Nextiva CEO Tomas Gorny On Launching New Team Collaboration Software And Helping Businesses Through COVID-19

The coronavirus crisis has thrown the business world into turmoil, with the stock market suffering severe losses, markets restricted by closed borders, and employees confined to their homes. 

In the midst of all this, companies are facing the challenge of adjusting, often by shifting much of their business life online, and working in remote teams. This abrupt transition to a distributed workforce has been tough for many, with teams struggling to solve communication and productivity issues. Much hangs in the balance.

Enter Tomas Gorny, co-founder and CEO of Nextiva, a cloud business communications company.

Helping Businesses Through The Digital Transition

Taking stock of the situation, Gorny realized that many companies were suddenly in dire need of deep expertise in remote work, as well as the tools to facilitate it. “Our customers need help not only with communications,” Gorny says, “but with the nuts and bolts of running their businesses in an unusual time.”

Fortunately, Nextiva provides just that kind of help. 

After starting out in 2008 as a business phone systems provider, the company quickly evolved. Today, it offers a suite of business management and communication services, including CRM, software for website chat, online surveys, business intelligence, e-mail marketing automation, multichannel customer relations management, and more. 

Crucially, the company has also completed the transition to distributed teams - with more than 1,000 employees. The experience gained in that transition is now in urgent demand.

Rags To Riches To Rags To Riches

Tomas Gorny is living the American dream. “My parents told me I started talking about owning my own business and moving to America when I was just seven years old,” says Gorny, who was born and raised in Poland. 

In 1996, he did move to the U.S. to pursue his dream, despite not knowing any English. Capitalizing on his passion for technology and business acumen, he became a millionaire by age 22. 

But Gorny also has intimate knowledge of precarious business situations, which allows him to understand what many companies are going through right now. The dot-com crash and the economic shock of 9/11 left his own ventures teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Only with adaptability, innovation, and flexibility he managed to maneuver his business through that crisis. He emerged from it stronger and with numerous lessons learned. 

“Going broke was the product of many unfortunate circumstances and bad investment decisions,” Gorny explains, “but it turned out to be the best experience in my life. It forced me to discover what I was good at and where I should channel my energy. Most importantly, it helped me establish strong principles in terms of how to do business that I still rely on today.”

These principles are what drives Gorny, and Nextiva as a whole, to do their utmost to fulfill their customers’ communication needs and aid them in the current challenge. 

Part of their efforts is launching Cospace, a team collaboration tool. 

Facilitating Team Collaboration In Cospace 

Gorny summarizes the idea behind Cospace as ‘one platform, one workspace, zero friction.’

Harnessing Nextiva’s experience with transitioning to a distributed workforce setup, Cospace was developed as an integrated team collaboration solution. The platform is a holistic virtual workspace for remote teams that integrates a long list of vital functions. 

Unlike other remote management tools, Cospace allows all essential team processes to happen in one place - documentation, organization, and communication. Team members can make audio and video calls, hold video conferences, message each other, hold group chats, share screens, schedule meetings, transfer files, search through archived data, assign tasks, and set due dates. 

In the face of all these features, simplicity is key. 

Intuitive and straightforward, Cospace’s interface allows for the creation of spaces for teams or projects, unified task management and communications. “Our mission was to simplify business communications,” Gorny says. “And communication is always simplest when everything is in one place.” 

At Nextiva, Cospace has been in the works for a while, but on a slower development track. With the coronavirus crisis however, Gorny decided to push the completion of the program ahead. 

Cospace is included in all business phone service plans that Nextiva offers, and access is free for all of 2020 to help anyone who needs it. 

The Crucial Role of Providing Value In Communication

The current situation highlights the crucial role that communication flexibility, insight, and reliability play in the modern business world. Nextiva strives to provide solutions for all of these points. 

“Expectations have never been higher,” Gorny points out. “Making money is just a side effect of providing value.”

A cornerstone of the value that Nextiva provides is the company’s enterprise-grade reliability. With highly secure data centers located across the U.S. and linked to multiple power grids to safeguard against outages, Nextiva can boast an uptime of 99.999% for the last five years. The company’s business phone service has long been listed among the best and most reliable.

But in no small part, Nextiva’s value also lies in integrated solutions like Cospace, or NextOS, an integrated business management platform aiming to help businesses understand their customers. 

“We’ve backed this up with affordable pricing, easy to use products, and amazing service,” Gorny said. The positive impact of this attitude was only recently showcased when Nextiva won a record of four Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service. 

The future is looking bright for Nextiva, looking at a significant trend toward distributed teams and online business communication. Gorny is an optimist at heart and deeply enthusiastic about the work that he and his team are doing. “We are part of a transformation in communication, and we all feel empowered that we are making a difference in the world.”