The Imminent Death of Indian Outsourcing

On February 29, 2008, Forbes published my column that remains a highlight in my career in tech journalism: The Coming Death of Indian Outsourcing. I found myself on the receiving end of a deluge of hate mail on a scale that I have never encountered before or after. I am known as a relatively balanced, objective, and fair commentator on the state of the industry. I don’t sensationalize issues unnecessarily. This article, that I thought was sound in its logical analysis, triggered an immense defensive reaction.
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A Textbook Case Study of Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bhavin Parikh, CEO of Magoosh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I have two questions. This was not a freelancer. It was a development company ,but you took one guy out of that company as a dedicated resource.

Bhavin Parikh: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find it? How did you select this particular company?

Bhavin Parikh: In our case, Pejman found the company. He asked others who had outsourced for recommendations. Generally, I think recommendations are a great way to go because you have evidence from people who’ve worked with the company before. When we look for contractors even today, I just reach out to my network. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see white spaces?

Mike Burkland: If you look at the history of software and the evolution of all these cloud technologies, for the most part, most of us who have been successful in the cloud have done so by taking something that was done by legacy on-premise solutions and providing a better solution in the cloud. It’s not just replicating what those legacy solutions did on-premise and delivering it on the cloud, but being able to do that in a differentiated way to provide our customers with a better solution. The cloud does provide this low upfront pay-as-you-go model. But we not just provide a better delivery and economic model but also very innovative technology and solutions to our customers on a regular basis. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It doesn’t look like it would be terribly interesting to click-down into use cases because ACD routing is ACD routing, right? Would it be worthwhile to go into any kind of use case discussion here? Are there any variations in use cases?

Mike Burkland: I would like to give you a couple of examples. We have several different use cases. NetSuite is a customer of ours. They run their entire global support organization on Five9. They’ve got a technical support organization with agents located in five different countries around the world. I think they have about 300 concurrent agents on our platform on a daily basis. It’s a tangible example of the type of customer that uses Five9 in a traditional inbound contact center use case. We also have some unique capabilities beyond the ACD routing technology mainly in the outbound or blended voice arena. Companies like Dun & Bradstreet actually use us in their contact center. They’ve got about 500 agents on our platform and they’re using us for both inbound and outbound. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 2)

Mike Burkland: To map out the landscape, this is a market in which Avaya, Genesys, Aspect, and Cisco have a product. Those four legacy players control a very large majority of this legacy market. They’ve been around for several years providing solutions on-premise that are hardware and software-based.

Sramana Mitra: These four legacy players have both switching and CRM and you consider them as direct competitors? You also do switching and CRM?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 1)

Cloud-based contact centers are an active space. Here’s an opportunity to get up to speed with the developments.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s first introduce yourself to the audience as well as what you do in the company.

Mike Burkland: I’m the CEO of Five9. I joined here as CEO back in January, 2008 – over six years ago. Five9 was founded in 2001. We’re a leading pure cloud software provider to the call center market or, as we refer to it today, the contact center market. Five9 has over 2,000 businesses as clients. They run their contact centers on our cloud solution. They actually process, on an annual basis, about 3 billion customer interactions across the Five9 platform. When I joined, we were about $10 million in revenue. Now, >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the monetization model on that one? Were they monetizing well?

Blaine Vess: I don’t think they were monetizing as best as they could, but both of them were making money out of Google AdSense. Flash Card Exchange had a lifetime membership for $20 a month. If you paid, you would not see any advertising and you also got a bit of storage space if you wanted to upload images or audio to flash cards. When we bought it, we removed the premium membership because we’ve been focused on growth and getting people to love the site and the brand. Right now, we only make money on advertising. We’re eventually going to launch a premium membership where you can have the advertising removed if you pay, mainly because a lot of people have requested that feature.

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: But it did not pan out that way?

Blaine Vess: It did not pan out, but we learned a lot in the process – mainly about a lot of the things that we were doing wrong like not having employees. We had very high margins. We were making a lot of money and not really spending that money on growing the business. We didn’t have an office. It was a highly educational process for us. In 2011, after going through that process, we decided that we wanted to give it a try. That summer, we hired our first employee who was our office manager at that time. We hired some programmers and an in-house SEO person. We got an office. The process has continued since then.

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