 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 theCUBE. I'm the ground special presentation at Enterprise Connect. I want to thank our sponsors, Oracle ZDLRA, zero data loss appliance, CafeX and Vonage. Thanks for your support for getting us here. We appreciate it. I'm John Furrier on the ground, and Peter Zantesonio at BC Communications. My co-host and analyst, our next guest is Scott Belting, who's the executive director of product management or hosted voice and data at AT&T. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here. Usly, having as iPhone, I've had since it launched with AT&T, I've been AT&T customer. That's one part of AT&T, obviously AT&T's a huge company, but it really touches on that thread of what's happening. And that is that this unified communications market is completely transitioning to a whole other world. Software, real-time communications, and user experience. Yeah, without a doubt. I think mobile devices and the mobility trend in general is really prominent right now, obviously. And so a lot of our customers are looking for how can they take advantage of that, make their businesses more productive, and we're trying to enhance our portfolio accordingly. It's funny, the iPhone is not even 10 years old, so it's not even an adolescent, if you will, but it's made such a dramatic change. But it's also a gateway drug, as we always say, to the real addiction, which is I want seamless user experience, real-time communications. This is the whole UC promise coming together. What's your experience? What patterns do you see talking to customers out there? Because they get the feel of the consumer device that they've had great success with. And then they realize when they bring it back to the workplace to put it all together. This is where the challenge starts. Yeah, so this is what we call in the industry, the bring your own device trend. So customers are used to using that consumer-oriented device. They want to bring it to work, they want to use applications that they're familiar with, and really the millennial generation is starting to drive a lot of that. They've grown up in that environment, and now they enter the workforce, and they want to start to utilize those same devices, those same applications. So the challenge for companies like AT&T is to develop the products that will enable that. And so again, we're developing our portfolio in a way that meets that need as well. So one of the key underlying things that drive all this is of course the evolution to the cloud, right? And I think that you just made a significant announcement that relates to the cloud. Yeah, indeed, indeed. And that's one of the main reasons we're here at Enterprise Connect. I mean, we typically come here every year, but this year we are pre-announcing the availability of a new product. It's called AT&T Collaborate. And AT&T Collaborate is essentially a cloud voice and collaboration product, and what I mean by the collaboration piece is, it enables things like audio, video, web conferencing, instant messaging and presence, desktop sharing. And so the customer will be able to, they'll be able to use it as simply a voice product if that's what they want to do, if they're trying to replace some of their legacy voice technologies, and they want to move to the cloud. They can use it for that, but it also enables them with additional capabilities so they can, again, support the needs of their employees and find a way to plug it into their processes to improve their businesses. So when this gets deployed as part of a corporate, well, let me back up. What's the target market? Is it SMB? Is it big enterprise? Is it all of that? Great question. We're gonna be positioning the products pretty much from small to large. I think the sweet spot initially is going to be more in the small to medium space, but because AT&T has such a broad depth and breadth of portfolio, we're going to find ways to integrate the product with the rest of our portfolio so that we can scale it up market and meet the needs of some of those more complex customers as well. So that's in our roadmap. What are some of the things that you see with customers doing where they're now architecting through the cloud and there's no real playbooks emerging. There's now new trends there. What are you seeing as patterns that you could share to the doers? There's a lot of digital builders we call them out there. They're trying to figure out architecture. So okay, I got on-premise, I got cloud. What are some of the things that you guys have and what do you guys tell those customers? Yeah, you know what I think is what's really important and what a lot of customers are going to be wrestling with is the whole concept of this hybrid environment. So I've got a bunch of software. I've got a bunch of my voice equipment on-premise. Some of that stuff as the cloud technologies have evolved and as broadband has become more ubiquitous, they're starting to develop business cases that make more sense to push some of that to the cloud. But I think the challenge is you don't get there overnight and so it's a journey. And so the challenge for the customers is how do we support that hybrid environment where some of our applications are going to be serviced from the cloud and some are still going to be on-prem that they have to maintain and support and provide software upgrades for that type of thing. So I know that AT&T has done a lot of work in the federation space. And the whole issue of being able to find you and where you are if you've got a Skype account or you've got an outlook, whatever the case may be, can you talk a little bit about that challenge and how collaborate is sort of going after that issue? Yeah, so you're right. The federation concept is a big challenge. You got Cisco out there with a lot of embedded base, a lot of Microsoft embedded base, other products. And so how do customers interact, how do our customers interact within their own employee group or if those employees want to interact with vendors, suppliers, who may be on a different platform. So federation starts to bring that together. And so we've definitely, AT&T has done that with a federation as a service type of a product offering that we have. With AT&T Collaborate, we're focused on the integration aspect of basically being able to allow an AT&T Collaborate customer to use that as a product that can integrate with, for example, a Skype for business, via some sort of a plug-in or an add-in type of an approach. And so that way, if the customer and their employees are comfortable using Skype for business, that's fine, we don't need to displace that. But AT&T Collaborate can be the voice engine, the public switched calling engine behind that because AT&T has a reputation for the reliability, the quality and security that customers may be more inclined to want to rely on an AT&T for that part of their service. Let's talk about the top three things that you're asked most by your customers. I mean, we're in a transformative world right now, digital transformation of the buzzword. What are the top three things that you hear most? I think it's, number one, how are you going to help me AT&T? How are you going to help me get from this environment that has maybe a lot of legacy components to it, older technology, big trend towards cloud, towards mobility, so how can you help me get there? Number one, what products do you have in the portfolio? But do you also have the support, the implementation support, the post-sale support? And so we bring all that to bear. And consulting services too, right? Consulting services, exactly. That's another key component because of all the complexity that all these different solutions are bringing to the market. So mobility is a big one. Mobility is definitely a big one. Security, you know, how are you going to ensure that if we move to the cloud, you know, with all the news stories you hear, but all the security breaches, what are you AT&T going to bring to the table that can help ensure that my data, my information as a customer is secure in your cloud? I mean, data loss, as we were saying on the intro, is a big deal, but here's the thing. With mobility and APIs in cloud, the surface area for attacks goes up significantly and it's like Swiss cheese, so there's no more perimeter. No, that's exactly right. And we have another area of the portfolio at AT&T, our whole security portfolio that revolves around how do we improve the customer's confidence in us in terms of how we can secure that cloud environment. What's your vision going forward for this unified communication space? This show is the center of all the action for this world. But now you've got the software world colliding in with it. You've got cloud, you've got mobile. Software is the value proposition at the center of all the action. DevOps, mobile, all the stuff around it. What's the future of this industry? Yeah, I see that trend only continuing and I see it accelerating actually. And so more and more applications are going to be pushed out there. More customers are going to have a more diverse set of applications that they're going to want to rely upon. The challenge for communications providers then is again, how do we integrate with that? How do we help customers support that? And at the end of the day, it's about how do we help customers run their businesses more efficiently? And that's really about employee productivity, improving business processes. So customers care about how are you going to help my business? Not what the vendors care about. They have their objectives. Yeah, no, that's true. And we have to remember that too. We can't get wander on the axle and the technology and what's possible. We got to understand our customers and then deliver solutions that make sense to them. I just have a practical, two practical questions. Number one, when can I eat this food? And number two, in terms of mobile deployment, are these clients or is it a browser-based thing? Yeah, great question. So the AT&T Collaborate, again, we're pre-announcing it. We're going to make it available at the end of April in a controlled introduction fashion. We first want to make sure everything that we spent all of our development energy building that it actually works and it works the way we expect it to so we can deliver a good customer experience. Now as we get through that controlled introduction period, we're going to expand availability. We're going to amplify it more loudly in the market. And so between now and the end of the year, I think you'll see more and more of that from AT&T. So in terms of when you can eat the dog food, relatively soon, we got to get it out there and make sure we can scale it to meet all the use cases that we're targeting for the product. You know, Peter and I were talking last night about this kind of philosophical question. So I'll pose it to you. You know, when theCUBE started six years ago, one of the first events we went to was a small event called Hadoop World. No one's ever heard of Hadoop, some small company named Cloudera. And then it became the big data, but there was an incumbent market of data warehouses and business intelligence that were all siloed based solutions. This show feels a little bit like that. That's going to break out. And it's not about the old way of doing things. It's about the new way. Your thoughts. Yeah, and on the big data front, I mean Cloudera, that's just, we're just beginning in terms of the possibilities there, especially when you think about what's going on with the internet of things, device connectivity, that type of thing. So that and the analytics related to it is going to be a critical piece of the business going forward for the industry in general. So there's a lot of challenges that we're going to have to tackle as we collectively go down that path as an industry. But yeah, that's another huge area that's ripe for opportunity. If you think about collaboration and you're only as good as the data you're dealing with to make collaborative decisions. So it seems to be central into the core of the operations. Yeah, no, without a doubt, without a doubt. Well, the other challenge of course here is that, historically communications is thought of as sort of like a point-to-point connection, whether it's an IM or whatever. And the reality is making this sort of an integral part of how we do everything that we do all day long, multimodal, seamless UIs and all that sort of stuff, right? And then you've got a huge legacy bunch of stuff out there that is clearly going to take a long time to sort of come along. I would think you'd have some pretty interesting perspectives on that given your customer base and so on and so forth. Yeah, particularly, and you're right, because AT&T has a legacy history and so we've got a lot of customers on some of these older technologies. AT&T Collaborate will be a great catch product for a lot of those customers as they move from that legacy environment. And that's one critical part of the strategy for us is making sure, obviously we want to keep those customers with AT&T, a lot of good offerings out there. We want to have an offering that makes a lot of sense for those customers and then help them get from where they are to where they... Yeah, you guys have huge capabilities and I think that's the key thing that people don't realize on big companies like that are transforming. But at the end of the day, the connectivity is important but you look at the trends out there, like Oculus Rift and Virtual Reality, AI, this is the new communication, omnichannel retail. So no matter what the app is, it's a omnisomething, more data, more rich media, more graphics, more data. Yeah, and you mentioned, we bring to bear the connectivity, obviously, as AT&T with the breadth of our footprint. It's also about the quality of service and reliability that we have such a history in. And so we're going to leverage that with AT&T Collaborate as well. AT&T Collaborate, we're going to sell it in what we call a transport agnostic fashion. Customer doesn't have to have AT&T transport. But part of the value proposition is when they have AT&T transport, we can enable them with that quality of service that we're known for. My other co-host, Dave Vellante in the queue, always says, you can't go wrong with more compute and more bandwidth. And that seems to be, give me more. I mean, people can't have enough of that. No, and especially as businesses are trying to find more and more ways to improve their businesses, improve their processes, make their employees more productive. You know, it's just creating an increased demand for products in those areas. I want to ask one more under the hood question. You obviously, AT&T has a relationship working with Microsoft selling Skype for Business, working with Cisco and a bunch of very high quality partners. Is Collaborate built on some synthesis of that or is it from the ground up built or I don't know if you feel comfortable commenting on that or not. I can share some on that. So yeah, we built AT&T Collaborate in AT&T's own cloud. So we're not reselling someone else's cloud product. It's our own platform in our own cloud. And you mentioned Cisco and Microsoft. I mentioned earlier the sweet spot, I think initially is going to be in that small to medium space. Now as we start to scale up market where Cisco and Microsoft have gained a lot more traction, you know, we're going to have to leverage other parts of our portfolio. But again, the intent is to continue to build out AT&T Collaborate, develop it into the lead offer in that space for small to large customers. So would you see actually going down, sorry John, going down into sort of the spaces where the eight by eights and the ring centrals in Vonage to some extent, going after that SMB space or is that not really part of the target? No, we'll be playing in that same space. We'll be playing in that same space. But we're not going to be contained there. And I think a lot of the names you just mentioned are wrestling with some of the same challenges that we will in terms of when you scale it up market, you've got to bring to bear the resources to help you in a more complex environment. The project management expertise, the consulting expertise that you mentioned earlier. And so we've got a lot of those assets and a lot of those capabilities, a lot of those organizational, you know, personnel. So we're going to bring those to bear as we pursue that end of the market. And the other thing you've got, I think, which is really interesting is if you go look at the data out there for what it really costs companies like Ring Central and those guys to do customer acquisition, it's a huge number, you know, and add churn to that. And you begin to look at this economic model which is not particularly encouraging, right? AT&T obviously has phenomenal brand name and market presence, right? So you've got, I would assume, a huge advantage there to be able to execute if you can. Yeah, and it's all about taking care of the customer and meeting, you know, their needs again and we've got to earn that business, right? We've got to establish that credibility with this new product and that's what we intend to do. Super. All right, well thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate AT&T here on theCUBE, on the ground here at Enterprise Connect 2016. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.