Nextiva NextCon 2019 – and What’s Next to Come

Conference season is in full swing, but alas I haven’t cloned myself and I can’t attend all of the events that I’d like. One of my favorite conferences is Nextcon, Nextiva’s annual partner and customer event, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to attend this year. Instead, I spoke with Nextiva CMO Yaniv Masjedi to get the inside scoop on the event. Here’s what he had to say.

Yaniv, I heard that NextCon 2019 was a big success - tell us about the event.

Thanks, Blair. This NextCon was our best one yet with more than 1,000 business leaders in attendance and amazing speakers sharing incredible wisdom. We intentionally made NextCon a boutique-style experience where attendees had several chances to learn in small groups and network with each other, and got a great response from that strategy.

Like previous years, we held the event in Scottsdale, AZ, and it spanned three days. It included workshops, sessions, and several keynote speeches with people like Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph, elite athlete Kyle Maynard, and marketing legend Rand Fishkin. The whole thing wrapped with an amazing concert by Ezra Ray Hart, a super group comprised of Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray, Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra, and Emerson Hart of Tonic. It was a blast. We missed seeing you at this year’s conference; hope to see you at the next one!

For people who weren’t able to attend, what were the key messages to the audience?

Tomas Gorny, Nextiva's co-founder and CEO, gave a really great keynote speech on the future of business communications and how customer preferences have drastically changed over the past 10 years. It was fascinating to hear his take on how tracking the customer journey is more important now than ever before.

He explained how vital it is for businesses to know, understand, and remember their customers -- how those who do know, understand, and remember them, will flourish. He also made a compelling case that those businesses that don’t make time to know, understand, and remember their customers will struggle and possibly even fail.

Aside from Tomas, the keynotes were compelling. So many leaders talked about their businesses and the future of business in general.

Were there any big announcements?

During Tomas's keynote, he talked about Nextiva’s overall vision and direction, and also announced the newest version of NextOS.

The following day, our CTO, Phil Steitz, talked more about Nextiva’s technology infrastructure, and then Chethan Visweswar, our vice president of global product engineering, gave a live demo of the new NextOS on stage.

In addition to NextOS updates, we made a number of other product-related announcements, all focused on helping businesses grow and serve their customers better.

What’s been the biggest change for Nextiva in the past year?

We've had a ton of great things happen in the past year, mostly as it relates to the growth of our team; we welcomed our 1,000 team member this year! That growth is a testament to the great things we are doing from a team/culture/product/service perspective. During the past year, we’ve added some truly outstanding people to our team. It has also been a year of huge growth in terms of customers

What should we expect to see/hear from Nextiva in the next 3-6 months?

Exciting announcements out of Nextiva just keep coming. This week alone, we announced that Glassdoor named us one of the best places to work in 2020 and U.S. News and World Report named us the best business phone service of 2020, beating out a field of 500 competitors.

In the next 3-6 months, we will continue to focus on growing our team, culture and innovative products. I will say that there are some MAJOR announcements to come, but you’ll just have to stay tuned!