Introducing the New Vonage

At Vonage’s analyst conference in San Francisco last month, a group of analysts got to preview the newly branded Vonage which was introduced at the company’s inaugural user and developer conference, Vonage Campus. All of the brands are now simply Vonage – say goodbye to Nexmo and NewVoiceMedia, or separate business and consumer brands. As part of the rebranding, Vonage introduced a nice new logo and beautiful gradient color scheme and design for its website, dashboards, and more.

Vonage CEO Alan Masarek spent a great deal of time with the analysts, laying out the company’s vision and strategy. As Masarek noted, Vonage’s mission is to make communications more flexible, intelligent, and personal so that its customers stay ahead. To do this, Vonage’s strategy is to be the world’s most flexible communications platform, leveraging the company’s APIs, global carrier network, global footprint, public cloud infrastructure, and third-party integrations.

At the conference I had a chance to speak with many Vonage executives and representatives. In this video interview, Masarek discusses the key messages at Vonage Campus conference, as well as the new branding and the One Vonage technology platform. He describes how Vonage brings together UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS, and provides an update on Vonage’s activities in 2019.

I also spoke with Vonage CMO Rishi Dave about the new branding and why it was important to Vonage to revitalize its brand and image.

Vonage Meetings

Aside from the new branding, Vonage made several new announcements, including Vonage Meetings, Vonage Conversation API, and an enhanced Vonage App Center.

Vonage Meetings adds new video collaboration capabilities to the Vonage Business Cloud (VBC) solution. Leveraging APIs via the Vonage API Platform, Vonage Meetings enables collaboration via voice, SMS, social, team messaging, email and video within a single interface.

This video shows a demo of the team messaging and meetings capabilities, as shown during the Vonage Campus event.

To delve deeper, I got a demo of how the video and meeting solution works and how a video meeting can be launched from an audio call.

AI, Contact Center, APIs, and More

During the analyst event, I met with Noam Fine, co-founder & former CEO of Over.ai, which developed a voice and conversational AI technology platform that provides intelligent virtual assistant functionality via APIs. Vonage recently acquired Over.ai’s technical team and intellectual property and will be integrating its technology throughout the Vonage portfolio.

Based on its NewVoiceMedia acquisition, Vonage has been very aggressive in the contact center space. I spoke with Erik Johnson, Director, Product Management, about Vonage’s contact center offerings, as well as about how they integrate with the company’s UCaaS offerings.

A big part of the Vonage discussions and presentations were around the Vonage API platform (formerly Nexmo).

In these videos, Lawrence Byrd demonstrates an end-to-end demo on creating customer journeys through conversations, from acquiring to supporting customers.

APIs play a key role in Vonage’s portfolio and strategy.  This video presents a demo of how Vonage’s APIs are used to provide “smart numbers."

Shortly after the San Francisco conference I had a chance to meet with several people at Vonage’s R&D center in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv has become a hub for technology innovation, and the Vonage office exemplifies this. I spoke with Sagi Dudai, Vonage CTO, and Ron Maayan, VP of Product Management, who discussed VBC Meetings and how Vonage provides an integrated experience. We also talked about the benefits of having an integrated UCaaS and CPaaS platform, as well as how AI is being integrated to Vonage’s offerings.

Final Thoughts

Vonage is separating itself from the pack by focusing on having a single platform that includes not just UCaaS and CCaaS, but also CPaaS. With the addition of Vonage Meetings, the company has a fully-featured, integrated platform, Vonage Business Communications. The company’s key differentiation as its ability to leverage its CPaaS platform and APIs to customize and integrate communications into business applications and workflows. Not all companies need this capability or have the internal staff and resources to properly utilize CPaaS, but those that do can create better employee and customer experiences.

While I was very impressed with what I heard and saw at the event, Vonage has some stiff competition in the market, and has to work hard to get above the noise. As CMO Rishi Dave told the analysts, “We are leveraging our legacy as fuel for our future, but are signaling a bold, new direction through brand revitalization.” With new investments in the Vonage name and brand, we’ll have to see if Vonage’s new message will resonate with customers.