Five9 and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service

Five9
Cloud

Genefa Murphy Chief Marketing Officer

August 13, 2021

Well, it’s Magic Quadrant time again and on August 9^th, 2021, Gartner published their 2021 Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service and we thank them for selecting Five9 as one of the elite providers amongst the large number of vendors out there in the CCaaS space.

This year, Five9 was recognized as a Challenger. While we believe that being recognized as a leader would be more reflective of the tremendous trust that we have seen our customers put in us, and as evidenced by our growth rates with existing customers and the addition of several new enterprise customers, we are pleased with our position. We know that customers are moving to the cloud faster than ever and they are increasingly choosing Five9 – as demonstrated by our revenue growing in the 30s in 2020 and accelerating to the 40s in the first half of 2021. We are thankful for our customers, and we look forward to continuing to build upon the strengths that Gartner outlines for Five9:

Strong Ability to Execute

Five9 is one of the largest CCaaS providers in the world with solid financials and a history of strong revenue growth, including 20+ quarters of increased revenue with an average of +29% each quarter since 2015. We also have a strong market cap that has grown substantially to over $13B. Why does this matter? Because it reflects the demand for the Five9 solution in the market and our ability to continue to invest where it matters most to our customers.

Focus on Service Strategy

The MQ highlighted the progress Five9 has made towards integrating some of the key acquisitions made over the last year and our ability to deliver on the "Four Pillars of Great Customer Service." We agree and are glad that not only has the team been able to integrate at a product-level but this hasn’t compromised the service that we provide to our customers. In fact, Five9 is laser-focused on delivering white glove customer service as demonstrated by a net promoter scores consistently +80% for implementations – globally.

Offering Choice – Especially in Pricing

As Gartner points out, Five9 offers competitive prices across a broad set of native and partner product and service capabilities. They call out that we don’t necessarily actively promote all the pricing options. We prefer to talk with our customers to find the price that’s right for them. We believe in value-driven discussions focused on business outcomes and giving customers a choice. Sometimes, that choice is a little more detailed than what can fit on a pricing page on the website. To aid customers in their research, we created a calculator to help them determine which approach works for them whether it be concurrent, pay-per-use or maybe a mix of both. You can find the calculator here. We also launched simplified product bundles earlier this year; those can be found at https://www.five9.com/products/pricing.

Being Market Responsive

The world is agile and being able to respond quickly to change is key. As Gartner pointed out, we continue to execute well in terms of adding new customers, both in the U.S. and internationally (in fact, Five9 is a global provider of CCaaS services with 25% of all concurrent seats coming from international locations). Our ability to keep expanding our footprint is supported by the fact that we are continuously iterating here at Five9 and our product and engineering teams are focused on continuously learning and delivering for our customers. This is reflected in the Five9 Hyperscale Architecture which delivers increased resiliency and global scalability while supporting the rapid release of new product features. This approach to Iterative development and the supporting Infrastructure has even led to Five9 being recognized by Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) as an "Elite" provider. This means that Five9 can deliver innovation faster than ever before and be more responsive to the needs of the market, while leveraging best-in-class CI/CD release methodologies.

Now, as we all know, in every MQ Gartner identifies strengths and cautions for each company. On the “Cautions” side they note that we have more to do to expand geographically and support local operations. We agree, and that is why we have tripled our investment in international and recently set up incremental operations teams in Europe and more to come in APAC. We are also very excited about recent wins we have had in the enterprise space with companies that are headquartered in the U.S. but operate extensively abroad (Gartner doesn’t classify this as “Western Europe” in their numbers). You can read about some of these customers via our website. You can also check out customer reviews on Five9 on Gartner Peer Insights, where Five9 was just awarded recognition as a "Customer First CCaaS Provider."

So, in summary, while we definitely believe that we should have been recognized as a Leader in the 2021 MQ (who wouldn’t, after all) we also understand that Five9 and Gartner disagree on some of the definitions. For example, Gartner defines the “global” CCaaS market to not include LATAM, Middle East/Africa, and APAC; we see global as truly meaning worldwide. However, despite this, we are pleased that we are a Challenger, and we are pleased that some of the areas of caution called out for our competitors in the area of account management and support were not concerns for Five9. Add this to the recent news regarding Zoom’s intent to acquire Five9, and we believe we are well-positioned to deliver for our customers now and in the future. We look forward to continuing to challenge the market on how to reimagine customer experience. Afterall, in the wise words and charismatic voice of Morgan Freeman, "Challenge yourself; it’s the only path that leads to growth."

BTW – if you want some additional perspectives on Five9’s leadership position, you can also check out these reports:

Thank you, Gartner, for including us in this year’s Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service It’s onwards and upwards for us and we will continue to maintain our laser focus on delighting customers – across the globe.