from New York City it's the cube covering welcome to the new edge brought to you by pensando systems hey welcome back here ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we are in downtown Manhattan at the top of goldman sachs it was a beautiful day now the clouds coming in but that's appropriate because we're talking about cloud we're talking about edge and the launch of a brand new company is pensando and their event it's called welcome to the new edge and we're happy to have since we're goldman the guys who have the money we're barry Eggers a founding partner of Lightspeed ventures and randy pond the CFO a pensando gentlemen welcome thank you thank you so Barry let's start with you you think you were involved at this early on why did you get involved what what kind of sparked your interest we got involved in this round and the reason we got involved were mainly because we've worked with this team before at Cisco we know they're fantastic they're probably the most prolific team and the enterprise and they're going after a big opportunity so we were pleased when the company said hey you guys want to work with us on this as a financial investor and we did some diligence and dug in and found you know everything to our liking and jump right in didn't anybody tell them this startup is a young man's game they mixed up the twenty-something I think yeah they sort of turned the startup on its head if you will no pun intended that's going right yeah yeah and Randy you've joined him a CFO you've known them for a while I mean what is it about this group of people that execute kind of forward-looking transformation transformational technologies time and time again that's not a very common trait it's a it's a great question so you know the key for these guys have been well they've been together since the 80s so Mario look and primitive this is the 80s I work with them at their previous startup before Christian two ladies and they're the combination of their skills are phenomenal together so you know one of them has some of the vision of where they want to go the second guy is a substantive sort of engineer takes it from concept first drawing and then the Prem takes over the execution perspective and then drives this thing and they've really been incredible together and then we added Sony at crescendo as a as a product marketing person and she's really stepped up and become integral part on the team so they work together so well it just makes a huge difference yeah it's it's it's amazing that that a that they keep doing it and B that they want to keep doing it right because they've got a few bucks in the bank and they don't really need to do it but still to take on a big challenge and then to keep it under wraps for two and a half years that's pretty pretty amazing so curious Barry from your point of view venture investing you guys kind of see the future you get pitched by smart people all day when you looked at John Chambers kind of conversation of these ten-year kind of big cycles you know what did you think of that how do you guys kind of slice and dice your opportunities and looking at these big Nick's yeah going back going back to the team a little bit they've been pretty good at identifying a lot of these cycles they brought us land switching a long time ago with crescendo they sort of redefined the data center several times and so there's another opportunity what's driving this opportunity really is the fact that explosion of applications in the network and of course east-west traffic in the network so networks were more designed north-south and they're slowly becoming more east-west but because the applications are closer to the edge and networks today mostly provide services in the core the idea for pensando is well why don't we bring the service deliver the services closer to the applications improve performance better security and better monitoring yeah and then just the just the hyper acceleration of you know the amount of data the amount of applications and then this age-old it's we're going to use the data to the computer do you move the compute to the data now the answer is yes all the above so you got some money to work with we do you got a round that he could be around you guys are closing the C round so I think 180 people approximately I think somebody told me close enough so as you put some of this capital to work what are some of your priorities going forward so we will continue to hire both in the engineering side but more importantly now we're hiring in sales and service we've been waiting for the product quite frankly so we've just got our first few sales guys hired we've got a pretty aggressive ramp especially with the HP relationship to put people out into the field we've hired a couple guys in New York will continue to hire at the sales team we're ramping the supply chain and we've got a relative complicated supply chain model but that has to react now that we're going to market all that might be pretty used to do that we're changing facilities we need to grow we're sort of cramped in a one-story building open up one floor of a building right now so the money is going to be used sort of critically to really scale the business down they can go to market okay but a pretty impressive list of both partners and customers on launch day you don't see Goldman HPE Equinix I think it was quite a slide some of that is the uniqueness of the way we went to market and did the original due diligence on the product and bringing customers in early and then converting them to investors you end up with a customer investment model so they stayed with us Goldman's been through all three rounds we've been about HP and last model we had NetApp has been um two rounds now so we've we've continued to develop as a business with this small core group of customers and investors that we could try to expand every time we move to the next round and as Barry said earlier this is the first time we had a traditional financial investor in our rounds the rest of them have all been customers they've been friends and family for the most part did you join the board too right I did yeah so what are you what are you excited about what what do you see is I mean just clearly your side you invested but is there something just extra special here you know react chambers put in a 10-year 10-year cycle yeah we've talked about it I mean I'm excited to work with the team right there best-in-class working closely with John again is a lot of fun a chance to not exhaust yeah yeah you know a chance to read redefine the data center and be part of the next way even as a VC you love waves and build my Connick company right and I think we have a real opportunity in front of us it it takes a lot of money to do this and do it right and I think we have the team that proven they can execute on this kind of opportunities from I'm excited to see what the next five years hold for this company good well it was funny John teased him a little bit about you know all the M&A stuff that he was famous for at Cisco he's like I don't do that anymore now I'm an investor I want IPOs all the way what's all 18 thinks it is 18 companies in his portfolio their routes they're going to IPO all the way yeah that's that's a good point actually this team has been prolific and they've delivered products that have generated fifty billion dollars and any walk into any data center in the world you're gonna see a product this team has built however this team has not taken a company public so that's really the opportunity I think that's what excites them Randy's here it's why Jon's here that's why I'm here we want to build a company that can be an independent company be a lasting leader in a new category yeah so last word Randy for you for people that aren't familiar with the team that aren't familiar with with with what they've done what would you tell them about why you came to this opportunity and why you're excited about it well this there is no higher quality engineering team in the world didn't these people so it's to get re-engaged with them again with an entirely new concept that's catching a transition and the market was just too good an opportunity to pass I mean I had retired for 15 months and I came out of retirement to join this team much to the chagrin of my wife but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity high caliber talent it's um every day is is interesting I have to say well thanks for for sharing the story with us and and congratulations on a great day and in a terrific event thank you thank you very much all right he's berry he's Randy I'm Jeff you're watching the cube from the top of goldman sachs in Manhattan thanks for watching we'll see you next time

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hello from Orlando and Lisa Martin with Student A Man. We are in the five nine booth at Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. We're excited to welcome back to the cube of one of our alumni, Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and Head of a Eye of five nine. Jonathan. Thanks so much for joining Stew and me on the program on Day one of this big event. >> My absolute pleasure. I'm super excited to be here and super excited talk about my favorite topic, so love to be >> so. This event is has been around for a long time. Twenty eight twenty nine years evolving from PBX to voice con enterprise Connect. You've been to this event about the last ten years or so, least your perspective, and I know you're new at five a. M. But your perspective on the evolution of not just the contact center but customer experience and really thiss changing landscape of how enterprises and people want to communicate with each other. >> Yeah, well, I mean, it's been funny to sort of watch this through this technology. Evolution that manifested the show and in the market for a long time was about hardware by big, bulky iron and we used to have the petting, the hardware, petting zoos, we call it. You have racks of equipment. You could go look at this >> blinky lights and >> cables, you know. And then it moved to software on. We saw that here and now we're deep into the software is a service, as cloud based delivery models and actually a bunch of ways were coming to the tail end of that into this aye aye era. And that's what's all the hotness, and you see tons of that. Almost everyone's put some kind of a eye logo, our branding on their stuff, and there's there is some real meat to it, but but that sort of this interesting evolution and on its in its infancy in the Contact Center. And that's what's sort of exciting about it. >> So let's dig into that a little bit, because a CZ Lisa mentioned you've worked for a couple of the other companies that have big boost here at the show. We've talked about intelligence back in the call center days. Oh, yeah, but, you know, tell us what's different about the Aye aye data. The center of everything is something that way. Definitely believe in something that we hear all over the industry in the cloud shows an A I and everything. Why is this so exciting? What really brought you five nine and gets you've got a storied career? You know what? Why here? Why now? >> What is the technology is finally ready. I mean, technologies like speech recognition. And we've been the industry has been working on that for decades. And it was only in the last five years or so with the sort of creation of practical deep learning that the tech finally got good enough. And and that was because of new algorithms, New date, you know, massive data sets, great hardware that all made it possible. And so that sort of opened up the avenues. And that's why we're seeing products like Alexa and Cirie take off. Is the tech is finally gotten good enough. But what hasn't happened? Yes, it hasn't shown up in the workplace, and that's sort of what's really exciting to me is to take these technologies that have become so pervasive in the consumer world and use them to really re imagine how a lot of these enterprise products work. That's why I came to five nine came to find time to do that. To do that for five nine to do that for the industry. >> So you had a session this morning. Five surprising reasons why a business should move their contact center to the cloud. And we know cost is not the number one. Talk to us about some of those key imperatives that an enterprise in any industry really needs to be able to take advantage of by moving to cloud >> right, so a cost was a unsurprising reasons. So what I did in my session was I said, all right. Five. Unsurprising. Here's ten. Here's ten obvious reasons. So I went through those and cost is one of them. But I know what's surprising. There's a couple of the big ones. Story, really is that if you go to a truce as player, they have lots of customers, and they can actually aggregate data software capabilities across those customers and do things that are impossible on premise. So the two of them, for example, are better reliability. Often people like what you know. I want to go to the cloud. I'm worried about reliability. Well, if you dig into it. You can see that once the technology is matured, the reliability can be much better than it is on premise. Because of the complexity that you could build. Same with security, often viewed is wait. It's more secure in promise. Actually, if you look at what you can do in the cloud, you can spend a lot more money on security and advertise that cost over multiple customers. And then, of course, there's a I, and that's about getting access to training data, but not just training data from one company, but using it across multiple companies to make the I work better for everybody. So those were three the big ones. >> So when you talk about that kind of learning, how do you make sure that there's proper firewalls is, you know, is five nine going to be able to say, Okay, we can take care of everything. But wait, I don't know what my competitors on this I don't want them getting advantage based on you know what my company have. How do you balance? You know, there's the security issues. There's, you know, personal information issues, and they're, you know, competitive dynamics, which you know, is a talking point in the cloud. These absolutely. I mean, >> so that's a That's a paramount consideration to design of this whole thing. So it starts with a basic level of like, opted, like we're just, you know, we can't do this, and we can't use your data to train a model that shared unless you want it. And generally it's a given get like, Oh, you want access to the shared model, then you you provide training data for it. If you don't, you can use a custom one, but it won't be as accurate. But then you don't show your day. That's your choice. So give the customer the option and give them something in return for their data. And, of course, there's other parts of it, like, Well, you know, almost all the time, people aren't actually like looking at your data, its dues to train. These model's ideally without human in the loop having to do that. And so there's other privacy considerations baked in that it's that makes it feel that gives a customer comfort that they're they're able to do this >> without trust is critical, right? We talk about it stew and ideo and the Cuban every show. But that's really essential because, as we know is consumers, we're more and more and more empowered. These days, there were transacting something through chatter, video or Alexa or we're checking on. The status of a mortgage is something We have so much information. They also are very demanding. You want to have this conversation with a business regardless of the channel, and I want them to know what I'm what my issue is so that it can be addressed and resolved quickly. But I also want to make sure that what you're doing is not, you know, in the issue of privacy that we've all faced recently that it's done in a way where this business can actually foster a trusting relationship with me is like, >> Yeah, so the trust goes on many levels, one of which the most important to us is our customers have to trust us, and that's the only thing that gives trust his time. You know, you have to be invested for a long time, and so we've really focused on building this longtime customer trust with our reliability, with our high touch with our customers, and that gets us That's really just what gives us permission to even start to do these things. The other thing to to touch on what you said is that end users contact the contact center. That's one of the areas were actually there is already in the user expectation that my call is being recorded, that what I say can be used for training purposes. So one of the reasons I got into Contact Center was that the privacy issues are much more readily addressed in the contacts and space and other areas where you might be interested to apply this type of technology. I mean, we're talking about having a eyes that are listening in on calls and analyzing what you say. If I were to do that for a regular phone call between me and my friend like people be totally spooked like there's no expectation that that happens. There is an expectation on the contact center, so that's a great place to build and grow these technologies. >> Yeah, I love that because, right, those of us that have, you know, personal assistant at home there's almost an expectation that they're living listening in a little bit. Everybody's had the weight I was talking about that with someone not even on the phone, and all of a sudden I'm getting ads for that. That's not right. So question I have for you, you hired your first data scientist in the group. And one of things we look at is we now have this, you know, great access to data. One of the biggest challenges is okay, I can get the answers if I know the right questions to ask, What are some of the early areas that you're poking at? Any early use cases that you can share as to, you know, where we where we cease? Um, how did you >> do that? One of the first things we're looking at is what I'm calling cross customer analytics. So analytics is old news. Everyone's had that for a while. But what the cloud does is it gives a provider like us date across multiple customers. Now what we can't do is share one customer state is with another. That's a total nut. It's not what I'm talking about. But aggregates are interesting. So, for example, would be intrigued to know this is my first call resolution rate. How does that compare to similarly sized contact centers in my geography right, And that's something where we can produce an aggregate that has total anonymous ation. So no privacy issues, and it gives a customer this piece of insight that they have never, ever had before. Never, and the only way you could do it with enough privacy. Seven of data to produce a useful AGR ee it, and therefore it can only be done at the larger cloud contact centers and thus five nine, as one of the market leaders were wear having enough data to produce this kind of information. So this was an immediate, frankly fairly low hanging piece of fruit. We've started to dive into no product announcements. It's just just looking at data to see what comes out and see if there's interesting meet there. But it's a kind of insights. I'm really excited about >> it. I love that because people are always like, Oh, wait, I need to measure it. But sometimes numbers alone don't tell me anything. You gotta put that into context for me, right? What are my peers? What? One of my industry. You know, what other stuff do I have there? Otherwise, you know, numbers are just numbers. >> Numbers are just numbers. You don't really know how you're doing. You're like a little island, like, you know, your contact center is doing, but is that good? You have no idea. And we'LL be able to unlock that overtime. So very excited about that. >> Yeah. Sorry, Stuart, You guys have about five billion recorded customer conversations, so you can I can think of the massive amount of competitive advantage that's in there. But you also brought out something that I hadn't considered before. And that is whether I'm, you know, interacting with the business because I haven't issue to resolve with my Internet or something. And you're right. We do have this expectation that the call's going to be recorded, but I never think about it is this is actually something it's gonna help me down the line or the fifty other people that aren't calling in. So I thought your comment on privacy being kind of more advanced in the context of her was was point. It was very interesting and not something that I was aware. >> Yeah, it >> has to be right >> exactly. There's there's an expectation that this is what this conversation is about and and there's lots of tools in place for dealing with today. Already with credit card numbers and phone numbers, which do get communicated between a user and the comics in URGENT there's lots of you know, tak and precedent about how to read, act and extract and again all in the contacts and are nowhere else really does that technology exists. So >> yeah, so Jonathan, take us inside the life of the agent, so we know when we're from call centre to Contact Center. It really brought in the role a little bit when I've got a eye in there is their new skill sets. We need tohave. You know, we always talk about, you know, if if you're doing the same thing you were doing five years ago, chances are you might need to be looking for a new job, because by so fast, so in the context center, you know what, What? What is the life of the agent likely to go through over the next couple of years? >> So this is an interesting debate in the lemon, the industry, and there's sort of two thought camps in this one thought camp is the role of A I is to replace the agent. And this, frankly, is fairly traditional thinking. We use terms like Deflection, right, like we want to deflect the call from an agent means we don't want you to connect to a human being or containment, right? How successful were we keeping the call in the I. V. R. And a customer never got to an agent like these air industry terms, and they were. And people view a I is like helping those things. There's a different camp of which you can tell I'm sort of in, which is like, No, no, no, that's sort of the traditional way of thinking about it. And of course, we're gonna have voice spots and I V R is. But really, the question is, how do we deliver the best customer experience possible? That should actually be the guide post, and what's funny is in this industry we know what the best customer experiences. It's that you pick up the phone, you call the comic center. You didn't wait one second. You went right to an agent. They were an expert. They knew exactly what to do. They fixed their problem in twenty seconds, you were done. That's the best experience. The problem is, is no one can afford to deliver that experience today. Well, that's where technology could help. So for me, the central question is, how do we use a >> eye >> to label us to make it cost effective to deliver that experience all the time and that does have an impact on the agents. And it's going to be through assistance technologies that allow the agents to be guided in their interactions and allowing them to be experts quicker and to learn from the best experts in the contact center and change the way they think about training and access to data knowledge. It's going to be a pretty profound change, but it never takes the human out of the loop people. When you pick up the phone to call that Connick Center, it's because you actually want to talk to a person and that human touch, that empathy that you know, someone just tow, you know, vent at a little bit that matters, and we're nowhere anywhere near having an A. I provide that if ever so that's what's going to change >> humans and machines or Jonathan, Thank you so much for stopping by. The Cuban wedding was with me about what's happening at five nine. Contact Centerist Service and the tremendous advantage that data could bring two organizations. >> My pleasure. Thank >> you. Thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin was stewed Minutemen on the program Today Live from Orlando at Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen stew and I will be right back after a short break.