Mike Kaplan was inducted into the CX Hall of Fame for the candor he has brought to a complicated category that the rest of the industry tends to oversimplify: global enterprise voice.

Kaplan leads marketing as Chief Marketing Officer for a global cloud voice platform serving enterprise contact centers. His position on the buyer’s experience in this category is unusually direct. If the buyer is purchasing voice services on a global basis, he says he genuinely feels bad for them. The category does not have a clean buying framework. The legacy carrier providers and the newer software-led entrants both claim to deliver the same set of capabilities. The buyer who tries to compare them feature-list to feature-list is likely to buy the wrong thing.

What separates the categories in practice, in his framing, is not the marketed feature list but the operating reality of speed, agility, and ecosystem integration. The legacy provider operates at the speed of network engineering, with multi-quarter change windows and contractual scope rigidity. The software-led entrant operates at the speed of product engineering, with continuous deployment and ecosystem partnerships that compound. Both can be the right answer for a given buyer; neither is universally right. The honest comparison work, the kind a buying team almost never has time to do, is the work that actually determines whether the deployment succeeds.

What earned Kaplan induction is the discipline of marketing this honestly while serving in the role of CMO, where the temptation in the opposite direction is constant.