Five9: Rites of PassageFive9: Rites of Passage

Cloud contact center software provider Five9 held its first industry analyst meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. last week, in conjunction with its fourth regional user conference, CX Summit. It occurred to me that inviting ten of the leading contact center industry analysts to the spend the day with the company's senior leadership team was a rite of passage for Five9, part of cementing its position as one of the leaders in the contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) market.

There have been other inaugural events for Five9 in the past few months, and, of course, the company has another event showing coming up next week at Enterprise Connect. In 2017, Five9 revenue exceeded $200 million for the first time. The company went public in 2014 and moved steadily from operating in the red for the first six quarters to rising profitability for the past nine quarters.

At the analyst meeting, Five9 executive vice president for products and technology Gaurav Passi described the company's technical "next step." With its Summer Release 2017, Five9 began to leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a global voice architecture. Passi told analysts that Five9 has already begun work to move the core multi-tenant contact center application to a microservices architecture, parts of which are already being tested in the AWS public cloud.

On the marketing front, in February 2017, Five9 hired a new vice president of corporate marketing, Niki Hall. Hall's remit is to help raise the company's profile as a CCaaS leader. With 11 years at Cisco and another five at Polycom, Hall's experience as a global marketing professional is in keeping with Five9's mission to grow into increasingly larger enterprise accounts as well as internationally. Along with several new marketing team members, including a dedicated industry analyst relations director, Hall launched a new marketing campaign with a digital transformation theme at CX Summit, highlighted in the graphic to the right.

For the past eleven years I have moderated a panel of senior executives as part of the Enterprise Connect contact center track. The companies represented on that panel were initially chosen due to their inclusion as leaders in Gartner's Contact Center Infrastructure Magic Quadrant. In 2007, that included Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, and Nortel.

In 2018, the composition of the panel has changed. For the first time, I have invited the leaders of both the premises and cloud contact center quadrants to the panel. On the premises side, the leaders remain Genesys and Cisco (and Genesys is a CCaaS leader as well). For cloud contact center, leaders from Five9 and NICE inContact are included, a first for Five9. (Avaya, who remains a market share leader, if not a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in 2017, rounds out the group in 2018.)

A Five9 customer, McKesson, will also be joining a panel discussion in the contact center track, in a Wednesday morning session titled, "Enterprise Case Studies: How We Made Our Contact Center Upgrade Decision.". With well over 1,000 agents on Five9, McKesson's appearance in the session reinforces that Five9 is enterprise-ready.

Learn more about Contact Center & Customer Experience at Enterprise Connect 2018, March 12 to 15, in Orlando, Fla. Register now using the code NOJITTER to save an additional $200 off the Regular Rate or get a free Expo Plus pass.

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