>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host for the week Stu Miniman, we are in Five9's booth here at this event, excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Jace Moreno, Microsoft Teams Developer Platform Lead from Microsoft, Jace, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure. >> So we're excited that you're here because you are on the main stage tomorrow morning with Lori Wright. But talk to us about Microsoft Teams. You've been with Microsoft for awhile now, about 10 months with Teams. Talk to us about this tool for collaboration that companies can use from 10 people in a meeting to 10,000? >> Yeah, you'll hear us tomorrow. The phrase we're coining is an intelligent workplace for everyone, right? And I think for a long time, we've been perceived as an organization who builds tools, a lot of times with the Enterprise Knowledge Worker, the whole goal is to dispel that. There's multiple people out there, millions of people who are frontline workers, whatever you want to call 'em but the folks that are interfacing with your actual customers. And so we need to make sure that we are developing tools that are for them. But overall as I look at the product and what we've delivered, it's about bringing you one single place to go to for collaboration, right? So and that is bringing together your tools, whether or not Microsoft built them into one experience and then process these in workflows around them. >> So do you find that in terms of traction that the, like the enterprises and maybe the more senior generations that have been working with Microsoft tools for a long time get it or I mean, 'cause I can imagine there's kind of a cultural gap there with, whether it's a large enterprise like a Microsoft or maybe a smaller organization, There are people in this modern workforce that have very different perspectives, different cultures. How can Teams help to maybe break down some of those barriers and really be a platform for innovation? >> That's a great question. I think we've been battling that cultural, digital clash for a long time to be fair. I think it really comes out with Teams, though. Because it is an entirely different way of working. It's not just chat anymore, right? It's collaboration. It's bringing together all of these experiences and so I think there's a maturity curve for some of our average users to be fair. We're already seeing that curve take off as we speak. But what I often give advice to customers and to partners, I call 'em superpowers but you got to find that one reason that really gets people over the line because we get asked all the time, "Hey, everybody loves it "but we want to get 'em to use this as the one tool, "the one place that I go so I know that everything "I send in our organization goes to that single place. "How do I deliver that?" And I go, "Just give 'em a reason." That's what it comes down to honestly and I genuinely see that with organizations. We're seeing incredible examples of organizations leveraging partner integrations where it's bringing out their culture rather than them trying to evolve it, if that makes sense. >> So Jace, I'm glad you brought up the partners there and when I hear developer platform, all right, bring us inside a little bit. Everything API compatible, when people think about developers, there have been developers in the Microsoft space. .NET's got its great ecosystem there but what is it like to be in the Microsoft ecosystem here in 2019? >> It's a fun place to be. I will say, I've even stopped using the term developer when I say platform though to be fair because, and the reason I bring this up, what we've actually built allows a lot of IT professionals to build as well on Teams. PowerShell Scripts as an example is a huge opportunity for customers. Frankly, I've never written a line of code in my life and I built a bot for Teams. So it's pretty amazing what we're enabling but when we look at a lot of what partners are building, it's where are they seeing opportunities in the marketplace? So Five9 as an example with customer care, great opportunity there where we can extend the capabilities that a contact center as an example might need inside of Teams if they want to explore that. >> I love, I actually got to interview Jeffrey Snover at Microsoft Ignite last year who of course created PowerShell and he was like more excited now than he was when it was created quite a long time ago. So when I look around this platform, tell us some of the partners that you're working with. I saw some of the early notes that things like Zoom, and gosh you know, talk about some of the partners you're working with. >> So one thing I'll touch on too that I don't know if I fully answered your last question is what I'm hearing from our partners who have built on Teams and I'll touch on which ones in a second, we call it the extensibility of our platform but quite literally what it means is they are, we are allowing partners to allow their solutions to render in different ways inside of Teams and what we're hearing from partners, I had a conversation with Disco the other day as an example, so they built a, I'm not doing them a service by explaining it like this but it's a kudos bot essentially that they've delivered and it's actually bringing out that culture. But they told us the beauty of the Teams platform is that they don't only show up as a bot to the end users, they actually, we've offered them other ways to interact with the end user, so whatever's more comfortable for me inside of team, and my interaction with that solution, it's easy for them to have that correspondence. But in terms of top partnerships that we're looking at, we've had some incredible integrations built recently. ADP just launched theirs pretty recently to check payroll and build sort of a time off process flow if you will, with the bot. Polly's been a great one from day one. We have integrations with partners like Atlassian for a DevOps tool, so Jira and Confluence Cloud, Trello for project management, I could go on forever but we have over 250 in the store right now and that is growing very rapidly. This is what we spend most of our time on. So the initial focus was what are the tools out there that most people need to get their job done every day? That's where we'll start and now we're really evolving that and we're seeing some incredible things being built as we speak. >> So Jace, being at Enterprise Connect, this is an event where it's been around for a long time and has evolved quite considerably as Enterprise Communication and Collaborations has but one of things that when I was doing research to prep for the show that I'm reading is that the customer experience is table stakes. It's make or break. But some of the recommendations that when a company is, whether it's within a business unit buying software and services or at the corporate level, the customer has to have a seat there so that the decision is being made. Are we implementing tools and technologies and services that are actually going to delight our customers, not just retain them but drive customer lifetime value? In your role, where are some of Microsoft's customers in terms of helping to evolve the evolution of the platform? >> That's a great question, I'm really glad you asked it. It's been fun in my role because what we're seeing is a lot of customers who have taken the platform and built integrations to their tools. So think outside of productivity for a second, think IT support, think employee resources, they're building those integrations and they're leveraging those as a way to drive that organic broad adoption inside of their companies. Because they don't want to do the IT force anymore, they want people to love it like you said and naturally take to it and so I keep coming back to that, I call it superpowers, again it might be a ridiculous term but it's those superpowers you deliver to your people that allow them to get their work done better, get them to love that product and to your point, not want to ever leave it 'cause you can get a majority of your work done every day in that place. So we've seen some really cool ones. A couple examples that we just shared recently, Dentsu's a great one, so they have a three person Change Management Team for a 50,000 person global organization, okay? Three people, got to scale that right? Can't do that one on one training and so they initially took Teams and integrated it into their current website, internet, internal portals to essentially create a chatbot that helped people learn how to use the technology they delivered. Now they're taken that one step further because they saw such great success and they're going to different centers of excellence inside the organization saying, "Hey, do you want to get on board? "Because we'd like to make this the bot "that you interact with as an employee of Dentsu." So it's just incredible but it's driving again that adoption they're seeing, leveraging some of the simple stuff that we have on the platform. Does that answer your question? >> Yes very well, thank you. >> So when I look at some of the macro trends about communication, where I've heard some great success stories is internally just being able to collaborate with some of my internal people, Teams has done really well. Collaborating between various organizations still seems to have more challenges. Can you just bring us a little bit of insight as to why I hear great success stories there and not negatives on Teams but just it's still challenging if I have multiple organizations? We all understand even just doing a conference call or heck, a video call between lots of different companies still in 2019's a challenge. >> Yeah look, I mean I'll give you a couple answers here. We are young, I mean it's two years old as a product. So the momentum's been incredible but I'm not going to sit here and tell you we don't have things to work on, we absolutely do. What I will say though, take Enterprise Connect for example, we actually have a Teams team for Enterprise Connect. There's, I actually checked this morning, there's 181 people in that team and a majority of them are guests, so external users, So vendors that we work with to help us plan this conference and bring it all together and a lot of that has been seamless. Yes, there are little things here or there that we're working on but in that respect it's been pretty incredible. I constantly am using it with external parties and I find though, I don't necessarily know if the challenge is in the interface itself, I think it ends up becoming this opportunity to really educate people on this new way of working. And so going back to our partners again, we're sitting here with Five9, but that becomes critical. How do we work better with these organizations who we have mutual customers with to create that experience together, right? And bring again, superpowers to the users. >> What about a security as a superpower? Where is that in these conversations? >> I mean everything we build has a layer of security. I actually just got out of a meeting, you'll see, we've got an announcement around this tomorrow. So I can't blow it unfortunately but the bottom, the foundation and core of everything that we do will be security focused, absolutely. >> All right, so I went to the Microsoft show last year, AI is also one of those things besides security. AI's infused anywhere, so where does AI fit into the whole Teams story? >> The way we see it, I look at this in a couple angles. So most people get onto Teams and it's kind of chat and collab at first, right? Not always the case but a lot of organizations do that. Then it goes to meetings then I think, and you'll see a lot of this cool stuff tomorrow, we're doing it on AI but it's how then do you proactively start delivering better experiences to your end users? So I think of things that we're looking at right now is taking data, and sending those as an example to your IT admins about giving them insight into how users are leveraging Teams. How do you improve that experience for them? So again, you drive that natural broad adoption but kind of assist them a little bit along the way. So tons of great examples around the board. I'm not sure if that fully answers your question but just the sky's the limit. I think of some other things we're looking at though, you'll see a lot coming in the form of transcription, translation, those services that really create inclusiveness which is a big focus for us. Again back to that point earlier, it's the intelligent workplace for everyone. We want to be able to provide services with our partnerships that can really reach anybody in the business world, right? And even in the consumer world in some sense. >> Well Jace, thanks so much for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon. We're looking forward to hearing your keynote in the morning and sharing with us some of the excitement and things that are happening and announcements we're going to hear from Microsoft Teams tomorrow. >> My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, appreciate it. >> Our pleasure, fFor Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of day one, Enterprise Connect 2019 from Orlando. Stick around, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. 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>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by, Five9. >> Welcome to theCUBE I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Mennamen. We are live on the show floor at Enterprise Connect 2019. Stu, welcome to Orlando! >> Thanks so much Lisa, great to be with you, (amplified voice echoing) and real excited to be here at Enterprise Connect. >> Likewise, and as you can hear, the show floor just opened, so we have a nice, conflicting overhead announcement. But Stu, this event is really interesting because it has evolved dramatically over the last 28, 29 years, where it was PBX, and then Voice Con. and for the last what, eight or so, it's been Enterprise Connect. As has, in terms of evolution, evolved enterprise communications, enterprise collaborations, cloud, AI, et cetera. Lot's of things and exciting news to talk about this week. >> Yeah Lisa, like any show, you say how are you relevant today? What is changing? What is staying the same? And as you said, 29 years of this show, first time we're going live here with theCUBE. But yeah, it is now, you know, unified communications. We're talking about cloud-based contact centers, like our friends here at Five9, who brought us here to the show, but 6,500 people is what I heard from the people that run the show. And it's been growing, it's been, you know, how do things like cloud and AI really transform some of these markets and at least in some ways, there are some things that remind me of what I worked on in this hotel communication space back in the late 90's, and some of those things are drastically different. So you know, we're not talking about call centers, we're talking about contact centers and that consumer experience. How data, and mobile, and the internet, and cloud, are changing, is definitely something that we're going to be digging into a lot this week. >> Yes, and another thing that we're going to dig into is this rising change in the empowerment of the consumer, right? We're consumers every day, we want to be able to transact, or get information on a mortgage or something from whatever channel we want, omnichannel is really going to be a key theme here. It's being able to talk to the customer where they want to be communicated with, and ensuring though, that it's not just, maybe you start out on web, and you go to chat, then maybe it's a call, maybe even as an escalation through Twitter. But that the organization that you're trying to engage with, has a contact center that can follow your trail, and follow your data, to be able to understand what the real issue is, and in a timely manner, empower that agent who's talking to you, whatever medium, to act correctly so you don't churn. >> Yeah, Lisa as you know, there's something that our audience, everyone has had to call support at one time or another. Myself, you know, I tend to troubleshoot a lot of stuff myself. When I actually want to call in, I want to get the answers, I don't want to have to spend a long time going through some robotic, you know, hi, give me an agent please, give me an agent, agent, agent. And then when I get to that person, I don't want to have to go through steps one through 17 because I've already done that myself so, how do I escalate fast? If I can do that all online or in chat, even better for me, because you know, I don't necessarily want to have to talk to a person, but when I do want to talk to a person, I want them to understand my environment, help me get there. And that's where a lot of these environments are helping today. How is it, you know, do I understand the client? Can I help them with where they need to be? And super hot-button is, you know, what about data? You know, how is the role of data in these environments changing? As a consumer, if there's certain things that I'm using, and I'm worried about them, talking about my privacy. But when it comes to the support experience, absolutely, I want you to understand who I am in the context and take care of things fast. >> You mentioned AI and one of the things that I'm curious to learn about this week is, is the maturation of that. But also something that you and I hear at pretty much every show theCUBE goes to, which is a lot, and that is, it's not about completely transforming to AI, there has to be a human AI combination to really, extract the most value from these experiences. >> Yeah, Lisa, you bring up a great point there. So right, automation and robots, absolutely are playing a bigger and bigger role, but the answer is not, you know, it's not binary, it's not one or the other, it's how can intelligence, and machines augment what they're doing? And when you talk to the contact center people, absolutely it's about, how do I get people information faster? How do I make those agents react faster and hopefully have a better job? You know when you talk about the people, and you know, Lisa my first job out of school, I worked in a call center and if you're answering calls all day, or answering emails, you know that's something that you have to do day-after-day and it can be tough. So if there's automation intelligence that can take care of it, prompt you with the information you need, help lead you along the way, help you get to mastery and resolution so much faster, that's all goodness. We want both the consumer and the employees to have a better experience and there's the promise that AI, and automation, and robots can all help with that experience. Not just a wholesale, let's rip out the people and put in technology. >> No, you're absolutely right, and it also is, I'm curious to learn too this week about, the employee training. One of the interviews you did recently in the Boston CUBE studio, the guest there mentioned, I recommend every C-level spend some amount of time in the call, contact center, to understand, are our processes efficient? If there's Sticky Notes and paper everywhere, we probably have some process challenges. But are those agents empowered to make the right decisions at the right time in order to, like I said before, prevent churn, and increase the customer lifetime value. So that customer experience is table stakes all the way up to the C-suite. >> Yeah I mean Lisa, as we know, if you talk to any marketer, and say, what do you want? I want to know what my customer wants. What do they need? What are the challenges? And when a customer's reaching out with a problem, that can be a great opportunity. Now hopefully there, you can solve their issue, because the concern is, maybe they won't even reach out. You know, if it's not on my website, if I tried to do it, or I had to wait too long, I might go turn to a competitor. It's easier sometimes just to leave. And we know every time, one person calls, there's usually many more that didn't call, that might've had that same issue. So, understanding where I can engage, more touchpoints with our customers is a good thing, and how can we leverage that into a good experience? And I know when I look into the contact center, it's not just the inbound requests, but how did that tie into outbound conversations? >> And enabling an organization to use that data, in a trusted manner as you mentioned, to switch from being reactive, to proactive, to eventually, predictive. But one of the points you mentioned is very valid and that is, for every customer that initiates a conversation through a contact center, there's probably exponential more customers with the same problem that aren't. So these companies need to be using AI in the cloud contact center as a service to really understand it's the customer that's telling you what the problem is, how do you get that information gleaned from it? You know, starting to use analytics and things that probably back in your early call center days, you didn't have access to, to really hone in on what that problem is, how prevalent is this problem? So do we need to throw a lot of resources at solving this, because this is going to ultimately help drive our business forward? >> Yeah, absolutely and Lisa, these are the kind of things that we talk about in the cloud world today, which has a huge impact on this show is, I have contacts with customers, we have engagement and data there, and what other services are there that will plug into this environment? So AI, you asked about the maturity, at least from what I've seen so far, we are early days in seeing that roll out. But, there's a lot of other technologies here. You talk about cloud, talk about text-to-speech, talk about devices that will help whether it's not just phones, and headsets and the like, but lots of other tools, that the enterprise uses to connect with their ultimate end users themselves, hence, Enterprise Connect. The communication at the center of it all. And it's interesting here in 2019, to see that relevance, and that intersection of the people and the technology to hopefully help people have better relationships longterm with their customers. >> Absolutely, so you mentioned, we're in the booth at Five9 here, there's about 140 exhibitors here, you mentioned 6,500 attendees here in Orlando. 60 plus sessions across nine tracks, unified communication, cloud communications, team collaborations, we've got Jace Moreno from Microsoft Teams on shortly with us today, so it's going to be a very interesting week. I'm very much looking forward to co-hosting with you and learning a lot about how the consumer is really driving, and has a table at the decision-making table within organizations. >> Yeah absolutely, and Lisa we've got a great line up. Really two and a half days, a half-day today from three to seven and then the full days from right after the keynote through the ending. The expo floor just opened up, a great buzz here already at the show, I'm looking forward to being able to walk around and see some of the technology, and some great guests on the program. Of course our friends here at Five9 who brought us here, we've got the CEO of Poly, rebranded Plantronics and PolyCom, the CIO of Zoom, and many other guests on the program, some of the industry analysts and the like. So, real excited to dig in and always a pleasure Lisa, to be digging in with you. >> Likewise, thanks Stu, I'm excited to learn more about this contact center as a service market. It seems early days as you mentioned. And I always appreciate it when businesses identify that. No we don't have all the answers for AI and the combination of humans and machines, it's early days, early innings as you said, but they're here to learn from each other, and understand how it is that they can really influence and drive these kinds of conversations forward. >> Yeah the fun fact on that, I was listening to a podcast on the way to the airport and it talked about actually, with all the data that we have today, often times the answer is easy, it's I need to be able to ask the right questions. And Lisa, you and I know a thing or two about trying to ask the right questions. >> We do. >> So we have lots of opportunities to do that this week. And hear how all the people in this ecosystem are thinking about asking better questions and getting to their customers. >> Yeah, so I predict it's going to be a thought-provoking week Stu, I'm looking forward to being here with you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE's kickoff of our live coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019, day one of three, stick around, Stu and I will be right back with our first guest. (upbeat synth music)