 the Wind Resort in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back. Michael Temporos here is the senior vice president of product management at Vonage, one of the keynote speakers today. Michael, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great, thanks for having me. So, this is your first .next conference. What are your initial impressions? I think it's fantastic. The folks at Nutanix have been great to us and certainly the service they provide for us makes them a great partner to us and our company and our customers. So, you're not the classic IT consumer. I want to talk about that a little bit, but let's talk about Vonage. You guys have really transformed your business. You've made a bunch of acquisitions. Give us the update on Vonage. Sure, I think most people remember us as a company that was founded in 2001 as one of the original voiceover IP companies that served residential voice customers. But in 2013, we actually began to serve the needs of business customers. And to that end, we've acquired six companies over the last three years, including companies like Vocalocity, Telesphere, Simple Signal, and most recently, Nexmo, which has launched us into the communications platform as a service business. So now we can not only provide communications services to our customers, but in fact, we can embed communications contextually for our business customers so that they can communicate better with their customers. Yeah, I mean, Michael, Telecom is one of those that's just been going through radical transformation over the years. Can you give us, what's your view on the space? How fast are things changing? And what does it mean to be a communications company these days? I think one of the things that's very interesting about being a communications company is IP has really changed the way communications works. So in the old days, if you had a desk phone, that was your phone number for your desk, and that's where you got phone calls. Today, your identity as a business user can actually work on your desk phone, on your mobile phone, through a soft client on your PC or your tablet. So you have a lot more flexibility with where you are when you use your communication service, and that goes for both voice and messaging. And for our business customers, now we can provide things like PBX type services that they used to have to buy a bunch of hardware to deliver. So it provides a lot of flexibility for our business customers. So it's entering a whole new sphere of competitive sphere, and talk a little bit about this whole notion of unified communications and collaboration and how that's driving your business. Sure. So the thing for our business customers is they want their communications available wherever they are on whatever device they want to use. And whether it's a voice phone call or a conference call or a video call, they want it to work. And they want it to work over the device that is their preferred device at that moment. So if I'm sitting in an airport that PC is the only thing I have available to me and there's a video call, I want to be able to participate in that and not have a hiccup in my service. And that's what IP communications and unified communications brings to our customers, our business customers. And we complement that with the cloud services that we provide to those customers. And that's really where we partner with Nutanix to be able to provide infrastructure as a service, virtual desktop, backups, capabilities. So now they can get their communication service and their cloud services from one provider. So I don't have to, as a business, I don't have to install infrastructure, is that right? I can just access these services in the cloud. You can, yes. Okay. And so talk about that a little bit. So how that's affected your business. So it's affected our customer's business dramatically because now they don't have to buy the hardware anymore. They have what I'll call a virtual data center. So they can actually buy their infrastructure from us or their desktop services from us and we can virtually deliver those desktop services just like we do communications. And Nutanix is one of the companies that really helps us. Their technology enables us to quickly deploy servers and storage so that we can rapidly bring our customers and then the architecture really allows us to manage the performance of those services very easily because we can, from a single management point, bring up multiple servers and manage multiple applications for our customers. So what's, talk about the business impact. You're on stage just sort of talking about your perspectives on the things that matter to you. So what matters to you, basically you're taking the customer view. What matters to your customers and how does that infrastructure translate into customer services? Yeah, I boil it down to two things, feature functionality and simplicity. So customers want the kind of feature capabilities that meet their business needs. So for example, if I'm a service business and I call on customers in their home, I probably want a phone number for my business that has an auto attendant that directs customers to the department that they need to get to very easily and so that they get their questions answered very quickly. By the same token, I want to stay in touch with the people who are in the field servicing customers and be able to record their transactions in my CRM package. So if I use Salesforce or some other CRM, record whenever they contact a customer and be able to track that stuff. So the simplicity is make the IT stuff invisible to me. I think the CMO of Nutanix said it very well. The best IT is the one you don't know is there. Make it invisible when a node goes down, don't make it the customer's problem. Easily move the service over to another node and keep them up and running. So what's important to our customers is be available when I need you available and make it invisible to me in terms of how you do it. So Michael, how does public cloud fit into the kind of your infrastructure and your customer's environments? And I look at the landscape that you guys are moving into and companies like Google provide everything from some of the consumer. Fiber, Microsoft of course has the business applications. So how do you fit in kind of the public cloud and differentiate against those players? Yeah, I think the differentiation is in the simplicity of having one service provider. So what we're finding is a lot of customers like the idea of dealing with one service provider. So while we may partner with others to provide backup or monitoring or some other service, they like the simplicity of buying their communications and their cloud services from one provider. So I think there are lots of opportunities to partner with others for the core service, but it's what you wrap around it in terms of service delivery and ongoing customer service that makes it simpler for them. Did the decision to go with Nutanix coincide with your strategy change to get more into business customers or did it predate that? Maybe talk about the timing a little bit. Sure, so the short answer is yes, it did coincide with our entry into business services. In fact, our relationship with Nutanix really grew out of our acquisition of iCore and the cloud services that they were providing to customers at that time. And we just continued with Nutanix and expanded that relationship. Okay, so maybe talk a little bit about, hearing a lot about invisible infrastructure. Maybe talk about was the infrastructure not invisible for Nutanix and how that all sort of transpired and sort of your role in that? I think it depends on who the customer is. Very often what we find with different cloud service providers or different service providers is when they have a problem, the customer has a problem and it becomes visible to them. Like their servers go down and the customers, the business customers service goes down. What I mean by invisible is ensure that if you have a node or server problem that you identify it, you take that node out of service which is one of the things Nutanix helps us do and then you fail over that customer to a node that's working until you can reintroduce the node that was broken. So that's kind of the thought of remaining invisible to the customer. So I have to imagine a company like yours has lots of requirements that IT needs to respond to new services and new applications on a pretty rapid deployment. So simplicity is great but what about agility? How does your IT help? How does Nutanix fit into that? Sure, so I'd say our IT is very responsive to us when we have thoughtful products and features that we want to add that are highly in demand to our customers. So the idea is be quick, if you're going to fail, fail quickly and recover. So we work very closely with companies like Apple when they have iOS upgrades to take advantage of those through our apps and our services and likewise with Nutanix we partner with them to find ways to further streamline that infrastructure that we have or in fact expand our portfolio of services which we've done with them on cloud. So how's the new strategy working out? Can you give us sort of the business update? Sure, we're one of the, I believe we're now number two in terms of growth in the over the top cloud services business for unified communications as a service for business. It's been kind of a fun ride for us since 2013 when we first acquired Vocalocity and we expect to continue that growth and become the leader in unified communications as a service as well as cloud platform as a service. So talk about how the value proposition for Vonage has evolved because initially as I recall it was sort of definitely simplicity sort of taking advantage of IP but definitely lower cost for consumers. What's the messaging to the business customer? Is it similar and then how has that evolved in terms of the value proposition for that constituency? Sure, I think for the business customer it's actually been more exciting. We've been able to say that when you come to Vonage we'll deliver cloud based communication services that not only give you a better price but give you business grade services without having to buy things like servers and hardware to do things like extension dialing or have an auto attendant. We can deliver all that for you in the cloud for basically a line price or a seat price rather than having to make a CapEx investment. So it's a lot more exciting for those businesses because it's cost savings along with improved functionality and really small businesses. And we have a lot of those customers call it the under 10 employees. Really small businesses love that because they would have never made those capital investments. So being able to get that big business kind of capability without having to make the CapEx investments really important. I have a service catalog, I can pick and choose the features that I want. You charge me accordingly. And how about mobility? Talk about how mobility has changed your business and how you service that constituency. Sure, so I think there are, as I said, IP enables you to use your service from virtually any broadband connected endpoint. So smartphones allow you to simply download an app and use your office service on your mobile device. So you can make and receive calls with your business identity from your mobile phone with some of the new APIs that are coming out from Android and Apple. Those are even going to, that experience is going to get a lot better. So now customer and user customers have the flexibility to work when they're out of the office and still use their business identity rather than their personal phone number. And I think that's true for how companies manage their CRM as well. Now you can, when an employee makes a phone call to a customer, you can have it automatically recorded in Salesforce as an example. And so that employee doesn't have to go home and log on to record that transaction with the customer. Can we talk after this? Sure. So you have me too. So that's a good use case. How has the team that you managed evolve from the standpoint of their skill sets as you go toward this sort of cloud-based offering? Is it more development and DevOps type of skills? And talk about that a little bit. So from a product standpoint, we certainly acquired a fair number of people with business experience. RIT shop, we were able to take our development people, some of whom are in Israel who do a lot of our application development, and the folks that we acquired from the companies that we bought in the last three years and married them together. And you get a much more innovative culture. And that's really what our CEO, Alan Madrick, has been trying to foster is a culture of innovation where we are constantly looking at the needs of our customers even before they know they have the need and identify the products that are going to solve those problems for them. As I think about it, we have a lot of people now who worry about eliminating friction points for our customers and making their lives simpler. What kind of people are they? Are they developers? Are they coding? Are they infrastructure people, company? All of the above? Is it shifted at all? So we've seen it in all parts of our company. Our chief product officer Omar Javade is a very technical guy who has brought a lot of innovative thinking to the company. We have several developers, as I said, in Israel who really are up to date on technology developments that affect communications and partner with the product team very closely to turn those things into products. So it's kind of in the development shop and in the product team. And you see it even in your IT and operations organization where we're solving customer problems together. All right, you're unifying communications. We're here at theCUBE unifying all the messaging and the innovations from .next. Last word, your impressions, your takeaways, things you have learned or hope to learn from .next? So one of the things I find exciting is as we look forward, I think Nutanix is really trying to solve problems with us so that we enable our customers to move swiftly to serve their customers. So their technologies marry very nicely with how we manage our business. And we're very excited about the future and our opportunities to work with Nutanix on cloud services and our communication suite. Michael, well, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you and good luck with the business. Thanks, Dave. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break.