 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello, and welcome to theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Everybody's talking about digital business and the transformation of digital business and the promise that it heralds for better customer experience, new levels of business productivity and quite frankly, the types of changes that are gonna save humanity in certain respects. But in those conversations, we too often focus on the technology, the applications, what we're gonna do with AI or what we're gonna do with machine learning and not enough about the people. In fact, often it's presumed that we're going to dislocate or displace a whole lot of people. But the simple reality is every system features work by people using systems to improve their productivity and it's time that we focus more attention on how we're going to improve the productivity of people as they use technology to undertake more complex work that is uniquely required, or that uniquely requires human capacities. Now, big topic, but we've got a great conversation. We're joined by Dan Decklis, who's the Chief Product Officer of 8x8 to talk about this. Dan, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Peter. Pleasure. I'm delighted to see our amazing studio over here. Well, thank you, Dan. So let's start 8x8. Tell us a little bit about 8x8. So 8x8 has been in business for a really long time. We have been public for 30 years now, give or take via in the communication and collaboration business. We are now close to 2,000 people worldwide. And I have to tell you, I have offices all over the world and I have remote employees all over the world. And I can tell you a lot about learning how to deal with people at scale in remote locations with different languages and different laws surrounding them. Well, let's jump into it. So I mentioned up front this notion that we have to move more attention to the people side of the equation. Certainly in the US, despite all these significant improvements in technology, we still face an employment issue. We are at full employment. So clearly we're using people to do things, but the question is, especially as you use your scenario, 2,000 people, company, offices all around the world, serious people doing serious work, what can we do ultimately to improve the productivity of how those people work together from a variety of different perspectives? Right, so that's a problem that I struggle with on the daily basis. Imagine 20 years ago, you had everybody sitting in the cube next to each other, talking to each other, going for lunch together. Then maybe 10, 15 years ago, we moved to remote teams. Everybody's Panapa team in Asia, Panapa team in Europe. Now you are in a world where you have remote individuals working literally all over the world. How do you get them all together is really difficult, right? One thing that we tried to do at 8x8 was literally fly in all the newbies that we hire every month into San Jose and introduce them to the company. Works great, but the cost is enormous. So we have now shifted to much more video-based enabling of individuals and teams. So what we did at 8x8 is we started this new product line, 8x8 video meetings, with exactly this goal in mind. I wanted to have a way to reach out any individual, wherever in the world they might be, with a minimum amount of drama, with minimum amount of impact on their day-to-day work. I just want the teams to collaborate and communicate. And I think we have seen in the past that there were plenty of research studies. Frost and Sullivan is one of them. Hanover Group is another one which say that the impact of video communications on the teams, on the decision-making, on simplification of day-to-day business is huge. And to me, that is the key for the next 10 to 20 years in our industry. So Dan, I've also had some experience with large teams on a global basis. And each time that some new technology came out, folks flocked to that new technology, whether it was email and then text or then collaboration, some sort of video collaboration. But it always seemed to me as though those became silos. They became independent channels for how you work with people. And the choice that you made about how to set the meeting up really constrained what you could do in the meeting. It seems as though it's time to think about how all these different communication mechanisms can come together in a common platform so that you can choose what you need to use at the time that you're trying to affect the communication. Have I got that right? I think you stole my words, that's perfect. Look, think of it also, it's more complex than that. You also have people from lots of different generations. You have millennials who first thing they will do is whip out their phone and start texting somebody. You and me who are not necessarily millennials anymore who will likely start the conversation with a phone call. And you go, my job as a chief products officer of 8x8 is to figure out how do I get all these people working together? And we have seen that there is an enormous value in having a unified platform which allows everybody to choose whichever mode of communication they want to engage in. So if you are a bit older millennial like myself, I will start with the phone call and then I will hop into a video meeting. For the younger kids in the company, they will probably start with chat, text and then go possibly to the phone if the conversation becomes too long and then eventually into a meeting. To me, the key for every enterprise and mid-market customer out there is how do you put all of this information together so you really know what your employees are doing and what your customers are doing. Yeah, I'll give you a great example of that. Some of the customers that I'm working with these days is this whole notion of evidence-based management which is in many respects the manifestation of AI, ML and some of this other stuff, analytics into how business managers actually operate. It's very difficult to communicate findings from some of these models using text or even using voice. You need images, you need pictures, but you don't want to just send a static file. You would rather be explaining something to the finding of the model, the outcome of the model to your executive, observe whether or not they look confused. How do you envision some of these new application styles that we're building for some of these new digital approaches pulling video into the conversation and not much more? Look, I think what you said is the key. We are humans and we evolved through interactions with each other. If I look at you and I see you are smiling, probably my presentation is gonna go slightly differently than if I see you go really upset at whatever I'm showing. Putting a solution together that allows you to share the screen, talk in really high definition audio and video as well as see the face of the person you are talking with is the key to me. And then as you think about it going forward starting to actually record the conversation start to extract the knowledge out of this conversation. A lot of times in the meeting you, somebody will say something really, really smart. Mostly by the end of the meeting, it's 45 minutes later you forgot about it. If you have a recording, if you have a transcript you can actually do something with that information. So to me it's all about remove the barriers, extract as much information from this conversation as possible and then if possible, provide the enterprise with the API where they can get all the information in some form of a digital download. So I personally am a huge believer of ML and AI that you opened up with and I believe that getting a lot of this information together will really change how we think about operations and how we think about running remote teams and local teams. And I think that one of the important things that I think you mentioned, so I can kind of pull this together is that video by itself is often difficult to search. But when you combine video and text through transcriptions, translations, et cetera, now you've got something that's searchable but you still are able to retain the power of the video. Is eight by eight looking at this as part of a unified platform? And if you are, it suggests that these are not things that you regard as wholly distinct but as part of the fundamental challenge of how do you improve communication inside of business. Exactly, so when I started two and a half years ago the first thing I did is I started the journey on the fully unified analytics platform. I want to have all the text messages, all the phone calls, all the transcriptions of all the meetings, all the contact center information. I want everything in one place so I can then start deploying my ML and AI models across the data. I tend to believe we are uniquely positioned to do that because not only do we have the actual product lines but we also have the captive audience in form of a customer on the phone or in a meeting or calling a support team in the contact center. Putting all of that together and getting the insights that drive human behavior to me is the absolute key for the industry. If I can know what problems you are facing and if I have the context of your problem I can probably solve your issue much, much faster than if it is the first conversation of a type please give me your mother's maiden name and last for digits of your social security number. Well, and I want to build on that because here at theCUBE we obviously use video pretty extensively and how we turn the conversations we're having into concepts or knowledge or artifacts that users can use to make decisions. We've found, and this is what I want to test with you, that something really interesting happens. It's a lot of research to support this. As you mentioned, we are humans with bicameral vision that's most of the information that we get we come in through our eyes. It just is that way, we're tuned for that. And so when you're looking at a face or you're having a conversation with someone and that face is available to you as part of the interaction, you just listen better. You retain better, you focus harder, you pay more attention. And it seems as though video is an absolute essential feature, must be an essential feature of how we improve communication, especially if we're going to ask people to take on more challenging tasks, perform more challenging work that feature higher risks. What do you think about that? I agree, and I think there is one more little point before all of that. The usage of the product has to be super simple and it has to be incredibly intuitive. You do not, my regular example is I'm always two minutes late to a start of the meeting. And then if I get asked, oh, now please download some plugins so you can start the meeting, blah, blah, blah, the time has gone by. Now I'm 15 minutes late to a meeting. Then people yell at me generally because I'm late. Well, with head-by-head meetings, there is no need to download any plugins and you remove this barrier to entry into the conversation. To me, that is almost the key to the whole thing. Just like the phone is by now intuitive for everybody, just like texting, video has to become exactly the same, where we need to communicate, well, let's just hop in it, let's talk it through, let's see how we each react to it and then we go move forward. You know, I think it's a great point. If the technology generates stress in the conversation, you've diminished the productivity of the conversation. One of the biggest challenges that CIOs face today is the business is applying, it's going after all these new opportunities with technology in mind, but if you don't get the enterprise to adopt the technology, it fails. And so you really have a challenge of abandonment. It's not just that individual phone call loses productivity but the entire approach to how you conduct business gets abandoned and you don't want that. So by doing it more simply, you get better results. So what kind of experience have your customers been enjoying as they use 8x8, advance some of these new technologies and what do you anticipate for their use of video? So the way I see it, there are almost two categories of customers that we deal with 8x8. There is the relatively simple customer, the small mid-market customer and then when you enter the enterprise, all hell breaks loose. The complexity starts exploding. We have customers that have deployed us at 4,000 locations worldwide. Imagine operating a system at that scale and you go, you are not only talking different locations, you are talking different legal jurisdictions, you are talking different geographies, different continents. Putting all of that together and simplifying this communication is the key for the customers. And I have seen again and again, CIOs try to force their workforce onto a platform of choice, right? And one of my friends who's a CIO here in the valley says, the easiest way for a CIO to get fired is to force sales and engineering on the same text messaging or a video meeting solution. One group will get you fired. So you go, if you go with 8x8, suddenly you can have everybody on the same platform. The firing concept goes away, which is always good and you enable massive gains in scale and in performance. You reduce the barriers to entry for all these people. But let me explore why that is because I think it's an interesting concept. And I think what you're saying is that sales people typically use different workflows that require different classes of information that can be rendered in different mechanisms, text or whatever else it might be. Engineering is showing different workflows, different classes of people, different kinds of information. So trying to make engineering give up some of what they need or sales give up some of what they need to try to make both happy. That's the prescription for failure. And you're saying that by being able to support all of those workflows, roles and information forms, you get a more complete system. Exactly, you get a more complete system and for you as a CIO who is deploying it by a similar tool, you suddenly get to see how your employees are actually interacting with each other as well as how they're interacting with the end customer. To me, it is fascinating how much the computer science is changing the way people communicate with each other. I know who you are. I have a lot of information from the web around you. Maybe I can tailor this communication specifically for you. To me, that is the path forward to the future. Using all of this data about you as a person in the context of the enterprise is the key. So the right tool for the right conversation in the right roles, but still with the opportunity to do derivative analysis as you bring all that information together later. Exactly, the analysis is the key. So we have seen all sorts of really interesting things happen at 8x8 as we are putting more and more of our internal employees on these tools. You start seeing inefficiencies in support. You start seeing inefficiencies on the sales ops side. And you go, well, before I had no idea. I did not know that my salespeople are not calling following people in Salesforce. Well, now I can see it. I can actually do something about it and I don't need analysts who will write me reports and build tableau data sheets and whatnot. I can see it day to day what is going on with my labor force and employees. Excellent. Dan, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. So Dan Decklisch from 8x8, Chief Product Officer. Thanks again for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time.