Evan Kirstel Venkat Nagaswamy Interview

Talking to Evan is always fun. This was during my Mitel days.

Transcript

Evan Kerstel, CMO, Venkat Nagaswamy, Hey everyone, it’s Evan Kerstel with another great discussion. Today we have Mitel CMO Venkat Nagaswamy. Venkat, how are you?

Good, how are you doing?

I’m doing really well and I’m excited to have this chat because we followed each other on social media for years, but we’ve actually never spoken. So welcome to the discussion. For folks who are new to you and or Mitel, maybe introduce yourself and say a few words about your role at Mitel.

Cool. So I run marketing at Mitel. I’ve been here for going on four months and I’m responsible for all marketing activities, creating pipeline and helping our sales guys close and telling the Mitel story to external audiences and internal audiences is what my job is. Yeah, four months.

Wow. Whole months or is it, can we count that in weeks?

You know, it’s like baby years. I think once you go past one quarter, then you got to count in months.

All right. So tell us why, where did you come from and why Mitel?

Absolutely. So just to give you some biographical, my potted biography as it were, I came here after doing a similar job at 8x8, a UCaaS provider. And prior to 8x8, my company, Mariana IQ, which was an AI for marketing company, was acquired by 8x8. That’s how I ended up at 8x8. The rest of the organization became the AI for 8x8, but I went into marketing. And the reason I went into marketing is that before starting my company, I was running enterprise monitoring at Juniper Networks and working with DemandGen and other things back in the day. Prior to that, I was at McKinsey. Before that, I used to sell plastics at GE. This is when I usually say, you know, I took the advice that Dustin Hoffman got in the beginning.

You stole my joke. I was totally going to use that.

So, yeah, so I did take his advice. And prior to that, I was designing bumpers at Ford. So as I always say, I studied to be an engineer for seven years, but I was an engineer for one, designing bumpers at Ford. So that’s when I was at GE, I was selling plastics. So switched over to the dark side as it were.

Well, don’t underestimate the power of the dark side. The power of plastics. And then I think you’re one of the famous IITs in India. So you have a very interesting bio. But let’s chat about Mitel maybe for a sec. You know, Mitel is a very storied company, has a lot of history and acquisitions behind it. It’s been a while actually since I’ve chatted with anyone from Mitel at length. So tell us what business exactly is Mitel in today?

Yeah. Yeah. And let me start that by addressing why I came here, which is to answer your question. So, you know, all the experience that I’ve had working in various companies, one of the lessons that I learned is that focus matters. You cannot be able to get everybody focused matters. So when Tarun, the CEO of Mitel called me, he said, look, we have made this deal with RingCentral and that allows us to move our UCaaS business to Ring. And this allows us to focus on UC. That is the story. Or that’s the strategy. That’s the strategy that we have right now. And that focus is what I believe we can use to win. Right. And that story, that strategy that he laid out, are things that I believe that we could make a difference. So to now address your question, we are in the UC business. We want to be number one in the middle market in every reason to be competing. The core UC business, whether you deploy it on-prem or deploy it in a private cloud or AWS or whatever the case may be, we want to be number one in the middle market in every reason to be competing. The core UC business, a lot of our other competitors are going away from it. Everybody’s telling the message of UCaaS. I myself used to tell the message of everything going on to UCAS as of four months ago. But the real truth is that there are companies like hospitals, there are hotels, cruise ships, a whole bunch of these places where on-prem and privately managed private cloud UC is super important. And it is that place where we are adding value. And that is the focus of our business. We want to be number one in the mid-market in UC. That’s it.

Well, that’s simple enough. And, you know, I would agree the real world is incredibly complex and the landscape is so dynamic and diverse. It’s really more than black and white. So you mentioned hospitals. That’s an interesting vertical. What other verticals is Mitel focused on? And where can you add the most value?

Yeah. So the five main verticals that we focused on in the U.S. are SLED, state, local, and education, higher ed, hospitals, and healthcare, hospitality, so hotels, cruise ships, et cetera, casinos, and finally financial services. In other parts of the globe, retail and manufacturing do have more of a role in here. And the reason why these verticals are important is that these verticals are important because they are the ones that are going to be the most important. And they are the ones that are going to be the most important. So the reason why these verticals are important is that these verticals are places where communication is not just about communications. It’s also about integrating with a bunch of other things. So let’s take an example of a school. A school not only has their phone systems, they also have PA that you need to address. So you need to be able to combine old circuit switching or TDM or analog circuits with boycott digital circuits. And you also want to be able to do things like emergency notifications. Right? So for instance, you want to be able to send a message when there are disasters. And unfortunately, we have many schools today. It could be a parent coming home to pick up a kid after a divorce or something like that. So when you talk about these situations where there are vertical-specific requirements that you need to integrate these various other platforms, that’s where we shine. To give you another example, in a hospital, nurses carry our phones. Now, the phones are used not just for communications, but the phones are used to detect where the nurses are, which is then integrated with the nurse deployment software, which gets the nurses to be in light stations at the right time. So again, these are places where the presence of the human being is used for other purposes beyond just communications. Right? So all of these. And so similarly, when you look at each of the verticals we are focused on, they have these unique requirements. And they also might have requirements of cost. Because from a TCO perspective, our CapEx model or even our OpEx model works very well, as opposed to UCAS model in a hotel, for instance. And by the way, one thing I should note is that in each of these verticals, to drive integrations and to drive the ecosystem, we use our CloudLink platform. And this CloudLink platform allows you to get the same benefits that you can get from UCAS in terms of integrations and so on in a private cloud UC market or a non-private UC market. Right? And this is what allows us to have a whole bunch of vertical-specific integrations. Our MSA program, MITIL’s Strategic Alliance Program, has 2,000 ISVs that are integrated. So we can offer these vertical-specific integrations and vertical-specific solutions that solves the problem. That’s unique for each of these individual spaces.

That’s awesome. I also love the idea of mission-critical communications where it really matters in healthcare and hospitals and first responders.

Absolutely. That’s just so important. Can’t be trusted to anything less than 100% kind of reliability.

So interesting. One thing you also, your team, are talking a lot about lately is something called customer lifecycle management. So give me a primer because I don’t exactly know what that is and how much. I was offering it.

Okay. Yeah. So customer lifecycle management is after you make the initial sale to the customer, how do they deploy? How do they use the product? And then as the time evolves, what are the other features and functionality that you’re helping them deploy and add on to it? And finally, if they choose to move elsewhere, help them in this whole transition. Now, software companies, especially SaaS companies, do a good job of it. So you have in Salesforce or Marketo, you have CSMs that help you guide through the entire process. But we in the box world on prem world, and this is not just us, it’s the whole ecosystem, hasn’t been known to do that extremely well. A lot of times you give a box and then here’s the box and then you got to do what you’re going to do. So what we’re doing right now in terms of CLM is that journey. How do we take a customer from the beginning? All the way beyond. So one, you can do more with what you have, just more licenses, more minutes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that you might want. Or you might want to get current on the stack that you have. We make frequent updates to our platform and therefore how do you use your software assurance to stay on top of the security changes and other things that we do? Or if you want to choose to go to Ring Central and UCaaS, which asserts a certain security. So that’s the segment of our population wants to do every year, 5% to 10% of our audience wants to do. In which case we have a relationship with Ring Central, and we make the path to go to Ring Central the smoothest, least risky, best option for our customers to transition to.

Yeah, so that’s a good segue into Ring Central and your partnership, strategic relationship with Ring. What’s the status? What’s the current impact for customers? Yeah. Yeah. So what’s the current impact for customers and partners and any stories that you have under your belt now that you have some time to reflect on the partnership?

Absolutely. So our core, as an reminder to everybody, Ring Central is our core, is our exclusive UCaaS partner. What that means is that our existing cloud, public cloud or multi-tenant cloud customers that have been on our platforms are migrating to Ring Central. We are helping them migrate. That’s one part of the puzzle. The other part of the puzzle is to help our prem, the people who have been on prem who want to go to cloud, we are helping them move to Lean Central. And what we’ve done in this relationship is you get your capital protection because we’ve certified our phones so you don’t need to go swap out the phones. And secondly, we also provide you migration tools where you can take the configurations and other things that you have for the phones and then seamlessly go from there. So that’s the core. And then seamlessly go from our platform into Ring Central’s platform. That cuts down your migration process and cuts down the migration time so much so that I think in one case we found like a $40,000 benefit in doing that because you didn’t need to take configurations and we are providing these tools. And we provide professional services as well to do that. So what this does is if a customer wants to move to cloud, we are the least risky. Most secure. The best way to do it with the minimum amount of downtime for the customer and they can move on to this cloud. And because of that, we’ve had a lot of successes under our belt. And I think I don’t want to speak for Ring Central, but like you should read that 10K where they talk about our relationship and how it’s performing. So I don’t want to take away that thunder as it were.

Nice. Well, nothing like making life easier for the customers. That I think what’s so great about the partnership. Yeah. I know it’s only been a few months, but what’s next from your standpoint, from the team standpoint over the next six months, 12 months? What are you focused on exactly?

Absolutely. So this actually goes to the point that you were making at the end. At the end of the day, the customer is the focus. The customer is the center. And what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to offer the choice and flexibility for the customer so that they can solve the problem in whichever way they want. In some cases, it’s going to be going to UCaaS. In a lot of other cases, it could be on-prem or it could be private cloud or AWS or whatever you have. So our overall vision is that we want to be number one in mid-market. And we accomplish that through our platform, which allows you a lot of choice and flexibility for the customer to do what they want. And so that’s still our strategy. The main focus for us in moving forward for the next year or so. Is to get more focused on our verticals strategy. We are talking to our partners. We are enabling our partners. We will be enabling our partners over time so that they can focus on certain verticals so that they can go deeper on it. And that’s going to be a big theme that you see. And then from a broader level, as you alluded to earlier, Mitel is a company that’s grown through acquisition. So over time, I expect to see more acquisitions in the UC space to flush out. So we’re going to try to get a product line on to get better market presence so that we can solve our customers’ problems. And again, the core of what we are trying to do is to offer choice and flexibility to the customer so that they can do what they need to do to solve their problems.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, transformation change isn’t easy as we all know in this space. So where do you see yourself in a year in terms of the culture you’re building and your engagement with customers? And the industry? Where do you hope to sort of be different than legacy practices? Yeah.

So at the end of the day, we as human beings identify ourselves with the stories that we tell ourselves. And similarly, organizations also identify themselves by having these stories. And so the focus for me as the CMO is for me to be able to do that. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to be able to do that. And I’m trying to be able to do that. I’m trying to be able to do that. And so the first thing that I want to do right now is for us to tell these customer stories, like the hospital case that I was talking about or a school case. We want to be able to tell these stories of what our customers are doing, how it’s changing their lives, and how it’s making them better for themselves. And thereby establish our identity as the UC player, as the only UC player who’s investing in UC on-prem and in private clubs. And that is where we want to get to. To be able to get to that spot, we need to tell more and more of these stories with our customers, with the influencers, with everybody in the marketplace so that they can see what we do to the world.

That’s fantastic. Well, I love how open and flexible you are. You’re on podcasts. You come on live streams like this one. You’re really out there on social media. You tweet yourself. Which I love. I can’t say all of your CMO peers do, sadly. So congratulations with such a hot start to the new role. And I’ll be looking forward with excitement to a lot of your upcoming news and announcements and events. I guess finally, I am curious just personally and professionally, what do you do to switch off, to unwind, to disconnect? We’re talking about connection, but it’s been a little stressful. So how do you relax?

Yeah. So during the COVID times, I’ve started getting into woodworking. And so outside my… So I live in San Francisco. I built my office way in the crawl space. And outside my office is another space where I have my cleaners and all my table saws and other things to do.

That’s getting really serious. You’re not just whittling with a stick.

No. No, I have more machines in there than I know what I’m doing. Yeah. I know what to do with it. And my wife says it’s not that I’m going enamored with the machines, that I’m making stuff. I made her a jewel box. I think it looks really good. Well, at least I think so. But anyway, so I make small stuff with that. That’s what I use.

I’m going to ask you to tweet out a couple of your creations.

Sure, I will. Over the next few weeks, and I’ll have a look. But thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for sharing the new vision. And opportunity with us. And onwards and upwards. Onwards and upwards. Thanks for your time, Evan. Take care. Take care. Bye-bye. Likewise. Bye-bye.