The Exchanges

Q And take, so, 2000, you said 24 years after 1983, so what, that would have been 2007, you hit a hundred million bucks in NAR, is that right?

A Uh, it was, it was, uh, 2005, I think, was the seminal year. That's when, you know, what happened was the business grew for a while. Uh, frankly, I was not a great manager. I started the business, and, and, uh, you know, I hadn't had enough experience. I, uh, for five years, brought in a president. And, uh, we actually learned a lot. I was able to really step back, but, uh, they weren't able to get it up over a hundred million. We were stuck there for several years. When I came back, I learned enough and we made enough changes to the product and our go to market that we were able to grow at a 20% plus place.

AI assessment note: “it was 2005, I think, was the seminal year”

Q So guys, those of you listening, I want to contrast this to today where last reported a revenue, you know, 809 hundred million ish. I want to ask him when he thinks they're going to invest a billion. But exciting space built over the long time. Let's go back to that original story. So you take out the initial things. What was the initial product, Alan, that you built?

A Well, it was interesting. It, in many ways, is reflective of what we do today. Though, after four complete generational rewrites, obviously, life has moved on quite a bit. The initial system was what one would have called a workflow system. It enabled you to organize, in that era, just for large companies, how you wanted to get your business processes to work. And it let you define the steps, the systems you had to deal with, the human interactions. And I never liked the word workflow, though it stuck around for a lot of years. I always thought it should be work do, because we've always sought to incorporate AI principles and incorporate automation, uh, into this from the inception. But that was the original idea, and, uh, The way it evolved is we really moved into the front office, being able to do end-to-end work all the way from a customer's customer right through execution.

AI assessment note: “The initial system was what one would have called a workflow system.”

Q markets, um, you know, you've seen a lot of companies do a lot of things and some companies do one thing really well. So, so what do you, what's the, what is the kind of the one sense or the one kind of filter you use to look through to decide what you're not going to be doing? Because again, you're right. You have an infrastructure. You could do anything.

A Well, part of being successful is not doing everything, and we look to see if what we're doing is true to the idea of our model-based architecture. We have an architecture that you could think of as a CAD CAM for software itself. It's software that literally, literally writes software by looking at the types of things people want to accomplish. Those types of things fall into certain categories, and so we need to be rigorous about making sure we solve problems Like a customer service desktop problems such as, oh, driving a plan of care for a diabetic or somebody who has a chronic condition. Those sorts of workflow and engagement use cases are, to our mind, absolutely critical. And we want to make sure we're aligning what we do with what our software does well and what our customers have been successful with.

AI assessment note: “we look to see if what we're doing is true to the idea”

Q yeah, they're a CRM, right? You, you seem to touch so many markets that are, and don't be obviously not a, not an offensive statement here, but not sexy markets, right? Or harder to get into markets. Um, how, how do you, how do you remain competitive, um, Uh, you're like your CRM product, uh, with a company that only focuses on one of the aspects of what you do.

A Well, one thing that is an enormous advantage for us is we have a coherent architecture. So when we, for example, made a build versus buy decision in 2010 to bring in what I still think are absolutely top of market predictive and adaptive analytics, we actually, you know, bought a company for a hundred and sixty million bucks, and then we spent two years Re-architecting what they did into this really seamless architecture that brings together customer engagement and process automation in a way that is, is, is quite unique. So, um, The mode that we have is by being able to do real things. And you're right. Some of those real things aren't as sexy, but I guarantee you all the sexy stuff sooner or later has to get real. And that's where these CRM systems all fall apart. See, years ago, I think Salesforce does the same stuff now.

AI assessment note: “one thing that is an enormous advantage for us is we have a coherent architecture.”

Q And then fast, so fast forward, how many decades is that? One, two, three, four decades. How would you describe the product today?

A Well, you know, the way I describe the company is we became an overnight success after 24 years. So it took 24 years. To hit a hundred million in revenue, and then obviously the business has really been clipping along, um, since then. Today, we're a company that, uh, offers technology that does not just Workflow, but, you know, which has now been renamed digital process automation, but is also able to do full end-to-end CRM for many of the world's most demanding firms, uh, being able to bring process and rules and intelligence from the point, uh, a customer or one of our client staff touches something related to a customer all the way through execution. It's quite a bit different.

AI assessment note: “Today, we're a company that, uh, offers technology that does not just Workflow”

Q and cash management tied back to product ideas. Is there anything that you see over the next kind of 12 to 24 months where you would totally be willing to, to hit your bottom, you know, your call, your, whatever your bottom line margin is to, to make an investment in the future and then, you know, obviously have to go up on your next earnings call and defend it?

A Well, I think that the, so a couple of things. One, I think we've Gotten a reputation over the years as being a prudent company. So if we did have to go and really hit something hard, I'd like to believe that we get some, um, You have some, you have some buffer here for your, you know, decades of experience, decades of experience and, and, and hopefully a good rational persona. Um, the thing that we are investing in is, is growth. We think that our sales force needs to be meaningfully larger. We think we need to do a better job at how we market. We're not a company that historically, uh, was very visible and we have been, and I expect we'll continue Uh, to invest in that, even though the payback on those things typically takes a little while to go.

AI assessment note: “The thing that we are investing in is growth. We think that our sales force”

Q physical devices coming into the home, the living room. There's a lot of kind of voice and there's a lot of open source things for voice because people don't want to like build a skill on top of Alexa or things like that. Do you have a stake in the voice game yet? And if so, how do you see that maturing over the next, you know, two, three years?

A So the way I look at things like voice and something that we've done, you can see it on our website, is to be able to link in to Alexa and to Google Home, right, or to Siri. So we see our job as bringing intelligence to voice, much as we have, we run in some large commercial contact centers behind the voice response unit. Some of which are really quite capable of offering personalized messages. We, we do something called call deflection. If you're, you call in, and we can figure out why you're calling, even by just knowing the number you're calling from, we can tell you, yeah, we received your payment, or yes, you know, that charge, it was removed from your, from your, uh, statement. Being able to do things like that can actually improve service. Uh, we do have live chatbot interaction available, though, with, for example, Alexa.

AI assessment note: “we see our job as bringing intelligence to voice”