Evan Kirstel Venkat Nagaswamy Interview

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

Transcript

[Evan K 00:00]: Hey everyone, it’s Evan Kirstel with another great discussion. Today, we have Mitel CMO Venkat Nagaswami. Venkat, how are you?

[Venkat 00:10]: Good, how are you doing?

[Evan K 00:12]: I’m doing really well, and I’m excited to have this chat because we’ve followed each other on social media for years, but we’ve actually never spoken. So, welcome to the discussion. Um, for folks who are new to you and or Mitel, maybe introduce yourself and say a few words about your role at Mitel.

[Venkat 00:28]: Cool. So, I uh uh run marketing at Mitel. I’ve been here for going on four months. Um, and I’m responsible for all marketing activities, uh creating pipeline, and uh helping our sales guys uh close, and telling this to the Mitel story to external audiences and internal audiences is what my job is.

[Evan K 00:53]: Yeah, four months. Wow. Whole months or is it is it can we count that in weeks, you know, it’s like baby weeks.

[Venkat 00:59]: I think once you go past one quarter, then you got to count in months. So,

[Evan K 01:03]: All right. So, tell us, tell us why? Where where did you come from and why? Mitel.

[Venkat 01:10]: Absolutely. So, I just to give you some biographical my biography as it were. I came here after doing a similar job at 8x8, uh, a Ucast provider. And uh prior to 8x8, I my company, uh 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 uh 8x8, but I went into marketing. And the reason I went into marketing is that before starting my company, I was running enterprise marketing at Networks, uh, and working with demand and all the things uh back in the day. Uh prior to that I was at McKinsey, before that I used to sell plastics at GE. This is where you usually say, you know, I took the advice that Dustin Hoffman got in the graduate, but so I sold.

[Evan K 01:58]: You stole my joke. I was totally going to use that, but

[Venkat 02:01]: So, yeah, so I think his uh think his advice and prior to that, I was designing bumpers at Ford. So, uh, as I always say, I studied to be an engineer for seven years, but I was an engineer for one, uh designing bumpers at Ford. So that’s uh and then I when I was at GE, I was selling plastic, so to the dark side.

[Evan K 02:23]: Well, don’t uh don’t underestimate the power of plastics. And then I think one of the famous ITs in India. So you have a very interesting bio. But let’s chat about Mitel maybe for a sec. Um, you know, Mitel is a very story company, uh has has a lot of history and acquisitions behind it. Uh it’s been a while actually since I’ve chatted with anyone from Mitel at length. So tell us what business exactly is my tell in today?

[Venkat 02:47]: Yeah, yeah, and uh let me start that by addressing why I came here, which is an answer to your earlier question. So, uh, you know, all the experience that I’ve had in working in the previous companies, one of the lessons that I learned, uh is that focus matters. Uh, you cannot be everything to everybody. focus matters. So when uh Todd, the CEO of Mitel called me, he said, look, uh uh we have made this deal with Ring Central and that allows us to move our Ucast business to Ring. and this allows us to focus on UC. That is the story or that’s the strategy that we have right now. And that focus is what I believe we can uh uh we can use to win, right? Uh 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 region that we compete in. Uh, 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, core UC business, a lot of our other competitors are going away from it. Everybody is telling the message of Ucast. I myself used to tell the message of everything going on to uh uh Ucast as of four months ago. But the real truth is that there are companies like like hospitals, there are uh uh hotels, cruise ships, a whole bunch of these places where on Prem and privately managed private cloud uh UC is super important and it is that place where we are adding uh uh value and that is the focus of our business. We want to be number one in the mid market in UC. That’s it.

[Evan K 04:30]: Well, that’s that’s simple enough. And you know, I I I would agree the real world is incredibly complex and the landscape is is so dynamic and diverse, it’s it’s really more than black and white. Um so you you mentioned hospitals. That’s an interesting vertical. What what other vertical is Mitel focused on and and where can you add the most value?

[Venkat 04:52]: Yeah, so the five main verticals that you’re focused on in the US are sled, um state local and education, higher ed, uh uh hospitals and health care, hospitality, so uh hotels, cruise ships, etc, casinos, and finally financial services. Uh in other parts of the globe, retail and and manufacturing do have a uh more of a role in here. And the reason why these verticals are important is that these verticals are places where communication is not just for communication, it’s also about integrating with a bunch of other things, right? So, let’s take an example of a school, a school not only has the phone systems, they also have PA that you need to address. So you need to be able to combine uh old circuit switching or TDM or analog circuits with uh uh with digital circuits, and you also want to be able to do things like uh emergency notifications, right? Uh so for instance, you want to be able to send a text send a message uh when there are disasters, unfortunately we have many schools today, or it can may not be even that bad, right? It could be uh uh a parent coming to pick up uh a kid that after divorce or something like that. So, it’s when you talk about these situations where in a vertical, there are vertical specific requirements that you need to integrate these various uh other platforms, that’s where we shine. To give you another example, uh in a hospital, uh 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 uh uh with the nurse deployment software, which gets uh the nurses to be in right stations at the right time. So, again, these are places where the presence of the human being is used for uh uh uh other purposes beyond just communications, right? And all of these and so similarly, when you look at each of the verticals we are focused on, they have these unique requirements, uh and they also might have requirements in terms of cost uh because from a TCO perspective, uh uh uh our CAPEX model a lot even uh uh our OPEX model works very well as opposed to Ucast modeling in a in a hotel for instance, right? So, and by the way, one thing I should note is that in each of these verticals, to drive integration and to drive the ecosystem, we use our cloud link platform and this cloud link platform allows you to get the same benefits that you can get from a Ucast into the integrations and so on in a private cloud UC market or on Prem UC market, right? And this is what allows us to have a whole bunch of uh vertical specific integrations, our MSA program, Mitel strategic alliance program has 2,000 uh uh ICVs that are integrated. So we can offer these uh uh uh vertical specific uh integrations and vertical specific solutions that solves a problem that’s unique for each of these individual spaces.

[Evan K 07:48]: That’s awesome. I I also love the idea of mission critical communications. where it really matters in health care and hospitals and first responders and that’s that’s just so important. Can’t be trusted to anything less than 100% kind of reliability. So so interesting. One thing you also your team talking a lot about lately is something called customer life cycle management. So give me a primer because I don’t exactly know what that is and how Mitel is offering it.

[Venkat 08:16]: Okay, yeah, so customer life cycle management is uh 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, uh what are the other features and functionality that you’re helping them to deploy and add on to it? And finally, if they should choose to move elsewhere, help them in this whole transition. Now, software companies, especially SAS companies do a good job of it, right? So you have in Salesforce or, you have CS, that help you guide through that process. But we in uh the box world of world, and this is not just ours, it’s the whole ecosystem, hasn’t been known to uh do that extremely well. Right? You a lot of times you get a box and here is the box and then you got to do what you got to do. So, what we are doing right now in terms of CLM is that uh uh is that journey, how do we take a customer from beginning uh all the way beyond, right? So, uh one, you can do more with what you have, just more licenses, more minutes, etc etc etc that you might want. Or you might want to uh get current on the stack that you have. We make frequent updates to our platform and therefore, how do you uh use your software assurance to stay on top of the security changes and other things that we do? Or you if you want to choose to go to uh ring central and Ucast, which uh which a certain segment of our population wants to do every year, 5 to 10% of our our audience wants to do, in which case, we have a relationship with Ring Central and we make the paths to go to Ring Central, the smoothest, least risky, uh best option for our for our customers to transition to.

[Evan K 09:58]: Yeah, so that’s that’s a good segue into Ring Central and your partnership, you know, strategic relationship with Ring. You know, how what’s the status? Uh what what’s the current uh, you know, impact for customers and partners and, you know, any any stories that you have under your belt now that you have some time to reflect on the partnership.

[Venkat 10:18]: Absolutely. So, our core as a reminder everybody, Ring Central is our co is an exclusive Ucas partner. What that means is that our existing cloud, public cloud or MIT cloud customers that have been on uh 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, the people who have been on Prem who want to go to cloud, uh we are helping them move to uh Ring Central. And what we’ve done in this relationship is uh you get uh uh capital protection because we’ve certified our phones, so you don’t need to go swap out the phones. Uh 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 uh go from our platform into uh Ring Central’s platform. That cuts down uh your migration process and cuts down the migration time so much so that I think in one case, we we we found like a $40,000 benefit in 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 have the least risky, most secure best way to do it with the minimum amount of downtime for the customer and they could move on this cloud. And because of that, we’ve had a lot of successes in our under our belts. Uh and I think uh uh I don’t want to speak for Ring Central, but like you should read their 10k where they talk about our relationship and how it’s performing, so I don’t want to take away their their thunder as it were.

[Evan K 12:00]: Nice. Well, nothing like making life easier for the customers. That’s I think what’s so great. about the partnership. Um, I know it’s only been a few months, but what’s next uh from your your standpoint, from the team standpoint over the next, you know, six months, 12 months, what what’s uh, what are you focused on exactly?

[Venkat 12:18]: 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 is is the focus, the customer is the center. And what we want to be able to do is to we want to be able to offer uh uh choice and flexibility for the customer so that they can solve their problem in whichever way they want. In some cases, it’s going to be moving to to Ucast, in a lot of other cases, it could be uh uh on Prem, or it could be a private cloud or AWS or what you have, right? So, our overall vision is that we want to be number one and number one in mid market, and we accomplish that through our uh platform which allows you uh 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 focus on our vertical strategy. We are talking to our partners, we are enabling our partners, we will be enabling our partners over time uh so that they can focus on certain verticals, so that they can go deeper on it. Uh so that’s going to be a big uh uh theme that you see. And then uh uh and from a broad level, as you alluded to earlier, Mitel is a company that’s grown through acquisition, so, uh over time, I expect to see more acquisitions in the UC space to flush out our uh product line or to to get better uh market presence. uh so that we can solve uh our customers uh problems. And again, the core of what we’re 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.

[Evan K 13:51]: Awesome. Awesome. Well, transformation, change uh isn’t easy as 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, you know, engagement with customers and the industry, uh, where do you hope to sort of be different than uh, you know, legacy practices.

[Venkat 14:13]: Yeah, so, uh, at the end of the day, you know, we uh, as human beings, identify ourselves with the stories that we tell ourselves, right? And similarly, organizations also identify themselves by telling the story by having these stories. And so, the the core focus for me as a CMO is for us to tell these customer stories, like the hospital case that I was talking about or or uh uh uh a school case. We want to be able to tell these stories of our uh uh 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 uh private clouds. And that is where we want to get to, to be able to to be able to get to that spot, we need to be we need to tell more and more of these stories uh with our customers, with the influencers, with everybody in the marketplace, so that we so that they can see what we delivered to the to the to the world, as it were.

[Evan K 15:19]: That’s fantastic. Well, I love how open and flexible you are, your um on podcast, you come on live streams like like this one, you’re really out there on social media, you tweet yourself, which I can’t say all of your CMO peers do, sadly. So, you know, congratulations with uh such a such a uh a hot start uh to to the new role. And I’ll be looking forward with excitement to a lot of your upcoming news and announcements and events. Um, I guess finally, I I am curious just personally and professionally, what what do you do to switch off, to unwind, uh, to disconnect? We’re talking about connection, but, you know, make it’s been a little stressful, so how do you, uh, relax?

[Venkat 16:02]: Yeah, so, uh, during the COVID times, uh, I’ve started getting into woodworking. And so, uh, outside my, so I live in San Francisco, I build my office away in the crawl space and outside my office is another space where I have my planers and and all my uh table saws and other things to do.

[Evan K 16:24]: That’s serious, you’re not just wling with a a kid.

[Venkat 16:27]: No, I have like I I I have more machines in there than than I can I know what to do and my wife says it’s not it that I’m more enamored with the machines than I am with making stuff. I made a jewel box and it looks really good, but well, at least I think so. Uh but but anyway, so, I make small staff. That’s that’s what it is.

[Evan K 16:47]: Right. Well, I’m going to ask you to tweet out a couple of your creations, uh over the next few weeks and I’ll I’ll have a look. And uh, but thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for sharing the new vision and opportunity with us and onwards and upwards.

[Venkat 17:04]: Onwards and upwards. Thanks for your time, Evan.

[Evan K 17:07]: Take take care.

[Venkat 17:08]: Take care.

[Venkat 17:10]: Likewise. Bye-bye.