 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5.9. Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. Lisa Martin with theCUBE, Stu Miniman joining me. We are on day three of our coverage of Enterprise Connect 19. Thanks to our gracious host in the booth here, 5.9. We're pleased to welcome from 5.9 to the program Wendell Black, VP of Global Channels and International Business. Wendell, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, Lisa, thank you for having me on. I know you're a bit of a celebrity because you have now been a CRN channel chief honoree three times, most recently last month. Congratulations. Well, thank you very much. It's absolutely a tribute to my team and to the company's focus on building out our channel business over the last three years. So it's been, you know, a super time for 5.9's growth in this area and it definitely is a team-engaged sport. A team that pulled you out of retirement, though, Les. Well, you know, we don't talk about that so much, but it is exciting to be back in the business and get out working here to build something new for 5.9 and to help take us into the next tier of business delivery. And especially the expansion we're doing outside of North America. That's the really exciting part. Yeah, so, before we talk about the international piece, one of the things that's been really interesting to watch, anybody that knows the channel is, the cloud has had a dramatic effect on them. If I walk around this show floor, many of the companies here and the channel that they did were used to selling boxes and they know I need to understand software and oh geez, this cloud is going to put us out of a business, the logo direct, but I'm sure you've got a lot of perspectives on this. So maybe help walk us through some of that transformation. Well, it's interesting, I've been an evangelist in the cloud space since the late 90s. And so we didn't call it cloud then. It was multi-tenant managed service technology. But the really exciting part is the last four or five years when it really caught on and started to take off. We've had a lot of good trailblazing companies out there that have won the minds of people for cloud and the CRM or the ERP and other spaces. Telecommunications is kind of the lagging technology area to be adopted as standards for cloud, but I believe today most IT buyers are trying to figure out why not cloud rather than why go to cloud and that's a game changer. Yeah, so I'm curious just from the channel perspective itself, we understand the customer journey, but the channel people was there. Do they have the skill set that they need to go? Was it just some retraining? Was it partnerships like yours? How did that transition go? Yeah, that's a great question. And I really think that the channel has the skills. They just have to adapt and retune a little bit. Things just happen faster when you do the cloud. And we have many discussions and experiences with partners where we're sitting around the table planning a rollout and just doing the basic discovery. And at the end of that, our PS team can say, well, and I've actually built it, let me show you how it works. Rather than the six month or 12 month rollout process that people were accustomed to in the past. So it's pretty exciting to be able to show people actionable results, that kind of timeframe. Very, very fun. Talk to us about the partnerships and the influence that your partners have had on such a big, successful close to FY18. You know, the partners were strong contributors in RQ4 and we certainly value everything they're doing for us and with us out in the market. Our continuum of partners is both in the master agent community, so referral oriented relationships where the five nine direct sales team is carrying in the water and working with them to get a deal done. But also in our resale business, you know, it's great to see those partners doing more and more to build the business and their portfolio and deliver joint customers. So it's a very exciting kind of uplift to everything we're doing. All right, so Wendell, one of the things when we talked to a lot of companies, it's like, well, there's North America and there's everything else. I was promised by some of your team members, you can actually give us a little bit more granular view of, you know, Europe, Eastern Europe and some of the other global differences that are happening in the marketplace. Would love if you could share some of your wisdom. Sure thing. And I believe that I don't want to be disparaging to my friends in Europe, but they're a little slower on the adoption rate. And it's interesting in my history and contact center, there were times where Europe led the field with different technologies and other times that they were kind of behind what North America was doing. This is one of the behind times. And I think it's just an ongoing concern in their minds about how security and management of a cloud-based delivery model was going to affect their business and how they were going to be looked at by regulators. But I think we've overcome those hurdles in the last several years. In 2018, our business in Europe doubled year over year and it's inspired us to add more sales and other departmental resources in the region so that we can do that again here in 2019. Similar story in Latin America. And there is a lot of growth, a lot of interest and it's not just in the mid-market anymore. We're talking big call centers and they are all jumping on the bandwagon for all of the economic reasons that people want to go to the cloud in the first place. It's less expensive to get started. It's easier to be nimble and flexible and you're staffing and costs. And they all need those benefits just as much as a mid-market or SMB kind of a client. I want to dig in a little bit further, Wendell, on how 5.9 and your partners have helped some of these customers in Europe and Latin America become comfortable with, we need to move to the cloud and also help them understand some of the other implications besides costs and things like the opportunity to start taking advantage of AI. Okay, great, yeah, because in particular, one of our partners in the UK has specialized in the travel, vacation, leisure kind of industry. And when they work in those markets, a distributed workforce is very much kind of the norm for them. And so one of their clients in particular has agents in the UK, they have agents in Germany, they want to manage them as a common group and be able to manage their television advertising to be able to staff and respond based on wherever the load is, whenever things are going on in their marketing activity. That's a key flexibility win for them and they get the right staff at the right time to be able to cover the television advertising, which is pretty costly, but it's a big win for them to have that flexibility with 5.9. You know, it's interesting, we actually, I've only talked a little bit this week about the distributed workforce and I'd love to get your perspective. I think back there's a large apparel company in the Northeast that when they didn't have any of their agents in their headquarters and something that got written up when that had happened. So today, what is that mix and are there some geographic differences that you're seeing that? Yeah, there are some differences just based on the infrastructure that may be available. And we find that a home-based workforce is a little bit more challenging in Latin America than it is perhaps in Europe or in the US, but then there's also cultural differences. There are some countries that actually regulate that employees have to show up in a physical building or you're violating the law because you might be taking advantage of your employee. So that's different strokes for different locations. We are finding it though more and more desirable because of all the reasons that have been around for a long time. You can save on real estate, you can save on the wear and tear of your employees traveling, but probably the biggest one is the benefit of flex staffing that allows you to get the right number of people for a short shift to cover your peaks or be ready for your valleys. If people have to drive to an office, they're just not as likely to want to sign up for. But that business modeling is actually becoming more and more compelling. I don't know, driving around Orlando this week. It was kind of a challenge on I-4 and with the rain, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who want to be at home workers here based on the weather this week. Definitely, so this is the end of Enterprise Connect Expo Hall anyway today. Three full days, this Expo Hall, 140 vendors, new products, new services, 6,500 attendees, so much excitement in this hot, hot contact center market. What are some of the things that excite you that you've heard from partners and customers that just think we're on the right track? The momentum, the wind is at our backs. Well, and you mentioned AI and what are your earlier questions and that's kind of the buzz. Everybody wants to talk about automation and machine learning and how you can bring AI into interacting in the call center. I'm sure you've heard from other people that have been up here, the focus we see in the near term is on agent augmentation and enhancing agent performance through those technologies. And a lot of people would have approached this, thinking like IVRs in the past, I can replace agents with interactive voice response. Well, we really want to make a smarter, better customer serving agent and bring that technology into play to do it. That's to me going to be the things I've been seeing, exciting new technologies that can be applied in real time transcription and providing the ability to read that and data dip and serve things up for agents to allow them to go to be more on the ball talking to a client. Yeah, that augmented agent is definitely something that came up quite a bit. We even talked with your CEO, Rowan Trollop, about that and the importance of empathy and voice that as consumers, I would love to know that you would too an augmented agent on the other end who knows, okay, I understand the issue. I see how many times this person has reached out through different channels and they're actually going to use that technology to facilitate a resolution and hopefully drive up CLV. I mean, that insight into the customer experience is key for the agent to be able to do more and do it better. We've been talking about that kind of insight for years and years. Technology is caught up with desire. And so now that we have the technology to do it, we can allow the agent to focus more on their conversation with a customer and not have to be working the keyboard in order to retrieve the next thing that they need to take care of. And so a better prepared agent, knowing the background of the client is going to give them a much better experience. And that's what Five Nines is trying to deliver in the market. We've heard that resoundingly throughout the three through your partners, customers, and it's been fantastic. And they'll congrats again on your three time channel chief honoree record. And I'm sure there's got to be a fourth one around the corner. I won't jinx that, but I'm just going to gas. Thank you. We thank you so much for your time. Lisa, appreciate it. Likewise. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.