With a slew of enhancements for its GlobalMeet platform, PGi continues to bulk up its product portfolio and carry forward on CEO Don Joos’s repositioning of the company from a collection of brands (such as from the January 2017 ReadyTalk acquisition) into a full-stack provider of cloud-based business communications tools.
The GlobalMeet platform, which provides cloud calling, collaboration and meeting, and event capabilities, is the focal point for the company’s transition. The
addition of UCaaS came in March, for example — an offering initially available in the U.S. and since extended to the U.K., noted Joos, who joined PGi in October 2018.
The enhancements PGi unveiled this week aim to:
- Improve voice quality during online meetings, via incorporation of Dolby’s high-def audio technology. Dolby Voice strips out unwanted sounds, suppresses background noise, and adjusts for volume fluctuations to improve the voice experience, PGi said.
- Provide consistency between the GlobalMeet desktop interface and mobile client, via a redesigned iOS app optimized by device type (iPhone or iPad)
- Expand GlobalMeet’s geographic reach and create additional localized calling experiences, with global inbound numbers now available in Mexico, South Africa, Israel, and New Zealand. These countries flesh out a list that already included Brazil, Australia, Japan, France, Ireland, and Germany, as well as the U.S. and the U.K., where PGi offers full phone service.
- Facilitate GlobalMeet event services, with a self-service portal that lets users book new events and receive conference details; view the schedule of upcoming events and make changes in real-time; and receive notices upon availability of post-event deliverables, downloadable from the portal
While my conversation with Joos pre-dated these latest GlobalMeet enhancements, they clearly reflect his desire to “meet any business use case” that comes up. And toward that goal, when we talked, he did provide a heads-up on what to watch for in 2020.
For one, PGi will be looking to add contact center capabilities so that it can meet a larger addressable market as well as better serve existing customers, Joos said. It will be partnering on contact center, not building its own, he added.
Additionally, PGi will be supplementing its portfolio with SD-WAN capabilities. This will enable PGi to better serve multisite, multinational customers, Joos said.
That PGi has an open API architecture is key, Joos added. “The enterprise customer is looking for someone that can provide [communications] capabilities to them but also enable them to build their own differentiators, right? You don’t want to buy a differentiator,” he said.
And while Joos describes his goal of turning PGi into a “software company providing business communications tools,” what he really means is that he wants to support “interactions.” To him, the word “communications” connotes human to human, and what’s taking place today also very much about human to machine and machine to machine, and those say “interaction.”
Having an open API platform allows him to think about “everything a business wants to do,” Joos said. Being able to combine an open API architecture with a mix of open source and proprietary technology, he concluded, “unleashes so much creativity” in the way businesses embed communications into their workflows to drive whatever goals they're trying to achieve.
