Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In the broad categorization that you just made, other than energy savings applications and then the off-shoots of energy savings, what are some of the other buckets of enterprise IoT?

Danny Yu: How to think about this is look at whose problems are we solving. We can talk about technology and effectively the technology can handle security and other things. There are standards-based products for these elements here. As an example, there are security-based access controls using open standards that would work on our platform. These are obvious extensions that inherently could be implemented.

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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 Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Who else besides Enlighted falls in that pool?

Danny Yu: We don’t compete with some of the companies directly. There’s a company called Digital Lumens that sells fixtures and controls. We, on the other hand, don’t sell the fixtures but sell the controls and the software. They sell this bundled solution where they offer their fixtures and their control system as well as the ability to connect with another fixture, but you require their proprietary end-device to go into that.

Sramana Mitra: I imagine that, just like you, everybody else in the space goes to market through channel.

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Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO, Phil Copeland (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you sell? Do you sell primarily in Australia or do you sell globally?

Phil Copeland: Australia is a great marketplace because they’re very early adopters of technology. Very early on, we recognized that to really succeed in this industry, you need to become an American-established business and you need to have a lot of the momentum behind your business here in North America. I’m actually based in Colorado. We have an office here. I spend about 80% of my time here helping grow and expand our North American business. We also have a small operation in the UK that has been very successful as well. Our core focus is really getting to critical size here in North America, because we realized that the exit events that may occur in the future will be from an American company.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are there any direct competitors in your cloud-based ACD routing area?

Mike Burkland: We have a few direct competitors. They are typically hybrid companies or hybrid solutions; they are not solely focused on providing cloud-based solution for ACD. One such direct competitor is a company called Interactive Intelligence that started out years ago as an on-premise solution. They still get, I believe, close to 90% of their revenue from their legacy on-premise business. They’ve also come out with a cloud offering, but from a business model and a revenue mix perspective, they’re still predominantly an old model company, if you will.

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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at your entire customer base, who are some of the off-the-chart leaders in adopting this kind of optimization?

Danny Yu: We can look at folks like United Stationers, an office products distributor. They have an office facility and also have some warehouse distribution. We’re deployed in a project with them where we are controlling every single LED light fixture on, what we call, a granular basis. Every fixture can be controlled discreetly. If you have a specific light over your head, you can control that specific light. Why is that project interesting? There are several factors. One is the amount of energy savings we achieve through converting from old fluorescent technology to LED plus controls. It’s over 90% energy savings. That’s a tremendous amount. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I think there is that, but there’s also a process that you have articulated very clearly. We have seen this process come up many times. This process of following a product that is somewhat successful in the market and doing this kind of system integration and value-added reseller work on top of it so that you basically simmer in customer scenarios. Where the art comes in is to figure out which problem can give you enough of an opportunity to build a real product and a business out of it.

Phil Copeland: You learn as you go. The big waves that have changed over my 25 or 30 years is obviously that whole launch of the PC industry and the opportunities that it created and the client server computing revolution. These are big changes in the industry and have had major impacts. I missed out on the Internet revolution when it first came along, but then the launch of tablets and iPad just had a profound impact on the way that everybody does business.

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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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