[00:00:07] Antony: Hey everyone.
[00:00:10] Daisy: Hello.
[00:00:11] Antony: So Robb, you mentioned that you were talking to experts in the field of conversational AI of telephony, and they have some comments about what we did our platform.
[00:00:28] Robb: Yeah. Yeah. Alright, so to, to start the story out, we haven't really focused our marketing on legion yet. We like, as a company, we still haven't tried to grow our company, tried to go get leads. Still haven't grown out our sales team. And of course that's one of the things that we raised money to be able to do.
And so in the OneReach way, we, we didn't wanna just go haphazard out into the world, just, doing a bunch of things in the way everybody else did things and hoping that it would just work for us. We wanted to have our own strategy and our own plan and we wanted to move very carefully.
So, the thought process is to, if, we were named number one by Gartner and capabilities, and that's true and that we are number one and that Gartner didn't get it wrong. Then the experts in the space should be able to appreciate what we've created.
And, if we focus our marketing efforts on speaking to these experts and, showing them what we've created, that would just create this sort of buzz on the inner circle of AI and, conversational AI. and that would then radiate out as an idea. And obviously you have to have a great product to pull that off. Not just the best product, but you have to have a product that's recognizably better than all the rest, something so much better that it's worth talking about.
So interestingly enough, my most recent conversation was with the guy who was in charge of the, Vodafone bot and conversational AI project. He's very active in the space. He blogs, almost daily, lot of followers. Very knowledgeable knows all of our competitors. And, he refers to OneReach as he just newly became aware of us as the black horse, because he's: " I've been in this space, I'm in the middle. I never even heard of you guys. How is this possible? and then all of a sudden I see you in Gartner."
And his words were, I saw that you were the top in Gartner and he said, I thought to myself, you haven't spent a lot in marketing. You haven't spent a lot in sales, like the other guys yet you're at the top. There must be something special about this company. And so I intrigued him.
So we had a call a couple days ago. We gave him a brief demo. I love demoing to people who know what they're doing because they just get it really fast. They appreciate it fast and they get it fast and he had some interesting comments. I can't wait to see what he writes, but this was the most interesting one.
He's been analyzing all the players that the Amelia, etc. So Amelia was the one that was ranked, first in the leadership quadrant, which means first in growth, we weren't first in growth. We were best product, but not the fastest growing company. In our space. I think we were fifth in growth. So he kinda looked at them all and he said, one of the things that he's been struggling with lately is that looking at how these companies try to differentiate from each other, he just doesn't see much opportunity in being able to differentiate. It's becoming like a commodity where one NLU engine is as good as the next one. Whether it's Luis or whether it's dialogue flow or whether it's Amelia or Kore.ai, in his words he was like, if I were to start a company today, in conversational AI, what would I do to stand out? And he said, it's something he's just been struggling with because cuz he can't see a lot of ways to differentiate for anyone and there's a lot of players.
And then we did our demo and he said: you know what? What blows my mind is that I couldn't come up with a lot of ways to differentiate. And now I've seen OneReach and I can't stop thinking of ways to differentiate. His comment was that we have just approached the problem from a completely different angle. That OneReach is, just not like any of the other solutions out there. And that, he's totally, excited and fascinated in that it just blew his mind.
And that seems to be the theme. Every time I talk to someone who's an influencer or an expert in this space and they see the tool, it just blows their mind because it, we seem to have come at this from a, direction that they never contemplated. And I think it's because they've narrowed themselves to purely language. They think of the solution as something that can take a sentence and understand an intent and that's the whole, that's the whole industry. So they see us and they see all the things you could do.
What, seemed to like really put it over the top for him was, we were showing him a demo of a voice flow and we said, look, there's a little, there's a leg here, the hangup leg. And on the hangup leg, if the end user hangs up, which we can control, whether what we do, if it's the end user or the bot that hang. We can send them a text message that says: "Hey, did we get hung up on? Do you want us to call you back?" and he thought, oh, that's cool. But then I said, yeah, but if you've ever implemented this, you would know that most people, if they wanted to call back by the time they get this text message, they're already calling you back. So now you're just interrupting them, calling you back with a text message that says, do you want us to call you back? So the best thing to do is to actually wait a few seconds, and then check to see if they've called back. And if they haven't then send the message out. And so then we're like, yeah, so I'd pull the, send SMS step out. I put in a sleep step. And it was just funny. He's oh my God, it seems like with OneReach, if you can dream it, you can do it. That was his words.
And it just it seems to me that what we've done is approached the problem with, from a, such a completely different angle. And the kind of angle that makes these guys get really excited.
As a result, I think we're our goal is to just contact every expert in the space at this point and do a demo for them. Because it seems like within 45 minutes they just become, absolute fans of OneReach. And so it just seems like this is something we should have been doing all along. I think, we built this in a vacuum. We built this to solve our customers problems and we made decisions that we thought made sense, collectively. And I don't think we ever really knew would the experts like it or not? How good is it compared to the other guys in this space? we weren't watching what they were building, so we never really knew how we stacked up against anybody else. And from a perspective of the experts we re we really never knew how they would perceive us in our approach.
And now we have solid evidence. anytime we demo for somebody who's an expert in this space. They love what they see. So the next move for us is to go demo it to every expert we can get our hands on. And why wouldn't they wanna see it? We were rated the number one by Gartner.
So I think that's there's this kind of news that, that is news not because something changed or not because we did something, but because we just learned something and this is one of those news, the moments where we knew we were good. We knew that Gartner appreciated what we'd done. And we haven't changed the product in any way. Since the last time we had a podcast, the product is still pretty much the same as it was, but what's new is that we've learned that people who have experience in this space love what we've built, to such an extent that they can tell within 45 minutes that this is just leaps and bounds above everybody else.
So now it's just time to get that word out there. I think I'm tired of people saying why haven't I heard of you? And I, think it's this strategy of talking to all the experts that then talk to everybody else, will be really helpful. I think it'll also be helpful with our clients who, as we try to manage them, always feel like, they know better than we do and we make a recommendation and then they ignore it and go their way.
I think the more the world recognizes what we've done and the more, we get recognized, the more our clients will tend to listen to us and, that will help them be more and more successful.
Yeah, it's been really fun. I always get nervous when I get on the phone with someone who's a real expert in this space, cuz they're gonna be a harsh critic. And then when they just love it, and appreciate it better than anyone else I've ever demoed for it's like this super exciting moment for me proud of our whole team and our company and what we've pulled off.
So, yeah, Now it's just a matter of time that, that the word gets out.
[00:09:26] Antony: Well, I guess I have to be devil's advocate in every situation and in this particular one. It's definitely cool to see that how we are through the eyes of the critic, how we are different, comparing to our competitors that we, as you said, we, are taking completely different approach. It's not just to extract in intent in some phrase that was said but it's more just general flow of, a process. It could be conversation, it could be something bigger. It could be just some automation process.
But on the other hand, we definitely need to become better at doing what our competitors do. Meaning to simplify working with extracting intents, extracting entities, from something that was said within channels we already have.
Lately we started this rebooted think tank initiative, by involving engineers from platform team to help do code reviews and help suggest solutions to the problems and just provide feedback on, how things are being built. It's interesting for me that on one hand, when we build stuff, we have a vision how it should be used, but then we, when you see how people are using it. it's oh, interesting. That's how you think it works.
[00:10:55] Robb: Yeah. You're like, oh, darn .
[00:10:57] Antony: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:59] Robb: That's not supposed to you. Weren't supposed to do that.
Yeah. I feel like that's my life now.
[00:11:05] Antony: Yeah. But on the other hand, what's cool about that is now it's easier to see through the eyes of solution designers. What problems are they trying to solve? And so we can kinda tune tools that they have to make it easier for them. I already see a lot of improvements we can make in just on a step level to make their life easier. Yeah it's, we definitely have lots of things we can improve well as always.
It's great to hear that experts. love what we do. Maybe that's exactly what we should do, from a marketing standpoint.
[00:11:41] Robb: Yeah, it is.
[00:11:42] Antony: And then when next client will come and talk to us saying who are you guys? And how did you manage to get this far with us? We can just show our credits if that's how it's hold, like saying this, what experts are saying about us. So that's how
[00:12:00] Robb: Yeah, it's the whole oh, you haven't heard of us. You must not be an expert
[00:12:04] Antony: Yeah
[00:12:05] Daisy: Hey Robb. One of the things that you had said the last person said is if you can dream it, you can do it through OneReach. And I feel like that's have been the biggest burden for us is that it sounds almost too good to be true. And until somebody gets in there and sees that it's actually the case they don't believe it. Have you been having those conversations with the experts so that we know how to market it in a way that comes across as being believable versus just marketing jargon? which is pathetic that we have to deal with that, but that's been the story for years and years.
[00:12:47] Robb: I know I'm trying to listen for what, how they describe it and, how they recommunicate it. What do they say back to me and how do they describe it? And they're, they struggle like we do, it's I see them like trying to find the words and they just go through the same things we've gone through. What is. what did I just see? How do I explain this?
And i, liken it to GPT-3. When you experience not just how it can summarize a sentence, but the quality of how well it does it, it's you have a hard time trying to articulate it to people.
Because there's a lot of tools out there that say they can summarize, a paragraph into a, sentence. And so people go, yeah, yeah, there's other tools that can do that. And you're like no. You don't understand, like this one does such a good job at it. And so, it is a hard thing to get across, cuz I feel like it's a similar thing that they're like: no, those other companies say that you can orchestrate, like that's nothing, OneReach like actually does it in a way that makes it not just, hopes and dreams. And
[00:13:56] Daisy: Do you think to, Oh, sorry, go ahead
[00:13:59] Robb: my that's how I was gonna get to is I realized that at the end of the day, I recognize that most customers, vast majority of customers don't really have their own brains, anyway. They're not going to really become experts in this space and that they really just buy tools that the experts recommend. And, so maybe we don't need to communicate to our customers what we are. If the experts just all unanimously brag about us, then maybe that's just enough for them to say, I don't need to understand I just trust those guys.
So it's a different approach of saying we're never gonna be able to explain it to people who don't have a lot of experience building this stuff. So let's just go explain it to those who do and those who talk a lot to the public. And then those who are getting into the space, which is most of our customers will just trust, that you know, that they know what they're doing.
[00:14:59] Daisy: Do you think that there's an issue of timing? So it seems like experts in the space get it because they have had those blockages they've experienced not being able to do what they wanna do and now this opens the door to being like, oh my gosh, that would've, that's exactly what I needed to solve this problem that I couldn't solve previously.
[00:15:21] Robb: Exactly
[00:15:22] Daisy: Where a lot of our customers are coming in going, I need a chat bot on a website, which is a 0.01 capacity or capability. They haven't hit any of those roadblocks. So they don't even know To even think through. So is this also going to impact the types of customers that we go towards? So that we're seeking out those that have experienced it.
[00:15:48] Robb: it's we'll see, I guess, but my feeling is that if the experts all say OneReach is the best then we'll get all walks of life coming to us. That just say, if someone reads an article from one, expert that says OneReach is great, and then another one regardless of their experience, I think they're just gonna listen to what those experts have to say before they listen to themselves.
But to your point every month, that goes by a new expert is born. This technology is, maturing very fast. People are trying to implement it. And so as, we go through the, sort of weeks and months more of these people have tried and failed there's gonna be more and more people that just appreciate what we've done and can recognize it on their own.
But I think there's a huge shortcut here. I think a lot of people make technology decisions. A lot of companies make technology decisions just based on what other companies decide to do.
And I think that's, we're seeing it a Discount Tire. Where anybody who has worked closely with us. It is a good example. Discount tire, I think, as an organization, they, I think they said they haven't released anything new, any technical project in the last three years. I think if I got that right. Like not one new technology initiative has been productionalized in the last three years. We've launched three in the last three months with them. So we're the only ones they've actually gone live with in the last three years as a company.
Which is a whole nother conversation about the fact that we need to slow down our deployments, but give our teams more time.
But, anyway we come in we're fast and we've deployed three times with them. And yet we're still finding that people at the C-suite at the very top of Discount Tire are questioning OneReach compared to IBM. Like why OneReach? Why not iBM? Why not SalesForce? And what it shows is the power of, that whole leming like trust and just do what everybody else is doing. It's obviously making this C-suite uneasy that these, that they're picking a company that isn't IBM and it gives you a peak into their decision making.
I don't know how much more we can do to win them over. But what it seems to all spell is that no matter how much we win inside of discount tire, if we don't start showing up outside of discount tire, we're always going to face this struggle where our customers see our success and and, appreciate it. And yet still question whether they made the right choice or not.
And so I, I think it's like this chicken or the egg, this is why it's so hard to become a big brand name, because it's, nobody wants to trust you until you're well known and you can't be well known until you have a lot of customers. And so how do you break through that? It's a battle to break through that. It's a grind, but eventually you become a company that is known and then people just choose you for that reason and that, reason alone. And that momentum is something we're just starting to gain. We're just getting there.
But, yeah I think our mistake is imagining that we could educate our customers enough that they could feel confident in their ability to make a decision, to choose a technology. I think with that was our mistake thinking that's how they made decisions. When in reality, it's, like oftentimes eight or nine people that all weigh in on a decision, none of which have any business evaluating a platform in this space. And therefore, what would you do if you had no experience and you weren't technical enough and you didn't have time to evaluate tools properly, you'd probably just go with whatever the experts say.
[00:20:01] Daisy: Yeah, at least that's your starting point either way, right?
[00:20:05] Robb: Yeah. So, what you end up realizing is most of these executives make decisions between one or two or three companies, that are at the top and then it just becomes like any one of those choices are fine. Just preference, right? Who do I wanna work with more? Which one of these three might be more suited?
So that's, it's gonna be interesting as in our space we're gonna come out as a very distant leader, a black horse ahead of everybody else considerably. So it's gonna break that paradigm. They're not gonna have two other OneReaches to evaluate. It's gonna be the guys that are way ahead or, if they wanna look at three, it's not gonna be a no matter which one we pick will be successful. It's gonna matter which one they pick and there's gonna be a big difference. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, but I think it's gonna, play out in our favor. I think it means that we're gonna, instead of out of every three deals, we get one, I think as the experts start weighing in on us, I think we're gonna get like the majority of the deals we're in. Because we're like a clear winner. We'll see.
[00:21:16] Daisy: Yeah. it seems like the focus of marketing is not marketing ourselves, but getting other people to market us. Or doing it in a way that comes from third party not from us specifically.
[00:21:29] Robb: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:21:31] Robb: So I, in the last 30 days, the summarization is we knew we were cool. We thought we were cool. We, knew that some people out there thought we were cool, that mattered like Gartner. Now we know we're cool. Now we know that anybody with experience thinks we're cool. There's a ton of validation that's come in. And the last bit of validation, which I think is the strongest, bit of validation is just last week you guys will see him on slack, his name's Jeremy and he he was the lead architect and designer of Amelia, which is the platform that is second to OneReach in capabilities. And so they came in second to OneReach in capabilities and, came in first in growth. So on the growing company side, they were ahead of us in growth. He's. no longer at Amelia he's now at OneReach. And he's learning our platform and his words. I just talked to him yesterday. His words are we're just way, way ahead of everybody. So now we got a guy who designed our, nearest competitor. Who's now working for us and says, we're way, way ahead. Which is, now it's not a question ,now it's a fact. And it'll be interesting to have him help us with with sort of a sense of how to, talk about our technology as it relates to Amelia. Of course, when customers looking at our platform and Amelia's, and when he gets on the phone and they find out that he left there, came here It's pretty amazing.
[00:23:10] Antony: Yeah, it's really interesting.
[00:23:14] Robb: Have you had a chance to talk to him yet? Antony?
[00:23:18] Antony: No, not really. No, I haven't had a chance to, talk to him yet, but I definitely will.
It's really interesting to hear thoughts of a person who pretty much did the same as we did.
So it's, he definitely knows a lot of kinda he went through a lot of pain that we did, but at the same time, he might have faced issues that we haven't seen yet. And so it would be really interesting to learn from a person like that.
[00:23:51] Robb: Yeah. He's a very nice guy and very knowledgeable. And he's gonna basically lead up the US side, the technology, portion to, to, focus on how we implement customers, how we guide them a great conduit between our customers and our platform team.
[00:24:08] Daisy: It's great that he has all of that knowledge to be able to bring to our company and not have to be, not have to be an engineer or a designer, but somebody who can elevate our company forward.
[00:24:22] Robb: Yeah, or just it's, cool to see that somebody can come here, and appreciate our structure for product where it's not as much of a hierarchy as was in our competitors that it's, that we just operate more organically. But yeah, I, he did say. I was talking to him. And one of the things he did say was that a lot of the things we have done, he wanted to do, he saw the need and he wanted to do it, but but like he wouldn't get permission to do it.
And I thought that was an interesting statement, cuz I can't imagine that happens too much here where someone says they didn't get permission to do something they thought would be really useful.
[00:25:00] Antony: Yeah, definitely not part of how we operate.
[00:25:03] Robb: Yeah.
[00:25:04] Daisy: I think it also shows how further ahead you can get by leading with experience. Again, I know that we come back to this time and time again and we can do always better with how we design or develop based on experience, but this product really has been based on experience, problem solving. So what are the problems we're trying to solve? What are the experiences that people are having that need to be improved? Not just technology first.
And I think that really pushes our company forward, at exponential paces, when we're focused on experiences over technology, not that technology doesn't play huge parts of the experience, but being led with experience first, I think makes a huge difference.
[00:25:57] Robb: Yeah. Yeah. yeah, And I think to your point, Antony, the big thing I, think is next for us is there's how we designed our tool, and how people are using it today. And that's where we're at how they use it today. And then the second piece we have is, how we designed it to be used and that's probably a, a big part of the LMS job is to help us close the gap on that and to say, all these things you're discovering in terms of how people are using it is now fuel for, more of the lessons and learning that we should do. We, we didn't know to teach this because we didn't know people would do this. So now we know what we need to teach. And so having a bunch of like lessons for experienced flow builders is gonna like tips I, think is where it ends up.
[00:26:45] Antony: Yeah. we already started with that. Like every time how, at least I I can speak for myself, every time I explain some concepts, then I go and write them down as some design patterns, or at least I try to crystallize them as those. And so then we can, first of all, I don't have to, repeat myself to an next person having similar issue. I can just say, go read that. And then it's as, what's cool about design patterns in the software development, is that just knowing how they are called and, what they mean, you can just say, oh, that's a, I don't know, factory and software developer would understand you, you gave something specific, name and the same would work for us as well. When we would just talk about designing a solution for a customer. Now we would be able to just use this terms, use these patterns and explain it better. And then when you would say you need to add queue in here, it would be not just why, meaning "what is queuing?", but rather, are you sure queuing, is a good idea in this case or not? So it's Kinda, kinda whole new level of expertise for people building solutions that they can step on.
What we, did with our tool is we allowed people to code without technically writing lines of code. But it doesn't mean that good design is a given, right? No, you have to kinda to aim for that. You have to try, and sometimes it's even harder with a tool like ours comparing to writing code directly because of some well specificity of how we do that because of this tree structure and so on, but still it's now it's a next, I'm not sure if that's the biggest thing, but that's definitely a huge, potential we need to tap into. We need to explain people who are in charge of building solutions, how to think in terms of a good design patterns.
[00:28:52] Robb: Yeah.
Yeah. This is the kind of difference between coding and programming. In my mind, coding is the act of like, how do I do this thing? Validate an email address. What is the regex code I need to write? The other is programming and that is knowing you should and needs to validate an email address.
And most people go into no coding as look. I don't need to know the code to to validate an email address. And I would say that's in a lot of cases, the easy part cuz you can Google the code to validate an email address. But knowing that you need to do that's the programming side.
So I think the world is focused on the coding and not the programming and that's something we've really tried to tackle.
And I always see it most coming through when we talk about aggregating steps versus, making our steps more detailed and less aggregated and more granular. And the granularity of steps is really key to programming because if we have like a step, like GPT-3 is a good example, it's a good start. But if we have a step that does 25 things in a dropdown it's not very good for programming because programming is about exploring and seeing what things are out there to even know that validating a step is a thing.
So people, are gonna wanna peruse the library. They're gonna wanna acquaint themselves with the tools that are out there. And if functionality is hidden in a dropdown menu inside of a step, then no one's gonna really ever know it exists. And it's why, like we gotta break out our steps. It's, great to have these like initial toolkits that are very flexible so we can see how people want to use them. But then over time, we've gotta break these out so that each one of those dropdown items are individual steps and people can see and explore some of the things they can do with them and that's, it's something we always talk about and I, I think framing it under no need to have programming experience it's a whole another level.
I also feel like another good example of no programming is our like timeout leg, or our error leg, where we're just nudging people to say, oh, you should handle timeouts. You should handle errors. This is like important that we're letting people and teaching people how to program with this stuff. When we get experienced flow builders, they tend to want to shortcut that stuff. They're like oh, just gimme a step with a dropdown, with a lot of things in it, so I don't have to go grabbing all these different steps from the library and they forget that they had to learn about them some way. Now that they know they're there, they want some fast, easy way to go get them. We can't just design the tool for experts. We gotta make sure that we design it for people and learning. The vast majority of the world out there doesn't know how to use our tool super finite small number do. At this moment we've gotta design for most of the people not the few that know it. So yeah.
[00:32:13] Daisy: I was just gonna say, I know that it's very, it's almost like, two parallel paths, right? For the people that know, and the people that don't know, one of the things that we had talked about a while ago, though and maybe especially with GPT-3, where this could come into play is getting to a place where we can predict or even recommend. And I think you could do that in the training section as well. Right? Where you can group things together and still nudge predict tool tip throughout that process of people building that also helps educate them along the way.
Is that something that we could utilize GPT-3, to help in those formats, as we start moving the product that direction?
[00:33:04] Robb: it might be GPT-3. I think the key is, and you said it is, it's one thing to to predict the next step someone should use, which we're trying to do, and it's getting better and better. And it's it's a game changer, but it's another thing to predict the next step and teach them how to use it also. Not just say here's the next step, but also here's a quick tutorial on how to use this step.
Yeah, it's always been an interesting concept for me. This, if we could start tracking when people are using a step for the first time and play a quick video a quick start it'd just be hard to pull it off without annoying people.
[00:33:46] Daisy: Yeah, or even if they're pulling on a queuing step where you can throw something up that says, are you sure you want queuing? Here's where it works best? Or you could utilize you know, maybe it's as easy as like do you want tooltips on or tooltips off to play you know something to that effect
[00:34:03] Robb: Could point our I wonder if our I design team could take challenge where you know, maybe there's some sort of mouse over like capability for steps on a canvas that kinda say what does this step do? Gives a quick overview of when you should use it.
[00:34:22] Antony: Yeah, some sort of a shortcut get access to help, it's just from a tree
[00:34:30] Robb: Yeah. Yeah, you're right to get help it would be some sort of, yeah, quick access. yeah. It's like help be brief a very brief summary of the help if you wanted it. Ah, cool idea.
So anyways I think the summary of all this is, we're way ahead and we still can see so many ways to improve our tool We still feel that we're at the beginning of the journey. We've barely gotten started with graph DB, we have a whole new NLU solution coming out. So many ways to tighten what we have. While our competitors are struggling to figure out how to differentiate we're we can just see so many ways make our tool better. What's super existing to me, we're way ahead, but far from out of ideas. Pretty exiting from that standpoint.
[00:35:22] Antony: On my side, I can say that we are just getting started on so many problems we wanna solve from our global architecture standpoint. All our dreams about being cloud agnostic, all our thoughts about how we can be more resilient with cross region replication and stuff. We just starting on these problems. Without even actual problems that our users face with UX and what kind of solutions they can build using our platform.
[00:35:57] Robb: Maybe that that'd be great. Do you wanna give a status
what ideas are around Amazon agnistic or cloud agnostic
[00:36:04] Antony: Yep, sure.
Um so as majority of you, I guess know platform is built on AWS as a primary cloud. Dependency to AWS resources is in the heart of our services. When we started years ago we relied a lot on AWS managed services meaning AWS is managing that service we just kinda pay for usage and it just magically works, it magically scales, depending on the load we have.
Uh, but as we were growing, as we were dealing with bigger and bigger customers at some moment start facing some, not obvious issues. So at some moment you realise that magical scalability is is not actually a reality, just a dream because everything has limits and so even though Amazon, and not just Amazon, any other cloud provider as well is trying to by, I don't know sly of hands say it will scale up to your demand at some moment, you realize that it is actually limited and if you hit then they do not really like some limits are just impossible to change, to increase for example. And so more and more of those we face the more we start realising that actually knowing that upfront or instead of relying on some service that Amazon created and manages in some cases we would prefer to manage this service on our own and then also on the other hand to this, we had, I remember that we had some potential client who at some moment asked us: product is great, but is it possible for you to be hosted in Google cloud? And obvious answer was: no we can not, Amazon is a primary cloud for us. Well, not even primary, the only. And, so that was the end for that potential contract, right?
So taking all this into account some time ago we decided that now from now we'll take a direction that every further architectural decisions we make, we would going toward becoming cloud agnostic. What it means for us is relying less and less on AWS managed services So instead using NoSQL database like dynamoDB or OpenSearch from Amazon, use ElasicSearch or in case of dynamoDB I guess there are other alternatives like Cassandra or something else and so on.
And with that in mind we started looking more and more into Kubernetes as the engine for orcherstrating and running all our services and flow included. So now we are investing heavily into putting together solid architecture, so structure on how services should be defined, how they should be delivered into Kubernetes cluster. Originally we had zero devops engineers in our team. Since our platform is serverless from its core, we were utilizing serverless approach from day one. With serverless, you don't have that many servers to manage, you don't need that overhead of devops people to deal with that. And now as we started looking into alternatives to manage services by cloud providers now we are in need of these people. Now we have team, right now it's a team of three people. Who are actually helping us a lot with, making it all cutting edge and how it should run and how it should be done. We have, we did a lot of good decisions on our path but some of them were bad, you can't always be right. So now we slowly untangling bad decisions that we made and so hopefully in, in the not that distant future we would be able to kind of disconnect from Amazon and to go into next layer of abstraction that now we can just say, we can run anywhere. We can run in Google, we can run in Amazon. We can, might even run in some cloud, like digital ocean. Why not? I mean with Kubernetes it's possible.
So, yeah, that's like really really brief explanation of why we are going in this direction and where we are. Actually many services that we spawned lately are already running this way, we are already switching gears. Service for using relational DBs it's still serverless in its nature, but it's designed differently and it runs as a serverless approach using kubernetes we already tapping into that actively and right now we are having a lot of discussions on, how we manage instrastructure right, how we deploy resources, how we deploy new versions of software and how we can reduce amount of problems that we have and so, I don't wanna go into all the technical details, but, a lot of great stuff is happening right now.
[00:41:38] Robb: That's great
Yeah I'm excited for this. I think we always knew we would kickstart off of Amazon services but then eventually we'd outgrow it and I think that's like time flies here we are looking at how we can reach beyond it address some of the latency issues and things that are out of our control right now by having more control over the underlying technology. So very cool.
[00:42:01] Antony: Yeah, exactly
[00:42:03] Robb: I think that's all we got for now and certainly could keep talking but hopefully we'll have a lot more to talk about next month with new intern program and so many products about to launch and live agent getting started with discount tire and so many cool things looking forward to that.
[00:42:23] Robb: I don't know if we mentioned this in the last podcast but discount tire was named the top retailer in customer centricity, so customer service. That means they beat Apple, the Apple store, Amazon, Google, Lulu lemon all the any retailer you can think of in the US. Discount tire came out ahead, so what that means for OneReach is everybody's gonna wanna understand what and watch what discount tire does, because whatever they do they're gonna wanna copy and since so far discount tire is a big part of our sort of major rollouts they're doing a lot of cool stuff with OneReach a lot of the stuff we sell they're actually implementing. So they limiting to there's thousand stores I think this should be really important moment for us is getting these guys through. But knowing that once, we've rolled out OneReach that the rest of the retailers will wanna know so it's that whole fall of the leader
We got lucky. We didn't pick discount tire, we didn't know. I never would've thought a tire store would've come out on top like that. But we got lucky and they were named number one and that's gonna mean a lot for us as we kinda move forward
[00:43:51] Daisy: Yeah, and to that point I don't wanna forget to mention that we've had some of that similar happening international side as well for Getronics international brand Kev Browne have been working and there one of their big customers is similar to somebody like an Agero, RAC and they just went live with their first project just a cuple weeks ago as well and they already have now five more and now they are getting introduced to big brands following that kinda following the leader approach just've what you mentioned with discount tire with companies like Electrolux or you know other big from the international market so it's definitely happening everywhere not just United States as well.
[00:44:40] Antony: Yeah, that's actually great. Again, how this conversation started that following leader of thoughts, like, as experts talking about us, this is another perspective that following leaders in their areas like in case of Discount Tire leader in retail area is the best way to market us. Again it's a bit more limited since not everyone might be willing to tell that OneReach is a technology behind it, but al least when it, I guess I can imagine when it when it comes to talking to a new potential clients we a say that.
[00:45:21] Robb: Yep, people will be writing about it, we'll be talking about it. I think word will get out and that will be very positive for us as we. Again, yeah you're right. It's, another thing like experts love us the top companies in terms of customer service use us that really starts to gain trust so that others will just use us on that basis alone.
And yeah it is important to note that the US tends to lead in customer service and The rest of the world tends to watch what the US companies do when it comes to customer service and that hospitality and retail tend to lead, be the we industries in customer service in the US.
So getting the number one and retail it it is a really really really big deal and now we'll be looking to get the number one in hospitality next. And of course they'll likely take the meeting just based on our experience with discount tire, but yeah we're really at that point where we've designed something cool It's time to execute it. And that's really the hard part and that's where we are at this moment.
[00:46:33] Antony: Yeah, sounds like a plan.
All right, guys, I guess we should wrap it up for this time.
[00:46:41] Robb: Sounds good. Till next time.
[00:46:43] Antony: Yeah. Thanks everyone.
[00:46:45] Daisy: Bye.
[00:46:46] Robb: Bye bye
[00:46:46] Antony: Bye