>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of where you've been hearing at the Public Sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an I V r. And, uh, you know, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age and barricade cake nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed. And as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in the endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of, right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers. But we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often, like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead, Ah, technologists to deploy at scale for the government. Canada all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know, the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's gonna be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example. In my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what, Ben? What I was trying to do sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah, I mean, so it's It's Ah, it's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes that make quick decisions that normally even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change How, How quick We can look at problems and and we reduced deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours, and I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that we know that when you were gonna come so >>Ben what this is. This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know? Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook timidly showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also, um, correctly because you know, you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental, and I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly to do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best paid plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going for it into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found the way. We certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity in the new, innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior study, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then obviously has a change leader. Our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's gonna allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, tested again and and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government can right? And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of edge of the building, blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean they're not fundamental to the way we're gonna. So our biggest, various and scariest problems, technologically and then from a business perspective, Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely re HVAC way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do on. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches, But the reality is that that's where we're heading. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they'll remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the other company, I would add is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. If you have been just about, well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better, it providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle, the client is the focus, and then we drive. Everyone's with that solution, >>you know, shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of us just looked could feel it's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been, uh, has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic if world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the >>West. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, this is the >>Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering enterprise connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to minimun joining me we are at Enterprise Connect 2019 day three graciously hosted by five nine we've had great conversations with five nine folks customers partners and we're very pleased to welcome back to the cube but the first time live the CEO of five nine Rowan trollope Bruin thank you so much for joining Stu and me today thank you Lisa thank you sue great to be here and for hosting us I was telling you before we live we've had a great three days of talking to your customers your partners this contact center is hot it's electric it's electric I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to contact center connector or central or something it's it really all the innovation I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that wow there's so much innovation happening in the contact center and they're 100% right and not just us but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now the rise of the powered consumer yeah it's incredible how this consumer behavior that's the driver absolutely and every company has to react because we have as consumers so much choice yeah we call it the experience economy it's like you know we're all and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers and when we deal with brands we want to have a great experience all around like not just when we're you know buying or when we're using or but you know from the very first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get and we're really really focused on that so that's the driver and your enterprises have realized that businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do so it's it's emerging as this like as this extraordinarily important part of every business yeah Rowen one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learn this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that were using it behind them it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer right and if I do need to call them what that experience would be like that's right we're so we think a lot about customer love what you know what does it take to get a customer to love your business and it doesn't only take having a great product it takes having a great experience with your brand and nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center it's where all the action happens right it's right at that front line it's for the moment you hear the ring when you call that company or what the website looks like and how you get answers to your questions and how do they engage with you how do they greet you what is it like do you does the person know who you are do they give you that delightful experience and you know the thing is we all know what great looks like and therefore we see when it's not great and it's just grates on us you know great great and and five nine is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses one of the things we heard - in terms of omni-channel and you know as these empowered consumers we we want a company to communicate with us so as you were saying before I know us on whatever channel that we want but one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool that that really companies of any industry saying I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone so I just was surprised to learn that that social wasn't as high on the radar yet but then other things that we're surprising to row and it's voices sexy voices back it's we have to have the humans and the empathise or some some sort of old-school things that are coming back and resurfacing is critical yeah well you know on the omni-channel things that sort of very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want in the best way possible and if we think about I keep this really simple for people think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting sometimes I would call you sometimes I would text you sometimes I might send you an email they're all different not one or the other is better or worse they're just different if I'm in line at Starbucks and I'm trying to like you know I'm not gonna call you and be that person who's like loudly yapping to Lisa on the phone I might send you a couple texts but then I walk out I jump in the car what a minute I'm gonna phone Conny on the phone the call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed so that's really the that's where we're driving towards and that's what our product offers the fancy word for that is omni-channel you know you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as you know you would like and we're able to deliver it deliver that out of the box right and we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and you know whoever the backend is that you're using so we can we partner with that and do that very effectively yeah Rowen one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening one of the panels though I was actually a little surprised to hear they're like oh how do we call kind of the hybrid environment I have my own premises I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle it's you know we're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry and sometimes they're like oh well there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of you know it's very large and part of me looks at it's like well I look at the largest technology companies in the world they're the cloud companies and they're scaling you know and they're enabling companies to scale even more I know clouds one of the main reasons you know for 5/9 success yeah in one of the regions that came over we're a market leader in cloud you know that's how we started we're born in the cloud so we don't have any on-premises technology you know think about a call center today that has phones on the desks and wires and this you know we're all about the agents login to our website at five nine com they get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the computer and so it's super lightweight there's nothing to deploy there's no closets of equipment anywhere it's all very seamless and lightweight and that's what customers really love about the solution the idea back to your point that you know there's some things are too big for the cloud that's total BS I just say to have to say it that's not true you know what I would agree with though is that we're on a journey you know we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud right and so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make and you know that frankly if all you have is a legacy on premises set of technology then that's the story you're gonna tell and it's not a it's not a lie it's true that for some companies but what's true for most companies almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer and we're essentially we're through the evangelism phase here there's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses it is you know we've got over 40 customers now paying us over a million dollars a year then that's doubled in the last two years so it's a fastest growing segment of our business is large-scale contact centers running a hundred percent on the cloud and they are loving it and another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI we've that's been a theme I know that hey I came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning but talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience yeah well I'll tell you a little story I was call center agent my first job we're talking about that earlier and you know I took a lot of calls and 8000 calls actually in a call center that I took after you take 8,000 calls your brain gets really good at predicting what the calls are about you've heard them all you're never gonna be surprised by an inbound sort of call or message or whatever you've seen it all and frankly by the time the customer says two or three words you already know where they're going but the big challenge in the context so if you got me on the phones I would know the answers to your questions after you think $8,000 you're fast you're efficient you can deliver that great experience the big problem in the context Center it's mostly a labor driven operation there's very high turnover contact center reps once they've taken out phase 8,000 calls the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center we think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem to deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents let them focus on the empathy we say let the Machine bring the mastery and let the human bring the heart because it's really important that you have the human touch in that experience right that drives that's what people crave in life they don't it's like I don't want to talk to a bot whether it's on text or the IVR as far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IV ARS nobody likes talking to a computer you want to talk to a human so our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient how we can arm them with real-time interactions and that's all about leveraging data right because the data in this case is voice so de voices the new data it's the biggest source of dart data in the enterprise customer voice actual voice like WAV files what's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time take that customer voice convert it into text real time with with high accuracy better than humans can do and we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next right that sort of superpower rep who's taken 8000 calls how do you make every rep like that we are sort of heading down a path to enable that the very first step though is you have to get to the cloud because this technology cannot be done on premises so you know you can dance around that all you want but the reality is you cannot get data at scale on-premises with the legacy approach you have to be in the cloud and that's where we are and that's where we were that's where we started well that that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week of the show and something we heard a lot from your team something that that's happening just across industries I'd love to hear a little bit about you know just future growth where you you know 5/9 had a very strong product great customer experience to begin with but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting moved down the AI path data becomes more and more important part of the story well what should we be looking at four five nine kind of the next you know 12 to 18 months yeah well I think five 9s got the best experience for our customers and you know where we're heading the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before so that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best best-in-class experience right that predictive you never wait you get someone whether it's text whether it's email whether it's chat you get a great answer you get a human touch but you also get the answer you want and whether that's inbound or outbound if its outbound it's really important that it is not only predictive but that it's anticipating what your needs are because I like to say if I have to call support like that's already a problem why am i calling you you know with IOT and with instrumentation going on and with the ability to gather data part of what you should be of doing every business should be doing is anticipating what their customers are gonna need and sharing that information across their company and a contact center is really where that all comes together to be able to say look we know this customers are already having a problem with this like let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them we should be calling them to figure out how do we can make that experience better so really honing and optimizing and anticipating your users needs is sort of the other side of this so it's both the inbound case I talked about but also that outbound case and and that that proactive engagement that that I think every end user really would like in an effective way five nine has about five billion recorded conversations customer conversations a year you have billion minutes a year five billion minutes thank you a year tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dirk data and becoming predictive talk to us about that as a competitive advantage yeah the very first step is lighting that data up we're lighting it up now with machine learning we signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech-to-text in a secure way in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data so very very secure obviously our our name is 5/9 we're known as the trusted you know brand in this industry five nines of reliability is what we're all about so this is for our customers is when it comes to the next step it's really okay take that voice data which is not very useful like you can have agent spot check or supervisors listen in on calls but that doesn't scale as I pointed out earlier the more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text let's then take that text and it becomes computable you can summarize it we can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls you can they can quickly scan down and see what's happened also to be predictive hey we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time we can actually go predict what they might you know what what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set so there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer from from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data so we're turning voice into the next digital channel and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business yeah Ron one of the interesting things is if you look around this at this show floor you've got a lot of partnerships but there's some of the overlaps and blurring the lines between some of the environments we had carfax on good customer of yours started out with the the contact center agents but you know they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound not a traditional contact center you're partnering with marketing cloud and unified communications but you know some of those lines blur out quite a bit so what is it call - yeah a contact center that the lines of that are blurring you know the traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years of 30 years ago was like you know rows of cubes people on headsets like that's mostly what people think about but increasingly some of our largest customers it's nurse practitioners it's doctors it's other experts that are interacting with their customers it's education consultants and specialists these are all customers of ours that are using our platform today you know I think about 10 years ago I'll give you an example of this transition 10 years ago I my wife Steph was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do cuz it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two years and then eventually had to do something about it she didn't give up she's very persistent and so I ran down to Home Depot and I got some like rack things that I could bring home and I organized all my junk so fast forward to a year ago and we've moved we now live in San Francisco and Steph's on me again about the same thing consistent and I ignore her for a while and I go out all right all right I'll get it done so what do I do I think about well last time I did this I got a rack how am I gonna get a rack I went on my phone and I searched garage organizing systems and I find a few companies and I go under their websites and I do a little bit of self-service likes discovery and learning about their products I'm an empowered consumer at this point right I find three different companies I call one of them because like this is a big purchase I don't want this huge thing to show up steal blah blah blah my house if it's the wrong thing I guess gonna get ahold of someone I talked to them I have a good experience I hang up my called one other one just to kind of compare it I compared the two then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep so ten years ago let me give you the punchline here ten years ago one trip to brick and mortar zero calls to the call center ten years later now zero trips to brick and mortar two calls to a call center and those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale that's the experience economy in action and that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future and they will look very different than how they look today it's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact centre agent is I wouldn't have thought of it as you're right these are nurse practitioners it's so diverse speaking of diversity I know that five nine has several thousand customers globally one of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because woman founded company woman founded company not a tech company talk to us about how 5/9 helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid yes we did George Clooney a solid so in the case of Estee Lauder they were a they're a huge company eleven billion dollars in sales they're an amalgamation of 40 different brands very high-end skin care products and so they had a big challenge which was they bought 40 companies they did not integrate any of them so you call any one of these places there was all different contact centers they didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had we had to sort of to make that a part of the discovery process and global they're in all over the world they're in asia-pacific they're in France and Europe they're here they had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases they had independent technology contracts and almost every single one of those cases and I don't even know how many systems that were coming together but it was a lot so we engaged with them and basically provided we we help them write the RFP we help work through that process we got them on board with our software nothing to deploy nothing to install right just have your agents login we did a training and we're able to on board you know well over a thousand agents onto the platform and those were folks who were engaged across many many different businesses and some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like how fewer contracts or a better system but it's also to tie that system back into the business so you know they have a some products that are they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever gift bags and you know they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products so they encourage them to call in to order more or to find out more about their products and so on they don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I you know would use maybe you would go to the VIPs but now it's called a regular contact center they want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure that you get the right specialist at the right time to that that customer that well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the on boardings George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that and so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time and that's about knowing the skills you know being able to route things in a complex way understanding oh this is a contact coming from an event that event has some you know some VIPs at the event we've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill this is the right person for it to go to they're really good at dealing with VIPs and you can get it to the right person at the right time so we saw it in action it was obviously great and what made us made us felt good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted Wow all that contacts Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me and also for 5/9 for graciously hosting the Q the last three days we've had a venture to hear great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year me too stay tuned stay tuned for Stu min Amman I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]

>> Welcome to the special. Keep conversation. I'm John Furrier in the Palo Alto Studios of the Cube. We're a special guest Rowan Trollope of CEO of Five9, formerly of Cisco formerly CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Thanks for joining me today. >> Great to see you, John. So let's talk about >> the future. The Contact Center. You got a new role. CEO Five9. Looks like a great opportunity. Tell us about it. >> Well, the Contact Center is really where it's at right now in the UC space on in the collaboration space. And frankly, in the digitization trend for most companies, they're realizing that the experience that they give to their customers has got to transform. You know, customers are telling them that if they don't fix the experience they deliver, they're going to leave. The business is that they're doing business with him. So I think that's, you know, it's It's really emerging as this really hot space and interesting space in a place where businesses recognize they have to spend money and do a much better job. >> One of the things that we talked about the past, certainly that you're always on the wave of cloud data. You've always had that vision in our previous conversations. Five9 Now in this contact center, kind of an old legacy old way of doing things. Voice over i p. You know, managing customer relationships. Whether it's support or outbound seems to be changed with cloud computing in the role of data. And now, machine learning and eyes really been an accelerant. Yet what's your vision over the next five years as this starts to transform and people re imagine what that's going to look like for their businesses? Because certainly customer relationships are changing. People have multiple devices here on any platform, there, there horizontally, moving around different websites, different places different on the undergo. A lot of change happening. What's your vision? There >> is a lot of change happening, and it's changed. But that's primarily driven by consumer behavior and sort of enabled by technology. So the biggest factor, in my opinion, that's affecting businesses, that you have the age of this empowered consumer. You know, ten years ago, for example, my wife stuff is you're bugging the crap out of me about fixing cleaning up my garage and so at the time, the way that I did that as I ran down to Home Depot, I looked at what they had on the shelf. I picked a, you know, a shelving system, and I brought it home, and I set it up ten years later, and this is just about a year ago. We have moved since then and, you know, the garages yet again, a mess. And I've been giving getting a hard time about it. So she's finally I said, Okay, okay, I'll organize the garage. And so what do I do this time? I go out and I get on my phone and I search for garage organizing systems, and I get lots of different forms and people talking about things and reading customer reviews and so on and so forth. I do a whole bunch of research, actually call a couple of the companies that made three different calls just to get some details about their product that I couldn't get online and ultimately ordered one. And it shows up at my house. So ten years ago, you have sort of, you know, not very empowered consumer. I took what was on the shelf. That's what I got. Ten years later, you have zero trips to retail brick and mortar. You have a very empowered consumer. Me. It has lots of options, lots of choices and three calls to a contact center that happened in the span of ten years, powered by the Internet, >> power by my mobile phone, powered >> by connectivity and so on and so forth. So any business, who's in, you know, every business essentially is dealing with this challenge and my expectation in terms of who I'm gonna do. Businesses with heavily influenced by the quality of their website, the quality of the experience that they had the quality of their community, that user reviews, they were coming back and, you know, some of them. Some of the commentary, Like, I got this thing it was missing. Some stuff I couldn't get hold of them was super hard to deal with. I'm not going to do business with that company. So what? You know, part of that transformation over the last ten, twenty, thirty years has been the empowered consumer gets to make a choice, and they don't have to do business if you don't have a great experience. So that's moving the contact center industry from being a sort of an extension of the phone system that we really don't want to think about very often into some that's really, really important for businesses, and I was seeing that left and right coming from my previous job. >> It's interesting. It's an opportunity to its challenge on one hand, for company dealing with the old way to do it, it becomes an opportunity when the user expectations and experiences impacted. That's a buying decision or relationship. Emotional decision. What is this opportunity mean for companies? Because now this now flips to the potential sellers of services and products. They have now an opportunity to take advantage of this new dynamic where users are in charge of being empowered. What's the opportunity for companies? >> So so it's two things. One, if you're a disruptive company coming out, you know any or starting up a new company and you're going after this. You can look at the user experience as part of your differentiation value proposition. I'm not only going to have a great product, but I'm gonna wrap that in the great experience. And that's the expectation today that any new company company will take a company like Square, for example, Yes, they have a beautiful little card swipe reader, and they have a, you know, nice industrial design. But that's not just what you get. You get a team behind that coming from, you know, the company that provides great support and a great experience. And when you sign up for square, the first thing you get is an email from their CEO sort of welcoming you to the community, and you see that with a lot of modern companies. Tesla's another great example where you see a really tremendous experience being around what is fundamentally a great product. Uh, and that's not something that you would see with the the incumbents. I think if you're a disrupter or new company, or you're looking at transforming an industry, then the opportunity is think about the holistic customer experience. If you're an incumbent or you've been in the business for a while and you're facing one of these sort of digital disruptors, if you want to call them that, then your opportunity is to re imagine your customer experience end to end and put some time and effort into it. You know, the reality is still, and I was in the call center thirty years ago, almost. The customers at the call centre. In most businesses, most incumbent businesses today is a call is a cost center because it's something that you sort of essentially have to deal with once this product has been sold. And it's not a place that most executives in most businesses want to go. In fact, in many cases it's been sent to other countries. Your contact center is You don't even know where it is. It's in the Philippines or it's and you know, some other country or it's in India or it's it's in a state, you know, less expensive state, which is all fine. But it's not fine that executives and companies don't want to go and see where the frontline of their business is, which is the place where they that experience meets the customer. So if you're an incumbent, you really have to think about, you know, you have to think about putting your contact center as a priority for your business and re imagining the experience and look, go walk a day in their shoes and experience what it's like. >> One of the things that we've been reporting on over the years and and you know you've been following the Cube and it's looking angle is the talk of CX or custom experience been going on for many, many years, somewhat aspirational outside of the corner cases of companies that actually specialize in, you know, differentiating on customer satisfaction and user experience. And that's obvious than you check the box there. But as as the market changes its now attainable, we're seeing that the rial actionable execution for companies to modernize what was once a call. Soon, as you pointed out, >> how do they >> do that? What's what's happening? Certainly, cloud computing helps data, and I are kind of at the table. How does a company that wants to modernize and have a real advantage and change their business business approach? What do they do? What's the What's the plan? You guys seem to be position for that. What do I do? What's the playbook? >> Go to Five9.com. No. The reality is that the first thing you have to do is really believe that this is an important aspect of delivering your business to your end consumer and and look at what's making up your competitors offer not just their product, but their offer and and sort of internalize and get the idea that OK, yes, this turns out it is important and I care about it. I'm going to go spend time on it because, look, the reality is we know how to deliver any business. You don't have to be a genius to figure out how to deliver great customer service. You know, what customers want is actually really simple. When I call you answer the phone. Don't send me through some rigmarole of IVRs and other technology hurdles. Don't hide your phone number when I want to get a hold of you make it easy for me to contact you. And when I contact you, what I want, I want someone who understands me. Who knows the problem that I have, Who's an expert who can help me and who has empathy, you know who can really connect with me and relate with me. And if there's a problem, it's not just about I'm going to solve the problem. But it's like we understand and we're sorry, you know, and we're going to make this better for you, and we're going to follow up with you, so that's a big part of what you have to-turns out doing that is not hard. You don't have to be a genius to figure out how to do it. Now. There are lots of technology companies that are out there today that make that easy. And the history of the Contact Center, essentially over the last twenty five years, has been essentially kind of stuck in the, you know, in a phone closet, somewheres with some technology that has actually hindered what smart people knew. We knew how to do this. We knew how to deliver a great experience. The problem was, you had like this legacy technology, and you had to call somebody in the data center somewhere else, and they were like, That's going to be hard. It's going to cost millions of dollars and our system doesn't support that. And so there is a technology sort of shackles that were on customer service experts and executives in businesses was like, Wow, that sounds like it's going to be expensive. It's going to take a long time now. We're in a world with the cloud where within a few clicks and a few minutes, You can deploy a contact center >> so we go to >> our side or other sites, and you can instantly have, you know, very, very quickly have a contact center that is modern that is flexible, that is, you know, has all the latest features and functionality. And so technology is no longer the hindrance that has been taken off the table. Our company was born in the cloud. There's other companies out there people can use. The bottom line is this is not really a technology problem anymore. >> So people have multiple devices and a lot of different channels of how people engaged. That's expectation on the Cust company side variety of sets of resource is that could be deployed at any given time. So you kind of have this now integrated kind of philosophy with cloud. How What does Cloud and Data? And now Aye, aye, due to the context. And how's the contact center change? Yeah. Does it look like >> that? Yes. Of the real, most important thing that has happened with the cloud computing wave is, you know, first that it made technology easy to consume. You know, it used to be really hard and expensive like we just talked about just to get technology. And then once you've got it, you were stuck with it and didn't change ever. Okay, we're kind of beyond that now with the cloud and that those were the table stakes. But something else happened when we started moving technology to the cloud that was more important. That and that was that we started collecting data, and as we started to collect data >> that >> became really interesting because of one other thing that happened, which was the revolution that happened in machine learning, and it started about ten years ago with some very, you know, big scientific breakthroughs on deep learning, more specifically, and what that deep learning approach needed was lots and lots and lots of data in order to work. It was a great scientific breakthrough, but it kind of stalled a little bit at the beginning because you didn't. There wasn't a lot of data out there that could actually you could get the benefits. Well, as companies have more, more been moving to the cloud. What that's creating his centers of data and not just data for your company, because lots of businesses don't have enough data actually to power machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms are famously data hungry. You know that there's a famous saying from, you know, a bunch of folks in the AI industry. But it's that more data is better data. You know, the more you have, the better you are. In fact, you can also say that you know if you have more data, it's better than having a great algorithm right. The more data will always win. So what the cloud has unlocked is massive amounts of data, and that data is important to actually get at the root cause of the problem of bad customer service and support, which is with that data and the breakthroughs in machine learning. And that data in our industry is customer conversations. What your customers are actually telling you, either by text or by voice or by email that information is really interesting and can be married with machine learning technology to provide automation. It's >> interesting you mentioned customer. I think that's, I think, a key point. And you know, as we look at the data world, people look at certainly from a tech perspective that supply technology to data great that could assist then things. But we tell what customers and you're in business to serve customers. That's probably most valuable data. So as you said earlier, people hide the phone Or is it that they want to shy away from engaging with customers to not support them or hope they go away? They might be indifferent of serving them. You're saying the reverse Be proactive, engaged the customer, get that data so you can iterated on that. So I get that I think that Israel innovation in terms of the direction but as you did with customers is also the human side of it. Yeah, customers want to know that there's someone on the other side. You brought your garage organizing system because that component, how is the role of humans and machines impacting this new transformation from customer center to custom contact Sent it to essentially customer center. Yeah, what is the What is that piece of human? Super important? >> Yeah, we don't see technology replacing all the humans, actually, because and this goes back to my experience in the in the contact center many years ago. And, you know, many years ago. And my observation was and I, in fact, my first job I said, you know, in between two different agents and one of them was named Dave and one was named Ken. And Ken was really warm and effusive, and he got, I remember, he used to get gifts on his desk from customers. They would send him flowers and chocolates and, you know, like their products and so on. And he could tell a customer to shut up in a nice way, and they would love him after it. I mean, it was amazing that he could do this. It was all about empathy. He didn't. He didn't actually know all the answers to all of the questions. But he created these, like, incredible fans amongst the customers. The guy to my right, Dave, he was super smart. He just had, like, as much empathy as a rock. And he could answer all the questions really fast. Okay, And I So I use that cause I would learn things from him, but customers didn't like him. And the answer, you know, what I saw in those two folks, was that you can't do one or the other. You need both And what computers, are and what machine learning specifically. But now that we're getting all this data through the cloud is is able to do is we're able to predict the answers to what customers. You know what the questions from customers will to predict those things really quickly. So that's a sort of a mastery, so machines can help with mastery. They can help with being able to answer every question instantly or know the best thing to say at it to a customer at any given time. But what machines can't do is empathy. Humans are the ones that have to bring the heart. So what we're working on at Five9 is using machines to help agents. Human agents give them mastery, and we're letting the humans then focus on what they do really well, which is bringing the heart to the customer. And that creates a a bond between a brand and a customer that is like, unbreakable. >> I think you're onto something big here because we look a digital, the impact of digital technologies And you could look at variety examples mainstream media to technology companies to any kind of industry of vertical. There's a lot lack of emotional I Q or emotional quotient, and this seems to be what people are looking at you. I'm just looking further than some of the polarization in with digital in terms of media coverage, politics or whatnot. You started to see this focus on how to bring Mohr empathy and Mohr emotional like, yeah, two systems. And I think users are responding to that. Can you comment on your reaction to that? >> Yeah, part of this starts with confusion that the contact that is rampant in the contact centre industry, which is that people don't really want to talk anymore. And, you know, this has been observed because of the fact that, you know, we have new generations entering the work force like millennials. You know, we'll have our kids out there who would prefer to text us than talkto us often. But the reality is, and we surveyed this that actually even millennials still prefer voice as the primary form of communication and and that what has happened, that is the mistake. What is the error that people made? The error that people made is assuming that no, if it were actually conflating a bad voice experience with the fact that voice is bad and that's just not true, and it's observable. Not too. We've gone and actually proven this. So So what we've sort of realised is that what you need to fix is the bad voice experience. What is that? It's like, Wait, going into an Ivy are Okay, That's frustrating. You know what's >> a G are real quick to >> find the interactive voice response. So it's the push one for this push to for that. Everybody hates everyone hates, you know, every company uses it, and it's like a stain on humanity. We need to get rid of those things because they're just awful. So you go into this tree and all that, Okay, so get rid of it. By the way, everybody, you know, five years ago said, Oh, we can fix that problem with bots. Oh, and that actually is almost worse. You know, I've been trying to use bots for the last three months. I've been doing my own little test on this and communicating, you know, using only using text and whenever I hit a But it's like the last thing I want to do is talk to a computer. I want to get to a human. So my first question now is Are you human, which is my version of push zero to get through the I v. R. Gets again to an agent. Okay, so you know, there's been a confusion about this, and when you go back to what you had said earlier, this notion that users that, you know, the empathy is what has tend to be lost. Well, turns out it's much harder to make a emotional connection on text. Then it is with voice, and people just in general are not as good at communicating that emotional content on text because they're not very good writers generally, and they don't have time, Whereas they're excellent at doing that with their voice. You know, I'm not happy verses. I'm not happy, you know, there's a huge range of emotion that commune can be communicated with the human voice, which is extremely powerful. So if we can fix the bad voice experience, take away all that crap so that when you get someone they know, you know they know who you are. It's a you know, if they understand you, they can get to the root cause of your problem very quickly. Then it turns out that the human voice is extremely useful and and we're in now entering into an era where we can use the computer to talk to humans in unique and interesting ways now that I believe is actually still a little bit further out because of a variety of reasons. But in the meantime, computers and a I can help agents master their craft and let them focus on the embassy side of >> things. So in terms of Five9, the core problem that you're solving is what. >> So we provide a flexible, easy to configure, easy to deploy, cloud based contact center. OK, and it's it's it's it's minutes or hours before you can have this technology deployed. You don't need to have a phone system. So you look at a call center that sort of from the old days, and it's like lots of phones on desks in our world. You sweep those away. You have a computer in a Web browser. You plug in a headset, your agent could be sitting anywhere in the world. They get a beautiful web UI that's deeply integrated into Sales Force or Zen desk or service. Now >> our Oracle or >> any CRM system that you have, and we give you this really, really tightly integrated end to end experience. And we just make all of that easy and it handles any kind of contact, whether it's voice or text or email, it all goes through our system. It's all in the cloud. It's really easy and it's affordable. >> And the data management is pretty straight forward. Is that going to be flexible and agile enough to use with other things as people start having different touchpoints? >> Absolutely. In fact, with our system, all your calls are recorded into the cloud, as are all of your contacts. All of that is stored securely in our servers and is accessible to you. You can. There's a whole range of APS in the contact center. You can plug in on >> top of our platform >> and including things like variant Collab Rios. You know this whole area of workforce optimization and and so on, so lots and lots of technologies are actually built on Five9. So when you, by our technology, really banged up technology platform with ah rich ecosystem of APS that plug in on top of it and where we sit really in that value chain, you know, is the core platform that delivers that delivers the data and the pipes, and we sort of provide the intelligence. Also, that runs on top of that data, and that's where we're heading >> and that's your core innovation. Pretty much get that cloud based in it up fast. Get the focus on >> that part of it, and I'd say the second part of it that's sort of product on platform. The second part is really the offer. So it turns out that if you go to most companies, the things that make their customer experience poor that they want to fix, ah, solvable through capabilities that are already available in the platforms that they generally already have. What they're missing is a partner who can help them make that happen because it turns out it's not easy. You know, we've got a very flexible platform. It's been built over more than a decade, so it's like, really rich and in features. But the question and more and more what we see our customers wanting from us is a complete offer, and that includes professional services on site support, you know, people to help you, you know, handhold walk you through that process so well, kind of go the extra mile for our customers and give them in end end solution to their problem, not just a piece of technology. Now, if just technology is what you wanted, Our technology works for businesses with two support center reps. So it's, you know, weeks scale >> all the >> way down to folks. But we also have context are running that have for thousand reps. So we run that entire that entire spectrum for the small customers. They want something easy pre configured off the shelf. Just go. Okay, There's nobody coming on site for those customers. You have four thousand reps, We've got people on site. We darken the skies with our support people and our our engineers and everyone else actually provide a complete solution to our customers. >> That's great. We'll congratulate. I think having that innovation and having the cloud approach gets it up fast, gets the value delivered. And then as they grow, you can flex it, flex with flex the size, the organization not limited. So I want to get Teo. You're doing a panel discussion. Enterprise connect coming up in Orlando That's where we first met. This has been a show that's been talking to the enterprise customers who are been evolving from voice over i. P. Integrated communications, unified communications. Though that world of voice, data and systems to now and open cloud based data A. I So should be exciting. Yeah, panel want to get I don't want to give it away, but what are you talking about? The title is why customer engagements leading the Enterprise communications conversation Give us a quick teaser. What? >> I'm going to be focused on what's coming next, and one of the big reasons that drove me to this company that's attracted some top talent in the industry is that many of us see that the era of the cloud has actually opened these golden doors to a new land, which is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that we see that solving some of the root cause problems that we talked about earlier, bad customer service and experience that have essentially been talked about for a long time but haven't been solved. That finally, the technology is actually caught up to the problem. And so our big play at Five9 is to become the world's best self learning intelligent contact center platform. And we see that the Contact Center has--is shifting from being less a contact center and more a center of customer data and that that is the key insight that that is the key and said that we had is that wow, this is a lot of really interesting data, you know? Turns out what your customers say to you. It's really, really important. And today, in almost all contact centers, almost everywhere that data goes nowhere. It goes away because it's not very useful. Most of the most of what customers they're telling you is actually voice traffic, and that sits in wave files. If you recorded at all, which many customers don't and then they're not very useful, so they get thrown away. We figured out that that information is ridiculously valuable, but it's only become valuable recently because of advances in machine learning that allow us to do speech to text reliably as good as humans. Okay, speech to text has been around for a while. It's just been really crappy. Now it's really good. And now that it's gotten really good and affordable. Every customer can take advantage of it. So because all of our customers have all of their data stored on our cloud and all calls get recorded, we can now start to translate those voice wave files into text and provide that as insight back to the customer. We signed a partnership with Google to leverage their technology to help us make sense of all of those spoken conversations and then, ultimately all of the text. So we believe the next generation of the Contact Center is going to be less about a contact center and more about a center of customer data, which can be used to drive automation and insight back into the business. That's the big transformation for the next decade in the Contact Center. >> taking the Contact center making gets a customer center. This is kind of compatible with >> Hostage Data Center. That's runner of customer data. >> I mean, it's it's really kind of in line with how dev ops change cloud computing, where you had Devon ops coming together and you're taking that concept, that ethos to the context center, You know? Look, >> um, >> I'm not sure that it's exactly like Deb ops, but I guess you could draw that correlation. I think what you do see in businesses that there's new functions >> popping up all >> the time. A recent function that's popped up his customer, uh, customer success and what his customers success. It's all about reaching out to your customer to help make them successful in the insight that led to customers successes. When you have a services business, if you engage with your customer proactively, you actually can make more money and drive higher value both for the customer and for the business. And you know, I relate this back to my first experience in business, and I remember and I was in support and we're on the twelfth floor. We had a >> whole floor of people, >> and I remember our boss came down one day and they said something really interesting. They said Every time you guys pick up the phone, we lose money. I mean, if you can believe that is that it is now. It sounds crazy, but that's what happened in America. I felt kind of bad about that was like, Wow, I don't want to answer the phone, but it's ringing all the time. So what am I going to do? Well, the answer was we hired someone, not me. But the team hired someone to hide the phone number, which is sort of logical if you're told that when you pick up the phone, you're going to lose money. What do you want to get less phone calls? Well, how are you going to do that? Well, the company's customers can't find about Guess what tons of customers did this other thing we did? Was we employment in an i. V. R. Let's try and give themselves service. So they really the motivation >> of hiding the customer experience that we were running away from the customer experience, >> that iron Iwas and this is in hindsight. I see this that right on the floor above me was it wasn't the thirteenth. It was the fourteenth floor. It was a sales floor and they were doing everything they could tow proactively reach out and contact customers who didn't want to really hear from here from the sales people. So you had this situation. We had a floor of people, my floor, which were sort of running away from customers and a floor of people they were trying to run towards customers and like we're both missing them. It was insane. And what's now transpired in businesses that people get this and go? Wow. If I can deliver a great experience, it actually increases loyalty. It increases the amount of services that my customer will get. They get more value, I get more value. We want to run way, want to run towards customers. We want to reduce the distance between a business and their customer to zero. We want that to be like this kind of connection. We want our businesses, you know, their customers, toe love them. And the way that you get that love actually often comes through the contact Center. So it's becoming much more >> strategic, connecting in, engaging with customers. We're only going >> to be powered by machine learning like you can't do this. Okay? Just by going, I mean, you could do it by hiring lots and lots of humans, but it's really expensive. OK? Does not scale. So the only answer to this problem, which we know how to solve, is toe leverage technology. And it starts in the cloud. >> Right? Great stuff. We'll see you at Enterprise Connect the Cube will be there and great degree to see you. Thanks for coming and great to see this's The Cube Conversation Special Cube comes here in Palo Alto. Grown trial of CEO of Five9. Solving the contact problem. Bring it in. Modernizing it. Running towards customers Customer engagement and big panel coming up. Enterprise connect. I'm John for here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. (upbeat techno music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here in San Francisco for Cisco Systems' inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier sitting with my co-host Peter Burris, Head of Research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jose Bogarin, Chief Innovation Officer, Altus Consulting, VIP here at Cisco DevNet Create. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So tell your story, you have a really special story of true transformation, where DevNet and being a developer in this new world order has changed things for you. >> Yeah, actually people from Cisco call it a rags to riches story. Basically I founded my company 10 years ago with my brother and a friend. And business was going good, but we were having some trouble competing with the larger Cisco partners in Costa Rica. So that's why we decided to do something else and software was the way to go. So three years ago I had the opportunity participate in the first DevNet Zone in Cisco Live in San Francisco in 2014. And that really was a turning point for my company because we actually shifted our focus to the software and software development and that really pushed us forward and really allowed us to compete with those big partners, but also expand our business to some other parts of Latin America. So now we're doing stuff also in Mexico, and doing stuff in Peru, and even thinking about coming to the States and doing some software developing here. >> You're like, taking over the world. So take us through specifically the inflection point. Obviously DevNet, you had an internal compass, you felt that, kind of the tailwind of the marketplace pretty, not obvious to everyone, but you guys saw it. What was the moment where you go wow, we're on to something with this? >> Yeah, it's probably hard to say because it's less, like, different moments. The first one I think is reading Andreessen Horowitz, >> Peter: Andreessen Horowitz? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Peter: The Venture capitalist. >> Yeah reading their blog post about softwares in the world. So that was a blog post in 2011 I think. But we read about it in maybe 2013. And we started thinking, hey, maybe the way to go is actually to do some software by ourselves and figure out if we can actually improve the Cisco solutions that we are selling right now using software. So, we basically used that and then we came to the San Francisco 2014 DevNet Zone and said, hey, now Cisco has a program around this, so maybe yeah, software is the way to go. Maybe software is the way to actually go ahead and innovate, and do some other stuff to better serve our customers. So that's when we actually went back home and doubled down around on our strategy. And started developing more software, and having more conversations with our clients that we were able to solve using Cisco technology and Cisco hardware, but also develop software around it. >> Why did customers resonate with your story? Was it because you had a unique differentiator? What specifically did you do with Cisco that made it such a high impact value proposition? >> Okay, one of the things that I really like about Cisco is they have a very robust infrastructure, but it's sometimes, or you need special integrations to really solve a business need for a customer. So a lot of customers that we had, really had maybe the hardware or the platform, for example the Cisco Contact Center, but there's a gap between having the infrastructure and really solving that business need. So when we got there and told them, hey, maybe we can have those skills, or we are building those skills in our company to bridge that gap, that really made the difference with our customers. And that's our whole business in past three or four years has really been about that basically. >> And so it gave you an opportunity to get into that market and just have good products, great! What was the biggest learnings that you've had over that journey? What's the learnings you could share with folks watching? >> Okay, the first of all that it's a complete shift in your company. If you've been selling hardware, and now developing software. It's two different worlds completely. I don't want to say it's easier to sell hardware, but it's maybe more complicated to develop software. It has to be a whole different process because when you are selling hardware, you're basically doing the design and then just buying the hardware from Cisco and then selling it to your customer. But when you're developing software you have to have your team ready, develop probably three, four, five months, or even six months in advance. And then get that solution to the customer. So it takes a while and you have to change all your business, you have to change your practice. It's difficult. I know that a lot of partners are trying to move in that way and develop more software, but to be honest it's not that easy. You have to have a lot of commitment from management to actually make it. >> But I presume you're developing software not just for the hardware in terms of management, or something like that. Are you also looking at WebEx, and TelePresence, and the full suite of Cisco products as you start thinking about how you're developing solutions for your customers? Is that kind of the direction you're taking? Obviously on top of the hardware. Is that kind of the direction you're taking? >> Yeah, we actually started more around Contact Center and then mainly around collaboration so, WebEx presence and now even Cisco Spark. That was our focus for the first maybe three years and now we're starting to do stuff around networking, like traditional networking like routers, switching, or stuff like AP Key M or CMX for the wireless part, or even Meraki gear. So we started in collaboration but now we're expanding our business to other parts within the Cisco portfolio. >> As you think about this message of how the network, which has now become programmable, so in other words you can use software to define and reconfigure, rapidly reconfigure the network, are you also then seeing yourselves working not just with the traditional network people within the companies you're selling to, but also developers in showing how the network is offering a more superior, or extending the quality of the target that they're writing to as they write software? >> Yeah, and it's quite interesting. And coming from that Contact Center side, our conversations moved from IT to the supervisors and teams supervising the Contact Center, and now going to networking we'll probably have to move the conversations from the operations team now to the development team. So when you start developing software you actually have to go to the line of business, or to teams different from that operational team that you used to talk to. >> I was going to say, that's probably one of the reasons why it becomes more complex. That the change management challenges, and a partner has to fit into those for installing a new switch, or installing a new router is one thing. But the change management practices of going in and evolving the way a Contact Center operates, and I know Costa Rica is one of the places where, at least here in the US, it serves Spanish speaking communities here in the US. That's a pretty significant challenge. There's a lot of change management things that have to happen there. To be dragged into those is not a trivial exercise, but it also points up the need for more intelligent, higher-rope, more easy to manage, more robust types of networking interfaces. Where do you see the network going as a resource for developers to hit? >> I can say that it has to become easier to program the network because right now you have a lot of technologies, but they're still not there yet. You still need a lot of network background to actually use them, and some of them are not very flexible. So those technologies need to evolve for the developers to actually use them. And I see that coming in the next few years and Cisco's made a lot of progress in that. And also what we're seeing it's that need to improve the analytics and information that you can get from the network. And again Cisco, for example, has made a lot of progress in that. >> John: Well, AppDynamics. >> Exactly. With things like AppDynamics, or for example, APIs like Data in Motion, or the whole thought computing process that they have and that needs to improve for the developers to actually start getting more use out of it. >> What's next for you now that you see DevNet Create? They're puttin' their toe in the water, doing a good job here. First inaugural event. Does this have legs, this event? Yeah, yeah, I've seen it. I wasn't there during first DevNet Zone in 2014 and I've seen the growth from 2014 to 2015 in San Diego, and then Vegas, and then Vegas this year. So I've seen that grow in the DevNet Zone. I'm completely confident that the DevNet Create is going to get bigger and bigger in the coming years because I've seen how other teams, networking teams, operational teams, like people from Data Center, traditional like computer teams, they're starting to get more interested in software development and events like this. >> So based on your first signals of the first year of DevNet, which you walked in and transformed your business, you feel a similar vibe here? >> Oh yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, completely. You get that vibe of people learning, people start to say hey, Cisco's really actually sponsoring this and is actually putting their money where their mouth is. They're actually investing-- >> And the content's good. That's to me, the tell is the content. >> Peter: It's called walkin' the walk. >> Yeah, exactly, they're really, really helping the developers and you can see that. >> Well, let's hope that it translates to the core of Cisco because it's a huge company. The network engineers in the past, their diversion of developer was using Voice-over-IP. Those worlds are over, not over, but they're subsumed by cloud, right. Cloud is changing everything. So what are you most excited about right now as an entrepreneur, recovered, you're back on your way, rags to riches, talk of the town. As you look out on the horizon, the 20 mile stare. What are you excited about that are enabling you to go out and do what you're doing, what technologies? >> Yeah, well probably I know that some of them it's like buzz words, like IoT and cloud and machine learning and even blockchain. But actually having those technologies at hand, and it's not like you have to choose every one of them but actually use them, some of them, to actually build a better product or better service to your customers. It's something that really excites me. And again, it's something that Cisco's really investing in. So getting that traditional Cisco mold, it's like networking or Contact Center and actually improve those technologies with machine learning or some IoT technology, I think that's the way forward. And we're actually doubling down our investment in those technologies. >> Jose, thanks so much for coming on CUBE, sharing your story, I really appreciate it. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Peter: And you've got to get us down to Costa Rica. >> Sure, anytime. >> We've got to get down there. Half of Palo Alto goes down there, so we might as well Peter. (laughing) Seriously, thanks for coming on, great to have you. It's theCUBE live coverage in San Francisco for Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create. Building on the popular, only three year old DevNet program. I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burris with theCUBE. Stay tuned for more live coverage. Stay with us after this short break. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Plan.