 Hello and welcome to another episode of the collab talk podcast where we discussed the convergence of technology business productivity and collaboration culture. My guest is a returning guest here is Alex Doyle vice president product management with Verizon business group welcome Alex. Thank you Christians great to be here again with you again yes and your first appearance on the podcast last summer. We talked about the expansion of unified communication solutions within a collaboration space and specifically, you know, my background and the Microsoft ecosystem SharePoint teams all that, but specifically about Verizon's partnership with Microsoft so that it was the the Verizon mobile for Microsoft teams and that integration with teams. So that was a great conversation that was episode 78 for those that are interested you can go back of course I'll have a link here in the blog post. Of course you can also search for Alex Doyle and collab talk podcast, and you'll find it across wherever you listen to your podcasts. It's on Spotify and I heart and Apple and Stitcher and kind of everywhere else so all the major platforms. But we're talking today, broader discussion here, we're going to tap into your knowledge or the history, the gray hairs that we have talking about the evolution of unified communications and the future of the UC space. This is something I mean it's it's amazing in the 33 years I've been in tech and of course I started early my career. You recall I was with good old Pacific bell, and then I went to about a year after the launch of what was Pacific bell mobile. What was it. It was it changed to pack bell mobile. But it was, they went through a couple name changes, then became singular, if you remember singular wireless. I joined about a year, year and a half after the formation of pack bells mobile business and work on some huge projects. That time in the mid 90s to now means pretty dramatic, the changes that happen in the space. So, maybe we start here, maybe you could just describe, you know the initial vision and the driving driving factors behind the emergence of unified communications in the 80s in the 90s. Here's my favorite story about this topic or an anecdote or a fable if you will. I think, you know, I started my telecom and back in the early 90s to, like you said, seen an enormous amount of change. Here's the story I always go back to I was talking to a customer at a trade show I think it was enterprise connect. And they said, way back in the day, if you were going to an enterprise, there'd be the telecom person, and there'd be the data come person, and the telecoms person's job was always to just kind of remove costs and drive out costs. And the data comes person job was to drive kind of productivity and strategy. And then you go fast forward five or 10 or eight years, and that telecoms person job is still low level or maybe gone, and that data come person's job. Now they're now the CIO right now they're running strategy or something. And I like that story because I think that's what unified communications is all about back a generation or two ago, you just wanted to have a phone system and you wanted to have it cheap and you wanted to have it reliable. And the whole premise of unified communications I think was all about productivity. Right. How can it be more strategic to the business. How can we make our sellers more productive or our engineers go faster make decisions faster serve customers faster. There's a lot of technology waves that happened. But I think that original goal of unified communications of premise was all about stop talking about like low cost and start talking about productivity. You know it's interesting though it is my observation of the space to is that, you know, because it was once you saw the launch of the rise of smartphones and the prevalence of high speed Internet and of course I went, I left the phone company and I went to a DSL company if anybody remembers the space communications and there was the what rhythms. Co bad not COVID co bad and North Point that were the three rivals in that space. And we were at North Point we're based in in San Francisco is that what you saw more and more people getting you know high speed Internet, you know that the nature of the solutions was evolving and changing the people that had telephony roles that, you know, some of them lost their jobs or they merged into other kind of networking spaces. They kind of found each other in these vendors that became highly specialized in unified comms, and they were in the Microsoft ecosystem this is especially true. It's a very high priced consultants, like they found that like that niche. I think organizations realize that we got rid of this, this knowledge, we got rid of these these people, and then how essential it was to have people that understood the telephony capabilities, as well as the the software the networking the the other SAS based services. You're exactly right Christian and you touch on another point too is like, I remember back in those days when you had co bad and all those other companies if I go back and again I'm dating myself to that telecommunications act 1996. It really generated a ton of new entrance into the space, which then stimulated a lot of innovation right back at the time was on a vendor that was building unified communication solutions. I'm trying to just engage with like, you know, two big pbx vendors and three big telecom vendors, you had all these alternative service providers out there, whether they were DSL providers or application service providers or whatnot. And I really do think in hindsight, that did kind of drive the industry forward, you know the DSL providers would say hey what SAS things can I put on top of it like you said Microsoft got into the game, you know, we did see a lot of interesting innovation from those days, which I think was involved to this day. Right well and a lot of that to part of what we're talking about because I was involved with that where you had like a mom and pop cellular phone store that suddenly because of that act in the late 90s was able to to purchase airtime and resell that. And so the vendors were your the phone companies were forced to to resell that. And so that that you're right it really sparked innovation it helped. It's one of those things that the market does is it it drove down a lot of the costs, you know, remember what my I remember my phone bill being so high, so high, and those early days of mobile phones. But now then all of these different options these little stores that just that popped up. So a lot of that capability you had number portability came out of that time. And that's something we take for granted now is that you go and like I grew up with a 415 grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area over in the East Bay grew up with a 415 area code well now that's just in the it's just San Francisco. And there's been a couple different area code splits, you know, away from that. But with the number portability, if you have a cell phone number like you can keep it you can move anywhere. I'm living Utah now my cell phone number is the Seattle area. Yeah, yeah, that's valuable cell phone number. Yeah, that's a good point and it kind of also reflects that the innovation is not just on the technology. A lot of it's kind of business model and new bundles and new ways to serve customers, you know, I think with unified communications, for example, I'll give you an analogy of like the consumer cell phone market today. Now a lot of service providers will say, hey, let's let's bundle in, you know, Netflix or Hulu or Max or put those into your mobile plan. I think unified communications has been the B to B angle of that right you know 15 years ago the cable companies made a big play into doing broadband into a small business, but also bundling in your voice your messaging maybe you know an office 365 subscription, and really being able to build that whole kind of business in a box solution as well. And I like that because it's it's it's business model innovation just as much as product innovation you're putting unified communications into maybe an easier to acquire offer. Well, that really started. I think where I started really paying close attention was just before 911, bringing up some big things here COVID 911, only because I was in Japan when all that happened I was actually the end of my work day, watching the news and was watching it all happen at the end of my day in Tokyo. But I was calling people. I think it was the early version of Yahoo messenger that was one of the first to have a telephony it was from digital to landline. And there I think there were a couple others that were out there, but that just, I mean for me to be able to do that, you know very quickly on a dial up hotel connection, you know get through and reach out to people where the phone lines were struggling to connect through the everybody was calling everybody. But that's why I started to see that that shift and just thinking differently about those tools, like, I could actually see. I don't I think it was a couple years later where we saw like the first CRM integration into a telephony offering with a headset connected to your laptop. Exactly right and I think those general themes of making communications more accessible, bundling more things into the offer integrating things. All those stay all those are durable and permanent. I think what ends up shifting sometimes now is more is like the technology underneath, just like, you know, evolution of devices happens I think we're seeing the evolution of the network as well. You know, a cable example you know back in 2010 you might go to a cable company for your access and your voice and your messaging and your calendar. Now I think what we're seeing at Verizon is a similar approach, but now it's all wireless. So it's a 5G wireless when into your office. It's a 5G anywhere mobile connection and the same unified communications apps all work but now they're in kind of a mobile first kind of a sense. And I think that's been another unlock for the industry as well. When people ask about you know or when you talk about you know unified communications like what are the core technologies that you're thinking of or what do people ask about because I like I think of instant messaging I think of, you know video conferencing of using, you know, live meeting of teams of zoom of those kinds of capabilities. And I'm not even thinking of the telephony that I'm like taking that for granted because I've got a phone I can I can double click on somebody's profile and it just dial right within an app. Like what are kind of those core things when you think of unified communications. That's a great question I think first I'll say I think the core fundamental ingredients still remain the same right it's it's it's voice and phone as your anchor and then it's meetings whatever that might be it's messaging and then it's kind of customer care. Those are kind of the four you know that's kind of the anchors of everything, but I do think the modality and type of all those changes a lot you know. I think one of the interesting things about as the world kind of moved to a mobile experience. It did do a few things one it kind of like broke that hard bundle. I think back in the day everybody the bias Cisco Microsoft we're all trying to get you to be 100% in the air experience you're going to use their thing for everything. And I think with the mobile experience and kind of the evolution of app stores you've seen this explosion of like a heterogeneous experience like people are totally happy to use one thing one minute one thing the next minute. You're not getting everything from one vendor and I think that's something we we've kind of embraced as well you know people are just going to gravitate to different tools at different times you know. Overseas you see people using WhatsApp a lot for commerce now you know so so I think the core things of voice meetings messaging CRM still the same but like the experience is kind of differ a lot. I think what I would then add to that is, you're starting to see some great innovation now and kind of three areas I think one is a security right and that just doesn't mean application security but like voice security and biometrics and authenticating a person is really who they are especially in the world of AI related to security is compliance, especially with our larger unified communications customers compliance is so important you know these banks can get fine. Tens of millions of dollars by the SEC if they're not responsible with our communications. And then I think the third is kind of verticals you know for a long time people would make these very horizontal you see plays, but there's great things you can do if you focus on dentists or construction or mining or realtors. And I think there's a real ability to kind of pivot the experience and solution to verticals as well. So those are kind of the big trends I'm seeing. A couple thoughts there. And I often talk about when Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft at his first, I think it was his first official keynote. It was at a partner conference which is in July of that that year when he became president, where he talked about like the goal of Microsoft to build the best software out there he says, and then he went a pivoted in direction that caught a lot of people by surprise and he said, again paraphrasing but is that you know where we don't have the best solution, or where we don't have any solution. We need to remember the customer, what they're trying to accomplish. And basically went on to say he said look at their, there's the customer what they're trying to do and from beginning to end, we may do pieces within that we need to make sure that they have the best experience. We don't just say well we just do that part and the rest of it good luck, like no unhappy customer for all of us is an unhappy customer. And so we have to think about that continuity across the various solutions. And so he then talked about partnering and integration of that experience. That's been, especially over the last few years, this focus of companies of software companies at least on the employee experience on the customer experience that that you know that that's whole space of your experience management, and being all of us should be responsible for no matter which technologies which players are in place, what that looks like for the end customer. I think that's exactly right and I remember reading that chapter of Satya's book and you're right it was such a big culture change it was such an announcement to the industry and it was important right. I think, as we're all kind of returning to the office more. It's becoming more evident as people kind of go back to physical devices sometimes and what I mean by that is this if I'm on a tablet or a mobile or even a laptop. It's easy to use different things different tools as a case may be. But if you go into a big large enterprise often, they usually have devices and equipment and room systems from a single vendor on the desk, whether it's Cisco or neat or, you know, HP or whoever it might be. And back in the day, those devices would really only work with one thing if you had a Cisco device, you know console in your room it was connected to the Cisco board and that was that. And I do think credit to Cisco just like Microsoft they've really kind of opened up you know if you're on that Cisco device, it's going to work with Microsoft it's going to work with zoom it's going to work with everything. And I think that's like you said the customers are demanding that. And I think it's nice to see these walled gardens break down. Yeah. Yeah, and that is happening in a lot of spaces a lot of areas. There's like the the open data initiative sharing of information where you have Microsoft playing nice with Oracle and SAP and Adobe and all these other players, which is again just it's a big, especially if you'd say like, I met bomber couple times. He was an early morning gym the pro club for folks that are aware of the club there in town and he would play basketball when he was in town he play a couple times a week and I was an early pro club gym participant and would go and watch them a lot and very vocal people would ask him questions. It's a bit awkward standing around the locker room people are changing his stuff and he's answering business questions, like, but he he did it he was, he was pretty open, not a shy man. Yeah, but I can have a discussion, but yeah, it but it is. It's interesting to see how much the cultural shift is and I mean I again I a big part of that I put on Satya but I also just think that the industry is evolving and changing from that. Like the sales models that worked 1015 years ago, don't work the same way or at all. It's gotten very relationship management and again that experience management. I think that's right the experience management is different the sales model is different. I mean even the concept of a device is different, you know back in the day unified communications would be like hey who's got the best desk phone and then it's going to go through the sale. You know we've worked with like, you know, big big frontline manufacturers, whether it's retail or a factory or whatnot, and they're all using kind of ruggedized mobile devices right that is the, that is the end point and when you kind of reimagine, you know it kind of, you know, 20 X grows what your unified communications market is you know by communications really used to be just for the knowledge worker who sat in an office all day. It's not that anymore it's really for anybody and and that's exciting, but you do have to have that real breath and diversity of experiences or you're not going to be able to win the market. How did Verizon initially approach the unified communications market like what were the key factors driving its strategy. Yeah, I think if I were to brag a little bit, I think it's, I'm proud of the fact that in general we've been kind of ahead of these curves and habits and bends in the market. I think full, you know full disclosure if you go back to you know 15 years or so, we, we kind of were looking a lot like everybody else, and then it was very large enterprise focused. It was very expensive. And I think the advantage Verizon has because it's really an independent provider is we spent a lot of time on on heterogeneous solutions. If a customer wanted to use Cisco here and Microsoft here we could do that. If you wanted to be in Europe and the America's in Asia we could do that because we had a worldwide global backbone. I think we always had a little bit of a market advantage because we weren't vendors specific right we were vendor agnostic partner agnostic, you know technology agnostic. I think where I'm proud of the fact that we've led it's been getting in front of these transitions. I think the first one was mobile right I think we're the first to do a integrated UC is built right into the wireless network we did that before everybody and I think after that we've done devices that are kind of just built into the network. We have desk phones that like one of the largest distributed retail companies in the United States is using. They still have desk phones, but rather than plug them into a land or a firewall they just connect over the macro cellular network just like you know just like an Android phone right we did that. And now I think we've kind of led in terms of integration with the the new move to Microsoft teams. And I think we've led into putting you see into kind of very small business and bringing that democratization down down to the smaller customer. These are all the places we've used to play basically going from large enterprise wire line to be everywhere and mobile first. And there maybe you know this off the top of your head like what percentage of enterprises are in cloud based unified comms versus those older systems. I tell you it's it's shocking how many old premises legacy solutions are still out there. So, so, you know, I think probably we're at like, let's say two thirds of cloud based systems and one third is still premises based. And then the cloud based is kind of a lot of that is on like rel one cloud that's kind of making the move to the next version. You know, I do think like the market has been kind of in the CPAS communications platform as a service API market for a while. It's been a little bit niche, a little bit focused on more like two factor authentications SMS type of applications. We're seeing people use our platform for a lot of CPAS and telco API things as well. And I only say that to say it's a little bit misleading to say cloud because a lot of them are on, you know, rel one cloud and moving to rel two or the next or mobile cloud or kitchen cloud or what have you. Right. Well, that's always the discussion from your information management systems as well. I mean there's dedicated cloud is it really cloud is like it's you're hosting on somebody's servers but is it really truly what the cloud is but no but I think something that has changed where I was kind of getting to is that is that, you know, the transformation of this space, because net new businesses, they're not going and putting infrastructure in place. I mean if you look at even like the subcontinent if you look at Africa, they're leading in areas around app development on on I mean, you know, the currency exchanges of, you know, the various the apps and tools that they use, because there aren't lines in the ground there's towers that instantly give them access to everything. I think that's exactly right and there's it's so empowering and inspiring to see some of that innovation right I do think in the US one of the next big innovations we'll see is in payments, because the payment doesn't have to be micro payments that could be about running your business in a different way as well. I do think if I look back to kind of the generation one of unified communications. It really was a lot of people trying to replicate the old PBX in a cloud SAS model. I remember talking to my old boss about this because people would ask us like, hey, can you replicate an old legacy feature like call park on an IP based cloud system. And we would sit look at ourselves and go like, well, why would anybody actually want that it's like when you move houses you don't take everything from the old house with you you kind of start again. I think like it really is the art of the product management and product marketing side to say, what is it that people really value and really value next to your point about new businesses. I'm always excited to see the rate of new businesses and particularly small business applications in the US. There's so much new things starting, and a lot of these founders, many of them are in their 20s are just going to start in a like, you know, you're not going to buy fiber DSL you're going to buy a mobile link you're going to be all mobile there's like new ways of thinking about the world. And I think that that's good that's a challenge to the unified communications providers to say how are you going to serve this next generation of customers. Well that's the other thing too are a lot of that innovation comes because they're not looking to those old features like they're not going to know to ask for those old features, a lot of those capabilities. What drives so much of it is then they are asking as they will about you know cross platform integrations they're asking about integrations with their other collaboration technology they want to do more. It's, it goes back to I started my career as a business analyst and a tech writer, and one of the things that we always this dilemma of, like do you go right into a prospect client and do you ask them what are your requirements, or do you show them some of the new technology. The problem is that people will give you their requirements through their lens of understanding today, you show them all what's possible, then the downside is, they won't ask for enough because they won't understand what's possible, versus they'll see all this cool stuff and then ask for things that aren't relevant. And if there's the happy place in the middle of all of that, you know, is, but it's, I mean that's, that's where the innovation, you know, comes from is people that are asking, you know, for things that not maybe not fully understanding the history, but asking for things that sometimes landing on like novel approaches or methods for how they think that they need to work. I think that's exactly right, but what I'd say is that as much as the technology changes as much as the macro economic environment changes the demographics change. You know, one thing I think is consistent, which is like, no matter what kind of business you go to, they, they want to run a successful business and there's a saying I used to say a lot, which was we help people focus on their core business, right, so all these companies, they want to be the best caterer, the best law firm, the best Bitcoin broker, whatever it is, they, they want their competitive advantage to be their business, not that oh they run their UC better than the other company down the street runs their UC, and that's where I think you mentioned the partners before I think the partners, the indirect channel, the providers like Verizon, our obligation is to support these companies so they can do what they do best and we can kind of take all of this off their off their plate and a lot of that like you says it's kind of balance that line of requirements versus versus outcomes that that is what you just described I mean that that's true across again information systems you met the majority of my career we we spent the first half of my career first 15 to 18 years. And we were worried about keeping the servers up and running. And so so much of the it pro role was keeping servers up and running, and actually using those servers for the business purposes was, I don't want to say secondary but almost secondary, just to keep everything up and running. Now, you know, we're at a maturity of a lot of these technologies where we that we can rely on them that like the consistency of the delivery of the solutions means really high. And so that does exactly what you said we could focus instead. So we don't have all these telephony experts of these UC experts that we have to have in house to fix things that instead, we can have experts on the services and focus on Well, what are we as a company trying to do we're creating a product, we could create X more because we're able to collaborate in the real time and kind of everything else. Right. And that when that magic happens that's that's when it's so enjoyable to see because I know, you know, millions of person hours goes into work underneath to make it reliable like you said to make sure you're hitting that I don't want to minimize the actual the work of all that. But I'm saying that Verizon's doing that. So we don't have to I mean exactly Microsoft is doing that with Office 365 with Microsoft so we don't have to do that on our own. Exactly. And then you see that innovation come from the market and that's that's kind of inspiring right I've told the story before I think we've talked about it like one of the great things about my job is I get to see our customers and they go all the way from the largest enterprises and the largest federal governments. My favorite customer, we have a one line 89 year old grandmother in Montana who started her own Etsy business at the age of 89. And that that inspires me that she was able to just take the tools we have and start her dream business. You know what a great story that is and then just goes to show like kind of how much we've opened up innovation to everybody. Yeah. Well, something to I was thinking about how like, I think a common story about the pandemic looking back. I always kind of, you know, half joke like nobody talks about the positive sides of COVID of the pandemic. But the reality is it really did expedite so many organizations their strategies, their, you know, their UC strategies. Did you also see the Verizon experience, you know, any evolution of the technology, like did you, did you shift in different directions, maybe unexpectedly because of what we collectively experienced. You sure did and I'll point out two things one kind of the under the surface to the point of investment and kind of one above the surface that the customer saw the, I remember it like it was yesterday that first week in March when everything March 2020 when everything really shut down. And we spent a lot of time at Verizon kind of analyzing the network analyzing traffic and things like that. And for us, Mother's Day in the US is the biggest day of the year in terms of calls and traffic everybody calls for that one week in March. It was like every day was more than Mother's Day and every day got bigger than the day before, because what happens is all these companies that were in a single locations you know you consolidate on trunks of the network and it was just massively distributed. Yeah, and the amount of just network infrastructure that we had to just build out in seven days was was just shocking it was a lot of sleepless nights. And we got through it right we were able to stay ahead of the traffic surge. But but I think what's happened is, you know, as you saw that kind of supernova out of coven. A lot of business estate permanent a lot of people worked at home a lot of new business form. So we were kind of been able to build that infrastructure to support this big growth in the market. I think the other kind of big trend that pushed towards was was kind of mobile devices and kind of that mobile first approach you know people didn't bring their IP desk phone home they use their mobile, but also it started a whole new, almost a whole new generation of customers to you know these big city governments and state governments would bring in like tablets from us or jet packs or devices for students to go home and people just kind of got used to running on kind of a mobile first experience. So I think that was you know another kind of those are the two things that point to the infrastructure build and then that kind of shift to mobile first. Yeah, I always, it just reminds me of like every conference you've ever been to how the Wi Fi sucks on day one. You know, it's like no matter how much we know we're going to have 20,000 people here. And yet it just they seem always like cut off guard by the demand that's on on the network on that first day and it levels out and they adjust up and from that and unified comms providers experience that like around the world everybody all at once. Yeah, that was that's that's a big scalability. It was it was great it was hard to go through that first week I'll tell you that but it has been great to see it like just you know live on kind of right and get not just the UC part right as we've grown our fixed wireless access to business we've got millions of customers on that. So we're seeing people not just running their voice or, you know, calls or messaging on our network. They're running their land and land to it's it's kind of a neat kind of a you kind of feel like the technology is like kind of making that shift forward. Can you also discuss what you see as like current impacts or what you see is impacts around some of the technology that's coming forward I mean there's, I mean, IOT has been around for a while but we're seeing more and more adoption. There's a lot of, I'm not so much in a VR fan as an AR and augmented reality some of the features the capabilities that are going to come through that. And then of course, AI. How, you know, how does Verizon look at those and how are you preparing for those. Yeah, so job one, and it's a kind of a good kind of a carry on of kind of that network undercurrent know the amount of data you're going to need to deliver, you know, AI payloads or AR payloads or VR payloads, you know, you got to be ready for that as well. So job for one for us is just invest in the network, and we continue to invest in the network the amount of capital and build out we put in that it's pretty pretty impressive. And, you know, so just like we had to stay in front of the UC growth under coven or staying in front of the growth on that side as well. So the other part of it that I think is going to be interesting though is you know what what are the use cases that come out. And then how does that kind of drive the usage as well. Like you, I'm a little skeptical on VR and the B2B or business side I think it might have a little more play in the consumer side. Education probably is probably strongest but yeah. Yeah, yeah, but but I tell you AR super excited about that. And also, I mentioned before we're we're seeing more front line deployments with like ruggedized endpoints like think about like a manufacturing plant or a food processing plant or things like that. You know those same types of customers are big uses of private networks, right, you know, they can just run a private 5G network. They can run IOT on that private network as well and run AR type of things. And it's it's almost like I think of it is unified communications, but it's not a knowledge worker. It's just a different kind of use case. And I think seeing IOT and AR big big what we're seeing those now I'm not even sure I'd look at those as future. I think on the AI side, I do wonder if sometimes, you know, we're a little bit of that maximum hype, and we'll see where it comes back on. Yeah, there's some of that will argue that like oh no no we're getting into the adoption like no no I think the hype cycle is still in full swing. I think here's where I think it might be interesting in the UC space and it's a little early but like I think some of the most clever creative silly fun things with AI and gen AI specifically are really on kind of like content creation right now right I want to make art I want to make marketing collateral things like that like one of the things where we think the market's going to go to when we're in some early prototypes is what happens when gen AI is like in your voice path or media path or meeting path right. So today I think you know we've seen Microsoft do some cool things with co pilot, you can do a meeting and then you get kind of your action items, you know when you're your summaries and things like that that's super interesting because they're tapping into that media path to give you intelligence. You think about well where else could you take that right you could take it for real time language translation you could take it for fraud detection. You could take it for emergency services and first responders and security. And I do think once we kind of tap into that voice path with gen AI, then you might see some interesting use cases come out of there as well. I think we're next, next four to five years. It's going to mature very quickly but I think you're exactly right back there's a that was just out in the news like the new. You probably saw in the news the the new Argentine president, and they like I don't know what AI platform it was but it was doing near real time voice and it actually modified the video as well. And so his mouth looked like he was speaking English. I mean it's just amazing. I want that in in in teams meetings. Anybody any language jump in and yeah I know that Microsoft is working on it. You know what it is Alex it's we're getting so close to the Star Trek universal translator, have a little thing on our color. It's connected to our mobile phones. So that's fine. You have to have it within your three feet of your person, but with that little communicator and be able to talk and hear back in your native language. I think it's going to be great and I think you know right now you know that Argentinean example I think a lot of it they kind of take the media path they do a voice to text transcription and then they use the text to feed it back in. It's good but it's an extra hop. Once you can kind of tap into the media directly without the voice to text, then it gets even more interesting. Obviously it also brings some interesting ethics fraud fraud prevention you're going to see an arms race there as well. You know one of the products we have today on our big enterprise call center side is fraud detection. If someone calls in and tries to spoof a voice, we have ways of kind of detecting that hey this is you know, highest score risk of fraud. Now it's going to be an arms race in terms of, you know, seeing where things going that as well I think will all be diligent. Well I think you just named like one of the, I'd say one of the most important future trend spaces where we need to focus and there's a reason why there's so many security focused startups that are popping up looking at different aspects of this. What else do you see like what do you see or what are your predictions of like the areas where we might see the most change. Well, I do wonder I think a couple things one I think you're going to see pretty big changes in the security space when we kind of brought in the aperture to five or 10 years right when you look at what the quantum computing applications are for security. It's going to be kind of mind blowing. So, so we are kind of pretty excited about what we're going to see happening in the security side as well. I do think that we expect hardware costs to come down and kind of mentioned the Star Trek University translator. You know you've seen kind of these AI type pins that can kind of you know project on your hand things like that. That one maybe didn't quite have product market fit, but I do think we're going to see more things like that as well. You know I can go to a whole foods and use like a palm checkout kind of stuff. I think a reliance on devices is going to go away and a kind of little more about wearables and the person and that way I can just kind of walk into a room and use any device. I think that's an area where there's room for innovation as well. So maybe we're not all tied to our phones but we're tied to like a community of devices out there as well. I think that's another area that you know what's that Bill Gates thing you you you overestimate what's going to happen in two years underestimate what's going to happen in 10 I think when you look at two to 10 frame I think I think you're going to see some things in those spaces. That's why I always admired Microsoft every few years they do their you know the future office like they do a video that I think is produced by their R&D team, which I remember seeing it when I joined in 2006. It was a building right near mind you could look at Microsoft like a little museum and stuff in it I think it's in there. In there, I think they have the actual museum and building 92 now it might be part of that but anyway, I remember watching that, and one it was like a person wakes up in the morning and they, they grab this piece of glass and there's not you know and then they touch it and all of a sudden this data comes and as they walk into the bathroom they flick it to the wall and all this kind of it was showing all these things and I thought two things. One, invest in Windex because in the future it's glass everywhere fingerprints everywhere so everybody's going to need their Windex. But two was just, you know, working there and then over the last 15 years, how much of what I saw in that video back in 2006 is actually come about that they've they've actually done and so it's still like one of the it's like going back and looking at the videos of the technologies where they're predicting the future and flying cars and all that. And there's a lot of things that are ridiculous and the design aesthetic changed, you know, all those kinds of things, but how much we've actually done that they kind of predicted So it is, that's why I love science fiction because especially when it's hard sci-fi that is based on actual technology, so much more real you can actually see, you know, the thinking the understanding of 1980s are written a book written in 1980s about sci-fi, how much actually is rooted in actual technology and we see in the modern day. You know, so I agree with all that and I'll also give my friends and Microsoft another shout out to they've done some great publications over the last year or so about kind of almost the mental and physical and brain aspects of like the ways of working now I think you've probably seen it right they they've literally kind of measured brainwaves of what happens if you've got back to back meetings for four hours versus if you space things out and it's it's it's pretty shocking research when you get into it and and I'll give you another example for my personal life I like to listen to podcasts I like to go listen to them when I go for a walk on the weekend and and I've often I've always listened to them at like and I think what happens when you listen to podcasts at high speed for a while it can kind of like, you know, mess with your brain a little bit. Why are you talking so slow Alex, you know, right. And I do think as we see all these innovation things of the technology I just like to give a shout out to to Microsoft about the research they're doing. Yeah, but I think we're going to have to continue to think about the human aspect of this and and how people intersect with this technology. I always recommend people if you've not found the Microsoft blog the work lab site. Is it work lab IO or work lab.com or any of you just go look for the work lab, one word work lab blog, you'll find that, but it's exactly what you talk about so they go into the employee space, you know, realm is what that site was started they're talking about the data, the research that went into the decisions they make around products and features. So you're getting the story the historical view of why, and they share the data and they share various stories and reports they make public through that that site that help drive their innovation. And so it's fascinating, as that's always as a product person, it's something that's frustrating to and when your customer facing especially where you've written in your like look I've got these issues are these problems with the way that the user experiences that the UI needs to change and this and here's why and it just seems like why are you wasting time on this feature that can't be serving many needs and you're taking so long and this other item that's in the backlog and they go through and they explain, like the reasoning behind a lot of those different things and now, and so it's, it's one of those things where you have to be a bit more empathetic when you're providing feedback feedback I'll put an air quotes to Microsoft of why you want to see something and understand that they have some very smart people that are looking at all those same things and while keeping in mind backwards compatibility integration future innovations that were not privy to like all those different things, and limited resources they don't just have 10s of thousands hundreds of thousands of engineers to jump and work on any one project. There's only so many people that you can have working on something developing but again. My soapbox be empathetic to that provide constructive feedback back to your vendors. But I do want to ask you a couple more questions. One, gun going back and look at historical like what stands out to you as some of the most significant innovations that you've seen ever Verizon's unified communication solutions to date. I'm going to lean into the mobility because I think one is something we're pretty proud of and I think it's something that really kind of move the industry forward. So, so I'll pick three. I'll say one is background 2016 on more of the small and medium business side. We launched one talk. One talk is basically a cloud unified communication solution, but it's built into the wireless network. So it just it just you just grab your Android or iPhone or desktop if you want it, and it just works you don't have to go to WebEx or this or that or the other thing it just worked. It was just like, hey, I'm starting a business with 10 people. I'm just going to say here's 10 iPhones and we're off to the races. I think making it mobile first. We were early, but I think we're leaders and I changed the market. So that's one. I think more recently, I'll talk about that macro cellular desk phone. We did kind of the enterprise flavor of our one talk of family where, you know, look, a lot of businesses still want desk phones. Maybe you're a laundromat. Maybe you're a hardware store or a retail store or maybe you're like a big rental car company. We have one which has got like 30,000 of these and airports and train stations and kiosks around the world. They were able to just get rid of all of their legacy old phone systems and put these cellular based desk phones on each desk. So you just all you do is just plug it in to power and it works just like a cell phone you just turn it on and it does. That's changed the deployment and cost factors for these businesses, like literally 20 x 20 x cheaper 20 x faster. So that's been a huge win. And then the third one I'll lean into what we've done with mobile and the Microsoft Teams family right you know Microsoft will call it teams phone mobile. I think this is taking all the power productivity consolidation of teams, and then giving it kind of that smartphone front end to it. So like, you know, I was with one of my buddies at Microsoft and a customer recently, and he goes watch this. And he goes, Hey, call my work number. Right. He just just calls the work number. We're going to talk for a bit. He goes now watch this and it's all turned into that co pilot AI meeting summary, because the cell phone experience now kind of inherits all of the capabilities of teams and co pilot and whatnot. So teams is great, but like, you're not always going to use it on your laptop when you're at the office, you want it on, you know, right in your native dialer experience. So I'm going to say I'm most proud of how we've moved the ball forward on the mobile side. Because at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do we're trying to, you know, care for all our networks but I think the more we're seeing B2B customers on our mobile network I think that's just been our differentiator. Well, that's, that's kind of a segue you kind of answered part of it I was going to my last question was talk about some of your partnerships because you sign some pretty significant partnerships and your teams and I also work with zoom you work with a number of players that are out there. How much do those collaborations, you know, shape of horizons you see offerings that do. So you just had a great example, I don't know how much that changed what your product teams were looking at and thinking about based on that integration but that seems like that would generate a lot of ideas of Oh, hey, here's some more that we could do deeper into the co pilot path. Just like we mentioned with such as book way back we're very partner oriented as well for for us and the way I look at it, it is kind of segment based. I think the more you go into small and medium businesses the more customers are really just looking for Verizon home built products. You know they're going to go into a Verizon retail store, or they're going to move and start a new business and they're going to want to fix wireless access when and then the service with it. So in that area can we build it more cells and we partner less it's things like one talk like our one talk cellular desk phone things like that. But once you go up market into the large enterprises into the state governments the federal governments there were really partner oriented, because can you leave these partner these customers are often looking to either go with the brand of our partners like a Microsoft teams, or they already have Microsoft teams, or WebEx or Amazon Connect, and they're looking to integrate what they already have with our networks. So that's kind of how we look at it down market it's more the Verizon brand up market is where we partner. Well Alex I really appreciate you taking the time to sit and walk through a good memory lane into you see the world but yeah it's a. I'm, I'm excited to see what further transformation is going to happen in this space with the way technology is going and I'm. I'm preparing to be surprised by some of what might come out of these the integrations just because I think it's the rate of change is speeding up. And we're going to see a lot more it's it was just talking earlier today about the fact that with co pilot expansion so that there's no gate of 300 users per, you know, per environment to be able to leverage the co pilot capabilities and now it's open to anybody to go and use and they came up with personal pricing as well as the enterprise price like that side of it. A month and a half after it was all released, you know it happened very quickly. And so I think you're going to see new skews new features new capabilities, especially through the partnerships. It's going to happen a lot faster as we move forward. We don't know what's going to happen but we know that's true you're right it's it's never going to be as slow as it was yesterday we're going to keep speeding up right. That's right. Next time we do one of these we'll use the AI and darken my hair and make me look. We can wash that gray right out of our hair that's right. Well Alex really appreciate your time. Thanks so much. 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