>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's Ecosystem partner. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're getting to the end of three days of live, wall-to-wall coverage here at Cisco Live 2018, and you're watching theCUBE. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest David Tucker, who's the SVP of business development, with SingleWire, thanks so much for joining us. >> I'm glad to be here, Stu. >> All right, so David, you've worked for Cisco, you're now a partner with them. Give us a little bit about your background and tell us, for those who don't know, what SingleWire's mission is. >> Okay, my background is almost 40 years in the voice space, and then I joined SingleWire about two... Two and a half years ago, after leaving Cisco for 18 years. So, Singlewire is a ISV that partnered with Cisco right after 9/11 when the Department of Interior came to Cisco and said, "We have to evacuate "all of our buildings in less than "10 minutes, give us a solution." Our product, InformaCast, was born after that event. So, what we do is we work with Cisco's UC collaboration portfolio, and when a customer needs to get critical communications out to employees, such as a weather alert, such as a safety announcement, in a hurry and they need to reach all their employees no matter where they may be, that's where we come in. >> Yeah, so David, it's an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, you know, when I go to my kids and I say, you know, "You have this device"-- >> Right. >> It's for the internet, the apps, and you know, text and everything... They don't actually use voice on it all that much. >> Right. >> On the other hand, you know, I go to some of the cloud shows and things like that, you know, voice is the new interface. I've got an Alexa and I got a Google Home and I talk to Siri and Cortana and everything like that, so people are programming again for voice. Give us your perspective on, you know, just voice in general and then I definitely want to get into, you know, your company's mission and how some of that stuff works. >> Well, couple thoughts... First off, when you need to communicate to people and get their attention there's nothing better than audio with voice, live audio. You know, if there's an emergency in a building, for example, if you hear it in your ear through, you know, a speaker, through a phone, through your cell phone, it gets your attention. If it's a text or an image I may look at it later and it's too late. From a user interface perspective, when you walk into a building or you now need to communicate that there's an event going on, what better way other than to speak it? "I need help." "Man down." "There's an armed gunman in the building." "There's a chemical spill in the factory." Using voice is a great way to communicate and to trigger events is a natural way of doing it. So, voice is still very powerful in terms of, you know, that human to human interaction. >> Yeah, absolutely, so tell us a little bit about how do these mass notifications work? You know, I've been, I travel a bunch, you know, for these environments and I've been places where all of a sudden everybody's phones start making those weird sounds because you know, flood alerts are going on. You know, "Thunderstorm, stay in place." You know, sometimes when there are either manmade or nature made events, you know, how does this work? Is this tied to the phone network, is it, you know, how does this fit in? >> Well, think of us as kind of a Swiss Army knife piece of software where a customer may have all kinds of ways to trigger an event, and it could be as simple as a panic button under a desk or a panic button on a Cisco phone, it could be tied to the weather service, such as a tornado bearing down on your building, and then we have to then communicate out to reach all the employees through their mobile interface, through digital sign-ins, through overhead speakers, through their Cisco phone be able to reach everybody. So, it's kind of that any-to-any kind of model because you never know where people are going to be, and so that's really what SingleWire really does. Very common in schools, K through 12, obviously. A lot of universities, but there's now a workflow component of this as well. "I need to be able to tell the "employees that my network is down." "There's a chemical spill in the factory. "How do I tell the right people not "to drive through that chemical spill?" So, that's what we really do, we're that Swiss Army knife of really making sure people know, whatever event it may be, as quickly as possible, and seconds is what it really comes down to. >> All right, and David, I heard you say this can be like a featurous part of a Cisco phone, so I assume that the software that goes in... Can you speak a little bit about, you know, how much is just... You have pre-made packages for verticals and how much is it... You know, we're here in the DevNet zone or you know, people coding and you know, putting together their own packages or you know, building you as part of a custom application. >> Well, we're one of the very first Cisco Ecosystem partners going back into 2001. Our system is API forward, so we've been working with Cisco APIs into the phone and into Call Manager since that timeframe, because we need to be able to talk to the speaker, be able to put something on the display of the phone. We need to be able to talk to Call Manager to know where people are, who's on what phone, what building, what floor they're on, and then we also have APIs on our side. So, we're also like a Ecosystem partner of Cisco but talking to another ecosystem of speaker vendors and of digital sign vendors. We're working now with the intent-based networking solutions, so when they're having problems in the network and they need to be able to communicate to certain people that there's a network issue, you know, who do you tell? So, you know, plug into that ecosystem, as well. So, that's our livelihood is DevNet. >> That's fascinating, yeah, it's great. No longer the pagers going off, right? >> That's right. >> Now that they hear that little voice on the weekend when they're not even on call anymore. (laughing) >> That's right, that's right. We're going to find you, yeah. (laughing) >> It sounds like you've got a really interesting, diverse customer set. I wonder if you have any interesting customer examples or things that would help us, you know, really put a face on these solutions. >> Our common, our core applications deal around safety, safety in the workplace, safety in a government building, safety in a school, but our customers have taken our product and used it for all different kinds of things. We have a school system, for example, that connected us to their restrooms because they wanted to be able to save water, and after hours we'd turn off the water supply so the toilets aren't running all the time. >> Right. >> We have an ice cream company that connected us to their ammonia sensors because they use ammonia to clean the tanks to make sure there's no Wisteria in there. So, that basically is an application where now, you know, that sensor goes off, we tell the people on the forklifts not to drive through this particular area. So, we have another hospital in California, Laguna Hospital, it's a hospital that focuses on patients with dementia, and they put RFID tags on the patient, and when they get up and they wander the hallways they may get lost and they get confused. We can detect that that patient is now in this particular wing. We now play back over the closest speaker the voice of their loved one telling them to go back to their room, which they tend to respond to. So, those are some interesting use cases how we tied Cisco technology to ours. >> Yeah, that's fascinating, David, have you been to a few of these Cisco Lives in the past? >> In my career quite a few, yes. >> Yeah, it had been a couple of years since I'd been here. There's great energy here, especially being, you know, here in the DevNet zone. What do you see that's different today in networking in general and at Cisco Live specifically? >> It continues to be a evolution to more open connectivity. In the early days it was all about Cisco and it was very much, "Sell my box." Now it's selling solutions and the resellers and the partners here that are selling those solutions look to multi-vendor type environments, and Cisco's openness to that has really changed over the years, and I was involved in the very beginning days of the Ecosystem and the collab group, and it was really about starting that ball going. But you know, this is a totally different environment now and it's really amazing to feel the energy of people willing to work together and create something unique. So, that's the big change I see. >> Yeah, absolutely, I think back to... You know, the line you'd hear is like, "Well, Cisco is the standard," so that's kind of the way people do things, but that community and openness, it's making progress. Not saying that everything that Cisco does is 100% open, but it is... We were talking to Susie Wee earlier and some of the other people in DevNet is... Remember when Cisco had, like, one API-- >> Oh, yeah. >> For a product, now you know, there are a lot of solutions and they're building and they're collaborating with the community. >> Right, right. >> All right, Dave, I want to just give you a final word as to, you know, things you're seeing out there, what's exciting you the most and any final takeaways from the show? >> Well, I think networking continues to evolve. I think UC and collaboration is really still in the forefront of how it can affect how businesses operate, and you know, with the extension of video in meetings, you know, I see that's going to continue to be very exciting for both Cisco and for customers. You know, what we do is really on the forefront of people's minds now with safety and we're just on the tip of the iceberg of customer opportunities, so you know, if somebody's out there, he knows a Cisco customer, give us a call. >> All right, well David Tucker, thank you so much. SingleWire, absolutely, security of the network has been top of mind, security of people, absolutely, critically, and great to see some of those things also spreading into lots of other ecosystems and building interesting solutions. So, be back with lots more coverage here at Cisco Live 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)