 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hello from Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and theCUBE. We are at Enterprise Connect 2019 in 5ix9ine's booth and we're welcoming from Verrent, Kristen Eminecker, the SVP of product strategy. Kristen, thanks so much for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon. Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to be here. So here we are in the expo hall. There's a lot of noise around us. There's 6,500 people attending this year's biggest Enterprise Connect, about 140 exhibitors announcing new products and services and solutions. You've been in the Enterprise Communication Space for quite a long time. I have. What are some of the vibes that you're feeling about this year and how this space is evolving and really kind of this kickstart of the actual Enterprise Connect event itself? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, I love this space first of all, right? You hear this energy around us. You see everybody bustling. And I think I've been in this, like you said, over 20 years now. And I think it's always an exciting space. It's always a space where the newest things happening in technology we get to see here in this space or at this event even since this event has been in a distance. And it's a space that is continuously changing, right? At such a fast degree. So where we used to see, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, a challenge with just connecting calls or, you know, getting the call to the right person. I tend to focus on the contact center area. Getting the call to the right person. Now we're looking at, you know, artificial intelligence and automation and the relationship between human workers and bot workers and how do we make that work together? And yet for as much as the space changes, right? For as much as we go through all of that, the fundamentals still continue to be the same, which is we want to improve experience for our customers and we want to control our costs, right? We want to do that in a cost effective and efficient way. And so it's fascinating to see that those fundamental things that we're trying to do remain the same year after year after year, but man, the way that we can do it is so far and beyond now what it was back then. I mean, it's just, it's so exciting. Yeah, it's really interesting, Kristin. I've talked to a number of people that were like, oh, you know, I was in the call center space and then I went away and then, you know, CX got hot and pulled everybody back in. We talked to one of the analysts at the program and he said, you know, Enterprise Connect, you know, might have even gone under if it wasn't for the cloud. Cloud really helped proliferate. Absolutely. If you look at the vendors that are here, there were a couple of big players in the ecosystem around them, but now it's the diversity that's going on here and the solutions that are helping customers in so many different environments. So you've seen a lot of those changes. You know, how are things like cloud and AI, not only, you know, making solutions even better today but holding the promise for, you know, where we can go in the future? Yeah, I mean, in so many ways, right? I mean, obviously cloud is such a great enabler. It just enables us to move faster on so many different levels and to connect in so many different levels. So when you have the ability to, through cloud and microservices, to connect different pieces and to automate those pieces and to be more intelligent as you're adding in analytics and you're adding in the AI, you start to change the picture from just, you know, A to B to C to, it could be A to Z to, you know, Y. There are a thousand possibilities and intelligently in real time, it's going to collect, you know, select the best possibility for that routing or for that process flow. It really, the cloud has changed so much of what can be done. It also has really lowered the barrier to entry. So, you know, I've spent my time in this space both serving at different times, very high end enterprise customers and at other times, small startup, that small business energy and a lot of times the small businesses wanted the same type of solutions that were available to the enterprises but it was just cost prohibitive, right? I mean, they just didn't have the time or the resources or the thousand people in IT to be able to set up one of those big systems and when we saw the emergence of cloud, what we saw was the ability to have access to that feature functionality in, you know, with just a computer and, you know, a connection to a phone, right? So a cell phone and the ability to immediately turn it up, only pay for what I use, have access to that really sophisticated functionality, even if I'm a small business and I've got, you know, just a handful of people and so it's really exciting to see it break down the barriers and it give access to world-class feature functionalities sort of to everybody. Yeah, it's fascinating to watch. We have that break between hardware and software. It used to be I need to buy the big iron to be able to get the big features. Right, that's right. Now, you know, it was like, okay, that software just kind of got spread amongst it and I was paying mostly for the gear. Today in the cloud, it's whether I'm that small shop or that big shop, I've had that democratization because I can get in at a small footprint and I can scale, I can grow, it's no longer the okay, which tier am I in? For the most part. We're still work to do, there's certain software providers I work with where it's like, oh, you're not on a big enough tier and don't pay enough money. I'm like, really? Come on, today I spent a lot of money for my business. You know, I should be able to get the same feature functionalities. There's that expectation that I can get there. I'm curious from like a variant standpoint, when you look at pricing, when you look at go to market, do you scale from the big to the small? Is it all similar as to how you price it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So from the variant standpoint, a few things to what you said. First of all, we're in sort of the application. We've always been in that application software layer of the space. And so it's really exciting to us because this is where the software again gets elevated to the cloud and available to everybody. So that's great for a variant. And we do, yeah, I mean, of course, we continue to make strategic acquisitions and to have go to market that is more specifically targeted and solutions that are more specifically targeted toward SMB. But again, I'm a big believer that, you know, when you're taking it to market through the cloud in a usage model, you really make it available to everybody. And you don't have to have, here's our separate product for this and here's our separate product for this. We have lots of options, but we also are a big believer that, you know, customers who want sophisticated functionality come in all shapes and sizes and we want to serve them. So speaking of options, let's talk about the consumer. We have so many options to transact business and we are bringing more and more demands to any business, right? We want to be able to have them interact with us on any channel that we want. Yep. Social, email, phone. We still want voice. That was a common theme that Stu and I heard yesterday is that people still want that human connection, but the consumer is increasingly empowered and demanding. What are, you mentioned some of the fundamentals such as delivering a superior CX that your customers have to still achieve, but some of those problems are changing because of the demanding consumer. Talk to us about some of those, turning some of those problems into opportunities for a variant customers to really take that competitive edge to the next level. Yeah, yeah. So at variant, our sort of tagline is that we are the customer engagement company. And so for us, that means customer engagement in the contact center, outside of the contact center, you know, in a retail branch store, online, however the consumer is connecting to that company, we want to help that company to understand that consumer better and to predict their needs because you're right, the consumer doesn't just come in through the contact center and expect for the person on the other end of the line not to know who they are or any of their history and expect to, you know, start from ground zero and explain the situation. The truth of the matter is that consumer maybe has been for the last day and a half on the website or went into the showroom to look and they're expecting that by the time they get to that contact center that you know all of that about them, right? That you know what they're looking for, that you understand that you can, that you understand what their sentiment is, how they're feeling about things that you can suggest things for them, they're used to that with their, you know, Amazon or their Netflix and they want the same experience. And this is really where I say this space is getting so exciting and so interesting right now because it's not just about, again, the connectivity, it's not just about even across different channels, connecting my email from here to here, connecting my call from here to here, connecting my chat from here to here. It's about the intermingling of all of these real time with context so that whoever they speak to, whether it's a chatbot or a human or you know something else, that entity has the full context gives a consistent answer, right? They get the same answer from the store that they get from the agent that they get from the chatbot when they're chatting and that each of those understands them as a consumer and can predict their needs without them having to take the time to explain the situation over and over and over again. It's a real challenge for companies but the tools are available today and it's really, really cool and exciting to see what we can do with them. Yeah, you talked about just the changing, blurring of the lines that's going on in some of the space. You talk about, you've got a partnership with 5.9. Where do you look as to, they've got innovation that they're doing in AI, everybody's looking at new ways to leverage data and access the customers. How do you look at the ecosystem and kind of your role and where the partners play and where you collaborate together? Yeah, so I love this relationship with 5.9. So I will tell you that I personally and my boss, John Goodson at Varrant who runs all of product at Varrant flew out to have a strategic full day meeting with 5.9. Just a few months ago, this is part of what we're doing regularly. We're really excited about innovating together, about developing together, about understanding how we can use our understanding of real time conversations and of customer sentiment and their digital sentiment from the website and all of those things and how we can connect them in to that moment of truth where that 5.9 customer, that customer service representative is getting that, receiving that contact and so that we can make the combination of 5.9 and Varrant something that's really, really special for our customers. And I mean, I think that's why we're all here, right? We're here to serve our customers and to provide a better experience for them every single day and uplift them because they're the people that have to provide that better experience for their consumers. And so the more we can uplift them, the more they can uplift their consumers and the more we start to feel the impact everywhere. It's very exciting. I love this particular partnership. The last question, since you are the SVP of product strategy, in the last 30 seconds, direction kind of your vision for where the market is going and say in the next couple of years. Yeah, I mean, so we're doing so much with automation. One of the things that actually we're excited about with 5.9 is our automated quality. So it's totally changed the way businesses do quality monitoring, but robotic process, automation. And there are lots of different ways that we're infusing automation and AI and machine learning throughout our portfolio in everything that we do. But we're also looking to add a lot in terms of extendability and APIs. So that's another big driver for us, really being a good player in the corporate ecosystem of our partners and our customers, wherever they are. Excellent. Kristen, thanks so much for joining us, too, and being on the program today. We appreciate your time. Thanks, it was fun. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.