Leapfrog CX Strategies

Dave and Evan chat with John Hernandez, the CEO of Selligent.

John Hernandez is well known in the communications industry as a contact center pro.  In August of 2017, he took those skills to Selligent, a marketing cloud. Selligent leverages automation and AI to improve the customer experience. Selligent's marketing platform provides a cohesive, flexible platform designed for agile, marketers. Seligent's services are complementary to both CRM and contact center initiatives.

While there are indeed other marketing clouds, and while some contact center solutions understand rudimentary marketing, Selligent offers a powerful integrated solution. Under Hernandez's leadership, Selligent has created alliances with Cisco, Genesys, Five9, and NICE.

Prior to Selligent, Hernandez was the COO and SVP, Service Cloud at Salesforce. He has the experience and vision to navigate Selligent thru its rapid growth. Before Salesforce, John served as VP and GM of IBM's collaboration business. Prior, Hernandez served as a VP and GM within Cisco's Collaboration business, where he created the Customer Collaboration Strategy.

You can follow John on Twitter. 

Dave and Evan chat with Jeff Lawson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Twilio. 

Jeff Lawson realized that communications are essential to every business. He got the idea as a result of his experiences as an entrepreneur and developer during a time when the API model for technology services was emerging. Lawson and co-founder Evan Cooke created Twilio, and effectively created a new enterprise communications category: Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS). 

Twilio has enabled small, medium, and large enterprises to create powerful communications enabled applications. It also spawned numerous other providers that leverage Twilio's services and Super Network under the covers. Twilio’s platform serves people in over 180 countries. The company’s revenue has grown from $88.8 million in 2014 to over a billion in 2019.

In this podcast we ask Jeff to explain why it makes sense to target budget developers, hwo live coding became a thing, and several other topics including why customers pay for services with their shoes. 

Dave and Evan chat with Brian Day the newly named CEO of Fuze.

Last month, Fuze named Brian Day its new CEO. Actually, Brian announced it himself in a blog post that also reemphasized Fuze's commitment to enterprise customers. 

Fuze was among the first UCaaS providers (under it's original brand Thinking Phones) to penetrate larger customers. While most providers started small and are working their way up, Fuze started big and has been (until recently) working its way to smaller accounts. 

Brain explains the differences in targeting enterprises vs. small and medium businesses, and why Fuze is taking deliberate actions to primarily focus on large accounts.  

Prior to being CEO, Brian was the CFO at Fuze. He has 25 years as a successful financial leader and operator at high-growth companies, most recently at Apperian where he also served first as CFO, and then CEO through its sale in 2016.

Brian has a B.A. in Economics from the University of New Hampshire, and also accidentally got a J.D. from Suffolk University Law School.

Dave and Evan chat with Quentin Gallivan, CEO of BlueJeans Network. 

Quentin was named the CEO of BlueJeans in August 2017. He brought to the company extensive experience in growth. As a founding executive at Verisign he grew the company to $1.5B in revenue (and took it through an IPO). He also grew cloud-based security market leader Postini to more than 35,000 customers (and over 10M users) before its acquisition by Google. 

He's well regarded as a numbers man, but comes across fairly well-rounded in this  interview. The takes Dave and Evan through some of the recent changes and announcements at BlueJeans. 

BlueJeans provides a meetings platform for the modern workplace that connects desktops, mobile devices and room systems. Thousands of organizations from growing businesses to Fortune 500s use BlueJeans for video meetings and large interactive events.

Dave and Evan chat with Yaniv Masjedi, CMO at Nextiva.

Yaniv Masjedi started building the Nextiva marketing engine on day one (day one of Nextiva) about 12 years ago. That involved introducing to prospects this crazy concept of a cloud-PBX. Nextiva offers UCaaS, video, team chat, and CRM services. It is headquartered in Scottsdale, AZ.

As CMO, Yaniv is responsible for Nextiva's marketing and branding efforts including demand generation, advertising, marketing communications, and thought leadership. Yaniv actively blogs about marketing on several industry and professional sites as well as Nextiva.com.

Follow Yaniv on Twitter. 

Dave and Evan chat with Milton Chen, founder and CEO VSee. 

Milton is a video pioneer that has built VSee into a powerful telemedicine platform. 

Telemedicine is no longer a fringe idea, in fact, some insist on dropping the "tele" part because it's just medicine now. It can save lives, and improve healthcare, and reduce costs. VSee serves over 1000 companies including Walgreens, MDLIVE, Trinity, DaVita, HCA, Seton, McKesson-US Oncology, and others. 

VSee was founded in 2008 by two Stanford PhD students, Milton and Erika Chuang. The original VSee platform was coded by Milton who did his PhD research on the psychology of video communications. Milton has deployed VSee for former President Obama’s Inauguration, for the Navy Seals, for Hillary Clinton, and Angelina Jolie in their refugee work. He is a genius at video, but needs to improve his skills around podcast audio. 

Dave and Evan chat with Paul Jarman, CEO at NICE inContact. 

Paul is a pioneer of the CCaaS, movement. Paul was instrumental in guiding inContact from its roots in telecommunications to its leadership position in the cloud-delivered contact center sector. He has been a part of every major enhancement the company has made since 1997.

Mr. Jarman has spent his career building a service-driven business focused around both customers and employees, resulting in a strong corporate culture with high retention rates of both groups. Prior to joining inContact, Paul was an executive with HealthRider, Inc. Paul holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from the University of Utah.

Dave and Evan chat with Julian Codorniou, Vice President of Workplace by Facebook.

Julien joined Facebook in 2011 to build the EMEA gaming team and then led the global Platform Partnerships team, helping Facebook partners to build, grow and monetize their apps with Platform. Prior to Facebook, Julien was director of business development at Microsoft Corp where he created and launched the BizSpark program.

Workplace is growing very fast, and it appears it's just getting started. This app has the potential (funding, engineering, innovation, capability, global reach, etc.) to radically transform enterprise communications . . . enterprise wide. 

Under Julien's leadership, Workplace serves more than 3 million paying users at companies including Walmart, Starbucks, Nestle, Telefonica, Grab, Spotify, Chevron and many more globally. 

In this podcast we get a better idea how Workplace is different from other enterprise social/messaging apps as well as from Facebook itself. Julien explains how Workplace started as an internal project and how Workplace balances familiarity with the unique requirements of business customers. 

Nidal Abou Ltaif is known for his desire to help his customers use technology to make a difference in people’s lives. 

Nidal joined Avaya as the sales leader for the Middle East in 2003. In early 2014, was selected to lead the newly formed Global Growth Markets theater that includes MEA, Turkey, Russia, India, and China. In August 2015, he was named President of Avaya International with responsibilities for Europe, Middle East and Africa & Asia Pacific

Nidal has responsibilities for sales, services, engineering, and vertical solutions. He has been instrumental in Avaya’s transformation from niche voice/IP telephony player to its leadership position for UC and CC. 

He is known for his ability to foster long lasting relationships with customers and employees. Many of the associates Nidal has mentored went on to have successful careers in technology across the Middle East and Africa. What sets him apart is sincere concern for others. 

Devoted to the principles of customer-centricity, leaders without titles, and accountability at the workplace, Nidal has fostered an environment that makes innovation everyone’s business – whether they’re an Avaya employee or customer. Prior to Avaya, Nidal works at NCR and AT&T. 

For more enterprise communications content, see TalkignPointz.com

Dave and Evan chat with Mark Strassman, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Unified Communications and Collaboration at LogMeIn. 

Mark serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager for LogMeIn’s Unified Communications & Collaboration business unit overseeing market-leading UCC products GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Jive, Grasshopper and more. Mark joins LogMeIn from BlueJeans Networks, where he served as the video collaboration company’s Chief Product Officer. Prior to BlueJeans, he was Senior Vice President of Products at Blackboard, Inc, a leading provider of video and collaboration technologies for the education industry. He’s also held various leadership positions at Autodesk, Inc., including managing Autodesk’s core products, AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT and at Adobe and Macromedia where he built and led the Web publishing and Flash businesses.

Mark holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.B.A. from the Walter A. Haas School of Business- University of California, Berkeley.