 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hello from Orlando, Florida. Lisa Martin with theCUBE, Stu Miniman's here with me, and we are on day three of our coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019. We've been graciously hosted by 5ix9ine this week, talking with a lot of their folks and partners as well about the Connected Contact Center, and we're excited to welcome one of their partners, Toistel, to theCUBE. Diane Smith, CEO, Diane, it's great to have you joining Stu and me today. Thank you. So first of all, I want to say congratulations, Toistel, 25th anniversary this year. Yes, thank you very much. Big milestone. Tell our viewers a little bit about Toistel and what you're doing with respect to enterprise communications. Of course, well, as you said, we've been at this for 25 years, and we've worked across many different business sectors in our industry. We really kind of help from the customer's phone all the way into the data center, so that complete communications channel, whether it be voice or data services. In today's world, it's very well interconnected. In the early days, voice was separate. Data was over here, but now it's all combined together, so we work with all of it. Diane, one of the things we've been talking about this week is the kind of ebb and flow of some of the communication channels. So this show a number of years ago changed from VoiceCon over to Enterprise Connect because it was like, oh, as one of the analysts said, voice wasn't that sexy anymore. But today when we talk, we understand that voice is still very important in all the communication methods. 25 years, I'm sure Toistel's gone through a number of changes. Absolutely. So how are you seeing these trends? What's important to your users? Let's go from there. Well, as you stated, voice really isn't going away. I mean, here we are today, right? So what's not going away? As a matter of fact, it's even more important because I think in the digital age, people kind of trended away and thought that we could just do email and texting, but we've lost so much with that. And so voice is actually becoming even more important. And as it's riding now across the data networks, it's even more sensitive to interruptions and companies that can actually deliver a reliable service. So we've kind of gone backwards to now we need to make sure it's reliable. But not only reliable, there's so much technology specifically around Contact Center that's really what's contributing to this, you know, this new, amazing perspective about voice. AI and all these other items that are really building in efficiencies we just never had before. So it just wasn't even possible. So how are you helping to educate your customers on, there's so many options now, right? And as we hear, it shows like this in everywhere we go to, especially as consumers, same thing, there's so many options, so much choice and so much challenge for Contact Centers to treat those customers as they know exactly why they're calling, what they're doing to give them the right information when they need it. Talk to us about the customers, say some of your customers that you've had maybe for quite some time since you're a storied company, helping them to understand and how to transform digitally their communications platform to be able to capitalize on the voices of their customers. Absolutely, as you stated, there are tremendous number of choices and the choices are growing every day. There are people here, vendors here that weren't here just last year, not to mention 10 years ago. So the options are just so expansive and exhaustive that most of our clients are overwhelmed by it. I mean, they're constantly being called by vendors every day and the benefit, obviously we're bringing to the table is they don't have to talk to them, they can just talk to us. And that's why we're here too, because there's always something new to learn and is never ending. And part of our job and our role is to make sure we're looking at vendors that will properly suit each customer, because each customer is also very different. There are some consistencies in some areas, but the personality of the customer dictates which vendor would best suit them beyond the technology piece, because even though it's technology, it's still people, we're still dealing with people. Yeah, Diane, I love that, because if you dig inside an organization and say what kind of problems you're having, oh, I wish our communications were better and we're talking about, oh, what about with my partners or my customers? Well, communication is something I care about, but most companies aren't an expert on communication, so I have to believe that's where you come in for a lot of it is, let them focus on the people and the relationships and not the underlying technology. Absolutely, and that's exactly what we do. So we're looking for the right mix of solutions and right mix of vendors. It's not always a one vendor fits all, and so, but most customers have no idea, so we'll take our customers through a voice discovery workshop, help them understand what the landscape looks like, and then start narrowing down the delivery models and which best delivery model fits best for them. Can you walk us through, it's a bit of a complex environment out here. You talk about customers, they've got their CRM, they've got their contact center, they're the WFO, WFM type stuff there, and they don't want to have to worry about choosing all of those pieces, and we've heard that the cloud, does the cloud actually deliver the, I can choose my pieces, but it works well together, rather than the old way of kind of taking boxes and manpower to integrate these things? It definitely does. I really believe that the next 18 months, is my opinion, but I believe the next 18 months are really going to be the tipping point for as-of-service communications, whether it be contact center, or regular UC, or all the components, as you mentioned, that tack onto that. I've seen very large customers finally making that turn, where before they were kind of sitting back and watching. Little guys were, you know, moving over small 10, 20, 30, 100 person offices, but now you've got thousands, people with thousands and thousands of endpoints that are ready to turn that corner. So- And what makes them ready the fear of being out-competed by a smaller, more agile business? That's an excellent point, because now the services that are available to small companies are available in the cloud, where before you had to spend, you know, maybe millions to get a whole system set up to be able to do AI and workforce management, but now a small 20-person company can have all of those tools at their hands. So that's a really good point. Yeah, to try to think about business technology, a lot of that stuff, you know, would sit around for a decade without being changed. Today as a consumer, I'm used to every three or four years. Sometimes every two years, or I sign up for one of those plans where every 18 months I can get the upgrade, there's a different expectation. And I think we're a little bit more conditioned to look at new ways. I know I try to talk to my kids as to some of the new ways to understand that. So are we starting to move a little faster, especially in the enterprise? I think so, and certainly some enterprises are ahead of others. Some are more, you know, leading edge, even bleeding edge, and others are still fairly conservative. But what's exciting about right now is even the companies that are conservative are starting to make that leap. So that's also part of the story. And I think it's because, you know, the technology's been around for a while now. I think that the as-a-service communications industry thought this would happen five years ago, and it didn't, but now there's so much stability, there's, you know, underlying infrastructure that's available through companies like Google and AWS that can enable service providers like 5.9 to be having that very strong, reliable, and secure backbone to promote the product. So let's talk a bit about your relationship. What Choice Tell is doing with your partnership with 5.9? Well, we have an exciting project that we're working on right now. Being from Michigan, we are working with an employment service through the state of Michigan that's located in the city of Detroit, and they have purchased 5.9s to train contact center agents to be contact center agents, people, individual people, of course, to be contact center agents. So the idea there is then to go help them get jobs in the community and to be fully trained on the platform of 5.9s. And how does Choice Tell help with that training and that enablement? So we are there to sort of handhold the whole process, provide training, network, and communicating to make sure that this option of this opportunity gets sent out to the community. And so we're working in our community, in our state, with the local municipalities, the chief information officers, and all the technology people to help bring that to fruition. And you work with companies in lots of industries, but any verticals in particular that Choice Tell, and maybe eventually with 5.9, is going to help to transform and bring into this more modern era? Definitely manufacturing. Michigan is certainly the manufacturing headquarters, but we have plenty of manufacturing customers in different geographies as well. But that's one of those kind of set in the back, didn't make that forward move that fast. And now they're really starting to see the advantages of moving to the cloud, the ability to be nimble and agile and to move fast. So there's not like this huge major commitment in the old days, if you bought a new system, you were going to live with it for 25 years maybe. I mean, even 20, or maybe less, but not usually. So with this type of technology, we were able to constantly stay up and above and move faster as well in deployments and including some of these new great things like AI. Diane, this show has been one that we've been talking a lot about change and how fast things are moving. You talked about in the next 18 months, you expect an inflection point to happen. Gives a little bit of insight as to conversations you're having at the show, some of the key takeaways you want people to have that might not have been able to attend the show this year. Well, I think that we shouldn't, there's so many really great new players out there and getting here helps you get to those companies and actually see them. Outside of that, you're usually not going to find them so easily, so this is really the place to do that. If you're in this business, you should be here because this is where you're going to hear about it. No other place do you really do that. Are there any trends or commentary that you heard in any of the keynotes or any of the fireside chats the last couple of days that sort of surprised you or piqued your interest, like wow, this tipping point, like you were saying, 18 months out, that really surprised you? I think that, I think the tipping point really and some of the new things, I mean we've been talking about AI for a while, but I think that AI is maturing more now and there's more underlying companies that are doing it as well. So just seeing that actually hit the application is the biggest change. So, because we've talked about it, now it's actually happening. Do you think customers are, some of your customers, if you look at a large manufacturer out of Detroit or that municipality that you mentioned in Michigan, when they hear AI, how does a small company react to a larger company? Are they excited? Are they like, how would we utilize this to our advantage? What's the sort of education piece that you can bring about that technology? There's a lot of education because most people think it's going to be some big, exorbitant project and how can we do that? We don't have enough time to implement it, but with the way most of these organizations are delivering it, they don't have to think about it and that's the biggest education piece because I think it sounds a little intimidating at first and you're thinking there's going to be a lot of cycles and work planning around it in order to really be able to enjoy it and receive the benefits but that's not the case and so there is an education process and helping them envision it so that's the biggest thing that we're doing is helping them to envision it because they didn't even think it was possible for them that they didn't need it or what could it do for them? So that's the biggest exercise that you have to go through. And we're hearing a lot, this show has been on repeats too but it's not, anytime we talk about AI there's always a conversation of jobs being taken but this has really thematically been it's humans plus AI, it's the humans you mentioned the relationships before that's what moves the dial, that's where the empathy is so it's part of that education sort of telling your customers it's not all of these machines and RPA and AI that's going to take jobs away it's actually augmenting what you're able to deliver to your customers. Exactly, in a more expedient manner which is really going to improve customer experience at the end of the day and that's the real business value and so as you're talking about these things everything has to be associated back to what is the business driver? What's the value that they get? Technology for technology's sake is never good and so that's part of that envisioning process helping customers envision how this can actually impact their business in a positive way and help them do more business hopefully, right? Improve their profits. Improve profits is always good Diane thank you so much for taking some time to join Stu and me on the queue this afternoon. And Kugraas again on your 25th anniversary choice title. Thank you, appreciated. For Lisa Martin, for Lisa Martin, I'm Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE from Orlando.