 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5.9. Welcome to theCUBE, we are live in Orlando, Florida at Enterprise Connect 2019, we're in 5.9's booth. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming Fuse to theCUBE for the first time, Michael LaFronti, the SVP of product and design. Michael, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you Lisa. Yeah, great to be here. Talk to us about Fuse, give our viewers a little bit of an opportunity to understand who you guys are, what you do in the unified communication space. Great, easy start. So Fuse is a global unified communication provider. We've been around since 2006. We deliver voice, video, and messaging experiences on our cloud platform. One of the things that's unique about Fuse is that we specialize in selling to very large enterprises. So we work primarily with multi-thousand, 10-thousand seat organizations that are globally distributed. Almost half of our business comes from outside of North America. So we work really well with companies that are much like Fuse, globally distributed, have workers scattered all over the place and want to give them a tool and a technology that helps them come together to be more productive. Great, so Michael, before we get into Fuse, give us a little bit of your journey. You've been involved in this space for quite a long time. Yeah, absolutely, I like to joke that I've been in the cloud before there was a cloud, right? So I've worked in unified communications my whole life. I'm very, very passionate about productivity. I like to make lists for pretty much everything that I do. My wife also does, so that works out really well. But the thing is, I think that productivity at its core is really fundamental to the way that people get their job done, communication applications. So I've been working in communication since I graduated from college, worked on some of the early email programs like Outlook, and then charted out on my own with some friends and we did a small startup in the communication space that helped us actually focus on blending machine learning with identity. That was called Contactive. And then we met up with the folks working on Fuse, I decided to join forces in 2013, and have had a really great run since then helping to build Fuse into what it is today. Yeah, so I just want to poke at one thing there. You talk about worker productivity. If you actually look at studies the last couple of decades, it's, you know, the new technology wave doesn't necessarily give us better worker productivity. I'm curious kind of your viewpoint, you know, what's working, what's not working, how can we actually, as a workforce, be more productive? Yeah, I would say adoption is actually the most critical challenge that most organizations face when it comes to communication tools. Similar to what we talked about when we were chatting earlier, you know, there's this concept of, I know how to communicate at work, don't change it. And when you change it, it's very disruptive. So even if the tools are actually better, like empirically better, workers' productivity will go down because they were either told to use it, or it's not as elegant to use as the thing they use on their consumer device, which is why it's very important from Fuse's perspective that we focus on application experiences, but not only application experiences, but the adoption of them through our cloud enablement and some of the practices that we put in place when we deploy our customers. Let's stick into that adoption because to your point, and whenever anything changes, creatures have happened, but you guys are working with large enterprise organizations, which presumably have been around for a long time. They've got multiple generations of workers who are used to working in their own ways. What are some of the best practices that Fuse can help these large organizations employ to drive up adoption and really satisfy those workers? Yeah, it actually starts with discovery, right? One of the first things that we do when we're working with a large enterprise, as we ask them, what are the business units within your company? What are the demographics and the styles of work of the people in those different groups? And then we help as part of our engagement plan, we actually come up with a persona map that says, for these employees, even though you want to move to a full cloud solution, we recommend giving them a hard phone that goes on the desk because the style of their job and the ergonomics of putting a receiver on their shoulder will help them transition to using the software as opposed to just ripping the phone off their desk and saying, here's a headset, good luck. And we help the companies identify those groups, give them specific adoption patterns like the one I mentioned, to make the ease into using a new cloud solution like Fuse much easier to adopt. So that is a persona-based, very, very specific with a clear plan and we tend to see very high success in adoption rates. That's really interesting persona-based. For an average organization, how many different personas are you helping them design adoption strategies for? I would say usually less than a dozen, depending on the size of the organization. You think about your major functions, back office, HR, finance, sales and marketing. Depending on the sales type, you'll have some others. So those are all individual personas that we'll develop a practice for. And one that's emerged recently for us, we announced our partnership with Samsung yesterday morning at Enterprise Connect to help us target frontline workers, the folks who are not in an office, who are out in the field, out in a truck, out in a manufacturing facility, working with customers in a very different capacity. So we've started developing some amazing persona and enablement models and software for them in partnership with Samsung to help them be successful and feel included with the rest of the organization. Michael, how are we doing with the dichotomy between what I can use from a communication standpoint as a personal, when I've got my smart phone, I've got the latest apps, millennials like to communicate a little bit differently than the boomers would. So that difference between what I do at home versus the enterprises, has that gap closed? Or is the business user now as empowered as what the consumer could be for? I would say the broad answer across the industry is no, I think if you look at most organizations and you actually stare at someone's phone and you flip open their WhatsApp if they let you, and you ask them, what's that group? And they'll say, oh, those are my colleagues for this project, why do you have a WhatsApp group for that? It's faster, one of the employees lives in Brazil and there's always a reason and they always default to what's easiest and to what's probably available in an app store. So I think the inherent challenge of communication apps in the enterprise is to engage the user in a way that they feel comfortable not going to that least common denominator, which is not secure, not protected, and none of the things that we don't want from an IT perspective. So I think on a good way, what consumer experiences are doing is much like with Instant Messenger many years ago, they're helping to condition users to a new way of communicating that they then bring that expectation to work. So I give the example, we have an employee at one of our customers that made the joke to me. She said, oh, you guys still have phone calls. That's sort of like video with the screen turned off. And I said, well, yes, that's the other way to come at it, right? She doesn't think about it as picking up the phone. She thinks about, I'm always going to be having a video chat with you and sometimes you'll turn the video off. So I think those expectations are changing and I think our software and everyone's software has to match to adapt. What, you talked about the frontline worker. In fact, that was addressed during the keynote this morning as well. A number of the customers on the panel talking about how they have to enable those frontline workers. I'm wondering about the remote workers because as you're working with large enterprise organizations who have a plethora of remote workers in different cultures, different time zones, how can you help bring that remote worker into the team so that they really feel part of the team and are part of that actual collaboration on a daily basis? Yeah, it's actually one critical thing that we did last year, emoji support, right? So emotion is really important, getting people excited about the fact that I'm talking to you but I'm not physically next to you. So when you lose the ability after a meeting to physically catch up with someone and say, hey, great job. Honestly, emojis help drive emotion and one of the things we saw once we implemented that was an actual uptick in our user adoption, a small one. And when you actually asked users about it, they said, well, yeah, I got to send that person a virtual high five. So I think remote employees yearn for the same experience you get when you physically bump into people at the office. So I think the imperative for collaboration tools is to try to recreate some of that. Now, some of that is very sophisticated things with whiteboards and collaboration but some of it could be as simple as sending a little smiley face or a thumbs up. Yeah, Michael, I have certain friends of mine. If you don't have GIF support, they're not using your engagement there. Wonder if you could help us connect the dots between the unified communication and the contact center. It's a big theme here at the show and obviously our friends here at 5.9 hosting us. Yeah, it's another great question. We have a great partnership with 5.9 at Fuse. We service a lot of joint large customers together and I think the reason that we do that, actually I know the reason we do that is because those customers have a single challenge, if you will, they want to be able to communicate to the people that they work with which is primarily going to be through Fuse and the people that are buying their products and services and those people are going to be talking to them through the 5.9 platform. So it's this idea that when I need to get help from someone and I'm on the call with a customer, how do I go do that easily? How do I go find the people that I need to talk to? Those walls I think traditionally were very, very strict. Contact center folks had a hard time getting access to subject matter experts or anyone they needed to talk to, but I think that's evolved a lot. Yeah, I wonder if you could help me with recognizing some data that I heard out there. Fuse, you talked about very large scale customer deployments. Some of the vendors here are like, well, when you talk about cloud contact centers, they're not going to go to the largest environments. We know cloud scale's pretty well. So maybe you can help us, where does the Fuse customer base, the 5.9 customer base, scalability and size, where do those intersect? Yeah, I think the way that we intersect is actually in a couple of places. So first and foremost, when we sell joint customers, I think it's also, well, I know that our definition of actually what large means can be different, right? For example, large multi-thousand seat organization that goes wall-to-wall with Fuse, not all of them are contact center agents. In fact, usually it's a small ratio of contact center agents, but contact center could also mean something different per deployment. There could be externally facing contact center agents. There could be a direct sales team that uses the 5.9 platform to communicate, outbound or receive inbound sales lead calls. There may also be internal help desks at large organizations that use them for HR support, IT, or manufacturing services. So I think what we see is that there's not an exact match between the two types of organizations that we service, but the ones that we work together in, there's a high overlap in need based on those personas. So you've been in UC for a long time, as you said. We're only halfway through, I guess, stage two of the event, but I'm curious, Michael, some of the announcements that have come out, Keynotes this morning, what excites you about the evolution of enterprise communications and collaborations that you've heard so far this week? Yeah, I think it's interesting. Over the years, I've been at Enterprise Connect for four years in Fuse, and a few years back when I was in my old role, and I think it came from a place that was very much about sort of speeds and feeds and switches and hardware, to now we're talking about frontline workers in waste removal trucks, trying to make them feel included. I think the thing that excites me the most is that almost all of the technology here is focused on this idea of inclusivity, right? The idea that you're a remote worker and maybe the emoji is the thing that works for you and I, but if you're a frontline worker and maybe you're between shifts or you're stopped on the road, how do you bring technology to bear that helps them feel included, helps them feel a part of the role and a part of their company? And I think what's really cool too is, as opposed to speeds and fees traditionally talked about, you're starting to hear things around the conference around retention, employee engagement, how hard it is to hire talent in a job market like it is in North America today. And those are the things that really matter when you think about employee engagement, which is a direct function of how connected do they feel, especially if they're working from home in a satellite office. So I love the change that it's now more about the person and their engagement as an employee as opposed to, I don't know, how cool is your technology? And I think that shift is really important because what we do is sort of fundamental to people getting their job done. And there's a tremendous interest because this is the largest event that they've done. They were saying this morning 6,500 attendees, 140 vendors, that momentum is palpable. It's moving forward, as you say, and you see there's a lot of excitement moving forward, but also getting to more of that personalization that we're all consumers in every aspect of it. We expect it. Right? Yeah, yeah, I think. So last question I had for you is you've got design in your title. I'm curious, are some of the generational things have to be taken into consideration as to the millennials with their mobile, they're used to that versus some of the more experienced workers in the force, and where you see that going in the future? Yeah, the design of what we build at Fuse is critically important to adoption. And I always give this very basic example. How many times a day do you pick up your phone and go to check a message, whether it be a text message, or flip through your recent calls, return a call, how many times when you're on a call do you hang up the call every time, right? Those gestures are really, really important. So one of the things that we actually stare at in Fuse is how close is the actual exit call button from the edge of the screen on most phones? And it sounds like a very nuanced thing, but for actions that you do repetitively throughout the day, the ergonomics of well-designed consumer applications make those things feel great, no matter if you're left or right-handed, if the phone is a phablet or a small one. So I think the design of enterprise applications, back when I first started, were it's gray and just use it and be quiet. And now it's much more of something where you must watch someone use your application and look at the telemetry to understand, are they having a good experience? Our software asks you after every call and meeting, how was it rated one through five stars? And that information actually helps us tune the software. And I know most of the vendors in the space do similar things because we have to listen to the individual end user. We cannot rely on the abstracted opinions of stuff that comes up through surveys. Absolutely, listening to that voice of the customer. Well, Michael, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Stu and me today about Fuse, what you guys are doing and your experience as the industry is evolving. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. It's been great. I appreciate it. First Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.