inContact Goes Mobile with Sierra360 AcquisitioninContact Goes Mobile with Sierra360 Acquisition

While enterprises may not be ready to deploy mobile apps, they want to know that the vendor they chose has those capabilities.

On the heels of a partnership (announced at Enteprise Connect) with SoCoCare to offer social media integration, inContact today further expands its multichannel capabilities with iCMobile. The new capability is based on inContact's recent acquisition of the assets and employees of Silicon Valley-based Sierra360 LLC.

Founded in early 2012 by Gus Laredo, a co-founder of Five9 (another early cloud-only contact center solution provider), Sierra360 is headquartered in San Francisco with software engineering located in Latin America. With the acquisition, inContact adds 17 developers in Bolivia, which it will combine organizationally with a development team that inContact already has in Costa Rica, as well as the expertise of Laredo, who is also joining inContact.

In a call with inContact CMO Mariann McDonagh, I asked whether Sierra360 had existing customers using the mobile customer care applications described in the release materials--applications such as mobile co-browsing and scheduled callback. McDonagh explained that like many technology startups, Sierra360 has been delivering mobile solutions to contact center customers on a project basis, i.e., custom applications. She went on to say that over the next couple of months the solutions described in the press release will be integrated using the RESTful API capability that was added to the inContact platform in the March 2013 release 13.1.

I also asked McDonagh whether inContact customers were asking for mobile applications, or if this was a capability being added to stay ahead of the market. She replied that one of every five RFPs today are asking some kind of question about mobile. While companies may not be ready to deploy mobile apps, they want to know that the vendor they chose has those capabilities.

Vice President for Product Management Kristyn Emenecker added that inContact customers are already using mobile devices to access inContact applications. Another set of applications that the new mobile-savvy developers will likely work on is purpose-built mobile applications for supervisors and managers.

In the Mobile Customer Experience session held at Enteprise Connect last month, one of the challenges identified as a stumbling block to mobile application deployment was the issue of what organization within a company owns mobile apps. The increasing popularity of a new executive function in businesses, Chief Digital Officer (CDO), may be part of the solution.

According to Wikipedia, a Chief Digital Officer is an individual who helps a company drive growth by converting traditional "analog" businesses to digital ones, and oversees operations in changing digital sectors like mobile applications, social media and virtual goods, as well as web-based information management and marketing. As businesses increasingly adopt the Chief Digital Officer title, crossing barriers between IT and Marketing, deployment of mobile customer experience applications may also become easier, and therefore more prevalent.

In the meantime, inContact has deployed over 1,300 cloud contact center instances to date, so taking this capability to existing customers is obviously the first step.

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