Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast, where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. I'm Max Clark. And today, I'm talking with Jonathan Nelson with Vonage.

Jonathan, thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me, Max. I'm looking forward to it.

So, Jonathan, can you tell me, what does Vonage do? What problem do you solve?

You know, in a in a basic way, we enable communications. This comes in so many different formats from packaged capabilities for disparate workforce, especially more so now than ever, but that on up to the building blocks for people who develop applications to drive communications resources into their own apps.

So thank you for not answering with acronyms. I appreciate that. So you say disparate workforce. So I mean, you're talking about you know, off companies with offices in multiple locations or or now, more importantly, companies with people working from home or working globally? I mean, what's the region?

What's the scope?

Yeah. I think yes to all, very simply. We are a global communications platform. We supply services around the world in many different countries. I do mean those remote workers that are now forced to work from home.

I mean, what used to be those isolated areas where people just had small offices or remote offices, really our goal is to make it simple and easy for both internal and external communications from a business perspective.

So this is obviously a conversation related to COVID nineteen and what I'm referring to as a post COVID world. So how does Vonage help companies react to and respond and and deal with shift from COVID?

That's a really good question. We help in a lot of different ways. Number 1, we've been in the Cloud communications world for 20 years. We kicked it off with residential. We hold some of the most patents within the industry.

So the cloud is not new to us. Our business communications platform has been around for many years as well, and we've been delivering these services to remote workers, for quite some time. What's really changed as far as the COVID world has brought us is speed of deployment, you know, the need to turn people up very quickly. We've designed our communications tools or applications to be very user friendly so that there's there's not a huge learning curve. You don't need tons of training to jump in and start doing what you do best, which is your business, which you've been hired to do.

Right? We want to make it easy for you to, engage your internal assets as well as those external assets to close business, be efficient as business, and drive customer experience.

So you mentioned API. I mean, so this is more than just communications and voice in the cloud. I mean, you have a lot of other suites of products that you offer and services that you can deliver for companies.

Correct. That's a really good point. There's a ton of apps out there that we all live and die by, right, in our day to day worlds. And a lot of those utilize the Vonage API platform. And what that is really is it's the abstract of the communication services that we provide in kind of a packaged application.

If you've got a developer out there who's trying to develop the Nest softphone application, we provide that infrastructure, that global infrastructure via our API access to get out there and have that app get dial tone and be able to utilize many communications.

And I I think, probably the biggest common example people would be familiar with is you get a text message on your phone that says, oh, your delivery is here, or my dentist messages me, don't forget your appointment tomorrow. Those are things.

Right? Yeah. Absolutely. It's interesting you bring that up too because so many times now people are looking to us. And I'll use the restaurant industry, which has changed dramatically due to COVID.

Now everybody's in a pickup or deliver aspect. And I know we're all used to the delivery apps, you know, the Uber Eats and such that are out there. But a lot of restaurants wanna do this themselves as well. And so they've come to us with the request, well, if somebody orders through our app, you know, how do we notify them that their food is ready? You know, how can we how can they notify us once they get to the parking lot so we can bring it out to them?

Those types of things. And so those are solutions that we're providing for for a lot of restaurants out there.

So is this something that they have to hire a developer to integrate themselves? Or is this something that, you know, if you're relatively computer savvy, you could build yourself?

So a a little from both. I would say the more advanced the use case, you're definitely going to need to be developer savvy, know a systems integrator, something to that effect. But we have a lot of ways in which we can drive these types of communications in a low code, no code fashion when you look at different flow builders, or integration platform as a service type stuff that's out there.

So you mentioned Vonage Residential and Vonage Business is a very different thing. I mean, it's a completely different platforms between the 2. So, I mean, give me an idea of, like, you know, who is Vonage Business' customers in terms of size or or locations or industries? I mean, what can you what can you tell me there?

I mean, we really we really run the gambit. Right? It's all across the board. We have a ton of success, say, on our API platform, especially now with telemedicine. We have HIPAA compliant video APIs that are driving tons of services in that range.

We provide UC or or Unified Communications Services to some of the largest financial firms, in North America and the world. And then retail, we've done some amazing things with retail too. It's it's hard to narrow it down to one specific thing, but I will say that what drives Vonage over some of the other competitors out there, no matter what industry or what size of organization you are, is the fact that we do own our our entire technology stack. And that includes unified communications, contact center, the APIs, and then, of course, the artificial intelligence as well. And these are things that can really draw together a complete solution for large enterprises all the way down to the SMB market.

So UC or UCaaS or Unified Communications. Right? This is a is a pretty defined trade term at this point.

Mhmm.

So if I don't know I need a UCaaS system, I mean, how how would somebody under say, oh, I'm having this problem or I'm trying to get to this goal. What actually is solved or or achieved with the UCaaS platform?

Yeah. So there there's a couple of different ways that I would actually look at that. Number 1 is as an IT organization, no matter the size, are you managing a ton of hardware specific to your communications? This could be physical phones. This could be servers that go along with your PBX.

Are you managing rack space at a local data center to host your PBX? Things like that. But also, too, how much work goes into now that your people are remote, into them being able to access that phone system. If it's not a simple download and you've got a softphone on your desktop, you start looking at more updated technologies that are out there. And and UC or hosted UC is, I think, a key a key ingredient there.

So the the UCaaS space, there's a lot of companies offering these services now. You mentioned patents. What about Vonage is better or easier or the best that somebody should think about and look at Vonage for versus somebody else?

Yeah. That's a great great question. So time in the industry, number 1. We own our own technology stack, so we can give you one piece, but we can also be your forward technology provider and advisor, throughout the process. But I think where we really truly differentiate is our ability to integrate but also sit and drive innovation.

We like to see how we can make things new for people and really drive new ways to have a better customer experience, but also employee experience.

So can you give me an idea of your your pricing range? Like, obviously, term length and number of of seats or, you know, extensions would impact this, but what's what's the kind of lane lines for this?

Yeah. That's a really good question. So we have anything from, no contracts, so kind of a month to month setup on up to 3 5 year terms depending on what people are trying to accomplish. And those monthly recurring costs for, say, a seat, can range anywhere from that $10 mark on up to that 65 to $85 mark for a low end contact center. We can go much higher than that with contact center.

But if you're talking just UC, you're in that 10 to $25 mark, which is a gives you a lot of different capabilities because there's a couple of different ways you can actually supply services.

Can you define what unified communications is in the Vonage space? Like, what are you actually offering in addition to telephone that can make and receive phone calls?

Yeah. So definitely a lot of different communications channels go into UC as far as Vonage is concerned. We look at interoffice communications. We look at external communications through SMS. We also look at external communications through social media like Facebook.

Then you've got meetings on top of it. So I I think there's so many things that go into it. Right? You have that automated triage of calls, whether that's through an IVR or through an AI, virtual assistant. And then once it gets to the human contact piece of the puzzle, you've got voice, video, and digital communications.

So nowadays, you know, the ability to give somebody an extension with a DID and either a physical phone or an application, a softphone, the expectation is that they can make and receive phone calls. Maybe they have SMS enabled. There's you said meetings, you know, video conferencing built into it. And then social is interesting because you have a concept of team inboxes, and you have a little bit more that's kind of contact center ish but for a non contact center environment. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. So one of the Vonage, products is Business Inbox. And we really like this one because it allows a couple of different engagements. The the first would be that that Facebook engagement. So when you look at the the midsize market, a lot of them utilize Facebook and have Facebook landing pages for their consumers and clients to engage them on.

And so it's a very easy path to have the client engage through Facebook and have the business respond within one platform, which is the Vonage Business Communications platform. So they see that inbox. It can be managed by multiple people inside the organization so that responses can be given out, but also visible by the entire organization so that we aren't duplicating efforts. The same goes for SMS. You can SMS the main business number and allow the organization to respond back and keep those communications going.

I would imagine that's extremely popular right now and powerful for people. Yeah. So you mentioned month to month. I mean, if somebody that's evaluating or looking at using Vonage, is there, I mean, a a proof of concept or a trial or demo period? I mean, what is the onboarding?

And when you say rapid response, what does that actually mean in in in real world? Like, how long would it take somebody to actually get set up with Vonage, you know, if they needed to tomorrow?

Yeah. So very basic deployments, we can do in 24 to 48 hours. We've done some mildly advanced deployments in that 48 to 72 hours due to COVID response needs. We have really enabled our professional services organization to move quickly to do these deployments. They're highly skilled staff that can handle a lot of different nuanced needs from our client base.

As we engage with clients and they want to move and they want to move fast, really, we can sit down and understand and and give them what they're looking for in the amount of time that usually they need. There's tons of emergencies right now, of course, but we've really, I think, gone through the thick of the emergencies. And now we're we're doing a bit more thoughtful deployments and starting to see, still, it's be fast, but it's it's coming back to a what would be a new normal in in times, which is around, you know, a week.

Awesome. Last question. So the on the low end, like, is there a size that's too small for Vonage? And is there a size that's too big for Vonage? Like, where where do you play where do you play best in?

So we definitely play really well in the enterprise sector. So when you look at upper mid market to enterprise, multiple locations, hundreds to thousands of seats. Where we're really growing fast is in the multinational place as well. So North American centric companies that have places in EMEA and APAC, that we can provide services to. The SMB market, the small mom and pop shops, they need our services.

We're always here to help those. A lot of those have become very automated because those needs are very straightforward. So you don't see a lot of heavy human interaction in those small ones, which really allows us to focus on the more advanced ones and and give people what they need from a business perspective.

And and what you mean by that is the ability I could I could log into an interface and say I'm adding an employee. I need a phone and a phone number, and that's all automated and, like, self-service.

Correct. That's exactly right.

Awesome. Jonathan, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Max.

Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.