>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Minuteman and we are live on day one of Enterprise Connect 2019. You can hear a ton of people behind us at the expo centers it's getting busier and busier throughout the day. We're welcoming to theCube, for the first time, John Bourne, the Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances at Verint. John thanks for joining us on theCube this afternoon. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I know we're in Five9's booth, so graciously hosting us this week. Verint is a partner of Five9, which we'll get into in a second. But give us a little bit about who Verint is, what your main brand is and how you're helping customers. >> Sure, so you know Verint has branded itself as a customer engagement company. We do employee and customer engagement solutions. We sit on top of CaaS like Five9, although Five9 is probably our biggest and most strategic partner in the space. And we provide everything end-to-end including work for software optimization, which was our legacy, but now we also provide digital feedback and outbound surveys and bots and AI and all the other things everyone else is talking about here as well. But the thing that makes us different is we're completely agnostic to the infrastructure that we sit on top of. And we'll mix and match pieces of our portfolio with the vendors pieces as well. And so we have an IVR but we don't use our IVR with CaaS vendors, for example, we use theirs. Just an example. >> What a pivot on the word legacy that you mentioned, because you have been to this event, which has been around for a very long time. Many, many years back when it was VoiceCon, so you've seen a lot of vendors that, probably, weren't even here five or 10 years ago. Tell us a little about the evolution and communication and customer experience as table stakes for a business. >> Let me talk about the industry for bit, because I'm fascinated by this. As an English guy, we don't get excited very often, but let me tell ya, it's really exciting times to be in this industry. I remember when we went from TDM to voiceover IP and that was the biggest thing that ever happened. If you think back to that, what's happening now, it's unreal. There are more vendors, more players, more solutions, more, more good stories that are talking about real customer outcomes today than there ever were before. You have to remember our industry is quite conservative. We're sort of laggers, quite conservative. We build bulletproof systems that work. And the phone always worked and dial tone was always there, but it's a whole new world, as you know. >> John, you bring up some great points here. I think about networking and telecommunications, we used to measure these things, you'd put it out in the decade of change. >> Absolutely. >> We'd go through this and then the standard rolls out and then the customer adoption. But you brought up this excitement here. When I look at my career, you scroll back a couple of decades ago, the importance of data, the importance of intelligence of the systems, we actually talked about some of those terms. It's different now. >> Very different. >> Maybe explain a little bit why it's so much different. Billions of customers out there, but why is it so exciting today. >> So, if you look at our industry, as far as- and even true for us, right? We really didn't even know who the customer was. We only cared about the interaction and we were building systems that would optimize the performance of the agent. Or we'd make sure there were enough agents with the right skills at the right time. It was all about agents and interactions. Now, we're seeing the confluence of customer engagement management, which means we're more integrated with CRM systems, we care about the customer's journey. So our perspective has changed, it's much more than just the agent. But we're not forgetting the agent. So, customer experience is very important, obviously, but so is the employee experience as well. It's both. We cater to both sides of that. >> When you're having customer conversations, I'm curious, where does that come up in terms of pivoting, or maybe over rotating towards improving customer experience? Because we have spent, historically, time ensuring that the agents are properly trained. Are they kind of over rotating back? Because they're so closely related. >> That's a great questions. Let's talk about how the buyer's changed, right? And you'll remember this. In the old days, you were selling to the techies or IT. Especially true with Five9 and many others, we're now selling to the business, we're selling business outcomes. They don't want to know about the technology underneath, they want to know what sort of experience their customer's going to have when they interact with them as a businesses. Providing the seamless journey regardless of the channel they're using. Voice is obviously still big, voice is not going away, no matter what anyone may tell you. Voice conversations are getting more complex but they're so much more self service now, both reactive and proactive. It's fun, but tying it all together, it's hard, it's hard. >> One of the things in this space, these are not push button simple solutions that are rolling out. When I talked to Five9 getting ready for this, they said, look, it's in the cloud and could someone do this on there, sure. But we white glove it, we really engage there. As a key partner of yours, how do you see that? Where does that tie into what Verint's doing? >> What we do with Five9, all of that technology is deployed, collocated with Five9's environment. It's the way we get the tighter integration. It's the way, when we're provisioning new tenets, so that everything gets done at the same time. It's not easier to do it that way. And again, I'll come back to the buyer, the buyer's the business and they're saying this is the outcome I want. And I just want to deal with one vendor and I want to pay per agent, per month for everything. That's the thing that's so different. It's an OpEx budget as well and that's where the world is going. I think perpetual licenses should be gone in the next two or three year, but they're still out there, they're still out there. >> One of the things I'm curious about is, we've been in this multichannel world, we're now in an omnichannel world that all of us as consumers are demanding. We want to be able to not just be able to talk to a contact center and agent on any channel we want, but want to have that conversation integrated so that there is progress from issue identification all the way to resolution. Where are businesses on that maturation of actually delivering an integrated omni channel experience? >> I think that's a really good question and I think that truth of it is it's still fairly early for most businesses. Because one, it's hard to do. If you look around the show, there are all sorts of vendors here who do one point solution, one piece. To make this work in a true integrated journey, the bots and the IVRs need to be communicating with the digital channels and email and chat and the self service channels on the web, as well as the voice. Because ultimately, what really matters to us as a consumer is when we do actually end up talking to an agent. We want them to know everything we've already done, and, quite frankly, we didn't really want to be talking to a live person unless we absolutely have to. Repeating all that is the biggest frustration out there. Getting all that tied together, that's what Verint does with Five9 together. That's really what makes us different and that's hard, it's hard. >> When you look at- these are business buyers, meaning to you, to deliver business outcomes, what are some of the key metrics that customers use? I mean when we think of context, we think of customer lifetime value, net promoter score. What are some of the key indicators that you help them? >> Those are exactly it. It's customer experience, it's however they decide to measure customer experience. It's like you said, some of them like a net promoter score, some of them have far more complex scenarios. It's all this stuff about average handle time, first time resolution, it's not important. It's all about what was the experience the customer had, was it seamless? Are they going to be loyal? But everybody measures it differently. It's not, from what I've seen anyway. >> John, one of the things I love coming to an event like this is you get to talk to some of the users and hear from some of the users. My understanding is Verint has some of your customers talking and sharing their journeys. Maybe give us a little insight into some of the flavor of what customers are going to be talking about here at the show this week. >> We have several customers that are doing sessions here. We've got, one of our customer's talking about what they're doing with speech analytics and the ability to understand the conversations that people are having. It wasn't that long ago you could go to our contact centers, supervisor, or a manager and say, well, what conversations are your agent having? I don't know, I don't care. That's all changed, now people really want to understand what are people talking about. The sentiment analysis is incredibly important, that's where things like speech analytics comes in. We've got other people here that are talking about the digital experiences, how they're marrying together the web interactions that customers have with their contact centers. A couple of years ago that never happened either. Contact centers were always very insular and were always the cost center. People of science realizing, intellectually they've always understood it, but somehow they haven't capitalized on the fact that the contact centers is the one place that is the face of the company for most consumers. And we need to get serious about them. >> Absolutely. Are you seeing this has a horizontal opportunity that lots of industries are taking advantage of? Or are there some early adopters who have really serious need to pivot quickly? >> Another really good questions. It is a very horizontal plane, but I'll tell you, the way the banks moved the big banks, the big insurance companies move, is different from maybe some of the smaller retail players. I think there are, even though the technology's the same, there still are some sweeps you can do. What people have on their desktop, what agents have on their desktops, for example, varies quite a bit. A lot of retail companies have Salesforce on their desktop, or Zendesk, or one of those types of products which, obviously, we all integrate with. The bigger companies are still running Legacy. The banks, the insurance companies, the telecos, they're running mainframes still in the background. There's all sorts of stuff on the agent's desktop. It's different, it's different. They're all active, I wouldn't tell you that there are any laggard industry verticals, but they're all coming at this at a different way. The banks especially need this. The insurance companies need this. Loyalty is so critical to them. And then retail, obviously they want to sell stuff. They want you to keep coming back and buy more stuff and they're competing with people like Amazon. Amazon does it really well. >> It's interesting, the question is, sometimes, if I'm a smaller or younger company that doesn't have all of the legacy, then a lot of times I have an opporutnity to be able to do things a new way. >> And that's the beauty about cloud, right? Now, probably for the first time ever I can be a relatively small contact center and I can get all this functionality and affordable price. I couldn't do that before because it was all premise based, it was big ticket, seven figure items, it's just not possible. Now, huge advantage for them now, huge advantage. >> Well John, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon and sharing what Verint is doing with Five9, and also the experiences and evolution that you're seeing in enterprise communication. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> For Stu Minuteman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)