Taking on the role of CEO just three months before an unprecedented global pandemic radically transformed customer demands may not seem an ideal situation, but for Brian Day, the CEO of Fuze, it resulted in the acceleration of already initiated trends in UC usage and provided the company with an opportunity to achieve faster growth.
Fortunately, Day was already familiar with Fuze, having joined the company as CFO in 2016, and had plans to refocus on enterprise customers before the pandemic took hold. “We always did a great job for enterprises with more than 500 users – our sweet spot is in the 1,000-10,000 user range – and the pandemic highlighted the value we offer to this market,” he says. “UC is a critical service for large enterprises, it’s not a piece of sales pipeline software which can go down for two hours without really impacting the business. If our platform goes down for two minutes, everyone knows.”
Day has drawn on his experience in the legal and financial sectors plus his previous experience as CEO of mobile app management company, Apperian, to pilot Fuze through the pandemic’s challenges while also preparing the company for life after COVID-19. “The pandemic has accelerated the whole move to a unified UCaaS solution, as people have utilised group chat and found that video aids productivity,” he adds. “We have worked with enterprises that sent everyone home overnight and, for the most part, they didn’t miss a beat. The challenge now is in how we make people who are remote feel as if they’re not when the situation is no longer 100% remote.”
Day added that the partner community also felt the challenges of a rapid shift to remote work, which is one of the reasons that Fuze accelerated investment in its channel partner program. Earlier this year the company announced its partner-first initiative, a world-class partner experience, that invests in enterprise partners who are committed to driving customer value.
The speed of adoption has been one of the most obvious changes, but customers are also more focused on security and how UCaaS offerings offer integrations with other software. “We signed a new 10,000 seat customer in December 2019 who planned to complete their Fuze deployment by the end of 2021,” says Day. “Instead, they deployed all users by March 2020, so a 24 month planned roll-out was effectively completed in three months. They were so happy with the solution that they have moved another 5,000 users onto our platform since then. Last year we saw enterprises focused on trying to survive, but this year the focus is to upgrade solutions for long- term business continuity.”
“The move from on-prem to cloud was always going to happen, the pandemic just accelerated it,” he adds. “If you go back 24 months there wasn’t the Zoom, Teams, and Slack adoption you see today, but these have now become ubiquitous. For us, we’re focusing and doubling down on specialising in delivering UCaaS solutions for complex and global enterprises. We believe that by spending a lot of time on our integrations, we can bring a lot of value to customers”
Day explains that by focusing on integrations, Fuze can bring functionality such as Fuze Click-to-Connect and Fuze Direct Routing into Microsoft Teams so users can access Fuze capabilities in their preferred ways. Accompanying this with the Fuze mobile app also takes care of remote workers’ needs and Fuze is poised to launch sector-specific versions that offer targeted features and functions to verticals.
“I want to pick our targets and be very disciplined about it,” he says. “We can’t be an inch deep and a mile wide, but we can target segments and will be continuing to rollout next-gen Fuze for Manufacturing enhancements in Q4, with more segments to come in 2022. Enterprises now understand the value of UCaaS and that’s proven by a 650% increase in our pipeline for deals worth more than $1M USD in the past year. There are a lot more deals in the pipeline, and it’s a lot more fun to grow a business than be the CEO of a business that doesn’t have growth or this kind of market momentum.”
from UC Today https://ift.tt/3F34Xkh
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