Leapfrog CX Strategies

Dave and Evan meet with Brett Shockley,  CEO and Co-Founder of Journey.ai. 

Brett's journey, prior to Journey, included being the CTO role at Avaya. He was responsible for Avaya's mergers, acquisitions, major partnerships, corporate strategy, and emerging products including Avaya Labs. Before Avaya, Brett was the VP & GM Customer Contact Business Unit at Cisco. He has extensive experience with the contact center industry, and is a tireless customer advocate. 

Brett also founded Spanlink Communications and Calabrio. He is also on the board of eGain Corp. and Spok Holdings, Inc.

In addition to holding a patent for a telecommunications device, Shockley has an MBA in Marketing from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology. 

Dave and Evan meet with Darren Schreiber, the co-Founder and CEO of 2600Hz.  With nearly two decades of telecom experience under his belt, Darren’s core focus is on distributed computing and communications technologies. 

His contributions to the open source telecom community are immense, including co-authoring the FreeSWITCH books and mentoring at universities and workshops.  He previously ran a large managed services operation, and he worked at one Bandwidth.com.

You may or may not be familiar with 2600-Hz, but you have very likely heard of its customers. Its technology is used by many well known service providers, carriers, and enterprises. 

In this podcast we learn more about the company, its KAZOO product, and the shifts and trends occurring in communications. 

Dave and Evan host their first TalkingHeadz foursome. In this episode we meet with Davide Petramala and Laura Faughtenberry of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS.

Avaya is best known for its powerful enterprise contact centers which can now do even more with OneCloud CPaaS. In this podcast we find out more about how/when Avaya got into the CPaaS business, and how customers are using it to customize even faster and better services.

Avaya OneCloud CPaaS is an Avaya public cloud service that offers APIs and applications as a service that can be used to customize and personalize communications and collaboration. This global platform allows developers, partners and customers to build agile and burstable mobile and web applications via CPaaS building blocks.

Case studies include Harris County and Nebraska Medicine as well as: 

• CTIntegrations https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/ctintegrations/
• 6 Points https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/6-points/
• IMPower https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/impower-solutions/

Dave and Evan meet with Aurangzeb Khan, SVP GN Jabra.

Aurangzeb was co-founder & CEO of Altia Systems which Jabra (GN Netcom) acquired in 2019. Currently,  Aurangzeb is the SVP of Intelligent Vision Systems at Jabra, best known for its Panacast products. The PanaCast products use multiple cameras, or a cam-array to create real-time, immersive video.
 
Earlier, Aurangzeb was President & CEO at Everspin Technologies. He was co-founder, President & CEO at Altius Solutions and, immediately following the merger Simplex Solutions, contributed to the IPO in May 2001. Aurangzeb held senior engineering and general management positions at Cadence, Cirrus Logic, Tandem Computers (now part of HP), and Fairchild. 

In this podcast we ask Aurangzeb multiple questions about cameras (or is it a single question about multiple cameras?), parallax distortion, how to sell a startup for $125 million, and why the world needed a new video cam company. 

Aurangzeb received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering Management from Stanford University, executive education at the Stanford GSB, a double-major B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Nuclear Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.Sc. in Physics and 1 Ingrid Lunden, 

Dave and Evan meet with Kira Makagon, Chief Innovation Officer, RingCentral.

Kira is a serial entrepreneur that landed at RingCentral in 2012. In her current role as Chief Innovation Officer she leads product strategy, product management and design, engineering and R&D.  She has had a tremendous impact on RingCentral.

Before RingCentral she co-founded several technology companies, including Octane (acquired by E.piphany NASDAQ: EPNY) for $3.2 billion, and RedAril (acquired by Hearst). Learn more about Kira at KiraMakagon.com. Kira is one of the most influential professionals in communications. 

In this interview, Dave and Evan cover a wide range of topics including innovation at RingCentral, her new role in RingCentral Ventures, and some of the interesting developments at RingCentral over the past several years. 

Dave and Evan meet with Evan MacMillan, CEO and Co-Founder of Gridspace.

We had to pull Evan out of the garage to record this podcast. Gridspace is a collaboration between SRI Speech Labs and some fellow Stanford engineers. It is pioneering real-time speech infrastructure for contact centers and developers. 

Gridspace was formed in 2012 as a collaboration between SRI Speech Lab, the lab behind Siri and Nuance, and a team of Stanford designers and engineers. Today, the company's software scans and automates calls for healthcare and financial services customers. The company is one of the largest Kubernetes cluster operators for streaming speech and has analyzed billions of call minutes with its cloud and telephony agnostic speech technology.

Dave and Evan meet with Rowan Trollope, the CEO of cloud contact center provider Five9. 

Rowan was named the CEO of Five9 in May of 2018. Though many of us within the industry met him during his three years as the head of Cisco Collaboration. 

Rowan is passionate about how digital transformation revolutionizes the way we communicate. He is a self-proclaimed geek and self-taught software developer. He has an eye for aesthetics, and during his term at Cisco, the collaboration group earned 20 awards for outstanding product design.

We cover a wide range of topics in this interview from Cisco Spark to Ethereum,  but spend most of the time talking about Five9. Both Rowan and the entire Five9 team have had a spectacular ride over the past three years. 

Evan and Dave chat with Karen Mangia, VP Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce.

Karen Mangia focuses on strategies for personal and professional success, and she regularly works with executives, managers and future leaders at companies of all sizes globally.  She published two books in 2020:  Listen Up! How to Tune In To Customers, And Turn Down the Noise and Working From Home:  Making the New Normal Work For You - both from Wiley.

We cover a lot of topics, especially work from home.  #WFH

Committed to diversity and inclusion, she serves on her company’s Racial Equality and Justice Task Force. She is a TEDx speaker and the author of Success With Less, a book that chronicles her own personal journey through a life-threatening health crisis. Her high-impact keynotes help organizations to access the future of work via innovative insights around the voice of the customer.

When John’s not working on network innovation, he enjoys golfing, skiing around pesky snowboarders, and hiking with his wife.

You can subscribe to TalkingHeadz on most podcast apps. 

Evan and Dave chat with Bill Wignall, the CEO of Sangoma Communications. 

You may not be that familiar with Bill or Sangoma, but both are industry giants that have  outperformed their peers and the broader industry.  Bill has guided Sangoma through tremendous growth and transformation, largely through acquisitions. 

Sangoma is known for its plug-and-play, enterprise grade solutions. The company is the primary producer of Asterisk and FreePBX, the two largest open source communications projects in the world. These systems power countless systems and providers around the world. 

In this podcast we go through most of the acquisitions, a little industry hotel, and a whole lotta transformation - hardware to software to cloud-delivered services. Bill's also shares his vision of the smart office, and it has nothing to do with dial tone. 

Enjoy this rare opportunity to meet Bill, he tends to avoid public appearances.