 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 Jim Burton. Okay, welcome everyone to our special presentation of Enterprise Connect. This is theCUBE and I want to give a shout out to our sponsors that made it happen. Oracle CafeX and Vonage, thanks a lot. Buy their stuff, they're great, they support theCUBE. Okay, I'm John Furrier, on the ground with Jim Burton with BC Communications and Zig Serafin, who's the corporate vice president of Skype for Business. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, good to be here. So Skype, going through a transformation. Certainly when private sold to Microsoft for $8 billion, you guys are out now getting your sea legs and a lot of focus on bringing unified communications into collaboration, which is the cloud, which is software, that's Microsoft's wheelhouse. Give us the update, what's happening? You're up on stage here at Enterprise Connect. Yeah, I think it's a really exciting time. You have a point in time right now where enterprises are expecting a system that is simple, intuitive, that works across meeting rooms, that works across mobile endpoints, that works across your desktop, that's built into your productivity system with Office 365 and Skype for Business today now is a global modern communication service that connects with Skype that people use every day in their daily lives on the consumer side, but you have an enterprise-grade system that meets security requirements, it meets scalability requirements that people expect to have, and ultimately what it does is it creates an opportunity for IT leaders to save a lot of money that they spend on telecom, legacy infrastructure in telecom, while at the same time being able to consolidate, create much more efficiency with a modern communications experience. It's not the Nutella, when since you took over as CEO with Azure, has done a great job, we've seen a lot of stuff. We actually have a cube at Open Compute where Microsoft has donated reference implementations, becoming very open, Skype now is obviously that kind of front end, how is that coming together? Because obviously the transformation of Microsoft as a company with Skype as this leading software out there, bringing that face-to-face collaboration with things like FaceTime from Apple out there, this is what users want, they want real-time collaboration and video is key in communications and center, you guys have the product, what do you guys do? Can you share some color on some of the innovation? Yeah, it's actually a really important point you make about video. In fact, in Skype today, over 50% of all of our usage traffic is actually video-based these days and so real-time video is becoming a part of the common language and how people are connecting and why need to collaborate and where it was doing with Skype for Business is actually enabling people to take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud Foundation and all of the innovation that we've had with being one of the leading public clouds and we're making that public cloud into a purpose-built communications cloud specific for mission-critical real-time communications so you can get dial-tone reliable voice and video and desktop sharing and screen sharing on regardless of whatever device you're on, wherever you are in the world, as part of something that an IT department can have full control over and meeting the requirements that they have around manageability and security. So think of it as end-user experience, simplifying things, the stuff that we're used to in mobile and messaging with Skype and then connecting that in with a system that enterprises can count on. So power of Azure, bolt it on with Skype power, that's kind of the function of Skype. That's largely the direction that we're taking, built into Office 365. Zeke, I remember 10 years ago, you and I had a conversation about what unified communications is all about and at that time, it was connecting all the silos of communications but one of the things you made a point about was the fact that you needed to have one management system. You couldn't have the silos be connected or clicked to communicate the management and administration things. Quite frankly, I hadn't even thought about that for a number of years until your demo today and it was very, very impressive. So you might want to go through that because we know that there are vendors out there who have been acquiring companies and putting pieces together and they're a little bit behind in getting the components together to make an easy management structure but your presentation blew me away with how easy it was. You might take a minute to talk about that. Thank you, Jim. The roots of what we've built with Skype for Business started over a decade ago where we really believed on this idea where you have a human. A human being is the person who wants to be able to connect and interact with people with the things that we've been blessed and be able to do. We can talk, we can see things, we want to share things and they don't want to be in the middle of having to stitch together different technologies so if I want to do a video conference and I want to show you something, Jim, you should be able to do that without having to go figure out the system. Well, guess what? The IT people also want a unified experience. They want an experience where they go in and they manage for managing video, for managing messaging, for managing voice, for knowing what numbers have actually been lit up, what dial tones connected from what. They don't want to actually go in and actually stitch things together as well and that's the world that they have to live in today. It's highly inefficient, it's expensive, it's hard to train people on different platforms and so what we're doing inside of the Office 365, Skype for Business management experience is we're going to be introducing what we refer to as the single pane of glass. That single pane of glass becomes your dashboard for managing your mission-critical real-time communications experience so that you can get management, recording and analytics across voice, across video, across messaging, across your web conferencing experience that spans your mobile devices, your room environments such as your conference rooms, as well as your desktop. Wow, very impressive. The other thing, you talked about the single pane of glass and I remember having a conversation with you about two years ago at this event and it's pretty impressive that in two years you're being able to come up with this but one of the challenges that we all know that almost every unified communication solution has when you come up with where some of the challenges are, it's the underlying network that has the problem so you might want to talk about that and maybe some of the initiatives you've got going on in the Wi-Fi area as well. Yeah, this is an extremely important topic, is our commitment is to deliver a dial tone reliable voice and video across all of the range of end points where people want communications to be available in business. So if I have an iPad, if I have an iPhone, I got an Android device, I've got a Surface, regardless of what location I'm in, people are expecting something that they can depend on when you pick up the device and you want to make a call that it works. Now, you can't do that all overnight across any random endpoint, across any device without taking some proper steps and so one of the things that we've done is we've introduced a voice quality SLA so where we end up guaranteeing a quality of an experience that you're going to get on the network legs that Microsoft is ultimately providing to the customer. But then there's the question of what happens to the network legs of the customer-owned such as, for instance, the Wi-Fi network that is running inside their environment. And that is where we're introducing things like call quality diagnostics tools, we have best practices that we're able to put together for customers but we also have a whole partner community as well. Companies like Nectar and Unify Square and IR and there's a whole ecosystem of companies that are building tools to be able to enable customers to manage their network properly across these range of devices so they can end up with dial tone reliable voice and video. Yeah, on the business side, there's always, we've been hearing here to show there's free and then there's paid. On the business side, there's certain SLA, as you mentioned that, that becomes critical, certainly video and voice quality. Is that what you're referring to and is that the paid product and can you differentiate between free and paid? So the free part is of course Skype. You and I can go and make a call and connect and the reality is there's actually a lot of businesses that use Skype internally to connect with people all around the world. But what IT leaders are doing is they're saying, look, I want that same experience but I want it under my control. I want security, I want manageability, I want a service level guarantee that comes along with that and that's why they're moving to Office 365, Skype for Business. And that is a paid product but importantly it's paid but it also has a game changing value proposition associated with in terms of the cost. On average, we're finding that customers will save about 30 to 40% relative to what they're currently spending on their PBX systems, their audio conferencing systems, their video conferencing systems when they move to this modern communication system. Well, Zig, thank you very much. Really appreciate your time today and look forward to another great keynote next year. We'll see you here. Thank you very much. We are here on the ground. This is theCUBE with Microsoft Skype for Business. Zig's laying down the authoritative commentary. Congratulations on your success. We'll be back with more. I'm John Furrier with Jim Burt. Thanks for watching.