With a change in top executive officers, it’s time to take stock of the dramatic transition that took place at Vonage during Alan Masarek’s six-year tenure. Alan actively oversaw a series of acquisitions and major rebranding that transformed the company’s core business from residential telecommunications to be a force in cloud-based Communications Platform (CPaaS) supporting both Unified Communications (UCaaS) and Contact Centers (CCaaS). The greatest testimony to the success of his strategy and tactics is the success Vonage is having in the fast-growing world of telehealth.

Three acquisitions stand out as accelerants into the world of Intelligent Assistance and Conversational Commerce. In 2016, the purchase of Nexmo brought with it a formidable set of apps, APIs and connectors. In 2018, CCaaS specialist NewVoiceMedia joined the fold. In 2019, the company also expressed high expectations for the acquisition of Over.ai to simplify the integration of Conversational AI into its customers’ workflows.

Vonage entered 2020 with a new, more business-like logo, matched with a formidable set of features, functions and APIs baked into its cloud-based offerings. Yet, in our past assessments which focused on CCaaS and Conversational AI, we paid short shrift to the WebRTC-based video communications that came over when Vonage brought on TokBox in 2018. That acquisition brought with it a base of 2,300 customers, including The Royal Bank of Scotland, InTouch Health and KickStarter. It also put it in tremendous position to ride the rapid growth of the telehealth vertical.

TokBox’s Position in Telehealth

At time of acquisition, TokBox was already supporting telehealth services in a big way, with “hundreds of customers” around the world. InTouch, which was mentioned in the press release that accompanied the acquisition document has since been acquired by Teledoc Health, which has been seeing explosive growth of its own with revenues vectoring toward $800 million this year and a paid customer base that grew 61% year-over-year to exceed 43 million.

Demand for rich media, such as video, to support public health initiatives has crescendoed as the Covid-19 pandemic drove hundreds of millions of people indoors and discouraged patients from making visits to doctors’ offices or clinics. In a Forbes article from April 2020, Alan Masarek mentioned that Vonage had “seen literally in the last month a 2,000% increase in video usage in the telehealth vertical.”

One customer, Doxy.me, reported 139,000 new providers — doctors, medical offices, healthcare professionals — in just one week. They served 1.35 million patients in that week, averaging almost 21 million video minutes for 170,000 calls each day. Another customer, Doctolib, is doing 100,000 video consultations every single day.

Employing Vonage’s full-stack, cloud-based platform is a natural solution to the demands of a vertical industry that needs to redefine every aspect of patient and and caregiver “workflows,” including patient check-ins and waiting room form-filling, which have taken on heightened importance as social distancing and shelter-in-place mandates are in place.

Masarek described the full potential of the API, video and AI-driven opportunity as follows: “Essentially what we’re seeing is the wholesale shift of an entire profession from physical to digital spaces. With around a million active doctors in the U.S., that’s a lot of visits to replace, easily 20 to 30 million each and every day.”

Addressing a Global Opportunity

The need to use video channels to provide affordable real-time video consultations is evergreen and global. A recent example is the TeleCorona system by AfroSaúde (in Brazil), a joint offering between DigiTalk and Vonage (based on Vonage Connect partner program). Another example is liveClinic, which is using the Vonage platform to extend free healthcare worldwide through a virtual field clinic with services offered by volunteer physicians. Perhaps the prototypical example is that from SimplePractice, which added Telehealth and virtual visits to core capabilities of scheduling and billing.

As Lawrence Byrd, a Vonage exec and evangelist for its APIs points out, Vonage is just at the beginning of discovering new use cases and putting them into practice.

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