Discover how Evolve IP is revolutionizing remote work with innovative cloud communications in our latest episode featuring Peter, a pioneer at Evolve IP since its founding in 2007. Join us as Peter reveals the company's unique dual expertise in voice and compute services, offering tailored solutions for mid-market companies. We explore Evolve IP's seamless integration of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), designed to meet the evolving needs of their clients. Listen as Peter shares their growth strategy, significant acquisitions, and how Evolve IP has remained ahead of the curve in facilitating remote work, even before it became a global necessity.
We also dive into the security advantages of Desktop as a Service (DAS) over traditional VPN solutions, particularly in highly regulated industries. Peter discusses how Evolve IP's partnerships with tech giants like VMware, Microsoft, and Cisco ensure compliance with standards like PCI, HITRUST, and SOC. Get insights into the future directions of Evolve IP, including upcoming innovations and the pivotal role of industry events like Enterprise Connect in showcasing groundbreaking advancements. This episode is packed with valuable information on how Evolve IP is shaping the future of cloud communications and collaboration.
Discover how Evolve IP is revolutionizing remote work with innovative cloud communications in our latest episode featuring Peter, a pioneer at Evolve IP since its founding in 2007. Join us as Peter reveals the company's unique dual expertise in voice and compute services, offering tailored solutions for mid-market companies. We explore Evolve IP's seamless integration of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), designed to meet the evolving needs of their clients. Listen as Peter shares their growth strategy, significant acquisitions, and how Evolve IP has remained ahead of the curve in facilitating remote work, even before it became a global necessity.
We also dive into the security advantages of Desktop as a Service (DAS) over traditional VPN solutions, particularly in highly regulated industries. Peter discusses how Evolve IP's partnerships with tech giants like VMware, Microsoft, and Cisco ensure compliance with standards like PCI, HITRUST, and SOC. Get insights into the future directions of Evolve IP, including upcoming innovations and the pivotal role of industry events like Enterprise Connect in showcasing groundbreaking advancements. This episode is packed with valuable information on how Evolve IP is shaping the future of cloud communications and collaboration.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Speaker 1:
Hey everybody diving into the world of cloud communications and UCaaS, and more today with Evolve IP. Peter, how are you? Hi, well nice to see you there. Good to see you, really intrigued by the work you're doing and your mission around cloud communications and collaboration and beyond. Maybe introductions, in order both to Evolve IP and yourself. Tell us about the team and the work you're doing.
Speaker 2:
Sure, you know, evolve IP is a cloud communications provider and we make remote work easy, right, and it's something we've always been doing, pre-pandemic. That just happened to really hit at the right time. And what I mean by that. We're in unified communications, we're in contact center and then we're in cloud computing. Das is a strength of ours. We also do IaaS and then all of the security stuff that goes around it, and then over on the voice side of the house, we do collaboration and call recording and intelligent call recording All of the things that you would expect from a cloud communications provider.
Speaker 2:
I've been with Evolve IP since its beginning back in 2007. Wow, I ran voice engineering for up until just earlier this year, right, which was 17 years I ran voice engineering. We've been through a good number a dozen or so acquisitions over the years, some of it over in Europe. So we've got a European arm of Evolve IP. You'll see them listed as Evolve IP, emea, and in EMEA we're primarily focused on the voice side of the business. We're not doing the compute business there. Today, we may tomorrow, I don't know. Um we are working towards. Well, actually, we've made some changes over over the past year, including myself. Like I said, I moved over into the product side earlier this year, basically to lend a hand where I thought a hand was needed and to take a change of pace for myself. I've been doing this with Evolve for 17 years, but I've been in engineering for 30. In fact, I think you and I probably met somewhere along the way back in your Acme packet days.
Speaker 1:
Wow, that's quite a flashback. I'm getting nostalgic here. But fast forward to now. You know this industry so well. I wouldn't say you're the typical UCAS provider and there are many of those but your business model and your platform's quite novel. Maybe describe a little bit about your position in this landscape and what makes you so different.
Speaker 2:
Sure, and this is one of the things that is both a good thing and a bad thing for us, because people have a hard time sticking us in a box. They don't know necessarily how to classify us. And where that's a good thing is it's a differentiator, right, and what I mean by that is we can go in and help people with you know their communications needs on the UC side or whatever, or we can talk to them about their compute needs and helping them to secure their environment, and I'll come back to that a little bit later. But what really makes us different is particularly when you compare us against the other compute like DAS providers. We've got a real strength in voice right, and that is a little bit of a differentiator. You know most of them will be able to do some sort of a voice overlay right. Maybe they can run the apps, maybe they figured out how to do their real-time audio and video well. It takes some work to optimize that. We've got that pretty well nailed and you know, being able to have that conversation where it helps us as a company is being able to, you know, to start the conversation very broadly and understand where the customer's needs may come from and begin to tell our solution. And it may be in computer, it may be on the voice side of the house, it might be contact center, right Wherever their needs might be. You know, I think we've got a pretty good handle on how to help. It's rare that somebody is in the buying cycle for all three things at the same time. So it helps us in that way. Right, it gets our foot in the door from a couple of different perspectives, but you know we're in it to try and help solve issues that people are having.
Speaker 2:
I mentioned earlier about, you know, about helping people secure their environment, obviously top of mind for most companies these days. And while we won't consider ourselves a security company, nor do the products like DAS by itself is not a security solution, but it does help them manage and secure their environment and makes it a little easier to manage that way. And then we have a whole suite of software that we can talk about and solutions around that to help really protect them. And you know the defense in depth posture. So the fact that we do both sides of the fence makes us a little bit different. You know, even when you talk about pure play voice, it's a little bit. It's changed in the last few years, as you know where you used to be. You had your swim lane, you were in UC or you were in contact center, but you generally didn't do both. You know we've been doing it for a long time and, in fact, that was one of the acquisitions back in 2017.
Speaker 2:
We acquired a software solution for contact centers specifically. So yeah.
Speaker 1:
I think that's exciting and, yeah, it's unusual, to say the least, to have UCaaS with CCaaS. Cloud Contact Center. Talk about the Cloud Contact Center. Talk about the cloud. You know contact center world and how you see yourself evolving in it and it is a super high growth area right now in tech. What are the opportunities that you're seeing there.
Speaker 2:
You know where our strength is is we look, for we play in the mid market, so you know, north of 250 seats to somewhere in the 5,000, that's our sweet spot. You, for, we play in the mid market, so you know, north of 250 seats to somewhere in the 5,000, that's our sweet spot. You know, we certainly have customers that are smaller and some that are larger, but in that range is sort of our sweet spot. And where we really excel is not necessarily we're not trying to sell to a you know, 5,000 seat contact center, BPO or something like that. That's not who we are. Where we excel is, you know, in the 1,000 or 2,000 seat enterprise, and maybe they are, you know, a home healthcare provider who happens to have a contact center right, and so we're going to help them with their communication overall. And then we're going to figure out how do we, you know, really position the contact center to suit the need that they have? So in that space, you know, maybe they've got a contact center with 100 agents or something like that. That's kind of who we are. And then where I think our strength is in that space is, you know, the underlying UC platform that we're running on today is Broadworks, and we've done a lot to really integrate the contact center to Broadworks, and if you're familiar with Broadworks, you know the old call center feature, if you want to call it that which we had turned into a practice.
Speaker 2:
Prior to buying this other software, we had really built a whole practice around call search, so this would have been like the early 2010s up to like 2015, 2016. And we had built a suite of software to go around it. You know dashboards and reporting and stuff that made it interesting and different from what others in the industry were doing with it, so we had developed a fairly strong base of call center providers, and then, you know, the market started to change and the omni-channel started to become a thing, and so we went on the hunt and bought this company that. You know. Really, feature rich does pretty much all of the same stuff that the big guys do, but like to like 80%, 90%. We're not going to compete against Genesis by any means, right? If somebody is going to do the feature comparison of AllBy IP against Genesis, and that's the thing that matters to them, we're not getting that business, and that's fine, right? That's not who we are.
Speaker 2:
What we are, though, is, you know, feature rich, that covers what most people are actually going to use out of the system. And then we're going to, like I said, we're going to really integrate it so that not only is it, you know, a separate system, but it looks and feels like it's part of the UC platform where you know, if you go off hook on your phone, the contact center knows, okay, maybe his administrative state is available but his actual state is busy so I'm not going to deliver a call to that person. So we spent a lot of time doing that kind of stuff and really integrating it to make it look and feel like one, so like if you're a contact center agent on your screen, you can pull up a directory and it's going to give you the directory of the entire enterprise and you can extension dial between them and all that.
Speaker 1:
A fantastic opportunity for your customers. You also talk a lot about remote work, and you know these pesky knowledge workers. They don't want to go in the office, certainly not full time, and so remote work is. Hybrid work is still a very much a reality, but how do you look at supporting those folks on a continued basis with advanced services and tech support? What's your philosophy there?
Speaker 2:
Sure, let me start with the tech support first, which is we generally will work with the IT staff of whatever company we're dealing with and, again, being in the mid-market, they generally are going to have some amount of IT staff. So we're not taking direct end user calls, we're working with through their IT staff, which I think helps in both cases. When it comes to, you know, the remote work and hybrid work and so forth, you know a couple of things have have helped to a forth. You know a couple of things have helped to a degree. You know, even like the early pandemic, everybody goes home. Luckily, we were already on the Teams bandwagon. It was a product that we sold. We had a good customer base on it. We are Teams users ourselves. So you know, moving people home was an easy thing to do, but you still had an awful lot of people who hadn't made that leap to some sort of a UC or some sort of a collab choice. And so you know, moving them home is okay. Take your phone home and we're going to help you get through the bumps of trying to get a phone turned up at your house Because, as you know, like home routers and sometimes do weird things with SIP, but you know, the collab side of it has changed the world from that perspective.
Speaker 2:
Daz, similarly right, where, you know, my desktop is wherever I go. In fact, I've got a story from a couple of years ago. It was Christmas Day, I was at my mom's and she's in New York. I'm from Pennsylvania and I get a call Somebody needs help with something. Ok, well, I didn't bring my laptop along, it was Christmas day, I didn't think to. So I just logged on to mom's really old, really clunky PC was able to open up my dad's. You know, my environment was exactly the way. I left it and I was able to solve the issue.
Speaker 2:
Now, that was with a browser. I generally work with a client installed. It's a little bit easier of a. You know experience. But generally speaking, you know, in a DAS environment you can connect from whatever machine you were on. Like, earlier today I was on my home PC. Now I'm on a laptop for this call and you know, same thing, right, I just closed the window over there, I opened it over here and it's yeah, everything was where it was. And being able to do that either from your house and then do it from work and so forth, what that enables is a couple of things. One is again the IT staff. It simplifies their management of their overall environment.
Speaker 2:
For one right, because now they're not managing let's say you've got 200 users they're not managing 200 endpoints out in the field.
Speaker 2:
Now they're really doing it from the core of the network, which means that their security, posture and all of the things that go with it are the same and all of the things that go with it are the same. And secondly, you know, when you compare DAS against a VPN as an example, you know VPN is a great solution for what it was, but I think its days are sort of over because you know you're having to pull files down and push files back up across the wire, versus a DAS, where it's just a window. It's like you know, it's like watching a YouTube. You don't have to download the video to watch a YouTube, streaming the screen at you. So in a DAS environment I'm doing the same thing. It's just streaming my window at me so I can work. And you know again, I'm centralizing all of that, I'm centralizing the management of it.
Speaker 2:
Easier to secure that way. And if you go back to the VPN example, you know, if I'm a home user and I got my laptop and maybe I'm working at Starbucks and I just downloaded something from across a VPN, somebody steals that laptop. They now have access to the file that I was just working on. In a DAS environment, that window closes. There's no files, there's nothing left behind, right? So you know, in that way that's what I was talking about earlier where DAS is not a security solution but it enables. You know, it's a security enabler. From that perspective, it makes life a little easier. From that perspective it's a security enabler. From that perspective, it makes life a little easier.
Speaker 1:
from that perspective, that's a great point and really valuable. And you mentioned security compliance. I think you work with a lot of companies and highly regulated businesses, industries. How do you think about that? You're not a security vendor per se, but how do you think about hardening your environment, their environment, against all these threats on the horizon?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean you're absolutely right. I mean there's threats every day. You read about it in the news. There's been a huge one after a huge one recently. You know we, like you said, we are not going to make customers compliant but we will help them along the way, right? So they're the environment that we're working in.
Speaker 2:
We run through PCI, which means that we have to go through the scans and remediation of everything on a quarterly basis. We've got to. So we do PCI, we do HITRUST, we do SOC. So you know, with the various compliance things, that's essentially saying that Evolve IP is meeting those standards, right. But that doesn't mean that by proxy, that customer becomes compliant. It means that we can give them the cert and that satisfies that part of their certification. They still have to run through their normal course of business from that perspective. But we do deal with things like PCI. So, as an example, I mentioned earlier call recording and intelligent call recording. In I mentioned earlier call recording and intelligent call recording. You know the ability to automatically redact anything that might be personal information or credit cards, or you know social security numbers things like that.
Speaker 2:
You know we're using tools that have that capability to be able to automatically redact that stuff so it doesn't show up in your recordings. So those are the kinds of things that we would capability to be able to automatically redact that stuff so it doesn't show up in your recordings. So those are the kinds of things that we would look to do. I don't know. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that makes total sense and that's more than your typical MSP or reseller would do, that's for sure. Seller would do that, that's for sure. And speaking of, you know the industry, the landscape. You work with pretty much who's who in the industry. I see VMware by Broadcom. Obviously Microsoft is a key partner, cisco. Tell us about those partnerships and how you see that you know helping customers.
Speaker 2:
Well, let me start with Broadcom VMware, because anybody that's in that side of the business is aware of the shakeup that Broadcom made significant changes to licensing and anybody that was below a certain size in terms of core counts had to go find another vendor to buy from. They would no longer sell direct to them and Evolve IP being of reasonable size and scale. We became one of those partners. We're able to and there it is.
Speaker 2:
We're one of their partners and we can help them with the licensing and support from that perspective. So decent relationship there. The changes with Broadcom still, you know we're learning every day what's happening. As far as some of the other vendors that we deal with, microsoft, you know we are a CSP so we're selling Microsoft licensing the entire suite I mentioned earlier. We do Teams as a collab tool. We also do Cisco Webex as a collab tool. We also do Cisco WebEx as a collab tool and we're considering others. So for all of those kinds of things, anything Microsoft, we're pretty well equipped to handle that. Cisco is a huge partner. I mentioned Broadsoft earlier, or Broadworks. It used to be a Broadsoft-owned property. Cisco acquired Broadsoft, so you know by way of acquisition we are a Cisco customer. That way we also do an awful lot on the Cisco hardware side. So most of our DAS infrastructure and certainly our routing and switching infrastructure, but also on the server side, a lot of that is Cisco-based super high-performance stuff.
Speaker 1:
Interesting. Well, you have a lot of arrows in your quiver, as it were, to help customers. And how do you think about integration, or systems integration with customer systems or legacy systems, you know, as that can get pretty hairy when it comes to technical debt. Well, as an engineering leader, I guess with that hat on how do you integrate with all that existing IT, or is it simpler than it used to be?
Speaker 2:
Well, I mean, maybe it's simpler. I'd never call it simple, you know, but if we're having those kinds of conversations around tech debt, we're thinking about it probably in the compute side of the house, right? Maybe they've got some old hardware, maybe they're trying to get out of managing their own. In a lot of cases we're talking to people who have run their own VDI and they want to offload that. And you know they still want that virtual experience, they still want all of the richness that comes with that, but they just don't want to manage the hardware and the cost that comes with it. In those cases we do have tools and expertise to be able to help them. You know, make that move. You know virtual to virtual. We also can do, you know, the physical to virtual transform their data from one to the other. You know pretty well laid out processes that way. You know great staff of engineering that can handle that kind of work.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so I think that that's where some of our value comes in, because you know, in those cases we are an MSP, right. We're helping with the work that it's going to take to make that happen and do it well, because it's our bread and butter. It's what we do, and at the same time, we're educating them about how we can help them maybe rethink their security posture and what things they should be doing to really secure themselves. Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't, and you know it's our job to make sure that they're at least aware of what is possible and what we can do for them and how to make it better. And, if not anything else, you know, make sure that they've got exceptional uptime, make sure that you know they've got all of the options available to them as far as DR or, you know, backup as a service. We do that, so we're trying to make it.
Speaker 2:
And in fact, one of our sales engineers brilliant guy Kevin, he has this saying, and I'm sure I'm going to butcher it, but he says if you can prevent an incident, prevent it. If you can't prevent it, mitigate it. You know how, how big it becomes. And if you can't mitigate it, be able to recover from it. So I think it's a really smart way of looking at this. Right, you want to make sure that you build out your protection, build out your walls as strong as you can, but if somebody infiltrates, you want to make sure that it's contained, right, so it doesn't spread throughout the network, and if you can't do that, you got to make sure that you can at least recover from it. So that's where the backup and the DR all comes into play.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so important these days and when it comes to the future, when it comes to innovation R&D acquisitions that you're making, how do you think about your own approach to innovation R&D not just partnering with vendors to rely on all the dollars they invest, but building out your own capabilities? You're a little different in that regard, right, because you do have engineers on the bench who do this work as well. I assume that's something you're looking to continue.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so when we look at the things that we actually create ourselves, we continue to innovate around the contact center space. So we have developers there. We also developed our main portal for the UC management. So we will continue to, you know, keep that up and continue to innovate. We're working on the next version of that. And then we have a couple of smaller point things that we do ourselves.
Speaker 2:
The most part, we're really good at integrating third-party stuff. So the things that where we're writing code is where you know, that's kind of a bit of an anomaly for us. It's more about, you know, putting together your best of breed and making sure that people you know can get the feature functionality that they need and being able to really put them together in a way that makes sense. So, as an example, some of the things that you see the name Dubber there, that was the call recording and the intelligent call recording stuff that we just talked about. So it's a, it's a partner. Customers know that we're using third party for that, but we're trying to find ways to make that simpler to consume, make it feel like part of the family, right? So it's part of the service without having to deal with another vendor or another, something else right, it's all part of it, and then really just trying to stay on top of what each of those vendors' capabilities are and making sure that we're moving the puck forward on all of those.
Speaker 1:
A fantastic approach. And, I guess, final question here, as we look out the next year or two what tech trends or future trends are you most excited about? You know, beyond the ones that here and now, but what's on your sort of radar with the future of Saton Well?
Speaker 2:
you know it would be remiss of me to not at least bring up AI. And you know AI means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and so we're still wrestling with where does this play for our customers, right? Where do they want us to go with it? It has a logical place in the contact center, and we're you know we're not there today, but we're pretty darn close, and we're you know we're moving in that direction. So in that case, again, if you compare us against Genesis, I'm sure that they have a full suite of functionality in the AI space, but we're going to get there.
Speaker 2:
But we also look at things like what some of our partners do, what Teams offers in AI and Copilot, and what WebEx can do with AI natively, and what Dubber does in terms of AI and its ability to not just transcribe calls but for them to be able to sort of pick up on trends and be able to report them and create some sort of analyses around. You know, hey, this is what your sales motion looks like and be able to get, you know, analytic data, not just, you know, the service, not just the recordings, and because of that, you know, using that as the example, you know, it makes it so that where in a typical contact center maybe somebody listens to three, maybe 5% of the calls as a QA you know AI can listen to 100% of them and tell you which ones to pay attention to, and that's a game changer in that space.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so many opportunities. The future looks so bright. Well, thanks so much, Peter, for just sharing a little bit behind the curtain and incredible work you're doing and a peek into where you're headed in the future. Really insightful and nice to catch up and hope to see you at one of the many industry events coming up this fall and beyond Enterprise Connect all the usual ones. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you, Evan, and thanks so much everyone for watching Reach out, follow Evolve IP. They're doing some great work in this space. Take care, have a great Fourth of July.
