Automated Transcript
Andrew Robinson, Head of UCaaS Practice: I’m Andy Robinson, I head up the UCaaS practice at Gamma and I’m here, delighted to be joined by D.P. Venkatesh of Cisco. I’ll let you do your own introductions.
D.P. Venkatesh, Chief Growth Officer at Cisco Collaboration: Thank you, Andy. Hi, I’m D.P. Venkatesh, the Chief Growth Officer of Cisco’s Collaboration business. We’re very excited to be here at Gammaverse. Gamma is one of our key partners, and it’s great to meet Gamma and also your partners, who, at the end of the day, are delivering Cisco’s solutions to their end customers. So thank you for the opportunity.
Andrew: No, no, it’s great, and hopefully, you’ve enjoyed the day so far. It was a really good debate that you had earlier. So we’ve got a number of questions for you, and we’d like to start by probably saying… I’ve probably been at Gamma now for 16 years and I’ve seen a good evolution of start-ups. But we’ve always had a good partnership with Cisco, and now we’ve got this more intense relationship with you. So what excites you most about the launch of Horizon with Webex, and of course Webex for Gamma?
D.P.: Look, I think we have two offers that are equally exciting. One is when you look at the Horizon with Webex offering. If you’re already an existing customer, you’re already using the platform, you’re using collaboration. This is a simple transition to say launch the Webex as part of the existing solution. Then I think for other customers where we have Webex for Gamma, it’s a full stack Webex calling and the Webex app solution from Cisco. So depending on the customer, one may make more sense than the other. But what we are excited about from Cisco’s perspective is it aligns us and Gamma where it’s the same technology stack, it’s the same platform, so as partners and customers move up the stack from one to the other, it’s more seamless. We try to create an environment and an experience that allows them to focus on their business, and the transition and the journey is a lot smoother. That’s why both these products and the offers into the market are equally exciting. One of them is targeted at a very specific segment, which is existing users, and then we think there’s a lot of growth opportunities in the Webex for Gamma offering. We’re excited about both.
Andrew: Given that, what do you think the top opportunities are for our Channel Partners?
D.P.: Sure, look, I think from a channel partner perspective or in the market, and I said in the panel earlier, the UK market, Europe in general, but the UK market has something like six to seven million seats that will move to the cloud just on the unified communications side of it. So we’re talking about a few trends that I think are very, very important over the next three years. You know, you have the shutdown of the traditional telephony network, so businesses, small and mid-market businesses are going to look for ‘what do I do?’. There’s a trigger point, there’s somebody saying you’re going to change, which is a huge opportunity for the partners. The second part of it is I think it’s not just communications and unified communications where we see the opportunity, we also see, you know, I like to look at it as this employee experience and customer experience. So unified communications is largely you and I talking to each other in our company, messaging, meetings, video, but also externally. Customer experience is about how you interact with a company. It has changed dramatically over the last 3-4 years. So for me, the two big opportunities would be around unified communications and collaboration, and then contact centre or customer experience is the other big opportunity. Yeah, and look at Cisco. When you look at where we sort of grew up in, we think we build the best devices that support the best experience in the market. So when you look at our video devices, our phone devices, and our entire portfolio, whether you’re working at home, you’re in the office, you’re on the road, we provide the best devices combined with our Webex platform, and that’s a killer value prop for partners to take to market. Another unique thing that we’ve done on the device side is we’ve actually made it an open platform. So you could have a Cisco device and also join a Webex meeting, but maybe a Teams meeting, maybe a Zoom meeting, or even a Google meeting. So, you know, we’ve created a solution from a channel partner perspective that makes them… you can go in and have a conversation about how your business is changing, how do you adapt, as opposed to just going in and pitching a product. Once you talk about the change, you can then say Cisco has the platform that allows you to go up and down the stack. I think that’s a key differentiator for us, and I think the channel partners will appreciate that.
Andrew: Yeah, I know, absolutely. And, you know, I think you hit a point in terms of certainly the customer experience, since everyone’s talking about CX these days and how to improve that, and the contact centre capability is now in the hands of people who don’t even know they’re a contact centre. It’s just bringing it down that stack into that SMB level. Yeah, I mean, who would have thought that a GP surgery would be using contact centre functionality? But it fits and it makes sense
D.P.: I think the nuance is, I think in the industry we tend to look at it as this is contact centre, this is UCaaS, this is CCaaS. We get very acronym heavy. But I, to your point on the GP, you know, he or she has a practice, maybe they’re looking at what happens when you call the doctor’s office and you want to schedule an appointment. That’s a contact centre. You could argue it’s an UCaaS in the sense it’s like call routing, or is it a contact centre. Now, they don’t hire people just to take phone calls, you’re like a one or two GP practice. But the ability to have a simple solution that even a GP can use, but maybe set it up to say between working hours, this is what I want you to do. After hours, route the traffic this way. And then we talked also about the world is changing. It used to be you called the GP office, now you may email them, chat with them, or you follow the GP on social and then you engage with them on a social channel, whether it’s WhatsApp or it’s Facebook or this. So I think we provide a platform that addresses the entire range of communication channels. I think we support 16 or so, and then we meet the customers where they are. So I think that’s what is changing. It’s not that the GP is continuing to do what they always did, but the way they get… it’s hard to say patients are customers, but if you look at it from that lens, how they engage with their patients, how they follow up with their patients, and then all of the tools built in the platform. So if I have, say, a telemedicine appointment with you, you record it, you transcribe it, you could provide a summary of it, you can provide the action items from it and make it available very securely with the privacy guardrails to the patient and the doctor. Those are the kinds of things that I think really will drive change in the market.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s great, and there’s so much opportunity in markets that can now be opened as a result of this and fit nicely in. And given that, I guess, is there any advice that you’ve got for our Channel Partners to make the most of these opportunities that they now have?
D.P.: Yeah, I think the time is now in terms of talking to your customers about change, and it’s more an evolution, right? Sometimes people say, “I have a system, it works,” but I don’t think they quite know what the capabilities available to them are. So my advice would be experiment, trial, proof of pilot or concept, figure out what makes sense, and then also look at, do you lead with unified communications? Is that the criteria? Do you lead with contact centre or customer experience? Is that the criteria? But at the end of the day, when I look at the UK market, we’re talking about 6 million odd seats that are going to move. They’re going to move to somebody’s platform. Why not Gamma? Why not your channel partners? So I think my ask of your channel partners is talk to your customers. Talk about how the business outcomes are different with the product, as opposed to saying, “I’ve got a shiny new toy and it’s got more horsepower,” or it’s got something else, which is great. But at the end of the day, the GP or the retailer or the store is looking at, “What does it do to help my business?” And, you know, there is a lot more functionality available in today’s platforms that I think the average business is aware of. So it’s our job to educate them and I think to get them to try these services.
Andrew: No, absolutely. And I guess it’s a case of where this whole market is heading towards. There’s so much that is being done. There are so many features and functionalities that we can now fit into these areas. As you say, it’s based on business needs as opposed… it’s always difficult not to sell the shiny stuff. You do make really good phones and so on, so it’s… you make them shiny, so that’s the draw. But where is this market heading, do you think, in terms of the collaboration and the whole UCaaS pieces?
D.P.: No, I think, you know, it’s interesting. Almost every conversation, podcast, or panel you participate on, you know, there’s this elephant in the room, which is all the noise on AI. What does it mean? How does it help? How does it hurt? Is it safe? Is it secure? I think AI will fundamentally transform a large number of industries. Some of them will be disrupted, some of them will benefit from it, some of them will be left behind. So when I look at where does the unified communications, collaboration, and customer experience market move, we all know of stories where it used to be, you know, we sent memos around the office and then we lived in email, and now we live in these messaging apps and we’re sitting on video conferences internally and externally. So the world’s changed. But I think what element, what will AI do to help me with my employee experience? So now every time, so if we were doing this on the Webex platform, we have a, you know, the ability to support webinars and events, it’s automatically recorded, it’s transcribed, it can be translated into different languages, so increase your reach, and we provide very specific summary items. All of that is done by AI. It changes your reach, it changes what you can do. Similarly, from a customer perspective, customers’ expectations have changed. So it used to be, you know, it was called a call centre, and you called, and then you stayed on hold forever. And then finally, people figured out, like, “Hey, maybe we will call you back. You know, you leave us your number.” I think in the future, what you’re already starting to see is sometimes you go to a store, sometimes you call, sometimes you’re on the website, you’re on a chat window, or you’re on a social channel. Every interaction with the company has changed because customers are in all these channels. So you can’t say, like, just as, I don’t know, 20 years ago, you couldn’t say, “Oh, we don’t need a website.” Remember when, you know, and then everybody figured out why they needed a website, or you don’t need the social channel, and then everybody figured out you need social channels. So I think what AI will do to these two markets is really sort of supercharge them to say, “How do you create a better employee experience and a better customer experience?” I think that’s what I see in the industry. That’s very exciting and it creates new opportunities for Gamma, for Cisco, and for your channel partners.
Andrew: And maybe one day, you won’t need me sitting here interviewing you. It will be an AI machine instead.
D.P.: And then I will send my avatar to interact with your AI. We both can watch later.
Andrew: Well, that’s great. Well, thanks very much for joining us. It’s been absolutely fantastic for you to join us here at Gammaverse, adding value and pushing forward the Cisco proposition, but also, of course, our partnership together. So thank you very much.
D.P.: Thanks, Andy. We appreciate the partnership with Gamma and your channel partners, so thank you for having me.
Andrew: Great, thanks.
D.P.: Thank you.
