A press release came across the wire Monday morning, "Virsae Hires Executive Vice President to lead North American Business." Virsae is far less than a household brand name, but it has a history that many will know.
Headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, Virsae was founded by the developers and software engineers of the former Agile Software. As an Avaya VAR, Agile developed Contact Center Express (CCE) to offer a mid-sized (and lower cost) alternative to Avaya's enterprise contact center offer, Interaction Center. In 2004, Avaya saw the success that Agile was having with the product in its home region, AsiaPac, and decided to OEM CCE for worldwide distribution.
Five years later, in 2009, Avaya purchased the application from Agile. As Agile's staff was not acquired by Avaya, that group reorganized as the Agile Group to develop new software solutions. Virsae was originally operated as part of the wider Agile Group, but has now been established as a standalone business. Both the Agile Group and Virsae share a CEO, the former CEO of Agile Software, Tony Jayne.
Virsae developed a hosted suite for the management and monitoring of multi-vendor communications environments built on the Microsoft public cloud platform, Windows Azure. But it's been five years since this group sold their contact center application to Avaya. While nobody I spoke to said it, I suspect there was a five year non-compete clause. Because the company is now ready to launch a new contact center solution, Virsae CC. Not surprisingly, the new solution is compatible with Microsoft Lync and built on Azure.
Enter John DeLozier, stage left.
DeLozier is the perfect choice to spearhead efforts to bring Virsae CC to the North American market. As the CEO of ACT, DeLozier was the first to implement and service Contact Center Express in the US. As the SVP/EVP of sales of an Avaya channel partner, first at Cross Telecom and then at ArrowS3 after it was acquired, he has led a sales team deploying Contact Center Express--as well as other contact center and enterprise communications solutions--nationwide.
But why was a move to a software provider attractive to 20-year channel veteran DeLozier?
We usually see the need for channel change discussed from the point of view of the solution providers: "Channels partners have to embrace the cloud." "Channels partners have to move from CAPEX to OPEX." "Channel partners have to learn to sell to business decision makers." "Channels partners need to sell business value."
However, like the vendors bemoaning the need for channels to change, channel partners are often looking at the vendor community and finding it wanting. Years of complicated unified communications solutions and messages, along with "migration paths" that made no sense for customers, have made life in the channel less rewarding.
DeLozier sees Virsae's coming infrastructure-agnostic contact center solution, fully compatible with the increasingly popular Microsoft Lync, as a breath of fresh air. He has seen customers struggling to understand how to gain some of the benefits of newer solutions while mired in existing infrastructure and contracts. As a traditional partner, he didn't always feel he had the right solution for a customer. He believes that Virsae, built from the outset with a cloud-based architecture, may be the answer for some.
As I discussed these issues with DeLozier, it became more obvious than ever that the struggles faced by traditional enterprise communications go-to-market channels have driven a number of recent news events. Over the next few weeks, I will explore these in a series of posts on The Changing Channel. Stay tuned.
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