>> 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)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE here in San Francisco, live coverage of Google Cloud Next 2018. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, our next guest is Ben Evans, who is the director of strategic alliances at Cisco, and Connie Tang, director of product management at Cisco here to talk about the alliance with Google Cloud and the relevance of the partnership around the collab. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> My pleasure to be here. >> So, we've been covering Cisco for a long time, most recently with theCUBE in Orlando, and DevNet creates huge surge of developer action going on across the Cisco ecosystem, not just network engineering stuff, the normal Cisco greatness, but up the stack with the collaboration side just cloud natives attracting and really giving a lot of energy to the developers and customers at Cisco. So, the partnership with Google is interesting. So, can you guys just share the big news, the Cisco news and how that relates to the Google Cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely, so firstly, Connie and myself have been working on this partnership for quite a while. And, as you'd said, there's multi, kind of, facets to this. There's the developer piece, so the SDKs are announcing around Android and the way that developers can now imbed calling and meeting and messaging inside their specific applications, their vertical applications. And, then there's also native integrations we're getting into around scheduling meetings from calenderings. I can go in and schedule a Webex meeting very easily. It was talked about on stage, 74 percent of, sort of, document collaboration involves some sort of co-collaboration, so it's a very kind of peanut butter and chocolate as you think about Cisco's portfolio of real time communications and meetings and how this is evolving into the team collaboration experience. Together with Google's portfolio in terms of AI and how that fits in to ultimate these work flows and make life easier for users. And, also just how this comes together in a very seamless way to enable this kind of real time collaboration and creation of documents. >> So, take us inside the partnership. How did it start? I mean, it seems like a match made in heaven. You guys aren't trying to create your own infrastructures of service. Google needs an enterprise presence, so obviously Cisco has a huge enterprise presence. But, how did it start and where did it start? >> We actually started engaging with Cisco over a year ago, and different groups start engaging because there's actually customer demand from our corporate enterprise customers wanting better integration of a collab portfolio into various aspects of G Suite. So, we worked with the calendering team because they're coming up with a brand new architecture, and so we're actually one of four front partners who work directly with them providing them feedback in what enterprises what, and then integrating our scheduling capabilities of Webex meetings directly into Google Calender. So that's one piece, and then we also work with the Chromebook group because more and more customers are starting to use and deploy Chromebook, and so they want to have an ability to start Webex meetings and be able to share content and actually join Webex meetings directly on Chromebook. So, there's another effort that went on separately. And then there's a third effort that goes on with the Chrome group where we're leveraging the WebRTC within Chrome, so that people can join Webex meeting directly without having to do download any client. So, they just open the web browser. They can have audio. They can have HD video. They can see the share. They can share content just on Chrome. >> When? >> This is what we've been waiting for with cloud. This is really, I want to expand on this notion of services. >> Yes. >> And service centric view because it has to be clean whether it's an EPI, a message que, or an event. The user experience's got to be integrated very cleanly. >> Yes. >> This is really kind of, the ah-ha moment of when people taste the Cloud, and that's the benefit. Can, because this is really interesting. You've got Webex, you've got G Suite. Two different applications. >> Very different, yes. >> This is the benefit of the services. Can you just explain the importance and why IT and why enterprises want this. >> Enterprises want ease of use. Ease of use, ease of access, and ease of deployment. So, Chrome solves that problem. There's no deployment required, right? It's already there, it's available on every desktop. And, the one simple click to join and schedule a meeting makes it easy to use, so with that combination, end use is adopted really, really quickly. So, we're seeing some of the fastest adoption of web clients based on those kind of ease of use and ease of joining. >> How has the product uptake been? Because if you have a seamless user experience, you're probably getting more customers coming in, integrating in... >> Yes. >> From G Suite and vice versa. They're getting lift. How is that partnership working? Can you share some color around that? >> Yes, as Connie said, we've really seen it's accelerating. One stat I'll share is during March, we were adding around 11 hundred new G Cal integrations every day, so we were seeing customers that were using Webex meeting, they were using G cal, and they wanted those things to work better together. So, integrating those calendars to make it easier to schedule and join meetings. So, yeah, that's 11 hundred a day. It's pretty good uptake considering we weren't really promoting it. It was just there and available to that existing customer base, so. >> What can you guys share to enterprise IT, application developers, or managers who have traditionally lived in a stone pipe world of like, let's build an app, and we'll distribute the app, and you log in, you do all the things, monolithic app. To a world that's services lead are service centric where you still do an app, but you got to think differently around some of the design criteria around integrating in with other apps. What's some of the best practices that you guys have found? Because you've seen the network all the way up to the application stack issues. You've got Kubernetes and all these new things. What are some of the best practices that companies should be developing around? >> So, what I've seen companies most concerned about is applications affecting other applications on the desktop, and hence, breaking some of their services. The web services kind of completely remove that. Because there's a web browser, they don't have to worry about it impacting any of their installed applications. And so, what we find out as IT looks into this mode of deployment, it's not really a deployment, it's an enablement. They actually really advertise it to their end users. They actually rather end users use the web client than to have to install, and they have to test and slow the roll out. >> What do you guys see as, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Lotus Notes was the state of the art collaboration. (laughs) >> That's real old. Man, that's old. >> I was digging myself. So, now you're talking a lot about integration, simplifying the experience, obviously video has come into play. >> Yes. What do you guys see as the mega trends and maybe give us a little glimpse of the road map as to what we can expect going forward whether it's AI or other data? Where does that all fit in? >> Yeah, I think you nailed it. So, there's this kind of better together, easy join, it's just table stakes right now. The ability for me to easily join a meeting, but where that's really rapidly going is the AI space. So, how can I augment that meeting? Before I join, how do I know about you as individuals, what you care about, what's happening with your company? So, a company acquisition we did recently, you know, fits into that in terms of how do we start surfacing information about the people. If I'm in the meeting, if I want to be able to click on someone and get more context about them. What happened in my previous engagements, what have we previously talked about? How do we surface that up in a timely fashion? And, when again you think about Google Calender and the information it knows about you as an individual, Cisco with the kind of matrix of who you're calling and what meetings have taken place, there's kind of a tantalizing thing there about how you blend that together. So, you surface the information, you automate this kind of, the repetitive, more mundane tasks, and free the people up to focus more on innovation and collaboration relationships. >> And the analytics opportunity is pretty big. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I mean Diane Green said in her keynote, security is the number one worry, AI is the number one opportunity. By freeing up the mundane tasks, automating that away, the value will shift to up the stack. We were using a metaphor with Jennifer Lynd from Google. You know, when the horse and buggy was, you know, killed by the car, those jobs went away. There was no need for stuff, you know, the horse, the hay, and all that stuff. IT, same thing. Things are shifting, operations are changing. >> Yeah. >> This is fundamental. >> Context is a great example of that. You know, if you look at what's happening in that market, you know, the predictions that they're call flows are going to decrease isn't really happening. What's happening is you're going to multi-channel, and people are doing the more basic stuff online, just fixing issues, but when it becomes complex, when it becomes relationship, it becomes high enough value, then you want the personal interaction, so I think the way personally I look at AI is it will free up computers. They're doing this kind of more repetitive finding patterns, but when it comes to talking to the doctor about, you know, your condition or you're trying to build relationships, there's things that people just naturally do very well. And, plowing through lots of data to find patterns, we don't do great, so. >> It's actually quite amazing when you look at the trends over the last decade or so in terms of collaboration. I mean, it used to be, I was joking about Lotus Notes, but it used to be you'd request people to show up 15 minutes early so you could sort out all the problems. And now today, if you're like a minute late, people are like texting you, "Where are you? Let's go." So, we become so much more productive, and the protocol has changed. So, when you think about how machine intelligence is going to affect productivity going forward, it's potentially massive. >> Yeah, we see massive opportunities. As you know, to really get the benefit from AI, you need some pretty big data sets, so again, just thinking about Webex for a second, six billion minutes a month in meetings. I'm not saying we're going to push all that straight into Google, but when you think about what's tied up in those six billion minutes. >> A lot of video. >> What's been discussed, how easily can I unlock that? How do I get insights from it? How do I train models? It's like, again, the combination of huge data sets. >> AI would be just amazing. You just go, "Hey, I missed that Webex. Give me the highlight reel." >> Yes. >> Exactly. >> That would be great. >> Not only that, but how do you customize that for the individuals? >> Or if I missed the first ten minutes, can I go scroll back? Can I actually review, get the transcription? And, if I need some additional information, can I just pull it up and it shows up, you know, for me within the meeting, right? So, there's just massive opportunities that we're looking at. >> And, the user expectations, the new experience, that's what people are really designing around, what they're expectations should be. >> Yes. >> And they're making that user... Okay, Connie and Ben, I want to get one last question in before we break. Two parts, for each of you. What's the most important story from your perspective here at the show this week that you're talking about and sharing, and what's next for you guys? Ben, we'll start with you. >> So, yeah, my two answers are firstly, the initial kind of integrations we're putting together. People should go check that out because, you know, there's some very compelling use cases that we're fixing there. But, the big item is Cisco and Google working together to really tackle this kind of future of work, and the combination of those two portfolios is going to unlock some really interesting opportunities, and that's what the teams are kind of getting together, working on, defining, and stay tuned to kind of see those phase two, phase three deliverables. >> Future words. Great, Connie, from a product perspective, what's the hottest things that you've been talking about here, most important, and then what's next. >> Yeah, for us, it's really the Google and Cisco coming together in a collaboration space, working together to make it much easier and simpler for customers to deploy and use the products. And, also to explore new opportunities in transcription and AI, leveraging Google Assist right to, and just make it even better in the future. >> Scale up the experience. >> Yes. >> Probably expect some great developer opportunities going on. >> Yes. >> Exploring and reinventing the enterprise. That was Diane Green's theme. She'll be here on theCUBE breaking it down. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Live coverage, here we have Cisco collaboration inside theCUBE, big relationship, expansion with Google. New product integrations, the value of the services within the cloud. The new model for development and user experience. theCUBE bringing you all the content here on the floor. Stay with us for more live coverage after the short break. (upbeat music)