Five9 Inc

Five9, Inc. is a company that makes virtual call center software which is used by sales and marketing, customer service and support, finance and collections and other organizations for both inbound and outbound call center functions such as telemarketing, telesales and support centers.
History
Five9, Inc. was founded by five Silicon Valley technology workers (John Kim, James Southworth, Andrew Veliath, Gus Laredo & Ray Soto) who sought to combine Voice-over-IP technology with an emerging Software-as-a-Service delivery model in January of 2001. Gus Laredo originally pitched the company as a softswitch startup at a time when the telecom market was in decline following the burst of the dot-com bubble. After early feedback from venture capitalists, they quickly switched to a virtual call center product model, which put them in direct competition with much larger vendors such as Avaya and Nortel.
In early 2008, the company reported revenue growth of 1,300 percent from 2003 to 2006. In that same year, Mike Burkland replaced Brian Silverman as CEO.
Five9's headquarters is in Pleasanton, California and they maintain a development office staffed with engineers in Nizhniy Novgorod Russia.
Funding
Venture Capital firm Hummer Winblad is a significant investor in the firm, along with Partech International and Mosaic Venture Partners. To date, the firm has raised $29 million in venture capital financing.
Claims to Fame
The company claims to have pioneered the hosted call center industry. In October of 2009, the company announced a cloud computing platform for call centers which they claim is an industry-first. The advent of virtual, or "hosted" call centers is significant or notable because of the substantial cost savings that industry analysts, such as Yankee Group, say that call center operators may realize. And because of how the technology fundamentally changes the way a call center operator or entire industry operates.
Partners
The company partners with many other firms such as CRM providers or lead management software providers to provide call center solutions that integrate multiple disciplines.
Partners include:
<ul>
<li> Salesforce.com
<li> Leads360
<li> NetSuite
<li> RightNow
</ul>
The company is also a member of the Workforce Management Software Group and provides one of the telephony platforms that is integrated into that group's Community workforce management solution.

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