TalkingHeadz foursome. In this episode we meet with Davide Petramala and Laura Faughtenberry of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS.
Avaya is best known for its powerful enterprise contact centers which can now do even more with OneCloud CPaaS. In this podcast we find out more about how/when Avaya got into the CPaaS business, and how customers are using it to customize even faster and better services.
Avaya OneCloud CPaaS is an Avaya public cloud service that offers APIs and applications as a service that can be used to customize and personalize communications and collaboration. This global platform allows developers, partners and customers to build agile and burstable mobile and web applications via CPaaS building blocks.
Case studies include Harris County and Nebraska Medicine as well as:
- CTIntegrations https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/ctintegrations/
- 6 Points https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/6-points/
- IMPower https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/impower-solutions/
Dave and Evanmeet with Aurangzeb Khan, SVP GN Jabra.
Aurangzeb was co-founder & CEO of Altia Systems which Jabra (GN Netcom) acquired in 2019. Currently, Aurangzeb is the SVP of Intelligent Vision Systems at Jabra, best known for its Panacast products. The PanaCast products use multiple cameras, or a cam-array to create real-time, immersive video.
Earlier, Aurangzeb was President & CEO at Everspin Technologies. He was co-founder, President & CEO at Altius Solutions and, immediately following the merger Simplex Solutions, contributed to the IPO in May 2001. Aurangzeb held senior engineering and general management positions at Cadence, Cirrus Logic, Tandem Computers (now part of HP), and Fairchild.
In this podcast we ask Aurangzeb multiple questions about cameras (or is it a single question about multiple cameras?), parallax distortion, how to sell a startup for $125 million, and why the world needed a new video cam company.
Aurangzeb received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering Management from Stanford University, executive education at the Stanford GSB, a double-major B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Nuclear Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.Sc. in Physics and 1 Ingrid Lunden,
Dave and Evanmeet with Kira Makagon, Chief Innovation Officer, RingCentral.Kira is a serial entrepreneur that landed at RingCentral in 2012. In her current role as Chief Innovation Officer she leads product strategy, product management and design, engineering and R&D. She has had a tremendous impact on RingCentral.
Before RingCentral she co-founded several technology companies, including Octane (acquired by E.piphany NASDAQ: EPNY) for $3.2 billion, and RedAril (acquired by Hearst). Learn more about Kira at KiraMakagon.com. Kira is one of the most influential professionals in communications.
In this interview, Dave and Evan cover a wide range of topics including innovation at RingCentral, her new role in RingCentral Ventures, and some of the interesting developments at RingCentral over the past several years.
Dave and Evanmeet with Evan MacMillan, CEO and Co-Founder of Gridspace.
We had to pull Evan out of the garage to record this podcast. Gridspace is a collaboration between SRI Speech Labs and some fellow Stanford engineers. It is pioneering real-time speech infrastructure for contact centers and developers.
Gridspace was formed in 2012 as a collaboration between SRI Speech Lab, the lab behind Siri and Nuance, and a team of Stanford designers and engineers. Today, the company's software scans and automates calls for healthcare and financial services customers. The company is one of the largest Kubernetes cluster operators for streaming speech and has analyzed billions of call minutes with its cloud and telephony agnostic speech technology.
Dave and Evanmeet withRowan Trollope, the CEO of cloud contact center provider Five9.
Rowan was named the CEO of Five9 in May of 2018. Though many of us within the industry met him during his three years as the head of Cisco Collaboration.
Rowan is passionate about how digital transformation revolutionizes the way we communicate. He is a self-proclaimed geek and self-taught software developer. He has an eye for aesthetics, and during his term at Cisco, the collaboration group earned 20 awards for outstanding product design.
We cover a wide range of topics in this interview from Cisco Spark to Ethereum, but spend most of the time talking about Five9. Both Rowan and the entire Five9 team have had a spectacular ride over the past three years.
Evan and Davechat with Karen Mangia, VP Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce.
Karen Mangia focuses on strategies for personal and professional success, and she regularly works with executives, managers and future leaders at companies of all sizes globally. She published two books in 2020: Listen Up! How to Tune In To Customers, And Turn Down the Noise and Working From Home: Making the New Normal Work For You - both from Wiley.
We cover a lot of topics, especially work from home. #WFH
Committed to diversity and inclusion, she serves on her company’s Racial Equality and Justice Task Force. She is a TEDx speaker and the author of Success With Less, a book that chronicles her own personal journey through a life-threatening health crisis. Her high-impact keynotes help organizations to access the future of work via innovative insights around the voice of the customer.
Evan and Davechat with John Saw, the CTO of T-Mobile.
John Saw is the EVP of Advanced and Emerging Technologies at T-Mobile, and is responsible for constantly evaluating ways to disrupt wireless communications. John was previously the CTO at Sprint and came to T-Mobile as a result of the companies merging. John was also the CTO at Clearwire before the company was acquired by Sprint in 2013.
John earned a Doctorate, Master’s, and Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from McMaster University, Canada, and has six U.S. patents in wireless technologies. In 2017, the FCC chairman appointed him to the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee. He also serves on the board of directors for Spectrum Effect, a pioneer in RF spectrum analytics, and he is on the advisory boards of the 5G Open Innovation Lab and Global TDD Initiative (GTI).
When John’s not working on network innovation, he enjoys golfing, skiing around pesky snowboarders, and hiking with his wife.
You can subscribe to TalkingHeadz on most podcast apps.
Evan and Davechat with Bill Wignall, the CEO of Sangoma Communications.
You may not be that familiar with Bill or Sangoma, but both are industry giants that have outperformed their peers and the broader industry. Bill has guided Sangoma through tremendous growth and transformation, largely through acquisitions.
Sangoma is known for its plug-and-play, enterprise grade solutions. The company is the primary producer of Asterisk and FreePBX, the two largest open source communications projects in the world. These systems power countless systems and providers around the world.
In this podcast we go through most of the acquisitions, a little industry hotel, and a whole lotta transformation - hardware to software to cloud-delivered services. Bill's also shares his vision of the smart office, and it has nothing to do with dial tone.
Enjoy this rare opportunity to meet Bill, he tends to avoid public appearances.
Evan and Davechat with OJ Winge and Simen Teigre, the founders of Neat.
Neat came out of stealth at Zoomtopia 2019. The company is new, but on day one had extensive expertise in both video and video hardware. OJ and Simen were part of Tandberg which is arguably the most innovative source of video technologies (both before and after its 2010 acquisition by Cisco).
Both OJ and Simen went to Cisco, both left and became involved in two separate video startups: OJ with Acano and Simen with Pexip. These companies were direct competitors. Acano was acquired by Cisco in 2015.
Fast forward to 2019, the two reunited and founded Neat. A new company focused on exclusively producing hardware for the rapidly growing Zoom ecosystem. Neat is the first video hardware company dedicated to Zoom, and what incredible timing. The video sector (especially Zoom) had explosive growth in 2020. An amazing year for most video-related businesses, but an incredible first year for Neat.
Evan and Davechat with Karl Hantho of Pexip.
Pexip is the result of a 2019 merger between Pexip and Videxio -- both started by a group of visionary industry veterans, both offshoots of Tandberg. They set out to break down the barriers which were making enterprise video conferencing expensive, and difficult to use, manage and scale. Pexip provides interoperability with Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and other video services, and also offers a complete end-to-end meeting and calling solution.
Karl Hantho is president of the Americas. Prior to Pexip, Karl led a successful Americas business for Videxio, a cloud-based video conferencing service that merged with Pexip in December of 2018. Before starting Videxio's business in the Americas in 2013, Karl was a member of the original joint venture leadership team in 1994 that established and grew BT Visual Images to become the US acquisition that launched Tandberg in the North American market in 1997, the business which he led through 2004.
Evan and Davechat with Chris MacFarland, Chairman and CEO of Masergy.
Masergy Communications is a software defined networking services company founded in 2000 and headquartered in Plano TX. Its offerings include advanced networking services such as Managed SD-WAN, UCaaS, CCaaS, and Managed Security.
Chris MacFarland joined Masergy as COO in 2008 and was promoted to CEO and Executive Chairman. Prior to Masergy, he has served in various senior executive positions at BroadSoft, McLeodUSA, Allegiance Telecom, Verio, OnRamp, CompuNet, and Compu-Tek International.
Chris was selected as a 2017 Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Top CEO, Tech Titans CEO of the Year for 2016 and Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2015 for the Southwest region.
In this podcast we learn how the cloud has changed over the past few years, and how Masergy has adapted. The company is among the first service providers to launch the new hybrid Webex service that utilizes locally hosted voice services with Cisco hosted conferencing services.
Chris is passionate about community service and has championed numerous charitable and outreach programs including as a board member of the Warrior Family Network and International Student Foundation. He attended the University of Texas at Arlington where he majored in Computer Science and Engineering.
Evan and Davechat with Scott Wharton, VP & GM, Video Collaboration at Logitech.
Logitech is well known for its PC and USB peripherals, and it has recently emerged as a major player in enterprise video. The company has been a key partner to Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco, Google, and many others. It has also been instrumental in building a bridge between smart room vendors and video conferencing services.
Prior to Logitech, Scott was the founder and CEO at Vidtel, a pioneering cloud-based service that interconnected enterprise video systems to consumer applications. After the sale of Vidtel and some extensive global travel with the family, Scott accepted the role to lead Logitech's video group. Soon after, its revenues tripled.
Prior to Vidtel, Scott was the VP of Marketing at BroadSoft. Scott holds an MBA. from Yale University.
Evan and Davechat with Tom Puorro, EVP and GM Products at Poly.
Tom leads the global development team, which is responsible for audio, video, and headset solutions at Poly. He joined Poly in 2018 and was part of the formation of the new company/branding after the merger of Plantronics and Polycom. Prior to joining Poly, Tom served as VP and GM of Cisco Collaboration's UC Technology Group He led Cisco’s $2 billion strategic acquisition and integration of BroadSoft, Inc.
Evan and Davechat with Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft 365 Collaboration with Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
Jeff leads the product design, and engineering teams for Teams (and a few other areas too) with the aim of empowering people and organizations to collaborate. Though he's been at Microsoft for close to 30 years, he's still inspired by its core mission of connecting people everywhere with tools and technologies to create, build, and achieve more together.
There may not be any other enterprise communications app as successful as Microsoft Teams. Last October Microsoft revealed Teams now has 115 million daily active users. That’s more than a 50 percent increase from the 75 million that Microsoft reported about six weeks earlier.
Jeff joined the Teams team in Q120, and lived through a lot of that growth. We cover what Satya thinks of Teams, Metaswitch, why Outlook and Teams are separate clients, if Teams is a business or consumer app, pandemic impacts, and so much more.
When not working, you might find Jeff preparing for a marathon, noshing a bagel, or enjoying The Beatles with his family. He earned a BS at NYU and an MBA from Harvard.
Evan and Davechat with Anand Janefalkar, CEO and Founder of UJET.
UJET is a new kind of CCaaS company, cloud native, designed and built for modern communications. That means it natively integrates with other cloud apps, without duplicating data, and is built for modern, multi-modal communications.
Anand is passionate about creating better business results through more natural communications. He started UJET to modernize the Contact Center by addressing long-standing design flaws and conventional thinking that have failed to evolve in parallel with changing human interaction landscape.
He has experience with personal mobility and consumer communications. We ask him about his time at both Motorola and Jawbone, but then we get into the meat of why UJET is different in how it approaches customer engagement.
Anand holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics from Mumbai University and a Master of Science in Telecommunications from Southern Methodist University.
Evan and Davechat with Javed Khan, SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration.
Javed Khan leads Cisco’s multi-billion-dollar Collaboration business which includes the Webex portfolio of Meetings, Teams, Rooms, Calling, and Contact Center. In this podcast we discuss the WebexOne conference that Cisco hosted earlier this month.
Prior to this position, Javed was running Cisco’s Cloud Calling business. He and his team were responsible for the strategy and execution of product management, development and partner operations for the Cisco Cloud Calling Portfolio. This includes Webex Calling, Cisco BroadWorks-based solutions, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) Cloud.
Javed came to Cisco from Symantec where he served as the VP of Enterprise and Consumer Security products. Javed holds an MS in Computer Science and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. When he's not working, he enjoys spending time with his family in the San Francisco bay area.
Evan and Davechat with Craig Malloy, the founder and CEO of Lifesize.
There are few, if any, executives in enterprise video who have seen what Craig has seen. He founded Lifesize in 2003, and other than a brief break, he's been at the helm the whole time.
Lifesize started as a vendor of premises-based, proprietary video equipment. The company has gone through a few different industry transitions, pivots, and demand shifts, and today offers a standards-based, cloud-delivered services for meetings - oh, and customer engagement too.
In this interview we ask Craig about what he's seen, and what's learned. We talk about WebRTC, the move to AWS, 4K video, Tech in Austin, and more.
Currently, Lifesize is owned by Marlin Equity, a private equity firm. We ask Craig about that transition too, and he does mention EBITDA. More importantly we learned how PE caused the recent merger with Serenova. Suddenly, Craig found himself the CEO of what may be the only provider of video and contact center services.
Actually, there are lots of companies that do both video and CCaaS, but they tend to offer UCaaS too. Craig will either create a new model, build/acquire a UCaaS offer, or perhaps both.
Evan and Davechat with the recently named CEO of Vonage, Rory Read.
In this podcast we get to know the new dude in charge at Vonage. Rory Read joined the Company as CEO and a member of the Board of Directors in July 2020. He was previously Chief Operating Executive for Dell Technologies, and also served as CEO and President of Virtustream, a Dell Technologies business. Rory also served as Executive Vice President of Dell Technologies Boomi, a SaaS integration platform provider. Rory played a lead role in the $67 billion merger of Dell and EMC. As President of Dell Worldwide Commercial Sales, he built and managed Dell’s best-in-class sales engine, and delivered the strategy for Dell’s global channel, partner and direct sales efforts.
Before joining Dell, he served as CEO, President and member of the Board of Directors of AMD. Prior to that he was COO and President at Lenovo. Earlier, Rory spent 23 years at IBM, serving in various leadership roles.
Evan and Davechat with the legendary tech activist and author Cory Doctorow.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger -- a contributor to Boing Boing and the author of young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER and novels for adults like RAPTURE OF THE NERDS and MAKERS. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group.
Enterprise users of communications and technologies need activists too. We cover a lot of ground in this podcast. Cory has an informed opinion on the changes taking place in the tech that governs our lives. We cover surveillance, privacy, chickenization, and so much more.
Works referenced in this episode:
Attack Surface
Little Brother
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
Subscribe to Cory's blog here.
Evan and Davechat with Javier Soltero, VP & GM of Google Workspace.
Javier wants you to re-think G Suite. Actually, he wants you re-think suites and in general. He explains in this podcast the logic and intent of rebranding G Suite to Google Workspace. We also cover some of the changes at Google Cloud, and Javier explains why enterprises can trust Google with their data. Go ahead and download this episode, voice is a great way to meet and chat.
Javier Soltero became the VP of G Suite about a year ago, and already worked himself out of that job. Google Workspace is more than a rebrand, it's a new philosophy about online productivity. We also cover voice, chat, and of course email. We also talk about how Google Workspace is different than Microsoft's Office 365 -- his prior gig.
Javier landed at Microsoft after it acquired his startup, Acompli in 2014. As an MS CVP, he worked on Cortana, Outlook, and Office. Prior to starting Acompli, Javier worked at VMware, Hyperic, and Netscape. Javier attended Carnegie Mellon University and currently lives in the San Francisco area.
Evan and Davechat with Cameron Weeks (Twitter/LinkedIn), CEO and co-Founder of Edify.
We strive to have guests that span the industry, and this episode has it it all. That's because Edify offers UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS. Actually, that's not even broad enough. Cameron and Team Edify are on a mission to redefine business communications, cloud, omnichannel, and customer engagement. He believes that the technologies today enable a totally new approach:
Cameron Weeks is the driving force behind Edify Labs. The company is only two years old, but has decades of experience behind it. The hardest part is getting prospects to realize that they can order off the established menu.
Evan and Davechat with Tony Bates (Twitter/LinkedIn), CEO of Genesys.
Many factors are currently contributing to the interesting and uncharted territories in which businesses now find themselves. From the global pandemic, to the continued rise of AI and the cloud, as well as the ever-evolving understanding of customer experience. For our guest today, Tony Bates, the confluence of these forces, and a desire to constantly innovate and scale both propel and ground his work.
Tony shares some reflections on Skype, and takes us through the process he went through accepting the CEO role at Genesys. We discuss some of the changes implemented since his arrival a little less than two years ago. Tony is no stranger to industry leaders and the forefront of the tech world. He explains why his current position at Genesys is the job he "has been waiting for his whole life!"
Our conversation covers the changes at Genesys since Tony arrived. He also unpacks the three-pronged approach to innovation that he subscribes to, underlining the importance of system synergies. We discuss balancing new talent with experienced minds, and Tony talks about the fusion of these two forces for a more successful future.
One of the great takeaways from our chat is Tony's explanation of the idea of experience as a service, his renewed focus on the customer journey, and how this relates to their marketing strategy at the company right now.
Evan and Davechat with Noreen Allen, CMO of Bandwidth Inc.
Noreen has been the CMO of Bandwidth (NASDAQ: BAND) since 2012. She is responsible for driving revenue across all lines of its business. Her specialty is building powerful, category-leading brands and creating scalable revenue engines for tech companies. Over the past twenty years, she’s been part of multiple rounds of fund raising and M&A activity and helped three companies IPO.
Her prior roles include: VP, Global Marketing for e-commerce software provider, ChannelAdvisor; VP, Marketing for Hosted Solutions; VP of Marketing for Motricity; and VP, Marketing with SpectraSite Communications.
In this podcast you will get a better intro Bandwidth, a provider that has experienced explosive growth as it powers many of the top brands and services in UCaaS including RingCentral and Microsoft Teams.
Evan and Davechat with Alan Duric (Twitter), the CTO/COO and Co-Founder of Wire.
Wire, based in Zug Switzerland, is a provider of secure collaborative communications, Wire offers messaging, voice and video calling, and file-sharing services all protected with end-to-end encryption.
The Wire app launched in 2014 with secure messaging. Over the years it has expanded into a full communications suite while retaining strong end-to-end encryption. In this podcast Alan shares some new features that are coming,
Prior to Wire, Duric has worked with several communications companies including Skype, Telio, Camino Networks, and Ericsson. He was also heavily involved in the development of WebRTC.
Evan and Davechat with Stewart Bufferfield, the co-Founder of Slack.
Slack is the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward.
In this podcast we cover a lot of ground, including Microsoft, recent acquisitions, Slack Connect, Amazon Chime, Enterprise Grid, and more.
Stewart has been regularly recognized for the foresight and innovation that has helped him build two companies. He was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine, and one of the Top 50 Leaders by BusinessWeek; he has been included on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment List, the Recode 100, Advertising Age’s Creativity 50, and the Technology Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal.
Slack was an accident, as was Flickr before it. The team invented the tools that became Slack in order to better collaborate. They eventually realized that other companies might want to improve collaboration too and Slack was born.
Stewart has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Victoria and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.
Evan and Davechat with Bruce McClelland, the recently named CEO and President of Ribbon Communications.
Ribbon Communications is a global communications and network solutions provider to service providers, enterprises, and critical infrastructure sectors. Bruce is a technical business leader with a proven history of developing and growing businesses. Previously, Bruce was CEO at ARRIS and led its sale to CommScope, where he served as COO. During his tenure at ARRIS, Bruce held multiple leadership positions and had a key role in the successful acquisition and integration of multiple companies including Ruckus, Pace and the Motorola Home Business.
This podcast is your chance to meet Bruce. He joined Ribbon just before the pandemic's shelter in place orders. That's probably made him more productive has he otherwise would have been traveling extensively. Ribbon's history of acquisitions has created a company that's extremely decentralized. We cover a broad swath of topics in this podcast including SBCs, 5G, wireless, IoT, and more.
Bruce began his career at Bell Northern Research and held several leadership roles at Nortel. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering (Great Distinction) from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.
Dave and Evanchat with Ryan Hollenbeck, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing and Customer Experience at Verint.
Ryan Hollenbeck is responsible for driving global corporate marketing, solutions marketing, marketing communications and operations, analyst and public relations, and sales enablement. Ryan also serves as executive sponsor of the Verint Customer Experience Program that focuses on gathering a deep understanding of the customer journey and translating that information into actionable insights.
We cover actionable intelligence, the difference between WFO and WEM, how the pandemic impacted Verint and its customers, and so much more.
Dave and Evanchat with Anthony Bartolo, the Chief Product Officer at Avaya.
Anthony Bartolo is responsible for product development, product management, emerging technologies and corporate strategy across Avaya’s premise and cloud-based solutions. He rejoined Avaya last November, and reports to CEO Jim Chirico.
Bartolo has over 30 years of functional and general management experience in transformational, high growth environments, ranging from start‑ups to large cap public companies. He returns to Avaya after having spent the last several years at Tata Communications where he served as its EVP and Chief Product Office. Prior to Tata, Bartolo was vice president at Avaya in both the UC and contact center business units responsible for product development and the SMB business segment.
Anthony’s previous roles include President and CEO of Skyrider Limited, a social networking start-up, and VP and GM of the Wireless Infrastructure and RFID Divisions for Symbol Technologies (acquired by Motorola). He has also held multiple senior leadership positions around the globe with Nortel Networks. A graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia.
Dave and Evanchat with Dmitry Netis of Q Advisors, a global investment firm focused on enterprise communications.
Netis heads Q Advisors' origination and business development efforts. He has over 24 years of experience that combines finance, venture investing, sell-side equity research, and operational industry experience across the telecom, media, and technology (TMT) sector. Most recently, he consulted for several public and private company clients under the practice he founded, Dmitry Netis & Company LLC, and was the CFO/COO of privately-held CafeX Communications. He was also a Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst with Stephens Inc. Prior to that, he spent over 10 years at William Blair & Company as a founding member of the TMT team, where he established cloud communications, data networking, and infrastructure software practices.
Dave and Evanchat with Antony Passemard, Applied Conversational AI and CCAI lead at Google Cloud.
This is a naturally intelligent conversation about how AI is changing the contact center. We cover terminology and then get into how Google is leveraging its vast AI capabilities to improve customer service - at other companies.
Antony has been in IT for over 20 years and spent the last 12 working on Enterprise products and partnerships at companies like Yahoo, Salesforce.com, AWS and now Google Cloud. Today Antony heads up product and strategy for Google Cloud's conversational AI solutions with a strong focus on Contact Center AI. Antony is originally from France and came to California to study for an MBA at the Haas School of Business from which he graduated in 2009, and stayed ever since with his wife and 2 children.
Dave and Evandiscuss recent enterprise communications news.
We discuss this Insider Report: https://talkingpointz.com/april-2020-insider-report/
Voicemails:
- Blue Jeans: 4:40
- Starfish: 11:15
- 2600Hz: 14:15
- Workplace by Facebook: 21:10
- Pexip: 25:30
Dave and Evanchat with Del Currie, Head of Solutions at Sneek.io.
Sneek.io provides what's known as persistent video. Though, it's not persistent video. It's really better described as a next generation of presence that involves frequent snapshots. Instead of a green or yellow icon, Sneek.io users see frequent snapshots of their colleagues, and presence can be seen if he or she is in the photo. A single click turns that snapshot into a live video chat.
Persistent video can be viewed as a new form of presence, a new form of chat, an Orwellian Big Brother, or potentially as a portal to another location. Whatever it is, it's a fascinating form of business communications. It's not a new concept, but perhaps its time has finally come. None of the persistent video apps that came before are still around. This doesn't bother Del, and he explains why in this podcast.
Dave and Evanchat with Sri Srinivasan (LinkedIn/Twitter), the new GM of Cisco Collaboration. In this discussion we talk about organizational changes, Sri's priorities, Webex in March, and what Sri learned from Microsoft. Prior to recent promotion, Sri was responsible for Webex including Meetings, Teams, Calling, and room hardware.
Sri has broad software experience across platforms and products. His career has spanned numerous roles including software development, development lead, architect, performance & scale engineering, program management and engineering general management. Sri has been a hands-on technical architect with deep domain understanding of business applications across ERP, CRM, and cloud communications.
He arrived at Cisco collaboration over two years ago. Prior to his arrival, he spent over 12 years at Microsoft developing (conceptualizing) ERP. Prior to Microsoft he worked at Claremont and Peoplesoft.
Dave and Evanchat with Mary T. McDowell, CEO of Mitel. In October 2019, Mary McDowell was named the CEO of Mitel. Many industry professionals first met McDowell during her term as CEO of Polycom. She exited Polycom when it was acquired by Plantronics (now known as Poly) in 2018.
Prior to Polycom, McDowell was an EVP at Nokia, where she was in charge of the company’s $15B global feature phone business and oversaw Nokia’s developer and app store organization. She also previously held senior positions at Compaq Computer and Hewlett Packard.
Mary is known to be a pragmatic and effective problem solver with extensive experience, in emerging markets, M&A, and operations, and turnarounds. In 2012 she was described as one of ten "disruptive individuals" reshaping the mobile phone industry. In 2018, she was recognized as one of the top 10 women in telecommunications. She is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Engineering.
@davemichels and @evankirstel discuss the TalkingPointz Insider Report for March News - our discussion features celebrity voicemails. Subscribe to TalkingPointz Insider Reports https://talkingpointz.com/pricing
Insider reports are accessible to non subscribers after 100 days.
https://talkingpointz.com/category/insider/
Dave and Evanchat with Murali Sitaram, GM of Microsoft Yammer and Office 365 Groups.
Yammer is an enterprise social networking service used for internal communications within organizations. Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012, but hasn't done that much with it - until recently. Yammer got a whole new look. Although Yammer and Teams offer a lot of the same functionality, the two apps are positioned as complementary rather than competitive. Yammer and Teams are both included in all Office 365 and Microsoft 365 enterprise plans.
Sitaram is the GM of Yammer and O365 Groups, accountable for the product strategy and
development and service delivery for both these products as part of the O365 suite. Before joining Microsoft, Murali Sitaram was most recently the Managing Director of global Partnerships and Alliances with Google serving Google Cloud’s portfolio. Prior to Google, Murali was the VP/GM of WebEx at Cisco, where he helped grow WebEx to over a $1B business.
Prior to this, Murali lead the development of WebEx Social an Enterprise Social Platform after successfully helping to turn around Cisco's Call Center business
as GM. Earlier in his career, Murali has held various product leadership positions at companies such as Avaya and Aspect Communications.
In this TalkingHeadz podcast, Dave and Evan discuss the news and events of February, with special guests via voicemail.
We discuss the February Insider Report, published the first week of March on TalkingPointz. Insider Reports summarize and analyze the major news and events from the prior month. You can subscribe to Insider Reports at https://talkingpointz.com/pricing/
Dave and Evanchat with Craig Walker, the CEO of Dialpad.
Craig Walker is the co-founder and CEO of Dialpad, a born-in-the-cloud UCaaS provider. Previously he led Dialpad Communications Inc., (acquired by Yahoo! for $50 million), a pioneer in VoIP services, and later co-founded GrandCentral (acquired by Google for $100 million). Dialpad has raised $120 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Felicis Ventures, SoftBank, and Iconiq Capital.
Craig was a technology venture investor at Sterling Payot Capital and TeleSoft Partners and was also a corporate attorney at top tier law firms in Silicon Valley, where he represented companies ranging from early stage start-ups to Cisco Systems. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley (BA), Georgetown University (MBA) and Boalt Hall School of Law (JD). Member of the Telecommunications and E-Commerce Committee for the US Chamber of Commerce.
In this podcast we discuss how Switch.co got Dialpad back as its name. How Craig can't escape Telecom, and why the restaurant business needs more disruption.
Dave and Evanchat with John Hernandez, the CEO of Selligent.
John Hernandez is well known in the communications industry as a contact center pro. In August of 2017, he took those skills to Selligent, a marketing cloud. Selligent leverages automation and AI to improve the customer experience. Selligent's marketing platform provides a cohesive, flexible platform designed for agile, marketers. Seligent's services are complementary to both CRM and contact center initiatives.
While there are indeed other marketing clouds, and while some contact center solutions understand rudimentary marketing, Selligent offers a powerful integrated solution. Under Hernandez's leadership, Selligent has created alliances with Cisco, Genesys, Five9, and NICE.
Prior to Selligent, Hernandez was the COO and SVP, Service Cloud at Salesforce. He has the experience and vision to navigate Selligent thru its rapid growth. Before Salesforce, John served as VP and GM of IBM's collaboration business. Prior, Hernandez served as a VP and GM within Cisco's Collaboration business, where he created the Customer Collaboration Strategy.
You can follow John on Twitter.
Dave and Evanchat with Jeff Lawson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Twilio.
Jeff Lawson realized that communications are essential to every business. He got the idea as a result of his experiences as an entrepreneur and developer during a time when the API model for technology services was emerging. Lawson and co-founder Evan Cooke created Twilio, and effectively created a new enterprise communications category: Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS).
Twilio has enabled small, medium, and large enterprises to create powerful communications enabled applications. It also spawned numerous other providers that leverage Twilio's services and Super Network under the covers. Twilio’s platform serves people in over 180 countries. The company’s revenue has grown from $88.8 million in 2014 to over a billion in 2019.
In this podcast we ask Jeff to explain why it makes sense to target budget developers, hwo live coding became a thing, and several other topics including why customers pay for services with their shoes.
Dave and Evanchat with Brian Day the newly named CEO of Fuze.
Last month, Fuze named Brian Day its new CEO. Actually, Brian announced it himself in a blog post that also reemphasized Fuze's commitment to enterprise customers.
Fuze was among the first UCaaS providers (under it's original brand Thinking Phones) to penetrate larger customers. While most providers started small and are working their way up, Fuze started big and has been (until recently) working its way to smaller accounts.
Brain explains the differences in targeting enterprises vs. small and medium businesses, and why Fuze is taking deliberate actions to primarily focus on large accounts.
Prior to being CEO, Brian was the CFO at Fuze. He has 25 years as a successful financial leader and operator at high-growth companies, most recently at Apperian where he also served first as CFO, and then CEO through its sale in 2016.
Brian has a B.A. in Economics from the University of New Hampshire, and also accidentally got a J.D. from Suffolk University Law School.
Dave and Evanchat with Quentin Gallivan, CEO of BlueJeans Network.
Quentin was named the CEO of BlueJeans in August 2017. He brought to the company extensive experience in growth. As a founding executive at Verisign he grew the company to $1.5B in revenue (and took it through an IPO). He also grew cloud-based security market leader Postini to more than 35,000 customers (and over 10M users) before its acquisition by Google.
He's well regarded as a numbers man, but comes across fairly well-rounded in this interview. The takes Dave and Evan through some of the recent changes and announcements at BlueJeans.
BlueJeans provides a meetings platform for the modern workplace that connects desktops, mobile devices and room systems. Thousands of organizations from growing businesses to Fortune 500s use BlueJeans for video meetings and large interactive events.
Dave and Evanchat with Yaniv Masjedi, CMO at Nextiva.
Yaniv Masjedi started building the Nextiva marketing engine on day one (day one of Nextiva) about 12 years ago. That involved introducing to prospects this crazy concept of a cloud-PBX. Nextiva offers UCaaS, video, team chat, and CRM services. It is headquartered in Scottsdale, AZ.
As CMO, Yaniv is responsible for Nextiva's marketing and branding efforts including demand generation, advertising, marketing communications, and thought leadership. Yaniv actively blogs about marketing on several industry and professional sites as well as Nextiva.com.
Follow Yaniv on Twitter.
Dave and Evanchat with Milton Chen, founder and CEO VSee.
Milton is a video pioneer that has built VSee into a powerful telemedicine platform.
Telemedicine is no longer a fringe idea, in fact, some insist on dropping the "tele" part because it's just medicine now. It can save lives, and improve healthcare, and reduce costs. VSee serves over 1000 companies including Walgreens, MDLIVE, Trinity, DaVita, HCA, Seton, McKesson-US Oncology, and others.
VSee was founded in 2008 by two Stanford PhD students, Milton and Erika Chuang. The original VSee platform was coded by Milton who did his PhD research on the psychology of video communications. Milton has deployed VSee for former President Obama’s Inauguration, for the Navy Seals, for Hillary Clinton, and Angelina Jolie in their refugee work. He is a genius at video, but needs to improve his skills around podcast audio.
Dave and Evanchat with Paul Jarman, CEO at NICE inContact.
Paul is a pioneer of the CCaaS, movement. Paul was instrumental in guiding inContact from its roots in telecommunications to its leadership position in the cloud-delivered contact center sector. He has been a part of every major enhancement the company has made since 1997.
Mr. Jarman has spent his career building a service-driven business focused around both customers and employees, resulting in a strong corporate culture with high retention rates of both groups. Prior to joining inContact, Paul was an executive with HealthRider, Inc. Paul holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from the University of Utah.
Dave and Evanchat with Julian Codorniou, Vice President of Workplace by Facebook.
Julien joined Facebook in 2011 to build the EMEA gaming team and then led the global Platform Partnerships team, helping Facebook partners to build, grow and monetize their apps with Platform. Prior to Facebook, Julien was director of business development at Microsoft Corp where he created and launched the BizSpark program.
Workplace is growing very fast, and it appears it's just getting started. This app has the potential (funding, engineering, innovation, capability, global reach, etc.) to radically transform enterprise communications . . . enterprise wide.
Under Julien's leadership, Workplace serves more than 3 million paying users at companies including Walmart, Starbucks, Nestle, Telefonica, Grab, Spotify, Chevron and many more globally.
In this podcast we get a better idea how Workplace is different from other enterprise social/messaging apps as well as from Facebook itself. Julien explains how Workplace started as an internal project and how Workplace balances familiarity with the unique requirements of business customers.
Nidal Abou Ltaif is known for his desire to help his customers use technology to make a difference in people’s lives.
Nidal joined Avaya as the sales leader for the Middle East in 2003. In early 2014, was selected to lead the newly formed Global Growth Markets theater that includes MEA, Turkey, Russia, India, and China. In August 2015, he was named President of Avaya International with responsibilities for Europe, Middle East and Africa & Asia Pacific
Nidal has responsibilities for sales, services, engineering, and vertical solutions. He has been instrumental in Avaya’s transformation from niche voice/IP telephony player to its leadership position for UC and CC.
He is known for his ability to foster long lasting relationships with customers and employees. Many of the associates Nidal has mentored went on to have successful careers in technology across the Middle East and Africa. What sets him apart is sincere concern for others.
Devoted to the principles of customer-centricity, leaders without titles, and accountability at the workplace, Nidal has fostered an environment that makes innovation everyone’s business – whether they’re an Avaya employee or customer. Prior to Avaya, Nidal works at NCR and AT&T.
For more enterprise communications content, see TalkignPointz.com
Dave and Evanchat with Mark Strassman, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Unified Communications and Collaboration at LogMeIn.
Mark serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager for LogMeIn’s Unified Communications & Collaboration business unit overseeing market-leading UCC products GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Jive, Grasshopper and more. Mark joins LogMeIn from BlueJeans Networks, where he served as the video collaboration company’s Chief Product Officer. Prior to BlueJeans, he was Senior Vice President of Products at Blackboard, Inc, a leading provider of video and collaboration technologies for the education industry. He’s also held various leadership positions at Autodesk, Inc., including managing Autodesk’s core products, AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT and at Adobe and Macromedia where he built and led the Web publishing and Flash businesses.
Mark holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.B.A. from the Walter A. Haas School of Business- University of California, Berkeley.
Dave and Evanchat with Sagi Dudai, the CTO of Vonage.
As CTO he is responsible for leading Vonage’s technology vision, architecture and design, overseeing all aspects of technology development, including new products, their enabling technologies and R&D.
Prior to being named CTO, Mr. Dudai was Senior Vice President of Software Engineering for Vonage, responsible for software development company-wide. Prior to joining Vonage in 2012, he held engineering leadership roles at various technology companies, including three startups – Mercury Interactive, TelMap & fring. Earlier, he also worked on a number of classified software and hardware engineering projects for Israeli intelligence.
He graduated from IDF computer science training program and earned his BA in Computer Science & Business Administration from Tel Aviv University. He also holds an Executive M.B.A from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Dave and Evanchat with Eric Yuan the founder and CEO of Zoom. In this conversation we learn that Eric credits something different than his product to Zoom's success and why it's so sweet that Walmart is a customer. Other topics include Eric's views on social media, freemium software, business travel, and contact centers.
Eric is a Chinese Internet Entrepreneur and was a founding engineer at Webex. He departed Webex about four years after its acquisition by Cisco in 2011 to start Zoom. Zoom had its IPO last may, a highly successful event that Eric considers just a milestone in his and his company's journey.
Yuan graduated from Shandong University of Science and Technology with a degree in Applied Math. He earned a Master's degree in engineering from China University of Mining and Technology.
Dave and Evanchat with Amy Barzdukas about her fascinating year of launches as the CMO of Poly. We learn that friends don't let friends conference with earbuds, her Spartan approach to glamping, and the world needed the Poly Studio.
Amy Barzdukas is an EVP and CMO at Poly. She is responsible for Poly’s global marketing strategy and execution. Barzdukas has more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry. She joined Polycom in 2015 as Vice President of Global Solutions Marketing and was promoted to Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer in 2017. She retained the CMO role after Plantronics and Polycom merged into the new Poly.
Prior to joining Polycom, Barzdukas served as VP WW Marketing for HP’s Business Personal Systems group and had a successful 16-year career at Microsoft with multiple leadership and GM roles.
Dave and Evanmeet withRowan Trollope, the CEO of cloud contact center provider Five9.
Rowan has a billion things on his mind, yet found time to share some of the recent organizational changes at Five9, what comes next for the contact center after the cloud, how is background helps him at Five9, and he also confirmed he doesn't ski with OJ Simpson.
Rowan Mehail Trollope was named the CEO of Five9 in May 2018. Previously, he headed the Collaboration group at Cisco. Rowan also held several leadership positions over 20 years at Symantec, where he helped grow it to the global leader in consumer security.
Rowan has completed the Executive Institute at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and the Stanford Directors College at Stanford Law School.
Dave and Evan meet with Vasili Triantto better understand how and why contact center has become such a priority at Cisco. Vasili brings a tremendous amount of sector experience to Cisco. He shares what's changing in the industry, how collaborative Cisco is in terms of its R&D, and why all the execs left ShoreTel.
Vasili Triant serves as Vice President and General Manager of the Cisco Contact Center Group. Vasili brings Vasili resides in Austin, Texas with his wife and family of eight kids. He volunteers with the Lake Travis Youth Sports Association where he is a Board Member and has coached football and baseball for the past six years. Vasili has a Bachelor in Business Administration from the University of San Diego.
Dave and Evan meet with Praful Shah, the Chief Strategy Officer at RingCentral. We discuss recent acquisitions, life as a pediatrician, and stadium names. Praful is responsible for defining RingCentral’s business, product, and marketing strategy. He brings more than 20 years of experience with major technology companies in the software and cloud industries. Before joining RingCentral, he worked at WebEx from its founding days until its acquisition by Cisco in 2007.
Shah holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communications engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology in India and a master’s degree in computer science from Pennsylvania State University.
Dave and Evan meet with Ilya Bukshteyn, the Partner Director over Teams Devices at Microsoft. We discuss how Microsoft is changing, new types of devices, and of course Tesla cars.
Ilya was there when real-time communications started at Microsoft. Actually, he was there when most things started at Microsoft as he's been there for about 25 years. He made the transition from SfB to Teams and wants to make sure you can too, so works to make sure that you have an ecosystem of high quality, certified devices for desktops and rooms.
Dave and Evan meet with Bryan Martin to discuss the history of VoIP, UCaaS, video, the cloud, and 8x8.Bryan Martin is 8x8’s technological visionary, leading the company’s drive to patent a range of disruptive and innovative technologies. With an excellent sense of how cloud communications transform enterprise communications and customer service, Bryan led 8x8 as CEO from its early days as a VoIP pioneer. Before becoming CEO in 2002, he held the positions of Chief Operating Officer, Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice President, Engineering Operations.
Martin holds 64 United States Patents in the fields of semiconductors, computer architecture, video processing algorithms, videophones, and communications. Internet Telephony magazine named Bryan one of the “Top 100 Voices of IP Communications.” Bryan also served on the California Broadband Task Force for the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, and later became Chair of the task force’s Emerging Technologies and New Applications Working Group.
Bryan is a member of the IEEE and Tau Beta Pi and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Dave and Evan meet with Tsahi Levent-levi to discuss WebRTC, video, and IP-based communications.
Tsahi has over 15 years of experience in telecommunications, VoIP video, and networking technologies. He has collected numerous titles in his career including CTO, Entrepreneur, Analyst, Engineer, developer, and more. Titles aside, his main role is to align a communications strategy with business objectives.
Tsahi is one of the most well known thought leaders on the subject of WebRTC. He’s published numerous articles and training materials related to WebRTC and believes it’s one of the most significant recent communications developments.
Tsahi holds an MSc in Computer Science, and an MBA. He has been awarded three patents and advises clients on the patent processes.
In this podcast we get into WebRTC as well other communications technologies and applications such as healthcare and travel.
Tsahi stays close to industry standards and the standards making process. He has previously acted as chairman of various activity groups within the IMTC (regarding interoperability of multimedia) and now holds the position of W3C Evangelist for all things WebRTC.
Visit Tsahi's site: BlogGeek.me
Dave and Evan meet with Alan Lepofsky of Salesforce to discuss the object of his evangelism, Quip.
With almost two decades of experience in the software industry, Alan helps companies understand how to develop and/or implement collaboration solutions that help employees get work done. He prefers to focus on how organizations can improve their existing business processes by providing access to the colleagues, content and communities that can help people get their work done more effectively.
After over seven years as a collaboration software analyst, Alan became the newest VP Evangelism for Business Productivity at Salesforce last February. Specifically, he is working with the Quip division to showcase the benefits of uniting content, collaboration and business objects. Quip is a digital canvas that empowers people to bring context to their conversations.
Learn more about Quip, collaboration, and how nothing has changed since Lotus Notes.
Dave and Evan meet with Michael Quinn of Q Advisors about mergers and acquisitions in enterprise communications.Michael Quinn is a founding partner of Q Advisors, and shares his insider views on industry M&A activities. With more than 25 years of international operations and investment banking experience in the telecommunications industry, Michael has originated, structured, and executed more than 100 deals totaling more than $4 billion in transaction value.
Michael has led transactions for Q Advisors' clients including: Arkadin, Atlantic Tele-Network, Inc., Broadcore, Grande Communications, Hudson Fiber, Masergy Communications, Neverblue, One Source Networks, NuVox, Inc., and WildBlue Communications.
Prior to forming Q Advisors, Michael was a founder of and Chief Corporate Development Officer for VeloCom Inc., a Latin American wireless services provider, where he was responsible for capital raising and acquisition activities. Michael began his career with the New York-based law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. He later became a partner in the Denver-based law firm Holland & Hart LLP, guiding their international corporate finance practice.
Michael received a B.A. in International Affairs from The George Washington University and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law. He is currently on the Advisory Board of The George Washington University School of Business and on the Board of the Elliot School of International Affairs at The George Washington University.
Michael is currently on the Board of the Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA), also serving as Secretary.
Dave and Evan meet with Zoom CIO Harry Moseley.
Harry joined Zoom just about a year ago to be its CIO. Formerly the CIO of KPMG, Blackstone, Credit Suisse, and UBS, Harry brings considerable expertise in solutions development, infrastructure, security, strategic planning, and building technology teams to Zoom.
Harry is responsible for creating business value at Zoom through technology innovation, supporting business growth objectives, and ensuring its technology platforms and procedures give the business outcomes customers expect.
Before we get into video streaming, we talk about streaming video. Harry shares a few things he's learned in the past year, a few things about millennials, why video is the new voice, and what it is like in the fast lane.
From Zoom:
Harry brings to Zoom a blend of transformational leadership, disruptive innovation, and corporate growth strategies. As the former CIO & Managing Director for KPMG, Harry was responsible for technology and innovation to support the firm’s competitive growth. Over five years he identified and replaced legacy technology to dramatically improve productivity, security, and reliability. Before joining KPMG, Harry served as CIO & Senior Managing Director − Partner for Blackstone, where he led the company’s transformation to the world’s best digital alternative asset manager. Prior to Blackstone, Harry was a Managing Director for Credit Suisse, where he served as the CIO of Global Investment Banking, and Global Co-Head of Application Development / Co-CIO of the firm. Before Credit Suisse, Harry served as CTO & Managing Director for UBS Americas.
In this TalkingHeadz, Dave and Evan hangout with Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management at Google. Among Scott's responsibilities are the communications and collaboration applications within G Suite which includes Hangouts Meet, Hangouts Chat, and Google Voice.
We discuss all of those as well as other things G including new leadership, Chromebooks and the Jamboard.
2019 is expected to be a big year for Google with regards to enterprise communications and collaboration. The Hangouts Classic app will be replaced with two separate apps: Hangouts Meet (for conferencing) and Hangouts Chat (for messaging). Additionally, Google will be launching Google Voice as an integrated, optional UCaaS service.
Google has quietly become not only an enterprise vendor, but a comprehensive one. The anchors are Google Cloud services for workloads and G Suite for workflow or office productivity. G Suite communications includes Hangouts and Voice. Google also has a number of additional communications services including Google AI for Contact Centers, room systems for conferencing, Duplex chatbots, Google Fi wireless service, and an arsenal of endpoints (Chrome browser, ChromeOS, and Android).
In this podcast, Dave Michels and Evan Kirstel chat with Colin Berkshire, a regular yet mysterious contributor to TalkingPoitnz.
Colin has an opinion on a lot of things - possibly everything, but especially Apple, Asia, 4G/5G, and Bell Labs. He's been a regular contributor for several years now, yet no one has met him. He guards his privacy and "Colin Berkshire" is a pen name. He does not use social media and doesn't directly respond to comments.
He does read them, and he's been known to indirectly respond with a separate, new post.
In this podcast we cover a lot of ground and air too. We get right into 5G and Colin explains that if you exclude cell phones, it's a great technology. We learn how to ascertain the proper amount to bribe, and why Tim Cook isn't a thief and doesn't want Colin's money.
Many people inquire if Colin is real. He finds that humorous and responded directly in a post titled: Do I Exist? He does. And now, for the first time, you can hear him in this podcast.
Here's a few of his greatest hits:
I Beat Apple
Betting on Magenta
The Best Money Government Can Buy
Reflecting on Bell Labs Era
AT&T and Verizon's Towers
Colin is technical, analytical, opinionated, historical and sometimes hysterical. He's mostly retired and enjoys rolling his eyes at just about everything, but does so with piercing accuracy. Colin is genuinely surprised that he enjoys writing posts, and even more surprised that anyone reads them.
One of the benefits of changing TalkingHeadz from a video to an audio format is that Colin agreed to participate.
In this podcast, Dave Michels and Evan Kirstel chat with Mathilde Collin, CEO and co-founder of Front.
While there's a general consensus that we have evolved past email, there's little agreement what to do about it. Many vendors are looking to replace email with workstream collaboration apps. Mathilde and Front are taking a different approach, and are reimagining email to better accommodate group collaboration.
Front offers an email client for effective team collaboration. It can be used with Exchange or Gmail -- though Mathilde makes a few comments that suggest a bigger plan.
Momentum is on her side. Email is growing, not declining. It's a problem because the universal inbox wasn't designed for today's volume or workflow. Can Front fix email before email breaks us? The original app of collaboration is indeed due for a makeover.
Mathilde Collin moved her company of 17 people to Silicon Valley and now has thousands of enterprise customers including Tesla, Shopify, and Dropbox. Front can be used by departments, and in some cases gets deployed enterprise-wide.
Front is a graduate of Y Combinator. The company recently raised millions from Sequoia Capital and investors such as Alexis Ohanian of Reddit and Stewart Butterfield of Slack.
In this TalkingHeadz, Evan and Dave learn that Joe Manuele moved into video because he likes watching. We also learned discussed contact centers, and Teslas.
Joe was recently named as the first non-founder CEO of video conferencing provider Highfive.
About Joe Manuele
Prior to joining Highfive, Joe Manuele ran the global Collaboration and Customer Experience practice at Dimension Data. An Enterprise Sales and GTM veteran, Joe’s background includes leadership roles at Cisco, Adtran, Actelis Networks and Avaya. Joe has a Computer Science degree from Control Data Institute in Montreal.
Prior to Cisco he was Chief Technology Strategist for Skype.
Highfive is an innovative video conferencing provider. The solution uses open WebRTC technology and offers room system hardware as part of its subscription offer.
Cross posted at https://TalkingPointz.com/th-highfive
In this TalkingHeadz, Evan and Dave ask the legendary Jonathan Rosenberg if SIP was a mistake. We also manage to discuss WebRTC, robocalls, Facebook, and fine dining.
JR was joined Cisco in 2013 where he a chief architect of what Webex Teams.
About Jonathan RosenbergJonathan Rosenberg is the outgoing VP, CTO, and very fine Fellow of Cisco Collaboration. Having worked in IP communication and collaboration for 18 years he has some hang-ups on disconnects. He has authored many of the Internet standards that define modern telecoms, including SIP, SIMPLE (SIP for presence and IM), and ICE. He has held numerous leadership positions in the IETF, is the fourth most prolific author of Internet standards of all time (with 70 RFCs), holds 52 granted US patents, has served on advisory boards of numerous startups, given nearly a hundred industry talks, and has received several industry awards, including being named to the Technology Review TR100 in 2002 – the 100 most innovative young technologists in the world.
Prior to Cisco he was Chief Technology Strategist for Skype.
In 2002 JR was named one of the most innovative young technologists in the world by Technology Review magazine. He also was named a "Top Supergeek" by CRN and won a Pulver Von Pioneer award for contributions to the VoIP industry. In 2015 he was presented with the Ohio University Strowger Award for transformational innovation in the telecommunications industry.
Rosenberg holds a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from MIT and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Columbia University.
Cross posted at https://TalkingPointz.com/th-jr
In this TalkingHeadz, Evan and Dave discuss the UC channel with SVP Todd Abbott at Mitel. Todd joined Mitel in April of 2017, and before that he worked everywhere else. He is in the complex role of encouraging UC channel partners to both sell and evolve as industry evolves toward cloud-delivered services. Todd takes us on a channel evolution safari.
About ToddA seasoned executive with more than 30 years of experience in the computing, networking, and business communications industries, Todd Abbott develops go-to-market strategies, sales models, and channel programs. He is currently Mitel’s Executive Vice President of Global Sales & Services, and oversees global sales operations, including cloud and enterprise sales, professional and support services, and channel programs.
Prior to joining Mitel, Todd has held senior executive positions at several business communications companies, including Symbol Technologies, Seagate Technology, Avaya, and Sonus Networks. Earlier in his career, Todd spent eight years at Cisco Systems. Todd began his career in 1982 at IBM Corporation.
Todd has a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in Finance and Marketing from Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts).
Cross posted at https://TalkingPointz.com/th-todd-abbott
Dave and Evan ask Jason What's Next? Jason is a very technical, UC/VoIP/CPaaS industry pioneer, and he's currently in a free agent mode, We took the opportunity to ask him what's on his mind - and the answers range from cameras to Twitter.
Ooma is suddenly on the enterprise UCaaS stage. Like Vonage before it, Ooma has broken free of its consumer VoIP roots and expanded into enterprise UCaaS. Perhaps suddenly is the wrong word, it had Ooma Office, but last March expanded its footprint with the acquisition of Voxter:
SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 05, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ooma, Inc. (NYSE:OOMA), a smart communications platform for businesses and consumers, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Voxter Communications Inc., a provider of custom UCaaS solutions for mid-market and enterprise businesses.
Voxter will complement the Ooma Office solution for small business, giving Ooma a business communications portfolio that can meet the needs of organizations of all sizes.
Founded in 2005 and based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Voxter provides its clients with fully hosted VoIP solutions, taking productivity to a higher level through a voice architecture that’s feature rich and highly customizable to meet the individual needs of each business. Beyond telephony, Voxter offers instant messaging, videoconferencing, contact center capabilities, integration with mobile devices and more.
Voxter provides its advanced UCaaS solution to leading businesses, including Slack, Optimizely, Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort, Hyperwallet and Grafana.
Suddenly, Ooma has a set of larger enterprise customers and some pretty slick back-end processing technologies. Slack is quite the reference customer too. In August, Ooma announced (featured in Quipz) a new GTM partnership with Talkdesk. It shows a commitment to expand its enterprise business with a broader, integrated portfolio.
Another interesting tidbit about Ooma is its DECT know-how. I've always been a fan of DECT wireless technologies, though they are not that popular in the US. Since Ooma's premised-based gateway device has DECT for wireless phones, they also expanded into home security. DECT has better range, requires less power, and offers better security than Wi-Fi.
https://talkingpointz.com/talkingheadz-15-chris-burgy-of-ooma/
Published October 3, 2018