The 20 Year Communication Revolution
This year Vonage celebrates a momentous milestone in what can only be described as an epic journey in the Cloud. For the past 20 years, Vonage has been synonymous with innovation. From its inception as a home phone provider to its notable pivot to business cloud communications, Vonage continues to transform its business and the way its customers communicate, operate and do business by leading through change.
A Company Ahead of its Time
Founded in 2001, Vonage pioneered and commercialized a new voice technology called VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), helping to shape a new form of communications - one that had no boundaries, delivered unprecedented value and forever changed the telecommunications industry. Using VoIP technology, Vonage transformed the home phone industry and grew incredibly fast, with almost three million homes using its VoIP service by 2008.
Recognizing an opportunity to gain share in the domestic-only calling market and leveraging the surge in mobile phones, in 2011, Vonage introduced a new home phone product that provided high-quality service at a great low price - mobile services via the Vonage Extensions® service. Extensions allowed customers to extend their home calling plans to their mobile phones at no additional cost. That same year, approximately 87 percent of Vonage’s home phone customers had a mobile extension, and 200 million international calls were made over the Vonage network from a mobile phone.
However, as the mobile industry grew, the market for home phone service started to decline. The Company had to transform, making the decision to pivot from its consumer roots to business cloud communications to serve the B2B world.
A Strategic Pivot
Through a series of nine strategic acquisitions, followed by consistent organic growth, Vonage transformed itself into a global leader in Business Cloud Communications. Starting with its first acquisition of then industry-leading SaaS-based communications provider Vocalocity in 2013, three more UCaaS companies and then its transformative acquisition of of Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider Nexmo in 2016, followed by WebRTC programmable video provider TokBox in 2018, Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) provider NewVoiceMedia in 2018 and Tel Aviv-based Voice and Conversational AI provider Over.ai in 2019 - Vonage is empowering businesses to do what is next and stay ahead. These acquisitions have led the Company to where it is today: a leading provider of a truly integrated communications experience that is more flexible, intelligent and personal, enabling businesses, their employees and agents to enhance collaboration and engagement with customers - from anywhere.
Communications APIs Open a Door to a World of Programmable Capabilities
In 2016, Vonage acquired Nexmo, a global CPaaS (Communications Platform as-a-Service) company. With Communications APIs, Vonage now had the ability to enable enterprises to improve the ways they engaged with their customers through embedded, contextual communications, on virtually any platform and on any device. With Vonage APIs, the Company provides cloud-based APIs that allow organizations to easily embed voice, messaging, phone verification and more into their applications, ensuring effective, personalized communications across any channel.
With the TokBox announcement, Vonage quickly became the worldwide leader in programmable video, rounding out our programmable communications APIs platform, and fully spanning core communication APIs across voice, SMS, IP messaging and now, video. This addition enables businesses to benefit from simple, flexible and scalable programmable video solutions to create deeper customer relationships for businesses.
The acquisitions of TokBox and Nexmo helped Vonage to address the needs of today’s businesses, leveraging the Cloud to create an exceptional customer experience via intelligent interactions. Communications APIs enable businesses to augment existing platforms and applications with feature-rich programmable capabilities - voice, video, messaging, verification and chat - or to use these building blocks to create unique applications and use cases, with just a few lines of code.
Entry into the High-Growth, Cloud Contact Center Market
The acquisition of cloud contact center provider NewVoiceMedia quickly followed. As businesses adopt CRM tools to improve customer engagement and to drive digital transformation, NewVoiceMedia’s cloud contact center solutions offered a superior, integrated experience with leading CRM’s, particularly in the form of better, real-time, omnichannel interactions across chat, voice and SMS, as well as more robust analytics and data capture. The addition of NewVoiceMedia helped to accelerate Vonage’s growth strategy and leadership position in business communications, strengthening its presence with global mid-market and enterprise clients, and deepening integrations and key go-to-market relationships with CRM platforms like Salesforce and CSMs like ServiceNow. In fact, NewVoiceMedia brought a long and strategic relationship with Salesforce as the leading contact center provider in the Salesforce ecosystem.
The Power of AI-driven Capabilities
With the acquisition of Tel Aviv-based Voice and Conversational AI provider Over.ai, Vonage gained significant technology talent and expertise in conversational-related AI. Through this acquisition, today Vonage’s voice and conversational AI technology platform provides intelligent virtual assistant functionality via APIs, enabling businesses to enhance their IVR; handle complex interactions with real-time human-like interactions over phone lines; and lower operational costs while significantly improving service. The power of these AI-driven capabilities provides businesses with a balance between automation and human support to deliver the service that today’s customers demand.
We’ve Only Just Begun
Communications are critical no matter what business or industry you're in and no matter the business size.
With the flexibility of the Vonage Communications Platform, startup or enterprise businesses have the tools to create better connections with customers and create efficiencies within their organizations.
With a mission to accelerate the world’s ability to connect, Vonage is providing the solutions and building blocks any business needs to keep employees connected and to create meaningful connections with customers.
As Vonage reaches the Platinum anniversary of its debut into the communications space, it does so with a nod to the past and a firm eye on the future.
As people have searched for new, more effective means of communicating, Vonage has been there, leading through change and evolving with customer needs by helping businesses focus on what really matters - keeping their team members and employees connected to each other and to their own customers and prospects in meaningful ways.
More and more businesses in nearly every industry and of every size have either begun to move or have completed their transition to the Cloud, leveraging communications as core elements to their overall digital transformation. And Vonage has been there from the beginning, transforming and revolutionizing communications that help individuals and organizations to make the kinds of connections that matter, the kinds of connections that are changing the way we do business, the kinds of connections that are changing the world.
Vonage Does That.
Here’s to the next 20 Years!
