[00:00:23] Speaker A: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Metrosite Metrocast. This is episode 24 and I'm excited to have with us today Mike Frane, who is CEO of VOS Digital Workplace Management. Before we get into the Q and A, just a quick overview. We're going to talk about how the world of unified communications and collaboration is continuing to evolve as companies increase their migration to the cloud. They need to support the needs of the hybrid workplace and most importantly, they're looking at optimizing operational expenses during challenging economic times. So I look forward, Mike, to getting your insight and your opinion. And let's go ahead and open up the discussion with just tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Vos.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Thank you Erwin. It's good to be here. I appreciate you making it available to us. So my background is I've been at Vos for about ten years as the CEO. Prior to that I ran a UK public company in the billing space, so OSS space. So pretty much most of my career been involved in some form or other with communications and telecommunications.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: And tell us a little bit about Foss. What kinds of problems are you solving for your customers?
[00:01:38] Speaker B: So we. So that we talk about ourselves as a digital experience management company. We highly focused on UC and collaboration, so we know that area well. Deep expertise in that space.
We have three different product capabilities, three solutions. One is a migration tool, another one is an automation tool and the third one is our monitoring and analytics tool. So we just talk quickly about the automation one as an example, literally any set of repeatable manual tasks that can be automated, we can create capabilities, workflows to do that with. So we spend a lot of time and we use our insights tool to do that, to try and figure out what people are actually doing on a day to day basis. And we take those use cases and create automation workflows around them. And the benefits are quite obvious if you think about it, because it's like having a production line as opposed to doing it another way. By simply automating those tasks, they get done quicker. So there's cost savings by definition in, but they also get done more accurately. So you're doing them things at scale, at pace and more accurately, so you get cost savings as well as obviously better success at the end of the day. So it's quite a simple value proposition at a very high level. Yeah.
If you look at the monitoring tool, that value proposition is obviously we all know what monitoring tools do, they collect a lot of data and present it and dashboards and stuff. But the key to everything is resolution of problems, not knowing about them. So essentially everyone's trying to get their mean time to resolution down to as close to zero as they can. So obviously knowing the UC space well and understanding what people are using, it just makes there's so much data out there. So just knowing what to collect and what to aggregate and what to correlate in terms of what's actually useful as opposed to just an overload of data is quite good for us. Of course, the other real interesting thing is once you know what the problem is, trying to figure out where the source of that problem is is the key. Knowing there's something wrong is kind of like, well, whatever, you've got to get down to what's actually wrong. So you got to be able to pull everything together, aggregate it up, but you've got to be able to dive down really quickly and really efficiently to find out what the problem is. So I think that deep knowledge of the space and the telco space and the UC space helps us do that effectively. Another quite interesting thing is if you think about that automation tool, it essentially gives us the ability to find problems and use the provisioning capabilities to sort of auto correct it. So we talk about that as self healing. So it again just gets back to applying more automation, some AI in there, to just try and solve people's problems quicker and more cost effectively and efficiently. And that's really the sort of fundamental kind of thesis of what we do in VOS today.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Excellent. So you mentioned that the need to drill down when there is an issue and uncover the root cause. And typically the way the markets worked, at least in the UC monitoring space, is the UC monitoring tools have been effective at finding problems or identifying problems with things like call quality, video quality. But then you always had a separate network tool that you had to go and look into to find out what's going on, if there's an underlying network issue. So about a year ago you acquired a company called LayerX. Can you talk a little bit about how layer x technologies fits into that VoS portfolio and addresses that need for holistic network and UC management?
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Sure. So I think that we got introduced to lyrics, interestingly, by some of our customers. So people like Telstra and Vodafone were using vast automate platform and had already acquired the lyrics capabilities and they themselves saw that, well, if we could combine those two capabilities, you can get another layer of automation on top of that. So that's the self healing stuff I talked about. But the other interesting thing is if you know what's going on in the network, having the consumption of which users are doing what and what those users profiles are. So if you know there's something wrong on the network and in some weird location where everybody is on six months of holiday versus that network component is in the head office and the CEO is connected to it. So we can enrich that data by all the usage data as well and all the user data and all the user profiles that we've got on the provisioning side. So just augmenting that data gives you another kind of capability that you wouldn't have if any of those two solutions were kind of on their own.
We actually land up partnering with Cisco, I mean, with lyrics in the Cisco space, because when we started unbundling our relationships from Cisco into direct relationships with the MSP's, Cisco were also kind of end of life ing some of their assurance capabilities. So it was just a market opportunity as well. So there was a kind of a combination of a market opportunity as well as obviously the ability to put those tools together into a single kind of stronger platform than either of those could be on their own.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Excellent. Yeah, I'd love to find that place where you mentioned six months of holiday. That sounds interesting.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Well, maybe it's all those meta employees that are a lot of holiday. Now.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: I wanted to dig a little bit more deeply into the value proposition. We've been as a research company studying the use of unified communication, digital transformation, or digital workplace management tools now for a number of years, and we often find that when companies are adopting a UC platform, they go in thinking, I'm going to get everything I need from my provider. Maybe I'll move into a cloud provider and they'll give me the management tools I need. And then usually at some point down the road, they realize there's gaps they may need to support a multi vendor environment. What are you typically seeing? Drive organizations to look at a solution like yours, as opposed to, again, just relying on the management capabilities that come with whatever UC platform they're implementing.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
So in some ways it's like the hierarchy, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There's some very basic needs that people have in the beginning and they got some interoperational capabilities, the different simplicity, et cetera, access to the multiple tools from the single vendor. So at a very high level, if your requirements are quite basic, then clearly what the vendors provide makes a ton of sense. It's almost like once people have satisfied that capability, they start dropping down and saying, now that we understand some of the benefits that you can get from these tools. What about this? And what about that? So, you know, the value prop is very, it's like an onion with lots of layers to it. So at a very high level, it's got simple MACD stuff that you want to do, but as you go deeper, the problems get more complex. So as you said, people have got hybrid cloud on prem. They've got different vendors, they've got overlapping tools. It's not just different vendors, but they got Zoom and the teams, and they got hangouts and they got slack and they've just got lots of different stuff at the moment. So if your environment's quite simple and your needs are quite simple, then obviously relatively simple tools work for you. So I think it's, sometimes people don't even know what actually their problems are. They've got to solve some basic things before they get down to the next level. So I think it's a very kind of hierarchical thing and it's a maturity thing as well. In the beginning, people are kind of happy with something, and they started using.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: It for a while.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Then they realized, hang on a sec, there's more to life than just this.
I think the other problem, this value prop thing, is quite difficult because, again, I think it's a slight pyramid of fairly simple organizations tend to have simpler problems, but the big guys tend to have complex environments. They have complex, they tend to set up their UC stack in order to solve some different problems. So if you maybe look at someone like higher education kind of customers, they've got specific problems around cyclical onboarding, off boarding, mass student notifications, etcetera. And if you look at someone like a retail guy, they might have a problem wherever they need to stand up new stores very quickly in a complete cookie cutter model. So just want something that takes a specific set of configs and gets it done quickly and efficiently. So it's almost like you find that the value prop is very different. And the key, I think, is kind of solving those very basic problems and then kind of understanding what people are trying to do and where they're trying to go and what their business problems are. Because the whole benefit of UCe isn't just enabling comms, it's actually, can you make the organization more effective and efficient and help them solve their business problems? So it's kind of for us as well, it's a layered thing. We get involved with companies, we tend to solve one or two use cases. And if I'm completely honest, they're sometimes so different that there's almost, you can't say, hey, this is the value prop. Because that value prop doesn't mean anything to the other guy. He's got some other problem. He doesn't care about that value prop. So it tends to move around a bit. So it's really hard to, it's not really commoditized. It tends to be quite unique, particularly for the very big guys.
So kind of a long complicated answer to, I guess a complicated problem.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: No, but that's really where the value of a solution like yours comes in, is that you have very unique cases where maybe the one size fits all toolset that's available from a provider isn't necessarily sufficient.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's that as well as people's needs change, they start off with, it's a little bit like you solve one problem and then there's always another one and another one. So I think the key to really being successful at providing management tools is you've got to be agile, you've got it. The tool's got to be highly configurable, it's got to adapt because the environments our customers are in, the technologies they're using and consuming, they keep changing. So you've got to be able to move with that quickly. And I think that's just fundamental. Architecturally, you've got to be able to evolve quickly and be relevant to potentially what their problem is going to be tomorrow as well.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: Excellent. So I want to dig in a little bit. You mentioned the use of AI. How do you see AI? And we've heard the term now AI ops, impacting the way that organizations are managing networks and communication services.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: So I think there's a ton of potential. There is this simple answer. I think the combination of AI and machine learning means that, again, if you take, go back to what we said earlier, which is we really automating things that people do manually. So if we can start using machine learning to track what those things are that get done repeatedly, and you can start building rules and creating rules around those things, you can essentially start correcting problems quicker. You can also start using AI, getting to more predictive analysis, because that's the holy grail. You don't want to if you can. At the moment, we all kind of, we report problems after they happened and we like scratch our heads and so how do we kind of fix that then? The second one is in flight stuff. If we can fix a call quality during a call, that's a lot better. It's even better if we can fix it before it happens. So everyone's moving that capability to be as proactive as possible. So the more you can learn about what goes wrong, under what circumstances, etcetera, and just so much data to process. And that's where AI and NML becomes super, super interesting because they can just churn through all that stuff, come up with things that help you become more proactive in the way you manage things.
So I think there's an enormous amount of efficiency and capabilities can be driven out using those technologies effectively and efficiently.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Excellent. And definitely an area where we see continued investment and acceleration and development of the technology.
Recently, watching the development of AI.
Go ahead, I'm sorry.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: You'Re quite right. The underlying AI tools just keep moving in leaps and bounds and obviously that's great for us because we just consume some of those things and use them. So it's fabulous.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Excellent. So I want to ask about a recent announcement you had with Microsoft. And we've obviously seen Microsoft Teams gaining tremendous market share over the last year. You announced something called a partner pivot program. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Sure. So I think Microsoft's interest in vos is kind of across a number of layers. So people talk a lot about the team's growth.
The next phase for Microsoft is they want people to use voice as well as just teams. So they want to kind of, there's only about 20% of the team's users that are really using voice. So that's a big drive for them to get people to consume voice from Microsoft as well. And obviously we've got quite a lot of experience in that space. So that's the one area that kind of made some sense for us to have discussions. The second is because of our track record of delivering these UCAS platforms. There's about 4 million seats that are kind of out there in the market on Cisco branded HS, and that platform's been end of life. So all of those end users are considering their future and where they want to go to, et cetera. So again, Microsoft obviously desperately wants them all to go to teams.
And because we know those partners and because we know those end customers, but not just do we know them, we know what's configured, what they're using, what they're not using, and all that data about what's been set up and how it works. And then the third component is we've obviously got these migration tools so we can help move from one platform to another in a kind of a very effective and efficient way. So it's those three things that bundled together got Microsoft talking to us. And so the plan is we're helping essentially our service provider partners to pivot from where they are now to a kind of a broader environment where they can deliver Microsoft to the existing end customers because if they, those end customers are going to move somewhere else, that obviously doesn't work well for the service providers and obviously it doesn't necessarily work for us and doesn't necessarily work so well for Microsoft because they could go anywhere. So giving our service provider partners that platform that they can have a hybrid capability initially so they can have some old legacy stuff plus some team stuff, so they can always augment and gradually transfer people to where they want to be, just means they got a better customer retention capability as well. And obviously it works well for Cisco, I mean for Microsoft. And clearly it's a good thing for us as well. So we came up with this kind of plan which called pivot, to essentially help those guys pivot from their legacy approach to their UCas offerings to a more kind of modern and up to date one.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: So as we wind down, I want to ask you to put on, look in your crystal ball as you're thinking about 2023.
How do you see the market around workplace and digital transformation, digital communications evolving?
What are you doing in terms of say, the concerns about the global economy? Sort of what's top of mind and what do you see happening over the next year?
[00:16:58] Speaker B: So clearly we see it in our business all the time is people are much more conservative about spending money. So everybody is looking at what the ROI is, what the value prop around everything is ton more depth and they tend to be yet another committee that you have to run those things through. So there's definitely pressure from everybody to make sure they're buying the right things at the right price. So obviously by definition, our automation stuff is very price cost saving centric in its capabilities. So we're just doubling down on things like the self healing and the AI stuff to make it even more automation, deeper levels of automation to obviously increase the cost savings. But another interesting dynamic which I think we kind of sometimes don't think about this carefully, is if we look back a bit to what happened before then.
So pre Covid, the way people would kind of implement a UCE or collab strategy would typically be they'd go talk to all the vendors, you know, Microsoft would push them in one direction, Cisco push them in another direction, et cetera. They probably make a relatively vendor centric decision where they wanted to go, then go out to RFP, RFI first, then RFP, then evaluation and a whole lot of decisions. And in some time in the future they gradually start transitioning and that would take potentially years before they move to those new technologies.
When everyone started working remotely, people didn't always have the infrastructure to support that. So stuff just started happening. There was no top down decisions, there was no let's go evaluate stuff. People just started using slack or Zoom or whatever they wanted to. So organizations are sitting now with proliferation of different, sometimes competing, often overlapping things. All that's being put together in a really unmanaged, haphazard way. So, you know, they've got possibly duplicate costs, people have got licenses for five different things and no one knows who's using them and do they need them, whatever. They've got overlaps of cloud consumption, but they've got on premise consumption as well. So it's created a whole lot of mess. And given that people are so conscious about costs now, they need to get that under control quickly. So I think that's a crazy interesting opportunity for us to work with people, help them through discovery and kind of monitoring what's there, what's being used, and then configure that environment and set it up to be sort of optimal from a resource consumption, license consumption, etcetera point of view. So I think people are going to look inward a lot and try and fix up what they've got and try and make that more effective and efficient. And obviously, you know, who knows what new cool stuff's going to come out next week. And again. So if that new approach, that new architecture is by definition vendor independent, then, you know, people can go best to breathe, stop talking about it and actually start doing it. So something cool comes, I want to plug it in, they want to be able to use it and coordinate it with other thing. So I think that's pretty interesting for people that are in our space that are supporting people being able to put platforms like that together and architectures like that together.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Yeah, we're certainly seeing a lot of interest in rationalization.
Can we avoid overlapping licenses? But at that same time, users have gotten kind of comfortable using some of these tools and they prefer them, and it may not want to take things away from people. So yeah, having that analytics to understand which tools are people using, how are they using them, what are the potential ROI for using the tools? Certainly, I think will be critical.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: Absolutely. No, it's very hard to figure out what to rationalize if you don't know what you got and who's using what. And the reality is it's a little bit like the old fax machine thing. If your customers are, what do you talk to on Zoom? You can't have a team strategy, so people will have multiple tools. That's just the way it's going to be. You know, once, that's just the way it is. But it's about, as you say, it's about understanding who needs what licenses and how that's all going to work, rather than let's just give everybody seven of each of these licenses and suck up the cost. So definitely think there's some clever ways to get some very significant cost savings in place for people.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: So wrapping up, how can people contact you? How can they learn more about Vos if they have additional questions?
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Yep, obviously the easiest Vos dash solutions.com. we're quite active on things like LinkedIn as well. People can find us there. There's blogs, et cetera, out there, so that's probably the easiest ways to get a hold of us.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. That's all the time we have for this week's episode. Please feel free to check back if you enjoyed this episode and look at some of our others that are available on our
[email protected], or on our Metrogy YouTube channel. You can also find our Metro site on your favorite podcasting application, and hopefully the recording comes out okay. And you can also find us on LinkedIn and Twitter as well. Mike, thank you so much for being here and wish you a happy holiday.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Thank you very much, Owen. Yep. Really appreciate it. It's good to catch up again.
