 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio and happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for a long time but actually first time on the program also a Boston area native, I believe, Jim. And so it's Jim Sullivan who's the CEO of NWN. Jim, thanks so much for joining us. Stu, it's great to be here. I'm watching you guys forever and first time and happy to be here. So we've got a lot of shared history. We both, we overlapped a little bit at a company that some people might remember was EMC before it was the largest acquisition in tech history. You've worked for a number of companies. We've covered here on theCUBE, XIV, Actifio and the like. So tell us first, NWN, it's not a company that the vast majority of people are going to know of but good-sized company, been around for a while, Waltham-based, tell us a little bit about what brought you to NWN. Thanks, Stu, yeah. NWN is a solution service provider. Been around 10 years, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues, 1,300 customers and a lot of really incredible platform offering, service offerings. And so I was really excited to be able to kind of get involved with the company and begin to look at what we could do for the industry and for customers. All right. You talk about an area that's transforming greatly. I mean, tech in general, we say that the only constant industry is change. When you talk about services, you talk about platforms, that means a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe explain a little bit the spaces that NWN plays in and where some of the core capabilities of the company are. Sure. If you look at, as you know this, a lot of everything for digital transformation is around the end user experience. So we all want to have great access to voice, video, clean network, the ability to kind of have this great experience to collaborate with customers. So NWN, really the core offerings, unified communications, which has really always been a core of the company, the networks underpinning those communications along with a contact center, collaboration, security. And so security really wraps around everything. And then those are the core areas where we are, but the core IP of the company is the platform that can manage all those environments as a self-service function that the customers use or that our contact center teams can kind of run. Okay. So when I hear the solutions that you're talking about, the thing that comes kind of front and center in the industry that I've been hearing about, it's the CX, it's the customer experience, what is the ultimate end users? How are they interacting with? As well as the employees themselves, if you've got people at the contact centers that are running things, how are you making their jobs easier? So how does that play into what you're seeing in the market and how NWN delivers offerings in that space? So everything's really tied together, whether you have a device, a phone system, everything's going to be tied into the network and required really high security. So the management platform that we have allows customers to have that ability to provision in a real secure fashion, a device that we can kind of deliver and manage the right phone systems that we can also deliver and manage all tied into a really secure network and it can be anywhere they want. It can be private cloud, hybrid cloud or hosted cloud is how we deliver it today. Yeah, there's the cloud discussion that's going on right now. I was at Enterprise Connect early this year and everything seemed to be cloud-enabled and AI-infused underneath. From a customer standpoint, they can get a little bit overwhelmed with some of the jargon that gets thrown out there. So help explain a little bit what solutions, what is NWN build, how does it fit in with kind of the big tech companies that they probably have relationships with and has been part of the channel for many of these products. Talk a little bit about that mix. Overall, we're going to deliver a solution for the customer in those areas, right? So in a unified communications area or a network area in security. And the solution is going to be required, some hardware, a lot of services, which is our people and then most importantly, this management platform which is going to be the management capability, the business analytics, the knowledge center that kind of pull off from everybody, right? So our focus is really delivering the solution, delivering it kind of a solution as a service. So the customer has the ability that it's not outsourcing, it's not managed services, but we're going to be running the service, but they have the ability to self-provision, interact with pulling all their own analytics, all their own data in their own environment. So it's a much more interactive relationship than kind of the old school managed services of the past. Yeah, no, I like that term solutions as a service because we learned the failings of just pure outsourcing. It was like, oh, can I get my mess for less? Well, no, no, you don't want your mess. What customers need is they need to be able to deploy something today. And as the business changes, adjust that and you can't have something that you have to throw over the wall and say, oh, hey, can you do this? Oh yeah, we'll get back to you in six months maybe and here's your new bill and how that changes. In the cloud era, I need to be able to deploy something today and stay flexible to be able to take advantage of new technologies, new innovations as they come along. How do your offerings help customers stay current and drive that innovation adoption? Right, so a huge part of, and we talk about this in a lot of industries, particularly in our old kind of infrastructure days, and that everything becoming more software defined is really everywhere or cloud offerings really everywhere. And with software, these changes are happening so fast. So the customer gets an environment that's stable and secure, deployed and managed by us. But as changes happen, our team and our kind of best practices capabilities allows to interact with their end users. So you kind of drive the adoption, which a lot of time it's marketing and training and making sure the new practices sort of happen because the efficiencies gained are huge. That's sort of one. And then two is it's beginning to get adopted, you're beginning to kind of roll that out across the entire enterprise. So the customer gets that end user experience which it helps with employee retention, really helps with business ROI. And ultimately the investments that they made are now being used and they're getting what they want. So it might be excellent line quality with great business analytics in a secure environment. But it goes back down to, is the network being utilized, all the software capabilities being deployed and managed and really what's the business outcome for the customer. So this world is very much less speeds and feeds or technology or all of that versus okay, where's the customer stand today and where do they want to bring the business to and what business outcomes they look into drive. The adoption services ensures that they get the business outcomes. All right, Jim, what industries, what geographies gives a little bit of kind of the scope and breadth of your team? Right, so it's 1300 customers. More than half the customers are really large enterprises, companies like Eversource. The other half of the business is Sled, state, local education. So Yale University, really big customer, state of California, we manage over 200,000 endpoints over 400 agencies. So really some huge scale, but it really maps to a great balance in the business of Sled and enterprise accounts. And you talked about cloud, do you have some of your own data centers? How do you play with some of the public cloud and customer environments? What's kind of that mix and what do you own? Yeah, so today, customers want to have like, I don't think they quite care, but they want to have fast deployments, really agile environments, consistent costs, really effective. And so for us, we able to provide that because we can provide private cloud on-prem in their environments. We can service any public cloud for these deployments. And we also have three data centers where we can provide a cloud solution for them or a hybrid cloud solution, really mapping, particularly in the enterprise accounts, as we know, they're beginning to learn like all public cloud, little scary, but if you get into a environment where you can have really a shop that has private clouds that delivers a hybrid cloud environment for them, much more flexible, much more agile for them. It's been a perfect scenario where the predominance of our customers are deployed in a cloud scenario, managed by us, but in their data centers and our cloud as well. Yeah, right, I think a really good point there. Customers are still sorting out where everything goes and you've got to have flexibility to say, okay, it's not one or the other, it's usually more of an and in helping customers move through what they're doing there. And for us, most of these environments are really mission critical applications that are going to be rolled out, whether it's the voice systems, which is really kind of backing the underpinning the whole customer experience. It might be devices as a service. So when we kind of talk about end user experience, it starts with really the voice, the devices, it's got to be really secure, which just becomes a kind of a compliance issue. And a lot of this is all tied together into the network. So the big differentiator for NWN is the ability that we can have the management portal that really manages all these five environments together into one seamless platform that they can pull the data from. Okay, so talked about, you've got team, you've got technology, you've got really important, you've got a lot of good customers, seems like you have a good relationship. NWN's going through a bit of a transformation here. Since you've been on board just a few months now, I've had a chance to look at the website and the biggest thing for me is, I'll tell you from the old one to the new one, the new one is simpler. I really kind of grasped much faster what NWN does. So maybe speak a little bit to what NWN of today, how that's different from how we might have thought of NWN in the past. Sure, NWN been around 10 years as NWN, but it had been acquiring companies and really has incredible employees, great customers, really loyal customers and big accounts that we're strategic to. But as we really went through kind of the assessment of what's really resonating with customers, we're able to really focus all the offerings down to these five core offerings that we've been talking about. And then really have the right investments around all the IP that we've developed and really wanted to put against those five offerings and then have the customer success teams be able to be organized around that. So the company has really focused on where 95% of the business was, the ability to really put all the wood behind the arrow for those environments and for our customers to really focus. And that's about a $50 billion market in the US. So that focus area is a big space, big opportunity for growth. And a lot of it was in the predominance of our 1300 customers, they buy one or two of these offerings from us and now the ability to really expand that. But so many of these customers are so happy, we're going to kind of take it, in those industries we're in, probably about five core industries, to really kind of take it to their peer companies and really expand it in that account-based marketing sort of kind of program. Okay, so five specific offerings, we've talked about a couple of them already, unified communications as a service, of course, we talked about contact center, we touched on devices as a service, you talked about some of the devices, security and advanced technology solutions. Maybe start with security. I think one of the most important topic being discussed, I look back at my career and 10 or 15 years ago, security was what I would call top of mind, bottom of budget. And today it is often a board level discussion, there are lots of dollars, lots of investment, lots of concern around security. So what piece is the security market that does NWN play in, what's good, what are you creating and what are you working with the ecosystem and where do we need to go in that space? So for unified communications, for the ATS practice around the supporting network and devices as a service, our security offerings are for those environments, right? And a lot of it is where there's a lot of tools deployed, but customers are really okay, once something happens, an incident happens, they have a tool that identifies something that happens, but a lot of the security will be really mapping those environments that they have a secure platform, but incident response is really where we're going to really be doubling down on. So something's happened in one of those environments, what happened and then how do you respond to that? That's going to be the big focus of what NWN has been doing and kind of what we'll invest more in, it's really incident response. Okay, great, advanced technology solutions, talk to us a little bit about that. So a lot of the core expertise in the company for years has been around the network, but then that really expanded with doing full hosted unified communications. So the company today can deploy any type of networking solutions for customers along with all the connectivity, so the bandwidth, any type of next generation networks like 5G, so all of that really tied together that you have the network, the right connectivity to kind of get to the right performance and then mapping it to the SLAs that have to go with the offerings of unified communications and devices of service, because everything's going to be intertwined and you think about any like collaboration technologies. I mean, how many times have we been in a meeting where a collaboration technology is not really working but the performance is not really there? It's not that software, it's something that was tied beneath that. So NWN can really bridge the two together to have that the right networking capability, the right connectivity, so you're getting the fast connectivity right away of what really matters to the end user experience, which is that collaboration system. Yeah, we talked a little bit about innovation. Where are your customers, what's exciting you that's helping your customers move forward and where are those areas that we're still struggling a little bit? I think back, I worked in the telecom and unified communication space back in the late 90s and by now we were supposed to have the flying cars with the ubiquitous video everywhere. And while FaceTime and some things have us there a little bit, sure I used my webcam way more than I did five or 10 years ago, but yeah, maybe speak a little bit to where we're having success and where we still need to go. Number one thing for me that I learned of one of the most unique assets that NWN has is the business analytics and data capability, right? So a lot of these environments have been deployed. We've got all these multiple different environments, but what I learned of the NWN capability is we have every piece of data of all those different environments in every customer environment. So we have the ability now with our portal and they've had the ability to do this, is really any type of function that the customer wants to learn more about in kind of an automated fashion that they can self provision this data themselves, we have the data. So it could be billing capabilities of really what groups are being billed. It could be any type of compliance. So what type of calls are being made and who's doing calls, any type of productivity for call centers of what capabilities we have. So I think the biggest thing to answer your question is, one, the NWN capability is all the business data that we have that maps across multiple industries to deliver best practices, but people have been deploying networks, deploying devices, deploying phone systems, but never really having the intelligence of what you're going to do with that data to drive the business forward. And so one, it's like, got to have the end user experience be like that's like table stakes where the end user experience is great, but now how does the business use the data of how all those systems are working together to really bring forward like, okay, what business decisions do we make to move forward in terms of what's working, what's not working, and it comes back to driving the right business outcomes. All right, so a lot of effort in the last few months, focus and execution, doing the relaunch here. Let's look forward a little bit Jim, as six or 12 months from now as we look back, what are some of the key KPIs, how for those of us on the outside, do we know that NWN is executing and meeting where you want the company to go? It's 100% about customer satisfaction, right? So it's the, as we continue to expand the offerings inside customers and then add new customers will be solely how we're going to manage the business. And that's really where it's at, as customers do upgrades with us, that the predominance of our customers long-term contracts, so as customers continue to do renewals and add new offerings and kind of new capabilities that we bring to the table. And as they tell their peer companies, which is people are really excited about being references for us, then we'll continue to add more companies into the mix and more customers and grow the 1300 to 2000. Great, and for potential customers out there, are there any of the kind of key things that you would call out that they said, oh, I've got this issue or I'm looking to do this kind of project. I want to make sure to have NWN on my shortlist. I see a couple areas, right? It's everyone, it's a $50 billion market. So everyone is dealing with unified communications issues, right, in terms of what decisions they're going to make. We're an expert in that space. The device is a service, you know, really, like we manage 200,000 endpoints with the state of California. So the device of the service is really a space that not a lot of people are in. A lot of people doing devices, but really as an end-to-end service, not really a strong kind of capability. And then the security requirements are for everybody. So I think for these solutions, then to have the right service people, the right network expertise. So that five areas is kind of the core space. And I think the biggest thing that I would say to customers is, everything's intertwined, right? So it's like you can have one person that's talking about one, but if you don't really tie it all together, that's where the challenges and the problems usually kind of come from. And we're also really sizable. Like the company's, you know, a lot of large customers, but the company's hundreds of millions of dollars with a lot of core expertise over the last 10 years. Yeah, so Jim, last thing, talk about the team and the culture, you know, talk about what you want to build on, what MDMA always has. And, you know, are you doing some hiring either here locally in the Boston area or, you know, in other geographic areas? Sure. So companies, you know, national company, so we'll be hiring sales reps, solution engineers nationally and really kind of continue to scale that out. The service desk function that we have and really the customer success team is continuing to expand and really supporting the growth of the business and really kind of driving it. So those are really the key areas. The rest of the company, the people and the culture of the company are amazing. The passion, commitment to customer success, people have been here a long time and so they have a lot of experience and a lot of kind of passion for the company. So a lot of the changes we made all came from within side, right? So everyone really rallied to be like, hey, here are the things we're good at that we want to get great at. And that's sort of been kind of the big focus. And we have really strong presence in the Carolinas all over the Northeast, California, Texas. And so we're going to really look to kind of connect all those geographies together to have one national, you know, kind of powerhouse player across the country. All right, Jim Sullivan, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the progress and look forward to watching the continued growth of NWM. You're thanks, great to be here. All right, and lots more coverage here. As always on theCUBE.net, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.