LiveOps invited to White House workplace forum

The White House has invited LiveOps, a Santa Clara, CA-based company, to join the President and First Lady in a forum hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls. LiveOps provides cloud-based solutions to labor needs predominantly in the contact center market. The company has an impressive list of investors (Benchmark Capital, Menlo Ventures, etc.), management (lots of eBay DNA), and board members, as well as high-profile customers like Salesforce.com and Kodak. It’s one of the first company to see the cloud computing trend and invested heavily in it. Now it’s definitely reaping the benefits, especially in this economy when companies are looking for any way to provide the most cost effective customer service.

So how did a west coast company focused on contact centers appear on the White House’s radar? Obviously LiveOps is perfectly qualified to speak to issues around workplace and labor challenges, but I’m just curious… after all, it’s a very niche segment of the economy.

Is it the $400,000 spent in 2009 on lobbying? It’s also interesting to see that Maynard Webb, Chairman and CEO, held the minority view in the 2008 presidential election compared to other employees. In that case I hope Webb is representing LiveOps at the forum just to mix things up a bit…

Press release from LiveOps here:

Washington, D.C. — March 30, 2010 — LiveOps today announced that the company will join the President and First Lady Wednesday to discuss the importance of workplace practices that allow America’s working men and women to meet the demands of their jobs without sacrificing the needs of their families. Hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls, the Forum on Workplace Flexibility will bring together CEOs, small business owners, labor leaders and policy experts to share ideas and strategies for making the workplace more flexible for the American worker and parent.

“LiveOps plays an instrumental role in helping businesses and individuals change the way they think about and approach work,” said Maynard Webb, chairman and CEO of LiveOps. “We applaud the President and First Lady for recognizing the need for a sustainable work model that meets the needs of everyone from parents to students entering the workforce to people living in rural communities far from the center of business commerce. It is a time for innovation at work; and LiveOps is pleased to be helping thousands of individuals across the U.S. establish careers that include flexibility in the way they work and live.”

The White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility will focus on the challenges facing America’s working families and strategies for keeping Americans employed without forcing them to sacrifice parental responsibilities. As a successful company that contracts with more than 20,000 independent agents who work from home, LiveOps understands the critical need for parents to maintain a work-life balance. Founded in Florida in 2000, LiveOps has transformed one of the world’s largest labor-intensive markets: the contact center. Company founders harnessed the Internet to match call center managers with an infinite number of qualified workers — regardless of location. With no location or traditional work-schedule restraints, LiveOps learned it could quickly and easily scale to handle dynamic and unpredictable call volume. The ability to scale made LiveOps’ technology a perfect fit for the direct response industry — an ever-changing market that requires constant flexibility and adjustment. Today LiveOps provides its technology and services to companies in the financial, health, retail and marketing industries.

For additional information about the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility, please visit the White House Web site at: www.whitehouse.gov.

About LiveOps, Inc.

LiveOps is a rapidly growing technology company offering two innovative solutions for enterprises: Contact Center in the Cloud, a SaaS technology platform for managing contact centers, and Workforce in the Cloud, an on-demand workforce for outsourcing call center calls. LiveOps On-Demand Contact Center Platform brings the value of cloud computing to the contact center by enabling enterprises to rapidly deploy an always-on and instantly scalable contact center infrastructure in a pay-per-use model that enables customers to achieve greater operational and cost efficiencies. LiveOps uses this same technology platform everyday to successfully run the largest virtual call center with over 20,000 independent agents. LiveOps provides enterprises with the on-demand call center platform and community of on-demand independent agents to quickly achieve better business results. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

Teleku joins Tropo and Twilio in competitive Web telephony

The Web telephony space welcomes another competitor today: Teleku (a project of GetVocal, Inc.). For all you Web developers in search of telephony APIs, rejoice! for you have another set of programming goodies to choose from.

Why Teleku over competitors Tropo and Twilio? According to this TechCrunch piece:

So how does Teleku differ from Twilio? It’s a matter of flexibility, according to founder (and sole employee) Chris Matthieu. He says that when you use Twilio, it’s an all-in-one deal: you write your code in Twilo’s easy-to-use syntax called TwiML, which is then sent to Twilio’s telephony services in the cloud that are hosted on AWS. That’s great (and may be even preferable to some people), but with Twilio you can’t port your application to a cheaper service should one become available.

With Teleku, you can write your code using TwiML, or you can use Teleku’s own simplified telephony scripting language, called PhoneML. Your code is then sent to Teleku’s servers, which translate it into industry standard (but harder to write) VoiceXML. Matthieu says you can use that code on any of a variety of established telephony providers, including Voxeo and Plum Voice, and it will also work with enterprise systems that rely on VoiceXML.

Matthieu says this gives Teleku users a few advantages: first, they can swap between various providers if they find a better rate. And he also says that Voxeo and other telecom services have better optimized their servers than AWS has to work with voice traffic, and that they offer a few features that Twilio doesn’t yet, like speech recognition.

Finally, Teleku offers a wizard for building web-enabled telephony services for people who don’t have any coding experience at all. This allows you to select actions from a dropdown menu, like “Play”, “Speak”, and “Transfer” (you then fill in text dialogs to instruct the application what to say or what number to transfer to). You can drag and drop these actions depending on what order you’d like to execute each action. Watch the video below for a complete demo of the wizard.

Sounds like a good combination of features and user experience. VoiceXML is certainly the industry standard and would be a plus to developers who’d want portable applications. The behind-the-curtain star is certainly Voxeo, for providing the platform and speech recognition feature. But no doubt Matthieu did a tremendous job in designing PhoneML and the user-friendly online tool for making it work seamlessly.

And judging by the fact that founder/developer Matthieu tweeted last at 2:30am and got TechCrunched, he’s probably having a very busy day…

Dialogic goes from boards to boxes, voice to video

Dialogic is computer telephony. The company made the specialized hardware — computer boards with digital signaling processors (DSP) attached — to enable telephony features on a server. It pretty much dominated this domain as its products were found inside PBXs, IVRs, fax servers, and more. Then interestingly in 1999 chip giant Intel acquired the company in a move that stirred the CPU and the telephony industries. Perhaps 1999 marked the start of Computer Telephony 2.0, when Intel pushed to phase out specialized DSPs in favor of its own CPUs to use for media and signaling. Well, Intel achieved most of its goal to bring its chips to the telephony masses, then sold Dialogic in 2006 to Eicon Networks, which is the Dialogic Corporation we know today.

I had a great meeting at VoiceCon with Bud Walder, Enterprise Marketing Director at Dialogic, about the company’s latest products and direction, as well as his insights into the industry and the conference. I was grateful that he reached out to me after reading my post about the Dialogic Border Gateway — “one gateway to rule them all” — but the meeting really turned out to be for my benefit. It appears that the company has readied itself for the Computer Telephony 3.0 era. Obviously, as important as telephony boards are, Dialogic considers that a legacy business. Today it is vying for dominance in the media gateway and border control business as SIP takes center stage. But more importantly, it believes Computer Telephony 3.0 is all about video and has made significant investments in that area. The company believes that “video is the new voice.”

According to Walder, the market for video has really exploded in the APAC region. And this is not just the usual desktop video conferencing, we’re talking about mobile video too. People with a cheap mobile phone — no need for fancy smartphones — being able to see clear videos on their handsets. It frustrates me to no end that my “state-of-the-art” iPhone, with its ugly sibling AT&T, cannot even do 3G streaming properly here in the States.

What about the brouhaha over interoperability? (Something I just had to ask.) Walder saw the openness of SIP as both a blessing and a curse, but Dialogic will strive for what it does best: making media work together, no matter the platform. SIP has enabled countless product innovations and cost savings (blessing), but also created some headaches during selection and implementation (curse). But we both agreed that this also creates an opportunity for companies to come up with products which will bridge the gap of interoperability — Dialogic being one of them.

So don’t be fooled by the Dialogic voice-y namesake. The company is about much more now. Maybe it’s time to change its name to Vidialogic.

Siemens Enterprise Communications interested in Polycom

According to Eric Krapf of No Jitter blog, SEN’s owner, Gores Group, wanted to buy Polycom in 2009:

The FT article reports that Gores approached Polycom last October about an acquisition but was turned down. I interviewed then-Siemens CEO Mark Stone in November and he made it clear that Gores would be aggressively pursuing acquisitions to bolster SEN. Stone, a top Gores Group exec, stepped in as SEN CEO when James O’Neill left the company; a new CEO, Hamid Akhavan, was named in December.

No doubt a move to counter Cisco’s acquisition of TANDBERG. It appears that the video conferencing market is heating up in light of news about a Polycom bidding war and M&A activity.

VoiceCon: Visiting the niche, Unimax and IQ Services

When I attend a trade show such as VoiceCon, I do my best to also stroll the “outer fringes” of the show floor, away from the noise and glitter of megabooths, because you never know what you may find and learn. Well, I’ve found two companies to share with you. These companies have been in the telecom industry for a while, serving customers large and small. What they do may not dazzle you like an Avaya demo or wow you like Cisco, but you will still be impressed because their products and services solve everyday business problems. In fact, you may end up slapping your forehead thinking, Why didn’t I think of this? or, I’ve thought about this but why didn’t I do something about it?

Unimax has a product named 2nd Nature that does PBX management. Before you open your mouth to yawn, it’s the PBX management software to end all PBX management software. 2nd Nature supports PBXs and voice messaging systems from multiple vendors: Avaya, AVST, Cisco, Nortel, Microsoft, and others. Imagine a single interface to manage all of your PBXs in the enterprise. More often than not an organization grows through acquisitions or new branch offices, and instead of replacing newly acquired telecom assets or hiring additional telecom resources, why not just use something like 2nd Nature? Additionally, Phil Moen (President and CEO) and Todd Remely (Director of Marketing) also touted the product’s redundancy and audit features — something that’s certainly very important to an organization with a sizable telecom infrastructure. As a contact center consultant I have previously worked for a few customers who struggled with managing their various PBX platforms. After learning about Unimax and seeing their product in action at VoiceCon, I did indeed slap my forehead…

Stopping by IQ Services‘ booth Cheryl Fortier, Account Exective at IQ Services, and her colleague, Suzanne Boston, handed me a printout titled “How do you know it all works together? (Communications and Contact Center Solution Infrastructure)” This question should be asked by anyone deploying a contact center solution, but is sometimes ignored. And honestly, the answer is “You don’t know.” Until you are able to run tests against the solution. IQ Services and Empirix, which you’ve probably heard of, are the two companies with enough horsepower to stress test your contact center system, from the IVR all the way to the desktop. Previously I was only aware of Empirix and always thought that they’d monopolized the market, but now I know that customers have another choice in IQ Services. Competition is a good thing in this industry!