>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Hello from Orlando, Florida. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. theCUBE has been here at Enterprise Connect 2019 in the booth of our gracious host, Five9, for the last three days. Stu, this event is our first time being live here on theCUBE. Your first time here, mine as well individually. Massive event that has transformed a lot. 6,500 attendees, their biggest ever. Well, 140 vendors in this expo hall. What an incredible week. We've had the opportunity to talk to so many people. Can't even keep track. But this enterprise communication and collaboration space is really, really, really hot. >> Yeah, Lisa. I'd definitely learned a lot and had a good time. And, really, it's always a pleasure to be hosting with you. I feel I am better educated as a consumer, now after having gone through this, and I wish as a consumer, I actually knew before I was making some choices on some of the brands, whether or not they had some of the technologies behind us that we heard about here, because we've all had some challenging interactions with whether it be chats, websites, emails, or trying to call in and hopefully getting to that live person. I've looked into my career, and the ebb and flow of changes that had happened from the call center to the contact center. I've also had some empathy. I had started out on the call center; my first job out of college. But you know there should be no excuse for a company not to be able to have a good customer experience, if they're leveraging the technologies and the solutions that are available today, especially a lot of those powered by the cloud. >> Absolutely, it's table stakes, I agree with you. I definitely feel reset as a consumer. My perspectives, and even understanding the fact that like Five9 here, they've been talking about the intelligent contact center. They have five billion recorded customer conversations a year. And I've never thought, when I'm calling in, when you hear this is going to be recorded, we just expect that. But how a company, like Five9, can enable them to actually, start to leverage the power of AI and cloud to harness that dark data so that, to your point, the customer experience is ideal. Because, as consumers, we have so much choice. >> Yeah, so we've been talking for a number of years on theCUBE about the companies need to be data-driven. And still, it's early days here in the enterprise communication space. There is a proliferation of everything from the end devices. We just interviewed the CEO of Poly, long history: Plantronics, Polycom. I've got long history, understand a lot of those technologies that they have. Huddle rooms and white boards and tetanization. They're all of these devices. And then the software and the cloud and all those pieces. We use CRM in our business and boy, there's things that I would love to be able to tap in, even for a small company. And I've talked to lots of companies as to how they can use these technologies. And it was really intriguing. And we had a great user discussion today with Carfax. Really enjoyed that. Always good to hear as to what they're doing and the blurring of the lines sometimes between unified computing and the contact center, and where putting that information into their agents' hands, or into the salespeople hands, or we've talked to people on the marketing side, and the marketing cloud to put it into the marketing hands. So, data, we know, is a huge differentiator. And I know an area that you were loving is CX was at the center of everything, and the role of the agent and the customer is something we need to think about. What were your takeaways about that, Lisa? >> About that, great question. Initially, everything that I was reading about this event and the industry was all about everyone is talking about customer experience, CX. And when we had Blair Pleasant on with Michael Rose on Monday, I think it was the customer satisfaction or service index that they did, showed that companies are actually rating employees' satisfaction lower than customers' satisfaction. And I thought, "but if I'm an employee and I'm an agent, "and I'm on the phone or I'm in a chat or whatever channel "dealing with what might be a disgruntled customer, "who probably has a really easy alternative to turn to. "My experience needs to be good. "I need to have the information, "the right content at the right time, "and be empowered to make a decision." So some of the conversations that we had started to show that really, AX, agent experience, and CX are blended together. They have to be because to me, they're mutually exclusive and if that agent doesn't have the information that they need, has to ask a consumer the same question that you've just repeated, the likelihood that consumer will churn is very high. So the agent is one of those ones, I think, at the front lines, that I honestly never really thought about it from that perspective how critical they are to the business. >> Yeah, and when you dig in to say, okay, what is the life of an agent, first of all, if I can give them a simpler interface. And that's something in both the unified communication and the contact center if I can do that and then, where is there automation or the AI to help me do my job to be able to critique myself and go in there, rather than having a manager yelling at you? There's some powerful stories we've heard about that, as to, I can better myself and I'll probably be more engaged and that should translate also into a better customer experience. So we're not getting, love the example someone gave, It's like, "do you ever called there and they're like "my system's a little slow today" or "I can't get into this." It's like, we don't want, as consumers, we never want to hear that. And that's not a good experience. What we heard is there really should be no excuse in today's day and age, that shouldn't be the issue. >> Absolutely. So we've talked about the agent experience, customer experience Some of the other users that we've talked about on the program are, for example, Microsoft team has this really cool demo. We had Jace Morano on the show on Monday. showing this incredible power of internal teams collaboration and communication and how connected companies can be across geographies, cultures, generations. So that internal collaboration is another big piece of the show that the power of cloud, the power of AI, that companies are starting to harness is transformative for a business on every level. >> Yeah, it's really. I've been to when I go to a Microsoft show or a Google show or an Amazon show, oh, look at the real time, things that are happening, global translation, being able to see sentiment by AI of like what the faces. Certain shows you go to you can go up and they're like, happy, sad, confused, things like that. So, Microsoft gave a great demo. Let's see how long it takes for that really to diffuse out and be usable for businesses. We know the power of video. It's core at the center of what we do with CUBE. We understand when it can transcribe and translate that's really powerful things that we're keeping an eye on. And the cloud is definitely driving a lot of innovation. And that's something that we've heard over and over again, is that this show, now in it's 29th year, and it's like, third life with a third different name. Cloud has really infused a lot of energy, many new companies here, and, therefore, there's a nice robust ecosystem with some blurring of the lines and some competition, but for the most part, if it's in the cloud, a lot of times, those integrations are happening behind the scenes and I, as a customer, don't need to put it together where it's baling wire and duct tape and zip ties which kind of felt like we had to do things in the old day. And it was very fragile. It should be much better. We heard lots of them as to how Seram, especially like sales force integrates and from Microsoft and many the other players here, they're saying there's is good commitment. There's good working agreement with many of the companies. And absolutely from our hosts here at Five9. We heard from a lot of their partners, from the device and the software players, as to how they all tie together seamlessly to make sure that their users has a good experience which leads to agent and customer experience ultimately. >> Absolutely, the partnership and the collaboration in this space was very palpable and it was great to have so much access to Five9's partners. I think a couple of tag lines I'll takeaway from this, as a marketer, is that Zoom, we had Harry Moseley, the CIO of Zoom on this morning. And his fireside chat this morning and with us, earlier today he said, "video's the new voice." We've also heard, "voice is sexy again." We've also heard, "it's humans being augmented by machines. "It's relationship based." So a lot of really interesting themes that all come together that I hope sort of dispel some of the concerns that either individuals, or some business users, have about AI taking over. It's this combination of differently tools, but the human component, the empathy, is still absolutely critical. >> Yeah, and we'll see AI will first be something's that's internal to these companies. So Five9's announced this week, it's the Five9, I believe, Genius is the tool in there. It helping make their agents help them ramp up much faster, get the data they need, and it's AI that's going to actually help them infuse them so that they can react faster and they're super agents, give them superpowers. We heard from a number of people that external facing AI, we're still a little bit early. And we'll try to see where some of the early leading use cases will be for that in the future. >> Well, Stu, it's been a great three days co-hosting theCUBE with you at Enterprise Connect '19. I cannot believe how much we've learned and how we both sort of changed our perspective as consumers. Let's see how long that lasts. >> Yeah, absolutely, Lisa. So many of the things that we've been hearing for years about cloud and AI definitely translate here and we love really documenting some of those industry transformations and pleasure as always to work with you on theCUBE. >> Likewise. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat rhythmic music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman, live in Orlando at Enterprise Connect 2019. This is day three of the event. Can you hear all of that buzz behind us? It's been a very full event. 6,500 or so attendees, 140 vendors here in the Exhibitor Hall. New products, new announcements, we're very excited, speaking of new announcements, to welcome for the first time to theCUBE the CEO of Poly, Joe Burton. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thanks so much for having us, it's great. >> Our pleasure, so big news Plantronics, Polycom, rebranded as Poly this week. Big coming out part here, this is way more than a rebrand. Walk us through what you guys have just announced, and why this is so exciting for the industry? >> Well it really is an exciting time. An exciting time for all of us. About a year ago, to the day, we announced that Polycom and Plantronics were coming together as one company to provide a end-to-end set of end points for the entire UC industry. So no matter what cloud you're hooking to in the contact center, for unified communications, from the headset that rides on your body, to the desktop, to the huddle room, to the board room, we were going to provide every end point where the end user touches the Collaboration Cloud. Very, very exciting. We were really looking for the right name to take us into the future. And frankly, Plantronics is a wonderful name, but it's very 60s sounding. Formed in 1961 by a couple of airline pilots to build headsets. Polycom, also a very good name, but a little old. We were looking for something short, punchy, tight, that really talked about everything that we do. And we were thinking about going down the route of an entirely new word, going the whole way. And one day a brilliant person on the brand team walked in and said, we can do both. We can have our heritage, our history, and we can go a different direction. Poly, Greek word for many. So many kinds of communication, many people, the power of many. Many ways of interacting. You actually look at our new logo it looks very much like a Polycom speakerphone of the past, it looks like an airline propellor for Plantronics, but it's also three Ps. Plantronics and Polycom coming together to form Poly. >> Joe, I do love that because that iconic speakerphone, heck, I sold some of those back in the 90s when I worked for one of the telecommunications company. There's still one sitting in our conference room in our boss scenario office today. Plantronics, of course, so known for so many of the different devices over the year. So maybe give us a little bit as to the coming together of Plantronics and Polycom, now as Poly. What's that mean for the future as we talk proliferation in devices, the line between what consumers expect and the Enterprise Connect. That's something we've been talking about for a couple of decades now. So what is Poly, into the future? >> You bet. So you see all these amazing communications, cloud providers around. Everybody is innovating in the cloud, they want to provide this software as a service that can enable all these great communications. But at the end of the day all of that Collaboration Cloud, gets accessed through a set of devices. Every single device where the end user touches the Collaboration Cloud actually comes from Poly. Like I said, the headset, the video conferencing, the audio conferencing and beyond. So as Poly we're going to build every single device that you need to access the cloud with a management layer, where you can understand each and every device. Is it on, is it off? Firmware upgrades, security patches, but so much more. You can actually understand usage data you've never seen before. So literally, because we're writing on the person, we're in the conference room, or on the desktop, we're in the open office area. We're in a position where we can actually tell you, these devices are being utilized but not these. That corner of the building is too noisy for good collaboration. Figure out what's going on. Even though the laptops in building 32 are telling you that there's no network problem, at the ear, we're actually seeing packet loss, and here's what we think you should do about it. So we think Poly literally brings something from the human perspective to the collaboration experience that just nobody else can do. >> We've heard a lot about the human element in it. Anytime we talk about emerging technologies, AI, ML, there's always that, oh the concerns about AI taking over jobs. But thematically, at this event, we've heard that it's got to be machines and humans augmenting. Whether we're talking about call center and it's agent delivery, but that human element, that relationship point, that voice, is really resounding at this event. It's absolutely hot again, still critical, whatever you want to call it. >> You're absolutely right. So what we're seeing very much when we look at AI and ML in our devices we're not in anyway seeing something that takes a job as much as helps you be your best self. What if you could be on your game, in the zone, instead of an hour or two a day but two, three, four times that much? And we think with some of the coaching we can do, using some of these AI and ML techniques. Through our devices, we can just help you be the best you can be all the time. >> Joe, at this show, we know it's a complex ecosystem. Something that I heard over and over again though, in the keynotes, is you've got a lot of partnerships. I heard many companies talking about, oh, and here's Poly devices. Heard it in the Microsoft keynote. We're here in the Five9 booth, we understand the partnership there. Talk about some of those partnerships, some of the news that was announced beyond just the company rebranding. >> Absolutely. Partnerships are our life blood. The reason we can be a great partner to so many companies is because, frankly, we don't compete against them for the cloud. We said we're going to do the user experience, we're going to be the end point. The management of the end point. But we've announced a lot of exciting things. Of course, Microsoft's a great partner to us. Zoom, and others, are a great partner. We announced this week a partnership with Google around Google Voice where we're the first and only certified Google Voice set of phones, at this point. Great announcements with Amazon around Chime and Alexa for business. Both in our trio speakerphones but also in the headsets. So I can actually touch the button and access Alexa straight through the headsets as well. And then of course companies like Five9 that are just an amazing, amazing partner to us. They have such an incredible product. Our headsets are on the vast mass majority of their agents. And when we look ahead at some of the unique analytics that we can do out of our headsets, some of the things they're trying to do, we just see an unbeatable combination with so many of these companies. >> What have been some of the feedback that you've heard from some of your customers and partners? This week, with such big news coming out and you mentioned a big spectrum-- >> Yeah. >> Of very big partners. Tell us about some of the feedbacks that you're getting from customers. >> Well I have to say, it has really been a thrilling week. The rebranding of the company as Poly, we had done all the research, we thought it was the right thing to do, the right name, the right heritage, plus being fresh. But it has been just overwhelmingly, you nailed it. I think from our customers and partners just a real excitement that they knew that Plantronics and Polycom were a premier end point provider, maybe the premier. But to see us partnered with so many of the cloud providers, as the predominant partner they're just seeing us in a whole new light, it's fantastic. >> Joe, one of the things we've been looking at is how Omnichannel's been changing over time. We talked about this show used to be VoiceCon. >> Yup. >> And a few years ago voice was a little bit lower on people's radar, but today a lot of voice, a lot of video. Of course it plays right into your heritage at the company. I'd love to hear what you're hearing from your customers as to the trends of the importance of voice and the ever growing importance of video. >> I think you nailed it in many ways, Stu. I think everybody has figured out that if voice isn't perfect the collaboration session isn't perfect. Even in a video conferencing call, we can put up with the video pixelating a little bit, as long as the voice is excellent. If the voice goes down, you don't have a session. So voice has to be fantastic. The end point plays a huge part in that. Working very carefully with our partners to make sure voice is absolute, is just fantastic. One of the other things on video that I think is really interesting is, we are really moving to, I guess I would say, a post speeds and feeds world. A few years ago all we heard is, are you VGA, are you force F? To use old words. Are you 1080p, are you 4K? Our product that won best of show yesterday in the product category, the Polycom Studio, a brand new video product for The Huddle Room. Really fascinating. Incredible good video, dead simple to use. I've probably been involved in 60 or 100 demos down here in the booth and done dozens of briefings on it. Nobody has asked me, what's the resolution of the camera? (Stu chuckling) What codec does it use? We've moved into a world of, it looks excellent, tell me about ease of use, tell me about the training. So I really think we're moving to a different world with that consumer expectation you talked about earlier of don't really care about those specifications anymore, it has to just work. >> That's a theme also Joe that we've heard from every guest that we've had on, as well as on the main stage. That that's what consumers, we are so demanding, we are so empowered, we have all this information and we expect that, to transact business as simply as we do things if we're buying something on Amazon or downloading something from Spotify, that simplicity is key. People say, it just has to work. Not so easy to be able to deliver, but it sounds like what you're saying is, people in your booth are getting it and it's so obvious to them that some of those speeds and feeds they just don't matter because it's so effective. >> Well you're absolutely right, the only thing I would disagree on is how hard it is. It really is just a matter of pivoting the company. So this has been a huge part of the Poly story. A couple of years ago as we were starting this journey of Plantronics and then as we brought Polycom in to form Poly we've really turned it on it's head. I mean our product managers, our engineers, we've got them out there with users, we ask users, not leading questions, but just in your wildest dreams, how do you see this working? Show me how you would do this as a consumer and we'll add the absolute minimum pieces in to add enterprise reliability, enterprise security, privacy, et cetera, et cetera. But we're really starting from that end user perspective and absolutely delighting them. And then adding what IT wants as opposed to the other way around which is where I think this industry was stuck for 10 or 15 years. >> Alright. So Joe, as a public company, I'm not going to ask too much but if we look down the road what should we be looking now that you've got the full resources together, you've got the rebranding, what should we expect as industry watchers to see from Poly kind of the next six to 12 months? >> So I think you'll see three or four things. We've talked about it publicly before. Number one, you'll see us just finish refreshing the product portfolio so every single product has the Poly look, has the Poly name, very consumer friendly, consumer forward, a consumer forward design and simplicity. So, best products across the board on the hardware side. Incredible ability to manage the products where you can understand every single one of them and then bringing those analytics and AI type functionality to these products that make the user their best self. That don't do weird things for them, that are a little scary, but really, really, really just anticipate their needs, help them do exactly what they want and you'll see even deeper and more partnerships. We are a partner company, we're going to live and die by partnerships, and we're going to be the best at it. >> Well Joe thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE. Again, congratulations on a momentous week with the launch of Poly, we look forward to hearing great news to come in the future. >> Fantastic, thank you so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. >> Yup. >> For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. Brought to you by five nine. >> Yeah, good afternoon. Welcome to Orlando, Florida The Cube is here at Enterprise Connect. Twenty ninety nine. Lisa Martin with my co host to Minuteman Stew and I have been Here's starting on Day two stew. Good afternoon, >> Lisa. Great to see Yeah. Day two of three. Enterprise Connect. >> It's not that sunny >> here in the Sunshine State, but the nice thing about the Gaylord is it's a nice controlled environment. Walk by. I saw the alligator for bid. They've got nice planning. They've got I love in the atrium there. There's great branding of thie E c. Nineteen. Everybody's taken photos of it. I saw some drone footage in the keynote this morning showing some of the setting here. So >> it's a It's a nice >> event way said sixty five hundred intended, which is nice. It's not one of these, you know, twenty thirty thousand. You're just buried by people toe big Expo Hall. But, you know, you could really get to talk to some people and enjoy the size of the show. >> Yeah, I agree. The size is great. It does no pun intended. Facilitate that collaboration and communication. You mentioned a number of attendees about one hundred forty vendors, and you can hear the noise behind soon. MIAs were in the ex ball in the booth of five nine and lots of conversations going on. This is an event that I find very interesting state because we talk about the contact center were all consumers every day. And we talked about this with a lot of our guests yesterday that the customer experience is absolutely table stakes for an organization, that it's essential to deliver an Omni Channel customer experience meeting with the consumer wherever they want to be and also facilitating a connected conversation so that if a shot is initiated and then the consumer goes to social or makes a phone call, that problem resolution is actually moving forward before we get into. Today's key knows a couple of really interesting things that you and I learned yesterday with some of the guests that we had on when we were talking with Blair Pleasant. One of the things that she and five nine uncovered with some research is that an employee's satisfaction was lower on the ratings for a lot of corporate decision makers, which was surprising from a collab and communications perspective that if employees, especially those agents on the front line, are having some challenges, it's going to be directly relating Tio customer Lifetime Value. >> Yeah, it was a little bit surprising, you know, if you think about just in general, you know, often the admin is not the key focus there. It's I need to get business outcomes. I need to get R. A Y. You know what I care about is, you know, how is my customer doing? But at the end of the day, you talk about the contact centers. If I don't have an agent that's engaged, really, how is that conversation going to go with the customer? So they need to think about that, You know? How will the technology help them do their job? Better help them game mastery faster? There were some things that I saw really parallel toe conversation we're having about cloud in general, which is, you know, there's lots of technologies out there, but it's often it's not the technology issue it is, you know, the organization and the people issue in the keynote this morning there was a big customer panel and that was definitely something we heard. I love one of the customers actually said We're going to make all these changes And they had the Don't panic towels, which, of course, harkens back to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy S O. You know, we know things are going to change. There might be some things you need to work through. But don't worry, we're there to help on. We will get through this and at the end, it should be better. >> No, I like that. You brought that up. I love that Tabal. Don't panic because, you know, we were talking yesterday a lot about the customer experience, the expectations of this rising, empowered consumer also the agent experience. But then, of course, there's the internal collaboration that's essential to all of this. And as I think, the gentleman that you're referring to was from Continental G talking about Hey, we don't have all the answers. But adoption of these tools internally is critical, but it's also a cultural sort of stepwise process. I thought that was very cool, that they actually were very transparent with their people. We identify this is not going to be smooth sailing, but it's an essential part of our business growth. >> Yeah, I tell you, it was really interesting. Listen, the panel there was one of the companies up there. They're pretty large and they said, Look, we're going to standardize on a single tool and everybody's going to get on board. And I actually bristled a little bit when I heard that because, you know, the engineering group versus the marketing group versus you know, the Contact Centre. There's certain things that they need to be able to collaborate. But thing like, you know, one tool to rule them all. You know, it sounds a little bit tough out there. Yes, there needs to be some standardization, but, you know, we see that in the cloud world. You know, it turns out customers are using multiple clouds out there because there should be a main one that we focus on. But if I need a best of breed piece for here, or if there's ah, feature functionality, they can't get elsewhere. I need tohave that, and we see that at this show there's just such a diverse ecosystem meant, and there's one hundred forty there's people that make device. There's all these software pieces, there's some big hubs. And then there are all the ancillary things that help plug and enhance and do this because there is some great innovation going on here. Some cool software, things that we're hoping toe, you know, take everything from, you know, White Board and voice two speech and globalization to the next phase. >> Yeah, that was very interesting. Especially the Microsoft teams demo. That Lori writing team this morning, The panel Now that you talked about, there were seven, uh, customers from a variety of industries. Kurtz was their continental. We mentioned, I think, paychecks. I'm curious to get your thoughts on when they were talking about their plans to migrate to cloud, all in some percentage, considering the numbers that we heard yesterday stew in terms of the cloud penetration for the contact center market, what were your thoughts? They're about those things. All in Depends on what makes sense. >> Yeah, It reminds me of what we were talking about in the public loud discussion two years ago. Way No cloud is growing at a very fast pace. Look at our friend here at five. Nine they were growing at a much faster pace, then the contact center. Overall, I believe they're growing somewhere twenty five percent as opposed The industry as a whole is growing at about nine percent. So we understand that cloud is growing faster than the market overall. And it was one of moderated. The panel said that today is about a third, a third, a third on premises hybrid in public and where that kind of steady state will be. I think it's still too early to tell in this industry, just as it is in cloud overall. But absolutely I burst a little bit when it's like, Well, you will never do this one this way. Well, you know, never is not something that we like to say in it because you never know when when that will be possible. You know, my background I worked on virtual ization, started out in test Devon. It reached a point where really there was no technical reasons that it couldn't do it when he rolled. The really large companies will never use cloud for it. Really. Who is better it scaling and updating and making sure you can manage an environment then those hyper scale players. You know, Microsoft got a big present here. You don't ask him. Like her soft customer. Uh oh. You're running off his three sixty five. You're living on Azure. What version of that are you running? And do you have the latest security patch as opposed to? If I have a Windows desktop and I'm not doing up a weight, have I done my patron? If I Donald this stuff and you amplify that by thousands of you know of agents and Contact Center, we know that Cloud has certain speed, agility and being up to get new features and updates in there that I just can't do nearly as well if it is something that I am installing and having to maintain myself or with a service organization, >> right? And so we talked yesterday with the number of guests about what are some of the imperatives to move to cloud in the end, the sum of the non obvious ones cost obviously, is one that we talk about all the time rights to it. Any show that we're at, but also the opportunity for businesses to leverage the burgeoning power of a I. Of course, every show we go Teo Isa Buzzword Machine learning. And of course, the cloud provides the opportunity for there to be more data to train the machines to be better at context and her overall. And, of course, internal communications. >> Right. And something that I like to hear at this show is start talking about a PC compatibility. You talk about the partnerships that are going on, It is not one software stack we're talking about platforms. We're talking about how integrations can happen so that if somebody has the cool new thing that does, you know, a real time engagement better than what I had before. Well, I could probably plug that in, and it's going to work on my platform. You know, everybody here talks about Well, whether you're, you know, a web, acts of Microsoft teams a zoom shop O r. You know any of those various environment, other? Everybody's working across those environments. We've had some standardisation here s O so that whichever one I've chosen, I'm not locked into one environment. And you know, I can help modernized the pieces as a need and take advantage of those new innovations when they come >> Absolutely all right. So, stew, you're a man on the street last night. Tell us some of the interesting things that you heard in some of the folks that you met Way. >> It's interesting. We think we talked about it in our open yesterday. There are a number of companies that have been around for a while And what are they doing today? What is their focus? And couple of companies have done rebranding. So the big party there was a line and I managed to get myself in. Is Polly So Polly has rebranded? Of course it was Polycom and Plantronics coming together. How many times we hear it on the keynote stage that they mentioned that everywhere you go, they're branding is there, So look kudos to their branding and messaging team. We're going to have their CEO on the programme tomorrow, but, you know, you know, the CEO talked about, you know, their new logo. It's like the meaning behind it. Of course, Polly means many, but there's three piece, and if you look at it, it looks like the iconic conference phone. So, you know the room was in there. Everybody is enjoying the appetizers and the open bar. But, you know, there was people, people, no polycom. I'm back in our conference room. We've got one of those speaker phones in there in the nineties. I usedto, you know, sell their conference phones in their video conferencing When I worked for was now a via but was lucid at the time. So there's a lot of intersections. Thie. Other thing I've really found is it feels like everybody here, you know, at one point in their career either work for Cisco or worked for, you know, the Lucent family. You know, of course, T back in the day had the whole telecom space, but it is like many other shows. We go to a rather interconnected community here on DH. You know, we'd guess on It's like, Oh, yeah, Cisco, Skype. And now at five nines. Yeah, it is friendly. You don't see some of the, you know, some of the places we go There's bitter rivalries between, you know, key competitors, and yeah, while you know, all the contact centers don't love, you know that they're there. Brothers and sisters, a two competitors there. Chances are they've worked with half the people there on, you know, Sometimes the future will be working with again. So it's it's a it's a good atmosphere. The people I've talked to really enjoy coming to the show, a Zoe said at the top. >> And this show has evolved over the last night. We were talking about yesterday twenty eight, twenty nine years, starting out as being called PBX and then re branding to Voice Con and then in about twenty eleven to Enterprise Connect. And it was interesting that because the word innovation comes up all the time, as does evolution of communications and collaborations. But when the king it was his kicked off this morning they talked about This is the biggest ever enterprise connect that they've had. So you can feel and you can hear it behind us the momentum, the excitement he talked about. There's a lot of cover artery here. There's a lot of two degrees of separation and tech, but the opportunities for every business, whether yours selling a small particles service on the Amazon marketplace or you're a big a global enterprise, the opportunity to connect and deliver a superior a competitive advantage to your customer experience. This table stakes these days if you don't have that opportunity. Those capabilities. There's going to be something that's going to come and replace you in a heartbeat. >> Yeah, absolutely. At least I have a background in space. But there were places where our walk Drano said, Wow, there's applicability for our business. I mean, we use a number of the collaboration Sweets, You know, I mentioned, I've got I've got maps for, you know, not just the Google sweet, but all the collaboration tools on there's technology that I'm like Gucci. I want to understand that a lot of them are downloaded an app. You can start using them for free. And then there's a Freeman model and and others arm or enterprise licenses on. It's been interesting to watch some of that dynamic as to, you know, it is the pricing. Is Mohr built for the mobile and cloud world than the traditional? You know, I'm going to buy boxes and have a huge capital expense up front. So >> what do you think if you look back to your early days in the call center when you were just a young pup, how much easier your job have been? If you had had some of the capabilities that we're talking about >> now least I wish, you know, back in the nineties, you know, if I just had linked in alone, I could have supercharged s o much of what I did. But all these other tools, right? Putting at my fingertips information. It was like, you know, Lisa tell you date myself in the nineties and taking a call where everybody that works in the call center You knew the area code of every single environment that it didn't tell you where it wass you would be like, Oh, yeah, I, too want to hide in New York. How you doing? You could be whether you're saying good morning or good afternoon based on what part it was like. Oh, wait, I'm talking Arizona. They don't follow daylight savings time. We'd remember all that stuff today. There's too many exchanges. Everybody takes their phone numbers wherever they go. S o it was It was a smaller country back then. But in the other hand, the technology is actually going to give us the opportunity to be ableto imbue that allow humans to focus on the empathy and connectedness that today's digital age sometimes tries to tear away from us. >> Exactly. We need that empathy in that connectedness. So, stew, we have a great program today. Stick around. We've got some folks from Selah Jin we've got. It's now on the programme within communications Fuse. Tetra VX five nine, of course. And there in that little and zoom this afternoon. Yes, thank you. Five O'Clock for student a man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

>> 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)

from New York it's the cube covering blockchain week now here's John furry hello everyone welcome back to this special cube exclusive on the water coverage of the awesome cryptocurrency event going on this week blockchain week New York City D central Anthony do re oh seven a big special event launching some great killer products me up to cube alumni that we introduced at polycon 2018 Genevieve Dec Monroe and Jeromy Gartner great to see you guys thanks for having us so you guys look fabulous you look beautiful you're smart we're on a boat we're partying it feels like Prague it feels like prom feels like we are at the top of another bubble couldn't feel better five more boat parties and then the bubbles officially at the top but we're only had the first boat party well the real existential question is what do we view next you know we've we've graduated from nightclubs and strip clubs and now two super yachts like do we go on a spaceship neck's or a Boeing Jets yeah I mean the options are somewhat limited in how we scale up the crypto parties I actually heard today one of my clients is launching in space a crypto mining operation that's fueled by solar power so we might be going to space Elon Musk wants to get involved I agree like where are we going you guys are awesome I love the creative so this party to me is really a testament of the community talk about the community I see polycon was great in Puerto Rico they had restart week and that but I heard these guys saying here at the central that the community's fragmented is the community fragmented seems like it's not out there or just only one pocket of the community I think the community so we have 10,000 people at consensus okay so these are 10,000 people that have gone down the rabbit hole and they're all at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan kind of going like how'd you get involved why are you here 10,000 people is a lot but I think that yeah we're we're at the decentral party so some of the yeast communities are being fragmented but I think we're having like infrastructure built to kind of connect the broader world to the things whether it's custodial services whether it's like tonight the jocks 2.0 wallet and you know everything that's getting involved there I don't know Jeremy Jeremy it's like an international traveler so you Carly Jeremy it's 100 percent in an echo chamber more importantly rabbit holes are like dark and confusing places that there are they're winding and a lot of people are here for very different reasons and thus when you have all these new entrants to the industry to this technology here for all these different reasons of course you have some fragmentation you know in many regards the ideological and philosophical roots of Bitcoin and blotchy technology have been lost son on many of the new entrants and and so it takes time to get to the point where we're all winding I think different blockchains and different applications of this technology will have different kind of approaches to how people think about investors always gonna be pragma because this is a massively growing industry that touches upon every kind of business and governmental and non-governmental it's actually fragmentation is a relative chairman is Genevieve you I saw you and you guys are working with things from cannabis coin I think you had to cannabis cabin this week in New Yorker yeah we're doing that tomorrow night actually so crypto and cannabis are two the hottest millennial sectors right and so we kind of like to say Agri capital we like to dance on the edge of chaos I actually found out about a cannabis company in Vancouver so just outside Vancouver that is using a crypto mining operation and all the excess heat that is coming off that to power a grow-op so we're literally at the intersection of crypto and cannabis not just for our handling money but handling energy in a different way which is so fast that's real mission impact investing right there you know using energy to grow weed that's the Seidel impact isn't it good bad I mean even as you look at it you know better cannabis healthy cannabis is a mission people look care about we're helping people's wallets and we're helping people's minds right in like ways that the government banks and pharmaceutical companies are fighting against so you know if you can't beat them join them so I welcome Astra Zeneca and the Bank of Canada to come on board our mission this is specially turning into a cube after dark episode Jeremy I gotta get your thoughts on these industries because look at cannabis we joke about it but that's an example of another market this zilean markets that are coming online that are gonna be impacted so fragmentation is a relative terms but hey look at it I mean energy tech is infrastructure tech and solid that's what I'm concerned about who nails the infrastructure for network effects and what's the instrumentation for that that's the number one question that is essential question for the protocols whether it's Theory amore Bitcoin oreos Definity so forth the protocol that provides the strongest and and most adaptable and infrastructure and foundational technology is going to be one of the main ones are those will be the main winners and so the names I mentioned they're up there they're very competitive but it's anybody's game right now I think any blockchain can come along right now and be the winner a decade from now and for entrepreneurs represents a challenge because you have to figure out what blocks came to go build on this is why I am big on investing in interoperable Ledger's technologies that enable the kind of transfer smart contracts and crypto assets between blockchains it's a great great segue let's just get an update since we last talked what are you working on what are you investing in what's new in your world share the update on strangers so now my fund is officially launched where how much we launched with just over 15 million dollars and amazingly we launched at the perfect time we're already up 55% and we got making an investment for a venture fund we actually did the exact WA T investment which transferred over from my personal investment portfolio but doing great I have really run the gamut in terms of investments we're making on the equity side of things and in crypto assets but what we're seeing is really accomplished entrepreneurs coming to this space continue actually more optimism than I had felt at polygon poly car and I was like this market needs to correct in a real way today I think that Corrections been prolonged if we were gonna feel a lot of pain it was gonna be two months ago but instead I think it's gonna be one to three years before the market goes through the correction that we need to see for the real shakeout to happen because so many of these teams that I think are garbage have so much money yeah and they're just floating around they got has worked their way out it's just like a bad burrito at some point it's got a pass Genevieve what are you working on I'll see you've got grit capital what's the update on your end what's new yeah amazing actually literally tonight probably about 60 minutes ago my business partner and I signed one of the fastest-growing exchanges in Canada called Einstein exchanges of quiet so these guys have only ever raised like one and a half million u.s. and they're the biggest exchange in Canada by sign ups active accounts so they're probably doing like almost a hundred million in top-line transaction volumes and they're probably never going public somebody's probably gonna buy them but we're gonna be marketing them across the country getting customers I mean the tagline is it doesn't take I'm Stein to open an account it shouldn't take n Stein it by Bitcoin you can literally get this account set up in under 60 seconds so they're vampires ease-of-use surety reducing the steps it takes to do it and get it up and running fast absolutely like my dad could do it and like alright so we say now follow you on Instagram and Facebook which is phenomenal by the way I got a great lifestyle what's the coolest thing you've done since we last talked to Polycom Wow polycon was kind of a high really peaked and then everyone got sick like our team got said polymath untraceable cuz everybody just got the flu yeah we were like on adrenaline and we kept going ah what's the coolest thing that we've done since then I think it's signing up like cool companies like Einstein we also signed a big cannabis company in Colombia called Chiron they're about to go public I don't know Cole what do you think I don't know maybe what's the coolest thing you've done travel what's your good so last night Jeremy and I just met we're together on a blockchain Research Institute project that Sonova Financial is backing and meeting him so you guys working together on a special project right now how's that going what's that about JCO which is a new sort of financial services firm they're creating what it could effectively be understood as a compliant coin offering that is available to more than just accredited investors and that's they're making ico something that falls within the pre-existing regulatory framework and also accessible to your average Joe which I think it's really important if we're going to follow the initial vision for both blockchain technology and offerings all right final question I know you guys want to get back to your dancing and schmoozing networking doing big deals having fun what is blockchain New York we call about we could pop chain we here in New York what the hell's happening there's been a lot of events what's your guy's assessment of you observed and saw anything can you share for the people who didn't make it to New York or not online reading all the action what's happened so as someone that did not attend consensus spoke at three other events or speaking at three other events I can say with certainty that the New York box chain week has been about bringing together virtually everyone in the industry to connect and kind of catch up with one another which is really important we we don't have that many events Miami was too short the industry's gotten too big but having a full week of activities in New York City has enabled me to kind of foster relationships are oh I yeah man get a lot of work John well I've gotten so much work done I haven't had to actually be a date conferences to reconnect with just about everyone that I want to industry that's really special Genevieve what is your observation what have you observed share some in anecdote some insight on what happened this week I know fluid he started I saw Bilt's I was just chatting with him about it it was started in over the weekend it's gone up and we're now into Thursday tomorrow coming up well I don't think it's a coincidence that Goldman Sachs came out today and said that they were launching some sort of digital currency marketing yeah exactly using the power of the 10,000 people i consensus but yeah i know i agree with what jeremy says it's not really about being at consensus it's about what happens like behind closed doors it's all these decentralized parties that are happening yeah open doors but like it's you know like we hosted a core capital asset we had a hundred people in a suite at the dream hotel and it was just like you put the biggest CEOs of the mining companies in the world together and like put those with investors in a room it's like you know 100 people and that's where the deals happen it's not like in the big you know huge auditorium where like nobody looks at each other and everyone's on their phone well I gotta tell you how do we know we the Entrepreneurship side is booming so I totally love the entrepreneurial side check check check access to capital new kinds of business model stuff economics so we reported on all that to me the big story is Wall Street in New York City has been kind of stuck the products kind of like our old is antiquated like the financial products and like that's why Goldman's coming out they got nothing what they don't have anything what are they got so you see in a stagnant they got a traditional product approximately nothing really like new fresh so you got in comes crypto just do a crypto washer so I think I see the New York crowd going this is something that is exciting and we could product ties potentially so I don't think they know yet what that is but I think some of the things that are going on you guys I like I like so I my dad's always the kind of barometer to this whole thing and he's like when are they gonna come out with like a Salesforce stock column for the blockchain right like some sort of application that it doesn't matter if you're like illegal if you're like in investment banking like some sort of pervasive application that just goes wild you have that yet what is that happening Jeremy Jeremy did the date was it's the Netscape moment if you will the moment that blotching technology becomes tangible and now and in retrospect a few years out we may decide that's great for all the young browsers is a browser the original browse for the Internet that was that moment may have already happened we don't really know it maybe it been something like a theory a more augered you know something where there's a use case but people haven't wrapped their heads around it yet but if that hasn't happened yet it's coming it's where we're on the cusp of it because people know what bitcoin is they've heard of the blockchain it is part of the zeitgeist now and and that cultural relevance it's so important for having that Netscape moment Jeremy Jeremy thanks so much to spend the time here on the ground on the water for our special cube coverage of blockchain week new york city consensus you had all kinds of different events you had the crypto house where we were at tons of fluidity conference all this stuff going on good to see you guys you look great thanks for sharing the update here and the cube special coverage I'm John Faria thanks for watching Thanks

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, its theCUBE. Covering LeMon 2018. Brought to you by VeeAM. >> Welcome back to the windy city everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We track the signal, extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with co-host Stu Miniman. This is our second year here at VeeAMON. Hashtag Veeamon, simple enough. Kate Hutchison is here, she's the CMO of VeeAm. >> Yes, thank you very much for having me. Its a pleasure to be here. >> You're very welcome, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, great show. You've painted the town in green. >> We certainly have. (laughs) >> So VeeAM obviously didn't need your expert help in creating awareness in places like this. >> Kate: Yes. >> And having a persona around around the green team. Awesome. Your background, Riverbed, Polycom, VMware, Citrix, BEA, some rockstar companies. You've got a lot of experience there. Why did you come to Veeam, and why now? >> Yes, so I was attracted to VeeAM for many reasons. We have some, as you know, some stellar attributes as a company. We've been talking about our net promoter score of 73, which is three and half times the industry average. And of course the executive team themselves, and meeting them and really wanting to be a part of that team. So that was a huge reason for me joining, but as it relates to my career and my background and what I thought I could bring to VeeAM. Very much about enterprise marketing. So I've spent about the last 20 years in the industry, as you mentioned the company names. Really helping those companies build the powerhouse brand, and so I just love being a company who is known for one thing, but is very successful that being known for something that's even broader and more strategic. And that's why I wanted to join the company. >> You mentioned the phrase powerhouse brand. What is a powerhouse brand, and how do you go about building it? >> Well everybody probably has a different definition of a powerhouse brand, but having spent a good 15 years in the Bay area, Silicon Valley, when you're walking around Silicon Valley and you say who you work for and everyone recognizes it, you're working for a powerhouse brand. That hasn't been the case with VeeAM. Now we're very strong, we do our research. We come out pretty strong it Europe, but in terms of our brand awareness in North America we have a ways to go there. Again, and I think because when it comes to building a brand and a powerhouse brand, enterprises really rely on customers to do that. To really leverage the voice of customers, to get the word out and to get the customers to go on record to talk about the power and value of VeeAM. Because when customers go on to talk about it, there really is no better marketing that you can do. >> Ya Kate, one of the things I saw. VeeAM started out with the geeks, and I say that in the most loving terms. People that did virtualization. >> Kate: Yes. >> VeeAM solved a problem, simple, huge adoption in that market, but as we've been talking about all day here, data protection is going up the stack. >> Kate: It is. >> It's hitting the seed sweep more, so. >> Kate: Yes. >> Maybe you could explain to a lot of our audience are the techies and they're like I don't understand this brand in marketing things. >> Kate: Sure. >> We just want the next little containers and things there. >> Kate: Absolutely. >> So why the brand elevation? >> So, first and foremost, we're known for one thing in the industry, as it relates to our product. It just works, and we're not leaving that behind, and certainly the enterprise cares a lot about the product, but as we go into the enterprise space, there's some things that an enterprise customer is going to look for, that an SMB may not. Enterprise is one of the assured company that they're doing business with, has long term viability. They want to make sure that there's plenty of addressable market and headroom for them to go far and above, beyond their sights of, a billion in our case. The other thing is, enterprise customers have a different way of engaging with that company, as it relates to the selling motion. So whether it's our partners, our alliance partners, our resellers, our sales teams directly, they want to be able to work with them as trusted advisors, and they want our folks to be able to anticipate their needs, well ahead of when they actually encounter them. So, we're talking a lot about a journey for our customers. We've been talking about intelligent data management, and the five stages of getting to that. So its really, its building on our core. Which has been SMB and commercial, but also now, up leveling the story, and by the way, the technologists at all companies of all sizes, want to be doing more to influence the outcomes, the business outcomes. So we're telling a story that we think will resonate with them and there's always plenty of click downs into the technology if you want it. (laughs) >> So you guys are putting a lot of emphasis on the up leveling. As Stu mentioned, CXO is becoming more aware of the data protection problem. >> Kate: Yes. >> Its becoming a board level topic. >> Kate: Yes. >> So I think I get the why now. >> Kate: Yes. >> My question is, why VeeAM? And what is the brand promise that you're going to bring to that enterprise? >> So I think, traditionally, VeeAM has been thought of as more of an S&B and commercial play. So the why now is that we have a much broader portfolio then we had a few years ago, and yet we're thought of as just back up and replication. Now, we're building on what our reputation is and back up and replication, but we want to take customers to where we know the puck is going. So for example, as enterprise customers want to take advantage of public clouds, of manage clouds, of SAS applications, they need to be able to get control of all their data. That's the one thing we hear over and over. I don't know where all my data is. Right? So they need to have a platform that can give them that visibility and that aggregated view, that single paint of glass. Then they're going to eventually want to take advantage of being able to move workloads into places where it makes more sense to have them. In cases where there needs to be tighter protection, or in the case of archive data, that they don't need to spend a lot of money on primary storage. It just depends on what our customers want to do. And, ultimately, to be able to move to more of a behavior based way of managing that data. For example, if we see malware crossing that network we can immediately respond and make sure that those workloads are secure. It could also happen as it relates to weather systems and being able to have the data be smart enough to sense and respond where it needs to move to. >> We saw some slides this morning that Peter McKay was showing, like off the platform slide, and I tweeted out that we learned years ago, working with Eric Brinyawlson and Andy McAfee that platforms beat products. >> Kate: Yes. >> So, talk about the importance of platforms through the enterprise. >> Yes, so first of all you cannot be a platform provider without an ecosystem that's embracing and extending the value, and we're working with our ecosystem through the API's, the application programming interfaces, that we make available to them so that they can integrate with our products, and actually allow our platform to be able to be the most complete platform for intelligent data management. That is not all coming from VeeAm, we are very heavily dependent on our ecosystem. >> Dave: Right. >> So that's really the crux of how important a platform is because customers have a lot of technology already in their environments. They want to make sure that if I'm buying something from you, that it'll integrate into my existing environment so I don't have to do a complete rip and replace. That's a very expensive proposition. So, we have been investing and we have thousands of technology partners that are embracing our API's and again, extending the value of our platform. >> I don't want to jump in but, I was going to ask you how you add value to those partners, and it's not just the product and the features, and doing what you say you're going to do from a product standpoint, it's having that platform that makes it easy to integrate, >> Kate: That's right. >> And creating that scale effect, that flyaway effect. >> Absolutely, and a solution that is better together. So, customers really like buying solutions that are already packaged and integrated as it might relate to Cysco and VeeAM or HPE and VeeAM or NetApp and VeeAM. That's what we've been doing with those partners in particular and really going to market together, and that is a preferred way for many customers to buy. >> Or IBM and VeeAM, or Microsoft and VeeAM, >> Yes >> Botanics and VeeAM. VMware and Veeam, we don't want to leave anybody out. >> Kate: We don't want to leave anyone out. Those three that I mentioned, we're on their price list and we are reselling. >> So that's the difference. >> Yes. That's the difference >> Okay, that's really the point. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> So my question is, as you go up the stack a bit, talk about platforms and things like orchestration, >> Kate: yes >> the swim lanes get a little bit muddy, because if you talk about those same partners, the VMware, Microsoft, the Newtanics of the world. >> Kate: Yes. >> They want to own a lot of those pieces in the multi cloud world. >> Kate: Yes. >> Maybe you can help explain that. >> I think we're all probably saying some of the same words, but defining them a little differently. So when we talk about orchestration, it's very much about allowing workloads to move seamlessly across multi-clouds. To do that while the data is secure and protected, and eventually introduce, we have partnerships today that allow us to leverage artificial intelligence. So that those workloads can move seamlessly without any disruption to the business as they're moving to the right location. So yes, I think you hear a lot of the terms, but as you drill down into it and you double click on what does that mean for, in your environment, it's a little different. >> So when VeeAM decided to expand deeper into the enterprise, it's putting its money where its mouth is. I mean Robby brought in Peter McKay, he brought in a number of folks on the sale side with enterprise, now yourself. >> Kate: Yes. >> We saw Dave Russel up on stage today. >> Kate: Yes. >> He's got some enterprise jobs. >> I'm looking forward to working with him. >> You're not just talking to talk, you're walking to walk. Which is great to see, and thinking about the total available market, its a TAM expansion move, can you address that at all? >> Kate: Yes. >> I know you guys are very research oriented, as a company. >> Kate: Yes. >> You have relationships with all the big research houses. What do you see from a taman standpoint. >> Yes, so, remember that our proposition is to have the most complete platform for intelligent data management. By virtue of saying that, it really means we have to look at adjacent markets for additional capabilities to put into our platform, to ensure that we remain ahead of the competition as it relates to intelligent data management. We're looking at various adjacent markets. Whether that be through a build buyer partner strategy. So one of the largest market opportunities in an adjacency is the cloud infrastructure as a service market. It's huge. Its about 90 billion. It's got a very fast clip in terms of its compounded annual growth rate, and we've already made some pretty great progress there, both organically, as well as through the acquisition of N2WS. When we move into fast growing market segments like that, and we have many others that are adjacent as well, it's creating an addressable market of about 30 billion for us as we look out into 2022. So we're pretty excited about that, and again, that gets back to making those investments so that an enterprise customer feels confident betting their business on us. We have that scale ability. We have that addressable market, and we are increasingly helping our folks on the front lines become trusted advisors to our customers. >> In your estimation, I know some of this is hard when you're doing the analysis >> Kate: Yes. >> I used to do that for a living so I know. In your estimation is that sort of an approximation of spend, or does it include what we look at, as the money that's left on the table by the global 2000 because they have inadequate data protection. Presume it does not include that. >> Kate: Yeah. >> Because if it did, it would probably be a trillion. >> Kate: Right >> But I wonder if you can add some color to it. >> Well I think as we get into an era of compliance, we have GDPR coming down this month, I think companies are taking a new look at what does it really mean to ensure that I know where all my data is, that I ensure it's protected, that I'm sure that it's secure, and that it's in compliance. I think you're seeing more attention, more money. You mentioned earlier that this is becoming more of a sea level issue, and I think in an era of compliance and regulations that are coming down, you're going to see that only increase. >> One of the interesting things that we saw about VeeAM when we were looking at the show here, you're almost, how do I say it, a tweener. You're still kind of a startup, but you're one of the bigger companies in the space. There's a lot of buzz and energy, and customer interest >> Yes. >> In this all market thing. How do you look at yourself compared to some of the legacy giants, >> Yeah. >> And some of the new startups? >> So we are a very fast growing company. We posted 40 percent growth in Q4. We were at 36% year over year. I mean off the very big numbers. I haven't seen these numbers since I was at VMware. So that is a rapid growth company that grows up quickly when it's growing at that clip, so I think there's a part of us that's extremely paranoid about the competition and looking at some of the new entrance to make sure that we are really staying ahead and innovating, continuing to innovate. Then we look at some being legacy companies that have been in this space, and we see in some cases, a downward trend in their revenue and in their investments in this era, in this area. Again, I think it's a healthy balance of innovative and paranoid, and recognizing that customers want the solution that VeeAM offers, and they do want to be able to migrate off of the legacy systems that are out there. We are seeing that time and again. We just showed, this morning in the general session, we showed a Royal Caribbean video and that was a case where they abandoned their legacy system to go with VeeAM. >> Well that's quite a story. Nearly a billion dollars, growing at 35 plus percent a year. You got to look to companies like Service Now, Work Day. >> Kate: Yes. >> You're in that rare-ified air. Well Kate thanks so much for coming. >> Absolutely. >> Congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you. >> Really excited to see you sort of take VeeAM up into that new stratosphere. >> I'm very excited to be here. >> It's great to be part of VeeAMON 2018. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll be right back with our next guess, right after this short break. (techno music)

(electronic theme music0 >> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's the Cube. Covering Polycom 18. Brought to you by Polycom. >> Welcome to Nassau, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at Polycom 18 in beautiful Bahamas, Nassau. Brian Brackeen is here, the CEO of Kairos. Brain, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> We just met this morning. >> Yep. >> I heard you up on the panel. So Kairos, first of all, I love the name. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Where's the name come from? >> It's Greek. >> Yeah, I thought so. >> It means, the most opportune moment. >> Love it. Okay, so you seize the opportune moment to do facial recognition. Everybody knows facial recognition from Facebook, but talk about what you guys bring to the table. >> Yeah and like you said. You seen it from Facebook. The new iPhone has facial recognition. It's really all about identifying who someone is and verifying their identity. We use it for companies. Prior to doing this for ICS stuff, we were an existing business, six years old. Mostly fortune 500, fortune 1,000 companies. We have retailers understand who's in the retail store. Their age, gender, ethnicities, their emotions, their feelings. We also help people like a, even like school bus companies that identifies which kids are getting on the right bus. We help movie studios to understand how you feel about a film. So we've been in this industry some time. We think it's perfect for the block change >> So there's a security angle there as well. >> Absolutely. >> As the fun on Facebook. How's, what's the state of facial recognition technology? I'd love to hear from an expert. I've talked to some people who say, oh, it's nowhere near ready. And I'm like how can it not be ready? I go on Facebook, they tag me in an instance. (laughing) I go, no, don't tag me. Where are we in terms of the quality and ethicacy of facial recognition. >> Yeah, we can find one person in a billion in about one third of a second. And we're about 99.8, 99.9% sure they are who we think they are. So definitely, the future is really now. >> Now you guys, unlike many companies who either done an ICO or raisen security tokens or done utility tokens, you guys are an established company. And then decided, so let's, but before we get into that. Give us the history of the company. You seized the moment and, how you got started and how you got here. >> Sure. My personal background, I'm a, Philadelphia, originally. We were just talking abut being an Eagles fan. >> Hey, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you so much. Long time coming. >> The Eagles, a deserved win. It hurts me from being from Boston, but. (laughing) >> But we still get along. >> Yeah >> So worked in large corporations for most of my career. >> Comcast, IBM in Phily, took a job at Apple, just after the iPhone launch on through the iPad launch. Steve Job was still there. It was a period of exponential growth. It changed my life. And then I got the shuttle bug, and quit my job there. Which my parents thought I was absolutely crazy. And started Kairos. First in San Francisco and then moved the company to Miami. We realized early on that facial recognition was a right direction that helping companies to do it was a big idea. Essentially the market is anywhere or anyone that works with people. So thought it was a good and growing market. And we got into it deeply in the last three to four years or so. >> So a bit of a change up. I want to ask you GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation is coming, it's here but the fines and penalties go into effect in May of this year. I learned recently that pictures qualify for personally identifiable information. >> Correct. >> Has that been a tailwind for you? Have people come to you and say, hey, we need help because we, we're on the video business or whatever it is and we need help in case somebody needs to identify somebody. Is that a use case. >> Yeah, we think a lot about GDPR, a lot about it. As your viewers may know, that's really a European Union regulation. However, it kind of extends to people who, anybody doing business there. >> Dave: Right. >> Which is everyone in the US. (laughing) So it becomes almost like defacto US law, even though it's not a US law. There's a lot of concern about, because of facial recognition, your picture really becomes your identity. So how do we manage that. We're actually one of the first anonymous facial recognition companies in the world. We sometimes just let you know that it's the same person, but not who that person is. Protecting your animity and your individuality. >> Okay, is that where block change comes in? >> Exactly. >> Okay, let's pivot to that discussion, block change. Talk about the technology that allows me to own my own data, protect my own data, anonymize, how's that work? >> Absolutely. Let's say me and you were in a kind of friendly wager, if it's really a go right, on the super bowl, (laughing) right. And I, you lost the game, so now you owe me 20 ether. So you don't just want to send it to a random address. You want to make sure that, you know, it's really me. Because 20 ether is a decent amount of money these days, right. And so now you're going to use facial recognition transaction today. Only this face can unlock this transaction. Can open this ether and deposit into their wallet. I don't think you don't even know who I am, but just this face. And so I'm standing on the other side. I can say that I will only accept ether from this face. >> Right >> Yeah, it changes everything. >> And then the obvious question people are going to ask you, server address really, but how secured is that? You know, how hackable is that? Can I take a picture of somebody and then, you know, recreate, you know, that image? How do you, you know, forth that? >> Yeah, yeah. A number of ways. Some things like you can take a picture of someone else and say hold it in front of the camera, that kind of thing. We have all kinds of anti fraud detection. So we can detect from the entrance of light, and because we can read emotions, is the person kind of really alive, are they feeling emotions or are they breathing. All kinds of technology we can use to verify someone's identity. >> Great. All right, let's get in the business of tokens. You choice to tokenize your business. Why does it make sense to tokenize your business? >> Yeah, and you know, you see this world, often times will write a white paper and say this is my idea. I appreciate that, but raising 10's and millions of dollars sometimes, and never coming through on that idea, right. In our case, we were an existing business. We've already raised about $80 million in capital, you know, like a Series A, Series B, very traditional way. And we didn't think we could just go off and build a new division in Gibralter or different kind of exotic. I would say that we're in US space and we have US investors in venture capital investors. So we said, let's do this the right way. Let's create a security token. Completely SEC compliant. So let's just do this like another round. To completely tokenize the existing investors and the new investors. So we're all on the same boat. And we've seen great success because of it. >> Okay and so the motivation for them was for investors was equity. Motivation for the existing, preferred investors was liquidity. >> Liquidity. >> Okay, so you basically took those existing, preferred. They protected their ownership and you transferred them over to tokens. >> Transferred them over to tokens, yeah. Essentially, you don't lose any equity, right. But you gain liquidity. You're still in the business. You're long on Kairos, you can stay long on Kairos. If you want to take a little off the table, you can take a little off the table. It really changes overseas finance. >> Dave: And you're doing it to your Chili token as well or no? >> We're doing it to Chili token as well. >> Dave: Okay. >> And with the Chili token, we gave it away for free. Because then we say to the SEC or anyone else, look, we're not trying to profit or get invested from the Chili tokens, that's why it completely free. We're doing a SEC compliant token. >> And talk about the use cases for that utility token. Howe are people utilizing it and what's the value? >> So going back to our friendly bet for the 25 ether, when I click my face for the first time, when I give a scan, that cost one Tyro token. >> Right >> Now after that, to verify it, it's free. But to create your face the first time, it's a Tyro token. >> Let's see, okay, and then you guys charge a monthly subscription for your service, correct? >> For the block change service, no. We just do it, just face san. >> Now right, okay. >> Yeah. >> But through your core business. >> For core business, monthly subscription, reoccurring revenue, absolutely. >> Excellent. I'll give you the last word. Kind of future, where's all this going? We're here at this investors conference. It's the first conference focused on security tokens? >> Yes, right. >> So, and you're a great example of that, of an existing company not a blank sheet of paper. >> Yeah. >> What's your outlook, you know, for the future of this industry, this eco system, this community? >> I'm literally like bubbling with excitement on the future. And it is, as you know, it's way tough for founders who are not base in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, to raise capital. This sort of democratizes that entire process. Now what you'll have is, somebody started in Miami or Portland or Boston, right. And first they would do a round of small investors, local VCs. Get their model together. Get their act right Get some customers. Things start to work for the company. And then there, instead of trying to go Silicon Valley, and beg them to invest, and maybe they won't just because the location. Now, you do ICO at that stage and make the folks in your community richer. They go off and do more things. Make better cities. It's really, really something great. >> Brian Brackeen, thanks very much >> Thank you. >> For coming on the Cube. Really appreciate having you. >> Yup. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching the Cube. (electronic theme music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (techno music) >> Okay, welcome back, we're live here at the Mandalay Bay, this is theCUBE's coverage of Oracle's Modern Customer Experience event, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and my co-host Peter Burris, Chief Researcher at Wikibon.com, and our next guest is Nick Edouard, who's the President CM of LookBookHQ, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much-- >> I was talking hockey, so I'm all distracted, I'm ruined, I'm disappointed, good to see you, before we get into it, it's all intelligent content, some of the things that are going on on this platform. But take a minute to talk about what your company does so we have some context. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're a marketing technology company based in Toronto. We are a very big part of the Oracle Marketing App Cloud. And we kind of pick out where Oracle basically leaves off, where the Marketing Cloud stops. So a lot of what happens in the Marketing Cloud is focused on generating moments of attention and orchestrating that kind of buyer's journey. We're what happens in the destination side of the click. So we focus on the intelligent use of content. How do we deliver content? We think of every moment of attention as core to a marketer, that that really is their currency, the attention. We need to actually think that marketers, B2B marketers in particular, need to think a lot more like B2C, to think more like publishers. They're obsessed with attention. We shouldn't be satisfied with clicks or form fills. We need to actually be capitalizing on those moments of attention to make sure that if Bob is really my whitepaper, then I need to know that he's actually reading it. How do I then move him to the next best content asset, or give him a choice of content assets in session? So in essence what we do, what our company does, and we help companies like Thomson Reuters and ADP, in fact ADP is speaking on about half this afternoon, Polycom, Quintiles, whole host of big Eloqua customers. What we do is to help them take their content use model from something that looks and feels like Blockbuster, one size fits all, I don't know if actually Bob watched the video that he walked out of the shop with or the DVD, rather. And hence, why Blockbuster is RIP. And we take that and make it far more like Netflix. We make it far more on demand. >> Instrumented. >> Yeah, it's very much like-- >> This is interesting, the attention to impact is interesting, and you know, attention is essentially aided awareness, which is the Holy Grail in marketing, right? I mean, getting people to have some aid to a final destination or transaction of some sort. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, very much so. I mean in the B2B side, obviously a marketer's job is to generate high quality marketing qualified leads and the real emphasis is on the Q, qualified. But companies like SiriusDecisions report that 94% of marketing qualified leads don't close. And that's a damning statistic for a B2B marketer. And our whole hypothesis is, and we're proving this to our customers is the reason why that happens is they're not qualified. Bob might have clicked on an e-mail, he might have filled in a form, et cetera, but did he read the content? We need to get an MQL to engage with five, seven, ten pieces of content to become a high quality MQL. And if we're only doing that one piece of content every engagement, that's really hard to do. No wonder our sales stat was this low. >> Well, we also need to understand that there's a progression people go through as they learn. It's not just that we want them to click on nine pieces of content-- >> Absolutely. >> As much as we want to see a pattern. So they've read this content and there was a suggestion made or an option provided and they then took the option, which is an even stronger suggestion that they've absorbed it, they've internalized it, and they're now part of a journey. So how does, I really like the idea that we're on the delivery side of the click, so you're, you know, we got all the stuff that's happening on the presenting things, the options, and then you're ensuring that when they click, whatever is being delivered is the highest quality-- >> Yeah. >> In terms of driving that customer forward in the journey, have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. So if we take, if you take something which Eloqua's done a fantastic job, for example, of teaching their community of their customers about lead nurture and the typical nurture track looks and feels something like six emails over six weeks advertising content offer A, then content offer B, content offer C. And typically they're scheduled 10:00 a.m on a Thursday. Now this would be great, if we could get Bob and the other 12,000 people that we sent the email to to click on every single one of those emails. And the reality is, if I've got low, single-digit clickthrough rate, it's not going to happen. So what we do instead is, well, if they're engaging with A, why don't we give them B in the same session? While they're here, while we've done the hard work in getting their attention. And to your point, Peter, we're tracking that, and then we can start to make some really intelligent decisions going forward, as to, oh it worked, this is what resonated with Bob. This content asset's actually performed well. So we have two basic approaches to this. One is we let the marketer curate that experience, decide what A, B, C is et cetera. Or we actually use machine learning to auto-generate. If Bob arrives at A, what should B, C, and D et cetera be? So to that, it's very much like Netflix, where we kind of base our algorithm, it looks and feels very similar to Netflix's content discovery. That's great for anonymous or net new prospects in the top of your funnel, once you've figured out what they're actually interested in, then you can actually-- >> How does it work for you guys? Do you require registration, because content in these days has two flavors, free and gated. So there's always that dilemma, how much is free, you want some flow, tension, and then you go on conversion, gated, maybe premium content, how do you guys view that, is that part of or independent of what you do? >> No, it's a big part of what we do. And, one of the things, one of the capabilities that we have in our application is actually the ability to serve forms based on time and behavior. So, if they've engaged with three content assets, then maybe I actually want them to give me some more information or put up a hand. So we can make the form time-based, you can let them try before you buy, as it were, or you can hard gate it. We use Eloqua Forms in our application, so all that information flows as normal, as the work flows all get triggered, et cetera. It's very much up to the marketer how they want to use it, but one of the things, what we increasingly see amongst our customers, is the most successful do try to take the forms out of the way. Once we've got, once they are a member of our known database, how much more information do we really need them to volunteer, particularly with our ability to augment that contact record with other sources of data. Asking the marketer, I'm sorry, asking the prospect for it isn't always the most sensible thing to do. >> It's the free versus registration, but it's also new kinds of content. One of the things I like to say is software is content. Trying software, for example, is content. Or presenting an interactive experience that has a software element associated with it is a crucial part of gaging where people are. Are you able to start embedding your tooling directly into some of these more interactive elements and choose options within that interaction, or is it more options on static content? >> It could be both. So we are fundamentally content diagnostic. The best way to think about what we do is really as a very smart wrapper that goes around the content and then that can be embedded or it could be shared however you want, it could be used as a destination in its own right. So, sure if you want to kick something off with some former interactive content, absolutely. We also pull all different types of content together. So if your content is distributed or you want to use third party content, reviews, an expert in the space that's writing about something, and you pull that in and use that as a jumping off point. And what's really interesting is frequently it is the sequence of content that's the most interesting thing, not the behavior or engagement of a single asset. >> Right, and so part of the experience that sort of marketing is developing here translates into other disciplines within the business, for example, service. Come into respects, one of the things that you're presumably testing is is the prospect learning the right stuff that actually makes them more qualified. Well the same thing could be said for service, self-service. Is the person going through the right sequencing? Are you also seeing a demand for this kind of a product over on the service side and does that tie marketing back together? >> That's a great question. And one of the things that when we kind of officially launched our company in the application, three or four years ago now, we focused very much upon demand generation. Like we knew the problem that were helping themselves, but there are a handful of our customers, Cisco being one, actually, where actually at the moment, all they do is use us on the customer marketing side of things. How do I drive adoption, how do I drive cross-sell and upsell? I mean, all this is, we've got to remember that attention's what we're looking for and the way that we achieve that is using content as our primary asset as a marketer. The channels are important, the creative is important, but these really are content offers. Bob doesn't buy because he clicks on an email, Bob buys because he reads the stuff and watches the things. >> Peter: But it's attention and competence. >> Yeah. >> Right, so it's, Sy Syms used to say, I think it was Sy Syms, used to say that an informed customer is the best customer. You want a competent customer. >> Nick: Yeah. >> In many respects, the process of moving from the marketing qualified an MQL to an SQL it is, is that customer competent enough to actually engage with a sales person or somebody else to do something. >> That is spot on. So what we're seeing across our customer base is improvement in conversion rates from MQL to SAL for example. So McAfee, Intel Security, now McAfee again, they've seen a three times increase in the MQL to SAL conversion rates. Rockwell Automation has actually made a 300x return on their investment in us in nine months by passing higher qualified leads to the sales team. I think they generated $250 million in additional net-- >> Peter: Rockwell? >> Rockwell, yeah. ADP, that's doing our customer case study this afternoon, a 3x increase in marketing influence opportunities, and a 6x increase in closed won marketing opportunities. So more, but to your point here, better qualified. We know that these people are actually read our stuff, therefore the conversation is easier. They are actually generally qualified. Carrier's been proving that out by actually 2.4 times faster through the funnel to MQL, and then their ACP is 2.3 times higher. Why? Because they're not getting the pushback in the sale cycle because the prospect has self-educated and they see the value now. >> Nick, I want to get your thoughts on something that's involved in our, we're in a independent media company and we don't really have any ads on our site at all, but we have a sponsorship model, we have data. But it's interesting, I'm reading an Ad Age article right now that says for the first time ever, digital has surpassed TV. I mean, I can remember-- >> Wow. back in the days, it's always this little slice and it's getting bigger and bigger. But for the first time, desktop and mobile ad revenue surpasses TV for the first time, 22% upswing from the previous year. So, digital ads, some are calling it native advertisement, whatever the hell that means, is a key part of the attention cycle. So the role that a marketer needs to take with channels as important, and a lot of content marketers are failing these days that we talk to because they're not being authentic with their message and the users can smell-- >> Right. >> You know, non-relevant content. Some are clever and make it link-baitish and some are actually really super smart and actually do authentic content. But, so that's kind of progression. That's an evolution in the industry, but from a data standpoint, there are platforms out there, like SiliconANGLE and others, that have an opportunity for impression and attention in real time. How does your system, how does your clients, and how do people deal with that? Is there a way, is there mechanisms? >> So we have two large publisher customers that run multiple different properties and have very large communities they're looking to monetize and they're all part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, they use their tech stat, and we're helping them in two ways. Firstly, kind of from an advertising thing, like high value added, advertising solutions, for want of a better description. How do I help to monetize my community, not just pass to HP, if they're the advertiser, here's a list of names of people that filled in the form. Here's actually people that are engaging with your content. And it's a mix of our editorial and your content to tell a story. And then one of the things that we're starting to explore for them is actually far more on the native side of things, actually being embedded as... >> John: An asset? >> Essentially, as a native ad in its own right, which can kind of get launched. That's something which I'm keen to explore further. And at the heart of it is, it's probably an even bigger problem on the ad tech side that it is on the martech side, but people like Gary Vaynerchuk are starting to ask the ad tech industry, we need a dose of common sense here, was the marketing consumed? And that's something which I am fascinated with, we're starting to see that we can actually identify by channels. This channel might, well this particular display provide the SP may have generated, you say, oh I don't know, 1,000 clicks in the last 30 days. Did it do anything? Did my-- >> A lot of times valuable. >> Exactly. >> You know at the end of the day, to sustain attention, you have to be valuable. I think John, we're talking really about a continuum from impression to attention to competence. We want to work with competent buyers because it cuts down the time that we spend on it, it reduces the risk that we're wasting our time, and quite frankly, it's a lot easier to work with someone who's really engaged and wants to succeed with whatever we're offering. >> It's also, he mentioned the publisher angle, I was thinking also from the customer angle, because I'm a customer and a marketer, I'm going to be looking for mechanisms to go to. The publisher wants better monetization of their communities, so have you seen any patterns in the business that could be a use case for helping customers operationalize, and we had great success with our business in the sense of saying, hey, we're engaging users, so that's good, you should join in with us at the right time not, you know, try to do it six hours too late, right, it's like being late to the party, right. So that real time piece is really super important. >> For sure. We've actually just changed the way that we're integrating with Eloqua to speed that up. So now we've actually moved to using web hooks as part of the integration and using their map form processing capabilities. Because it's faster, it's more extensive, it's more scalable. It means we can get very rich in content engagement data into someone's hands faster and better. And, I think, what is it? 50% of people buy from the first person that shows up, so being able to do that is critically important. >> Member-based communities are getting a lot of trends, traction these days. Some call, you know, subscribers, buyer walls, but member-based. >> So something we're starting to look at is how do we actually start to auto-generate the content experience, yeah, around kind of key accounts or topics, et cetera. >> Fascinating conversation, Nick, appreciate it, coming on. >> Nick: My pleasure. >> LookBookHQ, check 'em out, doing intelligent content, scaling content, looking at data, congratulations on your success, look forward to following up with you on some of the native advertising solutions that we, me need, that you need and congratulations, Oracle's certainly taking advantage of it. >> See you next time. Cheers. >> Thanks for coming out. Be back with more live coverage, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris after this short break. (techno music)