Texas-based Tango Networks launched their cloud offering in Europe first, but now brings it to the North American market, and are expanding their channel of enterprise-focused partners to help sell it.
Frisco TX-based Tango Networks has announced that their Kinetic Cloud cloud-powered enterprise mobility enablement solution is now available in North America.
“Kinetic Cloud is an evolution of the company’s platform to be cloud-based,” said Adam Boone, Vice President of Strategic Planning for Tango Networks. They first launched it in Europe earlier this year. It lets enterprises provide mobile unified communications, while recording compliance, automating enterprise application integration, and giving admins full control over policy.
While they initially rolled out Kinetic Cloud in Europe, Tango Networks is American, native to Texas, and has been in business since 2005.
“We started with this in Europe because the challenges in managing mobility are acute when different countries are involved, as you have factors like constant roaming costs and enforcing policies on someone three countries away,” Boone said. “So we decided to tackle that market first. Traditionally, much of these issues have been under the control of the mobile company, not the enterprise. We solved that problem, handing control back to the enterprise IT manager, so they can control mobile communications like they do Internet or application access.”
These sorts of issues have always been Tango Networks’ focus as a company.
Adam Boone, Vice President of Strategic Planning for Tango Networks
“We have always had a focus in enterprise mobility, mobile communications that are used, deployed and managed by an enterprise, in order to give the enterprise control of communications,” Boone said. “Our products allow an IT manager in the enterprise to manage and enforce rules and shape real time communications of employees on mobile devices. Typically, mobile is out of the IT manager’s control. What our platform does is route the mobile call into the enterprise, and allow the IT manager to see it, log it, capture it, and archive it.”
Boone described what Tango Networks does as working well with the Enterprise Mobility Management [EMM] vendors rather than being competitive with them.
“We are focused on the Real Time Communications [RTC] aspects – voice, messaging and collaboration tools – enabling enforcement of policies, and have 60 patents on this technology,” he said. “So we complement the EMMs.”
Tango Networks is also adding add-on services for the Kinetic Cloud platform, most recently a new Enterprise Text Messaging solution, which lets mobile network SMS text messages be sent and received on any company number, even existing numbers that haven’t previously been SMS-enabled.
“Individual UC vendors provide this for their own platforms, but our service is independent of any single UC platform,” Boone stated. “Large enterprises often have multiple vendor UC systems deployed, and we consolidate all of that.”
Tango Networks’ solution portfolio as a whole covers pretty much the whole market, from SMBs to large multi-national enterprises, but Kinetic Cloud is pitched more at the high end of this.
“We are aiming Kinetic Cloud more at larger enterprises and multinationals, because the technology is well suited for a very large user base,” Boone said.
Tango Networks has had partners for years, specifically mobile network operators who white label them to enterprise customers, a channel they have had for close to a decade.
“One reason that we are not that well known generally is that we didn’t really start up our own marketing and branding until last year, really the last 18 months,” Boone said. “Most of our demand generation before that was white labelling. We do have IT reseller and systems integrator partners as well.”
Today they have 50 of these partners, including a couple in Canada.
“This channel is something that really kicked in several years ago when we introduced a channel program,” Boone indicated. “However, we have made a real push this year to ramp that up, and become more aggressive in our channel recruiting. Ramping up the channel partner program with co-marketing and joint marketing initiatives puts tools in the hands of partners, so they can make noise about us too.”
Tango Networks is looking to keep the channel relatively select as they build it out, however.
“We are looking for people who have enterprise customer relationships, and a deep understanding of RTC,” Boone said.
Tango Networks is using strategic partnering in North America to help get the message out about Kinetic Cloud.
“We have aligned with various partners for better communication, such as Verint, who are focused on compliance,” Boone noted. “We are partnering with them on a road show around communications for financial services companies. These vendor strategic alliances are critically important for us. We have also begun ramping up discussions with analyst community, to get more visibility there.” This includes a joint 451 Research and Tango Networks webinar on Thursday, September 20, 2018.
