TalkingHeadz with Alan Masarek, CEO of Avaya
When Avaya exited bankruptcy (late 2017), I casually remarked to a friend that Avaya and Vonage should get together. In hindsight, it was a brilliant idea, but at time it was ludicrous. Avaya was free from Chapter 11, had restructured…
TalkingPointz Research on Ericsson and Vonage
9 9 page report on Ericsson’s move to acquire Vonage. 1. General On the morning of Monday, Nov. 22, 2021, Ericsson announced it had reached an agreement to acquire Vonage for $6.2B. Both boards have approved the deal. The deal…
TalkingHeadz Podcast with Rory Read, CEO of Vonage
In our effort to get to know Rory we cover a lot of ground in this podcast. We cover his journey to Vonage including IBM wingtips and appreciation for art. We cover the PC world including Lenovo, Dell, AMD, and…
Masarek Departs Vonage: WTF?
Vonage has announced that its CEO for the past 6 years, Alan Masarek, will be stepping down. His replacement is Rory Read, new to Vonage and the enterprise communications industry. Of course, team Vonage and Alan are excited and optimistic…
Vonage R&D
I did what many call an SAS Day (actually two) with Vonage R&D in Israel. What’s an SAS Day? No one really knows. It’s actually a Gartner term that stands for Strategy Advisory Session. The phrase “SAS day” is used…
VonageAR19
Here is my at-site Video from the Vonage Analyst Relations Event and Vonage Campus User Conference in San Francisco. Vonage Campus 2019 from Dave Michels on Vimeo. A few additional considerations. Vonage is a profitable provider that is in the…
Talkingheadz with Vonage CTO Sagi Dudai
I consider Vonage one of the most innovative providers in enterprise communications. It was back in 2016 when Vonage confused everyone with its acquisition of Nexmo. Wait, what’s a UCaaS company doing with a CPaaS company? This was so out…
I Would Like to Buy 2 Vowels: AI
Today, two communications companies bought to two NLP voice technology companies. Cisco announced intent to acquire privately-held Voicea. Voicea provides meeting transcription, voice search, and can identify conversational highlights/action items. It helps teams have more productive and actionable meetings by…
#CCTR at #EC19
EC is next week. I expect it will be, as usual, the busiest week of the year. Not only are there more comms related announcements this week then any other, but there is no bigger gathering of UC/CC professionals under…
RCS is Coming
2019 will be the year that RCS moves from tech punchline to reality. One never knows if a Google initiative is real or a lark (and to be fair we still don’t know), but Google’s efforts with RCS are coming…
Winners and Losers of 2018
2018 is a 12 month slice of time. In the world of enterprise communications, not much changes in 12 months. Each company has a few releases and a handful of major announcements. While market share remains largely unchanged in 12…
Intelligent Interactions with Vonage
Here are my quick thoughts on the Vonage Analyst Relations event that took place in November 2018. Intelligent Interactions is what Vonage provided in Scottsdale at its first analyst relations event. It was also the main topic of discussion. Vonage…
VonageFlow, the Next Evolution
Vonage introduced a new workstream collaboration app called VonageFlow. “Now, Vonage Business Cloud users can leverage team messaging, file sharing, SMS and voice, available across any device, and can integrate directly with the capabilities of Business Inbox, including social messaging…
TH #7 Everything is a CPaaS
As with all things telecom, what starts clear becomes murky. Case in point is definition of a CPaaS. It was an easy, one word definition: Twilio. But now, things are complicated. First, Twilio has expended in many ways that are…
Penny Wise Dollar Foolish: IT Network Spending
Most large enterprises spend 15% of their IT budget on networking and communications. Your network service providers and hardware/software suppliers are incented for enterprises to spend more, not less on services. Enterprise network bandwidth requirements double every 2.6 years and…
Twilio and the Future of the Contact Center #CCTR
Rewind back to mid-March, where at Enterprise Connect, Twilio Flex was launched. On one hand, it wasn’t much to notice. Organizations have been building contact centers on Twilio’s tools for years. On the other hand, the concept of a packaged…
TalkingHeadz #3 Vonage and Alan Masarek
In this interview, Evan and I chat with Vonage CEO Alan Masarek who evidently doubles as CFO. A real honor to talk with Vonage as it was one of the pioneers in VoiP. Remember their commercials?
A Visit to Vonage Labs Part1
Last month I was able to visit Vonage World Headquarters in Holmdel NJ. For those you under 30, Holmdel was the home of Bell Labs – sacred ground from a Telecom perspective. Bell Labs was located not too far away….
What Company Will Vonage Acquire?
In a recent Bloomberg interview, Vonage CEO Alan Masarek indicated that Vonage might leverage the company’s near-11-year-high valuation to make acquisitions. “We don’t feel like we have any holes in our product portfolio, but we think there’s going to be…
Google, Vonage, and RCS
We all know messaging is big right now – WeChat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Spark, the list goes on. It really all started with good ol, obsolete SMS. SMS is one of the big three that along with PSTN and…