 Live from Orlando, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2016. Brought to you by Oracle ZDLRA. Vonage and Cafe X. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Zantesonio. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. We are on the ground and we are sponsored here at Enterprise Connect by Oracle ZDLRA. Take the worry out of data recovery with Oracle's recovery appliance. It's a DVR for the Enterprise that records everything. It's bulletproof. Thanks to Oracle's ZDLRA. We are here on the ground. I'm John Furrier, Peter Zantesonio. Peter, talk about the BC Strategies Group. You guys are an analyst firm. We're partnering with you guys with this new space. We're going into, you guys have been covering it for generations. What's happening in the UC space? Well it's interesting, 10 years ago when we started dealing with this, it used to be called unified communications. And it was a term that nobody really understood. And Jim Burton, who was my partner, actually coined the term. And what's happened is over the years, instead of it being a sort of a standalone thing, it has become completely interwoven with all these other things that are going on out there. So today, we've evolved our name to BC Strategies to reflect that. And I think the really important thing is, this is not a discrete technology or solution or whatever, it's something that weaves into everything. You guys have the epic wine party because Jim's obviously from Napa Valley and he has a little, it's a great networking event. But also the who's who in the industry is there. And it's great networking. And we were talking after a few glasses of wine last night about the future of unified communications. And there I was getting all animated. It's totally in transition. There's really two camps of people, old school and new school. And they're all coming together. And if you're not moving to the new school, you will be dead on arrival. This is the big shift. What is your perspective as an expert in the field with your analysts? Are you guys seeing the same thing? What is this new transformation? Why is this area so hot? It's so hot because basically it's the integration of the new way of communicating with the old school business processes. I mean, the world today revolves around mobile devices. The world revolves around multi-dimensional communications days of email and our classic kind of communications are gone. And so even voice to some extent in the classic form is evolving. So what's exciting here is there's two dimensions. One dimension is all of the classic silo type communications modalities are merging and some are going away. And the second thing is communication as a discrete process is going away. It's becoming part of everything you do. Touching a customer, doing a process, doing manufacturing, it's seamless. And so as all this IT stuff for many years went on and on and on and building silos, it's all getting flattened and communications is the glue that's pulling it together. And Enterprise Connect is the show that where all the industry revolves around. This is the big industry show, Enterprise Connect 2016, where all the action's happening. And you've got the big whales out there. You've got Cisco, you've got Microsoft. Now with Skype for Business under pressure with the whole Slack conversation, you've got companies like CafeX and Vonage just absolutely coming out of the woodwork. Vonage Trends, they were disruptive on the voice over IP. They basically eliminated the telcos, the I-Lex, the last mile around voice down there doing it for the Enterprise. CafeX, a 30 person startup doing, basically telepresence at a low cost. That's disrupting Cisco. So the whales are on their heels. The new disruptors are coming in. How do you make sense of all this? What is the folks out there see all this noise? They see all this data. How are they going to get the signal from the noise? Well, the problem is there's so much noise out there. And a lot of the noise is coming from the fact that the classic legacy companies are out there thrashing around sort of their last hurrah. And that creates a lot of noise. These new guys are very, very focused. The other thing that's happening out there is how people buy things is changing, right? Historically in the telco world, we had a multi-layer channel, right? You had a company that sold to a distributor, that sold to a VAR, that sold to an end user. Today, with cloud services, people are buying direct. And so this thing that you build, this use channel thing, and it's the barrier to entry is gone. And so there's multiple things going on with respect to the distribution channels, as well as the endpoints being mobile, and the fact that the classic legacy silos are getting flagged. Jim Lundy from Aragon Research tweeted yesterday and wrote a blog post on his research site, UC is dead as UCC for unified communications and collaboration with the emphasis on collaboration. It's a perfect storm. The cloud in memory, mobile technologies, DevOps, and this time-to-value acceleration is happening right now. It really is the perfect storm. Do you see it that way? And what do you see happening this year? You're going to see some dead bodies, you're going to see some new growth. What's going to happen? Yeah, there's definitely dead bodies that are going to come along here. One of the challenges that people are not really that aware of though, is the fact that when you take large companies, you know, Fortune 100-type companies, they can't change their infrastructure on a dime, right? So you're seeing this stuff take hold at the SMB, the small to medium-sized business thing, and work its way up. You know, you got the guys like, you know, the Vonages and the 8x8s and the Ring Centrals and these guys that are coming up there, thinking Vonages is another one, more in the mid-market. And you got these big guys like Microsoft and Cisco with these big platforms, and they're trying to figure out how to come down because they used to be up here. So, you know, it's a question of trying to understand who is going to learn how to communicate direct and sell direct and deliver that value proposition. Yeah, the middle man goes away. This is the internet. It's been a business model for the internet for years, but now it's accelerated because unified communication are buzzwords and siloed stacks and software stacks of the past that have chat, video, communications, voice. Now, that's being jammed into one blurred, integrated solution, unified, aka unified. But now with cloud, the users want that consumer experience. They don't want to have an experience at work different from what they do at home. Exactly, and one of the real problems here, John, is that, you know, classically the legacy companies, every application, whether it's voice or video or whatever, had its own interface, right? Its own stack. And now people want to basically get on and they want to say, hey, I'm on the phone. Hey, let's do this. Let's share this document. Let's have a video chat. Let's bring this guy in. And the ability for all those things to seamlessly connect across many different vendors, that's where the people that know how to integrate cross-platform in an open environment are the people that are going to win long term. I can't wait for Snapchat for business to be hitting the scene. Can you imagine the work environment where you have Snapchat for business where it disappears? That's good stuff, we're going to see. But this is the future. The future of things like the Snapchat. 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