The role of a Chief Financial Officer, especially in mid-market size companies, continues to evolve rapidly beyond the immediate realm of finance. As LiveOps' Chief Financial Officer, my time is spent balancing the needs of various stakeholders from the conventional duties such as answering to investors and capital allocation, to key decision maker in data center deployment, product pricing, and strategic support function for the business so we collectively hit key financial metrics. Naturally, the evolution of the class of "operational" CFOs allows us to provide a perspective to highlight not just the ongoing technological trends but offer a financial lens to why those changes matter to investors. Ultimately it is the synchronization of the technological merits of cloud with a sound financial strategy that will continue to fuel investments and growth in the sector.
We are still in the infancy of cloud adoption and cloud technology. There are multiple applications available in the market today that use cloud computing and cloud providers are experiencing significant growth as they capture much of the market share from the traditional software and on premise solutions. As evidenced by the Bessemer Venture Partner (BVP) Cloud Index, public cloud companies have generated over $80B in market value since 2012.
Cloud Leaders Will Begin To Emerge
As cloud adoption expands more and more companies are finding ways to leverage the flexibility, scalability and cost savings it offers. Specialization in the cloud is fast becoming a trend. Take LiveOps for example. Through the LiveOps Cloud Contact Center Platform our customers are able to offer seamless interactions over different channels - voice chat, email, SMS and social - to their own customers. That is something unique. The ability to pivot between all of these different channels on a singular desktop gives the user a lot of power. We are able to monitor and report a customer's journey as he or she navigates through the ever widening communication channels in a singular platform. Cloud vendors will continue to develop specialization in their verticals and emerge as leaders.
Big Data and Cloud Will Propel Deeper Insights
We are also seeing notable developments emerging from the Big Data arena. As a cloud based application the LiveOps Platform captures a lot of rich transactional data. The LiveOps Platform captures metadata that tracks the customer journey from contact to closing the order. Amalgamating that customer journey from the LiveOps platform with the already rich data set in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) will begin to provide unique insights to companies on how better to manage customer experience and satisfaction. Cloud applications are therefore uniquely positioned to not only integrate effectively with Big Data, but then leverage the findings to roll out new feature sets seamlessly relative to traditional on-premise system.