live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering Enterprise Connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida I'm Lisa Martin was too many man cube we are at Enterprise Connect 2019 in five nine smooth and we're in welcoming from Verint Kristin emmenecker the SVP of product strategy Kristin thanks so much for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon thank you so much for having me it's wonderful to be here so you here we are in the expo hall there's a lot of noise around us there's 6,500 people attending this yes biggest Enterprise Connect about a hundred and forty exhibitors announcing new products and services and solutions you've been in the enterprise communication space for quite a long time I have what are you what are some of the vibes that you're feeling about this year and how this space is evolving and really kind of this kickstart of the actual enterprise connect even itself yeah yeah yeah you know I love this space first of all right you hear this energy around us you see everybody bustling and I think I've been in this like you said over 20 years now and I think it's always an exciting space it's always a space where the newest things happening in technology we get to see here in this space or at this event even since this event has been in a distance and it's a space that is is continuously changing right and at such a fast degree so where we used to see you know 10 years ago 15 years ago a challenge with just connecting calls or you know getting the call to the right person I tend to focus on the contact center area getting the call to the right person now we're looking at you know artificial intelligence and automation and the relationship between human workers and bot workers and how do we make that work together and and yet for as much as the space changes right for as much as we go through all of that the fundamentals still continue to be the same which is we want to improve experience for our customers and we want to control our costs right we want to do that in a cost-effective and efficient way and so it's it's fascinating to see that those fundamental things that we're trying to do remain the same year after year after year but man the way that we can do it is so far and beyond now what it was back then I mean it's just it's so exciting it's really interesting Kristen I've talked to a number of people that were like up you know I was in the call center space and then I went away and then you know CX got hot and pulled everybody back in we talked to one of the analysts at the program and he said you know enterprise connect you know might have even gone under if it wasn't for the cloud cloud really helped proliferate you look at the vendors that are here it's there were a couple of big players in the ecosystem around them but now it's the diversity of go that's going on here and the solutions that are helping customers in so many different environments so you've seen a lot of those changes you know how are things like cloud and AI not only you know making solutions even better today but holding the promise for you know where we can go in the future yeah I mean in so many ways right I mean obviously cloud is such a great enabler it just enables us to move faster on so many different levels and to connect in so many different levels so when you have the ability to through cloud and micro services to connect different pieces and to automate those pieces and to be more intelligent as you're adding in analytics and you're adding in the AI you start to change the picture from just you know a to B - C - it could be a to z - you know why there are a thousand possibilities and intelligently in real-time it's gonna click it you know select the best possibility for that routing or for that process flow it really it the cloud has changed so much of what can be done it also has really lowered the barrier to entry so you know I've spent my time in this space both serving at different times very high-end enterprise customers and at other times small startup that that small business energy and a lot of times the small businesses wanted the same type of solutions that were available to the enterprises but it was just cost prohibitive right I mean they just didn't have the time or the resources or the thousand people in IT to be able to set up one of those big systems and and when we saw the emergence of cloud what we saw was the ability to have access to that feature functionality in you know it with just a computer and you know a connection to a phone right so a cell phone and the ability to immediately turn it up only pay for what I use have access to that really sophisticated functionality even if I'm a small business and I've got you know just a handful of people and so it's really exciting to see it break down the barriers and it give access to world-class feature functionalities sort of to everybody yeah it's fascinating to watch it we have that break between hardware and software it used to be I need to buy the big iron to be able to get the big features right but that's right now you know it was like okay that software just kind of got spread amongst it and I was paying mostly for the gear today and the cloud it's whether I'm that small shop or that big shot I've had that democratization because I can get in at a small footprint and I could scale I can grow it's no longer the okay which tier am I in for the most part it's we still work to do there certain software providers I work with where it's like oh you're not on a big enough here and don't pay enough money I'm like really today lots of money for my business yes you know I should be able to get the same piece of function no there's an expectation that I can get there what what I'm curious from like a variant standpoint when you look at pricing when you look at go to market - do you scale from the big to small is it all similar as to you know how you price in yeah yeah absolutely so we so from the variance standpoint a few things to what you said first of all we're in sort of the application we've always been in that vacation software layer of the space and so so it's really exciting to us because this is where the software again gets elevated to to the cloud and available to everybody so that's great for Verint and we do yeah I mean of course we continue to make strategic acquisitions and have go-to market that is more specifically targeted and solutions that are more specifically targeted towards SMB but again I'm a big believer that you know when you're taking it to market through the cloud in a usage model you really make it available to everybody and you don't have to have here's our separate product for this and here's our separate product for this we have lots of options but we also are a big believer that you know customers who want sophisticated functionality come in all shapes and sizes and and we want to serve them so speaking of options let's talk about the consumer we have so many options to transact business and we are bringing more and more demands to any business right we want to be able to have them interact with us on any channel that we want yep social email phone we still want boys that was a common theme that Stu and I heard yesterday is that people still want that human connection but the consumer is increasingly empowered and demanding water so you mentioned some of the fundamentals such as delivering a superior CX that your customers have to still achieve but some of those problems are changing because of the demanding consumer absolute less about some of those turning some of those problems into opportunities for Verint customers to really take that competitive edge to the next level yeah yeah so so at very an our sort of tagline is that we are the customer engagement company and so for us that goes that means customer engagement in the contact center outside of the contact center you know in a retail branch store online however the consumer is connecting to that company we want to help that company to understand that consumer better and to predict their needs because you're right the consumer doesn't just come in through the contact center and you know and expect for the person on the other end the line not to know who they are and or any of their history and expect to you know start from Ground Zero and explain the situation the truth of the matter is that consumer maybe has been for the last day and a half on the website or you know went into the showroom to look and and they're expecting that by the time they get to that contact center that you know all of that about them right that you know what they're looking for that you understand that you can that you understand what their sentiment is how they're feeling about things that you can suggest things for them they're used to that and you know with their you know Amazon or their Netflix and they want the same experience and this is really where I say this space is getting so exciting and so interesting right now because it's not just about again the connectivity it's not just about even across different channels right connecting my email from here to here connecting my call from here to here connecting my chat from here to here it's about the intermingling of all of these real-time with context so that whoever they speak to whether it's a chat bot or human or you know something else that entity has the full context gives a consistent answer right if they get the same answer from the store that they get from the agent that they get from the chat bot when they're chatting and that they that each of those understands them as a consumer and can predict their needs without them having to take the time to explain the situation over and over and over again it's it's a real challenge for companies but the tools are available today and it's really really cool and exciting to see what we can do with them yeah you talked about just the changing blurring of the lines that's going on in some space you talked about you've got a partnership with 5/9 yes you know where do you look as to you know they've got innovation that they're doing in AI everybody's you know looking at new ways to leverage data and access the customers how do you look at the ecosystem and kind of you know your role and where the partners play and you know where you collaborate together yeah so I so I love this relationship with five nine so I will tell you that I personally and my boss John good Senate Verint who runs all of product at Verint flew out to have a strategic full-day meeting with five nine just a few months ago this is part of what we're doing regularly we're really excited about innovating together about you know developing together about understanding how we can use our understanding of real time conversations and of customer sentiment and their digital sentiment from their webs the website and all of those things and how we can connect them in to that moment of truth where that five nine customer that customer service representative is you know is getting that receiving that contact and so that we can make the combination of five nine and variants something that's really really special for our customers and I mean I think that's why we're all here right we're here to to serve our customers and to provide a better experience for them every single day and uplift them because they're the people that have to provide that better experience for their consumers and so the more we can uplift them the more they can uplift their consumers and the more you know we start to feel the impact everywhere it's very exciting I love this particular partnership a last question since you are the SVP of product strategy in the last 30 seconds direction kind of your vision for where the market is going and say in the next couple of years yeah I mean so we're doing so much with automation one of the things that actually we're excited about with 5/9 is our automated quality so it's totally changed the way businesses do quality monitoring but robotic process automation and there are lots of different ways that we're infusing automation and AI and machine learning throughout our portfolio in everything that we do but we're also looking to add a lot in terms of extendibility and api so that's another big driver for us really being a good player in the corporate ecosystem of our partners and our customers wherever they are excellent Kristin thanks so much for joining soon be on the program today we appreciate your time thanks it was fun first to minimun I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]

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