As technology leaders around the globe wrap up budgets and begin planning for next year, Andrew Taylor, President and Chief Revenue Officer of Calero had the opportunity to chat with David Bliss, Chief Product Officer of Calero to get a sneak-peak of product launches coming in 2022. In this exclusive interview, you’ll learn all about the exciting developments we have in store for Smart Automation, our SaaS and UCaaS management offerings, and how we plan to improve our customer experience in the year ahead.
Hi David, thanks for joining me today in this discussion. We’ve had a great track record over the last 12 months, bringing multiple innovative products and capabilities to market. Looking ahead to next year, how are we going to continue to delight our customers and improve their overall customer experience?
Happy to be here and great question. The user experience within our software is a primary focus in delighting our customers. To that end, we are updating our user interface to modernize the experience, simplify navigation, and give end users more control. These enhancements will not only make it more aesthetically pleasing for the customer but make them more powerful as well.
For example, these updates will deliver new dynamic grid capabilities with inline pivoting, expanded language support, and access to new self-service analytics. We have already delivered this new experience for our rapidly expanding Managed Mobility end user base and in our SaaS and UCaaS modules and are looking forward to rolling it out across the entire application in 2022.
Last year we launched Smart Automation, which won IDG’s CIO 100 Award for 2021. What comes next in the project?
After launching the first set of smart automation capabilities centered around enabling non-technical users to build their own bots, this coming year brings a lot of exciting new improvements. We are launching a new automated account onboarding process to streamline both invoice and inventory setup and maintenance. By combining Smart Automation with TrueInsight, which we also launched in 2021, we will significantly reduce the time it takes to implement new customers and improve quality and efficiency in maintaining telecom programs for our existing customers.
With the ubiquity of 5G and the exponential growth of IoT and machine-to-machine devices, how do we plan on better supporting our customers who rely on these connected devices to run their operations?
While we can support IoT expense management today, our 2022 IoT toolkit will provide a purpose-built program management module to address this exact issue. The toolkit will optimize the management of both devices, SIMs, and data plans through bulk-ordering integration with vendors, real-time usage monitoring, location tracking, and spend optimization recommendations, to name a few capabilities.
Many of our customers are planning for, or already working on, modernizing their technology infrastructure through SD-WAN migrations and other technology upgrades. How can we support our customers who are implementing these initiatives in 2022?
I’m glad you asked because this is a common question we get. We are coming out with a project management module designed explicitly for telecom network modernization. This module will help you plan, budget, execute, and review and report on these initiatives through the entire process. The module will also combine existing capabilities such as TrueInsight for network management and visualization, TrueSense Benchmarking for price comparisons, shopping, quoting and ordering to provision new products and services, and of course, our industry-leading analytics platform for monitoring progress throughout the project.
Finally, what’s next for our UCaaS and SaaS Expense Management offerings in 2022?
After launching the UCaaS solution in early 2021 with direct integration with Zoom and Microsoft for tracking real-time license data, usage and charges, and call detail records, we have been focused on building more connectors and additional functionality into the solution. In early 2022 we will be rolling out support for RingCentral, Webex, and other UCaaS vendors, as well as general SaaS application expense management for solutions like Salesforce.com, Google Suite, SAP, Oracle, Adobe and more. Finally, we will be adding robust policy management into the solution to enable configurable optimization recommendations based on usage of these SaaS tools across our customers’ employee base.
We hope you enjoyed getting a first-hand look at our product roadmap for 2022 and what’s to come in the growing technology space. We have more to share in the next few weeks - stay tuned!