I’m Michael Krigsman, Industry Analyst and the Host of CXOTalk.
We’re here at BroadSoft Connections, 2017, and I’m speaking with Taher Behbehani who
is the Chief Digital & Marketing Officer of BroadSoft.
Taher, how are you?
Good, thank you.
Nice to see you!
Tell us about the key themes at this event!
Absolutely!
The key theme of the Events Connections 2017, is “Re-think innovation.”
We need to really re-think how we innovate, not across just technology, but also our processes.
How we take products to market, how much time it takes, how we manage to change the customer
experience throughout that process.
So, basically the idea is that we have all the technology we need.Let’s actually look
at the innovative processes that we have to spend effort and energy on in taking products
to the market.
So, why is user experience, customer experience, so important today?
Well, look, in any industry nowadays, everything around us, customer experience is the key
differentiation factor.
If you are using an application or device or a system in your work, you need to be looking
forward to using it.
Otherwise, frankly, you’ll ignore it.
And our customers tell us.
Our service providers tell us.
And we want to make sure we create an experience that’s very close to, or better than, some
of the consumer experience you get.
So, what are the implications of this, as they’re developing new products and new
services?
Right.
So, our philosophy is open-platform: APIs, SDKs — interfaces that you can connect to
the devices, to a platform, then develop applications and services around.
So, that by default, means that the developers that we have, whether they’re software or
ecosystem, they need to also adjust and improve the experience by connecting to our platform,
which we call, by the way, BroadSoft Business.
And, the third part of it is whatever we do together, whatever we develop together, we
need to make sure that the new experiences and the improvements or additions or enhancements
— whatever you want to call them — they’re actually driven to market, presented to the
marketplace much faster.
That the cycles of innovation, the time to market, which is the main message, is actually
much shorter for us as well.
And this is all being driven by consumer expectations?
Well, you know I think what we do is, is we compare ourselves and we benchmark against
the best in-class consumer experience.
The consumer side now spills over very much into the business side because we are the
same people.
We just happen to work part of the day.
Where does mobility fit??
Massively.
Mobility is everything.
I mean, I think that, that the discussion that people have usually about “mobile-first”
frankly is no longer actually even should be used.
It’s a cliché.
I mean everybody is mobile.
So, there is no mobile-first, -second, or -third.
It’s just mobile.
We call it unified communications.
Now, on the enterprise side, what are some of the technology, as well as the organizational
or process challenges and opportunities that they need to think about??
The implications are actually quite severe because we’re being hard on ourselves and
somewhat controversial.
And that’s because our service-provider partners tell us to do so.
We’re telling people, “Listen, this is taking too long.”
Relying on existing systems which are very convoluted and require a lot of time to wire
and re-wire and take a long time to create, to take our innovation into the marketplace
is not acceptable.
So, we’re saying, “We gotta change.”
We gotta change the OSS, the provisioning, the onboarding, all of the billing systems
and somehow make it much more streamline.
Simplifying!
And, in fact, exactly right.
What we have done on our side, in partnership with many of the service providers, we develop
a platform, a system, which we call [BroadCloud] Channel Support System (CSS) that has all
of that.
So, if you are a partner of us and you deploy CSS, you can then roll out systems faster
and services and then the enterprise!
The CIO can also access it and make sure they provision within their own organization more
easily.
Where is this technology going during the next few years?
I think that we are just at the beginning.
As I said, unified and communications — interesting term.
I think we are just at the beginning.
We…
you see a glimpse of the future.
You see products such as Hub or RUC-01 or BroadSoft Business Platforms that integrate
different experiences, tying to the workflow of a business and essentially have intelligence
now built into it to be able to use data and my behavior — my sort of contextual data
— to make my life easier at work.
So, I think you’ll see a great deal of change across all of this and I think there will
be, frankly, a tipping point sometime down the road by combining these correctly and
putting it together so that everybody will say, “Well I can’t live without this stuff…
I gotta have it”.
And, I think we’ll probably get there in the next 3-5 years.
Okay!
Taher Behbehani, thank you so much!
Thank you!
Appreciate it.