Throwback Thursday: Cloud on the Horizon
It’s been an exciting week for NewVoiceMedia. On Tuesday, we announced the appointment of our new President and Chief Operating Officer, Dennis Fois, who will lead our marketing, product marketing and customer success teams. Based in San Francisco, Dennis will focus on accelerating NewVoiceMedia’s expansion in North America, pursuing market leadership and deepening the value we bring to our customers globally.
Dennis’ appointment is the latest milestone in our continued growth and success in North America. We look forward to celebrating many more of these milestones, but we also can’t help looking back on the ones that got us here. So we will be sharing some of our favorite moments and memories of the past 17 years on our blog, and we hope you’ll join us in reminiscing — Throwback Thursday style.
This particular throwback is brought to you by the year 2010, which our founder and Chief Scientist Ashley Unitt describes as, “the year things really started to change.”
Ashley and Richard Pickering founded NewVoiceMedia in 2000 because they wanted to fix what was broken about enterprise communications technology. Back then, businesses relied on complex, proprietary systems in different silos. These systems were expensive, difficult to use, didn’t communicate with other business systems and didn’t work across organizational or geographic boundaries. Ashley and Richard realized that the future of contact center technology was to move it to a web-based system – and this was before the cloud was even a thing.
But being ahead of your time comes with its challenges. As Ashley and Richard developed contact center technology in the emerging “cloud,” they had to overcome people’s fear of this new way of computing. Was the cloud secure? Was it reliable? Could businesses trust it? All that began to change in 2010, as companies like Salesforce brought knowledge and acceptance of the cloud to the enterprise. Businesses were starting to seek it out, which was good news for us, and we knew we needed to seize the moment. We needed more fuel in the engine to push us forward, which we found in the form of our first venture capital funding in May 2010.
2010 was also the year we signed our first U.S. customer, and the year we launched Version 5 of our ContactWorld solution. As a company, we learned quite a bit from that software release, which took a grueling two years to complete. In many ways, this experience shaped our modern mindset of ruthless, continual improvement, and now we push out new software releases “like clockwork,” as Ashley says. Our vision is to continue innovating ahead of the competition, further increasing global adoption of the ContactWorld platform.
Seven years after the year that changed everything, one thing has remained the same: Cloud solutions are the only intelligent way forward for enterprises. It’s fun to look back on our history as one of the first companies to apply that thinking to contact centers. And we can’t wait to see what’s next.
For more on the early days of NewVoiceMedia, read Ashley’s blog posts, Why did we start NewVoiceMedia? and Six rules of the Cloud.