TalkingHeadz Podcast

TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests. In this episode Dave and Evan hangout with Ujjwal Singh, Head of Workplace from Meta. 

Ujjwal Singh is a product and engineering leader with a focus in enterprise and SaaS technologies. He is the Head of Workplace, Meta’s business communication platform. 

Ujjwal is responsible for Workplace’s tech, engineering, design and research teams, as well as partnering with sales and partnerships to ensure the growth of the business. Before Workplace, Ujjwal helped found Facebook’s New Product Experimentation group, helping foster new ideas and business development. 

Previously Ujjwal was a partner at Area 120 and a senior engineering director at Google where he helped start the Hangouts project and worked at YouTube.  He was also  the CTO of GoFundMe. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Ujjwal enjoys working with early stage companies, running, and traveling, and currently lives in London with his family.

TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests too!

In this episode Dave and Evan discuss trends and possibilities of conversational AI platforms with Dan Miller of Opus research. 

Dan Miller founded Opus Research in 1986 and helped define Conversational Commerce.Dan held management positions at Atari, Warner Communications and Pacific Telesis Group (now part of AT&T). He also served as Editor-in-Chief of The Kelsey Report, where he also oversaw the launch of advisory services on local online commerce, voice & wireless commerce and global directories.

Dan received his BA from Hampshire College and an MBA from Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

TalkingHeadz is an interview format podcast that features the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests too. In this episode Dave and Evan discuss the importance of brand with Michael Gold, the CEO of Intermedia. 

Michael Gold joined Intermedia in 2011 which may have something to do with its revenues increasing five fold since. The provider also transitioned from an email and web hosting services to a channel-first UCC provider (voice, video, chat, contact center, email PLUS services such as file sharing, backups, security, archiving, and more.  

Intermedia is the only cloud company to have earned J.D. Power-certified technical support 6 years in a row. In 2020, Intermedia became the exclusive worldwide cloud communications provider for NEC. 

Gold has 20+ years of senior management experience in software, cloud services and channel development. Before joining Intermedia, Gold was CEO of Zlago. he was also an SVP at Parallels. Gold holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and an MBA from Stanford University.

TalkingHeadz is an ongoing interview podcast that features the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests too. In this audio-only episode Dave and Evan discuss the importance of video with Michael Litt. 
 
Michael Litt is CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, a global video creation, hosting and analytics platform for businesses.

In this TalkingHeadz podcast Dave and Evan Go deep, well beyond the app layer, with Cullen Jennings of Cisco. This is the final episode of 2021. 

Cullen Jennings is the CTO for Security and Collaboration Business at Cisco. How do you become the technology leader at a technology leader? Practice! Cullen is Cisco Fellow (1 out of 19) with over 30 years of experience across startups, large organizations, and Internet standards. He has a thing for disruptive, real-time technologies. 

Cullen holds over 100 patents. Cullen is a member of the IEEE and ACM and has published numerous technical articles. He was heavily involved in making WebRTC the standard that has enabled browser-based communications. Cullen tends to have his hand in a lot of standards and solutions impacting real-time communications. Just weeks ago, the new Cisco Webex Hologram solution escaped from Cullen's lab.  

This podcast has a few more acronyms than usual, but will also leave you ROTFL. 

Follow Cullen here: 

• Twitter
• Github
• IEEE

In this TalkingHeadz podcast Dave and Evan have One Talk with Alex Doyle of Verizon.

Alex is the Executive Director, Advanced Communications Products at Verizon.  If you thought 5G was advanced, you are missing out on all the great solutions Big V has for collaboration, call centers, and UCaaS -- including its own mobile-first One Talk.  The products and solutions delivered by Alex and his team support Verizon’s small to global business customers and governments. 

Prior to Verizon, Alex was a member of the founding team at BroadSoft (acquired by Cisco), Director of Service Provider Solutions at Polycom, and VP Marketing at cloud video conferencing provider Vidtel. Alex began his career at Nortel, where he was responsible for product development for Nortel's mobile switching system solutions. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a MBA from Johns Hopkins University. 

Dave and Evan meet with Philipp Heltewig, Co-Founder and CEO of Cognigy. 

Philipp is a German-Australian entrepreneur with profound technology experience working for companies in Europe, APAC and North America. He had the foresight to start up a conversational AI technology company in 2016. Long before anyone was talking about conversational AI. 

Since its founding in 2016, Heltewig has been the CEO of Cognigy. The company focuses on the automation of customer and employee services through Conversational AI. Cloud or premises-based, text or verbal, as well as employees or customer interactions. 

In this podcast you will learn more about how and why Cognigy stands out in a sea of conversational AI companies. 

Dave and Evan meet with Justin Mitchell, Founder and CEO of Yac. 

Sometimes voicemail can convey a message better than text, but voicemail isn't really a conversational tool. The answer is conversational voicemail. 

Yac provides conversational voicemail, and if you don't know what this, listen to this podcast. 

The reason enterprise chat has become so popular (and why email remains so popular) is because people really like async communications. Orlando based Yac brings back to async comms what chat apps leave out - voice. Yac works by itself or can complement apps like Slack. 

We all know that text has its limitations. For example, all caps just isn't the same thing as really shouting -- and sometimes shouting is necessary. Sure you can leave a loud voicemail. That's the message, but it probably won't result with an interactive or conversational experience, 

Put more emphasis on the conversational aspect than the shouting part and you have Yac. It is just in time because distributed teams are all the rage and nothing goes better with rage than all caps - I mean Yac. 

Justin started working in startups at 16.  At 19 he co-founded and launched his first company and 2 years later helped it IPO on the NASDAQ.  He bounces between design, engineering, and marketing  on his breaks from working on 27 patents.

Dave and Evan meet with Martin Taylor, a Co-Founder of Content Guru.

Content Guru is a leader in cloud-delivered customer engagement. Its Storm CCaaS solution is well known in Europe and expanding in North America. That's one of the topics we cover in this podcast. We also get Martin to explain the brands in his life: Redwood Technologies, Content Guru, and Storm.

Martin Taylor has been tinkering with technology since he was a child. “I was writing computer games when I was 10,” he says. He started Content Guru with his brother Sean in 2005, offering contact center technology as a service.

Martin has somehow managed to have one job since 1993. Even though his role, the key products, industry, and brand has changed. Perhaps this is why he's responsible for strategic market development. Actually, he has lots of tiles including  Deputy CEO, Global CMO, and Co-Founder. 

In his spare time Martin is a keen runner, having once been the Berkshire cross country champion and competing, along with Sean, in the English Schools Cross Country Championships.

Dave and Evan meet with Hugo Feiler the CEO and co-founder of Minima. A base layer protocol that brings blockchains to smartphones. 

Minima is the world’s first truly decentralized blockchain protocol that runs in full on mobile phones. Minima has created an ultra-lean blockchain protocol that fits on a mobile or IoT device, allowing every user to run a full constructing and validating node. It creates the possibility of operating a network that is decentralized, scalable, and inclusive, while remaining secure and resilient. A network that guarantees anti-censorship and no overarching authority. 

Prior to launching Minima, Hugo created global advertising campaigns for companies including Vodafone, Toshiba and Sony Electronics. He was previously General Manager of marcomms at Sony Europe for its computer and audio divisions.

It's not all fun and games when the net is down.

Dave and Evan meet with Mo Nezarati, President of Voice at Subspace. 

A funny thing happened to the folks at Subspace when they set out to improve gaming, they discovered how to upgrade the entire internet. Subspace harnesses the power of games to improve real-time apps. 

Latency and other network issues deprive us all from the online experience we deserve and expect. The obvious solution is to build a high performance, global platform that can personalize network performance for our specific situation - that's what Subspace did.  It uses gaming data to fix the performance of real-time applications around the globe. 

Mo is a voice pro. He has technical chops and understands the business side too. His career experience includes 26 years at Esna, a company he co-founded. Esna was acquired by Avaya in 2015, and that's where Mo launched Zang.  That service is now known as Avaya OneCloud Spaces and CPaaS, and are among Avaya's most significant recent launches. He did a short tour at Sangoma after Avaya and landed at Subspace about a year ago. 

Dave and Evan meet with Ray Pasquale,  CEO and Founder of Unified Office. 

Unified Office is a next-generation IT managed services provider focused on the Small and Medium-sized Business (SMB) market. Unified Office was built from the ground up focused on delivering business class communications services on the latest mobile devices. We take the latest in communications technologies and make them readily accessible by integrating them into an easy-to-use, scalable, virtualized service that extends from the desktop to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones called Total Connect NowSM. This offering allows people to stay connected to their business, anytime and anywhere, in a hyper connected world of business that operates in real time.

Dave and Evan meet with Brett Shockley,  CEO and Co-Founder of Journey.ai. 

Brett's journey, prior to Journey, included being the CTO role at Avaya. He was responsible for Avaya's mergers, acquisitions, major partnerships, corporate strategy, and emerging products including Avaya Labs. Before Avaya, Brett was the VP & GM Customer Contact Business Unit at Cisco. He has extensive experience with the contact center industry, and is a tireless customer advocate. 

Brett also founded Spanlink Communications and Calabrio. He is also on the board of eGain Corp. and Spok Holdings, Inc.

In addition to holding a patent for a telecommunications device, Shockley has an MBA in Marketing from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology. 

Dave and Evan meet with Darren Schreiber, the co-Founder and CEO of 2600Hz.  With nearly two decades of telecom experience under his belt, Darren’s core focus is on distributed computing and communications technologies. 

His contributions to the open source telecom community are immense, including co-authoring the FreeSWITCH books and mentoring at universities and workshops.  He previously ran a large managed services operation, and he worked at one Bandwidth.com.

You may or may not be familiar with 2600-Hz, but you have very likely heard of its customers. Its technology is used by many well known service providers, carriers, and enterprises. 

In this podcast we learn more about the company, its KAZOO product, and the shifts and trends occurring in communications. 

Dave and Evan host their first TalkingHeadz foursome. In this episode we meet with Davide Petramala and Laura Faughtenberry of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS.

Avaya is best known for its powerful enterprise contact centers which can now do even more with OneCloud CPaaS. In this podcast we find out more about how/when Avaya got into the CPaaS business, and how customers are using it to customize even faster and better services.

Avaya OneCloud CPaaS is an Avaya public cloud service that offers APIs and applications as a service that can be used to customize and personalize communications and collaboration. This global platform allows developers, partners and customers to build agile and burstable mobile and web applications via CPaaS building blocks.

Case studies include Harris County and Nebraska Medicine as well as: 

• CTIntegrations https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/ctintegrations/
• 6 Points https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/6-points/
• IMPower https://www.avaya.com/en/success-stories/impower-solutions/

Dave and Evan meet with Aurangzeb Khan, SVP GN Jabra.

Aurangzeb was co-founder & CEO of Altia Systems which Jabra (GN Netcom) acquired in 2019. Currently,  Aurangzeb is the SVP of Intelligent Vision Systems at Jabra, best known for its Panacast products. The PanaCast products use multiple cameras, or a cam-array to create real-time, immersive video.
 
Earlier, Aurangzeb was President & CEO at Everspin Technologies. He was co-founder, President & CEO at Altius Solutions and, immediately following the merger Simplex Solutions, contributed to the IPO in May 2001. Aurangzeb held senior engineering and general management positions at Cadence, Cirrus Logic, Tandem Computers (now part of HP), and Fairchild. 

In this podcast we ask Aurangzeb multiple questions about cameras (or is it a single question about multiple cameras?), parallax distortion, how to sell a startup for $125 million, and why the world needed a new video cam company. 

Aurangzeb received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering Management from Stanford University, executive education at the Stanford GSB, a double-major B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Nuclear Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.Sc. in Physics and 1 Ingrid Lunden, 

Dave and Evan meet with Kira Makagon, Chief Innovation Officer, RingCentral.

Kira is a serial entrepreneur that landed at RingCentral in 2012. In her current role as Chief Innovation Officer she leads product strategy, product management and design, engineering and R&D.  She has had a tremendous impact on RingCentral.

Before RingCentral she co-founded several technology companies, including Octane (acquired by E.piphany NASDAQ: EPNY) for $3.2 billion, and RedAril (acquired by Hearst). Learn more about Kira at KiraMakagon.com. Kira is one of the most influential professionals in communications. 

In this interview, Dave and Evan cover a wide range of topics including innovation at RingCentral, her new role in RingCentral Ventures, and some of the interesting developments at RingCentral over the past several years. 

Dave and Evan meet with Evan MacMillan, CEO and Co-Founder of Gridspace.

We had to pull Evan out of the garage to record this podcast. Gridspace is a collaboration between SRI Speech Labs and some fellow Stanford engineers. It is pioneering real-time speech infrastructure for contact centers and developers. 

Gridspace was formed in 2012 as a collaboration between SRI Speech Lab, the lab behind Siri and Nuance, and a team of Stanford designers and engineers. Today, the company's software scans and automates calls for healthcare and financial services customers. The company is one of the largest Kubernetes cluster operators for streaming speech and has analyzed billions of call minutes with its cloud and telephony agnostic speech technology.

Dave and Evan meet with Rowan Trollope, the CEO of cloud contact center provider Five9. 

Rowan was named the CEO of Five9 in May of 2018. Though many of us within the industry met him during his three years as the head of Cisco Collaboration. 

Rowan is passionate about how digital transformation revolutionizes the way we communicate. He is a self-proclaimed geek and self-taught software developer. He has an eye for aesthetics, and during his term at Cisco, the collaboration group earned 20 awards for outstanding product design.

We cover a wide range of topics in this interview from Cisco Spark to Ethereum,  but spend most of the time talking about Five9. Both Rowan and the entire Five9 team have had a spectacular ride over the past three years.