Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 1)

Did you know that the core technology at the heart of apps like Uber and Lyft is a relatively lesser known cloud-based communication platform called Twilio? Read on! Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Twilio to begin with. Jeff Lawson: I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Twilio. Twilio is communication-as-a-service.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Lauwers, CTO of Avistar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. The cloud-based collaboration, or in any kind of cloud strategy, collaboration is featuring as one of the top items right now. Now, given your experience with the industry, would you talk a little bit with some historical perspective about where we have come from in the cloud collaboration technology and where we

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Deal Radar 2009: OrecX

In this installment of Deal Radar, we follow a company that is working in line with a theme I addressed in a recent Forbes Column, commercializing open source. Chicago-based OrecX helps businesses record phone conversations using open source software. Founded by Bruce Kaskey and Bruno Haas in 2005, the company is focused on making call

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 7)

SM: In 2006 you decided to take VC money. Why then? VS: Our business got pretty big, relatively speaking. I am not an insider in that area, but we started getting calls from tier 1 VCs. I was never interested in just doing the rounds, but I figured if folks like that wanted to court

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 6)

SM: How did you manage to leave the OEM model as your go-to-market strategy? VS: The idea was to go straight to the customer. If you have hundreds of thousands of small customers paying you a small amount a month, it is better than one customer paying a lot at one time.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 5)

SM: What year did you finally become profitable after you made the transition from consulting to applications? VS: I believe it was 1997. We had the answering machine and fax. That was the core business in 1997. We were shipping worldwide and we had a good reputation.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 4)

SM: What was the application that you were developing at the time? VS: It was an answering machine on the PC. We developed the application, and it would not work. We had a meeting with HP up in Boston, and we were getting worried. My chief engineer and I had a sleepless night and found

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 3)

SM: Did you build your business yourself, or did you take outside funding? VS: We were not funded. We were always self-sustained. Eventually we figured out that we could reuse code we had, which let us focus on specific types of projects.