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A short note for navigating this section - scroll below for the most recent posts, and then for more, click on the Blog Archive box, where you can view all of my posts, going back to the beginning in March 2005.
Being the first week of the month, the current issue of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review is out now, along with our latest Watch This Space podcast. If the topic as per the thumb below piques your interest, you can give it a listen here. Otherwise, feel free to peruse earlier episodes here on my website, and same for past newsletter issues. And, to become a subscriber, just sign up here.
June was a busy month with virtual events and client work, along with early signs that the fall will be very busy as live events resume. Already, I have one live event to travel to almost every week through early November - geez. Still managed to get some writing done, though, and here’s my June digest. For more on what’s keeping me busy, next week my July newsletter and podcast both come out.
Genesys Xperience - My Perspectives on CX and DX on BCStrategies, BCStrategies, June 30
What Technologies are Essential for Effective Teamwork?, TechTarget, June 21
Voice Technology Triumphs Telephony - Here’s Why, No Jitter, June 8
I’ve been tracking several contact center events lately, and last week was Genesys Xperience. The company always has big updates to share, and the launch of Genesys DX was a highlight. I finally managed to get my takeaways organized, and have put together a post that’s running now on BCStrategies, where I’ve long been a contributor as a BC Expert.
My next webinar is for a targeted audience, so it’s not open to all, but it’s another opportunity to share my views about hybrid work, and in this case, how channels can help their customers adapt. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and if you’re a Canadian reseller looking to do this, you might find this Ingram Micro Canada webinar of interest. I’ll be presenting next Tuesday, July 6 at 2pm, and details to register are here.
Busy tying up loose ends for TMC’s Future of Work event, starting tomorrow - Wednesday - at 9am ET, running through Friday. I’m conference Chair, but due to travel restrictions, I can’t travel from Canada to be there. Colleague Phil Edholm will be running the sessions in the room, so we’re in good hands there. However, I’ll be moderating two virtual sessions, with the first one running at 9am tomorrow, and the one below at 11am.
Joining me for our session about hybrid work will be Bryan Martin from 8x8, Simon Lau from Otter, and Lisa Walker from Fuze. Here’s the full agenda, and if you’re attending ITExpo, I hope you’ll join us. Also - not on the agenda yet - Phil and I will be doing a joint session from 2-3 tomorrow, providing “the analyst perspective” on future of work.
Busy tying up loose ends for TMC’s Future of Work event, starting tomorrow - Wednesday - at 9am ET, running through Friday. I’m conference Chair, but due to travel restrictions, I can’t travel from Canada to be there. Colleague Phil Edholm will be running the sessions in the room, so we’re in good hands there. However, I’ll be moderating two virtual sessions, with the first one running at 9am tomorrow.
Joining me will be Gary Sorrentino from Zoom, Dave Silke from Mitel, and Brian Gilman from Vonage. Here’s the full agenda, and if you’re attending ITExpo, I hope you’ll join us. My next post will provide details for the second virtual session I’m moderating. Also - not on the agenda yet - Phil and I will be doing a joint session from 2-3 tomorrow, providing “the analyst perspective” on future of work.
There are lots of ways for an analyst to get visibility, and while I’m the one usually doing the writing or asking the questions, it’s nice every so often to be the subject of an interview. That’s the case here, where I’m in conversation with Joe Fields of Onalytica, talking about my practice, but also my views on which companies are doing innovative work, and which technologies are the most important to stay close to.
If you follow my blog, you’ll know I’ve been on a roll lately with Onalytica, being included in two of their recent “Who’s Who?” reports - one for telecoms, and one for Unified Communications. They also featured me in this Q&A interview, which now includes an embedded link to the video segment, which you can also watch down below.
You may not know NovelVox, but they’re a good under the radar vendor, and I’m doing an educataional webinar with them on July 22. The focus will be the growing role of digital channels to improve CX - customer experience - and the importance of having a strategy to use them effectively. More details are here, along with how to register. Hope you can join us!
Am back for Year 3 as Chair of this event, which runs under the much larger ITExpo banner, which is TMCnet’s flagship event. This is the first in-person event I’ve been involved with during the pandemic, and it’s difficult to say what the turnout will be. Being in Canada, travel is off the table for now, so I’ll be running some of the sessions virtually, while colleague Phil Edholm will be doing others in person.
Details about the program are here, and as we get closer to go-time, updates will be coming with new speakers. No doubt lots of people are keen to travel again, and it’s hard to complain about going to Miami as a destination. I’ll have more updates as the show approaches, and am still keeping the door open for new speakers, so don’t be shy to ask.
Voice has long been one of my core focus areas as an analyst, and while it’s easy to take for granted, the technologies behind it have evolved substantially over the years. There’s still a lot of telephony-centric thinking about voice, and while that remains a valid connection, with today’s technologies, voice has become so much more.
I explored that recently with colleague Chris Fine in our History of Telephony micro-course with PulveREDU, but there are many tangents that need their own track. One is the idea that voice is bigger than ever, and while it’s a big claim, I believe it’s warranted. My latest No Jitter post helps make the case, and if this piques your interest, I’d love to hear back.
Been busy on the awards judging front lately, and UC Awards 2021 is the latest. I was part of the judging cohort last year, and for 2021 we applied some lessons learned to make it better. This is a fun one, and you’ll be hearing more about it soon.
More details are in this article from UC Today about the event, including the various categories, and how to submit an entry. If you’re still considering this, entries must be in my June 14, fyi.
First Tuesday of the month - that usually means newsletter time, and yes, the June issue of JAA’s Communications and Collaboration Review went out to subscribers yesterday.
In tandem, our latest Watch This Space podcast episode went live as well. Thumbnail for that below will give you a good idea of what we talked about, and you can give it a listen here. Going forward, newsletter sign-up is easy - here’s the link, and you can explore back issues and earlier podcasts here and here.
My newsletter goes out later tdoay, and subscribers will see how busy May was, so my public writing output was limited. Unlike April, however, at least I got some pieces out, and here’s the digest.
Companies Must Rethink Video Conferencing Usage in 2021, May 24, TechTarget
How Could BYOD Support Touchless Meeting Rooms?, May 19, TechTarget
10 Essential Benefits of Unified Communications, May 12, TechTarget
Five9 Analyst Summit - My Quick Take, May 6, my blog
CCaaS: Rethinking Your CX and Customer Service Strategy, May 4, No Jitter
Will Video Fatigue Drive Users Back to Voice Calls?, May 4, TechTarget
Judging for various industry and vendor awards events is one of the hats analysts get to wear, and I’ve been doing a few of these lately. This is the most recent one, which I got to do last year with Talkdesk as well.
I’m just doing a heads-up here in advance of the winners, who will be announced on June 15 at their upcoming Opentalk event. I’ve completed my round of judging, which closes on June 1, and the winners will be notified on June 4. Stay tuned!
Earlier this week, I posted about being included for the second time in a “Who’s Who?” guide produced by UK-based Onalytica. It’s always great to get industry recognition, and to keep that vibe going, they just published a profile interview of me, conducted by Joe Fields, their Head of Influencer Marketing.
You can read the interview here, and if interested, I think you’ll find both guides to be useful resources. Just check my blog posts for details on how to download them.
I’ve recently landed on the radar of Onalytica, a UK firm focused on influencer marketing. We didn’t have terms like that in my MBA days, but it’s defnitely a thing now, and better to be on their radar than not.
They produce a series of “Who’s Who” reports, and I was included in last month’s report covering “Telecoms”. That was nice to see, and there’s more of the same in their latest report, Who’s Who in Unified Communications? The reports are fairly similar, but different enough to be worth getting both. They also did a profile interview with me, and I’ll share that here shortly.
Next week is the 2021 edition of UCX: Now, and am on the program again. This time, I’ll be speaking on a panel led by colleague Kevin Kieller, and we’ll be exploring how enterprises can manage all the data that’s now being captured in the workplace, thanks to AI and cloud. Big issues to explore, and we hope you can join us. Details for the session and registering for the event are here - if you can attend our session, it’s at 11am ET on Wednesday, May 19.
Time for another webinar, covering the white-hot contact center as a service - CCaaS - space. This one is with TelcoBridges, a vendor I’ve known for ages, and it’s good to see them doing well.
The main focus of my talk will be on what’s driving CCaaS adoption, and what service providers need to do to be successful. As always, it’s harder to do than it looks, but things should get a bit easier after joining us, right? The webinar is on Tuesday, May 25 at 11am ET, and all the details to register are here.
Cloud Conventions starts this Wednesday, and I’ll be speaking early in the program at 10:30 ET. Details are below, along with a 5 minute video interview that organizer Carolyn Bradfield did with me as a preview. Hope you can join us!
I’ll be providing the analyst perspective about how cloud is shaping the future of work, especially as we come out of the pandemic. If you’re attending, I’ll be speaking live as part of the Digital Transformation track at 10:30 ET on May 12. Then at 11:30, I’ll be joined by Mike Cromwell for an informal Meet The Experts scrum.
Details about my topic are here, along with all the other sessions - just scroll through a bit, and you’ll find me. If you haven’t made plans to attend, here’s where to register.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Virtual events with analysts are tricky to plan, especially for pacing out the program. Over the last year, vendors have tried all kinds of formats, but it seems clear that the best approach is to do it in manageable chunks of time. Nobody is going to sit through a day-long marathon of video streaming - it’s just too intense, and too easy for folks to wander off.
Over the past threee days, I’ve been tracking the Five9 Analyst Summit, and they seem to have the right formula - three days and three hours each day - and starting at 10:30 ET, which works pretty well going across multiple global time zones. It’s still a lot of content to digest, and I managed to take in just about all of it - only had to drop out a couple of times.
I’m not going to write up a full research note now, but will share a few takeaways and screenshots here while it’s still fresh. Following a solid Q1 earnings report, the updates we got this week provided detail as to why the company is doing so well.
Much like Zoom has been the right technology at the right time to enable work from home, Five9 provides a pretty complete CCaaS solution as contact centers rush to the cloud. As we heard, 85% of this market is still premises-based, and it’s hard to see why so many players are jumping in with all types of cloud offerings. Being a fully cloud-native contact center pure play, Five 9 is in a great spot right now.
The CCaaS market sure is messy right now - as is the broader customer service/CX space - and for that tangent, I’ll steer you to my latest No Jitter post which came out earlier this week. Coming back to Five9, here are some notable takeaways around the many things they’re doing right.
Lots of strong growth metrics, but their upmarket success with large enterprise customers catches my eye the most, with 45% YoY revenue growth. and 83% of Q1 business revenue. All cloud vendors will book their share of smaller customers, but I think it’s the ability to sell into this end of the market that will create the most sustainable value and growth for Five9.
We heard lots about their culture, and it’s a strong selling point for them as an organization. They’ve built out a solid managment team along with proven industry leaders on the sales side, and as CEO Rowan Trollope noted, it’s a place now “where nobody leaves” - in a good way, of course!
Plenty of updates around innovation - I’m not that technical, but their Inference acquisition is a good example with IVA - intelligent virtual agent - to help automate customer service - as is Whendu, which helps contact centers with complex legacy integrations migrate to the cloud. Aside from acquistions, they’ve added over 150 developers, and are maintaining R&D spend at a solid 12% of revenues. This is just a taste of what they’re doing, and the main idea here is that they’re holding their own, and then some, in a very competitive space that is evolving quickly.
So much more to talk about, and before I close off with some screenshots that can be shared, the intangibles of leadership have a lot to do with their success. You might be surprised to know that Five9 started in 2001, so this isn’t exactly a startup with wheels or a unicorn with hardly any revenues. They’ve been at this a long time, and both President Dan Burkland and CEO Rowan Trollope shared a clear vision for where they’re going and why they’ve been so successful, especially in this big moment of CCaaS adoption. Rowan kicked this event off talking about re-imagining CX and taking a clean slate approach with cloud and AI, and to build around the emerging “multi-modal” workforce, where both human agents and chatbots play key roles in transforming customer service into a highly personalized experience. Easier said than done, but they’re definitely on the right track - leading and not following.
J Arnold & Associates is an Independent Technology Research and Analyst, helping businesses understand the strategic value of communications technology as they adapt to the digital transformation of work
Who’s Who in Telecoms?, March 2021
Top 100 Unified Comms Influencers Revealed, September 2020
Unified Comms Influencers - Top 50 for 2019 Revealed, August 2019
TOP VoIP Bloggers to Follow VoIP Review, 2018
Top 10 Telecom Experts to Follow on Social Media - June 2017
