"The dual drivers of cloud and digitization have always been there, but now you've got COVID-19 turbo-charging it."
That's how Rowan Trollope, chief executive officer of call center software vendor Five9, explains what has happened to the world of work[1] as a result of the pandemic[2].
"When everybody had to go home — that's going to be a permanent feature of the landscape going forward — that really exposed the cracks of on-premise systems to not be able to handle those situations well."
"With Five9, it's a Web browser, you can have a Web browser at home, it's really easy."
Five9 on Thursday evening reported[3] third-quarter revenue and profit that comfortably surpassed analysts' expectations, and forecast this quarter's results much higher as well.
A good chunk of what is happening is a "labor shift," said Trollope in an interview with ZDNet following the report.
If you go to Home Depot to buy a drill, Trollope observed, one talks to a person in a blue shirt, and to return the drill later, you would talk to a second person at the customer service desk.
Those two individuals are now displaced by someone on the phone or in chat. It's that labor shift in commerce that Five9 has been enabling.
"A good part of what's driving our business is the overall market acceleration." Trollope thinks that labor shift will never entirely be unwound. "We've got these new habits, and those habits are not going to go away soon."
Five9's financial results, said Trollope, was