I just came off our annual Sales Kick-off and our beginning of the year All-Hands kick-off. I love doing those because it provides an opportunity to set the stage for the coming year and reflect on all we’ve accomplished. And, man, when I look back on 2016, the company and team have blown it out of the water. In a year of such significant change for us as a company, I wanted to share some of our successes as we continue to grow our business and platform to better meet the needs of serving customers in every industry.
As you may already know, we announced our divesture from LiveOps in December 2015 with an investment from Marlin Equity. In doing this, we had to stand up a completely separate, independent company, which, needless to say, does not come with an exact blue print. It certainly was not easy and while we’ve suffered a few bumps and bruises from the process, I’m proud to say that we completely finalized the split about mid-year 2016. This meant building several departments basically from scratch, including a new finance team and a new HR department, along with implementing new IT infrastructure and systems including from Netsuite to ADP to Office365.
As part of our divestiture, we also had the opportunity to revamp our executive team. While we already had a good foundation, we brought on a number of new executives – Keith Geneva, CFO; Carmela Pinzone, SVP of Operations; and Meg Marsh, VP of People – that are allowing us to make some major, positive shifts in how we do business and our overall culture. Adding to that, our entire employee base grew, including tripling the size of our Canada office and expanding our business in the APAC region. In fact, this growth and positive shift in culture helped us rank on Built In Austin’s list of Top Digital Employers in Austin.
Simply put, where we are as an organization, with regard to our infrastructure and our team compared to a year ago, is truly amazing!
Even with all this corporate reorganization going on, we introduced an all-new Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) strategy with the introduction of CxEngage in 2016. This is a brand new, built from the ground up, CCaaS solution that we felt was critical to driving the contact center market forward. We took this product from concept to reality in less than 22 months.
We designed the platform to completely change how organizations use their contact center solutions, by solving the industry’s three biggest problems – call quality, call latency, and scalability – through a technological advantage that nobody else offers. Calls never leave the PBX, which means better performance and significant savings in hidden telco fees. To cap off the traction we experienced with CxEngage, Gartner recognized and validated our vision and ability to execute by naming Serenova a Challenger in the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). Truly an amazing accomplishment from our engineering and product teams – well done guys! Stay tuned for updates on this in the year to come.
To top all this activity off, you might have heard that we rebranded in October 2016 – a move I believe is one of the best things we’ve done. With all the work that has gone into the split from LiveOps and delivering an all-new approach to CCaaS with CxEngage, the rebrand was designed to capture the positive transformation that we not only have gone through as a company, but a positive transformation that we are delivering to the market and our customers. By officially becoming Serenova, our rebrand is helping us emphasize that we are an entirely new company with a sole focus on software.
As you might imagine, last year was a busy, exhausting and yet exciting year. I believe – as does my entire team – that while we’ve got a lot of work ahead in 2017, we set the stage for a great year ahead and a trajectory that will blow us all away. So, thank you to a stellar group of employees – great being in the trenches with these guys.
And, lastly, we’d like to give special thanks to our customers and partners who’ve continued to invest in our services — without you, we would not be where we are today! 2016 was an epic year for us as an independent “startup.” Looking forward to what’s ahead in 2017.
