Leapfrog CX Strategies

Evan and Dave chat with OJ Winge and Simen Teigre, the founders of Neat. 

Neat came out of stealth at Zoomtopia 2019. The company is new, but on day one had extensive expertise in both video and video hardware. OJ and Simen were part of Tandberg which is arguably the most innovative source of video technologies (both before and after its 2010 acquisition by Cisco). 

Both OJ and Simen went to Cisco, both left and became involved in two separate video startups: OJ with Acano and Simen with Pexip. These companies were direct competitors. Acano was acquired by Cisco in 2015.

Fast forward to 2019, the two reunited and founded Neat. A new company focused on exclusively producing hardware for the rapidly growing Zoom ecosystem. Neat is the first video hardware company dedicated to Zoom, and what incredible timing. The video sector (especially Zoom) had explosive growth in 2020. An amazing year for most video-related businesses, but an incredible first year for Neat. 

Evan and Dave chat with Karl Hantho of Pexip. 

Pexip is the result of a 2019 merger between Pexip and Videxio -- both started by a group of visionary industry veterans, both offshoots of Tandberg. They set out to break down the barriers which were making enterprise video conferencing expensive, and difficult to use, manage and scale. Pexip provides interoperability with Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and other video services, and also offers a complete end-to-end meeting and calling solution. 

Karl Hantho is president of the Americas. Prior to Pexip, Karl led a successful Americas business for Videxio, a cloud-based video conferencing service that merged with Pexip in December of 2018. Before starting Videxio's business in the Americas in 2013, Karl was a member of the original joint venture leadership team in 1994 that established and grew BT Visual Images to become the US acquisition that launched Tandberg in the North American market in 1997, the business which he led through 2004. 

Evan and Dave chat with Chris MacFarland, Chairman and CEO of Masergy.

Masergy Communications is a software defined networking services company founded in 2000 and headquartered in Plano TX.  Its  offerings include advanced networking services such as Managed SD-WAN, UCaaS, CCaaS, and Managed Security.

Chris MacFarland joined Masergy as COO in 2008 and was promoted to CEO and Executive Chairman. Prior to Masergy, he has served in various senior executive positions at BroadSoft, McLeodUSA, Allegiance Telecom, Verio, OnRamp, CompuNet, and Compu-Tek International.

Chris was selected as a 2017 Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Top CEO, Tech Titans CEO of the Year for 2016 and Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2015 for the Southwest region.

In this podcast we learn how the cloud has changed over the past few years, and how Masergy has adapted. The company is among the first service providers to launch the new hybrid Webex service that utilizes locally hosted voice services with Cisco hosted conferencing services. 

Chris is passionate about community service and has championed numerous charitable and outreach programs including as a board member of the Warrior Family Network and International Student Foundation. He attended the University of Texas at Arlington where he majored in Computer Science and Engineering.

Evan and Dave chat with  Scott Wharton, VP & GM, Video Collaboration at Logitech. 

Logitech is well known for its PC and USB peripherals, and it has recently emerged as a major player in enterprise video. The company has been a key partner to  Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco, Google, and many others. It has also been instrumental in building a bridge between smart room vendors and video conferencing services. 

Prior to Logitech, Scott was the founder and CEO at Vidtel, a pioneering cloud-based service that interconnected enterprise video systems to consumer applications.  After the sale of Vidtel and some extensive global travel with the family, Scott accepted the role to lead Logitech's video group. Soon after,  its revenues tripled.  

Prior to Vidtel, Scott was the VP of Marketing at BroadSoft.  Scott holds an MBA. from Yale University.

Evan and Dave chat with Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft 365 Collaboration with Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. 

Jeff leads the product design, and engineering teams for Teams (and a few other areas too) with the aim of empowering people and organizations to collaborate. Though he's been at Microsoft for close to 30 years, he's still inspired by its core mission of connecting people everywhere with tools and technologies to create, build, and achieve more together.

There  may not be any other enterprise communications app as successful as Microsoft Teams.  Last October Microsoft revealed Teams now has 115 million daily active users. That’s more than a 50 percent increase from the 75 million that Microsoft reported about six weeks earlier.

Jeff joined the Teams team in Q120, and lived through a lot of that growth. We cover what Satya thinks of Teams, Metaswitch, why Outlook and Teams are separate clients, if Teams is a business or consumer app, pandemic impacts, and so much more. 

When not working, you might find Jeff preparing for a marathon, noshing a bagel, or enjoying The Beatles with his family.  He earned a BS at NYU and an MBA from Harvard. 

Evan and Dave chat with Anand Janefalkar, CEO and Founder of UJET. 

UJET is a new kind of CCaaS company, cloud native, designed and built for modern communications. That means it natively integrates with other cloud apps, without duplicating data, and is built for modern, multi-modal communications. 

Anand is passionate about creating better business results through more natural communications. He started UJET to modernize the Contact Center by addressing long-standing design flaws and conventional thinking that have failed to evolve in parallel with changing human interaction landscape.

He has experience with personal mobility and consumer communications. We ask him about his time at both Motorola and Jawbone, but then we get into the meat of why UJET is different in how it approaches customer engagement. 

Anand  holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics from Mumbai University and a Master of Science in Telecommunications from Southern Methodist University.

Evan and Dave chat with Javed Khan, SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration. 

Javed Khan leads Cisco’s multi-billion-dollar Collaboration business which includes the Webex portfolio of Meetings, Teams, Rooms, Calling, and Contact Center. In this podcast we discuss the WebexOne conference that Cisco hosted earlier this month. 

Prior to this position, Javed was running Cisco’s Cloud Calling business. He and his team were responsible for the strategy and execution of product management, development and partner operations for the Cisco Cloud Calling Portfolio. This includes Webex Calling, Cisco BroadWorks-based solutions, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) Cloud.

Javed came to Cisco from Symantec where he served as the VP of Enterprise and Consumer Security products. Javed holds an MS in Computer Science and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. When he's not working, he enjoys spending time with his family in the San Francisco bay area.

Evan and Dave chat with Craig Malloy, the founder and CEO of Lifesize. 

There are few, if any, executives in enterprise video who have seen what Craig has seen. He founded Lifesize in 2003, and other than a brief break, he's been at the helm the whole time. 

Lifesize started as a vendor of premises-based, proprietary video equipment.  The company has gone through a few different industry transitions, pivots, and demand shifts, and today offers a standards-based, cloud-delivered services for meetings - oh, and customer engagement too. 

In this interview we ask Craig about what he's seen, and what's learned. We talk about WebRTC, the move to AWS, 4K video, Tech in Austin, and more. 

Currently, Lifesize is owned by Marlin Equity, a private equity firm. We ask Craig about that transition too, and he does mention EBITDA. More importantly we learned how PE caused the recent merger with Serenova. Suddenly, Craig found himself the CEO of what may be the only provider of video and contact center services. 

Actually, there are lots of companies that do both video and CCaaS, but they tend to offer UCaaS too. Craig will either create a new model, build/acquire a UCaaS offer, or perhaps both. 

Evan and Dave chat with the recently named CEO of Vonage, Rory Read. 

In this podcast we get to know the new dude in charge at Vonage. Rory Read joined the Company as CEO and a member of the Board of Directors in July 2020. He was previously Chief Operating Executive for Dell Technologies, and also served as CEO and President of Virtustream, a Dell Technologies business. Rory also served as Executive Vice President of Dell Technologies Boomi, a SaaS integration platform provider. Rory played a lead role in the $67 billion merger of Dell and EMC. As President of Dell Worldwide Commercial Sales, he built and managed Dell’s best-in-class sales engine, and delivered the strategy for Dell’s global channel, partner and direct sales efforts.

Before joining Dell, he served as CEO, President and member of the Board of Directors of AMD. Prior to that he was COO and President at Lenovo. Earlier, Rory spent 23 years at IBM, serving in various leadership roles.