MEET KAI, THE MAN BEHIND THE ENTERPRISE!

MEET KAI, THE MAN BEHIND THE ENTERPRISE!

Tell us about your history with Enghouse Interactive?

I’ve been with the company for over 18 years and was originally brought into the Enghouse family via the Apropos Technology acquisition.  I’ve held several management and technical leadership roles within the R&D organization throughout my time at Enghouse and have been directly involved with evolving Contact Center Enterprise (CCE) to the product that it is today.  My team’s focus is to ensure we are delivering software that’s targeted to meet enterprise market demands and adding value for our existing customers.

What is the most gratifying part of your job?

Working with some of the smartest minds in our industry of course!  Joking aside, I really enjoy the relationships that are built along the way both internally within Enghouse as well as with our customers and partners.  I believe we have some of the greatest technology in our industry and it takes a team effort to create that technology.  Technology enables solutions but it’s the creativity of the people I work with who build solutions that solve real business problems.  It’s seeing all of this come together and being part of building solutions which is the most satisfying to me.

What’s on the horizon in the world of CCE?

I think CCE is well aligned with industry trends for enterprise software deployment models.  CCE’s cornerstone is its flexible and resilient architecture which allows for deployments into private clouds, hybrid clouds, traditional on premise, or any combination thereof.  Any of these deployment models can be managed by customers themselves, partners, or Enghouse.  So what’s exciting is that CCE customers have complete freedom to choose where the platform resides and who manages it.  Our architecture and deployment flexibility sets CCE apart from our competitors and has positioned us for a great future in the enterprise space.

What are a few signs to customers that may indicate it’s time to start considering an enterprise solution?

Our customers should look towards an enterprise solution if they meet one or more of the following requirements:

• Their contact center is mission critical and cannot afford to be offline even for 5 minutes.  CCE provides the architecture to achieve high availability with 99.999% uptime.
• Their contact center has 100’s or 1000’s of agents today or are expecting growth to those numbers in the next couple of years.
• Their contact center is distributed across multiple geographies or data centers.
• Finally, enterprise customers often require some level of customization to better enable agent workflow or capture information in various backend systems.  CCE is an open and extensible platform via APIs and integration points supporting any range of out-of-the-box configurations to sophisticated custom applications.

Anything else about CCE we should know?

Aside from the core CCE capabilities, I’d like to highlight that CCE maintains integrations for many of the products in the Enghouse portfolio such as Quality Management and Call Recording (QMS), IVR and Mobile IVR (Communications Portal), Outbound Notifications, Predictive Dialing, and more.  This is important because the R&D investments that are going into each of these product’s roadmaps will add direct value to CCE customers by enabling new solutions via new and exciting features.

How have you seen Enghouse evolve since you’ve been part of the team?

As I mentioned, I came into the Enghouse family relatively early on and I’ve seen the company grow both organically and through acquisition.  For me personally, this has created an environment of opportunity and professional growth.  Looking at Enghouse as a company, I think the primary contributing factor to the company’s success is consistency and the ability to stick to a plan and execute on it.

Tell us 3 fun facts about you!

• I was born in Germany just outside of Munich which makes me a Bavarian.  They have the world’s best soccer team and also produce some of the world’s best cars!
• I used to compete in power lifting and set a few records in bench press during that time.  My personal record in competition was 480 lbs.
• I play guitar and sometimes play around with drums as well.  At one point I was in a heavy metal band (yes, there’s a correlation to power lifting there! )