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OrecX |
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May 20, 2013 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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As an Open Source Call Recording Company, OrecX is positioned for continued Growth Providing Contact Centers and Business VoIP Providers with Reliable, Flexible, Full-Featured and Easy-to-Use Call Recording Software |
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About OrecX:
OrecX’s mission is simple:
Provide contact centers and business VoIP providers with full-featured,
reliable, flexible and very easy-to-use call recording software at a
fraction of the cost of competing solutions.
Steve has over 30 years experience in voice recording development, sales and support. Prior to co-founding OrecX, Steve founded Stevens Communications, the first North American channel partner for Nice Systems which was later acquired by Nice in 2000. |
VOIP
OrecX
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Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – May 20, 2013
Mr. Kaiser: We are an open source call recording company. We use open source as the core of our solution, and have differentiated with the commercial application—added some features, functionalities, and support for various protocols and codecs that would not exist in the open source version of it. There are a lot of recorders out there, a lot of recording companies; might be over fifty. We are the only ones that have the open core, the open source model. That brings a host of advantages, such as lower cost, higher quality, more customizable, more adaptable to trends, and open—and open cannot be under emphasized because it puts power and control back with the customer. Why do people need us? People record traditionally for compliance, performance, and risk (CPR). It is our view of the world that if we drive the cost of recording down to the point where it feels like voicemail, then call recording could potentially be a utility used on billions of devices throughout the planet as opposed to a niche market of call centers, public safety, and trading firms. This is where we are at and what we are trying to do.
CEOCFO: How is it that no one else, none of the major competitors, have realized that open source is the way to go? Mr. Kaiser: There are conditions when a market is right for open source. Larry Augustin is early proponent of commercial open source companies and he is the one who actually came up with those conditions when a market is right. Simply, when products become proprietary, overly complex, expensive to purchase, complicated to implement, costly to operate, then the conditions are right for open source. There is a growing discontent amongst the existing recording users that there has got to be a better way to do it, and there is a community of people that would like to see it be done. We recognized that years ago and that is why we created the model. We had come from the other side of the world where people were using proprietary models. We like to call the proprietary models “building Frankenstein” because of the complexity and cost associated with them. These proprietary models get so caught up in their models it is impossible for them to change, because when they do, these companies that count on their revenue stream are going to put the entire stream at risk and they are not going to be able to do that. They are not going to be able to change their fundamental business operating model to be an open source company if they did not start as one. We are actually quite surprised why nobody else has become an open source company. But part of what happens in open source—that is an unique culture and a philosophy —is once somebody has made an impression in a particular area in open source, for instance, let us say with MySQL for the database, somebody else might want to go out there and try and build another MySQL for databases and open source, but why? The community is already built, and the community is already supporting MySQL, so there is a limited interest, requirement, or need for the community to replicate the entire effort. It might be the same thing with us to a certain extent. We had over 110,000 instances of our software being downloaded. You could estimate that probably ten million users in 163 different countries of the world. I do not think anyone else in the call recording space can say that they have that kind of depth, coverage, and access to people in the community such as we do. If somebody is looking at call recording in the open source world, they would say, “Why would we do that. There already is a open source project that has been doing it extremely well for a long period of time. We really cannot add a lot of value to it.” If we were not being a true open source community provider, then people may have an incentive to do that, but that is not the case with us. I think part of it is that people are afraid of it; they do not understand it. The other part is once you build it, it does not leave the space for somebody else to do the same thing again, because it is pure redundancy of work effort that is not required.
CEOCFO: When customers are looking, are they sometimes scared away by the fact that it is open source and it is not traditional? Do they get it quickly? Is there an ‘aha’ moment? How does it work when you reach out to new clients or they reach out to you? Mr. Kaiser: It is probably easier to tell you how we built the model out strategically. Think of it as a bullseye or cocentric rings. At the center of our universe, the center of our philosophy is we are building something valuable enough that the open source community will pay attention to it, download it, use it, help us develop it quickly, contribute to it, and make it a high quality piece of software. The model begins at the core and moves out. At the center of core is the General Public License (GPL). Those people are highly technical, they are not afraid of anything open source; they are open source users. Many are developers, and in exchange for free use of our software, they make important contributions to it that benefit the entire community of users. From a commercial perspective, indirectly they have helped us create a good commercial product that we could sell later on. This is where it starts. The next ring out would be open source Users with telephony environments like Asterisk, Digium, Indosoft, and Fonality, and their channel partners like Foehne and Presence, and others that are out there that have used open source like the Asterisk’s platform or other open source platforms to create a business entity. These open source partners of ours understand open source already because they have built the commercial product on an open source platform, and they are selling, supporting, and adding a value to it. Working with another open source company is the easiest thing those guys can do because we understand how they operate, they understand how we operate, they understand a lot about our pricing and modeling, our marketing strategy before we have the first discussion with them because they are committed to open source. The next ring, VoIP service providers and similar partners are highly technical and rely on open source in many parts of their infrastructure. We fit well with them because we are operating system, database, and hardware agnostic. They retain power and control over the application. In our view, there are ten billion devices out there, and we would like to think maybe 10-15% of those, at some point, will be recorded because of convenience or other workflow efficiencies. An example could be as simple as recording a doctor’s mobile interactions with patients so it can be transcribed and automatically placed in their EMR so they are HIPAA compliant. When you start thinking along these lines, there are many new uses for recording. Those applications do not exist today because companies have been able to deliver software at a low enough price with open functionality that could be used as a component of the overall solution. In the next ring out, we leverage the channel partners, traditional ones that sell call recording, but since our solution is open and flexible, we leverage partners that have not traditionally sold call recording but now can use Oreka as part of this solution. In Healthcare electronic medical records business, maybe these are CRM companies that operate in healthcare, maybe these are database companies that operate in healthcare, maybe they are mobile service providers than can now add call recording as a new feature to their mobile service. These partners are skilled technically and are looking for tools to augment their solutions. Adding call recording as a value-added utility somewhere in that process helps them leverage a different result for their end user. Those are good target companies that see the merit in an open approach. Then you move a little bit further out, we look to innovate with end-users that might have recording in one area of the business, but with a bit of imagination, find new parts of the company to record that could create value. As an example, insurance companies have big call recording applications in the call centers, but for years have talked about, “How do we record all of our adjusters in the field? How do we record our agencies that are not actually our customers but they work for us? We do not want to record to keep track of what they are saying, we want to record these guys because we can do some analytics and we can come up with some trends on our customers that we could not come up with before because now we have access to massive amounts of data.” That expanding through innovation at that level, identifying and creating new markets, you still really are not out to the traditional end users yet; you are still with technical people familiar with open source or with people who are willing to take a risk because they have a big business requirement that needs to be solved. Then we get out to that last rung—you can call the “traditional recording” market. We think the world is our geography, and we sell it everywhere in the world, as I mentioned, Oreka software is in 163 plus countries. But there is a certain reality: once you get into the outer rung and you are dealing with end users, then they are saying, “I have looked at other recording companies. Why are you different? How come your interface is green and theirs is blue? How come you price it this way and they price it that way?” Then you get more into a traditional selling model, and we hope that if we are going to get into a traditional selling model, that again will be with regional channel partners that are selling already in the call recording space. That is how we look at it. We call ourselves “GPLERs”; it is an acronym for all of these categories.
CEOCFO: How is business today? Mr. Kaiser: Excellent. We are very pleased with the business model. Our customers are happy with software, the road map and the support they receive. For the foreseeable future, we see ourselves doubling every 18 months. We have a tremendous upside with our business model.
CEOCFO: You have a number of different products. What are some of the different offerings that you have? Mr. Kaiser: The essential one is call recording, and that is the basic utility that meets the requirements of 80% of the market. It captures calls, puts them in the database and lets you find them. Most people that think of call recording think of that. Then people start adding functionality on top of that. “Okay, I have had the calls, now I would like to review some of the data on the call and see how my agents are performing. I would like to rate them on a scorecard. That one is called Quality Monitoring. That is another module that you would add on top of your recording module. Some people say, “I like the Quality, but I would also like to see what my agent is doing with the screen while they are on the call with the customer. Can you record the screen?” Sure, we can record the screen. So you have Total Recording with Quality and Screen Capture. We provide an open application programming interface (API) that is language independent in which the client does not to create client -side library. That goes back to one of those core open source values. We give people our API for free and they can enhance the call record with metadata, they can enhance the recording experience by managing the recording through another application rather than our own. We can speak to other systems that are available out there to enrich the metadata that is in the call, database schemas, all these other things we have are open, and all of these things lend themselves to some kind of value to the customer. We have a few more apps. Mobile Recording can work in concert with our existing recording software or it can be a stand-alone application. There is Live Monitoring, it is a feature set of the recording module. Some people like live monitoring because they want to manage quality, but they do not want to record the call. We can enable that for some people. We have written some code that allows any business analytics company to use our recording software on-premise or in the Cloud. An analytics company such as IBM, Clarabridge, Mindshare, Voci Tec or others that exist out there can use our software to enhance their analytics applications. Now they can capture data from another source, convert that data to text, and do their analytics on it. Our product is very simple to implement. We can implement it anywhere in world in an hour. With other companies it takes weeks or even months to install the recording software.
CEOCFO: Why should investors and people in the business community be paying attention to OrecX?
Mr.
Kaiser:
What we would like to happen is analogous to how Intel
powered the PC revolution by building the chips that the operating systems
ran on. We would like to be the call recording utility that is de facto
standard for powering applications in the worldwide business community. We
want people developing solutions to problems that exist out there and to be
using Oreka as the utility to make it happen. The reason they will use us is
because again, getting back to the first part, we have got a super high
quality piece of software that is open, customizable, that is low cost, that
is responsive, adaptive, and supported broadly. |
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“We are an open source call recording company. We use open source as the core of our solution, and have differentiated with the commercial application—added some features, functionalities, and support for various protocols and codecs that would not exist in the open source version of it… People record traditionally for compliance, performance, and risk (CPR). It is our view of the world that if we drive the cost of recording down to the point where it feels like voicemail, then call recording could potentially be a utility used on billions of devices throughout the planet as opposed to a niche market of call centers, public safety, and trading firms. This is where we are at and what we are trying to do.”- Steve Kaiser |
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Call Recording Company, OrecX, CEO Interviews 2013, Open Source Call Recording Provider, VoIP, Call Recording Software for Contact Centers, Business VoIP Providers, Oreka, Recent CEO Interviews, Technology Stock, Technology Companies, OrecX Press Releases, News, Companies looking for venture capital, Angel Investors, private companies looking for investors, technology companies seeking investors, software companies needing investment capital |
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