 Hello and welcome to this episode of The Cube Conversation. I'm Shelly Kramer, Managing Director and Principal Analyst here at The Cube Research. And today, I am joined by two MindTel superstars, Eric Hansen, the new CMO, and Louise Domingos, who's the CTO. Step into the CTO role. So gentlemen, welcome. It's great to see you. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. So I'm going to start with you. I'm going to start with you and have you explain kind of the transition that you've made from your former role to your current role. Certainly. And great to be here with you. Yes, I come from the Unify heritage. So I'm part of the Unify acquisition. And at Unify, I was the CTO for several years. And I've been in the business for so long, over 20 years now, and following the evolution of UC contact center, cloud, et cetera. So and I'm very excited being part of MindTel now. We're just completing six months of the acquisition. And a lot we're learning about the combined company, trying to bring the two heritage together, strongly heritage of innovation, portfolio, and solutions to customers. I'm very excited to be part of the MindTel group now. Excellent. Well, I'm sure they're glad to have you around. And quite honestly, speaking as someone who has a similar, you know, 20 plus decades in the business, it's such an exciting time because we're seeing so much evolution. You know, I've had conversations with people before about, you know, what it was like living through the advent of the internet and how much that changed everything. And I think we're living through another time like that. So it is exciting. There's a benefit to having some gray hair in this business, right? Absolutely. You don't have any. So we don't like you a little blonde. What did you start to say? I was just going to mention that, yeah, exciting times because we have a chance to do another revolution, technologically speaking. And I think we are well positioned to pivot to it and take advantage of generative AI and how that plays along, communications, collaborations and the businesses of the future. Well, and I think that probably my favorite line of today is that all the conversations that we're having are really about experience. They're not really about the technology. They're not really about those pieces. You know, it's really about serving up better customer experience is better user experience, better employee experiences, all those things. But speaking of revolutions, we've got Eric Hansen stepping into a new role as the CMO. Congratulations. I know the team is very excited to have you. So tell us a little bit about you and your backstory and all that. So I spent over 10 years in the UCAS space actually, then took a brief break from this industry and went to cybersecurity for the last two years. And I'm really excited to be back. And I think for me, in my role, which I do have some, you know, past product experience in the telecommunication space, it's really about the art of the possible. It's communicating the art of the possible as we think about not just connecting knowledge workers, but also frontline workers and vertical industries, whether we believe there's a lot of opportunity for differentiation. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I agree. So why Mitel? Well, I think, you know, from my perspective, when I was in UCAS, one of the things that we struggled with, I think, is to really address those needs of frontline workers and those nuanced use cases around things like manufacturing or healthcare. And I think Mitel is really uniquely positioned in terms of being at the intersection of hardware and software and creating those unique experiences, not just based on telephony, but how, you know, multimodal communications come together and leverage AI as well. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think that there's so much happening in the UC industry and Mitel plays a pretty critical role there. So speaking of all that's going on in the industry, what do you think the key trends are that, you know, what are you paying the most attention to right now? I think from my perspective, I'm obviously AI is the word of the day, even though I would argue that some people can't spell it. And I would actually argue that it might be automated intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence, because I think it's still early days. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and certainly, Louise has been doing a lot of work on that front as we think about innovation with our portfolio. And I think for us, the big trend is really around how we take some of those types of trends and really think about helping our customers drive value out of them today by really and then also helping them learn as they position themselves for tomorrow. So I think that's one of the big trends, obviously. I think taking you brought up customer experience, I think thinking about customer outcomes versus the technology is another big trend. It's certainly something that we're focused on. And personally, I'm more interested in, like for a long time, we've been very focused on, oh, everything's pure cloud, pure cloud, pure cloud. And for us, I think the exciting thing is, I believe that the market is sort of switching into more of a mode of what's the right tool for the right job? What's the right technology and delivery methodology? And so I think that's particularly very exciting. And there really is not a one-size-fits-all solution and so approaching the market with that sort of hybrid thinking. And in some instances, cloud-based is great. In some instances, it's not. And so I think that's really an important part of the equation. So what's your go-forward strategy? What do we have ahead of us? So I think, well, I'll let Louise talk a little bit about the portfolio. I think from a business strategy perspective, from my tell, it's really about we are now a much bigger global organization after acquiring Unify. The Unify heritage certainly brought with it a direct sales force that I think complements our mature channel that we have on the heritage Mitel side. I think from a marketing perspective, certainly being louder about the things that we're doing, I don't know that Mitel has always been that loud in the market. And I think there's an opportunity to celebrate some of the things that we've been building now for quite some time. So I'm personally really excited about that aspect of things as well as what Louise got working in the Innovation Labs. Yeah, and I'll step in here just real quickly and say, I see the same thing as it relates to Mitel. In particular, fantastic company doing great things and sometimes doing a fantastic job of marketing is really the secret sauce that makes it all happen. So I know that they're very excited to have you on board. And I spent 20 years as a marketing brand strategist. So telling stories, connecting the dots, connecting with customers. And there's no such thing as telling your story too much, I think, you know, people don't really know. This is a complicated industry. So that's great. Louise. Yeah, just taking the message from marketing correct and trying to translate that into the technology and portfolio side. So we so far are focusing the innovation front in addition coordination with the portfolio team before unique pillars. First starting with the experience front, ensuring that you see and contact center offer the right experience, the best experiences across our combined portfolio. So there's a lot of initiatives for integration of the portfolios, as you can imagine, to decide how we march towards the future with the right you see the right contact center, the right applications in general. So we're putting a lot of effort in that front to ensure the experience is the best. Also bringing contact center and you see together, ensuring that the contact center agents have the necessary back office support through the UC applications. The second front is about delivering the hybrid cloud capabilities. So we're called on parallel deployment capabilities and efficiencies, but ensuring that in a in a world of today where customers have capabilities already in the cloud, a lot of premise equipment applications and third party integrations, we want to be the vendor that has now a very strong service capability by ourselves with our channel partners to be able to provide those functionalities. Portfolio wise, we're using our integration capabilities through our SBC, through our clients, through our apparel that we call Unified Phone that brings really the simple integrations for any third party cloud application and bringing UCAS and premise capabilities together. So that's part of our hybrid cloud deployment capabilities. Third, we're investing a lot in verticals and in verticals, we have solutions nowadays that merge both solutions from my tail and unified to address healthcare, finance, hospitality, government, etc. So a lot of capabilities there. So unfortunately, we cannot show you all, but there are so many different new products now that really create the view that verticals bring capabilities beyond the standard horizontal play. And last but not least, we're investing in AI. And surprise, surprise. Well, and to a degree, we're still defining how that plays for us and for our customers. We're not starting with that now. So we've been doing AI for several years now with dialogue flow, with sentiment analysis, virtual agents, etc. We're just trying to now add the element of generative AI to it to ensure that we have the necessary assistance that we have the capabilities built into the products, or again, utilizing our strong professional services workforce to create the necessary tailored learning machines for the customers based on their needs and demands on their knowledge base. So we have just a recent implementation that does that particularly for our product themselves and bring that capability to our partners. So the service of our products are now already implemented through some chat bots in the system. Nice. I wanted to go back and talk a little bit about the services element of your offering. So I feel like this is a time when, you know, all the conversation is about AI, even though many vendors have been integrating AI into their solutions for years now, right? But now the conversation is all about gen AI. And there's, you know, on one hand, there's a mad dash. And then on another hand, there's a, let's go a little bit more slowly. Let's make sure we get this right and that sort of thing. But above all, it's complicated and scary. So what kind of support do you provide your customers as they want to go down this path? Do you have, you know, tell us about that part of your offering? Yes. The expertise is really in tailoring and learning from the customer knowledge base of their analytics and data and creating the necessary functionality that they can either provide internal support to their employees, help desks, agent assist, etc., or something they can also play in their contact center functionality towards their customers. We created a few use cases and we're piloting those which are degree. Let's take the case of government, which is a very strong market for us. We're now creating a bot that is able to create an interface between the, let's put a service, the public servant, or basically the employee in the government area that is providing a service to a common citizen like myself. And this person wants to hassle the lingo that goes into the public government capabilities. And I'm the stupid citizen that's trying to figure out how I pay my taxes or what's wrong with my taxes. By the way, we're not stupid. No, I think they are. And AI can be a middleman or a middle person actually to provide the capability of translating that complexity into something that I can understand. Vice versa when we're in healthcare, the doctor has its own terminology. I'm a patient, correct? I just want to know what's wrong with me in simple terms. And AI can be that interface. I think there are several use cases that we can play. And professional services comes into that because each customer will be a unique case is not a one side fit. So yeah, and I think that's super important. And as a person, you know, I always put myself in the shoes of a buyer and it's like, I'm putting myself on the line. I'm putting my reputation on the line. Usually these decisions aren't made just by one person anymore, of course, but you know, it is a big investment. It's a big leap. And so to me, hearing from vendors that we are here to meet you where you are and we, you know, we don't expect you to just, you know, write a check and figure all this stuff out, like we're going to walk along this journey with you. I think that's such an important part of any a solution offering. And so that's one of the things I'm always looking for from vendors. I'll just add, I think, you know, for us, post acquisition of Unify, you know, 25% of our team is in services, which is I think significant. And I think the other thing that's a byproduct of these two companies coming together is it is, you know, the largest or one of the, you know, top three in terms of the size of our install base. And there are a lot of workers that fall into these different vertical markets. So the knowledge, which is ultimately what feeds things like AI is also really valuable in terms of how we learn and then learn with our customers. So I think that's another really interesting component. And then, you know, whether it's partners and where they are in terms of sophistication, in terms of implementing these things and can they lean on us? I think is an important component. Our existing customers, you know, they're trying to figure things out. We're encouraging them to experiment, because I think that's the stage that we're in right now. And then new customers want to your point need to know, is this a partner that I can lean on? And so for us, we have something called our customer lifecycle management initiative. And that starts actually before somebody even becomes a customer, right? Well, we're starting to partner with them with the what ifs, what if we were to partner, what would that look like? What's the value that can be generated? Let's set those expectations. And then once you become a customer and you're deployed and you're starting to use these things, are you realizing that value, not just the first year, but the second year, the third year and so on. And so I think that's a really important component as you think about these things as well. I have covered Mitel for a long time and I'm very familiar with the customer lifecycle management and the passion that Mitel has about that. I mean, then the reality of it is getting customers is the easy part of the equation, serving them, meeting their needs and keeping them is really, you know, what it's all about. Okay, I'm going to let I'm going to wrap this conversation with final thoughts. What's the first thing that's on your list that that you can talk about that you're going to tackle in this new role? So I think, you know, the alignment around some of the vertical strategy, I think is really important enabling our sales force, getting much noisier with with our message around these things. You know, we've got some new products that we're I've actually been shipping. So we want to talk about them. And and mostly we've been talking about them in Europe. So I want to bring that to the US for sure. And so I'm really excited about that. Yeah, that's awesome. What about you, Luis? Similarly, I think there is definitely an opportunity now in the combined company to create so much novelty, so much innovation. So we basically doubled our indie capacity. I'm very glad to see that. And in general, I think there are so many opportunities we can explore, technically, technologically speaking, across the verticals that we promote, and bringing the hybrid cloud message. So even though AI, we've been thinking about AI becoming an element of our hybrid cloud deployments, and with edge AI capability. So we're looking into that, trying to research, of course, doing some POCs. But yeah, I'm very excited. I think that we have a strong potential we just need to develop forward of that. Exciting times ahead. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much to our viewing audience coming to you live from Enterprise Connect here in Orlando. And keep your eye on Eric Hansen and Luis Domingos from Mitel because I can see there are some interesting things ahead.