>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the Cube. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by Five9. >> Hello from Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman on the Cube, at Enterprise Connect 2019. Stu and I are joined by a guest from Ribbon Communications. We've got Sacha Gera, the SVP of Cloud. Sacha welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So we've had the opportunity to talk to one of your colleagues from Ribbon before but let's give our audience an opportunity to learn more about Ribbon, who you guys are, what you do and then of course we'll talk about some of the great new exciting announcements that you'll make here this week. >> Absolutely, so Ribbon Communications is a global leader in providing real-time communications. We provide piece parse technology to over a thousand carriers around the world and increasingly to independent software vendors and enterprise. So we came into existence about 18 months ago with the amalgamation of Sonus and GENBAND coming together and about 18 months old and doing some big things now so. >> And a lot of news coming out this week. Talk to us about some of the key announcements that Ribbon is making with some of your partners, AT&T for example. >> Absolutely, so our Kandy cloud communications business which is our SaaS brand, we're a white label platform as a service providing UCaaS and CPaaS services to independent software vendors and carriers around the world. And we're really excited about AT&T's announcement ahead of the conference here and AT&T, you know a lot of people have been saying, "We're waiting for the big tier one service providers to fire back at some of the more well-known CPaaS players out there." And so what we do is we helped AT&T with an end-to-end platform as a service play to help them launch their marketplace. And the key word there is marketplace. There is a lot of folks providing APIs and SDKs as you look around the conference here but when you think about the Fortune thousand looking for those low code, no code-type digital solutions that can have the easy button to launch and transform into the digital evolution that's going on, that's what we are helping AT&T to do. So it's been quite they announcement for us. >> Sacha, I love that. We've been saying for years you know, the enterprise really needs an upmarket place, just like we have on our phones, it'd be great to have that, you know when I came into the show. my first time coming here it was like okay, how much is it just API compatibility? And we were working amongst each other but as I walk around the show floor it's like, "Oh well yeah that (mumbles) makes sense." And then these kind of pieces, which ones come together and which ones would I, as an enterprise or service provider just be able to, you know, plug into. So can you speak a little a little of that maturation of the marketplace and what the reality out there is there today. >> Absolutely and think about that large enterprise that has an existing procurement vehicle with the large carriers. They're getting their data services, their telephony, their collaboration. It's an actual extension to want to sell use cases and digital solutions. And so with the carrier, you've got an existing bill. One bill. Now your adding APIs and SDKs, turn key digital solutions and an easy button that's more E-commerce centric. And that's really what we've been able to help AT&T do, to really move up the value chain, so. >> So when you're out talking with customers and I know one of your customers, Hertz was on the customer panel this morning during the general session. When you're out talking with customers, talk to us about real-time communication. It's this huge opportunity for customers. It's almost an imperative that they'll be able to have real-time communications with whoever they are transacting business with. How are you guys helping customers embrace and deliver real-time communications? >> Absolutely, so we were really pleased to hear Hertz give us the shout out this morning and you know our end customer is actually not Hertz. Hertz is a customer of IBM and we are helping IBM with their white label platform as a service for their UCaaS and collaboration services. And of course Hertz is transforming all of their rental car branches around the world into the cloud, using our hosted voice over IP and UCaaS services. So we're really pleased about the announcement. So when it comes to real-time communications, I mean this is, you got to think about the customer journey and we've heard this from a lot of folks. The consumer is more empowered than ever when it comes to the customer journey. Gone are the days of necessarily walking into a bricks and mortar shop, taking an hour to kind of learn about what's going on. People are making decisions like this because all the information is at the touch of their fingertips. And today it's about customer engagement and it's about making the best informed decisions as possible and customer engagement in especially the contact center is increasingly playing an important role. So we're helping customer like IBM transform their portfolios, fill in portfolio gaps where they can provide new hosting services but at the same time transform that contact center experience and really help drive new sales with engagement tools and new technologies like WebRTC and CPaaS are playing a really important role there. >> So Sacha, it's interesting you have for the most part a degree of separation between yourself and the end consumer. There's one of the press releases that caught my eye though, the scourge to the consumer today is robocalls. It's like most of all, I want to turn off my phone number because most of the calls that come through, even when it says it's somebody you think you know, often times it isn't. Can you talk about, there's an engagement that Ribbon has with a number of service providers, helping to attack this big challenge today. >> Absolutely. So we recently hosted a forum with a number of carriers coming down because there's some studies that show that upwards of 50% of calls in the next couple of years are going to be robocalls and they're annoying as heck, depending on the geography and where you live. So with our new kind of end-to-end portfolio which kind of mixes both analytics and our strategic positioning in the core and the edge. The enterprise edge as well as the core of the carrier. We're in a very strategic place to get that information, data mine it and proactively identify where we're not only getting robocalling but fraud and helping carriers and others to monetize that business and do proactive things with that data. So we have a new kind of solution coming out STIR-SHAKEN, you'll hear a little bit more about that and don't ask me to spell out that acronym. It does actually stand for something that's more technical but we're really excited about what's going on there. The robocalling industry is becoming quite annoying for a lot of folks. It's a big opportunity for us. >> Heck, John Oliver did a segment on it a couple of weeks ago. So, hopefully, your company can help solve that issue because that definitely holds us back today. >> Absolutely. >> So in terms of industry adoption, we mentioned Hertz as a customer of yours through IBM but talk to us about some of the verticals maybe that you're seeing as leading-edge. I think governments, health care, financial services. Are you really seeing those industries kind of lead in this real-time communications opportunity area? >> Absolutely, likes we like to think of ourselves more as of a horizontal player and specifically all verticals are kind of going towards frictionless real-time communications. And you know we have a great thing going on with Five 9s for example. Five 9s is a well-known Cloud contact, it's a center it's a service player and one of the things we're doing with Five 9s is they've got a bunch of end customers who are revolutionizing their contact center and so one of the things we were able to do with Five 9s for example is enable them with WebRTC services. And it was about this time last year, maybe a little bit before when WebRTC ubiquitously kind of got standardized in all the major web browsers. And what we're able to help do with Five 9s is introduce a new frictionless in context way of communicating into the contact center over WebRTC which is great for customers who want to save on the toll-free minutes. It's kind of over the top web toll-free but it's kind of in browser in context like again, contact center agents have that full contextual toolkit of engagement to be able to preserve customers and upsell and cross-sell and provide great customer service. And we're not really seeing any particular vertical that is necessarily adopting that more than the other. We like to think of ourselves as horizontal but certainly governments, financials, retails, telemedicine, we're seeing tremendous traction across all of those. >> See, oh go ahead Stu. >> Yeah I was just being in the cloud, can you talk about some of the relationships with the public cloud. No, no, there were some announcements with Microsoft, believe with Amazon also. How are you seeing, that the hyper-scale public clouds impacting your space? >> Absolutely. So you know in this day and age, you've got to be able to fire up new micro-services and new cloud services instantly and practically anywhere. And there's reasons for that. Some of that is data privacy, some of it's security, some of it's just latency and so on And you know AWS, Azure we're kind of agnostic to the public cloud infrastructure but we're pretty excited about some of their announcements. We've been working with Amazon and Microsoft Azure for some time and increasingly with IBM SoftLayer as well. And so the ability to fire up some of our piece parts or Session Border Controllers. Our WebRTC gateways up in the public cloud and able to facilitate our channel partners to go to market in rapid time. It's an important part of our strategy. With Microsoft, obviously we're one of two certified vendors and with Microsoft and Teams, you know a lot of enterprises are going towards the Teams. We're able to help carriers play in that by having those interconnects to the carriers to provide the voice services and the carrier services and fire up practically instantly in the public cloud. So we're pretty excited about some of those announcements here as well. >> And what can some folks find out and learn about in your booth here at Enterprise Connect? >> Yeah, so I think at our booth you'll see a number of key topics being highlighted. Obviously the public cloud and the Microsoft as well as some of the other public cloud announcements we've had. In addition to that, we recently acquired a company called Edgewater and so our heritage, we've been known very much as kind of a carrier SBC player of choice but we've kind of extended that to the enterprise edge with the acquisition of Edgewater. And what Edgewater provides us is kind of that Enterprise SBC, but with SD-WANs. So SD-WANs, a growing part of our story, having that end-to-end quality of service, over the top with analytics and all the protection of security and all that kind of stuff. So it's a perfect fit into our portfolio and that's another area that you'd be able to see at our booth here this year at Enterprise Connect. >> Excellent last-- >> So if I understand that, I'm sorry. So you have an SD-WAN offering, is it something we've been watching quite a bit in the multi-cloud space and a lot of movement high growth in that area? >> Absolutely. So the SD-WAN offering with the Edgewater product offers a number of key services. Obviously the disaster recovery, having multiple broadband inputs and being able to switch from an LTE to another broadband input is part of that but the analytics in the end-to-end quality of service are equally important and you know for somebody who helps run our cloud communications business, when we go deploy to folks like Hertz, putting that Edgewater CPE box on the prem is an important part of our solution to have that end-to-end visibility for things like SD-WAN but also the analytics and inevitably security and protection as well. >> As we talk about at this event the evolution of communication, the evolution of this event and collaboration, I know we're only kind of halfway through day two here but I'm just curious, any key takeaways that you have gleaned so far from the event that you're looking forward to bringing back to HQ after this event is over? >> Absolutely. You know, every year is a little bit different. There's always a buzz word or two. I think this year what I'm starting to see is there's a lot more focus on the use cases as opposed to the technology. You know in the past, you come here, you talk a lot about the three-letter acronyms, SIP and UCaaS and CPaaS and WebRTC. This year, you're seeing a lot more about how can we actually monetize the business? What are the use cases? And you know as opposed to APIs being a big part of how you get there and the focus on the how, it's more about the what, like APIs are just kind of de-facto and you need them to help mask the complexity of the network and monetize and do things like creating new digital solutions and use cases. So you know it's just an example of how people are trying to talk about things this year as well as analytics and BI. People aren't just talking about how they're doing it, they're showing you what they can do with sentiment analysis. They're showing you how proactive policy can be applied. So that's pretty cool because we're now getting into the fun part of monetizing all of this great technology investment we've made for 10 years. >> And actually showing the business outcomes that it should be delivering, >> Absolutely. >> Right? That's the need, right? >> That's right, yeah. >> Well Sacha thank you so much for stopping by the Cube and chatting with Stu and me. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. >> All right. >> Thank you for watching the Cube, Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman, you're watching the Cube. (upbeat music)

>> (announcer) Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Fortinet Accelerate '18. Brought to you by Fortinet. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Cube. We are live at Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, with my co-host, Peter Burris. And we're excited to be joined by Myk Conrad, the VP of Product Management at Ribbon Communications. Myk, welcome to the Cube. >> Well, thank you very much, and it's great to be here. >> So tell us about Ribbon, your Technology Alliance's partner. Tell us about Ribbon Communications, and what you guys do with Fortinet. >> Okay, so a few things. Ribbon Communications, we basically are a security and cloud company, in the voice and video space. So what does that practically mean? That means we sell something called a session border controller, which is a voice and video firewall, into both service providers and into enterprises. So an example would be, when you make a mobile call, with AT&T, or Verizon, or Deutsche Tel, or British Talk, I mean, whoever your particular service provider is, that voice session becomes an IP packet, wends its way through the network, and as it's wending its way through the network, it has to be potentially encrypted, it has to be protected, denial service attacks, all of that stuff, that's what we do. Now how does that work into what Fortinet does? We are a part of their cloud security fabric, and we have the ability, with a new product that we're launching, or have launched this week, or announced this week. It will be actually GA and available in the summer. It will be included in passing information into the security fabric. So we protect voice and video, Fortinet protects data, web, email, you know, everything that they do very well. What we are, what this new product that we call Ribbon Protect is, is going to be a bridge between the voice and video world of IP communications, and the data world that Fortinet works with. And we're going to be passing information and talking between those two worlds, and therefore adding an extra layer of security to that. So that's how we work with them. >> (Peter) So voice and video have some certain special communications requirements, and basically, you're bringing the capacity to do voice video security, and the special requirements associated therein into the Fortinet ecosystem. >> (Mykola) Yeah, so a great example is, so let's use an enterprise as an example, alright? So let's say you're a big bank, somebody along the lines of a Bank of America, and I'm not saying it's Bank of America, or Wells Fargo. I'm not naming anyone, but just along those lines. Big bank. You probably have a SIP trunk, which is an IP trunk, and IP packets for communications coming into a data center, or multiple data centers around the world, and into individual branches of all your retail locations. And those are voice and video packets. And your tellers, or your contact center agents, are picking up the phone, and that's all IP audio and video. Or they might be using a handset, and again, that's all IP to the laptop, or to the handset. And they're having these conversations. You may want to encrypt those conversations. You definitely want to make sure, if a contact center is up, and it's doing mortgage calls, it's taking individual requests for checking account balances, that that contact center stays up. In the world of IP, especially in SIP communications, it's very easy to send a denial service attack against, for example, a contact center, and bring that down. So nothing keeps somebody from generating, from a single laptop, 20 gigabytes, 30 gigabytes, or petabytes worth of calls into a contact center. And that will bring down the infrastructure, unless you're protecting that infrastructure with a download service type of device. Similar, very analogous to what you would see is in a DDoS device that, for example, Fortinet sells, on the data side, to protect your web servers and your email servers, and all the other things, except on the voice side. So that's what we do. And now, with Ribbon Protect, we're going to be taking all the information that we're gleaning, as these ports are being opened and closed, and as we are getting attacked on the voice and video side. so an IP address comes in. We've decided that there's a lot of bad calls coming in from that side of the fence. We blacklist that. We will then pass that information over to the data side of the house. Through the security fabric, we will pass through, and then Fortinet can, on their side, say, "Hey, this is now blacklisted also." So any packets coming from that IP address that are doing something else, that have nothing to do with voice and video, because it's two separate networks, typically, will now be protected. So now the bank has an added level of security. >> (Peter) And Fortinet propagates that, cascades it throughout. >> Cascades it throughout their entire partner ecosystem. >> Right. >> So that's what we do. And we have deep visibility into SIP. So one of the things, as an example, firewalls are very good at opening and closing ports. And the default for most firewalls is port closed. The problem is with SIP it's a phone call. Ports are typically closed. A call comes in, and it's ringing. You answer, and when you answer the UDP port has to be open, so that a media stream can come through and cut through the call, so you can actually have a conversation. Otherwise, the packets will get blocked, and there will be no conversation. You'll get one-way audio, or no audio. We have very good visibility into which ports are being assigned the duration of that call, so when somebody says, "Okay, bye." Hang up, click, and you kill that packet stream, that port will get closed automatically. A lot of firewalls don't do that. They keep the ports open, because they don't know at that SIP level that a call's coming through right this very second for Myk, open the port for three minutes because he's talking to his mom, conversation's over, close the port, because they don't go to that depth of information on the SIP application level. We do, because that's our job. And we then pass that information, say, "Listen, you should be closing this port, or opening this port." We have a lot of visibility that firewalls just don't have. And now, as part of the security fabric, we're going to be passing that information onwards. So now we're going to have a stronger security perimeter for enterprises as well as service providers that are using the combination of our session border controllers, Ribbon Protect, the new product that's coming out, and the Fortinet panoply of products. >> So if I'm a CSO at a bank, and we were speaking with Fortinet's CSO earlier today, and kind of talking about the evolution of that. We talked as well, I think with John Madison, about the security architect. If I'm the CSO at a bank, or a service provider, what is my material value that this technology alliance is going to give to my organization? >> (Mykola) That's a good question. So there's a couple different aspects of this. So let me talk about Ribbon Protect. We frame Ribbon Protect in three different value propositions: one is for telephony fraud, or communications fraud, another one is in cybersecurity threats, and a third one is network visibility. So I'm going to start with network visibility and work my way back up that chain. So there's a value proposition, not necessarily for the CSO, but for the CIO and the people running the communications network, in having really good visibility into the communications network, an end-to end view across multiple different disparate items. So let me give you an example. Typical bank will have Cisco, they might have Juniper, they might also have an Avia system, when it comes to communications, they might have an old Nortel system, they might have some cloud communications from a Vonage, or a Fuse, or Verizon. All these disparate systems, all under this one CIO, and a call comes in, and nothing works. For some reason it's not routing correctly, the contact center agent isn't getting the call. You know, have you ever called, and you get transferred, and you get dropped? That's the problem. And then when they try to troubleshoot that, it's very hard, because there's so many disparate elements. So the first thing you need is visibility. So from a CIO perspective this product, Ribbon Protect, will give you visibility into the network, and that will allow you to troubleshoot and bring the network up. Then you go into the next level. So once you have visibility. So you can't provide security until you have visibility into a network, so now that you've got this N10 visibility, now let's talk about security. Two different types of security threats that our customers are seeing when it comes to communications. One is sort of robo dialing, toll fraud. And I would even put denial service attacks sort of in there. Denial service attacks also go to the next level, which is cybersecurity. But robo dialing: how many of you are getting calls all the time now? I'm getting them on my mobile, literally, I get like three or four a day on my mobile phone from a different random number, because they know my area code and they think if they mask it, it's a friend of mine, and I'll answer the call. That's becoming more and more prevalent. Now think about if you're an enterprise, and if you're a CSO, and now you're tasked with keeping these employees productive, but they're starting to get all these random calls, your contact center agent. And we've actually had this happen to customers of ours, where they picked up the phone and they were getting random garbled noise on the other end. And you're a contact center agent, your job is to sit there, and you hear these weird noises in your earphone, you hang up, next one comes in, it's weird noises. Third one comes in, it's actually a person that is asking about their mortgage. Great. That's your job. But then the next one is some weird ... It brings productivity way down. So there's that one area. And then there's toll fraud, which is in the billions of dollars, now, of cost to both enterprises and service providers, where people are doing things like calling Zambia, or weird little countries, and routing through enterprise networks. So that's another aspect that a CSO would be worried about. And lastly, and the most important one, is the cybersecurity issue. Packet-based denial service attacks across your entire system, that can not only take down your web server and your email server, but also your communications, your real-time communications, but also exfiltration of data. So what we've seen is the following: a hacker comes in through the data side and understands the network typology, puts in some malware, but because they're using something from Fortinet or somebody else, they can't do anything with that information. There's no way out. But here's the SIP network, this UC network, sitting in the system, and it's sort of unguarded, not that there's no guards there in place, but the data side, if you look at everything that Fortinet and others have been putting out, that side of the fence is getting a lot of attention. And over the last few years even more attention, as hacks have taken place, and PII has been stolen. But on the SIP side of the fence, that hasn't really happened as much. And so we believe that's the weakest chain right now, or will soon be the weakest chain. And hackers will use the open ports, because if your just using a firewall, those ports are open. The range of UDP ports to put media through is wide open. It has to be, otherwise it won't work. And so they can exfiltrate data through that. So they use some other means to find the typology of the network, get in, and then they can pass data out through that. And it might look like a good media stream, like a video call, and we've actually seen examples where people have sent video and embedded, underneath that, data inside the video. >> They piggyback. >> And they piggyback it. So you're going to see, the value to the CSO is, listen, if you're concerned about people finding a different way into your network, you're protected against, or you think you're protected against malware, you're protected against email, you're protected against web server attacks. Well have you really thought about the UC side? So if I'm a CSO, I should be really worried about securing that side of my fence, because I haven't been worried about it for the last three or four years, and there's been an increase in attacks, or increasing amount of attacks on that side of the fence. And then there's these other values of Ribbon Protect that hit other aspects of the IT chain. So we believe that there's a, sort of three core value propositions, two that really affect the CSO, and one that's more of a CIO issue. >> Well, look, once a port's open it's open. >> Correct, yeah. >> And video and voice do have characteristics that if a device is set up to introspect it and understand it, then it can recognize it. But as you said, your general-purpose firewall typically is not looking at that. And you don't want to introduce an entirely distinct and separate management platform, and paying, if you don't have to. So the CSO gets to see the same paying, while the CIO gets to ensure that voice and video happens without being hit? >> (Myk) And works. Yes. >> And at the same time, that the CSO is getting the paying that they need, so they have some visibility into what's going on with the network. >> (Myk) Exactly, and that's the entire purpose of this product. We believe it meshes nicely with what Fortinet's talking about, in that they have their Fortiguard Artificial Intelligence product that they've been talking about, and how it's detecting what's going on in the network, and millions of nodes, and features, and really actually quite sophisticated stuff. I just sat through an entire presentation on it. We are doing the same thing with Ribbon Protect, where we have an artificial intelligence layer that would sit inside the company, but it's specifically looking at the communications pathways, what's normal communications, what's abnormal communications. what's normal packet flows on the communications side, and abnormal communication flows. And putting two and two together, and doing machine learning, similar analogous things to what they're doing on the data side, and on the virus malware detection side, is what we're doing on the communications side, and putting together our own database, again, similar to what they have, where they have a database, and they apply that database of known bad, known good, to their ... And we're doing the same thing, and then we're going to share that information into the Fortinet fabric. >> So you're really collaborating and, it sounds like complimentary technologies. >> (Peter) Yeah, you're complimenting. >> That the customer benefits from. We've got about a minute left, but I'd love for you to share, maybe at a super high level, an example of a joint Fortinet/Ribbon customer, where the CIO and the CSO are being very happy with the technologies that you are delivering in this collaboration. >> I can't name any names, unfortunately, but we are talking with a large service provider right now, that is very enamored of Fortinet, and uses them extensively on the data side, to provide services to their customers, meaning: as a service provider, you're providing data and managed services to your enterprise customers. And they also use us today to provide voice services - >> (Peter) To secure voice. >> To secure voice services to the same set of customers. And so now what we're talking about is marrying the two, not sending data to Fortinet, and what is getting this service provider very excited is to be able to offer a differentiated service to their enterprise customer base, something that the other service providers can't, because they either aren't using Fortinet, or aren't using us. They need somebody that is using both, and this particular one happens to be using both of us, so we can put Ribbon Protect into their environment, into their network, and it'll start sharing their information, and what that will allow them to do is market to their customers at a higher level of security, and even to the point where they might be able to go out and say things like, "The most secure voice video system in the world today." >> (Peter) Yeah. They're expanding the scope of a common security footprint, and thereby allowing a new class of services to be provided to, whether CSO or CIO. >> And they view it as a differentiator for themselves. >> (Lisa) That's exactly what I was thinking - >> Which is why, when they're talking to the CSO or the CIO, why should you use us versus the other three guys you're probably talking to right now, well here's one reason. There's probably a few others, but here's at least one reason. >> Differentiation, a key fundamental for digital transformation. Well Myk, Mykola, thank you so much for joining us on the Cube. You're now a Cube alumni. >> Thank you very much, happy to be an alumni. >> (Lisa) Excellent. We want to thank you for watching the Cube's continuing coverage of Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. For my co-host, Peter Burris, stick around. We've got great interviews coming up next. (upbeat music)