Angel UpdateAngel Update

In a world gone crazy with talk of business analytics, Angel brings serious experience and assets to the table.

No, this is not a blog with religious overtones. It is SpeechTEK week in New York City, and cloud-based self service provider angel.com chose the first day of the event to re-brand the company Angel, at the same time incorporating a new marketing tagline, Beyond Voice. The re-launch as Angel is meant to highlight a number of characteristics of the company that are either new or have changed since Angel first launched in 1999.

* .com naming is passé. As hot as it was to be a .com in 1999, the boom and bust is behind us and the nomenclature only serves to remind people (for example of how much they lost in their 401Ks).

* The lower case a, besides being a way to stylize the name, was a great fit for the SMB target market of angel.com. With the increasing market attention and adoption of cloud-based solutions by larger enterprises, the move to an upper case A is a subtle way for angel.com to grow up with its market.

* Over the years, Angel has dramatically broadened the number of solutions it offers. Told by Director of Marketing Dave Tolliver that the company provided agent license hosting in addition to self service ports, I asked the proportion of licenses each type of service drove. I was surprised to hear that the split is 70 percent self service ports and 30 percent agent licenses--showing that Angel has already had significant success leveraging self service customers into full service ones. The graphic below, of the Angel Experience Platform 4.0, details the various components of the platform.

* Notice the "On-Demand Business Intelligence Analytics" slice of the architecture slide. In a world gone crazy with talk of analytics (OK, maybe it is just SpeechTEK that's crazy with analytics), Angel brings serious experience and assets to the table. It turns out that the angel.com platform was initially designed by business intelligence company MicroStrategy as a way to answer the question, "How do we get our BI data into the hands of executives on their mobile phones?" The company quickly discovered that the platform they had built to provide mobile access to BI data had broader applicability, and launched angel.com as a separate subsidiary. This means that the Angel platform was designed from the outset to create and deliver analytics, certainly an key differentiator in today's climate.

Angel did a great job of showcasing many of these attributes by sponsoring Monday's Keynote lunch with a customer speaker, John DiBrango, Channel Management Director for AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. Not only is AstraZeneca is a top-notch logo, DiBrango did a great job of explaining why his company went from multiple CPE IVR implementations to a single hosted environment. As a business user, he didn't talk about SIP or SCXML but about how the combination of a single look and feel for customers and physicians calling into AstraZeneca and analytics are the key benefits to his Angel deployment.