Nextiva: Beyond UCaaS — Platform Selling Key for Future Prosperity

(Pictured above: Nextiva CEO Tomas Gorny at NextCon 2019 in Scottsdale, Arizona, Nov. 4.

NEXTIVA NEXTCON — Nextiva on Monday unveiled the latest innovations to NextOS, its customer experience management platform, and will roll out an all-new partner program in January.

The announcements were made at this week’s Nextiva NextCon 2019, in Scottsdale, Arizona. The partner conference has drawn more than 1,000 attendees.

Tomas Gorny, Nextiva’s co-founder and CEO, told attendees that businesses that don’t know, understand and remember their customers won’t be around much longer. He said his company has invested more financial resources than the profits of all of its competitors combined to help businesses struggling to get a complete picture of all of their customers.

“What we need is an all-in-one solution,” he said. “All of our communication and customer management needs to be connected, and in one platform and one place. We created one place in business where all of our communication – voice, email, chat, [text] – live together with customer management tools such as customer relationship management (CRM). The ‘InBox’ is designed for productivity and communication to operate in perfect balance.”

With InBox, which is being added to NextOS, the “complete picture” of the customer is brought into focus and can be immediately updated as more communication data is gathered, Gorny said.

NextOS also includes latest automation and analytics capabilities, he said. With NextOS, Nextiva‘s purpose is to “democratize innovation so every business has a chance to win,” he said.

“The upcoming year will be very exciting,” Gorny said. “We’re reintroducing a new smarter and more powerful NextOS … and this is just the beginning. Today, with our partners and our customers … we are on the ground floor of a great opportunity.”

Carl Katz, Nextiva’s vice president of channel sales for North America, said the NextOS business communications suite in its entirety will be out before the end of the year and “it’s going to mean a lot of additional opportunity for partners.”

Nextiva’s Carl Katz

“Right now with the UCaaS market, price compression is continuing and pricing per seats is declining, and at the same time demand for solutions are increasing,” he said. “So the new product portfolio is going to take us from a $20 billion total adjustable market to over $100 billion total adjustable market, with … CRM, webchat and surveys in addition to the UCaaS. It’s all included to make the customers more sticky so they’re not going to want to go through CRM migrations, they’re not going to want to change their chat server, and it’s going to be on one pane of glass without integrations, which is critical. So it’s a tremendous opportunity for partners that are looking to create solutions and help customers increase their productivity, and gain a competitive advantage in their market.”

In UCaaS, everybody’s competing on price and land-grabbing the market, and Nextiva wants to “get out of the UCaaS race to zero and get more into platform selling,” Katz said.

“Communications platform as a service (CPaaS) is the newer technology allowing us to create solutions on one pane of glass without integrations, and keeping the customer stickier and solidifying the partner annuity for the long term,” he said. “It’s a critical time right now for our partners, our customers and suppliers to come out with this kind of solution in order to …