 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by 5.9. Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are live on the show floor at Enterprise Connect 2019. Stu, welcome to Orlando. Thanks so much, Lisa. Great to be with you and real excited to be here at Enterprise Connect. Likewise, and as you can hear the show floor just opened so we have a nice conflicting overhead announcement. Stu, this event is really interesting because it has evolved dramatically over the last 28, 29 years where it was PBX and then VoiceCon and for the last, what, eight or so, it's been Enterprise Connect. As has in terms of evolution, evolved enterprise communications, enterprise collaborations, cloud, AI, et cetera. Lots of things and exciting news to talk about this week. Yeah, Lisa, like any show that you say how are you relevant today? What is changing? What is staying the same? As you said, 29 years of the show, first time we're going live here with theCUBE, but yeah, it is now unified communications. We're talking about cloud-based contact centers like our friends here at 5.9 who brought us here to the show, but 6,500 people is what I heard from the people that run the show and it's been growing. It's been how do things like cloud and AI really transform some of these markets and at least in some ways there are some things that remind me of what I worked on in the telecommunications space back in the late 90s and some of those things are drastically different. So we're not talking about call centers, we're talking about contact center and that consumer experience, how data and mobile and the internet and cloud are changing is definitely something that we're going to be digging into a lot this week. Yes, and another thing that we're going to dig into is this rising change in the empowerment of the consumer, right? We're consumers every day. We want to be able to transact or get information on a mortgage or something from whatever channel we want. Omni-channel is really going to be a key theme here. It's being able to talk to the customer where they want to be communicated with and ensuring though that it's not just maybe you start out on web and you go to chat and maybe it's a call and maybe then it's an escalation through Twitter, but the organization that you're trying to engage with has a contact center that can follow your trail and follow your data to be able to understand what the real issue is and in a timely manner empower that agent who's talking to you, whatever medium, to act correctly so you don't churn. Yeah, Lisa, as something that our audience, everyone has had to call support at one time or another. Myself, I tend to troubleshoot a lot of stuff myself when I actually want to call in. I want to get the answers. I don't want to have to spend a long time going through some robotic, you know, hi, give me an agent please, give me an agent, agent, agent. And then when I get to that person, I don't want to have to go through steps one through 17 because I've already done that myself too. How do I escalate fast? If I can do that all online or in a chat, even better for me because, you know, I don't necessarily want to have to talk to a person, but when I do want to talk to a person, I want them to understand my environment, help me get there, and that's where a lot of these environments, you know, are helping today. How is it, you know, do I understand the client? Can I help them with where they need to be? And super hot button is, you know, what about data? You know, how is the role of data in these environments changing as a consumer? If there's certain things that I'm using and I'm worried about them talking about my privacy, but when it comes to the support experience, absolutely. I want you to understand who I am in the context and take care of things fast. You mentioned AI, and one of the things that I'm curious to learn about this week is the maturation of that, but also something that you and I hear at pretty much every show theCUBE goes to, which is a lot, and that is, it's not about completely transforming to AI, there has to be a human AI combination to really extract the most value from these experiences. Yeah, Lisa, you bring up a great point there. So, right, automation and robots, absolutely are playing a bigger and bigger role, but the answer is not that, you know, it's not binary, it's not one or the other, it's how can intelligence and machines augment what they're doing and when you talk to the context center people, absolutely, it's about how do I get people information faster, how do I make those agents react faster and hopefully have a better job? You know, when you talk about the people, you know, at least my first job out of school, I worked in a call center and if you're answering calls all day or answering emails, you know, something that you have to do day after day and it can be tough, so if there's automation and intelligence that can take care of it, you know, prompt you with the information you need, help lead you along the way, help you get to mastery and resolution so much faster, that's all goodness, you know, we want both the consumer and the employees to have a better experience and there's the promise that AI and automation and robots can all help with that experience, not just a wholesale, let's rip out the people and put in technology. No, you're absolutely right and it also is, I'm curious to learn too this week about the employee training. One of the interviews you did recently in the Boston Cube Studio, the guest there mentioned, I recommend every C level spends some amount of time in the contact center to understand, are our processes efficient? If there's sticky notes and paper everywhere, we probably have some process challenges, but are those agents empowered to make the right decisions at the right time in order to, like I said before, prevent, shurn and increase the customer lifetime value? So that customer experience is table stakes, all the way up to the C suite. Yeah, I mean, Lisa, as we know, if you talk to any marketer and say, what do you want? I want to know what my customer wants. What do they need? What are the challenges? And when a customer's reaching out with a problem, that can be a great opportunity. Now, hopefully you can solve their issue because the concern is, maybe they won't even reach out, you know? If it's not on my website, if I tried to do it or if I had to wait too long, I might go turn to a competitor. It's easier sometimes just to leave. And we know every time one person calls, there's usually many more that didn't call, that might have had that same issue. So understanding where I can engage, more touch points with our customers is a good thing. And how can we leverage that into a good experience? I know when I look into the contact center, it's not just the inbound requests, but how does that tie into outbound conversations? And enabling an organization to use that data in a trusted manner, as you mentioned, to switch from being reactive to proactive to eventually predictive. But one of the points you mentioned is very valid and that is for every customer that initiates a conversation through a contact center, there's probably exponential more customers with the same problem that aren't. So these companies need to be using AI in the cloud context and as a service to really understand it's the customer that's telling you what the problem is. How do you get that information, glean from it, starting to use analytics and things that probably back in your early call center days you didn't have access to, to really hone in on what that problem is. How prevalent is this problem? So do we need to throw a lot of resources at solving this because this is the way to ultimately help drive our business forward. Yeah, absolutely. And Lisa, these are the kind of things that we talk about in the cloud world today, which has a huge impact on this show, is I have contacts with customers, we have engagement and data there and what other services are there that will plug into this environment? So AI, you asked about the maturity, at least from what I've seen so far, we are early days in seeing that roll out. But there's a lot of other technologies here. You talk about cloud, talk about text to speech, talk about devices that will help, whether it's not just phones and headsets and the like, but lots of other tools that the enterprise uses to connect with their ultimate end users themselves, hence enterprise connect, that the communication at the center of it all. And it's interesting here in 2019 to see that relevance and that intersection of the people and the technology to hopefully help people have better relationships long-term with their customers. Absolutely. So you mentioned we're in the booth at 5.9 here. There's about 140 exhibitors here. You mentioned 6,500 attendees here in Orlando. 60 plus sessions across nine tracks, unified communication, cloud communications, team collaborations. We've got Jason Moreno from Microsoft Teams on and shortly with us today. So it's going to be a very interesting week. I'm very much looking forward to co-hosting with you and learning a lot about how the consumer is really driving has a table at the decision-making table within organizations. Yeah, absolutely. And Lisa, we've got a great lineup. Really two and a half days, half day to day from three to seven and then the full days from right after the keynote through the ending. The Expo floor just opened up. Great buzz here already at the show. I'm looking forward to be able to walk around and see some of the technology and some great guests on the program. Of course, our friends here at 5.9 who brought us here. We've got the CEO of Poly. Rebranded Plantronics and Polycom. The CIO of Zoom and many other guests on the program. Some of the industry analysts and the like. So really excited to dig in and always a pleasure, Lisa, to be digging in with you. Likewise. Thanks, Dewey. I'm excited to learn more about this contact center as a service market. It seems early days, as you mentioned, and I always appreciate it when businesses identify that. No, we don't have all the answers for AI and the combination of humans and machines. It's early days, early innings, as you said, but they're here to learn from each other and understand how it is that they can really influence and drag these conversations forward. Yeah, the fun fact on that, I was listening to a podcast on the way to the airport and it talked about actually with all the data that we have today, oftentimes the answer is easy. It's I need to be able to ask the right questions. And Lisa, you and I know a thing or two about trying to ask the right question. So we have lots of opportunity to do that this week and hear how all the people in this ecosystem are thinking about asking better questions and getting to their customers. Yes, I predict it's going to be a thought provoking week, Stu, and look forward to being here with you. We want to thank you for watching the Cube's kickoff of our live coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019, day one of three, stick around. Stu and I, we write back with our first guest.