2021: A Year in Review

2021 presented major challenges to businesses of all sizes, but it also offered unique opportunities for growth. Fortunately for us, the people who work at Cloverhound are a determined, innovative, and hard-working bunch that never ceases to amaze me. Not only did we survive the pandemic, but we’ve also flourished. 2021 was a record year and 2022 is on track to be more of the same but that won’t come without some changes to keep growth on track. Before we cover some major announcements, let’s cover 2021’s wins. (Scroll past the bullets if you just want announcements).

Here are some of the Cloverhound organizational accomplishments over the pandemic I am most proud of as we look back:

  • Revenue grew in 2021 from 2.8M to 4.7M – almost 65% growth. All organic with no investors behind.
  • SaaS Revenue is now hovering around 50% of our book. 3 years ago, this was at 5%.
  • A new partnership with Five9 generated significant value for all parties. Over 30 new Five9 Contact Centers delivered in 2021 alone with expectations to grow.
  • Achieved our Webex Contact Center certification and began helping partners sell using our expertise.
  • Cloverhound nearly doubled in employee headcount from around 12 to 24 people today. We experienced growth in both the Charlotte and Denver offices.
  • Built our initial Managed Services platform.
  • Moved to a hybrid work model with 3 days in the office, 2 from home.
  • Incentivized our employees to get vaccinated and achieved 100% vaccination very early in the pandemic.
  • We added multiple Cloverbabies to our family and already have more coming in 2022. Nothing makes us happier than seeing our employees and their families flourish.
  • Moved our Charlotte HQ downtown to 501 N. Church St. to allow us to grow in headcount easier.
  • Hired Kevin Parrett as our COO who has over 20 years of industry experience doing exactly what we do. This was critical to allow us to continue to scale our growth. Kevin will be relocating to Denver.

We had a ton of amazing technical accomplishments as well.

  • Built over 25 custom gadgets for clients on Finesse and Webex CC.
  • Our pro-active monitoring platform for Cisco CCE, Vigilus, now has over 25 customers. We’ve recently added full support for all Cisco UC applications (CUCM, Unity, IM&P, Expressway, Cubes, etc…). You’ll want a demo.
  • Major technical investments into Amazon Connect, Twilio, and Google AI for advanced customer experience.
  • Upgraded the UC and CC Systems of one of the largest insurance companies in the world.
  • Built a modular password reset system for Office365 that can be used by any IVR or Bot platform.
  • Was one of the first companies to have a Webex Embedded App certified on the Webex App Hub. (Cloverhound Connect)
  • Acquired IP from a previous client and built Cloverhound Connect on top of it. Cloverhound Connect is our B2C verticalized video platform. Here are some neat stats.
    • Over 1,000,000 meetings scheduled on the platform since its launch last April.
    • One of the largest metros in the world is using it for all their DMV and traffic hearings.
    • Two major hospital systems doing all telehealth appointments on it. Over 20,000 patient visits last year.
    • Powering 6 major court systems across the country for all their virtual hearings.
    • Integrated into UCCE Task router for unified video routing channel.
    • Retail vertical launching soon.
    • SDK Launching in 2022 to take B2C functionality into your custom-built applications.
    • Nearing 1M in ARR per year already.

So, what’s in store for Cloverhound in the future?

It’s no secret that as companies move more and more towards the cloud, they are switching vendors from traditional players to newer more agile solutions, especially in Contact Center and Video. Although we’ve seen this transition happening, to this point we’ve been primarily a Cisco-only shop.

Over that course of time, I’ve always tried to paint the picture to our partners and customers that Cloverhound is an engineering and development firm, not a product reseller. Over the years we proved this countless times by helping our customers solve problems with whatever tech it took to get the job done. As such, as the cloud changes the market, we must expand our capabilities to suit our customer’s needs.

As we look forward to 2022, I am happy to announce that our full set of development services is now available for the Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Twilio platforms. This means both Professional Services and Product. Starting on Jan 10th, our Cloverhound Connect platform will be available for Webex but also all 3 of the above vendors as well. Self-signup and trial organizations are also coming to the platform in Q1.

We’re also making major investments in our agnostic CC strategy. One where you can take any of Cloverhound’s prebuilt APIs and weave complex interactions such as payments, CRM lookups, customer journey metric gathering into any CC quickly and get the same experience across vendors. Later this year that backend and its features will become more public-facing but for now, contact us for a demo to see functionality like password resets and payments in action in the Cloud CC of your choice.

The industry is moving faster than ever and I’m happy to say thanks to all our great Cloverhounders for keeping up with it.  You can contact me at cstachowicz@cloverhound.com if you’d like to discuss a new partnership supporting development and engineering at your organization. We’re really excited for 2022 and we look forward to making the journey with you!

Best,

Chad Stachowicz