Published on the 27/02/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
The tyranny of distance is no more for US vendor LiveOps, which is actively growing its development team in New Zealand to spearhead further global customer growth…
Silicon Valley-based cloud contact centre vendor LiveOps has this week officially opened a technology hub in New Zealand dedicated to developing its cloud product and providing customer support locally and in the States.
LiveOps came to New Zealand when it acquired Datasquirt in 2011, and chose to retain all seven employees in the region. The team now numbers 23 and works on the fastest growing part of the company’s business, the LiveOps’ cloud contact centre business which experienced 55 percent growth in the last year.
CEO, Marty Beard, flew in from the States with SVP of engineering and operations Steve Griset to attend the official launch of the technology hub at Auckland’s Chorus House. He told iStart that LiveOps was expanding its team in New Zealand because of the amazing development talent it was able to find here and the loyalty of the developers.
“One of the issues in Silicon Valley is you can attract a lot of great talent but you get a lot of turnover and it’s obviously highly competitive. One thing we learned over here through the acquisition is you can get equally strong technological talent, not as much turnover and the time zone is really workable.”
As testament to the strength of the local programmers, last September LiveOps won the Business Intelligence Group’s BIG Award for Best Product for the LiveOps Engage platform that was built in New Zealand.
Beard said he feels a bit like his New Zealand team is the secret recipe, but he doesn’t see them as being in New Zealand per se. “I see it as having code that is being built globally for customers who are global,” he explained. The New Zealand office is quickly becoming a very big chunk of engineering, and with plenty of space to expand and Beard would love to double its size again in the next year or so given his growth plans for the business.
Talking about the time difference between New Zealand and the US, Griset added: “It’s almost near sourcing – it’s three to five hours’ time difference from our East Coast. And LiveOps is live on Sunday in the US so we get six days coverage from our operation team automatically with this investment.” He also said that, compared to getting a green card in the States, the immigration laws in New Zealand made recruiting talented developers here easier.
The launch of the Auckland development hub follows the recent announcement that LiveOps raised $US30 million specifically to accelerate its global expansion. As part of this continued expansion LiveOps in January this year acquired Canadian start-up UserEvents and its product CxEngage which uses a contextual routing engine to collect and process events on any communications channel in real time so that LiveOps users an react to customer needs immediately.
LiveOps has also just opened a new data centre in Sydney that will further support LiveOp’s growth plans (which will be rapid), as well as ensure customers will have high-speed access to the cloud-based network.
