 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Good afternoon, welcome to Orlando, Florida. The Cube is here at Enterprise Connect 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman. Stu and I have been here starting on day two, Stu. Good afternoon. Hey, Lisa, great to see you. Yeah, day two of three, Enterprise Connect. Not that sunny here in the sunshine today, but the nice thing about the Gaylord is it's a nice controlled environment. Walked by, saw the alligators for a bit. They've got some nice planning. They've got some, I love in the atrium there, there's great branding of the EC-19. Everybody's taking photos of it. I saw some drone footage in the keynote this morning showing some of the setting here. So it's a nice event. We said 6,500 intendants, which is nice. It's not one of these 20, 30,000 you're just buried by people. It's a big Expo hall, but you can really get to talk to some people and enjoy the size of the show. Yeah, I agree. The size is great. It does no pun intended facilitate that collaboration and communication. You mentioned the number of attendees, about 140 vendors, and you can hear the noise behind Stu and me as we're in the Expo hall, in the booth of 5ix9ine, and lots of conversations going on. This is an event that I find very interesting, Stu, because we talk about the Contact Center. We're all consumers every day, and we talked about this with a lot of our guests yesterday, that the customer experience is absolutely table stakes for an organization, that it's essential to deliver an omnichannel customer experience, meeting with the consumer wherever they want to be, and also facilitating a connected conversation so that if a chat is initiated and then the consumer goes to social, or makes a phone call, that problem resolution is actually moving forward. Before we get into today's keynotes, a couple of really interesting things that you and I learned yesterday with some of the guests that we had on. When we were talking with Blair Pleasant, one of the things that she and 5ix9ine uncovered with some research is that, and employee satisfaction was lower on the ratings for a lot of corporate decision makers, which was surprising from a collab and communications perspective, that if the employees, especially those agents on the front line, are having some challenges, that's going to be directly relating to customer lifetime value. Yeah, it was a little bit surprising. If you think about just IT in general, often the admin is not the key focus there. It's, I need to get business outcomes, I need to get ROI. What I care about is how is my customer doing? But at the end of the day, you talk about the contact centers, if I don't have an agent that's engaged, really how is that conversation going to go with the customer? So they need to think about that. How will the technology help them do their job better, help them gain mastery faster? There were some things that I saw really parallel to conversation we're having about cloud in general, which is, there's lots of technologies out there, but it's often it's not the technology issue. It is the organization and the people issue. In the keynote this morning, there was a big customer panel, and that was definitely something we heard. I love one of the customers actually said, we're going to make all these changes, and they had the don't panic towels, which of course, Harvick is back to the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. So, you know, we know things are going to change. There might be some things you need to work through, but don't worry, we're there to help, and we will get through this, and at the end it should be better. No, I like that you brought that up. I loved that towel don't panic, because, you know, we were talking yesterday a lot about the customer experience, the expectations of this rising empowered consumer, also the agent experience, but then of course there's the internal collaboration that's essential to all of this, and as I think the gentleman that you're referring to was from Continental AG, talking about, hey, we don't have all the answers, but adoption of these tools internally is critical, but it's also a cultural sort of step-wise process. I thought that was very cool that they actually, were very transparent with their people. We identify this is not going to be smooth sailing, but it's an essential part of our business growth. Yeah, I tell you, it was really interesting to listen to the panel. There was one of the companies up there, they're pretty large and they said, look, we're going to standardize on a single tool and everybody's going to get on board, and I actually bristled a little bit when I heard that, because, you know, the engineering group versus the marketing group versus, you know, the contact center, there's certain things that they need to be able to collaborate, but saying like, you know, one tool to rule them all, you know, it sounds a little bit tough out there. Yes, there needs to be some standardization, but you know, we see that in the cloud world, you know, it turns out customers are using multiple clouds out there because there should be a main one that we focus on, but if I need a best of breed piece for here, or if there's a feature functionality that I can't get elsewhere, I need to have that, and we see that at this show. There's just such a diverse ecosystem, you mentioned there's 140 of them, there's the people that make device, there's all these software pieces, there's some big hubs, and then there are all the ancillary things that help plug and enhance and do this because there is some great innovation going on here, some cool software things that are helping to, you know, take everything from, you know, whiteboard and voice to speech and globalization to the next phase. Yeah, that was very interesting, especially in the Microsoft Teams demo that Lori Wrighton team did this morning. The panel though that you talked about, there were seven customers from a variety of industries. Hertz was there, Continental, we mentioned, I think Paychex. I'm curious to get your thoughts on when they were talking about their plans to migrate to cloud, all in some percentage, considering the numbers that we heard yesterday, Stu, in terms of the cloud penetration for the contact center market, what were your thoughts there about those saying all in depends on what makes sense? Yeah, it reminds me of what we were talking about in the public cloud discussion two years ago. We know cloud is growing at a very fast pace. Look at our friends here at 5.9, they were growing at a much faster pace than the contact center overall. I believe they're growing somewhere, what, 25% as opposed to the industry as a whole is growing at about 9%. So we understand that cloud is growing faster than the market overall. And it was one of the moderators of the panel said that today is about a third of third of third, on-premises, hybrid and public and where that kind of steady state will be, I think it's still too early to tell in this industry, just as it is in cloud overall. But absolutely, I brisk a little bit when it's like, well, you will never do this one this way. Well, never is not something that we like to say in IT because you never know when that will be possible. My background, I worked on virtualization, started out in test dev and it reached a point where really there was no technical reason that I couldn't do it. When you hear, oh, the really large companies will never use cloud for it. Really, who is better at scaling and updating and making sure you can manage an environment than those hyperscale players? Microsoft's got a big present here. You don't ask a Microsoft customer, oh, you're running Office 365, you're living on Azure, what version of that are you running and do you have the latest security patch? As opposed to, if I have a Windows desktop and I'm not doing, oh, wait, have I done my patching? Have I done all this stuff? And you amplify that by thousands of agents and the contact center. We know that cloud has certain speed, agility and being able to get new features and updates in there that I just can't do nearly as well if it is something that I am installing and having to maintain myself or with a service organization. Right, and so we talked yesterday with a number of guests about what are some of the imperatives to move to cloud and some of the non-obvious ones cost obviously is one that we talk about all the time, right, Stuart, any show that we're at, but also the opportunity for businesses to leverage the burgeoning power of AI. Of course, every show we go to, AI is a buzzword, machine learning and of course the cloud provides that opportunity for there to be more data to train the machines to be better at contact center overall and of course internal communications. Right, and something that I like to hear at this show is start talking about API compatibility, you talk about the partnerships that are going on. It is not one software stack. We're talking about platforms. We're talking about how integrations can happen so that if somebody has a cool new thing that does a real-time engagement better than what I had before, well, I can probably plug that in and it's going to work on my platform. Everybody here talks about, well, whether you're a WebEx, a Microsoft Teams, a Zoom shop or any of those various environments out there, everybody's working across those environments. We've had some standardization here so that whichever one I've chosen, I'm not locked into one environment and I can help modernize the pieces as I need and take advantage of those new innovations when they come. Absolutely. All right, so Stu, you were a man on the street last night. Tell us some of the interesting things that you heard and some of the folks that you met after we left. It's interesting. We think we talked about it in our open yesterday. There are a number of companies that have been around for a while and what are they doing today? What is their focus? And a couple of companies have done rebranding. So the big party, there was a line and I managed to get myself in is Poly. So Poly has rebranded, of course, it was Polycom and Plantronics coming together. How many times do we hear it on the keynote stage that they mentioned that everywhere you go, their branding is there? So look, kudos to their branding and messaging team. We're going to have their CEO on the program tomorrow but the CEO talked about their new logo. The meaning behind it, of course, Poly means many but there's three P's and if you look at it, it looks like the iconic conference phones. So the room was in there, everybody's enjoying the appetizers and the open bar but there was people know Polycom. Heck, in our conference room, we've got one of those speaker phones in there. In the 90s, I used to sell their conference phones and their video conferencing when I worked for what's now Avaya but was loosened at the time. So there's a lot of intersections. The other thing I've really found is it feels like everybody here, at one point in their career, either worked for Cisco or worked for the Lucent family. Of course, AT&T back in the day had the Hotelcom space but it is like many other shows we go to. A rather interconnected community here and we'd guess on, it's like, oh yeah, Cisco Skype and now at five nines. Yeah, it is friendly. You don't see some of the places we go. There's bitter rivalries between key competitors and yeah, well, all the contact centers don't love their brothers and sisters at the competitor there. Chances are they've worked with half the people there and sometime the future will be working with again. So it's a good atmosphere. The people I've talked to really enjoy coming to the show as we said at the top. And this show has evolved over the last week we were talking about yesterday, 28, 29 years starting out as being called PBX and then rebranding to VoiceCon and then about 2011 to Enterprise Connect and it was, it's interesting that, because the word innovation comes up all the time as does evolution of communications and collaborations but when the keynote was kicked off this morning they talked about this is the biggest ever Enterprise Connect that they've had so you can feel and you can hear it behind us. The momentum, the excitement, you talked about there's a lot of carottery here, there's a lot of two degrees of separation in tech but the opportunities for every business whether you're selling a small product and service on the Amazon Marketplace or you're a big global enterprise the opportunity to connect and deliver a superior competitive advantage to your customer experience that's table stakes these days if you don't have that opportunity, those capabilities there's going to be somebody that's going to come and replace you in a heartbeat. Yeah absolutely, at least I have background in the space but there were places where I walked around and I said wow there's applicability for our business I mean we use a number of the collaboration suites and I've mentioned I've got apps for not just the Google suite but all the collaboration tools and there's technology that I'm like oh gee I want to understand that a lot of them are downloaded an app you can start using them for free and then there's a Freeman model and others are more enterprise licenses and it's been interesting to watch some of that dynamic as to it is the pricing is more built for the mobile and cloud world than the traditional I'm going to buy boxes and have a huge capital expense up front. So what do you think if you look back to your early days in the call center when you were just a young pup how much easier would your job have been if you had had some of the capabilities that we're talking about now? Oh Lisa I wish back in the 90s if I just had LinkedIn alone I could have supercharged so much of what I did but all these other tools right putting at my fingertips information it was like Lisa tell you I date myself in the 90s taking a call with everybody that worked in the call center you knew the area code of every single environment that it didn't tell you where it was you would be like oh yeah two and two how you New York how you doing you could whether you're saying good morning or good afternoon based on what part it was like oh wait I'm talking to Arizona they don't follow daylight savings time we'd remember all that stuff today there's too many exchanges everybody takes their phone numbers wherever they go so it was a smaller country back then but in the other hand the technology's actually going to give us the opportunity to be able to imbue that allow humans to focus on the empathy and connectedness that today's digital age sometimes tries to tear away from us. Exactly we need that empathy and that connectedness so Stu we have a great program today stick around we've got some folks from Celigin we've got ServiceNow on the program Riven Communications, Fuse, Tetra VX-59 of course and they're in and Zoom this afternoon yes thank you five o'clock. For Stu Miniman I'm Lisa Martin you're watching The Cube.