Evan Kirstel Venkat Nagaswamy Interview
Talking to Evan is always fun. This was during my Mitel days.
TranscriptOf course. Here is the exact transcript of the video, organized by speaker and formatted in Markdown.
Transcript: A Discussion with Mitel CMO Venkat Nagaswamy
Introduction
Evan Kirstel: Hey everyone, it’s Evan Kirstel with another great discussion. Today we have Mitel CMO Venkat Nagaswamy. Venkat, how are you?
Venkat Nagaswamy: Good, how are you doing?
Evan Kirstel: 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. For folks who are new to you and or Mitel, maybe introduce yourself and say a few words about your role at Mitel.
Venkat Nagaswamy: 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.
Evan Kirstel: Four months, wow, four months, or is it, can we count that in weeks? You know, it’s like a baby.
Venkat Nagaswamy: I think once you go past one quarter, then you got to count in months.
Evan Kirstel: So tell us, tell us where you, where you, where did you come from and what Mitel?
Venkat Nagaswamy: Absolutely. So I, so just to give you some biographical, my partner biography as it were, I came here after doing a simple job at 8x8, a US provider. And prior to 8x8, my company Money on 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 to marketing is that before starting my company, I was running enterprise marketing and Juniper networks, and working with Dimension 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 they usually say, you know, I took the advice that Dustin Hoffman got in The Graduate, pregnancy.
Evan Kirstel: You stole my joke. I was totally going to use that.
Venkat Nagaswamy: Yeah, 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, uh, and then I when I was at GE, I was selling plastics, so switched over to the dark side.
Mitel’s Business and Focus
Evan Kirstel: Well, don’t underestimate the power of plastics and then I think 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’s 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.
Venkat Nagaswamy: Yeah, yeah, and let me start that by addressing why I came here, which is an answer to your earlier question. So you know, all the experience that I’ve had in working in various companies, one of the lessons that I learned is that focus matters, you cannot be everything, everybody, even focus matters. So when Taran, 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, 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 use to win. Right, and that story, that strategy that he laid out, 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 to be the code UC business, whether you deploy it on-prem or duplicate a private cloud or the AWS or whatever the case may be. Code UC business, a lot of our other competitors are going away from it, everybody’s telling the message of you guess, I myself used to tell the message of everything going on to you guess as of four months ago. But the real truth is that there are companies like like hospitals, that 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 a focus on our business, we want to be number one in the mid-market in UC, that’s it.
Evan Kirstel: Well, that’s, that’s simple enough, and you know, 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. So you mentioned hospitals, that’s an interesting vertical. What, what other verticals is Mitel focused on and, and where can you add the most value?
Venkat Nagaswamy: Yeah, so the five main vehicles that are focused on in the US are SLED (State, Local, and Education), higher ed, hospitals and healthcare, hospitality (so hotels, cruise ships, etcetera, casinos), and finally financial services. In other parts of the globe, retail and manufacturing do have a more of a role in care, and the reason why these verticals are important is that these verticals are places where communication is not just for communications, 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 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 VoIP and digital circuits. And you also want to be able to do things like emergency notifications. Right, uh, so for instance, you want to be able to send a text, send a message when there are disasters. And unfortunately, we have many schools today, I mean, not even that bad, it could be a parent coming home to pick up a kid after a 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 other platforms, that’s why 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 a nurse deployment software which gets 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 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, 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 you guess money 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 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 UCaaS in terms of integrations and so on in the private cloud UC market or non-previously market. Right, and this is what allows us to have a whole bunch of vertical-specific integrations. Our MSA program, Mitel’s Strategic Alliance program, has 2000 ISVs that are integrated, so we can offer these vertical-specific integrations and vertical-specific solutions that solves a problem that’s unique for each of these individual spaces.
Evan Kirstel: 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, so interesting.
Customer Lifecycle Management and RingCentral Partnership
Evan Kirstel: One thing you also your team 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 Mitel is offering it.
Venkat Nagaswamy: 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 of functionality that you’re helping them 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 SaaS companies, do a good job of it. Right, so you have in Salesforce or Mercado, you have CSMs that help you guide through this entire process, but we in the box world of grim world, and this is not just us, it’s, it’s, it’s the whole ecosystem hasn’t been known to do that extremely well. Like you, a lot of times you give a box and then here’s the box and then you have to do what you’re going to do. So what we’re doing right now in terms of CLM is that, is that journey, how do we take a customer from the beginning all the way beyond? Right, so one, you can do more with what you have, just more licenses, more minutes, etcetera, that you might go 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 you if you want to choose to go to RingCentral and UCaaS, which a certain subsegment of our population wants to do every year, five to 10% of our audience wants to do. In which case, we have a relationship with RingCentral, and we make the path to go to RingCentral the smoothest, least risky, best option for our for our customers to transition to, yeah.
Evan Kirstel: So that’s a good segue into RingCentral and your partnership in a strategic relationship with RingCentral. You know, how, what’s the status, what, what’s the current, 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 Nagaswamy: Absolutely, so our core, as a reminder to everybody, RingCentral is our exclusive UCaaS partner. What that means is that our existing cloud, public cloud, or a multi-tenant cloud customers that have been on show on our platforms are migrating to RingCentral, we are helping them migrate. That’s one part of the puzzle. The other part of the puzzle is to help our on-prem, the people who have been on-prem who want to go to cloud, we are helping them move to RingCentral. 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 our platform into RingCentral’s platform. That cuts down your migration process and cuts down the migration time so much so that I think in one case we, we found like a $40,000 benefit in, in doing that because you didn’t need to take configuration. That 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 the 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, you have a lot of successes in our under our belt. And I think, I don’t want to speak for RingCentral, but like you should read the 10K where they talk about our relationship and how it’s performing, so I don’t want to take away that, that thunder, it doesn’t work.
Evan Kirstel: Nice, well, nothing like making life easier for the customers. That’s I think what’s so great about the partnership.
What’s Next for Mitel?
Evan Kirstel: I know it’s only been a few months, but what’s next from your standpoint, from the team’s standpoint over the next, you know, six months, 12 months, what, what’s, what are you focused on exactly?
Venkat Nagaswamy: 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 to, we want to be able to offer a 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 do you guess, in a lot of other cases, it could be on-prem or it could be 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 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 focus on our vertical strategy. We are copying our partners, we are enabling our partners, or we will be enabling our partners over time so that they can focus on certain verticals so that they can go deeper on it. So that’s going to be a big team that you see. And then, and 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 our product line or to get better market presence so that we can solve our customers’ 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 Kirstel: Awesome, awesome. Well, transformation, change, 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? Where do you hope to sort of be different than, you know, legacy practices?
Venkat Nagaswamy: Yeah, so at the end of the day, you know, we 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 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 a school case. We weren’t able to tell these stories of our 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 clouds. And that is what we want to get to, to be able to, to be able to get to that spot. We need to be do, we need to tell more and more of these stories with our customers, with the influencers, with everybody in the marketplace so that we certainly can see what we deliver to the world.
Conclusion
Evan Kirstel: That’s fantastic. Well, I love how open and flexible you are. You’re on podcasts, 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 such a, such a hot start to, 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, you know, yeah, I’m like it’s been a little stressful, so how do you relax?
Evan Kirstel: You’re really serious, you’re not just whittling with…
Venkat Nagaswamy: No, I have like, I, I have more machines in there than, than I can, I don’t want to do it. Then my wife says it’s not that I’m more enamored with the machines that I’m making stuff. I made from a jewel box, and it looks really good, but, well, at least I think so. But, but anyway, so I make small gas stuff, right, with that.
Evan Kirstel: I’m going to ask you to tweet out a couple of your creations. I will over the next few weeks and 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 Nagaswamy: Onwards, not just thanks for your time, Evan.
Evan Kirstel: Take care, bye-bye.