Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera (Part 1)

Prem Uppaluru is co-founder, CEO, and president of Transera. The company collects data from numerous contact centers, turns unstructured data into structured data, and drives insights that improve customer satisfaction and engagement and helps predict trends. Prem has more than 25 years of experience in the telecommunications and networking industry. Prior to Transera, he held executive roles in Telera, VOIS Corporation, and Novell. In this interview he paints a detailed pictured of how Transera drives insights from the data the company collects and how those insights are being put to use in contact centers.

Sramana Mitra: Prem, let’s set some context about Transera and about you.

Prem Uppaluru: I am an engineer by training. I attended IIT in Bombay, and I have a PhD from the University of Texas. I worked in the research and development area for about seven to eight years at Bell Labs, branched off to more entrepreneurial careers, and have been a serial entrepreneur since then. This is my fourth startup. One of the startups I was involved in was sold to Novell in early 1991. Another startup I co-founded was acquired by Alcatel  in 2002. Transera is my latest startup. We have been in operation for eight years now. Transera has traditionally been a customer interaction management company, and we deliver our SaaS from the cloud. We target enterprise customers. Some of those include Office Depot, Aon, and the American Red Cross.

SM: What is the core value proposition of Transera?

PU: The ability to manage customer interactions in the cloud without having to invest in any technology or personnel and pay for the capability on a pay-as-you-go business model. Over the last two years we have been developing a new product suite based on customer engagement analytics that draws insights from different customer operation systems that take part in managing customer contacts in companies.

We created a customer interaction repository using big data technologies in the cloud. We provide a set of applications on top of that to draw insights and provide actionable intelligence. In particular, we make recommendations to enterprises to connect callers and customers to agents who deliver better business outcomes by analyzing previous transactions and making recommendations that lift revenue conversions, upselling, retention, and provide a better customer experience. We have become a profitable company with that suite, and we are now investing into our new capability. We have just announced our first engagement in our customer analytics suite called the Customer eEngagement Analyzer.

SM: Let’s do a few use cases.

PU: Let’s start with Office Depot. They are one of the larger office supplies companies in the world. They have global operations primarily serving North America and Europe. They process millions of transactions each month among their customers and their contact centers. We manage all of those interactions globally with a single application.

SM: Office Depot is a retailer. What do you mean by “handling customer interactions”?

PU: If you go to Office Depot’s website or if you look at any of their advertising, there are 1-800 numbers you can call to order things, to get customer service, to inquire about things you have ordered, etc. They operate fairly large customer centers for customer service and sales orders.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera
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