 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. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE on the ground special presentation of Enterprise Connect 2016. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE theCUBE and I'm Haywood Steve Layden with Layden Associates. Working with the analysts, working with the consultants, working for the end users out there, trying to make sense of unified communication as it transforms into the cloud. Steve, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, glad to be here. The big story here is the cloud, unified communications as a service, but it's a nuance, there's a lot of stuff under the hood that's transforming and certainly the end user expectations around web development, mobile development, all kind of the perfect storm going on in this unified communications, AKA enterprise software, transit, networking, all of it's coming together, it's all software based. What's your take this year on the show? Well, the show's fabulous. We got a ton of traction on the trading floor or show floor, I should say, my bed. And it's just amazing the interest in the cloud being promoted at every session, really at the point where we're just getting a lot of traction from the enterprise users to learn more about the cloud, use more about the cloud, really trying to get under the hood about where it's going. And the biggest challenge that most of the enterprise users have is the fact that we're really in this CapEx mode and now they need to move towards an OpEx mode or some kind of hybrid version of the two. And as I call on doing a session later this afternoon about the five tough questions to ask your UCAS providers, the big question is really, are you willing to give all of your keys of your kingdom over to one provider? Okay, and that includes your network and your endpoints and your QOS and the architecture and that's the big question that the enterprise users need to ask. Yeah, and certainly the enterprise users have had generations of lock-in and they're also gun-shy of lock-in, but same time they're under a lot of pressure to move the ball down the field on value creation. This is a big deal, but the architecture is changing around horizontally scalable, data's going to move from maybe the edge to different data sources vice versa, but vertical integration is a great differentiation. How are people looking at that? How are they vetting vendors? So, different verticals have different requirements, two in particular that we work for, one being healthcare and another being financial services. They both require protection on personal information. So in the world of finance, it's all about PCI compliance and in the world of healthcare, it's all about HIPAA compliance. And so anybody wants to play in the cloud in those particular verticals, they have to subscribe to that. And it's not only that, but it's about how do we deliver best practices for security encryption to the endpoints, so. So is the answer to the question on the end user side, they don't want to give the keys to the kingdom to one vendor? It depends on the enterprise. Some are looking at it, we actually have one client that we did last year that's got 5,000 endpoints, okay, that went totally to the cloud. And it was with a vendor that they trusted, but yeah, the contract was very strict about, you know, SLAs and yeah, giving the keys to the kingdom, there was some ownership built into the home model, if you will. So there's a whole balancing act and this is kind of what you're getting at, security is a concern. If you make it too open and too multi-vendor, you might have an increased surface area, certainly with APIs and whatnot. Yeah, totally, yeah. So now we're getting into this whole, you know, environment of salesforrest.com and sugar CRM and ERP, CRM type applications. There has to be integration into those, whether it be a premise-based system or cloud. But if the cloud players want to, you know, get ahead, they have to provide, you know, at least some of those. So I'll get your take on the landscape because I interviewed the CEO of Vonage and he was talking about the transformation of Vonage as an example. And there's many examples of vendors that are transforming their old brand to new brand. And the UC space has got a lot of old school mentalities and if they have the dogma of the old way, they might not make it to the new way and Vonage is one of those players that has that new vibe but they have legacy and they've done some good things. They have certainly a brand that pioneered voice over IP. But now voice over IP is table stakes, it's embedded in everything. Right, right. So I think the misconception really about Vonage is that you think of them in terms of consumer first, okay, the commercials and the residential users, et cetera. But they did buy Telesphere, okay, not too long ago and they were a legacy cloud provider that has been around for quite a while that's been doing the cloud in the business space. So I think if I'm not mistaken, a full third of their full business model now is business and it's actually accelerating quite quickly. And they've actually got a lot of security measures around encryption. They deliver on what we term in the business as a private cloud model versus public. They deliver on a private circuit which is MPLS in our space or a layer two ethernet on locals if you will. And that to me is a huge differentiator because they can guarantee quality of service in the cloud whereas you can't on just a standard internet connection if you want. So they have a lot of meat on the bone, they've done the work, they have some things baked out and they got a good foundation. You're happy with Vonage? Yeah, I've really, back in November we really got into a one-on-one and I grill them on what best practices we use for the enterprise users, whether they're on a premise base or in the cloud. And they were right on point with every hard point we asked about. They're on solid footing obviously. I did a little due diligence last night, saw the product looks pretty damn good. They were a finalist for the best of show. But more importantly, if look at their financials, I mean they're a publicly held company. They're close to a billion dollars in revenue. If they were a privately held company, they'd be like worth 16 billion dollars because a Snapchat and Uber and then look at Slack being quote, valued at four billion. I mean their market cap is almost on book value, on revenue. I mean, so they're in a good position financially. Yeah, yeah, and they're all about best practices. So yeah, so financially, I think they're very strong. So yeah, you never want to have a provider who's going to be out of business in 12 months, 24 months, which we have seen that. So you definitely want a provider that's good, you know, some good financial footing. And also has best practices around delivery on their model. Yeah, they got some good, I'm going to ask you the tough question on the industry because this is the number one question I've been getting here at the show and I've been hearing on social and we've heard it in many of our CUBE events over the past 77 events last year is end user practitioners, the builders, the doers, the digital builders are actually re-architecting their enterprise to be more DevOps, to be more cloud, to meet more agile for mobile development, to actually add value to the top line for the business, not just BIT. And the number one question is, how do I architect this new way? And so I got to ask you, what are you seeing here in this market from an architectural standpoint that the end users are requesting? Is it more information? Is it more about the data? Is it more about the latency? Is it, what's under the hood if you will? What's the number one challenge for those end users? Well, specifically to the cloud, it's really what's under the covers? You know, so when we've interviewed or when we actually do evaluations on cloud vendors, we want to get under the hood. We want to sign an NDA with them and say, what does your network looks like? Look like, what does your Visio look like? What is your topology? Okay, and by the way, anything that you wholesale out, we want to see what the wholesalers SLAs are that you're using in order to deliver on the promise of, you know, high availability, et cetera. So that's what we like to say. How should enterprises evaluate vendors in this day and age? What do you look for as a checklist? Yeah, yeah. So we have an RFP that we've developed for cloud as well as on-premise. In fact, we actually have a hybrid version because every one of our enterprise clients is looking for cloud as an option in every case. It's pretty interesting. You know, there's definitely an appreciation for at least interest in it. So you're going to be stirring the pot up on your panel, the five tough questions. What are those questions? One is, can you deliver on the service? You know, can you promise security? You know, can you deliver on best practices? Can you deliver on TCO? And are you willing to give us a hard penalty if you're not delivering properly, et cetera? Yeah, do you allow customers to see into your portal to see what the latency measures are on the network right now so that I know where I'm at on the property, so which is huge. See, we're going to have to follow up with you and get the results of that and see how people are squirming in their chairs. But that's great, we're going to follow up on that. But I want to ask you a final question. What's the bumper sticker for this show this year? If you had to put a bumper sticker on the car, leaving Enterprise Connect, what is the main theme this year? Well, it would be cloud, but I would say, I would like to even use the word just, you know, look for the next generation in UC. It's here today. It's here today and it's certainly exploding with the cloud in memory. All the technologies that were inhibitors are exploding. Absolutely, yeah. We have actually, I understand, at least a full third of all of the companies at the floor here are all brand new. And a lot of them are clouds. So we're starting to see that whole involvement as to where things are going. It's exciting. It's super exciting. The consumer technologies coming in, the enterprise all kind of, a little bit harder to bake out, but it's happening. We're theCUBE here on the ground at Enterprise Connect 2016. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.