Having experienced a meteoric rise to the forefront of the CCaaS space, Five9 is determined to cement its position.
Of course, that will require releasing innovations, integrations, and services by the bucketload.
Yet, it also necessitates an ever-expanding global footprint, which Five9 has established by developing data centers and research hubs in key growth regions.
Perhaps the most prominent of these hubs is Five9’s new European engineering headquarters in Porto, Portugal – a European hotbed for tech talent and innovation.
” Five9 chose Porto due to its tremendous engineering, technology, and contact centre talent, and to provide scale to the company’s international expansion,” said Daniel Silva, VP of Engineering at Five9 and Site Lead for the Porto hub.
“The local presence to our European customers allows us to partner with our customers, so together, we can build products that directly impact their needs.”
But it’s not just a purely European play. Indeed, engineers in Porto will integrate with Five9’s global tech teams, building the Five9 platform for customers worldwide.
Naturally, much of the efforts from this hub will fixate on making it easier for Five9 to listen to and understand its European customer challenges. Yet, that’s only part of the story.
Global innovation is front and center of the Porto team’s agenda.
Speed It Up. Innovate In Porto
“Innovate or die” is often attributed to Peter Drucker, a management consultant and author. The phrase presents business leaders with a stark choice, especially when the pace of technological change has reached unparalleled complexity and speed.
“The engineering at Porto is a continuous delivery process from inception to delivery, Silva said. “It’s successive releases every day, multiple times a day,” explained Silva.
Five9’s US engineering team helps accelerate these efforts. Residing on the West Coast, that team is joined at the hip with engineers in Porto, delivering around-the-clock innovation.
Indeed, when it comes to enterprise collaboration, Five9 is a business that practices what it preaches. Silva added:
“One team releases products into production while another team is offline activating features as we test. It’s a succession of releases while increasing the pace of innovation. Speed is crucial.”
Early Examples of Global Innovation
AI is nothing new to Five9. The company has built conversational AI platforms, speech analytics, routing engines, agent-assist modules, scheduling tools, authentication products, and more.
The expansion into Porto may soon accelerate its innovation curve, which could prove critical as generative AI seems set to redefine elements of the service experience.
“ChatGPT is already part of our product mix, reflecting how crucial it is to deliver meaningful products quickly,” added Silva.
In the short time ChatGPT has been on the scene, Five9 has released capabilities to provide AI-based summaries (created on top of ChatGPT) and spot opportunities for automation. Silva continued:
“Before ChatGPT, it was costly to train a model. But now ChatGPT is a very effective way for companies to integrate AI into their products at a fraction of the cost.”
The Porto hub is likely to assist Five9 as it drops in these new GenAI-based applications on the fly and intensifies its speed of innovation.
The World Beckons
Getting the right techniques to solve the right problems at the right time is difficult. But Five9 has a game plan to take on new regions in Europe and Latin America.
“We leverage the latest technologies to move the needle and deploy investments to solve the real problems,” explained Silva.
We got it right because our Porto engineering hub brings us closer to our European customers, which helps shape the future of our products. And that’s an essential element of our global innovation strategy.”
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