 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 Peter Zantesonio. Okay, welcome everyone to our special presentation of theCUBE at Enterprise Connect 2016. This is theCUBE on the ground. Another full CUBE where we go out and extract the signal from the noise. We would not be here if it wasn't for our sponsors helping us out get here this time. Oracle ZDLRA, Zero Data Law Suppliance and Recovery Appliance, Vonage, CafeX, thank you. Go to those companies, check them out, buy their stuff. Thank you for supporting theCUBE, really appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, we're here on the ground with Peter Bailey, the CEO of Vertical Communications. Great to see you, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you so much. So you guys just had an analyst event. I saw that on Twitter. Great to catch up with you here in person. Saw a lot of buzz. One of the analysts, Ron, was doing a crowd chat. Really interesting view into the unified communication world and it's very clear from the analysts that the digital transformation is upon us. Not just cloud washing, digital transformation washing, it's a real trend and this show here at Enterprise Connect is highlighting that with cloud. What's your take on digital transformation because it's not about voice anymore, it's about everything. That's right, so we kind of think about beyond UC and it's back to sort of what business is really about and so we talk to our customers a lot about workflow but it comes back to this macro trend of digital transformation. Companies across the world using whether it's mobile or cloud or internet of things to make their business more efficient, create better customer experiences and even create new business models. And so when we talk about our communication software platform and the tools that we provide, it's around providing tools to impact things like efficiencies and costs and customer experience. So we think this is the meat of the conversation. It's great to be passed kind of the UC conversation onto what companies really want to talk about which is digital transformation. Look at UC, the old UC, I was just going to say it was a relic, it was old. It was stuck in this tide shift between low tide, high tide, the tsunami, whatever you want to call it but now it's busting out with cloud. So I want to talk about that. And first, talk about what you guys do is probably, what do you guys sell, what's your product, what's your value purposes and then we'll talk about some of the trends. So we replace the phone system with the communications platforms. We come out of the unified communication space but really what we found is that by taking that tool set and really customizing it for vertical markets, we can go much further with customers. So with our model, we're direct. We direct sales force, direct service force. We've got our own technology and we go two inches off the ground with customers to deliver value in the retail market and auto dealers and healthcare and other verticals where we can make a real difference around efficiencies around creating better customer experiences and that ultimately is a huge value add to our customers. That's software and hardware, both? Both, obviously more and more it's just software but obviously we have handsets in the mix, we have appliances in the mix but more and more it's software and cloud services which give people scalability and the flexibility to do the things they want to do. You know, Peter, one of the things we talk about in theCUBE all the time we're new to this space from theCUBE coverage, we've been watching it. Quite frankly it's been a little bit boring but now it's exciting. But what's happening is that the digital transformation of how people are buying and interfacing and engaging with the data and the edge of the network. Wearables is right here, retail you mentioned. These vertical stacks work but you can't be fully vertical. You got to have some horizontal, that's where the cloud comes in. This seems to be the disruption between people who get it and don't get it. What's your take on that? Well so listen, I think in our business the cloud has been to some degree slow and accelerating into the last couple of years. And I think like what we've done is we've built a framework for all of our applications residing in the cloud so they can be scalable, integrate with other platforms very easily, other data stores and really still providing kind of core call management notification messaging that can still sit behind the firewall. So in our case there's a nice mix of sort of behind the firewall secure notification and call management services mixed with a cloud framework that provides a scalability and flexibility for customers. So we think cloud is an enabler in this market but again in our world it comes back to what workflows are you impacting? What difference are you making for customers and their customers? And really that's all about the applications you're deploying in those environments. You know it's interesting the old way in that going back to the old client server days of the computer industry lock in meant vertical stacks. Now with open source you still need pre-package purpose built solutions because there's differentiation that are unique. The general purpose platforms are going away. That's pretty clear, we see that. I think everyone will generally agree. So talk about that what you guys do because this is a nuance in the business right now. It's okay to be vertical because there's unique work streams and workflows that are unique to say retail versus say oil and gas. And if you don't own the stack you have a hard time really impacting those workflows. So in our case the stack is really from call management on up but also customer engagement on down. And so when we think about the full stack we even add customer engagement to that because again if you're trying to help a retailer do a better job connecting with their customers through mobile devices and WebRTC on a website you need to be tied down into their business talking to marketing, talking to their P&L owners talking to IT, developing solutions specific for retailer that's going to drive whatever outcome they're looking for. And so when we think about full stack it even goes beyond technology. That's really the engagement model too. If you think about the old way of the stack, vertical stack you have systems of record, the database, systems of engagement, the interaction data and then this new era of predictive analytics call it cognitive IBM calls it cognitive what are you going to call it? That's where the action's happening but also horizontally there's the same model going on. If you have a call center application where you have live chat for instance or something cool that's unique to the work stream it's got to go into another database in another stack. So there's a horizontal vertical interplay here. Talk about that nuance. And it goes beyond that as well. It's not just the call center it's also users across the organization. So again if you think about functionality in the call center to interact with customers, to screen share, to take multimedia types of interactions coming in why can't we deploy that down to the workflow force on the floor of a retailer that is trying to connect with their customer with the personal shopper and their customer. And so again to your point we're seeing these different tools going across organizations tapping into data source being really deployed with these end user applications that connect back to the organization that's trying to create this unique customer experience. So you'd agree silos are a bad word these days? I think silos are a bad word except I will tell you that again back to the engagement model silos in the sense of really understanding a vertical market down to its real detail is important for our business. The other day it doesn't create a silo but it creates expertise in the business. And that expertise also then does get spread across the organization and work for the vertical markets. Well that's a good point this highlights like our conversation a little bit nuanced here but we're going to get into it is that you can have pre-packaged vertical integration purpose built that's unique and proprietary open but you have to work with other systems that's not end to end vertical. Is that kind of the cutoff line between because you want to provide differentiation because retail is different than another application. That's right and again yeah so listen I think open APIs integration with other platforms that is you have to be able to do that you need that flexibility you cannot let customers in with a full stack proprietary solution that is not going to happen. So that is part of the solution today. But again we flip that around and see that gives you more flexibility in how you can sell, how you can create value for customers how you can be flexible to meet their needs and frankly how you can work within their existing ecosystem because there is an existing ecosystem in there. What's the number one thing you hear from your customers? I mean what's the pattern that you see in terms of like the architect out there there are people sitting there out there I mean Gardner doesn't do magic quadrant for this new integrated stack and a new integrated horizontal and there's no the analysts are all kind of stuck in their silos but the end of the day there's a person sitting out there scratching their heads saying I got to put an architect together for the next year to one to five years and it's a DevOps meets app and I got to have some cool vertically optimized work stream sometimes automated using data. This is a challenge. What are you hearing from in terms of those target customers out in the trenches? What's the pattern? What's the number one conversation you're hearing? Well listen I think overarching if you want to really dumb it down there is this move to the cloud or replatforming to the cloud right I mean everyone's to do that securely scalably flexibly and you got to flip it around and see what are the needs of the business too and again this is where we think we make a big difference because if IT is if the customer is the business ultimately the business is living in a world of workflows and efficiencies and P&L management and so how can those technologies at the end of the day improve those line items in their P&L and still meet the needs of IT from security, scalability and cloud perspective so putting all that together is really the biggest challenge The customers care about their business and that's the vendor's technology. Absolutely this is not about us this is about the customer absolutely and that's a key, key point here. Alright if you talk about your company update you mentioned that you're growing what's employee count you guys recently announced you're doing a direct sales force give us some data on the company. The last couple years you know we started our business as a channel based business in the last two, three years we've gone direct with our business we bought a few companies along the way we're about 250 employees we've got a sales force across North America we're really only in North America today sales and service force across North America and as I mentioned before we are focused on vertical markets the retail's nearly half our business auto dealers, healthcare, hospitality these are vertical Real businesses Real businesses, yeah, yeah and absolutely and we're not just providing a horizontal solution we're going deep two inches off the ground in these markets to make a difference Two inches off the ground you were referring to getting deep with the customer getting your hands dirty getting down and dirty understanding their workflows is there automation involved you guys have specialized software give us that guy so it starts with understanding the customer's needs and then we've obviously got the platform, the APIs the ability to customize professional services team then obviously to the best of our ability we're productizing that as much as we can so we can wash and repeat for the next customer final question what's the big aha moment right now in this evolving and changing UC Unified Communications world well in our view it's workflows, workflows, workflows okay you're at it here this is the cube on the ground here at Enterprise Connect 2016 I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching