 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's special presentation of Enterprise Connect 2016. I want to thank our sponsors, Oracle ZDLRA, Zero Data Loss Appliances, Vonage and CafeX. Thanks for your support for being here. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're here with Elka Popova, who's a Frost and Sullivan and analyst. Welcome to theCUBE. I'm glad to be here, thank you. So you've been covering for 15 years, you mentioned the space and the enterprise space with around unified communications has always been about voice, voice and then telephony, voice over IP and Vonage is one of those early pioneers that have been disrupting the existing incumbents and now they're transforming. But that's the theme here. The cloud has enabled more compute, more agile, more data services, these enablers are changing essentially what used to be siloed apps, chat, email, collaboration, all now coming together and it's all software, it's all integrated, it's all silo busting. What's your take on this? You guys are covering this at Frost and Sullivan, what's your take on this? Well, we're seeing a lot of excitement around the cloud and cloud unified communications. This space is referred to by many different names. We call it UCAS, we call it cloud you see. The growth is driven by a number of factors. On one hand, as you pointed out, that there is a growing arsenal of communications and collaboration tools. Voice is now joined by messaging and email of course, that's been around for a while, but there's instant messaging and presence and video conferencing and web conferencing and collaboration social apps and so on. And this is really making the communications infrastructure more and more complex. Business is removing the communications to the cloud and these collaboration solutions to the cloud to be able to more efficiently manage their solutions. So it's becoming more complex, yet the user experience needs to be simplified. That's another theme here. How are people getting it done? I mean, we hear cloud, APIs, everything is a service these days. Certainly UC as a service is a big buzzword. How do they take the complexity out of it so that it's more simple for either developers and end users? Well, there are a number of ways, but unified communications, the term unified, is what was always meant to simplify the experience for the end user. To put together one single client that provides access to all of the communications and collaboration applications so that you can click to call, click to message, click to conference. We're seeing that taking place on the premises with premises based systems and it's certainly happening in the cloud communication space as well. How about integration? It's a theme we hear all day in our interviews also on the web. It's something that's the number one conversation as the web RTC is getting better. But they're hinting at the integration challenges now because now whether you have legacy infrastructure or you're cloud native, pulling this all together is a real challenge. What's your thoughts on that and what are the road map items that customers should pay attention to when really thinking about going to the cloud, whether it's hybrid or public or private. There's a lot of architectural decisions on the table. Correct, correct. One of the main issues today is about how to use these advanced communications and collaboration tools to actually accelerate or improve business processes, to achieve some broader business results and not just make communications less expensive or a little bit easier to use. And to accomplish this, we service providers, vendors, businesses out there are looking to integrate the communications applications with productivity applications or other business applications of various nature. Whether those CRM applications or maybe help desk applications or very specific vertical apps. But we're moving closer and closer to that vision of communications being real enablers of business productivity, business agility and overall competitive advantage. Elka, I got to ask you a question because one of the things that I'm excited about with this space is it's intersecting with the software world. Certainly even on the analysts, I started to see the analysts kind of blend together and the vendors themselves are all reshaping themselves because the customer doesn't care about the categories and where they have solutions, whether it's a retail app or some of the banking app or anything, it's a cloud equation now with on-prem, all these complexities. So I got to ask you the question, how do you determine when you look at companies? Who's on the old side of the street and who's on the new side of the street? Because the new schools are completely different mindset than this old mentality. So in this space in particular where there's a lot of transitional existing vendors and certainly the big names we see, Microsoft, Cisco, you name it, all are out there, even IBM's in here in this space as well. These guys are transforming but then you got the upstarts. Cafe acts, Vonage, these dropbox just announced massive numbers and that's just file sharing in the cloud. So you have upstarts, you have disruption but the enterprises have table stakes, enterprise grade requirements. Who's old, who's new, how do you decide? Very interesting question actually. I gave a presentation on Monday on who's going cloud communications and I had a chart showing the different categories of service providers offering cloud communications today and you do see some of the traditional telcos. You do see some of the more traditional PBX vendors. Some of the, some more traditional IT vendors and providers but you see also providers focused entirely on UCAS or on next generation messaging solutions. There are contact center vendors, VARs and so on that are offering cloud communication solutions and all of them are bringing something different and differentiated to the table. They have different advantages and disadvantages and some of them are pitching the strengths and footprint of their network. Others are showing their more advanced features and functionality at a third group can really deliver value through the integration of cloud communications with let's say IT, other IT solutions and productivity apps and so on. So in my opinion, there is a space for everyone. There are customers out there that are looking for different solutions and capabilities but it's really a matter of execution about who's going to succeed in this space and who may not be as efficient. Yeah, you could have a highly differentiated solution and be down a cul-de-sac with no market. I mean that's potential. Correct, it's a combination of strategy and execution. So let's talk about big data for instance. IoT seems to be a theme that's creeping into this space because it is data, digital digitization of digital transformation is a part of this, the human component of engagement as you hear that message a lot. That's all coming together. What's the role of big data because engagement certainly is no brainer on that. You can say, hey, engagement and interaction and making that elegant and easy and making that workable is a great outcome. Cool. But now you've got things like cognitive and AI, virtual reality, other kinds of communications that are around the horizon. So the data is a very big part but what's your view on the whole data piece? Well, big data is only as good and as useful as your analytic tools are in reality unless you have the right analytic tools to properly process the data and then provide insights, you know, predictive or other insights that help your business react upon the data collected. Big data is really not going to be of great value to the organization. So Hadoop can help you store data and big pile of data that you get to later. It could be a data swamp but if you don't use the data, if you have the data you got to get it and then you got to use it. If you don't have it, that's what you're saying. Exactly. To be able to actually make business decisions based on the data, you need to be able to properly analyze it and draw conclusions. So let's say from a customer perspective because this shift that's happening is impacting customers, the doers, the digital builders and they're being bombarded with salespeople knocking on the door. I'm going to sell you my product. We're featured in the research at Magic Quadrant on Gartner, Frost and Sullivan that says we're in a rising vendor and the customer's like, look, I got my own problems. I got to re-engineer to get my business rolling again. This seems to be the cloud agile mindset. Can you share some data on what you're hearing from customers and how they're approached because certainly vendors, it looks like noise in some cases to them. How do they sort through this? How do they make in those decisions? So customer decision making processes vary and we know very well that some customers have a more structured approach to their communications investments and other customers maybe a little more spontaneous and make these decisions based on existing relationships, solely on brand or solely on the feature set. I would personally recommend that all businesses have a very structured approach starting with thorough assessment of their own assets, their own capabilities, the nature of their workforce, the capabilities of their IT staff and then they also need to review their business goals and objectives but broader business goals and objectives, those that go beyond the communications solutions themselves. And then they need to start evaluating the service providers on a pretty complex and comprehensive list of criteria. So they need to look at the obviously feature set price, more specifically the total cost of ownership but then they also need to look at the reliability of the solution, the integration and customization capabilities of the solution and the overall service provider viability and vision and roadmap. And securities, obviously. Oh, securities is a paramount. Not even an item, it's inherent in all conversations. Correct, correct. Actually, when we asked our customers about what they considered, the top criteria in their cloud provider selection, two things ranked very high, reliability and security. Price was a close third but then everything else was really lower in their list of criteria. So I've got to ask you the consumerization trend. And obviously you mentioned IT and the role of IT certainly changing but I interviewed the CEO of Vonage earlier today and they were a residential voice company and they were very disruptive. They killed the I-Lex, they got in at the last mile on the voice side. Very consumer driven. Now they're shifting to business. So this is the trend, consumer to business but now in this market there's a lot of business trying to be more consumer like. Is that a challenge? Is that for the industry? Is there an approach that you've seen works? Can you do both? Are they mutually exclusive? Because it's hard to be a business to be more consumer so that's the trend. But yet Vonage is showing that you can be a consumer and come in and do business. What's your tip? Businesses need to adapt to the new realities. Business users are much more savvy today bringing consumer tools into the business environment including obviously their mobile devices. That's a typical example we always give but also they're using WhatsApp and they're using consumer social media for business purposes and other consumer tools. So businesses need to really capitalize on this trend. Provide their users with the right devices and applications whether they have a consumer background or not but they need to also implement certain policies to ensure that these are properly managed. All the consumer tools that are being brought into the enterprise that they're as secure as possible and that they become part of a business strategy instead of becoming all these rogue devices or applications within the organization. They've got to be vetted. Those things got to be from a security standpoint. So the developer is big. So like we were seeing a trend where it's an app economy, API economy, those are kind of the buzzwords that gets kicked around. Cisco announced today on stage here at Enterprise Connect a fund for developers. So now the developers are in here but it's okay to build pre-packaged applications whether you're a telecoach service provider. That seems to be the thing but there's still a horizontal open source, big data, all that stuff's going on to the hood. So developers are a key part of this digital transformation in an ecosystem kind of way. So I've got to ask you, what are you seeing for developers in this space? I mean, is there a ton of traction as to the end user focus, for usability as being what's your take? I mean, are they making the right moves by enticing developers? How do they entice developers? Do you track that? Do you have any comments? Well, there is certainly a market for pre-packaged apps and there is also a market for platforms as a service, APIs and other tools provided to developers to further customize solutions and deliver custom tailored applications for either a specific enterprise or a specific vertical. I think we will see both trends develop going forward. Thanks for sharing your time. And final question, what's the show like this year? What's so important about this year in this market space right now? Well, as a UCAS analyst, I'm excited to see more sessions on cloud you see UCAS. Again, names may vary, but we're talking about the same thing. I'm also excited to see that some of the biggest sponsors this year are cloud communications companies such as Vonage and 8x8 and others. I'm also excited to hear from these providers that they're making some significant announcement that they're seeing a lot of traffic in their booths. In fact, I think that they've seen record interest in their communication solutions. It's going to be a booming market, Elka here at Frost and Sullivan breaking it down. Follow her research, go to Frost and Sullivan, check it out. Cloud Services is coming to the unified communication space. It's UC is dead, it's now UCC. Collaboration is going to be the focus. Thanks so much Elka for sharing this with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier on the ground at Enterprise Connect 2016.