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 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 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, >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think the process that you’ve outlined is a very effective process. I’ve seen case study after case study where people have been successful in doing this. That’s to take some existing product that’s in the market, start selling and do some sort of a value-added reseller or system integration kind of partnership. That enables entrepreneurs to get close to customers, learn their problems, and then productize and build IP based on that knowledge. You’ve very clearly articulated a process that absolutely works. It’s a tried and true proven process.

Phil Copeland: I couldn’t agree more. I’ve run through this talk a few times. There’s a time and place too for getting venture-backed businesses, but I have to say that some of the worst disasters I’ve seen in businesses starting up are companies that have had too much money to start with. There was a classic company in Australia in the early 2000s that was backed by two really first-class >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: But if you look at the reports, there are also reports, for example, that people have already got the apps that they want to use on a regular basis on their phone and that they’re not downloading a lot of new apps. The number of new apps that are getting downloaded is going down.

Samar Singla: No, it’s not. If you look at Cohort data, their per user usage is going up, and per user app downloads are going up. The total number of apps is obviously going up because the number of smart phones is increasing. Even if you look at Cohort data, it’s actually increasing. There’s no doubt about it. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Phil Copeland: There were a lot of lessons learned out of that. First of all, the original business was self-funded and was grown out of cash flow. Spot On was my first venture capital-based business, and it was also started in San Francisco. That was a really interesting experience. After that, I returned with my family to Sydney and once again, spent a bit of time wanting to start another technology business. I wanted one that was self-funded because after the dot-com boom, it was much harder to raise capital. Frankly, I was looking for a new idea for business that we could self-fund. It needed to earn money pretty much from the outset. >>>