As we discussed in last week's blog, at True North, one of our areas of expertise is developing and expanding our clients overall Go to Market Strategy. Our focus is to create a framework that becomes a living document with our clients go to market strategy, whether it is an early stage start-up just evolving its strategy all the way to Fortune 500 looking to expand the current framework to new geographies, verticals and alliance/strategic partners.

At True North, one of our areas of expertise is developing and expanding our clients overall go-to-market strategy. Our focus is to create a framework that becomes a living document with our clients go-to-market strategy, whether it is an early stage start-up just evolving its strategy all the way to Fortune 500 looking to expand the current framework to new geographies, verticals and alliance/strategic partners.

The True North team recently concluded its offsite in Austin, Texas to discuss the firm’s key focus areas, and where we envision the world of CX headed. When you analyze the business-to-business market, you quickly realize how many different solution categories exist, and the complexity it creates for the customer. It’s hard to be an expert on everything in the technology space, and at True North our focus is to be the de facto and best in class strategy boutique in the industry around the CX space.

Last week True North achieved an exciting milestone. We met at a team offsite….face to face! It is interesting how totally pre pandemic normal activities have become fraught, and as we (slowly) emerge from the pandemic, become exciting but occasionally scary new adventures.

Over the past ten years, there has been a seismic push away from physical infrastructure and purpose-built hardware to cloud-based computing. This push paved the way for a new type of software licensing and delivery model known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Today, SaaS offerings have become a standard delivery model for many business applications, making it easy for workers to access their favorite business tools from a web browser or mobile app. Common SaaS offerings include collaboration tools, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, accounting, invoicing, and more. The advent of SaaS offerings has revolutionized business models, customer journey dynamics, and investor interest and valuation.

In our previous blog, we talked about the importance of being with your customers to truly understand them. In the early days of Acme Packet, the overwhelming opinion of the engineering experts was that the world was transitioning to SIP and that H.323 & MGCP were quickly becoming protocols of the past. This version of the world was being presented over and over again at the then-popular VONs (Voice on the Net) shows. The Acme Packet team took this message to our customers.

In our previous blog titled Entrepreneurs in the New COVID Normal, we wanted to start a conversation about COVID and to think about the world we see post the pandemic.

I decided to take a detour from the normal blog entries. For those of you who know me, most would not characterize me as sentimental but here is my attempt.

By 2001, BroadSoft had grown into a thought leader for VoIP applications. We had secured funding, had a working product, and won a few smaller service providers. Things were going well and we were happy with our progress, but we hadn’t made any headway with a big name service provider. Around this time, Verizon put out an RFI/RFP for a set of VoIP solutions. We were very excited to receive it, but it included solutions for just about all of their voice products - a massive undertaking for any size company.

As you may have seen in True North Advisory’s press release, we joined Mike, Jim, and Scott to help our clients grow and scale their businesses. We wanted to share our moments and learnings that enable us to assist clients in their growth strategy and initiatives. We both come with extensive CxO experience and deep industry knowledge. Let’s start from the beginning.

One of the most sought after stories is the details behind some of the acquisitions we made at BroadSoft. Scott can share some of the integration secrets and post acquisitions surprises we encountered. This particular story is perhaps one of the most strategic acquisitions in our history.

In my last blog, I talked about the risks with making technology decisions that ensure your products are future proofed and have the longevity to survive in our ever changing industry. I gave an example of one of the things that kept me up at night, which was our decision to use Java as the underlying platform for BroadWorks. The other big decision for us at BroadSoft was our decision to use SIP as our core communications protocol. Let me tell you that story.

Continuing on the BroadSoft Secrets series, I want to shift gears and share some funny (and odd) moments. Beware! You might never know when I may feature you in a story. Kidding - but thanks to all the folks I’ve met along the way that has provided some interesting experiences.

BroadSoft went public in June 2010. We had filed to go public that March in a ‘frothy’ IPO market but by June many of the prospective IPO’s had been pulled from the market because market sentiment had gone very south. It felt like we barely got out.

When we started BroadSoft in 1998, we knew that voice networks were going to transition from circuit switching to packet switching. There were a bunch of companies doing gateways between the two technologies, using them for niche applications. We wanted to look further out, to a time when packet based networks would be mainstream, so we decided to focus on the applications that would go on top of these networks.

Part of BroadSoft’s success were the many acquisitions we negotiated with and closed. Many of you ask about some of the secrets around those acquisitions. To be honest, without the many companies we acquired, we would not have been able to grow the BroadSoft many people know and love today. We truly did build the company through a combination of organic efforts and growth via acquisition.

Connections became THE event every year at BroadSoft. We never expected to create twenty years of memories with our customers, partners, and our employees!

Many people are curious how we started BroadSoft but let me start with how Scott and I first met.

We have witnessed a pretty remarkable revolution in the software business to Software as a Service or SaaS. Stories abound on traditional software firms making (or trying and not making) the transition to SaaS as they compete with more native Cloud competitors.

A fews weeks ago someone asked me to help them with replacing a BroadWorks platform. My initial reaction was — wait… what? Naturally, I thought BroadWorks would be like the Pyramids of Giza and continue to be the wonder of the unified communications world. Apparently this version of history isn’t going to happen. Technology moves quickly and BroadWorks is aging (which also means I’m getting old). Our industry moves in phases, and that got me to thinking.