 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hello from Orlando, I'm Lisa Martin on theCUBE with Stu Minimanna. We are in 5ix9ine's booth at Enterprise Connect 2019. Can you hear all of the attendees behind me? There's about 6,500 people here. In the Expo hall, there's 140 exhibitors. I mentioned we're in 5ix9ine's booth and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE the President of 5ix9ine, Dan Birkeland. Dan, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. It's great to be here. What an event. This is amazingly well attended and can't wait, let's get to it. It is, so let's do a little bit of by the numbers. Four years in a row that 5ix9ine has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Context Center as a service. You have, I think we were talking with some of your guys yesterday, five billion recorded customer conversations. Oh, the data and the opportunities in that couple thousand customers worldwide and a big, strong finish to FY18, lot of momentum. Right, and 2018 couldn't have been better. We had wonderful growth, capped off with a Q4 that showed 31% revenue growth year over year. We continue to increase our profitability as well. EBITDA being 23%. So for us, it was a phenomenal year. The combination of revenue growth plus the EBITDA put us over 50. Oftentimes companies are evaluated for the rule of 40 and we shattered that and came in over 50. So we're very excited. It's helping fuel the growth for us, which we believe is still ahead of us for the most part. Dan, congratulations on the progress. We've been watching, there's some big name hires that have happened in the company. Well, I was excited to talk to you is not only have you been with the company coming up on 10 years now, but you've got sales underneath what you're doing. And when you watch a company that is exceeding the industry growth rate by like two to three X, hiring and culture is so important. So bring us inside a little bit. What's happening at five nines? How do you maintain the momentum? What is that five nine employee that you look for? So Stu, and you just touched on it. We've been an execution machine for many years, growing the top line of the business while keeping an eye on bottom line profitability. And we believe doing that as well as anybody in our industry. And what's very powerful now is those new hires that you mentioned. Wouldn't have guessed in my wildest dreams that we get to track somebody with Rowan's pedigree and really his reputation of being able to take companies, transform them and take them to new heights. With his reputation, he was able to attract Jonathan Rosenberg, co-author of the SIP protocol and really thought leader in the collaboration space for us. So we see taking what we've done over the past several years and growing the business into what's now a $250 million plus company and applying their thought leadership and expertise to an already highly executing machine really disguised the limit for us. And I think what it now brings us is the ability to expand the product and really take the products into whole new areas like artificial intelligence and being able to leverage those technologies and really change the way customers provide support and really evolve the customer experience as a whole. Yeah, it's been interesting. I've watched the cloud space in general for a number of years and the numbers sometimes belie what we're used to. It's like, oh, well, okay, somewhere 40 to 90% growth for some of the public cloud providers. Oh, well, when's that going to slow down? And sometimes it actually still accelerates. And when I look at the cloud contact centers, once again, you're growing at a pretty good clip but you've still got lots of headroom there. So we talk a little bit about that dynamic, we're past the evangelization phase and now generally cloud, it's here, it's still growing massively. Well said, Stu, and not only is it still here, it's just the beginning. If you look at the cloud penetration rate to date, we now see that about 10 to 15% of companies have moved and transitioned to the cloud for their contact center needs. We see that continuing for a decade or more. As we move forward and some of the drivers for that, if you look at it, you mentioned at the outset, Lisa, the fact that we're recording five million minutes of conversations and that is valuable, valuable data that we're sitting on. And one of the true advance is when you look at AI and you look at artificial intelligence, lots of folks around the show are talking about how AI is going to revolutionize and change the way contact centers operate. And we know it's going to do that. Lots of us are experimenting and building out proofs of concepts in the areas like agent assistance. For the first time ever, we can get strong transcription tools that allow us to take speech and convert it into text at a very high rate and be able to then apply natural language understanding tools to that same text, to be able to derive what a customer's asking for in real time. And therefore it takes the responsibility away from the agent and not burden the agent with having to go hunt and search for the solutions. But actually let the system go hunt and search for that while the agent can pay attention and focus on the client or the end user customer. And then have the system be able to give responses. So if the system's giving responses to the agent, the agent that has the ability to choose which response is accurate and the system will learn over time and become smarter, the machine learning portion of that is it will get better and better at suggesting responses to the agent. It allows us to take a very junior or unseasoned agent and make them a very experienced agent very, very quickly. So in the past we've had to rely on scripts that were very form driven with a few variables being filled in. Now we can be very dynamic with AI providing those responses. Let's talk about the impacts of the consumer. We are consumers, right? We're so empowered, we can make any decision and we have these expectations on any business that we're dealing with that you're going to be able to to an agent we're dealing with because we have a problem. You're going to be able to identify my problem right away in whatever channel it is that I want to communicate with you. And I have this expectation that whatever, I want it to be as easy as, you know, downloading something on Netflix. So in terms of the consumer influence, what are some of the ways in which 5.9 can help those agents really become empowered decision makers and help the businesses be able to have the content that they can in real time distribute through the appropriate channel? Right, well and that's a great question because there's nothing more important, I should say nothing more frustrating for a consumer who contacts a business and has to go through an IVR which we've all done. It's not a pleasant experience. We're oftentimes trying to input information first so the company can identify who we are. Second to derive intent, why are we contacting them? And third, now that the company knows why we're contacting them, how they can find and locate and route us to the most appropriate resource to handle that transaction. And with AI coming, it can allow us to very quickly identify the caller, ask them why they're calling and through that natural language understanding we can then derive why they're calling and not only distribute the call to the right agent but as I mentioned earlier, be able to actually provide the pertinent data that'll help them interact with the consumer. So as consumer expectations continue to rise and they expect to not have to give information more than once, regardless of the channel, it puts the onus on us as technology solution providers to build the solutions that will accomplish just that. Yeah, Dan, I'm wondering if you could help us peel the onion a little bit when you talk about the opportunity for growth. We know where cloud adoption is still a little bit more heavy here in North America so bring us global, you know, Five Nine is a global company but what's the international opportunity there? So great, we've had small European teams and Latin America teams for several years now. In fact, we set up our data centers in Europe with a fully geographic redundant solution and it's been hardened. We have over a hundred customers now on our European data centers and so we're now in the mode of scale and execution. It's very critical in this space to establish presence and get reference ability within a region and then scale it. And that's the same thing we did here in the US and we're doing the same thing now in Europe and Latin America. So that's a big area for our expansion needs for 2019. We're also seeing an area along with the large systems integrators. The global companies like Deloitte and also with PWC, EY, Accenture, IBM, being able to really leverage what they have is a lot of account control and they're looked at as trusted advisors to come in and help companies go through that digital transformation which includes so much more than just contact center but we're a critical element. And so what we've done is we've worked very closely with them to make sure that we can participate in that transformation and they've been wonderful about introducing us into domestic customers but many global customers in nature. Yeah, I love that you brought up the digital transformation. When we talk to companies, data is so important to what they're doing is at the center of that digital transformation. Data plays a pretty important role in the contact centers. We've talked to Jonathan yesterday about some of the future of AI that's there. When you talk about your field and your engagement with your customers, where does contact center fit into some of those big themes and big transformations that they're doing? Yeah, so data is critical because it's, hey, how it was mentioned yesterday by Jonathan, it's really what's going to allow us to teach the machine learning to be so much more accurate. You've got to have millions of conversations in order to do that effectively. The other is for our customers and potential customers. Well, the time is now to move to the cloud so that when the applications that we're doing POCs with and we're testing the different use cases, when those become relevant and prevalent within production environments, the first step is you need to be in the cloud already. And the next step is start recording your data today. So if you're recording calls and you're flushing those calls or you're not saving them, the key is that's valuable data and can create valuable insights to what the conversations are happening between your agents and your customers. Today, many of our customers record all their calls and they put them in a vault and about one to 2% get listened to again and they're getting listened to, not for the content, but for training purposes. And we would argue that there's so much valuable content in there that if it can be taken, transcribed, organized, filtered and then brought back to the business, there's many insights that can be driven because of that. One example is if you take data from a conversation and you're able to transcribe it, the system can have the intelligence to go in and mine for topics. What are the key elements that this conversation just had? And take that information and disposition a call. So today, many organizations have their agents do wrap up on the keyboard and type in notes about what occurred in a call. Sometimes those notes are accurate, sometimes they're not. Same with dispositioning, I may have a pull down menu and disposition a call. It may be accurate, oftentimes it's not. With the technology that's available to us today, we can auto-disposition if you will or let the system dispossession the call, let the system put in the relevant notes and let the agent move on to their next call. The key there is tomorrow when I call back, if Lisa answers my call, Lisa can say, oh great, I see you talked to Stu yesterday for 20 minutes and you talked about X, Y and Z. Is that why you're calling? A much more personalized conversation. So since customers are going to these Great Lakes to record and store these conversations and as you're saying there's so much value, they're way besides training, what are some of the barriers that you're finding that they need help getting over to actually start mining that data to dramatically improve their competitive advantage, reduce churn, increase CLV, how do you help them get over that? All right, we have to invest here. Yeah, great, some of the barriers historically have been just the sheer accuracy. There's been speech to text technologies and algorithms available in the market for many years. They just haven't had the accuracy rate of that of a human. So we've always relied on the humans to really extract the detail and be able to transcribe. The trouble is going from an active conversation to transcribing what I really just heard are a lot gets lost in that translation as well. And so with human levels of accuracy of the new technologies coming from companies like Google and others to be able to transcribe that information, then we need to then apply the NLU to that same text. And so those historically have been the challenges. Now that we're there with the technology, it becomes the companies like us to be able to apply that technology in a way that's fitting for the customer. Yeah, so Dan, I expect you're meeting with a lot of customers at a show like this. And just in your job, you talk to a lot of customers. When we've been talking to many of your partners here at the show, we hear about if only we can get greater adoption, we need to help people train up, we need to help them get over the barrier of learning something new. Is that one of the main challenges you hear from your users or are there anything else that's kind of rising up as the biggest challenges that your customers face today? Yeah, no, from a distribution standpoint and channels perspective, we have lots of channels that are embracing 5.9 and bringing, for the first time in many cases, a cloud solution to their customers. Historically, that's been met with mixed results because they felt like, hey, there's a large CapEx solution that I can sell or I can go on a subscription basis and I don't see that same revenue for many years to come. And so we're finding that that channel is really opening up nicely for us. And that goes from everything from a regional var that may have been providing and selling the premises-based solutions to the large global CDWs of the world that have global reach and global scale. And then of course, like I mentioned earlier, the SIs like Deloitte and Accenture and those that have strategic value that they bring to their clients. So we're seeing it hit on many different cylinders to help fuel our expansion. And that's what's really what we're looking forward to go from the 250 million to 500 million to a billion. Those are the types of channels that will help us scale much more effectively. Yeah, the last thing I wanted to ask about is your cloud-based solution. But my understanding is you still treat this, it's white glove, every customer you're engaging there. It's not some hands-off relationship there. You talk a little bit about that differentiation from 5.9. Yes, that's an excellent point. And it's something that I brought over from my previous experience of selling into larger enterprises. We said, you know, there's this misnomer about, oh, if it's in the cloud, it's off the shelf and it's not as customizable. That's nothing to be further from the truth, for one. We have to, all of our enterprise customers have a different deployment and a different effective implementation of our solution. And having built out 300 REST-based APIs, we give tremendous flexibility and allow our customers to get very creative on how they customize it. Whether that be for integrating tobacco office data systems, building their own UIs or dashboards that are in the look and feel that they want, there's a variety of different ways that they can leverage and customize the product. So it's important for us to have a solution that allows that flexibility and it allows customers to move to the cloud and yet still have that much greater flexibility than they had with premises systems. And that's come about over the last several years. Okay Dan, last question, let's bring it home. You're on the road all the time, you talk with a ton of customers. Give us one by name, if you can, or industry that really epitomizes the breadth and the strength that 5.9 and your channel partners can deliver. Yeah, so, and getting back, and I'll touch on the channel partners first. The channel partners element of them being able to recognize, the first step we want for them is to leverage and empower them to recognize a cloud offering or an application that might be a fit for 5.9. And then we're now in the process of enabling them, not only on the pre-sale side, but on the post-sale side to be able to leverage their expertise from a services perspective. So when you look at customers that really want to take that and go to the next level, a lot of them have been brought to us by, I'll use Deloitte as the example. When Deloitte first brought us into Lilly, they were able to bring us in and help Lilly transform their global centers over to 5.9. And they're taking out and migrating their premises-based solutions over the last three years, over to 5.9. And it has to do with the program management and the strategic nature in which Deloitte helps them time those projects and the technology that 5.9 brings to the table to allow us to eventually take on their entire enterprise and move it over. Wow, Dan, thank you so much for sharing all of this great excitement about what you're doing at 5.9 and how you're really helping to move the business forward. Stu and I appreciate your time. Excellent, thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. Great to be here. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.