 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Live in Orlando at Enterprise Connect 2019. This is day three of the event. Can you hear all of the buzz behind us? It's been a very full event. 6,500 or so attendees, 140 vendors here in the exhibitor hall, new products, new announcements. We're very excited speaking of new announcements. So welcome for the first time at theCUBE, the CEO of Poly, Joe Burton. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thanks so much for having us, it's great. Our pleasure. So big news, Plantronics Polycom, rebranded as Poly this week. Big coming out part here. This is way more than a rebrand. Walk us through what you guys have just announced and why this is so exciting for the industry. Well, you know, it really is an exciting time, an exciting time for all of us. About a year ago to the day, we announced that Polycom and Plantronics were coming together as one company to provide a end-to-end set of endpoints for the entire UC industry. So no matter what cloud you're hooking to in the contact center for unified communications, from the headset that rides on your body, to the desktop, to the huddle room, to the board room, we were going to provide every endpoint where the end user touches the collaboration cloud. Very, very exciting. We were really looking for the right name to take us into the future. And frankly, Plantronics is a wonderful name, but it's very 60 sounding, farmed in 1961 by a couple of airline pilots to build headsets. Polycom, also a very good name, but a little old. We were looking for something short, punchy, tight that really talked about everything that we do. And we were thinking about going down the route of an entirely new word, go in the whole way. And one day a brilliant person on the brand team walked in and said, we can do both. We can have our heritage, our history, and we can go a different direction. Poly, Greek word for many. So many kinds of communication, many people, the power of many, many ways of interacting. You actually look at our new logo, it looks very much like a Polycom speakerphone of the past. It looks like an airline propeller for Plantronics, but it's also three P's, Plantronics and Polycom coming together to form Poly. Yeah, Joe, I do love that because that iconic speakerphone, it's heck, I used to, I sold some of those back in the 90s when I worked for one of the telecommunications company. There's still one sitting in our conference room in our Boston area office today. Plantronics, of course, I mean so known for so many of the different devices over the year. So maybe give us a little bit as to the coming together of Plantronics and Polycom now as Poly. What's that mean for the future? As we talk proliferation of devices, the line between what consumers expect and the enterprise connect is something we've been talking about for a couple of decades now. So what is Poly into the future? Well, you bet. So you see all these amazing communications and cloud providers around. Everybody is innovating in the cloud. They want to provide this software as a service that can enable all these great communications. But at the end of the day, all of that collaboration cloud gets accessed through a set of devices. Every single device where the end user touches the collaboration cloud actually comes from Poly. Like I said, the headset, the video conferencing, the audio conferencing and beyond. So as Poly, we're going to build every single device that you need to access the cloud with a management layer where you can understand each and every device as it on, as it off, firmware upgrades, security patches, but so much more. You can actually understand usage data you've never seen before. So literally because we're writing on the person, we're in the conference room, we're on the desktop, we're in the open office area, we're in a position where we can actually tell you these devices are being utilized, but not these. That corner of the building is too noisy for good collaboration, figure out what's going on. Even though the laptops in Building 32 are telling you that there's no network problem, at the ear, we're actually seeing packet loss and here's what we think you should do about it. So we think Poly literally brings something from the human perspective to the collaboration experience that just nobody else can do. We've heard a lot about the human element and anytime we talk about emerging technologies, AI, ML, there's always that, oh, the concerns about AI taking over jobs, but semantically at this event, we've heard that it's got to be machines and humans augmenting whether it's, we're talking about call center and it's agent delivery, but that human element, that relationship point, that voice is really resounding at this event, is absolutely hot again, still critical, whatever you want to call it. You're absolutely right. So what we're seeing very much when we look at AI and ML and our devices, we're not in any way seeing something that takes a job as much as helps you be your best self. What if you could be on your game in the zone instead of an hour or two a day, but two, three, four times that much and we think with some of the coaching we can do using some of these AI and ML techniques through our devices, we can just help you be the best you can be all the time. Joe, at this show, we know it's a complex ecosystem. Something that I heard over and over again though in the keynotes is you've got a lot of partnerships. So I've heard many companies talking about up and here's Polly Devices, heard it in the Microsoft keynote. We're here in the 5.9 booth, we understand the partnership there. Talk about some of those partnerships, some of the news that was announced beyond just the company rebranding. Well, so absolutely, I mean, partnerships are our lifeblood. The reason we can be a great partner to so many companies is because frankly we don't compete against them for the cloud. We've said we're going to do the user experience, we're going to be the endpoint, the management of the endpoint, but we've announced a lot of exciting things. Of course, Microsoft's a great partner to a Zoom and others are a great partner. We announced this week a partnership with Google around Google Voice, where we're the first and only certified Google Voice set of phones at this point. Great announcements with Amazon around Chime and Alexa for Business, both in our Trio speaker phones, but also in the headsets. So I can actually touch the button and access Alexa straight through the headsets as well. And then of course companies like 5.9 that are just an amazing, amazing partner to us. We, you know, they have such an incredible product. Our headsets are on the vast majority of their agents. And when we look ahead at some of the unique analytics that we can do out of our headsets, some of the things they're trying to do, we just see an unbeatable combination with so many of these companies. There's been some of the feedback that you've heard from some of your customers and partners. This week was such a big news coming out. You mentioned a big spectrum of very big partners. Tell us about some of the feedback that you're getting from customers. Well, I have to say, it has really been a thrilling week. I mean, the rebranding of the company as Poly, we had done all the research, we thought it was the right thing to do, the right name, the right heritage, plus being fresh, but it has been just overwhelmingly you nailed it. I think from our customers and partners, just a real excitement that they knew that Plantronics and Polycom were a premier endpoint provider, maybe the premier, but to see us partnered with so many of the cloud providers as the predominant partner, they're just seeing us in a whole new light. It's fantastic. Joe, one of the things we've been looking at is just how OmniChannel's been changing over time. So we talked about this show used to be VoiceCon. And a few years ago, voice was a little bit lower on people's radar, but today a lot of voice, a lot of video, of course plays right into your heritage at the company. Love to hear what you're hearing from your customers as the trends of the importance of voice and the ever-growing importance of video. Well, I think you nailed it in many ways, Stu. I think everybody has figured out that if voice isn't perfect, the collaboration session isn't perfect, even in a video conferencing call, we can put up with the video pixelating a little bit as long as the voice is excellent. If the voice goes down, you don't have a session. So voice has to be fantastic. The endpoint plays a huge part in that, working very carefully with our partners to make sure voice is absolute is just fantastic. One of the other things on video that I think is really interesting is we are really moving to, I guess I would say, a post speeds and feeds world. A few years ago, all we heard is, are you VGA, are you forcef, are you, to use old words, are you 1080p, are you 4K? Our product that won Best of Show yesterday in the product category, the Polycom Studio, brand new video product for the huddle room, really fascinating, incredibly good video, dead simple to use, I've probably been involved in 60 or 100 demos down here in the booth and done dozens of briefings on it. Nobody has asked me, what's the resolution of the camera? What codec does it use? We've moved into a world of, it looks excellent, tell me about ease of use, tell me about the training, and so I really think we're moving to a different world with that consumer expectation you talked about earlier of don't really care about those specifications anymore, it has to just work. That's a theme also, Joe, that we've heard from every guest that we've had on it, as well as on the main stage, but that's what consumers, right, we are so demanding, we are so empowered, we have all this information and we expect that to transact business as simply as we do things, if we're buying something on Amazon or downloading something from Spotify, that simplicity is key. People say it just has to work. Not so easy to be able to deliver, but it sounds like what you're saying is people in your booth are getting it and it's so obvious to them that some of those speeds and speeds, they just don't matter because it's so effective. Well, you're absolutely right, the only thing I would disagree on is how hard it is. It really is just a matter of pivoting the company, so this has been a huge part of the Poly story. So, you know, a couple of years ago, as we were starting this journey at Plantronics and then as we brought Polycom into Form Poly, we've really turned it on its head. I mean, our product managers, our engineers, we've got them out there with users, we ask users, not leading questions, but just in your wildest dreams, how do you see this working? Show me how you would do this as a consumer and we'll add the absolute minimum pieces in to add enterprise reliability, enterprise security, privacy, et cetera, et cetera. But we're really starting from that end user perspective and absolutely delighting them and then adding what IT wants as opposed to the other way around, which is where I think this industry was stuck for 10 or 15 years. All right, so, Joe, as a public company, I'm not going to ask too much, but as we look down the road, what should we be looking now that you've got the full resources together, you've got the rebranding, what should we expect as industry watchers to see from Poly kind of the next six to 12 months? Yeah, so I think you'll see three or four things. We've talked about it publicly before. So, number one, you'll see us just finish refreshing the product portfolio so every single product has the Poly look, has the Poly name, very consumer friendly, consumer forward design and simplicity. So, best products across the board on the hardware side, incredible ability to manage the products where you can understand every single one of them and then bringing those analytics and AI type functionality to these products that make the user their best self, that don't do weird things for them that are a little scary, but really, really, really just anticipate their needs, help them do exactly what they want and you'll see even deeper and more partnerships. We are a partner company. We're going to live and die by partnerships and we're going to be the best at it. Well, Joe, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE. Again, congratulations on a momentous week with the launch of Poly. We look forward to hearing great news to come in the future. Fantastic, thank you so much for having me. Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.