Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. My guest on the pod this week is Sanjay Srinivasan. He's the Senior Vice President of Solutions Engineering for Vonage. In his distant past, he served as the Chief Architect for Simple Signal. They were acquired by Vonage to be their business arm about a decade ago.
And because of that, he and I have a long history together at the early stages of UCaaS. Back then we called it hosted PBX. We were sort of early innovators around the broad, soft switch platform that powered a lot of the early providers in the space and that platform would later come to be purchased by Cisco.
We broke a lot of the same regulations. We figured out a lot of the same problems. We broke a lot of eggs together. Scaled some session border controllers for service providers together, and we did all that work along with our great engineering teams. But I can tell you, I don't think it's bombastic to say, that this is a conversation with one of the early pioneers of hosted VoIP and a close friend for nearly 15 years.
We joked that for 10 of those years at various industry conferences, and every year we were like, this is going to be the year of video. Of course, all it took was a pandemic for that to happen, right? And now we feel like we have to have a formal 30-minute meeting to accomplish what we could have covered in a five minute phone call.
Because you know, nobody wants to make phone calls anymore, right? We always want to get on video. Here we are though, both former CTOs, in the VoIP business talking about how humans need face-to-face interaction and how we need to learn to take breaks between our meetings. He shares some insights on the blurring line of who is actually in customer service in the business, a theme that we've heard multiple times in recent weeks.
He also said something that I found incredibly interesting though that and I've added it to my lexicon, “happy agents create happy customers”. Seems obvious, but customer experience always starts with the agent experience. And something we really need to think about if you're redesigning your contact center.
This led us to conversations about communications, APIs, supporting unique business cases, and needing to stop worrying about tech and start worrying about the problems that we're trying to solve before we get into wiring APIs up. Lastly, we wrapped up with soccer becoming popular in the US, the availability of high quality 5G everywhere, how a book reader could eventually become the most important app on your phone and lastly, and most importantly, how the judge in my cousin Vinny, is possibly one of the most underrated roles in modern cinema. So, time to get to it. This is a podcast I've really been looking forward to. My longtime innovation partner and peer, and all around great guy, Sanjay Srinivasan, Senior Vice president of Solutions Engineering for Vonage.
ABOUT SANJAY
Chief Architect, GM, SVP, Business Services, Vonage
Sanjay has over 24 years if experience in the areas of VOIP, UCaaS, Cloud/Hosted Services, SD-WAN, Software Development, Telecommunications and IP networking with time spent on Product Development, Marketing, Telecom Service Provider, IP MPLS and launching businesses. He has launched services in the telecommunications and managed services arena using ground-breaking technologies in the areas of VOIP and Cloud Computing. He has led and coordinated large teams to build disruptive business models and services challenging status quo in the areas of telecommunications.
He has built successful businesses offering Cloud Communications, Hosted VOIP, SD-WAN and IP Networking Services.
Specialties: Specialize in the area of Hosted Services - CaaS & PaaS.
CONTACT SANJAY