Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get back to doing some use cases in the industries that you are working with and really understanding what was happening before you came in to those situations and what’s happening as you do your magic in those use cases.

David Schmaier: Let’s go back to Sky Italia now. I met Sky last year at Dreamforce. They were using the Siebel Communications industry-specific on-premise piece of software that some of my people here have built over a decade ago. They wanted to move to the cloud but Oracle had not invested in the Siebel product after that acquisition. It’s hard to stay competitive if you don’t invest in a piece of software for a decade. Oracle really did Sky a disservice.

When we met them at Dreamforce, they had been starting on their journey to go to Salesforce. They just purchased Salesforce. What a lot of people do today with Salesforce and the Salesforce ecosystem is you buy Salesforce and then you hire a systems integrator and they custom-build all the industry capabilities for you. I met the executives of Sky Italia and I said, “Tell me about what you’re doing.” They said, “We have 5,000 contact centers taking 25 million calls a year across multiple channels to support 5 million customers. We’re going to custom-build for millions of dollars this functionality with a top-tier systems integrator.” I said, “That’s interesting. Do you want to see the application that you’ve already custom-built?”

This gentleman’s name is Umberto Angelucci who’s the CTO of Sky Italia. Because his native language was Italian, I think he looked at me that maybe I didn’t understand. I walked him over our trade shoe booth and said, “This is Vlocity Communications.” I think he was stunned. I said, “What product do you use now?” He said, “Siebel Communications.” I pointed to one of our people and said, “That’s the guy who built that product. We’re now bringing you that capability and way more in the cloud on the Salesforce platform.” From there, we had many meetings in Milan. They became a customer. Now, they standardized on Vlocity and Salesforce for their omni-channel initiatives. This is the largest B2C contact center on Salesforce in all of Europe.

Sramana Mitra: Has that use case translated to other telcom providers?

David Schmaier: Yes. We just announced yesterday that another provider in Italy just standardized on Vlocity. That’s for B2C and B2B. We also have a couple of big announcements coming out shortly.

Sramana Mitra: What I find interesting is that in telecom, your adoption is happening in Europe. Is that deliberate? What’s driving that?

David Schmaier: I’m hosting with Salesforce an executive communications dinner at Dreamforce next week. I have 30 CXOs from companies like AT&T, Verizon, and DirecTV, and a lot of the leading people in Europe and Asia too. It’s a global market. The reason why we got going in Europe first is that in the US, it’s consolidated so much. AT&T uses Siebel Communications. Sprint uses Siebel. Most of these people have used the prior product that we built. It’s a big opportunity for us to go in there and bring them to the cloud and replace our old stuff that Oracle has not done a good job with.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity
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