The ink is now dry on the contract that makes cloud-based contact center specialist NewVoiceMedia (NVM) the newest element in Vonage’s solution stack. The $350 million purchase is the culmination of a series of acquisitions by the pioneer of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) as it responds to fundamental changes in how enterprises engage and carry on conversations (Conversational Commerce) with their customers and prospects.

Vonage was formed in 2001 following 3 years in which co-founder Jeff Pulver operated Min-X.com whose name described the fundamental business of acting as an exchange for minutes of talk time on the Internet. That exchange became the best way to identify and market “Purple Minutes,” which was his term for value-added, IP-based services.

International dial-around – the sort of services that Skype and every conference provider in the world throw in for free – was mere table stakes. Discovery and marketing of premium services was an organic function of Min-X.com and then Vonage from the beginning. To this day, low-priced international calls, conferencing, enhanced voicemail, video and all of what is now called Unified Communications (UC) have IP as their greatest common denominator.

NVM represents the latest in a stream of acquisitions which began in 2013 and now defines a full-stack of IP- and cloud-based services. Vocalocity – a company which came into Opus Research’s radar range as a proponent of VoiceXML-based voice portals for the do-it-yourself crowd in 2005, was brought into the Vonage fold in 2013 for $130 million. This was followed by a group of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) firms. The largest are Telesphere, with a $114 million pricetag in 2014, and iCore Networks, for $92 million in 2015.

UC is not enough

Think of Vocalocity as a precursor to the likes of Twilio and the contact center-oriented offerings of cloud service providers Amazon, Salesforce and Google. It is according to this framing that Vonage’s most recent acquisitions make sense. The generic framing is “Communications Platform as a Service” (CPaaS) and, as noted in this recent post regarding Twilio’s introduction of AutoPilot, I describe the new hierarchy that renders UC obsolete and makes Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) one of many elements in vendors’ CPaaS goody bag.

For Vonage, those goodies include the services made possible by the acquisition of Nexmo in late 2016 for $230 million. That was followed by TokBox, whose $35 million pricetag belies the importance of integrating WebRTC-enabled video streaming into conversations between and among brands, their employees and customers. NVM completes the new solution stack; bringing a highly popular and deeply functional suite of contact center capabilities that benefit from deep integration with Salesforce’s CRM, Marketing and Third-party apps clouds.

New Rules of Engagement As Enterprises Adapt

In tracking the evolution of Conversational Commerce, Opus Research has repeatedly made the following observation:

“Individuals Have Successfully Integrated Their Digital Worlds.
Enterprises Have Not”

Because omnipresent smartphones support voice conversations, browsing, search, messaging, virtual reality in all their combinations and permutations, people of all ages, levels of education and nationality are proving to be quite digitally agile. Enterprises are ill-suited to support this mass digitization because they are saddled with long-standing lines of demarcation separating the people and resources that support various channels. Web sites, mobile apps and contact centers are traditionally self-contained. Each offers similar or identical services rendered as text on agent screens, as screen pops, chat elements or text messages. Or they can be rendered in the Voice Channels through IVRs, mobile apps or smart speakers.  The same can be said for their treatment of the digital content that informs eCommerce Web sites, the customer data residing in CRM systems, transaction histories and the like.

Disparate modes of communications and a plethora of “platforms” to accommodate each of them exposes brands to multiple points of failure. What they need is a solution stack that can render consistently correct answers, at scale and across all modalities and devices. That, in turn, calls for a single “source of truth” or “system of record” for informing all the Intelligent Assistants (live and robotic) across all the channels. These are hard problems to solve for targeted enterprises be they financial services, telecommunications, retail, healthcare or travel & hospitality (which represent the verticals that have started to take lead in defining the judicious use of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Analytics that Vonage and its Full-Stack competitors are assembling.

Attention is rightfully turning to solution providers that help enterprises tackle these hard problems. Many large companies had the luxury to address them through their Digital Transformation initiatives or under the umbrella of “Innovation” groups. However, one of the themes that came through loud and clear at our recent Conversational Commerce Conference in San Francisco is that the transition from “Innovation to Production” is taking place at unprecedented speeds. Its driven by competitive factors and has moved from the direct control of Chief Digital Officers to business unit execs primarily in Marketing, but with participation from Customer Support and, to a lesser degree, Contact Center Operations.

With NVM in the solution stack, Vonage is very well positioned to address the first-order challenges of firms that have already made the decision to “move to the cloud” to speed development and deployment of Intelligent Assistants, in the form of chatbots, virtual agents and live agents. Experience tells us that initiatives will be Use Case driven and they will transcend (perhaps destroy) traditional boundaries between departments and business units. Once again, IP is the greatest common denominator and the quest for Purple Minutes means defining connections between and among people and the data that will make them more productive and more efficient at achieving their goals.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles