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.

Evan and Dave chat with the legendary tech activist and author Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger -- a contributor to Boing Boing and the author of young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER and novels for adults like RAPTURE OF THE NERDS and MAKERS. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group.

Enterprise users of communications and technologies need activists too.  We cover a lot of ground in this podcast. Cory has an informed opinion on the changes taking place in the tech that governs our lives. We cover surveillance, privacy, chickenization, and so much more.

Works referenced in this episode:
Attack Surface
Little Brother
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

Subscribe to Cory's blog here. 

Evan and Dave chat with Javier Soltero, VP & GM of Google Workspace. 

Javier wants you to re-think G Suite. Actually, he wants you re-think suites and in general. He explains in this podcast the logic and intent of rebranding G Suite to Google Workspace. We also cover some of the changes at Google Cloud, and Javier explains why enterprises can trust Google with their data.  Go ahead and download this episode, voice is a great way to meet and chat. 

Javier Soltero became the VP of G Suite about a year ago, and already worked himself out of that job. Google Workspace is more than a rebrand, it's a new philosophy about online productivity. We also cover voice, chat, and of course email. We also talk about how Google Workspace is different than Microsoft's Office 365 -- his prior gig. 

Javier landed at Microsoft after it acquired his startup, Acompli in 2014. As an MS CVP, he worked on Cortana, Outlook, and Office. Prior to starting Acompli, Javier worked at VMware, Hyperic, and Netscape. Javier attended Carnegie Mellon University and currently lives in the San Francisco area.

Evan and Dave chat with Cameron Weeks (Twitter/LinkedIn), CEO and co-Founder of Edify. 

We strive to have guests that span the industry, and this episode has it it all. That's because Edify offers UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS. Actually, that's not even broad enough. Cameron and Team Edify are on a mission to redefine business communications, cloud, omnichannel, and customer engagement. He believes that the technologies today enable a totally new approach: 

Cameron Weeks is the driving force behind Edify Labs. The company is only two years old, but has decades of experience behind it. The hardest part is getting prospects to realize that they can order off the established menu. 

Evan and Dave chat with Tony Bates (Twitter/LinkedIn), CEO of Genesys.

Many factors are currently contributing to the interesting and uncharted territories in which businesses now find themselves. From the global pandemic, to the continued rise of AI and the cloud, as well as the ever-evolving understanding of customer experience. For our guest today, Tony Bates, the confluence of these forces, and a desire to constantly innovate and scale both propel and ground his work.

Tony shares some reflections on Skype, and takes us through the process he went through accepting the CEO role at Genesys. We discuss some of the changes implemented since his arrival a little less than two years ago. Tony is no stranger to industry leaders and the forefront of the tech world. He explains why his current position at Genesys is the job he "has been waiting for his whole life!" 

Our conversation covers the changes at Genesys since Tony arrived. He also unpacks the three-pronged approach to innovation that he subscribes to, underlining the importance of system synergies. We discuss balancing new talent with experienced minds, and Tony talks about the fusion of these two forces for a more successful future. 

One of the great takeaways from our chat is Tony's explanation of the idea of experience as a service, his renewed focus on the customer journey, and how this relates to their marketing strategy at the company right now.