Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to raise this $2.4 million, you had customers? Joshua March: Yes, we had customers. It was still early on. We then sold the agency. In early 2012, we succeeded in selling the agency to a larger agency. Sramana Mitra: How much did you get for the agency? Joshua
Sramana Mitra: At that time when you were going through this thought evolution, I imagine you must have done some competitive analysis. All these companies like RightNow and people who came at it from the customer service side were also discovering that they needed to do this. They need to support customer service from the
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
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
Sramana Mitra: Are the Hadoop clusters customer-specific? Prem Uppaluru: The database can be shared across multiple tenants. SM: So it is a multi-tenant Hadoop cluster? PU: Absolutely.
Sramana Mitra: So you have the ability to do routing at a granular level. Prem Uppaluru: Exactly. This brings me to the next use case, which concerns the largest direct response marketing merchant with multiple ways to attract customers. They are the company behind the [skin care product] vendor Proactiv. They get around two million
Sramana Mitra: So the key value proposition is call routing. Prem Uppaluru: Call routing and matching the callers with the right agents to deliver highest value transactions.
Sramana Mitra: It is the call center you are supporting. Prem Uppaluru: That is right. They offer the 1-800 number to their customer, and they have both consumers and business customers. Many of the business customers tend to be continued customers in the sense that they would do business with Office Depot every month.