This month, AMC Technology is celebrating the one year anniversary of introducing DaVinci, its cloud-based flexible contact center platform, on the market. As the teams have been reflecting, celebrating and planning for 2020, I had a discussion with Anthony Uliano, Founder and CTO of AMC, and Praveen Ravela, Product Owner at AMC, about the hybrid deployment enhancements brought to the platform in 2019 as well as future developments.
Read the transcript of the interview below:
Carole Morris: Hi! I am Carole Morris and I am here today with Tony Uliano, Founder and CTO of AMC Technology. I am also with Praveen Ravela, Product Owner at AMC. Welcome to both of you, welcome everybody. Today we are going to talk about DaVinci. AMC Technology launched DaVinci last year in October and I wanted to have a little talk about it and know where the platform is now.
So first let me ask to both of you, what is DaVinci and what makes it unique? Praveen, you want to go first?
Praveen Ravela: Yes, thank you Carole. To me, being in this industry for quite some time now and looking at how it has transformed, it’s clear where the market is going and that’s how DaVinci has started. We see how we can bring all the communication channels together for our customers, and that’s the center of what DaVinci is going to bring on to the table. DaVinci has very different scopes, one of the key aspects is how we are going to help our customers bring their telephony and their CRM together and have their entire integration done as quickly as possible.
Anthony Uliano: I can’t believe it’s already been a year. It’s been incredible. DaVinci is really a true CRM and contact center integration platform. It’s not aligned with just a single communication platform or a single CRM system it’s actually a platform that allows you to integrate the best of breed channels with the best of breed CRM capabilities. So, customers are able to use DaVinci to combine the best of breed from both the communication side to CRM into a true hybrid deployment. DaVinci itself offers this single pane of glass experience for agents with deep embedded CRM integration and it gives our customers total flexibility to create their ideal experience for customer service.
“DaVinci itself offers this single pane of glass experience for agents with deep embedded CRM integration and it gives our customers total flexibility to create their ideal experience for customer service.”
CM: So, Tony you just said DaVinci is allowing customers to have a true hybrid deployment, so knowing now that on the market companies are moving to the cloud more and more, is there really a need for a hybrid solution?
TU: Yes, I think that hybrid is more important than ever actually now. Companies have invested heavily in their premise environments, not just in equipment but also in the way that they have configured their contact center for agent routing, agent experience, to track the metrics and so forth. So as they are looking to advance into all the digital channels that are available, and digital channels are evolving very quickly, customers really don’t want to just rip and replace. Businesses would like to leverage the investment that they have made in all that time and money and equipment; they want to be able to leverage that while still being able to evolve with all the digital channels that are coming out. DaVinci offers this true hybrid environment that allows you to keep using your premise infrastructure and add on to that all these digital channels. Hybrid is becoming increasingly important because it used to be that they could just continue to use their premise environment or they could make that decision to give that up for digital but a lot of companies don’t want to do that; they want to be able to leverage both of them and that’s what DaVinci allows you to do.
“Customers are able to use DaVinci to combine the best of breed from both the communication side and CRM into a true hybrid deployment.”
CM: Praveen, do you want to add anything on the necessity now for hybrid environments?
PR: Yes as Tony mentioned when we talk to customers and prospects, everyone has a roadmap on how they want to go the cloud and how they are going to see for themselves how they are going to reach their end customers and how they are going to help them. We’ve seen for quite some time now that end users are empowered very significantly and very quickly nowadays. So for businesses to be able to adapt to the latest technology and to be able to reach their end customers, it is a necessity to be on the cloud and be robust.
CM: So DaVinci was introduced a year ago, can you tell us how it has evolved in the past year?
PR: Almost a year now. We are heads down working with customers, partners and prospects and understanding what their needs are and which challenges they are facing primarily with the cloud first initiatives that are coming through; especially with smartphones being available to everyone and how it is empowering the public and completely changing the communication landscape as we knew it before. So we are working with partners to see how DaVinci as a platform can provide quick integration and how can we take something like the current technology and keep it before the customers so they can innovate for their unique contact center experience up to date.
TU: I agree that customers and partners really have a big influence on where we are going with our roadmap. During the past year we have dramatically increased the available apps that we have and capabilities. We’ve added integration with Genesys PureCloud, Twilio Flex, with Twilio API app. We’ve also added integration with RingCentral. As we got feedback from customers, we’ve also enhanced the user experience to make it an ever a better agent experience. We’ve done that by also increasing the CRM integrations we have. So not only have we made the existing integrations deeper, but we’ve also added integrations. We’ve started with Salesforce, and Dynamics and C4C from SAP but we’ve also added on Zendesk and ServiceNow. So we really brought in the capabilities of DaVinci and built in more use cases for hybrid deployments; and also to add these additional channels from the digital side.
CM: Great, so we talked about what happened this past year. Tell me, what is next for DaVinci, what are you working on now?
TU: As I said earlier the feedback from customers and partners fuels our roadmap. One of the things that customers have been asking about is how businesses have been invested heavily in how they route channels to agents. It’s an important aspect of good customer service: figuring out how to find the best agent at the right time. And they’ve invested heavily in how to do that routing with their phone calls and other channels. But what businesses are trying to do is leveraging their digital channels and their CRM application more as they are looking to route all objects that exist within that ecosystem to agents. So we see customers are asking to be able to take things like cases and leads and use the same routing logic to route those entities to the right agent at the right time. That’s a big part of what we are doing with DaVinci, we are adding that capability to extend routing in a universal way that not just only routes channels but also routes business objects. On top of that, we are looking at agent insights and embedded AI so we are exploring quite a few things. As we are about to turn 25, we have been focused on creating great interactions between customers, agents, businesses and the community through these innovative solutions, and that will continue to be our sole focus as we move forward. Praveen do you want to add anything?
“Customers really don’t want to just rip and replace. Businesses […] want to be able to leverage the investments they have made while still being able to evolve with all the digital channels that are coming out.”
PR: Yes, that’s really a good point with respect to the current needs that we can see and what we are looking at a long horizon. As you pointed out Carole, hybrid is more important than before at this time especially for our customers. As Tony mentioned, most of them have already invested heavily in their existing infrastructure and another thing we hear from them is how they can leverage the expertise they have in house but still be able to adapt to the new technologies, the new channels that are coming up and they can effectively serve their end users. Combining all of these, we see routing as one of the primary use case for customers need, have everything integrated together along with the other functionalities that Tony has outlined.
“We are adding that capability to extend routing in a universal way that not just only routes channels but also routes business objects.”
CM: Thanks for sharing that with us. Tony, you mentioned AMC turning 25 next year, congrats! What is AMC success based on?
TU: Well, it certainly is all of the people that are part of the AMC team. We have great people who really aspire to implement our vision. Our vision is to bring people together through great interactions and this is what we’ve been striving to do since I started the company. The people at AMC are doing a fantastic job at sharing that vision and implementing it. I think that’s what our key to success is.
CM: Great. I have one final question for you. Why did you name DaVinci “DaVinci” in the first place?
TU: DaVinci to me as a person really represents everything that we want in a solution. We wanted a solution that was inventive and artistic, and it was really born from this tremendous curiosity that we have on human interactions. As we are committed to improving these interactions within the ecosystem, through these innovative solutions, I think DaVinci does a great job helping us realize that vision.
CM: Thank you to both of you.
