 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 Jim Burton. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here inside theCUBE with special coverage of Enterprise Connect, and I want to thank our sponsors real quick. Oracle ZDLRA, zero data loss appliance, CafeX and Vonage, thanks for supporting us. By their stuff, they're great. They support theCUBE. Okay, I'm John Furrier here with Jim Burton. Our next guest is Hardy Meyers, presidency of AVST, Enterprise Grade, Unified Communications. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, obviously, Enterprise Grade is one of those things where it's kicked around, but there's a lot of nuances around what Enterprise Grade means. You see stuff that's free, Google Hangouts, Skype has a free product. They have Skype for Business, which is much more SLA. How hard is it to be Enterprise Grade? It's actually very hard, and our core competency is making Unified Communications solutions for medium and large enterprises. So, we sell through channel worldwide to medium and large enterprises. And what's the vibe at the show this year? I mean, this seems to be one of those years where the cloud has obviously centered the tension. It seems to be breaking out. It seems to be hitting an inflection point. I agree. Cloud is hot. We made an announcement about cloud this week, and the bottom line is for large enterprises, moving to the cloud is complex. Typically, it's a hybrid scenario. Some pure cloud scenarios, Microsoft had some great announcements today, and so we made an announcement about how we're going to enable people to move to the cloud, both through a Microsoft cloud or whatever the cloud they want. Can you share a little bit on the analysis, because that's a pretty big deal. Oh, thank you. Yeah, so we have, for many years, supported private cloud, large enterprise high-scale deployments, and now we're going to be supporting through our partners and through an AVST delivery mechanism, the ability for enterprises to consume our technology, either in a hybrid format or from a cloud directly. Hardy, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is your relationship with Microsoft and the products and services that you support underneath Microsoft. And I think one of the things that I find fascinating is that Microsoft has a lot of partners, but Microsoft actually uses your products in a unique environment. So a lot of people would say, well, gee, why wouldn't you use an AVST product when Microsoft has some of their own products? So maybe give us a little bit of background about that relationship and how you've been able to help Microsoft as well as a number of their partners take your product to market to deliver customer solutions. Yeah, so, very simply stated, large enterprises have very complex environments. Microsoft is a very large enterprise. Skype for business as a single discrete solution for a large enterprise is probably the end game in many cases, but about 80% of customers we see are going to migrate to Skype for business over time. And what the AVST platform does is in addition to supplying some applications where Microsoft doesn't have quite the same level of scalability as AVST does, we also enable a customer to migrate from whatever their legacy environment is to the Skype for business, whether it's premise or cloud deployment. So, but in addition to that though, you provide some features and functionalities because you, in many cases, are CPE based. So when companies have restrictions of what they can do, you fill that bill. And I think quite frankly, that's some of what you're able to help Microsoft with themselves. That's true. It's depending on the customer, if voice applications, highly scalable automated attendants, voice messaging, work of plans or confidentiality, prohibits them from moving to Exchange or O365 informal call center type solutions that are sort of a notch above the baseline configuration but below a big contact center. Those are all areas where we deliver enterprise scale or enterprise class levels of solutions through our and Microsoft's larger partners. Well, maybe you could spend a few minutes just really talking about what your product portfolio looks like. I mean, one of the things that just always surprised me and I keep forgetting about it is that you have an informal contact center that's being very, very successful in the marketplace. But just talk about your platform and the breadth of that portfolio, your mobility solutions and all of that because some people may not really understand all you do because they may stereotype you as a company that they know as a messaging company and you're so much more than that. Right, right. Well, and many people do know us for our world class messaging solutions but really what we've built is a highly interoperable unified communications platform by putting our product into an enterprise's infrastructure, it basically future-proofs for them how they're going to evolve their infrastructure in the future. And so relative to Microsoft, specifically what we're doing at that core is that future-proofing or enabling a customer to migrate over time from a legacy environment, whatever that might be, whether it's a biases or even operate frankly with both Microsoft and that other vendor's technology simultaneously. And so we're able to deliver mission critical voice applications, both messaging and call processing. So highly scalable automated attendance, et cetera. In that framework, enable a centralization strategy that supports a big private cloud data center deployment, moving into more mobile type capabilities including secure messaging, call completion, things like that. And then as you mentioned into informal call center, contact center type capabilities. And what we've done is developed a product that's really designed for informal work groups like IT organizations. We see it, we're particularly strong on higher ed. We see several use cases in higher ed organizations where they have teams that want to have contact center-like capabilities but they don't want to outlay that kind of expenditure. And so what we've done is engineer a product that rides on our platform, leverages all the resources that you've already acquired using the AVST technology perhaps for some of the core voice applications and enables you to get that kind of technology to those informal work groups. And the feedback's been excellent as you alluded to. Well it seems to me that you're in a unique spot because large enterprises don't just post-sale change over. They migrate and they need to migrate. So you actually have the ability to help them go migrate from whatever their current vendor is over to a Skype for Business solution. That's exactly right. And we have many customers where they started with brand X and they didn't know whether they were going to go to the cloud or to Skype for Business or maybe both. And so putting an AVST and future proof their infrastructure and they're very, very happy with that scenario. It's enabled them to move towards a centralized, probably initially a large private cloud data deployment. Maybe they're going to convert that to a managed service with one of our premier global partners or maybe they're going to move that up into the cloud and leverage some of the great technology Microsoft delivering from the cloud. Great to have you here. I want to get your thoughts on the show and this year. What's the big impact to the folks out there, your customers and a lot of these suppliers here have end user customers that are trying to figure things out. It's converging. You talked about some very complex enterprise grade stuff and then you got the cloud which is just cloud native slap stuff up, stand stuff up quick, get stuff going, agile, it's all kind of coming together. What is the big impact of the customers this year? So I think it's getting clear on what cloud means to the customer. And I call it cloud confusion. Are we talking delivery model? Or we're talking consumption model? And there's a lot of people throwing it around. And so from our perspective, our advice, we say, people ask us, are we in the cloud? The answer is yes. And then the question is what do you mean by cloud? And so clearly what I think is cool about the show is unlike two years ago, there's probably half of the vendors here are delivering their technology from the cloud or in a hybrid format and that really portends the direction for where the enterprises are going and I think it's great. So I want to get your take on what's the driver? Is it the economics? Is it the native cloud computing world? It's always in great economics and you see public cloud clearly there. What's your take on that? I would say honestly, I think it's flexibility. I don't think it's economics. All right, thanks for sharing your thoughts here in theCUBE, Jim. Thanks for joining us. This is theCUBE on the ground. I'm John Furrier of Jim Burton. Thanks for watching. Thank you.