Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It is the call center you are supporting.

Prem Uppaluru: That is right. They offer the 1-800 number to their customer, and they have both consumers and business customers. Many of the business customers tend to be continued customers in the sense that they would do business with Office Depot every month. All of those calls, e-mails, and chat sessions go through these contact centers. We manage all the contact center traffic that originates in North America and Europe. We intercept these calls in the cloud and intelligently route them to the agents, wherever they are. We virtualize the contact center platform by enabling Office Depot to virtualize their workforce. They have agents on four continents serving North America and Europe. They have agents in the U.S., all over Europe, India, the Philippines, Latin America, the Bahamas, etc. We connect these callers to the right agents instantaneously, and we reduce the total cost of ownership for Office Depot and save them millions of dollars each year.

That is a good illustration of a global enterprise with a global workforce managing their entire customer care and order processing service through a cloud-based application that Transera manages and delivers as a service. Office Depot manages their entire global operation with fewer than half a dozen people and without any equipment, without any capital infusion, without any of their own technology or assets, by simply using a cloud-based application.

SM: We constantly get pitched about customer service call center–related offerings. Frankly, it seems like an incredibly crowded space. Can you describe the ecosystem and talk about where you fit into this crowded space?

PU: You can see contact centers in the sense of technology versus people – people being the workforce that is actually taking the calls. Ninety percent of the calls to contact centers is in the agent and 10% is in the technology. There are a number of software vendors that provide technology solutions that enable contact center companies to manage their workforce and customer interactions in an effective way. There are about half a dozen technologies involved in this, starting with a ACD (automatic call distributor) or interaction manager, which is the space we are in.

Adjacent to that is voice self-service, web self-service, CRM applications from Salesforce.com, or quality management applications that participate in the training of agents and workforce management applications that participate in forecasting and scheduling agents efficiently. There are half a dozen solution segments in the contact center from the technology perspective, and we fall into the customer interaction management sector. Even that field is crowded with a number of legacy players who have been delivering on-premise solutions, which require significant capital, technology, and process management. We are part of a new breed of technology solution providers that are providing this as a service from the cloud by developing a cloud-friendly, multitenant SaaS application.

SM: Whom do you consider as your closest competitors?

PU: We have two kinds of competitors. On our larger enterprise customers side the competition are on premise vendors like Avaya or Cisco, and in the hosted contact center market the competitors tend to be inContact and Interactive Intelligence.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera
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