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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. & GALWAY, Ireland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 12, 2014--Altocloud, a new technology company with a mission of improving customer engagement and contact center experiences, today announced its formation and that senior Cisco communications executive Barry O’Sullivan has joined as co-founder and CEO.
Altocloud co-founder and CEO Barry O'Sullivan (Photo: Business Wire)
Altocloud is creating a cloud-based contextual communications platform that uses data analytics and machine learning to produce more effective customer-to-company interactions. The new platform can be integrated with existing enterprise contact center, marketing automation, CRM and web analytics solutions and can be implemented across mobile and web. A private beta of the Altocloud platform is planned to begin later this month.
Businesses have made huge investments in technology solutions and are spending around $300 billion a year on their customer care, sales and service centers. Separately, businesses have been investing in mobile and web technology and data analytics, without a path to make contextual information and rich media useful during these customer contact touchpoints. The result is that customer contact center experiences continue to be notoriously viewed as ineffective, frustrating and disjointed for both customers and agents.
“Customer-to-company communications is the last big user experience problem to be tackled. It’s our mission at Altocloud to re-imagine and forever change the customer communications journey and dramatically improve relationships between customers and brands,” said O’Sullivan.
O’Sullivan continued, “Our vision is to revolutionize customer communications by delivering personalized experiences, smarter interactions, faster resolution and satisfied customers to your business - without brands having to invest more money in additional technology infrastructure or people.”
The Altocloud platform can be rapidly deployed though simple JavaScript libraries and mobile SDKs to provide the power to analyze and shape the customer journey. Developers can embed rich voice, video and chat communications directly within mobile and web applications. Central to the solution is a real-time analytics and learning engine that combines business data with customer interaction experience for personal recommendations and predictive routing. Altocloud APIs allow developers to connect and improve current applications – no need to replace current infrastructure.
“We believe it is critical to engage customers in the moment of need and to be able to deliver real-time, personalized care in the right context, on the right platform in a streamlined exchange,” emphasized O’Sullivan.
Understanding how the customer journey unfolds is increasingly important as customer contact moves rapidly across multiple channels via social, mobile and web. “Data analytics will play a key role in improving the customer journey in the future,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, Principal Analyst with McGee-Smith Analytics. “Altocloud understands this and is building a cross platform solution with predictive analytics at its core aiming to improve customer satisfaction across business functions.”
Partnerships
Altocloud also today announced its first application development partnership with Marketo, a leading cloud-based marketing software provider, and its first services partnership with Touchbase, a global unified communications and contact center integrator. The company plans to expand its work with marketing automation and software vendors, VARs and other channel partners.
Seasoned executive and development team
Altocloud has amassed a seasoned executive team, headquartered in Mountain View California, led by O’Sullivan. He joins co-founders Joe Smyth, CTO and Dan Arra, VP of Sales.
Most recently O’Sullivan headed Cisco’s Unified Communications and VOIP businesses and previously served as VP/GM of Cisco’s Contact Center business. O’Sullivan has been an active venture investor in Ireland and Silicon Valley, and is widely known in Ireland for his TV role as an investor on “ Dragons’ Den ” - the Irish TV’s equivalent of the “The Shark Tank.”
Smyth formerly held R&D leadership positions at Cisco, Apple, and Nortel, and holds patents in UC and Contact Center technology. Smyth led development of Nortel’s first VOIP product and Cisco’s Unified Communications Client. Arra is the founder of four successful technology companies, including BrightstarIT, Gatespeed and Blackstone Solutions.
Altocloud’s development and technology team, based in Galway, is drawn from PhDs from Ireland’s leading R&D universities and other world-class university-based research organizations. The team includes Dr. Maciej Dabrowski as Chief Data Scientist, who brings a decade of experience in recommendation techniques, personalization, data mining and analytics. The team’s expertise also includes user experience design, mobile and web development, contact centers and cloud application deployment.
Altocloud’s notable board of advisors includes Steve Souders, Head Performance Engineer at Google; Kara Wilson, CMO Fireye; Raj Patel, recently SVP Technical Operations at Salesforce, and John Harnett, CEO and Founding Partner of SVG Partners. The company has received seed funding from SVG Partners, Enterprise Ireland and private investors.
About Altocloud
Altocloud’s mission is to empower and improve human interaction and exchange of “in the moment” information between customers and companies to help make the customer journey far less painful, and more connected, without brands having to invest in additional technology infrastructure or complex systems.
For more information, go to http://www.altocloud.com.
Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available:http://www.businesswire.com/multimedia/home/20140312005635/en/
CONTACT: For Altocloud
Betty Taylor, 408-981-7551
bettyt@krause-taylor.com
KEYWORD: UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES EUROPE NORTH AMERICA CALIFORNIA IRELAND
INDUSTRY KEYWORD: TECHNOLOGY DATA MANAGEMENT INTERNET SOFTWARE TELECOMMUNICATIONS MOBILE/WIRELESS VOIP PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FINANCE COMMUNICATIONS MARKETING
SOURCE: Altocloud
Copyright Business Wire 2014
PUB: 03/12/2014 08:00 AM/DISC: 03/12/2014 08:00 AM
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