Specialist
Former Director at Five9 Inc
Agenda
- Operating environment for Zoom (NASDAQ: ZM) and Five9 (NASDAQ: FIVN) – drivers of merger and 12-18-month outlook for product demand trends
- Expectations around sales motion as it relates to improved average blended adoption of UCaaS and CCaaS
- Zoom's channel investment needs and implications of possible strategy and focus evolution
- Outlook for H2 2021 and beyond – competitive dynamics across Microsoft Teams (NASDAQ: MSFT), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), RingCentral (NYSE: RNG), Nice InContact (NASDAQ: NICE), Genesys and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM)
Questions
1.
What are your main takeaways from Zoom’s acquisition of Five9?
2.
Why do you think Five9 might be the best fit for Zoom vs other players such as Nice InContact or Genesys? Was their existing strategic partnership the key driver? What else might have drawn Zoom to Five9?
3.
Why do you think Five9 agreed to the Zoom acquisition deal? There’s the colleague aspect between the C suites, but Zoom is B2C native and video native vs RingCentral being voice native and Microsoft Teams being very enterprise ready.
4.
I’ve heard often that Zoom is not channel-friendly to the extent that the economics it provides resellers and SIs [system integrators] is not industry competitive. To what extent could increasingly bringing Zoom into the sales story – where Five9 is perhaps well-established with the channels and SIs – negatively impact sales cycles?
5.
What might happen to Zoom Phone post-acquisition? Could it fully integrate with the Five9 CCaaS solution, or do you think they will remain separate, at least over the medium term?
6.
Do you expect much product synergy from incorporating video increasingly into call centre? The increased value proposition provided seems limited at first glance. What benefit could this provide customers?
7.
The deal is not anticipated to close until Q1 2022. When do you think Zoom and Five9 might be fully integrated, given your emphasis on the lift the product and engineering aspects will provide? Is this a 2-3-year process?
8.
To what extent can Zoom and Five9 maintain their open integrations with collaborative partners? How quickly would you expect Zoom’s CCaaS partner relationships and Five9’s UCaaS [unified-communications as-a-service] ones to deteriorate as the two companies integrate?
9.
Do you think being part of Zoom could meaningfully expand Five9’s install base? In what use cases could Zoom help Five9 gain incremental market share that would not have been possible pre-acquisition? Could departure from the generalist go-to-market approach narrow the company’s serviceable opportunity?
10.
You mentioned premise to cloud penetration rates may be 20-25%. What might be the total CCaaS opportunity in number of global seats?
11.
To what extent can all tides rise for all of the players that we’ve discussed across the UCaaS and CCaaS ecosystems? Who will this deal negatively impact? What about RingCentral?
12.
A theme that keeps coming up is whether or not the open generalist model will win out vs the platform suite model. Does this likely drive a necessary consolidation response from RingCentral? Alternatively, do you think the company will maintain that generalist model, where it has strategic partners such as Avaya, Atos, Alcatel and Lucent, and then stay openly integrated with Nice and Avaya and Genesys on the CCaaS? Why doesn’t that provide more growth runway?
13.
How might the communications software landscape shake out over the next few years? Who do you think has the best and worst prospects?
