 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 CafeX. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Zantesonio. Hello everyone, welcome to this special presentation of theCUBE on the ground at Enterprise Connect 2016. Want to do a shout out to our sponsors. Oracle ZDLRA, zero data loss appliance, CafeX and Vonage, thanks to our sponsors. Go buy their stuff, they're great, thank you very much. Okay, we're here, theCUBE on the ground. I'm John Furrier with Steve Zantesonio, and our next guest is Stephen Braw, who's the Tata Communications Director of Mobile, UC and Voice, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Jim, for having me today. Very excited to talk to you about our company and our services here at Enterprise Connect. So Tata Communications is a huge company. We see Tata Consultancy around as well as tons of different groups. Break down what group you're in and what you guys are doing here. So to understand our group is, to understand the overall group we're part of. So Tata Sons has 600,000 employees. It's about $110 billion. Both people say, okay, that's in India. No, actually 70% of that is outside of India. So we're really known for some of our brands. Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley T, Cora Steel, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata DoCoMo, which is I think the fourth, the fifth largest mobile operator in India with almost 100 million subscribers. And of course our company, Tata Communications, which we do a lot of the international communications around the world, enabling a lot of the entities that are exhibiting downstairs today. We handle one out of 10 phone calls worldwide. We connect one out of two mobile operators which touch about four out of five mobile subscribers on the planet. Fiber. Yeah, and our subsidy cable network carries about 25% of the internet in the world. We have, we're the only company that has a wholly owned subsidy cable system that goes all the way around the planet. Our fiber is about 700,000 kilometers, which is a very large network that a lot of the people that are mobile operators, Fortune 500 carries in general, a lot of the, again, the main players downstairs, they all will use our network or may ever manage services to enable their UC services worldwide. Tell us about the mobile dynamic because this show here and all the shows now, mobile first has been the buzzword you've hear but mobile is the device, that's where the software, sometimes it's in the cloud, it's in the application, it's becoming the focal point. How has that changed the dynamic for the customers and also the vendor's supplying solutions? Yeah, so I mean, I think with the shift, going to cloud now and then now with mobile and then with workforces with BYOD and constantly changing access to apologies, it creates I think a lot of challenge for anyone providing a UC service because it's an over the top service that's kind of at its routing, however it's routing. So the key is being able to control quality, control the pathway of the packets of the UC service. And so there's a lot of things that are happening behind the scenes that maybe a consumer would know on a lot of technologies that allow you to control how that voice packet or how that video packet or that message packet is being delivered in a way that optimizes quality because again, in a mobile operator, you're constantly switching cell sides, Wi-Fi access points, you're stepping in and out of access and that creates a lot of complexity for anyone providing a UC service. Is SDN having an impact on that problem yet or is that still sort of in early days, if you could comment at all? I mean, there are a lot of players that are looking at SDN as their overall strategy. I just came from Mobile World Congress where in a way you start to see that approach done Facebook and Google and others are looking at that for not only in the data warehouse but now they're looking at that with access points. They're trying to make that open source and be able to then have software to find what the access points are doing. So you're starting to see a lot of, in a way, very similar SDN related approaches, both in mobile and I know in UC industry and voice as well. Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of the UC business at Tata? I mean, at Tata we've been an enabler of many of these people in the industry for many years. So I mean, it's something as simple as- Vertical integration to some extent. We have a very large network. So anything from a layer one to a layer three. So we're talking IPLCs to Ethernet to MPLS or IP transit. We provide that and we provide that at great scale for many of the people in the industry or Fortune 500 companies, SMBs and so forth. And we also provide a lot of managed services that could be around DID, so local numbers. I have international toll-free numbers. Just a lot of those different services there. SIP Trunking, international A to Z. Again, that all rides off of our core competency where we handle one out of 10 phone calls worldwide at a wholesale level where the biggest by a large amount, that same capability we bring into the UC space to help other entities. And we can also make this available through APIs, through cloud delivery as well. So is the UC business, sorry to interrupt you, is the UC business, are you an OEM provider or do you provide direct services to end users? So we provide, so we don't manufacture equipment. Right, right. But the wholesale maybe is a better word. So yeah, we provide services. Those services could be to other service providers. And those services could be to SMBs and Fortune 500 directly as well. So we serve many parties. We're agnostic across the many platforms you see in the UC industry as well. As you see from many of our press releases, we work with Cisco, we work with Microsoft. We work with a lot of the access hardware providers as well. We're kind of in these different businesses all together enabling them. So talk about the trend that's happening that's been discussed for a few years now. Should I build a mobile native app or should I be web responsive? And I'm bringing the question specifically around that's been trending at this show, WebRTC. And so coming back down to the device native role. Because in UC, any device, anywhere, any experience, it's kind of the vision most of these vendors have and that's what the customers don't want to get caught up into all these different nuances on an app development basis. How do you guys view that whole dynamic at the end point from a device standpoint? Being native, mobile taking advantage of the capabilities of the hardware versus having some sort of web responsive kind of interface, browser-based. I mean, I guess from a voice call is a voice call. A message is a message. A packet is a packet. I mean, you have multiple ways in which to receive and that traffic or deliver that traffic. You know, I think that the industry, like in mobile or any other ones, there's constantly experimenting and kind of seeing what works and what doesn't. I think with the proliferation of apps in the last seven or so years, you know, you see a lot of people shifting that way. Now you see people looking at, okay, with SDKs and APIs, can I get features as a service where I don't actually code or provision these things? The Lego blocks model. Yeah, there was an article that went out on Friday and venture beat about that that I thought was quite interesting on the rise of feature as a service is almost a segment. So, you know, again, we serve these entities, these partners of ours. They still at the end of the day have a need to pass a packet, make a phone call, need a phone number, send a message to SMS and we're enabling that. If it's partners that are building their own apps, if it's a Fortune 500, then it's a different kind of engagement with them where we're bringing more of a complete solution. How about video? Okay, guys, video, huh? Yeah. How about video? I mean, video is constantly growing. One thing I found quite interesting coming from Mobile World Congress just two weeks ago is the biggest thing there was virtual reality and augmented reality. So I'm kind of curious to see, I don't see it yet in the enterprise, but it seems like that could be, people are calling that the fourth screen. So you have theater, the first screen, TV, the second screen, Mobile Third. And so how would that affect a UC experience having virtual reality, either with people remotely or in office and how would the main players who are in telepresence and video today kind of adapt and you know. You know a lot of compute and bandwidth of those. Yeah, so using a 4K video, you're going to need a lot of bandwidth to deliver that or with augmented reality and pushing images into the, in there. And I mean, that's why the Push in Mobile World Congress was from 5G and really fast technologies to deliver it. A lot of it is behind us. If you're going to have this, it's got to be mobile, can't be wired in. It's going to have that fast access. Steve, my final question is your take on the show here, your role here, what are you doing at the show? What's your activities? And then what's the, this show turning into, what's the industry turning into? Where is UC going, UC communications? I, you know, I've been in telecom for about 20 years and with a strong mobile focus. I was starting with VoIP back before 2000. So for me, it's great to see the industry almost in a VoIP de facto phase, moving to the cloud now, seeing mobile now in there. And it's, I think it's really interesting is now you have things in the mobile world called RCS which looks a lot like UCC and What's RCS then? Rich communication suite. So it's basically presence, it's rich video content. I am. I am, all these things that we talk about in UC, that's in mobile speak, that's RCS. And I see these kind of worlds in a way colliding in a way slowly. And I think, you know, you see other entities that are, that are not here at the event that maybe might be here in a few years that are out of Silicon Valley that are now in persistent chat and so forth that are now starting to creep into video and voice that probably we might start to see that as well. Which creates I think a lot more innovation and opportunity for ultimately our customers who are, you know, SMBs Fortune 500. Right. One last question for you. Who out there should be talking to Tata? You know, if I say, I don't think it's an SMB, or maybe it is. But anyway, the question is, who do you want to talk to directly and who should be looking out to you directly? Yeah, I mean, it depends on, I guess, the company. So it's like, we don't have a client that we don't work with. So it's kind of, I mean, if we're talking to somebody who provides a UC application suite, we're able to provide components or capabilities or features within that overall suite that they then take on and sell to their Fortune 500 clients. Or you have people who don't sell as much as Fortune 500, but more small and medium business. Again, we can provide these same sort of capabilities. So that around voice, around video, around texting, around just basic connectivity, we can provide that. And then you have clients that come here that come from large organizations, the small ones, that we work with directly day in, day out as well. That we either are combining part of their partner's technology in a solution that we provide to them or some of our solutions, depending on if they need conferencing, they need UC as a service, they need sip truncating, things of that nature. If they've got other components already in place, we are able to bring in stuff that doesn't require kind of a forklift to everything else they may have. People watching in the segment, let's just describe it in a bumper sticker. What is this show all about this year? Ah, gosh, in a bumper sticker, I think you're seeing a very strong shift that you see in the cloud. And a shift from the savings and the scale, you can go global very easily. You've got cost efficiencies. And for me, and I think it was pushed on last year, but this year it seems like a very strong cloud field for me this year. All right, Steven is here from Tata Communications inside the Cube, on the ground here, and at Price Connect 2016, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Thanks.