Last week at Technology Services World Best Practices, the closing event of the conference was the Vision Awards at Service Revolutions. This “American Idol” style competition gives tech companies 7 minutes to demo their coolest technology. The competition was hosted by our CEO, JB Wood. A panel of judges, consisting of Al Gray, Vice President, Bentley Systems; Tony Brucha, Director, Advanced Services, WebEx Customer Success, Cisco; and yours truly, asked questions and made somewhat relevant comments after each presenter. Audience voting determined the winners.
To be considered for Service Revolutions, technology firms submit applications in 3 categories:
- Service Practitioners. These are service organizations within tech firms, showing off technology or programs they have developed to improve customer service, streamline operations, or drive service revenue.
- Commercial. These are established technology firms selling products to service organizations. The products must be in Beta phase or newly released.
- Startup. These are brand new tech firms within their first 2 years, often pre-VC, showing off products yet to be released. The winner of the startup category wins a check for $10,000!
The finalists who took the stage were:
- Service Practitioner: Blackbaud. Blackbaud demonstrated their group consulting model for professional services.
- Service Practitioner: SAP. SAP demonstrated their Learning Hub for customer education.
- Commercial: Ancile. Ancile demonstrated their in-product dynamic help technology.
- Commercial: Radialpoint. Radialpoint demonstrated their Google extension which incorporates internal content into employee’s Google searches.
- Commercial: Transversal. Trasnversal demonstrated Prescience, their voice self-service product.
- Startup: SimpleQL. SimpleQL demontrated their dynamic analytics tools, “the Festivus of Business Intelligence.”
- Startup: XOEye Technologies. XOEye demonstrated their camera and video enabled saftey glasses for field service, with a price point in the hundreds–not thousands.
The winners were Blackbaud, Radialpoint and SimpleQL. I thank all the presenters for great demonstrations, and congratulations to the winners!
Ragsdale’s Eye on Service 