 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5.9. Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are live on day one of Enterprise Connect 2019. You can hear a ton of people behind us in the Expo Center as it's getting busier and busier throughout the day. We're welcoming to theCUBE for the first time John Bourne is Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliance is at Varrant. John, thanks for joining us on theCUBE this afternoon. Thanks for having me. So I know we're in 5.9's booth, so graciously hosting us this week. Varrant is a partner of 5.9 which we'll get into in a second but give us a little bit about who Varrant is, what your main brand is and how you're helping customers. Sure, so Varrant is branded itself as a customer engagement company. We do employee and customer engagement solutions. We sit on top of CCAS vendors like 5.9, although 5.9 is probably our biggest and most strategic partner in the space and we provide everything into and including workforce optimization which was our legacy but now we also provide digital feedback and outbound surveys and bots and AI and all the other things everybody else is talking about here as well. The thing that makes us different is we're completely agnostic to the infrastructure that we set on top of. And we'll mix and match pieces of our portfolio with the vendor's pieces as well. We have an IVR but we don't use our IVR with CCAS vendors, for example, we use that. Just an example. What a pivot on the word legacy that you mentioned because you have been to this event which has been around for a very long time. Many years. Many years back when it was VoiceCon so you've seen a lot of vendors that probably weren't even here five or 10 years ago. Tell us a little bit about the evolution and communication and customer experience as table stakes for a business. Let me talk about the industry for a bit because I'm fascinated by this. As an English guy we don't get excited very often. Now let me tell you, it's a really exciting time to be in this industry. It's, I remember when we went from TDM to voiceover IP and that was the biggest thing that ever happened. If you think back to that, what's happening now it's unreal, right? There are more vendors, more players, more solutions, more good stories that are talking about real customer outcomes today than there ever were before. And if you have to remember our industry is quite conservative, with sort of laggers, quite conservative. We build bulletproof systems that work and the phone always worked and dial tone was always there but it's a whole new world. And as you know, right? John you bring up some great points here. I mean I think about networking and telecommunications. We used to measure these things you'd put it out in the decades of change. Absolutely. We go through this and then the standard rolls out and then the customer adoption. But you brought up this excitement here when I look at my career and you scroll back a couple of decades ago, the importance of data, the importance of intelligence of the systems, we actually talked about some of those terms. It's different now. Very different. Explain a little bit why it's so much different. It's not just billions of customers out there but why is it so exciting today? If you look at our industry and even true for us, we really didn't even know who the customer was. We only cared about the interaction and we were building systems that would optimize the performance of the agent or we'd make sure there were enough agents with the right skills at the right time but it was all about agents and interactions. But now we're seeing the confluence of customer engagement management which means we're more integrated with CRM systems. We care about the customer's journey so our perspective has changed. It's much more than just the agent but we're not forgetting the agent. So customer experience is very important obviously but so is the employee experience as well. It's both. So we cater to both sides of that. When you're having customer conversations, I'm curious, where does that come up in terms of pivoting or maybe over rotating towards improving customer experience because we've spent historically time ensuring that the agents are properly trained or they kind of over rotating back because they're so closely related. It's a great question. Let's talk about how the buyers changed, right? And you'll remember this, right? In the old days you were selling to the techies or IT especially through with 5.9 and many other. We're now selling to the business. We're selling business outcomes. They don't want to know about the technology underneath. They want to know what sort of experience their customers are going to have when they interact with them as a business, right? So providing their seamless journey regardless of the channel they're using. So voice is obviously still big. Voice is not going away what anybody may tell you. Voice conversation to get more complex but there's so much more self-service now but both reactive and proactive, right? So it's fun but tying it all together, this is hard, right? It's hard. So one of the things in this space is these are not, push button simple solutions that are rolling out. When I talked to 5.9 getting ready for this, they said, look it's in the cloud and could somebody do this on their own? Sure, but we white-glove it. We really engage there. As a key partner of yours, how do you see that? Where does that tie into what Barron's doing? So what we do with 5.9, all of our technology is deployed, co-located with 5.9's environment. It's the way we get the tighter integration. It's the way when we're provisioning new tenants that everything gets done at the same time. It's much easier to do it that way. And again, I'll come back to the buyer, right? The buyer's the business and they're saying, this is the outcome I want and I just want to deal with one vendor and I want to pay per agent per month for everything, right? And that's the thing that's so different, right? So it's an OPEX budget as well and that's where the world is going, right? I think perpetual licenses will be gone or should be gone in the next two or three years, but they're still out there and still out there. One of the things I'm curious about is, we've been in this multi-channel world. We're now in an omnichannel world that all of us as consumers are demanding, right? We want to be able to not just be able to talk to a contact center and agent on any channel that we want, but we want to have that conversation integrated so that there is progress from issue identification all the way to resolution. Where are businesses on that maturation of actually delivering an integrated omnichannel experience? I think that's a really good question and I think the truth of it is it's still fairly early for most businesses, right? Because what it's hard to do, right? If you look around the show, there's all sorts of vendors here that who do one point solution, one piece, right? And to make this work in a true integrated journey, the bots and the IVRs need to be communicating with the digital channels and email and chat and the self-service channels on the web as well as the voice, right? Because ultimately it really matters to us as consumers when we do actually end up talking to an agent, we want them to know everything we've already done and quite frankly, we didn't really want to be talking to a live person unless we absolutely have to. So repeating all that is the biggest frustration out there. Getting all that tied together, that's what Verrent does with 5.9 together and that's really what makes this different and that's hard, right? It's hard. When you look at, you know, these are business buyers needing to, you, to deliver business outcomes, what are some of the key metrics that customers use? I mean, we think of context and we think of customer lifetime value, net promoter score, what are some of the key indicators that you help them? Those are exactly it, right? It's customer experience. It's however they decide to measure customer experience. Like I said, some of them like a net promoter score, some of them have far more complex scenarios. This is all this stuff about average handle time, first time resolution. It's not important, right? It's all about what was the experience the customer had as it seamless and are they going to be loyal? But everybody measures it differently. It's not from what I've seen anyway. John, one of the things I love coming to an event like this is you get to talk to some of the users and hear from some of the users. My understanding is Verrent has some of your customers talking and sharing their journeys. Maybe give us a little insight, some of the flavor of what customers are going to be talking about here at the show this week. We have several customers that are doing sessions here. We've got one of our customers is talking about what they're doing with speech analytics and the ability to understand the conversations that people are having. It wasn't that long ago, you could go to a contact center, a supervisor or a manager and say, well, what conversations are your agent having? I don't know, I don't care, right? That's all change, right? Now people really want to understand what are people talking about? The sentiment analysis is incredibly important. That's where things like speech analytics comes in, right? And then we've got other people here that are talking about their digital experiences, how they're marrying together the web interactions that customers have with their contact centers. A couple of years ago, that never happened either. I mean, contact centers were always very insular and were always the cost center. People are starting to realize, intellectually they've always understood it, but somehow they haven't capitalized on the fact that the contact center is the one place that is the face of the company for most consumers, right? Are you seeing- We need to get serious about that. Absolutely. Are you seeing this as a horizontal opportunity that lots of industries are taking advantage of? Or are there some early adopters who have a really serious need to pivot quickly? It's another really good question. It is a very horizontal play, but I'll tell you, the way the banks move, the big banks or the big insurance companies move is different from maybe some of the smaller retail players. And I think there are, even though the technology is the same, there are still some tweets you can do. What people have on their desktop, what agents have on their desktop, for example, varies quite a bit. So a lot of retail companies have Salesforce on a desktop or Zendesk or one of those types of products, which obviously we all integrate with. The bigger companies are still running, like the banks and the insurance companies and the telcos, they're running mainframes still in the background and there's all sorts of stuff on the agents' desktop. So it's different, it's different. They're all active. I wouldn't tell you that they're any laggard industry verticals, but they're all coming at this in a different way. The banks especially need this, the insurance companies need this, right? Loyalty is so critical to them. And then retail, obviously, they want to sell stuff, right? And they want you to keep coming back and buy more stuff and they're competing with people like Amazon, right? So, and Amazon does it really well. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, the question is sometimes if I'm smaller or a younger company that doesn't have all of the, you know, legacy, then a lot of times I have an opportunity to be able to do things the new way. That's the beauty about cloud, right? Now, probably for the first time ever, I can be a relatively small contact center and I can get all this functionality at an affordable price. I couldn't do that before because it was all-premise base, it was big tickets, seven-figured items. It's just not possible. Now, it's a huge advantage for them now. Huge advantage. Well, John, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon and sharing what Varen is doing with 5.9 and also the experiences and evolution that you're seeing in enterprise communication. We appreciate your time. Thank you very much for having me. Of course Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.