(gentle music) >> Good afternoon, cloud community and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We are at AWS re:Invent. It's our fourth day, it's in the afternoon. We've got two more segments left. This is a serious marathon, but it's so exciting, it's kept my brain super curious. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by Paul Gillan today. Paul- >> Hello Savannah. >> Are you as excited about how much we've learned this week as I am? >> I am. It's just taking, my mind is just bursting with all the new information I've absorbed over the last three days. Amazing talking to all these smart people. >> It has really been so cool. >> And learning about all the permutations that we to think about cloud but there are so many businesses that have been built around the cloud, around making the cloud easier to use, supporting cloud as our next guest can talk about, that there's this whole ecosystem element that we don't hear about so much, but it's very much the foundation of the people who are here. >> Speaking of ecosystem, our next guest, please welcome Garrett to the show. Runs Ecosystem for Console Connect. How you doing Eric? >> I'm doing very well. >> Savannah: Garrett, sorry. Excuse me. >> No worries. >> Few names on the show today. >> Garrett: I'm sure. >> I do know your name, my mouth just doesn't want to, just doesn't want to participate today. Have you had a great show so far? >> It's been fantastic. You know, the AWS re:Invent show has always been a fantastic event, so. >> You're a veteran. You're also a CUBE alumni, which is great. >> Yes. Thank you for having me back. Thank you for your time. I most appreciated it. >> Yeah. We love having you. It's going to be great. We'll, we'll try and do even better each time we have you on the show. So just in case those listening are unfamiliar with Console Connect, give us the pitch. >> Okay, so Console Connect is our software defined interconnect platform. We also provide what we call network as a service. This allows our customers and partners to take advantage of our global private network on a pay as you go basis. Scalable and flexible. When you're not using the service, you can turn it off. So you only pay as you go. >> What a novel idea. >> Yes, yes. In the past you would have to have a year or multi-year contract. So we're making our services match cloud offerings around the world. The platform itself is in more than a thousand data centers all around the globe. >> Savannah: Just a couple. >> Yes, just a few. We have about 45 terabits of network behind it. It's all on our private network, so none of it's accessible via the public internet and we have a meeting place which allows our existing customers and partners to reach out across the platform and share services. So one customer needs to subscribe to another customer services, they can do so right across the platform on a pay as to go basis. So it's been very exciting for us. It's been very fast, it seems to me, for the past five or six years that we've had the service. >> At what point in their cloud journey do customers typically realize they need a service like yours? If the bandwidth they're getting, their native bandwidth they're getting is insufficient. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great question. I think the customers themselves have seen a serious disconnect between their direct connections to the cloud service providers where the cloud service providers are billing by the minute. And a traditional telecommunications connection is built by the year or multi years and then you really lose control over your cloud connection when you forget about it, right? Because service is always up. The connection's always up. >> Yeah. >> And a lot of individuals in a company may have access to the cloud, that cloud service, provider service. And next thing you know, you have a runaway group of services that are running that you're paying for and you don't really realize it 'cause the connection's up, you've already paid the connection the cloud service is up, you've already paid for it. >> So how do businesses get better control over that spend or how do you help them? >> Yeah, so how we help them is our service is able to be turned off when it's not in use. So in the event that you don't need the service over a weekend or over a month, you can just turn it off and you're not paying for that. >> It sounds so simple but it actually is kind of revolutionary in the industry which is why I keep coming back to it. It's great. So we've heard a lot about hybrid cloud, multicloud. How is this increasing the complexity for customers? >> Well I think the complexity for customers has increased due to the fact that you have a multicloud requirement or you have multiple teams accessing your cloud service provider and there's no one really managing it from a central perspective. >> Savannah: They can definitely get siloed really easy. >> Yeah, and then it runs away from you and the next thing you know, you start to look at the monthly bills. But generally that happens on an annual basis. If any companies like mine, you're doing your annual reconciliation of your bills and that's when you notice something's not right. >> Yeah, definitely. I can actually see a Slack message I got once, multiple times probably. Is anyone using this service? Why does it cost us that? That's exactly what you're talking about. >> Do you integrate with the Amazon Management Console or is it a separate service? >> It's, our service is a separate service. We are APId in with AWS. You do have a single console from our platform to manage your connections to the cloud. And then once you are connected in, you would still need to use the AWS console to manage your service. They're very, let's just say no one is offering a remote console third party console yet for AWS or any other cloud service for that matter. >> How about for hybrid cloud is obviously the way, you know, the way the industry is going. How do you enable companies to manage their hybrid cloud environments more intelligently? >> Yeah, and that's another great question. We allow that, you know, we're a global company. We have global access around the world. It includes not only traditional telecommunication services but also includes satellite service as well as 5G and LTE capability to the platform. So in the event that someone is in a hyper cloud situation, they have a lot of capability to enable their services. >> You talked about network as a service, and I, we haven't had a chance to dig into it. So tell me a little bit more. How does, how can this help reduce egress charges? How, are people excited when they hear network as a service? Where are we off at on that hype curve? >> Yeah, I think it's low on the excitement scale. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> You know, network has become somewhat of a commodity in the world, like electricity or water, you know, for the most of the world. And so network as a service, what it has enabled is it has enabled the customers more control over what they're doing. 'Cause in the past, you would need weeks, if not months to get services installed. And then if you needed to make a change to that service to increase it or decrease it in accordance to your requirements, that might take a couple of days at the soonest and you know, the Console Connect platform now changed that down to a few minutes. So within a few minutes, you can enable services, turn it up, turn it down, scale up, scale down. >> Savannah: Talk about time to value. >> There's no equipment installation required? >> No, it is our private network and so there must be a direct connection to it. It's not available over the public internet. Generally, a customer will connect to us via a cross connect at a data center or they can bring in a local loop. Or our existing customers, we just flip a little switch, so to speak, software wise, and we give them access to the platform from their existing services. >> Do you work with co-location interconnects as well? >> Exactly, yes. And in fact, you can purchase those services across our platform with a lot of the co-location service providers. >> So if I'm already using a co-lo, I can deploy your service directly from that co-lo. >> Yes. Yes. >> That's very convenient. >> That is very convenient. (laughs) >> You also mentioned the ability interconnect between customers. So your customers can actually connect to each other and conduct transactions or integrate their applications. Talk about how that works. >> Yeah, so for instance, let's say you are a customer that's taking advantage of our platform and you find your network is under a DDoS attack. You can go into our meeting place, connect to one of our cloud service providers who specializes in DDoS mitigation, spin up a connection to them within a few minutes, and immediately, you can start taking care of your DDoS problem. And once it's taken care of, you turn it down. Now those types of services that are subscription based are via API into our platform so we can settle the bill for our customer on behalf of that service provider or the service provider themselves can bill that customer depending on how they want to set it up. So it's very flexible. >> It's really clever, too. I mean, especially in an instance like you just mentioned in that example, that's a moment of panic and high stress and high tension. The last thing you want to be thinking about is what's the right service provider? How quickly can I get this up and running? If I can just couple clicks, couple lines of code perhaps, or even just through the portal, be able to do it, it's pretty powerful. You mentioned that Console Connect, and I want to talk about this 'cause it's clear you care about the user experience, the community and Console Connect came out of LinkedIn DNA and you mentioned there's a social component to the platform as well. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? >> Yes, thank you for that. Yeah, so you can, as a customer or a partner, you can market directly to others on the platform using our meeting place. And you have the ability to reach out directly to people across the platform, send them a message. You have the ability to post articles, blog in one of our sections. And then the other one, you can actually go in and see all the latest activity in the platform. You can see who's the newest companies to join Console Connect. >> Savannah: Oh wow, cool. >> How do I reach out to them? And then that gives you the ability to begin either marketing across the platform or direct marketing to someone or directly just reach out and connect with them and say hey, we want to set a bilateral partnership with you. You know, how do we do that? So it's very flexible. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Can I connect my systems to others? So if I want to plug into their eCommerce system so I can fulfill orders taken through their eCommerce system, can I enable that kind of connection? >> Oh, we're not there yet. It is coming, but we're just not there yet. >> What are the complexities? >> A lot of that is a trust issue. >> Yeah. >> You know, when you're dealing with across the globe, there are regulations in every location that must be adhered to. A lot of that is security and privacy related. And we must make sure that we are adhering to all the local regulations wherever we are. >> So it's not the technology, it's a problem, really. It's the- >> It's a regulatory issue, yeah. So the technology is there and I would say that the rest is following, it's just, it's slow when you're dealing with permits and with compliance. >> I also want to ask you, our notes here mention egress charges, which are a niggling pain point for a lot of customers. They have to pay to get their data of the cloud. How do you help with that problem? >> So how we help with this is first, we get a discount from our partners, our cloud partners, including AWS, and we pass that on to the customers. The other way is you have a full visibility of which connections you have live into those partners and you can manage that much easier through the single, I would say view. Of all of your connections. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> You can see all of your cloud connections right in the one view. And then you can do a little more digging and say are we using these, you know? Because a lot of times, you have projects that spin up and then someone forgets to spin them back down. So this helps give you that single view. But again, we get the discount that we are happy to pass on as well. >> Which is a win-win for everyone. I've using a tab analogy all show, we all we want it in one place, one tab, not all the tabs. >> Yes. I think network management and service management in any enterprise or partnership company is a real drain on resources. >> Oh yeah. And it's a waste of money. >> Garrett: Yeah. And if you're not managing correctly, yeah, you get the thing on the money. >> Are you an alternative to the direct connect services from the major cloud providers or are you a compliment to them? >> We're not competing with them, we're partnered. And so we don't see ourselves as an alternative. A lot of times, our customers come to us and they want to direct connect in a location where perhaps AWS isn't. >> Paul: Doesn't have a point of presence. >> Exactly. Right. We give them that flexibility of, yes you can directly connect here. And then the other approach that we like to take is we like to give our customers the choice of not only data center, but also region. So a lot of times egress charges are can be calculated across regions as well and that can really add up for our customer. Whereas if you have multiple egress locations, you're not transferring data across a region on the AWS platform or another cloud service platform. You can egress at that location and then take it across your own network or take it across our network and then your egress charges will be more reasonable. >> That's, it's convenient. Smart! You're making people's jobs optimized and easier as well as their stack and all the tools that they're using. It's fantastic. All right Garrett, we've got a new challenge here on theCUBE at re:Invent. >> Garrett: All right. >> It's probably different from the last time you were on theCUBE. We're looking for your 30 second hot take, your thought leadership moment. What's the biggest theme coming out of the show or for you as we look into 2023? >> Well, for in 30 seconds- >> Savannah: Yeah, casual, right? >> No pressure. >> Savannah: No big deal. >> No, so with Console Connect, you know, we are around the globe. I know that a lot of companies at AWS are, some are regional, some are global. And we have the ability to cover both. We can do either regional or global or a hybrid of those. We also have a hybrid approach on different types of services. And so the flexibility, scalability, reliability, and the lowered cost of egress with Console Connect is a win all around. You can't lose with it. >> I love it. You're meeting customers where they are. Garrett, it was fantastic to have you back on theCUBE. We look forward to your third cameo. >> Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Thank you for having Console Connect on. >> Hey, absolutely. We look forward to continuing to watch and hopefully tell that story as well. And thank all of you for tuning in to day four of AWS's re:Invent coverage in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm starting to forget my own name. I am with Paul Gilland. I'm Savannah Peterson. This is theCUBE. We are the leading source for high tech coverage. (gentle music)

>> (bright music) >> Narrator: The Cube, presents Kubecon and Cloudnativecon, year of 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Now what we're opening. Welcome to Valencia, Spain in Kubecon Cloudnativecon, Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host, Paul Gillin, who is the senior editor for architecture at Silicon angle, Paul. >> Keith you've been asking me questions all these last two days. Let me ask you one. You're a traveling man. You go to a lot of conferences. What's different about this one. >> You know what, we're just talking about that pre-conference, open source conferences are usually pretty intimate. This is big. 7,500 people talking about complex topics, all in one big area. And then it's, I got to say it's overwhelming. It's way more. It's not focused on a single company's product or messaging. It is about a whole ecosystem, very different show. >> And certainly some of the best t-shirts I've ever seen. And our first guest, Jim has one of the better ones. >> I mean a bit cockroach come on, right. >> Jim Walker, principal product evangelist at CockroachDB and Christian Huning, tech director of cloud technologies at Finleap Connect, a financial services company that's based out of Germany, now offering services in four countries now. >> Basically all over Europe. >> Okay. >> But we are in three countries with offices. >> So you're CockroachDB customer and I got to ask the obvious question. Databases are hard and started the company in 2015 CockroachDB, been a customer since 2019, I understand. Why take the risk on a four year old database. I mean that just sounds like a world of risk and trouble. >> So it was in 2018 when we joined the company back then and we did this cloud native transformation, that was our task basically. We had very limited amount of time and we were faced with a legacy infrastructure and we needed something that would run in a cloud native way and just blend in with everything else we had. And the idea was to go all in with Kubernetes. Though early days, a lot of things were alpha beta, and we were running on mySQL back then. >> Yeah. >> On a VM, kind of small setup. And then we were looking for something that we could just deploy in Kubernetes, alongside with everything else. And we had to stack and we had to duplicate it many times. So also to maintain that we wanted to do it all the same like with GitOps and everything and Cockroach delivered that proposition. So that was why we evaluate the risk of relatively early adopting that solution with the proposition of having something that's truly cloud native and really blends in with everything else we do in the same way was something we considered, and then we jumped the leap of faith and >> The fin leap of faith >> The fin leap of faith. Exactly. And we were not dissatisfied. >> So talk to me a little bit about the challenges because when we think of MySQL, MySQL scales to amazing sizes, it is the de facto database for many cloud based architectures. What problems were you running into with MySQL? >> We were running into the problem that we essentially, as a finTech company, we are regulated and we have companies, customers that really value running things like on-prem, private cloud, on-prem is a bit of a bad word, maybe. So it's private cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud in our own data centers in Frankfurt. And we needed to run it in there. So we wanted to somehow manage that and with, so all of the managed solution were off the table, so we couldn't use them. So we needed something that ran in Kubernetes because we only wanted to maintain Kubernetes. We're a small team, didn't want to use also like full blown VM solution, of sorts. So that was that. And the other thing was, we needed something that was HA distributable somehow. So we also looked into other solutions back at the time, like Vitis, which is also prominent for having a MySQL compliant interface and great solution. We also got into work, but we figured, this is from the scale, and from the sheer amount of maintenance it would need, we couldn't deliver that, we were too small for that. So that's where then Cockroach just fitted in nicely by being able to distribute BHA, be resilient against failure, but also be able to scale out because we had this problem with a single MySQL deployment to not really, as it grew, as the data amounts grew, we had trouble to operatively keep that under control. >> So Jim, every time someone comes to me and says, I have a new database, I think we don't need it, yet another database. >> Right. >> What problem, or how does CockroachDB go about solving the types of problems that Christian had? >> Yeah. I mean, Christian laid out why it exists. I mean, look guys, building a database isn't easy. If it was easy, we'd have a database for every application, but you know, Michael Stonebraker, kind of godfather of all database says it himself, it takes seven, eight years for a database to fully gestate to be something that's like enterprise ready and kind of, be relied upon. We've been billing for about seven, eight years. I mean, I'm thankful for people like Christian to join us early on to help us kind of like troubleshoot and go through some things. We're building a database, it's not easy. You're right. But building a distributor system is also not easy. And so for us, if you look at what's going on in just infrastructure in general, what's happening in Kubernetes, like this whole space is Kubernetes. It's all about automation. How do I automate scale? How do I automate resilience out of the entire equation of what we're actually doing? I don't want to have to think about active passive systems. I don't want to think about sharding a database. Sure you can scale MySQL. You know, how many people it takes to run three or four shards of MySQL database. That's not automation. And I tell you what, this world right now with the advances in data how hard it is to find people who actually understand infrastructure to hire them. This is why this automation is happening, because our systems are more complex. So we started from the very beginning to be something that was very different. This is a cloud native database. This is built with the same exact principles that are in Kubernetes. In fact, like Kubernetes it's kind of a spawn of borg, the back end of Google. We are inspired by Spanner. I mean, this started by three engineers that worked at Google, are frustrated, they didn't have the tools, they had at Google. So they built something that was, outside of Google. And how do we give that kind of Google like infrastructure for everybody. And that's, the advent of Cockroach and kind of why we're doing, what we're doing. >> As your database has matured, you're now beginning a transition or you're in a transition to a serverless version. How are you doing that without disrupting the experience for existing customers? And why go serverless at all? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, you know, serverless was, it was kind of a an R&D project for us. And when we first started on a path, because I think you know, ultimately what we would love to do for the database is let's not even think about database, Keith. Like, I don't want to think about the database. What we're building too is, we want a SQL API in the cloud. That's it. I don't want to think about scale. I don't want to think about upgrades. I literally like. that stuff should just go away. That's what we need, right. As developers, I don't want to think about isolation levels or like, you know, give me DML and I want to be able to communicate. And for us the realization of that vision is like, if we're going to put a database on the planet for everybody to actually use it, we have to be really, really efficient. And serverless, which I believe really should be infrastructure less because I don't think we should be thinking of just about service. We got to think about, how do I take the context of regions out of this thing? How do I take the context of cloud providers out of what we're talking about? Let's just not think about that. Let's just code against something. Serverless was the answer. Now we've been building for about a year and a half. We launched a serverless version of Cockroach last October and we did it so that everybody in the public could have a free version of a database. And that's what serverless allows us to do. It's all consumption based up to certain limits and then you pay. But I think ultimately, and we spoke a little bit about this at the very beginning. I think as ISVs, people who are building software today the serverless vision gets really interesting because I think what's on the mind of the CTO is, how do I drive down my cost to the cloud provider? And if we can basically, drive down costs through either making things multi-tenant and super efficient, and then optimizing how much compute we use, spinning things down to zero and back up and auto scaling these sort of things in our software. We can start to make changes in the way that people are thinking about spend with the cloud provider. And ultimately we did that, so we could do things for free. >> So, Jim, I think I disagree Christian, I'm sorry, Jim. I think I disagree with you just a little bit. Christian, I think the biggest challenge facing CTOs are people. >> True. >> Getting the people to worry about cost and spend and implementation. So as you hear the concepts of CoachDB moving to a serverless model, and you're a large customer how does that make you think or react to your people side of your resources? >> Well, I can say that from the people side of resources luckily Cockroach is our least problem. So it just kind of, we always said, it's an operator stream because that was the part that just worked for us, so. >> And it's worked as you have scaled it? without you having ... >> Yeah. I mean, we use it in a bit of a, we do not really scale out like the Cockroach, like really large. It's like, more that we use it with the enterprise features of encryption in the stack and our customers then demand. If they do so, we have the Zas offering and we also do like dedicated stacks. So by having a fully cloud native solution on top of Kubernetes, as the foundational layer we can just use that and stamp it out and deploy it. >> How does that translate into services you can provide your customers? Are there services you can provide customers that you couldn't have, if you were running, say, MySQL? >> No, what we do is, we run this, so the SAS offering runs in our hybrid private cloud. And the other thing that we offer is that we run the entire stack at a cloud provider of their choosing. So if they are an AWS, they give us an AWS account, we put it in there. Theoretically, we could then also talk about using the serverless variant, if they like so, but it's not strictly required for us. >> So Christian, talk to me about that provisioning process because if I had a MySQL deployment before I can imagine how putting that into a cloud native type of repeatable CICD pipeline or Ansible script that could be difficult. Talk to me about that. How CockroachDB enables you to create new onboarding experiences for your customers? >> So what we do is, we use helm charts all over the place as probably everybody else. And then each application team has their parts of services, they've packaged them to helm charts, they've wrapped us in a super chart that gets wrapped into the super, super chart for the entire stack. And then at the right place, somewhere in between Cockroach is added, where it's a dependency. And as they just offer a helm chart that's as easy as it gets. And then what the teams do is they have an inner job, that once you deploy all that, it would spin up. And as soon as Cockroach is ready it's just the same reconcile loop as everything. It will then provision users, set up database schema, do all that. And initialize, initial data sets that might be required for a new setup. So with that setup, we can spin up a new cluster and then deploy that stack chart in there. And it takes some time. And then it's done. >> So talk to me about life cycle management. Because when I have one database, I have one schema. When I have a lot of databases I have a lot of different schemas. How do you keep your stack consistent across customers? >> That is basically part of the same story. We have get offs all over the place. So we have this repository, we see the super helm chart versions and we maintain like minus three versions and ensure that we update the customers and keep them up to date. It's part of the contract sometimes, down to the schedule of the customer at times. And Cockroach nicely supports also, these updates with these migrations in the background, the schema migrations in the background. So we use in our case, in that integration SQL alchemy, which is also nicely supported. So there was also part of the story from MySQL to Postgres, was supported by the ORM, these kind of things. So the skill approach together with the ease of helm charts and the background migrations of the schema is a very seamless upgrade operations. Before that we had to have downtime. >> That's right, you could have online schema changes. Upgrading the database uses the same concept of rolling upgrades that you have in Kubernetes. It's just cloud native. It just fits that same context, I think. >> Christian: It became a no-brainer. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Jim, you mentioned the idea of a SQL API in the cloud, that's really interesting. Why does such a thing not exist? >> Because it's really difficult to build. You know, SQL API, what does that mean? Like, okay. What I'm going to, where does that endpoint live? Is there one in California one on the east coast, one in Europe, one in Asia? Okay. And I'm asking that endpoint for data. Where does that data live? Can you control where data lives on the planet? Because ultimately what we're fighting in software today in a lot of these situations is the speed of light. And so how do you intelligently place data on this planet? So that, you know, when you're asking for data, when you're maybe home, it's a different latency than when you're here in Valencia. Does that data follow and move you? These are really, really difficult problems to solve. And I think that we're at that layer of, we're at this moment in time in software engineering, we're solving some really interesting, interesting things cause we are budding against this speed of light problem. And ultimately that's one of the biggest challenges. But underneath, it has to have all this automation like the ease at which we can scale this database like the always on resilient, the way that we can upgrade the entire thing with just rolling upgrades. The cloud native concepts is really what's enabling us to do things at global scale it's automation. >> Let's alk about that speed of light in global scale. There's no better conference for speed of light, for scale, than Kubecon. Any predictions coming out of the show? >> It's less a prediction for me and more of an observation, you guys. Like look at two years ago, when we were here in Barcelona at QCon EU, it was a lot of hype. It's a lot of hype, a lot of people walking around, curious, fascinated, this is reality. The conversations that I'm having with people today, there's a reality. There's people really doing, they're becoming cloud native. And to me, I think what we're going to see over the next two to three years is people start to adopt this kind of distributed mindset. And it permeates not just within infrastructure but it goes up into the stack. We'll start to see much more developers using, Go and these kind of the threaded languages, because I think that distributed mindset, if it starts at the chip all the way to the fingertip of the person clicking and you're distributed everywhere in between. It is extremely powerful. And I think that's what Finleap, I mean, that's exactly what the team is doing. And I think there's a lot of value and a lot of power in that. >> Jim, Christian, thank you so much for coming on the Cube and sharing your story. You know what we're past the hype cycle of Kubernetes, I agree. I was a nonbeliever in Kubernetes two, three years ago. It was mostly hype. We're looking at customers from Microsoft, Finleap and competitors doing amazing things with this platform and cloud native in general. Stay tuned for more coverage of Kubecon from Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with Paul Gillin and you're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here, over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000, and it's whole overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable and we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the Vice President of Development and Operations, at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, Vice President of Ecosystem Partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. Jay, maybe you could take us through, for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do, what are you all about? >> PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong telecom. If it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable, we've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity came into business in 2005, if my brain is serving me correctly right now. We have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a Tier 1 service provider from that perspective as well. We do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really, what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on our network and our assets. >> Okay. 2005, obviously you predated Cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers struck it in the ocean, I mean, global networks. There was a big trend to do that you had to think, you had to go bigger, go home in that business, (laughing) all right. Console Connect is your platform, is that right? >> Jay: Yes. >> So explain- >> Yeah, sorry, Console Connect is a software defined interconnection platform. We built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issued to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. That may be extending to their data centers or extending to their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the Cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. All of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> When you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the Cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, if you will, like the visioning in management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people, and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. So it's a classic case, okay. AWS has direct connect. People will go, oh, that's directly competitive, but it's now you're adding value on top of that. Right? >> Yeah. >> Describe where you fit, Garrett, inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem. What's that like? >> Where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other Cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. We have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> And you're doing that inside of AWS, is that right or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> So your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> Your relationship with AWS is to superpower direct connect. Is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in Cloud. >> So wherever there's a Cloud, you plug into it, okay? >> Garrett: That's correct. >> Jay: Yeah. And then another advantage, the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographical region. If for some reason you need to be connected to U.S. west, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Dave: Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? What's the use case there. >> Global diversity is certainly one of them just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these Cloud-based companies are beginning to be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these packets of views and they'll go, well, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. We want our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What's the big macro trends in your business? Broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughs) Because that's what our granularity is. We allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. If something happens, if suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic, if a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you or we've provisioned a new circuit for you, we've got your backup going, whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume or so, I can have one day to a three-year term, for example if I commit to three years, I get a better deal. Is that right, or? >> You do, but at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. If you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> So it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. It's just (indistinct) reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you will sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to, because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a flow? And then everything above that is, I can flex up. Is that how it works? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, the more I commit to, the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat rate. >> Okay, I'm going to commit and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, or sign up for that and anything over it, you're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense and I don't want. And we, fine, take your one gig port run one gig of services on it. If that's 20 different services, we're fine. We allow you to multiplex your port and provision as- >> So awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend to take a look at that pricing model. So Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that? Maybe you could draw and paint a picture of the idea of partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but, >> Sure. Our ideal partners are internet exchangers, Cloud partners and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the Cloud, and the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the Cloud much easier in a flexible format for their customers. >> What can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the scope, the scale? >> Well, of our business, (Dave laughs) one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think, 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the Cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. Instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to understand that, now you're going, it's in the Cloud, now I need to manage my connectivity there. wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just bought into myself to try to run this? The platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So your a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. That's really one of our guiding principles, is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> I understand that, cause in the early days of Cloud, a lot of enterprises, the CIOs, they were concerned about security, then I think they realized, ah, AWS has pretty good security. CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's best security, it's just different. You know, we move slow, Dave. How do you accommodate, there's that diversity, I mean, AWS is obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the Cloud? Is that how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and, the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> And is it such now in the eco, is all the diversity in the ecosystem, is it such that there's enough common patterns you guys can accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. We do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem. We can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of, I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. We're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> If would think 5G actually, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services, I think. I can see somebody arguing the counter about it. What's your point of view on that? >> No, I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor and it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. We're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse and help ending it. The ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. That's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah. You look at, some of the car companies are coming on, Tesla, you're drive around with like eight CPUs and I think communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> You start scaling that and you start getting into some some real bottlenecks. >> Amazing business you guys having obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you got a big moat. That is a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in High-Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. Lisa Martin. With the cues to minimum joining me, we are a day three of our coverage of enterprise connect nineteen. Thanks to our gracious hosts in the booth here, five nine, We're pleased to welcome from five nine to the program. Wendell Black, VP of Global Channels and international Business. Wendell, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Well, Lisa, thank you for having me on. >> I know you're a bit of a celebrity because you have now been a crn channel chief honoree three times, most recently last month. Congratulations. >> Well, thank you very much. It's absolutely a tribute to my team and the company's focus on building out our channel business over the last three years. So it's been, you know, a super time for five nights growth in this area on DH. It definitely is a team engage sport >> team that pulled you out of retirement. They're less >> Well, you know, we don't talk about that so much, but it is exciting to be back in the business and, you know, working here toe, you have to build something new for five nine and to help take us into the next Thira Business delivery and especially the expansion we're doing outside of North America. That's, uh, that's the really exciting part. >> So before we talk about the international peace, one of the things that's been really interesting to watch anybody that knows the channel is the cloud has had a dramatic effect on on them. If I walk around the show floor, many of the companies here in the channel that they did, where used to sell in boxes and then all I need to understand software and oh, jeez, this cloud, it's gonna put us out of a business. They'Ll all go direct, but I'm sure you've got a lot of perspectives on this. So maybe help walk us through some of that transformation. >> But it's interesting. I've been an evangelist in the cloud space since the late nineties senses peace. So we didn't call it cloud then it was multi tenant managed service technology. But you know, the really exciting part is, you know, the last four or five years when it really caught on and started to take off, you know, we've had a lot of good trailblazing companies out there that yo have won the minds of people for cloud and the C r m or the Air P and other spaces. Yeah, telecommunications is kind of the lagging, Uh, yeah. Technology area to be adopted, You know, his standards for cloud. But I believe today most buyers are trying to figure out why not cloud, rather than why go to cloud. And that's a game changer. >> Yes. Oh, I'm curious. Just from the channel perspective itself. We understand that customer journey, but the channel people was there. Do they have the skill set that they need to go? Was just some retraining. Was it partnerships like like yours, you know, how did that transition go? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And I really think that the channel has the skills. Yeah, they just have to adapt and re tune a little bit. Things just happen faster when you do the cloud and and we have get a MIDI discussions and experiences with partners where we're sitting around the table planning Ah, roll out. And you're just doing the basic discovery. And, you know, at the end of that, r P s team can say, Well, I've actually built it. Let me show you how it works, you know, rather than you know, the six month or twelve months rollout process that people were accustomed to in the past. So it's pretty exciting to be able to show people actionable results that kind of time frame very, very fun. >> Talk to us about the partnerships and the influence that your partners have had on such a big, successful close to f. Y eighteen. >> You know, the other partners were strong contributors in, you know, our cue for and we certainly value everything they're doing for us and with us out in the market are continuum of partners is get both in the master agent community. So referral oriented relationships where the five nine direct sales team is getting Carrie in the water and working with them to get a deal done, but also in our resale business. Uh, you know, it's great to see those partners doing more and more to build the business and their portfolio on DH delivered joint customers. So it's a very exciting, you know, kind of up lift everything we're doing. All right, >> So So Wendell, uh, one of things when we talked. A lot of companies, it's like, Well, there's North American. There's everything else I was promised by some of your team members. You can actually give us a little bit more granular view of, you know, Europe, Eastern Europe and some of the other global differences that are happening in the market Place would love if you could share some of your wisdom. It's >> your thing. And I believe that I don't want to be disparaging Tio my friends in Europe, but they're a little slower on the adoption rate. Um, it's interesting. In my history and contact center, there were times where Europe led the field with different technologies, and yet other times that they were kind of behind what North America was doing. Uh, this is one of behind times, and I think it is just, you know, an ongoing concern and their minds about you know, how security and management of a cloud based delivery model was going to affect their business and how they were going to be looked at by regulators. But I think we've overcome, uh, those hurdles and the last several years in twenty eighteen, our business in Europe doubled year over year. Uh, and it's inspired us God, ADM. Or sales and other departmental resource is in the region so that we can do that again here and twenty nineteen similar story in Latin America. And now there is, ah lot of growth, a lot of interest. And it's not just in the mid market anymore. We're talking big, big call centers on. They are all jumping on the bandwagon. Uh, for all of the economic reasons that people want to go to the cloud in the first place. You know it's less expensive to get started. You know, it's easier to be nimble and flexible and your staffing and costs, and, you know, they all need those benefits just as much as a mid market or s and be kind of a client. >> Well, dig in a little bit further, Wendell, on how five nine and your partners have helped some of these customers in Europe in Latin America become comfortable with. We need to move to the cloud and also help them understand some of the other implications. Besides costs and things like the opportunity to start taking advantage of a >> okay, Great, yeah, because in particular, one of our partners in the UK has specialized in the travel, vacation Liza kind of industry and yell when they work in those markets. Uh, distributed workforce is very much kind of the norm for them. And so, you know, one of their clients, in particular, has agents in the UK They have agents in Germany. They want to manage him, is a common group and be able Teo manage there, television advertising to be ableto staff and respond based on wherever the load is. You know, whenever things are going on in there, you know, marketing activity, that's that's a key flexibility win for them. And they get the right staff at the right time to be ableto you know, to cover the television advertising, which is pretty costly, but it's a big win for them. Gotta have that flexibility with five nine. >> You know, it's interesting. We actually have only talked a little bit this week about the distributed workforce, and I I'd love to get your perspective. You know, I think back there's, you know, a large apparel company in the Northeast that when they didn't have any of their agents, you know, in their headquarters, and, you know, it was something that got written up. You know when that had happened. So today you know what? What is that? That mix? And, you know, are there some geographic differences that you see in that? >> Yeah, there are some differences just based on the infrastructure that may be available. And, you know, we find that home based workforce is a little bit more challenging in Latin America than it is perhaps in Europe or in the US But then there's also cultural differences. Yeah, there are some countries that have actually regulate that employees have to show up in a physical building or you're violating the law because you might be taking advantage of your employees. So that's different. Different strokes for get up for different locations. We are finding it more and more desirable because of all the reasons that, yeah, I've been around for a long time. You can save on real estate. You can save on the wear and tear of your employees traveling, but probably the biggest one is the benefit of flex staffing that allows you to get the right number of people for a short shift to cover your peaks or your be ready for your valleys that you know if people have to drive to an office they're just not is likely to want to sign up for, But that business modeling is actually becoming more and more compelling. Driving around Orlando. You know, this week it was kind of a challenge. Get on I for and with the rain. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who want to be at home workers here, you know, based on the weather this week. >> Definitely. So this is the end of enterprise Connect Expo Hall anyway, today, three full days this Expo Hall one hundred forty vendors knew new products. New service is sixty five hundred attendees. So much excitement in this hot, hot contact center market. What are some of the things that excite you that you've heard from partners and customers that just think we're on the right track? The momentum, The wind is at our backs >> Well, and you mentioned a I and what do your earlier questions? And that's kind of the buzz. Everybody was to talk about automation and machine learning, and you can bring a I into, you know, interacting in the call center. I'm sure you've heard from other people that have been up here. The focus we see in the near term is on agent augmentation and, you know, enhancing. Yeah. Agent performance through those technologies on, you know, a lot of people would have approached this thinking like Ivy ours in the past. I can replace agents with interactive voice response. Well, we will. We want to make a smarter, better customer serving agent and bring that technology and to play to do it. That's to me. Going be the things I've been seen exciting new technologies that can be applied in real time transcription and Theo providing the ability to read that and data depth and serve things up for for agents to allow them, Tio go to be more on the ball, talking to a client. >> Yeah, that old mental Asian is definitely something that came up quite a bit. We even talked with your CEO, Rohan trollop about that and the importance of empathy and voice that as consumers I would love to know that you went to an augmented agent on the other end. Who knows? Okay, I understand the issue. I see how many times this person has reached out through different channels and they're actually going to use that technology to facilitate a resolution and hopefully drive up. See Elvi. >> I mean, that insight into the customer experience is key for the agent to be able to do Mohr and do it better. You know, we've been talking about that night of insight for years and years. You know, technology has caught up with desire. And so now that we have the technology to do it, you know, we can allow the agent focus more on their conversation with a customer and not have to be working the keyboard in order to retrieve the next thing that they need to take care of. And so better prepared agent, you know, knowing the background of the client, you know, is going to give them a much better experience. And, you know, that's what five nines trying to deliver in the market. >> We've heard that resoundingly throughout the re through your partners customers, and it's been fantastic. Wendell, congrats again on your three time channel, chief. Honoree. A record. And I'm sure there's got to be a fourth one around the corner. I won't jinx that, but I'm just gonna gas. >> Thank you. >> We thank you so much for your time. >> Appreciate it. >> Likewise forced to Mina. Man, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering enterprise connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to minimun joining me we are at Enterprise Connect 2019 day three graciously hosted by five nine we've had great conversations with five nine folks customers partners and we're very pleased to welcome back to the cube but the first time live the CEO of five nine Rowan trollope Bruin thank you so much for joining Stu and me today thank you Lisa thank you sue great to be here and for hosting us I was telling you before we live we've had a great three days of talking to your customers your partners this contact center is hot it's electric it's electric I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to contact center connector or central or something it's it really all the innovation I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that wow there's so much innovation happening in the contact center and they're 100% right and not just us but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now the rise of the powered consumer yeah it's incredible how this consumer behavior that's the driver absolutely and every company has to react because we have as consumers so much choice yeah we call it the experience economy it's like you know we're all and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers and when we deal with brands we want to have a great experience all around like not just when we're you know buying or when we're using or but you know from the very first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get and we're really really focused on that so that's the driver and your enterprises have realized that businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do so it's it's emerging as this like as this extraordinarily important part of every business yeah Rowen one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learn this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that were using it behind them it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer right and if I do need to call them what that experience would be like that's right we're so we think a lot about customer love what you know what does it take to get a customer to love your business and it doesn't only take having a great product it takes having a great experience with your brand and nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center it's where all the action happens right it's right at that front line it's for the moment you hear the ring when you call that company or what the website looks like and how you get answers to your questions and how do they engage with you how do they greet you what is it like do you does the person know who you are do they give you that delightful experience and you know the thing is we all know what great looks like and therefore we see when it's not great and it's just grates on us you know great great and and five nine is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses one of the things we heard - in terms of omni-channel and you know as these empowered consumers we we want a company to communicate with us so as you were saying before I know us on whatever channel that we want but one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool that that really companies of any industry saying I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone so I just was surprised to learn that that social wasn't as high on the radar yet but then other things that we're surprising to row and it's voices sexy voices back it's we have to have the humans and the empathise or some some sort of old-school things that are coming back and resurfacing is critical yeah well you know on the omni-channel things that sort of very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want in the best way possible and if we think about I keep this really simple for people think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting sometimes I would call you sometimes I would text you sometimes I might send you an email they're all different not one or the other is better or worse they're just different if I'm in line at Starbucks and I'm trying to like you know I'm not gonna call you and be that person who's like loudly yapping to Lisa on the phone I might send you a couple texts but then I walk out I jump in the car what a minute I'm gonna phone Conny on the phone the call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed so that's really the that's where we're driving towards and that's what our product offers the fancy word for that is omni-channel you know you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as you know you would like and we're able to deliver it deliver that out of the box right and we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and you know whoever the backend is that you're using so we can we partner with that and do that very effectively yeah Rowen one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening one of the panels though I was actually a little surprised to hear they're like oh how do we call kind of the hybrid environment I have my own premises I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle it's you know we're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry and sometimes they're like oh well there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of you know it's very large and part of me looks at it's like well I look at the largest technology companies in the world they're the cloud companies and they're scaling you know and they're enabling companies to scale even more I know clouds one of the main reasons you know for 5/9 success yeah in one of the regions that came over we're a market leader in cloud you know that's how we started we're born in the cloud so we don't have any on-premises technology you know think about a call center today that has phones on the desks and wires and this you know we're all about the agents login to our website at five nine com they get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the computer and so it's super lightweight there's nothing to deploy there's no closets of equipment anywhere it's all very seamless and lightweight and that's what customers really love about the solution the idea back to your point that you know there's some things are too big for the cloud that's total BS I just say to have to say it that's not true you know what I would agree with though is that we're on a journey you know we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud right and so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make and you know that frankly if all you have is a legacy on premises set of technology then that's the story you're gonna tell and it's not a it's not a lie it's true that for some companies but what's true for most companies almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer and we're essentially we're through the evangelism phase here there's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses it is you know we've got over 40 customers now paying us over a million dollars a year then that's doubled in the last two years so it's a fastest growing segment of our business is large-scale contact centers running a hundred percent on the cloud and they are loving it and another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI we've that's been a theme I know that hey I came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning but talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience yeah well I'll tell you a little story I was call center agent my first job we're talking about that earlier and you know I took a lot of calls and 8000 calls actually in a call center that I took after you take 8,000 calls your brain gets really good at predicting what the calls are about you've heard them all you're never gonna be surprised by an inbound sort of call or message or whatever you've seen it all and frankly by the time the customer says two or three words you already know where they're going but the big challenge in the context so if you got me on the phones I would know the answers to your questions after you think $8,000 you're fast you're efficient you can deliver that great experience the big problem in the context Center it's mostly a labor driven operation there's very high turnover contact center reps once they've taken out phase 8,000 calls the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center we think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem to deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents let them focus on the empathy we say let the Machine bring the mastery and let the human bring the heart because it's really important that you have the human touch in that experience right that drives that's what people crave in life they don't it's like I don't want to talk to a bot whether it's on text or the IVR as far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IV ARS nobody likes talking to a computer you want to talk to a human so our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient how we can arm them with real-time interactions and that's all about leveraging data right because the data in this case is voice so de voices the new data it's the biggest source of dart data in the enterprise customer voice actual voice like WAV files what's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time take that customer voice convert it into text real time with with high accuracy better than humans can do and we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next right that sort of superpower rep who's taken 8000 calls how do you make every rep like that we are sort of heading down a path to enable that the very first step though is you have to get to the cloud because this technology cannot be done on premises so you know you can dance around that all you want but the reality is you cannot get data at scale on-premises with the legacy approach you have to be in the cloud and that's where we are and that's where we were that's where we started well that that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week of the show and something we heard a lot from your team something that that's happening just across industries I'd love to hear a little bit about you know just future growth where you you know 5/9 had a very strong product great customer experience to begin with but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting moved down the AI path data becomes more and more important part of the story well what should we be looking at four five nine kind of the next you know 12 to 18 months yeah well I think five 9s got the best experience for our customers and you know where we're heading the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before so that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best best-in-class experience right that predictive you never wait you get someone whether it's text whether it's email whether it's chat you get a great answer you get a human touch but you also get the answer you want and whether that's inbound or outbound if its outbound it's really important that it is not only predictive but that it's anticipating what your needs are because I like to say if I have to call support like that's already a problem why am i calling you you know with IOT and with instrumentation going on and with the ability to gather data part of what you should be of doing every business should be doing is anticipating what their customers are gonna need and sharing that information across their company and a contact center is really where that all comes together to be able to say look we know this customers are already having a problem with this like let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them we should be calling them to figure out how do we can make that experience better so really honing and optimizing and anticipating your users needs is sort of the other side of this so it's both the inbound case I talked about but also that outbound case and and that that proactive engagement that that I think every end user really would like in an effective way five nine has about five billion recorded conversations customer conversations a year you have billion minutes a year five billion minutes thank you a year tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dirk data and becoming predictive talk to us about that as a competitive advantage yeah the very first step is lighting that data up we're lighting it up now with machine learning we signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech-to-text in a secure way in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data so very very secure obviously our our name is 5/9 we're known as the trusted you know brand in this industry five nines of reliability is what we're all about so this is for our customers is when it comes to the next step it's really okay take that voice data which is not very useful like you can have agent spot check or supervisors listen in on calls but that doesn't scale as I pointed out earlier the more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text let's then take that text and it becomes computable you can summarize it we can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls you can they can quickly scan down and see what's happened also to be predictive hey we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time we can actually go predict what they might you know what what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set so there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer from from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data so we're turning voice into the next digital channel and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business yeah Ron one of the interesting things is if you look around this at this show floor you've got a lot of partnerships but there's some of the overlaps and blurring the lines between some of the environments we had carfax on good customer of yours started out with the the contact center agents but you know they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound not a traditional contact center you're partnering with marketing cloud and unified communications but you know some of those lines blur out quite a bit so what is it call - yeah a contact center that the lines of that are blurring you know the traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years of 30 years ago was like you know rows of cubes people on headsets like that's mostly what people think about but increasingly some of our largest customers it's nurse practitioners it's doctors it's other experts that are interacting with their customers it's education consultants and specialists these are all customers of ours that are using our platform today you know I think about 10 years ago I'll give you an example of this transition 10 years ago I my wife Steph was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do cuz it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two years and then eventually had to do something about it she didn't give up she's very persistent and so I ran down to Home Depot and I got some like rack things that I could bring home and I organized all my junk so fast forward to a year ago and we've moved we now live in San Francisco and Steph's on me again about the same thing consistent and I ignore her for a while and I go out all right all right I'll get it done so what do I do I think about well last time I did this I got a rack how am I gonna get a rack I went on my phone and I searched garage organizing systems and I find a few companies and I go under their websites and I do a little bit of self-service likes discovery and learning about their products I'm an empowered consumer at this point right I find three different companies I call one of them because like this is a big purchase I don't want this huge thing to show up steal blah blah blah my house if it's the wrong thing I guess gonna get ahold of someone I talked to them I have a good experience I hang up my called one other one just to kind of compare it I compared the two then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep so ten years ago let me give you the punchline here ten years ago one trip to brick and mortar zero calls to the call center ten years later now zero trips to brick and mortar two calls to a call center and those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale that's the experience economy in action and that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future and they will look very different than how they look today it's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact centre agent is I wouldn't have thought of it as you're right these are nurse practitioners it's so diverse speaking of diversity I know that five nine has several thousand customers globally one of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because woman founded company woman founded company not a tech company talk to us about how 5/9 helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid yes we did George Clooney a solid so in the case of Estee Lauder they were a they're a huge company eleven billion dollars in sales they're an amalgamation of 40 different brands very high-end skin care products and so they had a big challenge which was they bought 40 companies they did not integrate any of them so you call any one of these places there was all different contact centers they didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had we had to sort of to make that a part of the discovery process and global they're in all over the world they're in asia-pacific they're in France and Europe they're here they had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases they had independent technology contracts and almost every single one of those cases and I don't even know how many systems that were coming together but it was a lot so we engaged with them and basically provided we we help them write the RFP we help work through that process we got them on board with our software nothing to deploy nothing to install right just have your agents login we did a training and we're able to on board you know well over a thousand agents onto the platform and those were folks who were engaged across many many different businesses and some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like how fewer contracts or a better system but it's also to tie that system back into the business so you know they have a some products that are they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever gift bags and you know they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products so they encourage them to call in to order more or to find out more about their products and so on they don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I you know would use maybe you would go to the VIPs but now it's called a regular contact center they want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure that you get the right specialist at the right time to that that customer that well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the on boardings George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that and so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time and that's about knowing the skills you know being able to route things in a complex way understanding oh this is a contact coming from an event that event has some you know some VIPs at the event we've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill this is the right person for it to go to they're really good at dealing with VIPs and you can get it to the right person at the right time so we saw it in action it was obviously great and what made us made us felt good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted Wow all that contacts Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me and also for 5/9 for graciously hosting the Q the last three days we've had a venture to hear great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year me too stay tuned stay tuned for Stu min Amman 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. >> Hello from Orlando, Florida. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. theCUBE has been here at Enterprise Connect 2019 in the booth of our gracious host, Five9, for the last three days. Stu, this event is our first time being live here on theCUBE. Your first time here, mine as well individually. Massive event that has transformed a lot. 6,500 attendees, their biggest ever. Well, 140 vendors in this expo hall. What an incredible week. We've had the opportunity to talk to so many people. Can't even keep track. But this enterprise communication and collaboration space is really, really, really hot. >> Yeah, Lisa. I'd definitely learned a lot and had a good time. And, really, it's always a pleasure to be hosting with you. I feel I am better educated as a consumer, now after having gone through this, and I wish as a consumer, I actually knew before I was making some choices on some of the brands, whether or not they had some of the technologies behind us that we heard about here, because we've all had some challenging interactions with whether it be chats, websites, emails, or trying to call in and hopefully getting to that live person. I've looked into my career, and the ebb and flow of changes that had happened from the call center to the contact center. I've also had some empathy. I had started out on the call center; my first job out of college. But you know there should be no excuse for a company not to be able to have a good customer experience, if they're leveraging the technologies and the solutions that are available today, especially a lot of those powered by the cloud. >> Absolutely, it's table stakes, I agree with you. I definitely feel reset as a consumer. My perspectives, and even understanding the fact that like Five9 here, they've been talking about the intelligent contact center. They have five billion recorded customer conversations a year. And I've never thought, when I'm calling in, when you hear this is going to be recorded, we just expect that. But how a company, like Five9, can enable them to actually, start to leverage the power of AI and cloud to harness that dark data so that, to your point, the customer experience is ideal. Because, as consumers, we have so much choice. >> Yeah, so we've been talking for a number of years on theCUBE about the companies need to be data-driven. And still, it's early days here in the enterprise communication space. There is a proliferation of everything from the end devices. We just interviewed the CEO of Poly, long history: Plantronics, Polycom. I've got long history, understand a lot of those technologies that they have. Huddle rooms and white boards and tetanization. They're all of these devices. And then the software and the cloud and all those pieces. We use CRM in our business and boy, there's things that I would love to be able to tap in, even for a small company. And I've talked to lots of companies as to how they can use these technologies. And it was really intriguing. And we had a great user discussion today with Carfax. Really enjoyed that. Always good to hear as to what they're doing and the blurring of the lines sometimes between unified computing and the contact center, and where putting that information into their agents' hands, or into the salespeople hands, or we've talked to people on the marketing side, and the marketing cloud to put it into the marketing hands. So, data, we know, is a huge differentiator. And I know an area that you were loving is CX was at the center of everything, and the role of the agent and the customer is something we need to think about. What were your takeaways about that, Lisa? >> About that, great question. Initially, everything that I was reading about this event and the industry was all about everyone is talking about customer experience, CX. And when we had Blair Pleasant on with Michael Rose on Monday, I think it was the customer satisfaction or service index that they did, showed that companies are actually rating employees' satisfaction lower than customers' satisfaction. And I thought, "but if I'm an employee and I'm an agent, "and I'm on the phone or I'm in a chat or whatever channel "dealing with what might be a disgruntled customer, "who probably has a really easy alternative to turn to. "My experience needs to be good. "I need to have the information, "the right content at the right time, "and be empowered to make a decision." So some of the conversations that we had started to show that really, AX, agent experience, and CX are blended together. They have to be because to me, they're mutually exclusive and if that agent doesn't have the information that they need, has to ask a consumer the same question that you've just repeated, the likelihood that consumer will churn is very high. So the agent is one of those ones, I think, at the front lines, that I honestly never really thought about it from that perspective how critical they are to the business. >> Yeah, and when you dig in to say, okay, what is the life of an agent, first of all, if I can give them a simpler interface. And that's something in both the unified communication and the contact center if I can do that and then, where is there automation or the AI to help me do my job to be able to critique myself and go in there, rather than having a manager yelling at you? There's some powerful stories we've heard about that, as to, I can better myself and I'll probably be more engaged and that should translate also into a better customer experience. So we're not getting, love the example someone gave, It's like, "do you ever called there and they're like "my system's a little slow today" or "I can't get into this." It's like, we don't want, as consumers, we never want to hear that. And that's not a good experience. What we heard is there really should be no excuse in today's day and age, that shouldn't be the issue. >> Absolutely. So we've talked about the agent experience, customer experience Some of the other users that we've talked about on the program are, for example, Microsoft team has this really cool demo. We had Jace Morano on the show on Monday. showing this incredible power of internal teams collaboration and communication and how connected companies can be across geographies, cultures, generations. So that internal collaboration is another big piece of the show that the power of cloud, the power of AI, that companies are starting to harness is transformative for a business on every level. >> Yeah, it's really. I've been to when I go to a Microsoft show or a Google show or an Amazon show, oh, look at the real time, things that are happening, global translation, being able to see sentiment by AI of like what the faces. Certain shows you go to you can go up and they're like, happy, sad, confused, things like that. So, Microsoft gave a great demo. Let's see how long it takes for that really to diffuse out and be usable for businesses. We know the power of video. It's core at the center of what we do with CUBE. We understand when it can transcribe and translate that's really powerful things that we're keeping an eye on. And the cloud is definitely driving a lot of innovation. And that's something that we've heard over and over again, is that this show, now in it's 29th year, and it's like, third life with a third different name. Cloud has really infused a lot of energy, many new companies here, and, therefore, there's a nice robust ecosystem with some blurring of the lines and some competition, but for the most part, if it's in the cloud, a lot of times, those integrations are happening behind the scenes and I, as a customer, don't need to put it together where it's baling wire and duct tape and zip ties which kind of felt like we had to do things in the old day. And it was very fragile. It should be much better. We heard lots of them as to how Seram, especially like sales force integrates and from Microsoft and many the other players here, they're saying there's is good commitment. There's good working agreement with many of the companies. And absolutely from our hosts here at Five9. We heard from a lot of their partners, from the device and the software players, as to how they all tie together seamlessly to make sure that their users has a good experience which leads to agent and customer experience ultimately. >> Absolutely, the partnership and the collaboration in this space was very palpable and it was great to have so much access to Five9's partners. I think a couple of tag lines I'll takeaway from this, as a marketer, is that Zoom, we had Harry Moseley, the CIO of Zoom on this morning. And his fireside chat this morning and with us, earlier today he said, "video's the new voice." We've also heard, "voice is sexy again." We've also heard, "it's humans being augmented by machines. "It's relationship based." So a lot of really interesting themes that all come together that I hope sort of dispel some of the concerns that either individuals, or some business users, have about AI taking over. It's this combination of differently tools, but the human component, the empathy, is still absolutely critical. >> Yeah, and we'll see AI will first be something's that's internal to these companies. So Five9's announced this week, it's the Five9, I believe, Genius is the tool in there. It helping make their agents help them ramp up much faster, get the data they need, and it's AI that's going to actually help them infuse them so that they can react faster and they're super agents, give them superpowers. We heard from a number of people that external facing AI, we're still a little bit early. And we'll try to see where some of the early leading use cases will be for that in the future. >> Well, Stu, it's been a great three days co-hosting theCUBE with you at Enterprise Connect '19. I cannot believe how much we've learned and how we both sort of changed our perspective as consumers. Let's see how long that lasts. >> Yeah, absolutely, Lisa. So many of the things that we've been hearing for years about cloud and AI definitely translate here and we love really documenting some of those industry transformations and pleasure as always to work with you on theCUBE. >> Likewise. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

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

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hello from Orlando, Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to Mina mints here with me, and we're on Day three of our coverage of Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. We've been graciously hosted by five nine this week, talking with a lot of their folks and partners as well about the connected contact center. And we're excited to welcome one of their partners, Choi still to the Cube. Diane Smith, CEO. Diane It's great to have you joining stew and me today. You. So, first of all, I want to say congratulations. Choice Tell twenty fifth anniversary this year as big milestone. Tele Review is a little bit about choice telling what you're doing with respect to Enterprise Communications >> course. Well, as you said, we've been at this for twenty five years, and we've worked across many different business sectors in our industry. We really kind of help from the customers phone all the way into the data center so that complete communications channel, whether it be voice or data services in today's world, is very well interconnected. In the early days, voice with separate data was over here, but now it's all combined together. So we work with all of it. >> Diana, I want one of things we've been talking about this week is the kind of ebb and flow of some of the communication channels. So, you know, this show a number of years ago change from voice, voice, con overto enterprise connect because it was like, oh, is one of one of the analysts That voice wasn't that sexy any more. But today, when we talk, we understand that voice is still very important in all the communication that that twenty five years, you know, I'm sure choice tells gone through a number of changes. S o. How are you seeing these trends? What's important to your users? Let's go from there. >> Well, as you stated, voice really isn't going away. I mean, here we are today, right? So what's not going away? It's a matter of fact. It's even more important because I think in the digital age, people kind of trended away and thought that we could just do email on texting. But we've lost so much with that, and so voices actually becoming even more important. And as this writing now across the data networks, it's even even more sensitive to interruptions and companies that can actually deliver a reliable service. So we've kind of gone backwards to now. We need to make sure it's reliable, but not only reliable. There's so much technology specifically around Contact Center. That's really what's contributing to this. You know this new, amazing perspective about voice. Aye, aye, And all these other items that are really building in efficiencies we just never had before, So this was impossible. >> So how are you helping to educate your customers on there? So many options now, right? And as we hear it, shows like this. And everywhere we go two, especially as consumers. Same thing. So many options, so much choice and so much challenge for contact centers to treat those customers as they know exactly why they're calling what they're doing to get them the right information when they need it. Talk to us about the customers, say some of your customers that you've had maybe for quite some time since you're a storied company helping them to understand and how to transform digitally their communications platform to be able to capitalize on the voices of their customers. >> Absolutely. As you stated, there are tremendous number of choices and these choices are growing every day. There are people here vendors here that were here just last year, not to mention ten years ago. So the options are just so expansive and exhaustive that most of our clients are overwhelmed by it. I mean, they're constantly being called by vendor's every day, and they and then the benefit obviously we're bringing to the table is they don't have to talk to them. They could just talk to us, and, uh, and that's why we're here, too, because there's always something new to learn and is never ending and part of our job. And our role is to make sure we're looking at vendors that we're properly suit each customer because each customer's also very different. There are some consistencies in some areas, but the personality of the customer dictates which vendor would best suit them beyond the technology piece, you know, because it even those technology, it's still people. We're still dealing with people >> that I and I. I love that because if you dig inside an organization and say what kind of problems you're having A. You know, I wish our communications were better and we're talking about a What about with my partners or my customers. Well, communication is something I care about, but most companies are in an expert on communications. I have to believe that's where you come in for a lot of it is that, you know, let them focus on the people in the relationships and not the underlying technology. >> Absolutely ifs and this exactly what we do. So we're looking for the right mix of solutions and right mix of vendors. It's not always the one vendor fits all and so, but most customers have no idea. So we'LL take our customers through a voice Discovery workshop, helped him understand what the landscape looks like and then start narrowing down like the delivery models in which best delivery model fits best for them. >> Can you walk us through that? It takes a bit of a complex environment out here. You talk about customers, they've got their serum. They've got their context than her. They're the w F O wfm type stuff there and that they don't have to worry about choosing all of those pieces. And we've heard that the cloud it does the cloud actually deliver the I can choose my pieces, but it works well together, rather than the old way of kind of taking boxes and manpower to integrate these things. >> It definitely does. I really believe that the next eighteen months, in my opinion, but I believe the next eighteen months are really going to be the tipping point for as a service communications, whether it be contact center or regular U C or all the components. As you mentioned that tack on to that. I've seen a very large customers finally making that turn where before they were kind of sitting back and watching little guys were, you know, moving over small ten twenty thirty hundred person offices. But now you've got thousand people with thousands and thousands of end points that are ready to turn that corner >> and what makes them ready. The fear of being out competed by a smaller, more agile business. >> That's an excellent point, because now the services that are available to small companies are available in the cloud where before you had to spend, you know, maybe million's to get a whole system set up to be able to do a I am workforce management. But now a small twenty person company can have all of those tools at their hands >> itself. That's >> a really good point. >> Yeah, it's Detroit. Do you think about business technology? A lot of that stuff, you know, would sit around for a decade without being changed. Today is a consumer. I'm used to every three or four years, sometimes every two years, or I sign up for one of those plans where every eighteen months I can get the upgrade there. There's a different expectation, and I think we're a little bit more condition, too. Look at new ways. I know I tryto talk to my kids is toe some of the new ways to understand that. So are we starting to move a little faster? Especially in the Enterprise? >> I think so. And certainly some enterprises are ahead of others. Some are more, you know, leading edge. Even bleeding Edge and others are still fairly conservative. But what's exciting about right now is even the companies that are conservative are starting to make that leap. So so that's also part of the story. And I think it's because you know what the technology's been around for a while now. I think that the ass of service communications industry thought this would happen five years ago, and it didn't. But now there's so much stability. There's no underlying infrastructure that's available through companies like Google and A WS. It can enable service provider's like five nine to be having that very strong, reliable and secure backbone to promote the product. >> So let's talk a bit about your relationship. What choice tell is doing with your partnership with five nine? >> Well, way haven't exciting project that we're working on right now. Being from Michigan, we're working with an employment service through the state of Michigan that's located in the city of Detroit. And they have purchased five nines to train contact center agents to be context, injury, people, individual people. Course contact center agent. So thie idea there's ended will help them get jobs in the community and to be fully trained on the platform of five nights. And >> how does choice tell help with that training in that enablement? >> So were there two sort of hand, hold the whole process, provide training network and communicating and make sure that this option at this opportunity get sent out to the community? And so we're working in our community in our state with the local news municipalities, the chief information officers and all the technology people to help bring them to fruition >> when you work with companies and lots of industries. But any verticals in particular that choice tell it may be with eventually with five nine is going to help to transform and bring into this more modern era. >> Definitely manufacturing. You know, Michigan is certainly the manufacturing headquarters, but we have plenty of manufacturing customers and different geography. Zzzz well, but that's one of those you know kind of sat in the back, didn't make that forward move that fast on DH. Now they're really starting to see the advantages of moving to the cloud, the the ability to be nimble and agile and two new fast. So you know, there's not like this huge major commitment in the old days, if you bought a new system, you're gonna live with them for twenty five years, maybe even twenty, maybe less, but not usually. So with this type of technology, we were able to constantly stay up and above and move faster as well deployments and including some of these new great things like a I >> Diana, this show has been one that we've been talking a lot about change and how fast things are moving you talked about. In the next eighteen months, you expect an inflection point toe happen gives a little bit insight. Is Tio conversations you're having at the show some of the key takeaway. If you want people to have that that might not have been ableto in the show this year. >> Well, I think that way shouldn't There's There's so many really great new players out there and getting here helps you get to those companies and actually see them outside of that, You're usually not going to find them so easily. So this is really the place to do that. If you're in this business, you should be here because this is where you're gonna hear about it. No other place. Do you really do that? >> Are there any trends or commentary that you heard in any of the keynotes or, uh, any of the fireside chats the last couple of days? That sort of surprised your teacher interests like Wow, this tipping point, like you were saying eighteen months out, that really surprised you? >> Um, >> I think that, uh, I think the tipping point really, and some of the new things. I mean, we've been talking about for a while. But I think that A I is maturing more now and there's there's more. There's more underlying companies that are doing it as well. So just seeing that actually hit the application is the biggest. The biggest change. So because we've talked about it now, it's actually happening. Do >> you think customers are some of your customers? If you look at ah, large manufacturer out of Detroit or that municipality that you mentioned in Michigan when they hear a I just how does a small company react to a larger company? Are they excited? Are they like, How would we utilize this to our advantage? What's the sort of education piece that you could bring about that technology? >> There's a lot of education because most people think it's going to be some big, exorbitant project, and how can we do that? We don't have enough time to implement it, but with the way most of these organizations are delivering it, they don't have to think about it. And that's the biggest education piece, because I think it sounds a little intimidating at first, and you're thinking it's going to be. There's gonna be a lot of cycles and work planning around it in order to really be able to enjoy it and receive the benefits. But that's not the case. And so there is an education process and helping them envision it. So that's the biggest thing that we're doing is helping them to envision it because they didn't even I think it was possible for them that they didn't need it or what could it do for them? So that's that's the biggest exercise that you have to go through. >> And we're hearing a lot. This show has been on a repeats to if it's not any, any time we talk about a, there's always a conversation of, you know, jobs being taken. But this has really thematically been it's humans plus a it's the humans You mentioned the relationships before that. That's that's what moves the dial. That's where the empathy is. So it's part of that education sort of telling your customers it's not all of these machines and RPI N II that's going to take jobs away. It's actually augmenting what they're able to deliver to your customers >> exactly in a more expedient manner, which was really going to improve customer experience at the end of the day. And that's the real business value. And so, as you're talking about these things and everything has to be associate ID back to what is the business driver? What's the value that they get? You know, technology for technology sake is never good. And so that's part of that envisioning process. Helping customers envision how this can actually impact our business in a positive way and help them do more business. Hopefully right. Improve their profits. Improved >> profits is always good. Diane, Thank you so much for taking some time to joins, too, and be on the cure this afternoon. Congrats again on your twenty fifth anniversary of choice. Tell >> you appreciate it >> for Lisa Martin. For Lisa Martin. I'm Lisa Martin for stupid, and you're watching The Cube from Orlando

(upbeat 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 theCUBE. Stu Miniman is here with me, and we are on day three of our coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019. This is a show that talks all about enterprise communication and collaboration. We're with Five9, who's been our gracious host this whole week talking about the intelligent contact center. We're all consumers at one point or another. We all buy a lot of things, and we're excited to bring to theCUBE for the first time, a gentleman from CARFAX, I'm sure you know, David Muttiah, the Salesforce Manager. David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, it's great to be here. >> The only thing you didn't bring is your CARFAX fox. >> I did, that's exactly right, we did not bring the car fox, but next time, I'll make sure to bring the fox along. >> If I give you my address, can I get one? You certainly can. >> Awesome. Alright, so David, this is your first time here. You are a longtime customer of Five9, which we talk about. >> That's right. >> But I know you and Stu had a chance to chat earlier. >> Sure. >> Talk to us and our audience about CARFAX. What is-- People know it as I'm going to go there, I'm going to get the value of my car. >> Right. I want to be able to use this in my purchases and transactions. >> Right. >> The role of digital transformation and data to CARFAX's business. >> Sure. Right. And I think at the core, CARFAX is a data company, that's what we're known for, and most consumers know us for what we do, which is in the CARFAX history or the CARFAX reports, so, most people probably interact with us when they get ready to purchase a car, or they're about to sell one of their cars, so, they typically will want a CARFAX report, and so, that's been the experience, and that's what we're known for, and that's what we're recognized for, but over the last few years, we've also kind of moved into some other spaces. One area is the search capability on looking for a used car, so, today you can go online and search for used cars through various channels, but if you come to CARFAX.com, you can search for a car, the traditional method, which is you would typically go look for a car by the criteria, the color, the make, model, and a distance from your geographic area, but then also we now start layering CARFAX data on top of that. So, now you can search the cars based on I'm looking for a car with no accidents, I'm looking for a car with one owner, or I want a car that's got a lot of good history on it based on service and maintenance, So, you can do your searches based on those criterias at CARFAX.com, so, that's something now we're starting to grow and do more of. The other is talking about the value of your car. So, most people really want to know how much is my car worth, especially when you go to trade in, or you're trying to sell it, and so, you want to get a better sense of what that is. So, what we have started to do is based on the history of the car, based on what's in our database, and what's in our data, you can now, we start valuing the car, we start putting a value for the car and what it's worth, so that you as a consumer, when you get ready to trade in or sell, you have some confidence around the value of what your car is. This is also why you want to maintain your car and take good care of it, because the maintenance aspect really goes into what the car is valued at. >> Yeah, David, I love this. First of all, thank you, I've used CARFAX in the past. It helped me when I bought a used car for my wife, and it helped me in my negotiation quite a bit, and we love this trend is data. Actually, putting it in the hand of the consumer. >> Right. >> It's no longer this, I need to go in, and I don't have all the information, and >> Right, exactly. >> The traditional car salesman has the upper hand. Here, come on, I'm a good consumer. I know how to research this stuff and with your tools I've got the upper hand again. >> Exactly. >> I can go on in and negotiate, so. >> Right, and our goal, really, is to empower consumers to make better decisions and have confidence in the decisions they make around buying and selling their car. And so, we want to be able to help them in that process, but we also help dealers, automobile dealers, throughout the United States. They use us in the same way, as to run and manage their business. So, we help them to do that, in providing the data that we have to empower them to be able to do their business. >> Yeah, when we look at some of the big themes we've seen this show. >> Sure >> First of all, customer experience CX is at the center of what everyone is talking about. And when I talk about, in the contact center even, is that shifting role between inbound and outbound, >> Sure. >> Is how do I leverage my resources? Maybe bring us inside a little bit what it's like inside a CARFAX. >> Sure. >> Those items. >> Yeah, and I think you know CARFAX, when you look at it from a contact center standpoint, you know we've got two sides of the business. One is the traditional call center type of environment, where we are assisting our customers. They can call in and we're available to them to answer any questions that they have. And so, we have Agents available that are on call, to answer any questions around the data that CARFAX provides to our customers. The other side is on the Sales side, you know, we're still going out and talking about our business, trying to let people know what we do. Not just on the CARFAX Report, but on the CARFAX search capabilities, as well as, on the evaluation of the car. So, we're trying to get people more informed about how we're doing that. So, we have a Sales Team that really goes out and is empowered to do that. And so, we're using the contact center in that space as well, to be able to reach customers, to kind of really talk to the value of what CARFAX brings. >> So on the Sales side, on the contact center side, three, four years ago you guys said, We have some significant opportunities here. You've been one of the greatest examples, I think, I've heard all week about the power that the consumer has with all this data. When you said, "Alright, we need to dial this up a level. "There's a lot more opportunity to grow the business." When you came to Five9, what were some of the key challenges that you looked to them to help you resolve? >> You know, I think at the time we had on-prem solution that was working well for us. And think what we had done was internally, we had switched to Salesforce.com, which as a CRM, that was a cloud based solution. So, we had moved into the cloud. We were quit happy with what we were getting from a cloud solution, from a CRM standpoint. So, we said let's step back now that we want to migrate, our really, contact center into that area. Let's take a look at who's the players in this space. And we kind of did our due diligence and evaluation. And we ended up and landed on Five9 as kind of our go-to solution. And since then, we have really integrated Five9 into our sales force instance. And that's been the goal, is to be able to integrate the two systems and it's worked out really well for us. And I think one of the things that we look at from-- at CARFAX is we want, our employees, the interaction to kind of be a user friendly interaction. So, Salesforce is our primary CRM. And so, we want anything that our employees do to be primarily focused on Salesforce. And so, the contact center solution needs to be integrated in and we don't necessarily want a contact center that's kind of a stand alone. So, we have it integrated so, the experience for the agent or the employee is really seamless between a CRM and a contact center. They're kind of one and the same for us. >> Yeah, that's great. We just had Zisan of the analyst talking about how anyone that has a CRM, Five9 is something that can help them. What if you can go in that your sales people that are using it. There's a lot of other options besides Contact Center. Look here some of the UC solutions out there. And Salesforce has lots of modules they'd be happy to upgrade you, >> Exactly. Yep. too, for those environments. So, what was it about the Five9 that you said, hey, it works in our contact center, let's start moving it to some of our other people? >> Sure. I think, you know, one of the things is >> if we look at how we work, we really want a lot of the information that we're gathering from our sales rep's to be really input into Salesforce. And so, we wanted a contact center that integrated in a way that we could capture everything that we're doing with our customers and the interactions that we're having to be solely in Salesforce. And so, that's one of the big pieces, is we didn't necessarily want a contact center that captured information outside and then tried to marry the two. We really want it, the experience, to be one and the same, so that the-- For us as we start interacting with our customers we're able to input everything into our CRM. As well as, from a contact center standpoint, if we have customers that are reaching out to us, we're able to serve up information within our CRM, for the agent, so they can interact in a more meaningful way, and provide our customers information in a much more quicker, and easier manner than we have in the past. >> We talk about CX a lot, an agent experience. One of the things I'm curious to learn is adoption. That's a theme that's come up, as well. It's great to hold all the technologies, but if at the end of the day, as consumers, we want things simple, well so do employees, right? >> Sure. >> Talk to us about the adoption that you've been able to drive, since you've brought in the Five9 contact center, integrating it with your CRM, the impact on the contact center folks, as well as the sales folks. >> Right, I think one of the keys to any kind of adoption efforts is really having stake hold or buy in. And so, if we look at our leadership at CARFAX, they were truly bought in on Salesforce and a solution like Five9. So, they were behind us from a technology standpoint to say look we want these tools integrated. We want our employees to have a seamless experience. So, we were able to get our sales leadership, our contact center leadership, truly bought in on the experience. They had a lot of say and a voice and make selection. So, when we went and do the due diligence, they were part of the process of selecting Five9. They, too, looked at them as a solution. And they were able to give us feedback on what they're needs were. So, we really took into consideration a lot of the things that they looked for. And so, when we launched the two and integrated it, and we went live. We had a lot of buy-in. They had already gone out to their teams, talked about what they were going to get. So, the agents and sales reps, themselves, were familiar with what was coming, what was to be expected. So, in some sense there was a little bit of excitement within the company of what's to come. So, we had users already approaching us saying, hey, when are we going to get this, cause we're ready to kind of transform and move over to this new solution? So, that was, it was a good experience. And I think that's key to any kind of adoption, is really having your leadership kind of have buy-in and backing, cause they're the ones that kind of empower the employees to kind of truly adopt and use these tools. >> Yeah, David, one of the things we've been trying to parse this week in that buzzword of omnichannel and the ebb and resurgence of voice has been something that's been a theme of this conference, used to be called VoiceCon. >> Right. >> So, from your perspective, your different groups, what are the channels, what are you seeing, and maybe for yourself and any of your peers that your hearing? What are some of those big trends? >> I think one of the things we're seeing, is obviously, omnichannel is kind of a buzzword that's talked about in the industry. We're still primarily phone based and it's partly because of the nature of our business. We're serving customers that are calling in with highly technical question. And we do have chat as an avenue. And we can obviously talk to our customers, through chat, as a means, but we're also finding is that sometimes when you get into these high level technical questions, chat is not necessarily the place to have that. Chat has a place in our business. But I think it's also, you have to be mindful about the amount of time your going to take to be able to respond to these things. And so, what we're starting to offer chat as an option, but in most cases what we're doing is flipping from chat over to the phone and continuing that conversation with our customers, cause that seems to be a a more seamless and better interaction. And then in most cases we can answer these questions via phone quicker than through chat. And for the customer themselves it's a better user experience to do that. And so, we have kind of tended to be self-voice, primarily. We're are certainly looking of kind of omnichannels, of where that industry is evolving. That's something we'll continue to look at, and see if we can bring in, and so more with that, but we're still very much phone-based. And that's what our customers want. And we're want to kind of continue to serve them through those channels. >> So, your really following the journey of your specific customers, >> Exactly. to determine where should we be meeting them that going to best and fastest serve their needs. >> Exactly, right, and I think the industry changes, and if our customers start saying to us, hey, I want more ways to reach you that are alternative to voice, and we'll certainly look at that and provide that as a solution. >> Alright, so, David, as you work with Five9 and your other vendors, if you had a magic wand, what could they be doing to make you job easier, help your customer experience anymore? >> Sure, I think, as a whole, they're doing a today. I think one of the things we are talking to Five9 and other folks in the spaces. We have today, as a company, we're using Five9 for the contact center folks that are integrated with our CRM, but we also have folks at our corporate office that are non-contact center folks. Maybe they interact with our CRM more, but they're not necessarily making outbound calls or taking inbound calls, but each of them has a phone at their desk. And so, we want to combine and bridge the two systems. So, that's something we're looking at and talking to, to see what we can do to be able to bring some of our corporate office folks, and have them seamlessly integrate with our contact center folk, so that conversations can be passed back and forth between the two systems and make it a little bit more easier than what we have today. >> For other businesses that are the precipice of where CARFAX was a few years ago, what are your lessons learned and recommendations for successfully navigating this process? >> I think one of the things is to always take a step back and look at your kind of processes and say this is what we've done up to this point, Is that what you want to continue to do? And then look at ways you can continue to improve. You certainly want to reach out to your employees and your agents, cause they're kind of the true source of knowledge for this. They can give you some valuable insight into how their day-to-day interactions are, and how we can improve and make some changes there. So, you really want to take a step back and take a look at how you can improve those things. Of course, the other aspect is, looking at tools that truly work in the environments that you are in. So, for us, it was Salesforce. And we really wanted a partner that truly integrated with Salesforce. And we wanted to make sure the integration was seamless, 'cause the last thing you really want is a system that is kind of-- A CRM is one aspect and the contact center is separate, and having it work seamlessly was our number one criteria. So, come up with some things that you cannot do without. And so, come up with some things that you can, you say, look, these are core to our business needs and we're not going to divert from that, and we want to be able to find a solution that works in those parameters. >> Great advice, David. Thank you so much for sharing what CARFAX is doing with Five9 and what's next for you guys. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. It was great to be here. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hello from Orlando. We are at Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen, and we're being very graciously hosted by five nine, which is the intelligent Cloud Contact center. We had a great few days, two minute minute myself talking with customers, partners, vendors on this massive change and enterprise, communication and collaboration. We're excited to welcome back to the key one of our alumni, Zs Caravella, the founder and principal analyst at Zeke Research. These It's great to have you here, >> Dawson. To me. Here >> you are. You should have the i p status at Enterprise Connect because you have been to this event some twenty times. >> I believe it's my twentieth. >> Can't imagine. So they didn't They should have rolled out the red carpet. Maybe we'll put a note >> in next year, >> but Yeah. There you go. I >> want to get my own booth. >> There you go. But I can't imagine how much this event has changed. And just your perspectives on Day three here of e. C nineteen and some of the vendors that you're like, Wow. A few years ago, you would never have seen a so and so here. >> Yeah, the shows massive compared to what it used to be the Remember when I first started coming to the show floor was maybe if I was a quarter the size, I mean generous, and it was really dominated by just a handful of companies. But since then, it's gone through several transitions the i p to software to the cloud on. That's gotten a lot more companies interested. And I think also, finally, businesses starting understand that if you're going to transform digitally right, communications has to be part of that fact. If you look at any piece of research right that I know there's a walker study throwing around saying by twenty twenty customer experience to be the number one brand differentiator, that's that's already happening. It's already the number one brand differentiator. And so because of that, more and more companies are now interested in communications. So, you know, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, we didn't have Amazon here. We didn't have Microsoft here. We didn't have Oracle here, but it's been a great thing for the show to see all these other companies that really have really great presidents validate what we've been saying for a long time, and it's a much different show today than it was. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that the thing that opened my eye is some of the companies that air here. I wish I knew which brand used these technologies so that if and when I do have an issue, I'm not gonna have that horrible customer experience that you know we've had in the past. It's like, you know, if I wanted to make a call, it's like, Can I even make a call? And, you know, do I actually get through the I V R. Things like that? I like how you set it up there. Some of these pendulums swings some of these waves of technology. Um, let's talk a little bit about voice because this used to be called Voice Khan, and it went through a rebranding because, you know, voice was in a little bit of kind. But, you know, we know voices. It's still very important. How does that fit in the hall >> when I went through that rebound, Frankly, voice wasn't sexy anymore. Everyone is talking about unified communications. No one was going to call anybody ever again. We're just gonna message or social each other to death and what's happened is voice is kind of important, right? And I think one of the undersea and friends to look at is that voice is becoming simultaneously less important and more important. What I mean by that is that they sound like a little bit of an oxymoron. But if you look across all age demographics right there, everybody has a prefered mode of communications, and it's rarely voice to start a conversation with the company. You message them your social, um, send them an e mail. But somewhere in there, you you eventually want to talk to somebody, and a that moment s o to start the conversation voices less important. But at that moment, you now want to have a conversation with uneducated agent who knows what your problem is and can help you quickly. And so now voices Mohr important than it's ever been before where, but I think the buried entry wasn't all that high, but voices, you know, it's it's important, it's sexy, and especially when people are dealing with emotional issues, they're dealing with money problems right in front of get a refund. If I'm trying to check on the status of my health, I want to talk to somebody. But when I want to talk to somebody, I want to get that conversation with over. It's possible. I think the bar's been raised as you mentioned to. You used to think that the dreaded Ivy are. If you have a dread and ivy are experience, you just want to business that company anymore, right? And so the stakes are higher than the bar's been raised on. What voices >> are you saying that the customers that you were talking to are now starting to get much more prescriptive in terms of understanding their customer journeys and their preferences? You know, before they used to go, we assume we're talking to millennials. They only want they only want ASA Master. Our company's starting to get more focused on. Alright, let's actually do analysis and determine if a voice only one of the next channels that we need to enable, >> uh, well, I wish they were. I think we're really in the early early innings that I think the best companies in the world are doing that. If you look at companies with very high, uh, NPS scores and customer SAT scores there doing that thing already and I think it's a good lesson for the rest of the industry. If you're not doing that, you're gonna fall behind pretty quickly. And I think that is driving companies more to the Saami Channel experience Where, uh, from, uh, from an analytic standpoint, you really have to understand your customer, not at the demographic level, but almost at a custom level because everyone's different, right? I think that's, uh, that's never been possible before. But today, because we've got bigger data sets. Things were in the cloud rise of artificial intelligence. It's made all the stuff possible. So companies like I said, the best cos the world to taken advantage of and they're having a, you know, big differences. That's why there's been such a huge swings in the market leadership right there cos we never heard of before. Market leaders and brands we trusted loved before they're gone. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because every company we talked to this week that that CX is at the center of what they're talking about. So, in your research, what is differentiating though those new leaders and, you know, causing some of those swings in the market place hot out of the customer. Look at these and help differentiate and and ever changing marketplace. >> Well, it's what's going on today. It's really about being more contextual, having a deeper understanding a wire. Customers calling, uh, how you could help him faster understanding maybe what products they own. You know what? What are some of the adjacent ones? Ah, no. I think that's going very quickly, become table stakes. And I think where we're moving to is we're going to shift customer service from being largely inbound, driven and reactive. And that's where they I can help react faster to being Mohr, outbound driven and pearl active. Right? So, for instance, let's say I buy a connected refrigerator and my water filter needs changing. Well, right now, I still have to recognize that. And maybe I call that refrigerator company and they can proactively help me because they understand what I have. And they've got a great arm, the Channel contact center. But ultimately that should be a reverse. They should contact me, maybe through a text message saying, Hey, you're we noticed your water filter needs changing. Can we send you one? Yes, it comes and then maybe I call the agent and say, Can you help me install it? Right? So I think within the next three, four years, we're going to see a lot of customer service, Uh, where contextual is the table stakes and then the ability to predict what your customer wants. That's going to be the differentiator. And frankly, that's really exciting. I mean, if you think we've seen change of this industry as you mentioned in the last five years, wait for the next five. >> When you're talking with customers or even doing research and and other venues, it's to mention CX. We talk. We've been talking about it all week, but I get curious when I hear the customer experience and the agent experience just think, How are they not how they separate because of the Asian isn't empowered to be able to, whether it's no the right channel. But I want to be communicated with or have the information where the context about why I'm calling, then the customer experience, right? >> Yeah, well, they're very tightly linked together. You can't have a good customer experience that a good agent experience and you may have the best trained agents in the world that are the most empathetic that are incredibly sensitive with what people want. But if they don't have the data, you're going frustrate your customer. And everybody's been through that situation where you get transferred to somebody else and you gotta start that whole conversation over again and eventually you just hang up and say, I don't want ever to business. So I think you're right. Agent experience Customer experience are very tightly interwoven, and they're they're really dependent on one another. You can't you can't do without the data. And again, that's where all these friends of a I come into play because they're able to send better information to the agents faster, really, through an assistive technology versus replacement. Right? >> So when we came into this show, we knew that the wave of cloud had made a big transformation. We're starting to hear a I is the next wave everybody's talking about. I believe I read something that that you had written that was talking about, you know, whether that is something just internal the company build in versus how it interacts with the customer. Where do you see I having the biggest impact kind of in the short term, and nowhere is that more long. >> It's a great question because I ask my customers all the time. Should we be using intelligence bots? Or if you saw the Google Duplex Nemo, where they have on a I call in order pizza I think it was or something like that. So is a I ready to talk to people? And I think if you think of the entire world of interactions on a two by two grid is an analyst would like to buy two grids, right? And you put complexity of conversation on one axis and frequency of interactions if it's hiking, or if it's low complexity, high frequency, that might be okay to try and automate through a But other than that, everything should flipped. Agent. And I think right now we're very early in the cycle, and so is a business. I'm not sure I trust today. I tow always have the right answer, but it makes a great assistant technology to recommend to the agent. This is what you should say, and the great thing about that is, if the agent says no, that's stupid and says that wasn't helpful. That becomes the input to the learning mechanism for the A I so overtime will get smarter and smarter. But if you if you want to think about just the role of it now, I always use the analogy is like a self driving car. I'm not sure if either one of you would want to jump in a car that has no driver, no steering wheel, no controls. But there's a lot of great aye aye technology in a car like lane change assist, parallel parking assist things like that that can make you a better driver. So let's make our agents better drivers by giving him those assistive technologies. And that's the the short term vision long term. Who knows? But I But I think oh, if company's heir to aggressively they II, they're actually gonna create a nod. The opposite effect, where they hurt customer experience. It's the people that make a difference, so let's make those people better. >> That's one of the things that we've heard consistently throughout this event is the empathy factor machines can't bring. That's really got to be the humans with the A I to deliver on idea, hopefully optimal experience, too. Whatever customer has whatever issue on the back end. >> Yeah, in fact, Roman always talks about that as well. The CEO of five nine and I think he's right from that. Regarded is about having the knowledge of the customer in the empathy to understand. Put yourself in the customer's position and this to your point. Lisa, about CX. In Asian experience, we tied a couple together. If the Asian distressed because they don't have the right information and they're trying a message, this person, or look something up in the database, that frustration is going to come through to the customer. And that further frustrates the customer, right? So of the agents, armed with the right information, they can spend more time focused on the customer and less time trying to find the data that, frankly, they should have at their fingertips all the time. >> So speaking of five nine, you recently attended their analyst event. >> I did >> on. We've had the executives on the team. You know, Jonathan on earlier this week, you know, rock star background. We're goingto throwing on a little bit later. We know him from his Cisco days without breaking any India's, you know, give us a little bit of the insight as to, you know, five nine. You know, what have they been doing? Well, what's what's the new team driving them forward towards? >> Well, I mean, if you look at their stock price from Roland joined, it's it's more than doubled. So obviously there's, um, some good growth there. I think. What? I've always believed that it's very difficult to compete on product alone, right? And if you believe this whole world of it is this customer experience, that's what they do really well, the customers, their customers have a great experience here with five nine, they have a great service organization that makes sure that when you buy five nine, you have a good on boarding experience that set up the way you want it, and that services business makes a big difference. Now they've always had that. Now, where I think the new executive team has made a difference is helping the company understand the scale, move upmarket, more enterprises because the needs their different than down market. And so I think you know, they're gonna have a big impact on the future of five nine. Frankly, I think a lot of what you've seen for growth in the last year has been stuff that was put in place. But I know they're working on a lot of the AI capabilities. We're not breaking in the NBA's. I can tell you that the demonstrations that Jonathan Rosenberg, who's in there incredibly smart guy, I mean he might be the smartest guy in this industry was giving around. How a I can impact customer experience was the best set of concrete examples that I've seen today because it's really easy to give me a pie in the sky hypothetical things. But he really boiled it down in a very grand your level of this possible. This is possible and I'm expecting over the next year, five nine customers will see those things. >> They've done really well in the enterprise market. I think last year in twenty eighteen, they closed very, very strongly. Also, a lot of growth in there. Custom enterprise customers with a Million and Ahrar plus What are you seeing, though, in terms of some of the smaller businesses that probably are facing a lot of the same challenges that enterprises are? Is this an area where they can also leverage five nine two really dial up and deliver Great CX, >> Yeah, but the line has moved up right of people interested in cloud services that used to be too small businesses, and now it's all kinds. But I think for a small business, you can look like a much larger business. I think there's a lot of companies people sometimes think that's a little risky deal the small company. But five nine is a very, very valuable tool because by having that information right away that agents fingertips, they're able to actually replicates, uh, large company experience and on almost validate that the customer made the right decision using them. So I think up and down the stack it for five nine. They provide value tow companies of all sizes. Today, one of them, you know, the interesting aspects of what I've seen two is everybody talks about this twenty four billion dollars tam for Contact Center. I know I've been in that eye, and may I say that because that twenty four billion dollars tam is based on giving contact, Senator people contact center tools, but what I've been noticing over the last years, when people buy five nine, often it's not contact center people using that using it. It's sales people in marketing people, field service. Anybody that needs customer info is using it. And I'll give an example. One of the customers that was at the five nine day I can't see you. They say who they are. They migrated all fifty contacts and regions five nine. And since then they've added one hundred mohr sales people using the tools. So now we've got one hundred fifty people using five nine when there was only fifty contacts. Generations you can see the value is starting to spread across the company, and I think that's a pretty exciting thing. >> It's been interesting we've seen at the show. And in some of the interviews, that line between kind of unified communications and contact center seems to be blurring. It seems to be that >> well, everybody needs that data on the customer info. I actually cameras closer to forty. Forty five billion. To be frank, really, every anybody who uses a serum tool should have five nine capabilities. >> Zia's Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your energy on Day three. If Enterprise connect nineteen, we appreciate your time Thank you. First two minute, man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the que Covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen. Brought to you by five nine. >> Hello from Orlando, Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to amendments here with me as well. We are at Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen, and we've been graciously hosted this week by five nine. We're pleased to welcome to the Cube for the first time the V p of product marketing from five nine. Scott Coleman Scott Thank you so much for joining me today >> to be here. >> So Day three of this event. Biggest enterprise Connect. If they've had sixty five hundred attendees expected, we're in the Expo Hall, which you could hear all the buzz behind US one hundred forty or so exhibitors announcing new products, new services, etcetera, all talking about putting the customer at the heart of the contact center. Why is that so important >> now? It's a great question, and to your point about the show itself in the floor. Really, The Context center is very much at the center of actual floor itself, in terms of who's hear what they're talking about. It's not an after thought. It's really I think it's an acknowledgement that companies are realising that they have to take the customer experience seriously. And the context center is that point where you either reinforce the brand or you rode it right. So this is now the opportunity for companies to think a little differently about what role in place and how they're going to use it to really build a better relationship. >> Scott. It's been interesting. Lease and I came in tow this show being the first time that we've been at the show. But, you know, we're both consumers. We've looked through it, you know? I think back to the last decade or so there was outsourcing. There was technology, which is I'm just going to say, you know, some of the big technology companies I want to call them. Are you kidding? You can't write hide that. I can't even email them if I wanted to it. You know that the customer relation stupid, very different. But today it feels like the pendulum is swinging back the other way, right, that that customer relations we know when I need to talk to somebody. It's important that I do get to talk to a person and technologies an enabler of that, >> Yeah, absolutely, you know, And the question is, why? What changed? Right? And there's a couple things that really changed to make that happened. Probably the primary thing is customers had more choice. And then the voice right there more choice. Never before. It's no longer the issue, depending on whatever industry you're in, that you're only stuck with a certain cable provider or a retailer down the street I can buy from anywhere in the world, you know. And so I have choice there. There's disrupters in every industry as we've seen over the last decade, and so that that's one element. And just as importantly, they have a voice used to be. I could go home and complained to my my wife I could claim by family members my friends. Now I can actually amplify that through social media and other elements. So not only do I have a ability to move, but also in terms of the voice. I actually have a bigger impact on the brand, right, and those there is really big elements there. >> So along those lines, if you look at the consumer behavior is being so influential companies are they looking at it as more of an opportunity. Go. All right. Maybe we have a few channels. Maybe we're voice only. What? How does finding help a customer that might be voice only, Or maybe multi channel get to Omni Channel so that they can, as I loved what you study. No thiss contact senator. Moment in time is an opportunity to improve the brand or eroded. So how are they working with you guys to enable a customer to be able to have their issues identified, resolved quickly through various channels? >> What's the first thing is when you look at Omni Channel is why, what? Ultimately you want to make sure that you're o engaging with your customer over them channel on the method that they prefer. Right? That's the most important element there. So it's not about having ten, fifteen different ways to communicate. It's letting them do it when, where and how they choose to. That's the most important thing, and it's also then understanding. What else do they expect? Well, first in the expect is they want you. They want you to know them. You know, our research that we've done through our customer service index and a light consistently shows that people first and they want to know is Nomi understand my relationship. So when we work with our customers, we really focus on that as they engage over a phone call and email a chat, another channel. Always make sure that you, at the heart of it, you understand who they are. And one of the ways to do that is draw that information and make it available to the agent. So integration with serum systems with workforce optimization, others is critical so that when they're at the point of engagement, that moment of truth, they're able. Teo acknowledge the customer and probably have a really good understanding of not only their history, but why they're why they're engaging with you. Why they're calling are contacting >> Scott. Wait. We had a great conversation with Darrell, who's part part of your team, about how cloud not only enables the speed and agility, but, you know, I could start using new features much faster and easier. Then, in a non cloud environment. Wonder if you might have some customer stories to help illustrate some of these journeys as to you know, maybe just what they've gotten from Day one, but also, you know, subsequent to your customers that have been with you for a while. The rights that they keep innovating and adopting new things along the road. You >> know, it's funny. I I think of a couple examples. One. We had a customer who, newer, a newer company, a bit of a destructor in their industry, and they actually started out with digital channels on Lee. They had no voice. So they were offering email and Chad and other methods. And then, to their surprise, they found that they needed to introduce voice. They were deal with more millennials folks that they assumed were going to communicate over the right. Well, what happened was there were certain times when they wanted to actually communicate over Voice Channel. Maybe it was a financial issue. Maybe it was emotionally charged or something like that. So they brought. That is, we were able to help them by integrating in first. So they're there Syria to be able to digital channels and then open up voice. Now the other side of it is, we have customers who will start me with Voice Channel, and then they again understanding your customer, your end customers what do they want? Introducing a chat and making sure that those agents have all the relevant information they need to be able to do that. Realizing that email is still around after all these years, there's sometimes you want to communicate that way because you can send a lot of information. So it's really about building out a plan with the customer understanding. What is that customer journey of their customers? And how do they best a treated and helped him along the way >> on that customer journey front, I'm wondering, are the majority of customers that you're meeting with not aware of their customer journey and their customer preferences for different channels? Is that something that you're finding that you're actually from a consul? Tate of Perspective saying. Actually, what's idea here is to really not make assumptions on DH to actually do some investigations, and some studies tto learn. Is that a part of the process with you guys? It's a little >> bit a little bit of that. It's also sometimes that there's a journey purchase journey, a service journey in account management journey. You know the change. Change certain things about your service profile, but it's been developed over time, just through kind of osmosis, right? And so sometimes it's stepping back and understanding. What is that? Defining that journey and saying Where Artless critical path, where it may break down where problems occur So really drawn from that and understanding where those two points where we can Actually, and I say we being with customer helped them to be able to make that better overcome frustrations and delays and so on. So that's a really important element there in terms of channels. It's really just listening, listening to customers. Listen to agents listening to people that are on the front line talking to customers day in, day out and in realizing also, what's the profile of your customer? Your buyer? You know, not everybody is the same, and it doesn't always fit based on age or other demographics. You know, I have my father's eighty nine years old and weighs text messages all the time, you know, And once he embraced that, it's a wonderful method of communication. So, you know, there's a lot of things you have to look at along the way. >> Scott one of one of the biggest challenges in technologies we need to balance simplicity with the custom, ization and all of the choice in the world. I wonder if you might be able to comment. We know you know, from a customer standpoint, from agent standpoint. We wantto get them. The information they want when they need it is simple. It's possible. But on the back end, you know, we look at how many partners five nines has in all the different technologies you work with. You know, my business needs, you know, thes seven letters in the alphabet, not these other things. So how do you balance that from a messaging? And from a product standpoint, well, >> one of the >> things I realized is that one size doesn't fit. All right, companies have are different sizes. They're different complexity preferences along the way. So we really focus on how do you adapt the context center to the needs of that business? And that could be. Sometimes they have preferred vendors. So I'm a sales force, or Oracle or Mike saw for service now or whom you name it shop. I want to continue to use that it may be on work first optimization that I want. I have a certain set of capabilities I required that fits a particular vendor. Not so we really try to. And this is the beauty of the cloud is we can host. You know, elements in there in the case of, like, workforce optimization or in a grate in the case of serum to make that seamless. When you look at it from an agent perspective, it's all about giving them a common look and feel, you know, one term that's been really used. A lot of the show is the single pane of glass, the one agent desktop where they can really navigate because we've all experienced when you call into a context center and the agent is frustrated and these are complaining about the system, I'm sorry I'm trying to figure this out O this darn system. Oh, it's gotta wait or I have to find your information. I don't care. I'm the consumer. I just want my problem solved and frankly, the agents frustrated. But by integrating it within a with the serum, we could have all that information on the desktop on ly the relevant information that the agencies at that moment, you know, if I'm dealing with the purchase. Then I need that information on agent that's going to help me along the way. I don't need to worry about other factors, and I want to be able to customize that a little bit, too. My the way I behaved as an agent. So it is about convenience, intuitiveness, you know, and just ease of use. Long way. >> I'm curious. So here we are. Day three, Almost time with Enterprise Connect. Nineteen. You've been at the event the whole time. What are some of the things that you're hearing say from the analyst community? That is exciting. You about one. The direction that the contact center market is going into, what five nine is going to be able to deliver the rest of the year and beyond. >> You know, it's interesting. A couple of years ago, the buzz and the talk wass voices dead. It's all about everybody's going digital. And that was because of the increase in the number of transaction interacts that occurred over email chat social life. Now I was just talking to an analyst a little bit ago today, said You know, it's really interesting. Voice is hot again. Voice is cool because people are realizing voice has a very distinct role. And so it's not your only digital channels. It's not. You're it's really part of that mix back to comment we had before. So that's one thing you're seeing that you're seeing that with other vendors. You're seeing that with the conversations with customers, that it's really it's part of the mix and it's appropriate. Um, the other thing is, contexts enters hot again. It's kind of, you know, cool. And it's because of that change that we talked about earlier that, uh, it's no longer about cost center. It's no longer about Oh, I have tto answer that customer question. But now I play an integral role in that relationship my company has with the customer and how I can really reinforce the brand. So those are the things I think we're also seeing and talking to the analyst as well. They're saying that excitement and and also conversations that are occurring at the event are very engaging. People are really thinking about how they could change their business, >> and you could feel that and you could hear that here. So, Scott, as you say, the contact center is hot again stew. And I thank you for joining us on the program this afternoon. >> My pleasure. Thank you >> for student a man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

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 with two men a man of the cube and we are on the floor in five 9s booth at Enterprise Connect 2019 were excited to be joined by another guest from 5-9 we've got Darryl Addington the director of portfolio marketing Darryl it's great to have you so nice to be here yeah man this has been great for us we've gotten a lot of conversations over the last few days a lot from your execs customers partners this space enterprise communication and collaboration it's really hot it really is yes so much opportunity there give us a little bit of a picture about what you're seeing in the global market from a trend perspective to where your team says all right let's really work with our customers right there on the problems at five nine shit's off yeah so it's really an interesting as you said it's a very hot space right now everybody has to contact center that has any sort of customer service and so moving from where they're what they're currently using the day into the cloud is what's happening in mass and the market is a whole on contact centers as a whole has really said ok you know the cloud does look like it's got the right capabilities for me and as they age out of those older systems they're moving into the cloud so it's very exciting and there's a lot of new capabilities there as well my team really focuses on what the customers are trying to do in the contact center you know what types of problems they're trying to solve today in order to meet the needs of their customers and then we work to put together materials and things like that to help articulate you know what makes us different what makes us unique or how we can uniquely solve some of the issues that contact centers are facing today Darryl I love that I love it love you can bring us in a little bit more in those customers so you know the queues been covering the cloud for quite a long time yeah and speed and agility are some of the top things that we hear when we're talking about cloud and generally I know that is you know translates to the contact center but what else what are some of those key concerns that you're meeting with the customers and what are you hearing from them today yeah so I think one of the big things that people don't maybe don't realize when they're ready to move in in the cloud or they're starting to move into the cloud is that the updates and the the innovation that is that capable of that you're capable of having when you're in the cloud is increased pretty drastically so there's two ways that that happens so one thing is that we're a multi-tenant cloud offering you know you know what that is and so when we push code out to our customers we do it to all of our customers all at the same time so there's no upgrade path that they have to go on or extra work that they have to do our professional services teams we just get that to them so I have new capabilities at their fingertips all the time that they can take advantage that's one big area it's such a great point even you know you give most customers and to talk to them as Microsoft as their example you know the the Microsoft of previous years where I have Patch Tuesday and am I in the latest patch and what's going on and everything if I'm running office 365 if I'm living on Microsoft Azure I'm not asking what version or how did I get that latest security patch in there because they take care of it yeah that absolutely all goes away the other thing that's happened it's really interesting is that in an on-premises world you get the software you buy the perpetual license of course you load it onto servers and then somebody integrates it all together so that the agent can see where the customer information is and the contact center and some of the WFL features in a cloud environment that's all happening based on the vendor and it has a kind of a surprising result as part of that and that surprising result is that it doesn't break as often it's not as fragile as it was when it got all stitched together by a specialized team of people that by the way have moved on to the next project they're not there to support it anymore but because we have hundreds of customers that are using those integrations on our platform you know and they're using it every single month each one of the integrations we have to obviously make sure that it's functioning all the time and that lets them this is the surprising part let's say you iterate in the contact center in a way that the contact center hasn't really been able to do up until they had the cloud you can make changes every couple of weeks if you want to and actually you know you'll have David on I think a little bit later from Carfax and that's one of the things that he talks about so hopefully you can ask them some questions about how they've changed their since they came on board with would love to know that because as we as we talk about the centrioles of cloud for context and our contact center as a service the obvious operational and cost benefits of the club but also I know 5/9 has about five billion minutes of reported customer conversations and Rowan Tolliver CEO per year yes thank you will be coming on later today this thing you know I was gonna say prehistorically maybe previously there's a ton of dark data in there but there's so much insight there yes that that you know the problem is the consumer behavior is changing everything we expect omni-channel experience rate we're demanding that contact center still has the original problem of meeting the customer demands and resolving a problem but now there's so much more complexity because of omni-channel and all of these different things so talk to us about how you guys at five minute open customers to really ensure that the cloud is going to maximize say their opportunity to dial up AI right so it's interesting i mean AI has got so much potential in this marketplace and and and rollin we'll talk about that this afternoon you know it's an exciting time because well first of all AI is a whole bunch of different types of technologies you know kind of at the core of it is machine learning of course which allows you to create these different types of models for doing things that human beings have been good at and you know in the cases of Google what we've seen is that they're dictation has improved drastically over previous generations of recognition and things like that so that's very exciting because you can so dictation in particular lots of things you can do with dictation that's part of that dark data story that we've been talking about you can pull the words out of the voice that are sitting there and use those effectively but there's another layer there which is natural language understanding once you have the words what are the words mean and that's I think where five nine I'll be able to provide a significant value again based on that dark data because if you think about the way a customer is going to interact with a business they're not going to use the words that you use when you're communicating on your mobile phone to Siri right you're gonna you're gonna be talking about whatever it is that you're doing inside of that business and so if it's pharmaceuticals a whole different set of vocabulary that you're going to use communicating with an agent around around pharmaceuticals and the same for every single industry right and so that's where that really starts to come into play is those systems that machine learning system has to have all those specific not just industry level words but business level words right if I'm calling Amazon and I'm talking about you know a specific capability I have an Amazon that's gonna be a different set of words versus you know if I'm if I'm calling my cable company because there's specific products and so anyway so all of that is gonna lead I think into a future where we're able to provide some very interesting and compelling yeah I driven solutions for contact centers all right so Darryl lately and I've had a chance to we see the show floor we've attended some of the keynotes one of the things we rarely get to do though is actually go to some of the breakout sessions you led one of those yesterday participated in one yesterday maybe bring us inside you know sure how was the attendance any good questions from the audience and what was some of the key takeaways you know attendance was good it was it was a good session so we were talking about the intelligent cloud contact center so one of the things that contact centers are trying to think about is how do I create a system or a platform and a process within my contact center where I can better serve customers and so we've coined this term or we have this term the intelligent cloud contact sentence what we deliver with five nine genius which is the five nine platform for delivering services out into contact centers and essentially affecting just running through it really quickly the intelligent cloud contact center is integrated into all the systems as we talked about previously so CRM and WFO capabilities out of the cloud you just turn it on and configure it and you can use it of course you can customize it if you need to for your specific business processes as well second element is around agent empowerment and agent so the agent is the really that human touch point between the customer and the business and that usually when the agent gets involved it's this kind of critical moment right so the agent needs to know either in their head but there's a lot of information and that can extend your training time or right in front of them on their desktop you know all the information about that customer so that they can help the customer continue their journey whatever that happens to be and hopefully drive it to conclusion right so that's the second element and then the third element is is really about reliability so has to be a reliable system because you're offering it as a cloud service if it's not available you can't use it if you can't use it you then you can't run your contact center and you're you know you're you're not gonna you're not gonna provide great service to your customers and really drive up that customer experience so that's the third element of the intelligent cloud contact center and seem to get good feedback from the crowd yeah how to add a number of interesting questions back on that anything particular question catcher that you know might be a common thing that users would be asking you know I am NOT the none of them are coming to mind at the moment they I remember them as being interesting I flagged them as such and we had an interesting conversation after this session but but I don't actually remember it's always at these shows it's a blur of you know there's a lot of activities there's been good buzz any any other just kind of key takeaways you've had is we're you know get into the third day of the show and some of the interactions well I think every single business is at a different place and so well it's fun to talk about AI and it's very interesting I'm excited about it I think depending on where a business is right now in their particular path and their particular journey there's still a lot of things that you can do that don't require AI to transform what you're doing in the contact center and that intelligent cloud contact center I think is one of the ways that a business can really do that and that is to get that data all in a location get it in front of the agents let that agent be able to know what's going on with that customer at that moment and be able to communicate with the customer and then do that with confidence that you can iterate and then improve your business so one of the things I didn't talk about that yet so I'll do it now is metrics and being able to know what's happening in your contact center and that's obviously a fully integrated part of that what are some of those key metrics so we think of Net Promoter Score customer lifetime value or predicting customer lifetime value what are some of those key metrics that 5:9 is helping your customers to achieve through the intelligent kind of first call resolution is of course I'm you know a critical one that a lot of contact center is used to trying to determine what you know how well your your your serving your customers I think one of the key things that's relatively new for the contact center industry is giving the stats to the agent so that the agents know how they're performing all throughout the day we all like to know how we're doing right we want feedback on a regular basis and when you don't provide those to an agent or if you just have a really simple wall board that's up that the agents are looking at then you know then all they have to go on is that weekly call with their supervisor where the supervisor goes well actually on Tuesday at 10:00 you forgot to introduce the brand correctly and on Wednesday at 11:00 you didn't greet the customer in the appropriate way and you didn't end the call with the appropriate greeting based on the fact that they were called so that's no fun for an agent right it's it's basically a mistake driven set of feedback that you get but if you give them the stats in front and the performance dashboard that we provide does that then they can see exactly how they're doing all through the course of the day and you know that helps them to do better people will autocorrect almost instantly when they get feedback on how they're doing and it makes you feel better because then with the gamification aspect of it it kind you know you're ratcheting up you know how you're doing you're starting to compete maybe with your peers a little better at least you're feeling good and then at the end of the week the supervisor can come back and say hey great job this week let's let's talk about some deeper skills that you can work on with you to you know improve your close rate on sales for example rather than yeah I love that because I cringe a little bit of gamification but knowing this kind of environment right if it's something that I can proactively look at it myself I can engage on I take ownership myself so right you can have more constructive engagement and work on you know strengths when you're going with your management that's what it's really all about it's all about making it fun it's not about having a you know a silly game on the side it's all about am I doing the things that the company wants me to do and then there's some nice fringe benefits that can be out of it too you know monetary awards or things that you can buy tickets to sporting events things like that it's all part of the so we talk so much about customer experience CX big theme of the show every conversation that we've had but I'm just kind of wondering and hearing you talk about how five nine five nine is enabling the agent experience when you're talking with customers do they see customer experience an agent experience as separate issues to deal with or are you really saying they are one in the same and here's how we're going to enable you through the agent empowerment to deliver that awesome CX yeah it's a it's a really great question because you're absolutely right if the agent is you know like we just talked about a second ago getting negative feedback every week about what they didn't do right well how is that gonna you know how is that going to motivate them to be excited about talking to the customer you know whereas if you've got an environment where the agent doesn't have to so part of the problem with the old desktops for the agents is this they're just too complicated right so if I'm on the phone and I'll just do it like a parody of it and I'm trying to talk to you guys you know but I'm constant trading on you know what I'm digging through different screens and it's just really hard to connect with the customer so if you create that environment where it's easy to understand what the customer data is intuitive you know almost so it doesn't require much training but then also you don't have to focus on it and you're giving constant feedback on how you're doing in your performance all throughout the day and your supervisor sessions at the end of every week are on a positive note doing great job let's see how we can increase your close rate now you've got an agent who's enjoying their job which is cool because then of course if they're enjoying their job then when they get that call from a customer they're interacting with customers and they're empowered to make decisions right and to have the right content to deliver that through the right channel to you know not make that the last exchange that that business has with a customer but to actually retain them as you said retention is huge that agent empowerment and being able to make decisions I can imagine can be an absolute game changer yeah I know absolutely and a lot of call centers would like to become they would like to transform and be able to help the business in those key areas whether it's retaining customers or whether it's cross-selling and upselling different capabilities and if you have the right tools it's much much easier to enable the agents to do that all right so Darryl we've been talking with your team this week about many of the announcements at the show what have you been involved in what's the ones that been exciting you the most to be able to get in front of customers and about well so one of the one of the things we've been talking about over and over is the agent desktop and the information that the agent has and so we renamed our platform at there as part of this show and so we've renamed it to five nine genius the intelligent cloud contact center as I've mentioned previously and we think that name gives us some interesting ways to talk about really the power that we're bringing to bear with the our cloud contact center because it's integrated because the desktop is intuitive because it pulls information from all the appropriate data sources including customer intent in a self-service channel and it's still bringing that to the agent it really does empower a different way in a different method of communicating with customers that businesses can use to improve their customer experience Darryl thank you so much for joining suing me on the Cuba separated sharing about what you're doing and how that voice of the customer is really impacting everything that 5/9 does we appreciate your time yeah thanks so much thanks for having me first a minute man I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]

>> Live from Orlando, Florida its theCUBE covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Hello from Orlando, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman theCUBE. We are live, day three at Enterprise Connect 2019. We have been in Five9's booth all week and we're very excited to welcome to the program for the first time Harry Moseley the CIO of Zoom Video Communications. Harry thanks so much for joining Stu and me on The CUBE today. >> Lisa, Stu its a pleasure to be here, thank you for having me. >> And you're a hall of famer, you have been inducted into the CIO Magazine's hall of fame and recognized as one of the world's top 100 CIO's be Computer World >> Yes that's right >> So we're in the presence of a VIP >> (chuckles) Well thank you for that it's, as I say its all credit back to the wonderful people that have supported me throughout my career. And I've worked with some amazing people and leaders and, who have supported me and the visions that I've created for their organizations. And so, I understand its about me but it's also about the great teams that I've worked with in my past. I can't make this stuff up, yep. >> Harry, we love talking to CIO's especially one with such a distinguished career as yours 'cause the role of CIO has gone through a lot of changes. IT has gone through a lot of changes. You know we've been doing this program for nine years. Remember reading Nick Carr's IT, does IT matter? And you know, we believe IT matters more than ever Not just IT, the business, the relationship maybe give us a little more of your view point as to the role of the CIO and technology, at a show like this. We hear about the CMO and the business and IT all working together. >> Yeah so its actually, in my opinion, there's never been a better time to be a CIO, irrespective of the company you are in, whether its a tech company like where I'm, you know Zoom Video Communications or any one of the prior companies I worked for, professional services, financial services. But even when you think about it like trucking, You think about trucking as an industry, you think about trucking as a company, its like it was a very sort of brick and mortars? But now its all about digital, right? A friend of mine runs a shipping container company and to think that they load five miles of wagons every day. And so I said to him, "how long does it take to load a wagon on a truck?" "It takes four minutes, and you know what Harry, "we're working that down to three. "And that'll increase our revenue by 20 to 25 percent.' And so its just fantastic. And the pace of change, you know it's just growing exponentially. It's just fascinating, the things that we can actually do today we only dreamed about them a year ago. And you think about it sort of' I can't wait to be back here next year, 'cause we're going to just lift the roof off this place in terms of the capabilities. And so its fantastic, yeah it's just absolutely fantastic. >> So looking at, a lot of us know Zoom for video conferencing and different things like that, but you said something very interesting in your fireside chat this morning that I hadn't thought about, and that is when, either going from audio to video, when you're on a video chat you really can't or shouldn't multi-task. So in terms of capturing peoples attention, enabling meetings to happen maybe more on time, faster, more productive. Thought that was an interesting realization, I thought, you're right. >> It just clicks, it just works. You know mobile, you know when I go back to my you know sort of' going back and again, thank you for the recognition from the key note. But when I go back earlier in my career it's like dialing that number, dialing that ten digit number, misdialing that number, what happened? I got to' hang up, I got to' get a dial tone, I got to' dial the numbers again. Now I'm like two minutes late and I know I'm late more often than I'd like, but when its late because of something like that, that's frustrating. That's really frustrating. And so the notion that you can just click on your mobile device, you can click on your laptop, I have no stress anymore, in joining meetings anywhere. I love telling the story about how I had a client meeting, I was in O'Hare Airport and I joined the client prospect meeting. I joined the prospect meeting on my phone using the free wifi service at O'Hare Airport. Put up my virtual background on my phone I just showed you this Stu, with our logo shared the content off of my phone 18 minutes into this 30 minutes call, the person I was talking to, the CIO for this firm called a halt to the meeting. This is what exactly what happened. Enough, I've heard enough. (announcement in background) >> Keep going. >> Keep going, okay. Enough, I didn't know what enough meant. And so I was a little spooked by that if you will. He goes, "you're on a phone, you're in O'Hare Airport, "you've got a virtual background, "you're sharing content, its all flawless. "Its like this is an amazing experience "that we can't get from all the technology "investment we've done in this space "for our company. "So guys, enough. "We're starting a proof of concept on Monday. "No more discussions about it. "Harry, looking forward to being a business partner." >> Does it get better than that? >> It doesn't get better than that. Its like you know, you hop through security, you get on a plane, and its cruisin' all the way home. >> Yeah I mean Harry, I do have to say, you know disclaimer, we are Zoom customers I'm actually a Zoom admin and its that simplicity that you've built into it is the experience, makes it easy. >> And then when you, and Stu, sorry to interrupt you but I got really excited about this stuff as you can tell. But, and then you look at the enterprise. So you're admin? You get into the enterprise management portal and its like Stu, I had a really bad experience. Oh let me look that up, oh yeah, okay. Where were you? You know, I was in outer Mongolia Ah okay, about five minutes into the call you had some packet loss, its like yeah it wasn't. But it still maintains the connection, right? So you can actually, so our Enterprise Management Portal is awesome. >> Yeah so that actually where I was going with the question, is you know I remember back, I actually worked for Lucent right after they spun out from AT&T. And we had videos talking about pervasive video everywhere, in my home in the business. Feels like we're almost there but still even when I have a team get together my folks that live in Silicon Valley, their connectivity's awful. You know when they have their, and its like oh well my computer or my phone don't have the cycles to be able to run. Maybe we have to turn off some of the video Are we getting there, will 5G solve some of these issues? Will the next generation of phones and computers keep up with it? Because it's, I'm sure you can guess we're big fans of video. It's a lot of what we do. >> Because video is the new voice, right. We like video. If I can only hear you and I can't see you, then when I make a statement I can't see you nodding. If I say something you like, you nod. So we get that concurrency of the experience Again it comes back Stu, where were we a year ago? The capabilities we had, where will we be a year from today? Whether its AI, whether its the power in the device in front of us whether its the network, you know, 5G is becoming a reality. It's going to take some time to get there but you've got sort of great technologies and capabilities, that you know, you look at the introduction of our real-time transcription services. I mean how cool is that? I'm sure there's lots of questions, so lots of people would ask about that real-time transcription in terms of, well what's next? I'm not going to talk about what's next. But as they say in life, watch this space. >> Yeah, just you made some announcements at the show with some partners I actually believe Otter AI is one of the ones you mentioned there. I got a demo of their thing, real time, a little bit of AI built in there. Can you talk about some of those partnerships? >> Yeah so we have great, we love our partnerships right? Whether its on the AI space, with Apple and Siri and Amazon and Otter. We also love our partnerships with Questron and Logitek and HP, and Polly of course. Again its the notion of, we have terrific software. You guys realize that, right? Its terrific software, proprietary QOS proprietary capabilities, its like its a fantastic experience every time on our software. These partners have great technologies too. But they're more on the hardware side, we are software engineers at our core. As Andreson said, I think it was about ten years go, "software is the easing thing in the world "so you take terrific software "you imbed it in terrific hardware "with terrific partners and what happens "is you get exceptional experiences." And that's what we want to deliver to people. So its not about the technology, its about the people. Its about making people happy, making easy, taking stress off the table. You go to the meeting, you light it up, you share the content, you record it, you can watch it later, its just terrific. >> So the people, the experiences you about we've been hearing that thematically for the last three days. As we know as consumers, the consumer behavior is driving so much of this change that has to happen, for companies to not just digitally transform, but to be competitive. We're in Five9's booth and they've mentioned they've got five billion minutes of recorded customer conversations. You guys can record, but its not just about the recording of the voice and the video and the transcription. Tell us about what you're doing to enable the context, so that the data and the recordings have much more value. >> Yeah so , I mean its the notion of being able to sort of rewind and replay. I'll give you another example if I may. Coming out of an office in Palo Alto jumped in the Uber, going back to San Jose for a client meeting. I'm a New Yorker as we talked about a few minutes ago and, I don't know the traffic patterns in Southern, in the Valley. And its about 5:00 o'clock, 5:15. San Jose meetings 5:45. Normally it would be fine, but its rush hour, what do I know about rush hour? I know a lot more now than then. I realize I'm not going to be able to make it on time. Put up the client logo, virtual background on the phone, in the Uber, client gets on the call, Harry where are you? I'm in the back of an Uber. Again, the same sort of experience. Then he asks the question, "well with this recording capability, "can I watch it at 35,000 feet?" Of course you can. And that was it. That was the magic moment for this particular client, because he said "I'm client facing all the time. "I don't get it in time, "I don't always make my management meetings "so I won't have to ask my colleagues what happened "and get their interpretation of the meeting. "I can actually watch the meeting "when I'm at 35,000 feet on a plane, going to Europe." So that's what this is all about. >> Alright, well Harry obviously this space excites you a bunch. Can you bring us back a little bit? This brought you out of retirement and the chase, the space is changing so fast. We come a year from now, what kind of things do we think we'll be talking about, and what's going to keep you excited going forward? >> So lets talk about the first part first and then sort of' break it into two. So yes I had a fantastic career and I retired and so when I met Eric and I met the leadership team at Zoom and I dug into the technology and I understood sort of' A, the culture of the company which is amazing. When I understood the product capability and how this was built as video first, and how we would have this maniacal focus if you will on sort of being a software company at our core. And how it was all about the people. That was sort of a very big part of my decision. So that was one. Two is, look we have a labor shortage right? We can't hire enough people, we can't hire the people, we have more jobs than we have people. So and so, retaining talent is really important. Giving them the technology and the studies that have been done, if you make an investment in the technology, that helps with retention. That helps with profit. It helps with, product innovation. So investment in the people. And the ability to collaborate. It's very hard to work if you don't collaborate, right? It just makes it really, very lumpy if you will. So the ability to collaborate locally, nationally, and globally, and people say, well what's collaborating locally? It's kind of like we can just walk down the corridor. Yeah, well if you're in two different buildings how do you get there? And then it gives us, a foot of snow between you, its makes it really hard. So collaborating locally, nationally, and globally is super important. So you put all that together that was the, what convinced me to say okay you know what, retirement, we're just going to put a pause button on that. And we're going to gave some fun over here. And that really has been, so I've, over a year now and its been absolutely amazing. So yes, big advances. What's in the the future? I think the future, you know there's been a lot of discussion around AI. We hear that its like, all the time. And we've seen from a variety of different providers this week in terms of their, their thoughts around how they're going to leverage AI. Its not about the technology, its about the end of the its about the user experience. And you look at the things that we started to do, we talked about real-time transcriptions a few moments ago, you look at the partnership that we have with Linkedin where you can hover over the name and their Linkinin profile pops up. You're going to see this, I just see this as an exponential change in these abilities. Because you have these building blocks today that you can grow on an exponential basis. So, the world is our oyster, is how I fundamentally think about it. And the art of the possible is now possible, And so lets, I think the future is going to' be absolutely amazing. Who would have, sorry Lisa, who would have thought a year ago, you could get on a plane using facial recognition? Let me just throw that out there. I mean, that's pretty amazing. Who would have thought a year ago that when you rent a car, you can just look at the camera on the way out and you're approved to go? Who would have thought that? >> So with that speed I'm curious to get your take on how Zoom is facilitating adoption. You mentioned some great customers examples where your engagement with them via Zoom Video Conference basically sold the POC in and of itself, with you at an airport >> That's a great questions. >> I guess O'Hare has pretty good wifi. >> What's that? >> O'Hare has pretty good wifi. >> A little choppy but, but it worked. >> It worked. >> Because of our great software, yeah. >> There you go, but in terms of adoption so as customers understand, alright our consumers are so demanding, we have to be able to react, and facilitate collaboration internally and externally. How, what are some of the tools and the techniques that Zoom delivers to enable those guys and gals to go I get it, I'm going to use it, And I'm actually going to actually use it successfully? >> This is a question, I don't know how many clients, CIOs, CTOs, C suite execs I talk to, and they all say, they all ask me similar sorts of questions. Like we're not a video first culture. Its like video, its kind of like we're a phone culture. And then I, so I throw that right back at them and I say and why is that? Because we don't have a good video platform. Aha. Now, when you have good video, when it just works when its easy, when its seamless, when its platform agnostic. IOS, Andriod, Mac, Windows, Linux, VDI, web. When you have this sort of, this platform when you're agnostic to the platform, and its a consistent high quality experience, you use it. So its the notion of, Lisa, it's the notion of would we rather get into a room and, would we rather get into a room and have a face to face meeting? Absolutely. So why would you get on a call and not like to see the people you're talking to. You like to see the people. Why, because its a video first. >> Unless its just one of those meetings that's on my calender and I didn't want to be there and I'm not going to listen. But I totally agree with you Harry. So, another hot button topic that I think we're at the center of here and that I'm sure you have an opinion on. Remote workers. So we watched some really big companies I think really got back in the dialogue a coupla' years ago when Yahoo was like okay, everybody's got to' come in work for us and we've seen some very large public companies that said you need to be in your workforce. and as I said, I'm sure you've got some pretty strong opinions on this >> I don't know what's going on here, quite honestly Stu but its like I think you're reading my brain because these are things I love talking about. So yeah, its. Sorry repeat the question? >> Remote workers. >> Remote workers, yeah. So first of all, I was at an event recently we talked about remote work. We didn't like the term. Its a distributed workforce. >> Yes. Because if you say you're a remote worker its kind like, that doesn't give you that warm feeling of being part of the organization. So we call it, so we said, we should drop calling people remote workers and we should call them a distributed work force. So that's one. Two is, I'm in New york, I'm in Orlando, I'm in Chicago, I'm in Atlanta, I'm in Denver. I'm on planes, I'm in an Uber. I don't feel disconnected at all. Why? Because I can see my colleagues, and its immersive. They share content with me. I'm walking down Park Avenue and I've got my phone and they're sharing content and I'm zooming in and I can see them and I can hear them and I'm giving feedback and I'm marking up on my phone, as I'm walking. So I don't feel, and then when I go to, its fascinating, and then I go to San Jose and I'm walking around the office and I'm seeing people physically. It doesn't feel like I haven't seen them, its really funny. I was in San Jose last week, Wednesday and Thursday in San Jose, took the red-eye back. Hate the red-eye but, I don't like flying during the day, I think it's inefficient, a waste of time. Took the red-eye back, now I'm on calls Friday morning from my office at home with my green screen, Zoom background and everybody's got, it's like I'm talking to the same people I was talking to yesterday but they were in the flesh, now they're on video. It's like Harry where are you, why didn't you come to the room? Well I'm back in New York. It's just just that simple, yep. >> That simple and really it sounds like Harry, what Zoom is delivering is a cultural transformation for some of these newer or older companies who, there is no reason not to be a video culture. We thank you so much for taking some time >> Thank you, thank you >> To stop by theCUBE and chat with Stu and me about all of the exciting things that brought you back into tech. and I'm excited to dial up how I'm using Zoom. >> Well we can take five minutes after this and I can show you some cool tricks >> Wow, from the CIO himself. Harry Moseley, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you, thank you >> Great to have you on the program. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE (upbeat tune)

(funky music) >> [Narrator voiceover] Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Hello from Orlando. I'm Lisa Martin on theCube with Stu Miniman, and we are in Five9's booth at Enterprise Connect 2019. Can you hear all of the attendees behind me? There's about 6,500 people here. In the expo hall, there's 140 exhibitors. I mentioned we are in Five9's booth, and we're pleased to welcome to theCube the president of Five9, Dan Burkland. Dan, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. It's great to be here. What an event. This is amazingly well attended, and, uh, can't wait. Let's get to it. >> It is, so let's do a little bit of by the numbers. Four years in a row that Five9 has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service. You have, I think we were talking with some of your guys yesterday, five billion recorded customer conversations. Oh the data and the opportunities in that. Couple thousand customers worldwide, and a big, strong finish to FY18. Lot of momentum. >> Right, and 2018 couldn't have been better. We had wonderful growth, capped off with a Q4 that showed 31% revenue growth year over year. We continue to increase our profitability as well, EBITDA being 23%. So for us it was a phenomenal year. The combination of revenue growth plus the EBITDA, put us over 50. Oftentimes companies are evaluated for the rule of 40. And we shattered that and came in over 50, so we're very excited. It's helping fuel the growth for us, which we believe is still ahead of us, for the most part. >> Dan, congratulations on the progress. We've been watching, there's some big-name hires that have happened in the company. Why I was excited to talk to you, is not only have you been with the company coming up on 10 years now, but you've got sales underneath what you're doing, and when you watch a company that is exceeding the industry growth rate by, like, 2 to 3X, you know hiring and culture is so important. Bring us inside a little bit. What's happening at Five9? How do you maintain the momentum? What is that, you know, Five9 employee that you look for? >> So, Stu, and you just touched on it. We've been an execution machine for many years, growing the top line of the business, while keeping an eye on bottom line profitability, and we believe doing that as well as anybody in our industry. And what's very powerful now is those new hires that you mentioned. Wouldn't have guess in my wildest dreams that we could attract somebody with Rowan's, uh, pedigree and really his reputation of being able to take companies, transform them, and take them to new heights. You know, with his reputation he was able to attract Jonathan Rosenberg, co-author of the SIP protocol, and really thought leader in the collaboration space for us. So, we see taking what we've done over the past several years and growing the business into what's now, you know a $250 million plus company and applying their thought leadership and expertise to an already highly executing machine. Really the sky's the limit for us, and I think what it now brings us is the ability to expand the product and really take the products into whole new areas, like artificial intelligence and being able to leverage those technologies and really change the way customers provide support and really evolve the customer experience as a whole. >> Yeah, it's been interesting. I've watched the cloud space in general for a number of years, and, you know the numbers sometimes bely what we're used to. It's like, oh well okay, you know, somewhere 40 to 90% growth for some of the public cloud providers. Oh well, when's that going to slow down? And sometimes it actually still accelerates, you know. And when I look at the cloud contact centers, you know, once again, you know, you're growing at a pretty good clip, but you've still got lots of head room there. So talk a little bit about that dynamic, you know, we're past the evangelization phase, and now, you know, generally Cloud it's here it's still growing massively. >> Well said, Stu, and not only is it still here, it's just the beginning. If you look at the Cloud penetration rate to date we now see that about 10 to 15% of companies have moved and transitioned to the Cloud for their contact center needs. We see that continuing for a decade or more as we move forward, and some of the drivers for that, if you look at it, are... Uh, you mentioned at the outset, Lisa the fact that we're recording five million minutes of conversations, and that is valuable, valuable data that we're sitting on. One of the true, uh, advents is when you look at AI and you look at artificial intelligence, lots of folks around this show are talking about how AI is going to revolutionize and change the way contact centers operate. And we know it's going to do that. Lots of us are experimenting and building out proofs of concepts in the areas like agent assistance. For the first time ever, we can get strong transcription tools that allow us to take speech and convert it into text at a very high rate. And be able to then apply natural language understanding tools to that same text to be able to derive what a customer's asking for in real time, and, therefore, it takes the responsibility away from the agent and not burden the agent with having to go hunt and search for the solutions, but actually let the system go hunt and search for that, while the agent can pay attention and focus on the client or the end user customer. And then have the system be able to give responses, so if the system's giving responses to, uh, the agent, the agent then has the ability to chose which response is accurate, and the system will learn over time and become smarter. The machine learning portion of that is it will get better and better at suggesting responses to the agent. It allows us to take a very junior or unseasoned agent and make them a very experienced agent very, very quickly. So, in the past, we've had to rely on scripts that were very form-driven, with a few variables being filled in. Now we can be very dynamic, with AI providing those responses. >> Let's talk about the impacts of the consumer. We are consumers, right? We're so empowered. We can make any decision, and we have these expectations on any business that we're dealing with, you're going to be able to... If it's an agent we're dealing with because we have a problem, you're going to be able to identify my problem right away, um, in whatever channel it is that I want to communicate with you, and I have this expectation that... That whatever... I want it to be as easy as, uh, you know, downloading something on Netflix. So, in terms of the consumer influence, what are some of the ways in which Five9 can help those agents really become empowered decision makers and help the businesses be able to have the content that they can, in real time, distribute through the appropriate channel? >> Right, well, that's a great question because there's nothing more important... I should say nothing more frustrating for a consumer who contacts a business and has to go through an IVR, which we've all done. It's not a pleasant experience. We're oftentimes trying to input information first so the company can identify who we are, second to derive intent. Why are we contacting them? And third, now that the company knows why we are contacting them, how they can find and locate and route us to the most appropriate resource to handle that transaction. And with AI coming, it can allow us to very quickly identify the caller, ask them why they're calling, and, through that natural language understanding, then we can derive why they're calling and not only distribute the call to the right agent, but as I mentioned earlier, be able to actually provide the pertinent data to help them interact with the consumer. So as consumer expectations continue to rise, and they expect to not have to give information more than once, regardless of the channel, it puts the onus on us as technology solution providers to build the solutions that will accomplish just that. >> Yeah, Dan, I wonder if you can help us peel the onion a little bit when you talk about the opportunity for growth. We know where Cloud adoption is still a little bit more heavy here in North America, so bring us, bring us global, you know, Five9 is a global company, but what's the international opportunity there? >> So, great, we've had small European teams and Latin America teams for several years now, in fact we set up our data centers in Europe with a fully geographic-redundant solution. And it's been hardened. We have over a hundred customers now on our European data centers, and so we're now in the mode of scale and execution. It's very critical in this space to establish presence, get reference ability within a region, and then scale it. That's the same we did here in the US, and we're doing the same thing now in Europe and Latin America. So that's a big area for our expansion needs for 2019. We're also seeing an area along, erhm... with the large systems intergrators, the global companies like Deloitte and also with PWC, EY, Accenture, IBM. Being able to really leverage what they have is a lot of account control, and they're look at as trusted advisors to come in and help companies go through that digital transformation, which includes so much more than just contact center, but we're a critical element. And so what we've done is we've worked very closely with them to make sure that we can participate in that transformation, and they've been wonderful about introducing us into domestic customers but many global customers in nature. >> I love that you brought up the digital transformation. When we talk to companies, data is so important to what they're doing, is at the center of that digital transformation. Data plays a pretty important role in the contact centers. We talked to Jonathan yesterday about some of the future of AI. That's there. When you talk about your field and your engagement with your customers, you know, where does contact center fit into some of those big themes and big transformations that they're doing? >> So, um, uh, data's critical because it's, A, how it was mentioned yesterday by Jonathan, it's really what's going to allow us to teach the machine learning to be so much more accurate, you've got to have millions of conversations in order to do that effectively. The other is for our customers and potential customers. Well, the time is now to move to the Cloud, so that when the application that we're doing PoCs with and we're testing the different use cases, when those become relevant and prevalent within production environments, the first step is you need to be in the Cloud already, and the next step is start recording your data today. So if you're recording calls and you're flushing those calls and you're not saving them, the key is that's valuable data and can create valuable insights to what conversations are happening between your agents and your customers. Today many of our customers record all their calls, and they put them in a vault, and about 1 to 2% get listened to again. And they're getting listened to, not for the content, but for training purposes. And we would argue that there's so much valuable content in there, that if it can be taken, transcribed, organized, filtered, and then brought back to the business, there's many insights that can be driven because of that. One example is if you take data from a conversation and you're able to transcribe it, the system can have the intelligence to go in and mine for topics. What are the key elements that this conversation just had? And take that information and disposition a call. So today many organizations have their agents do wrap up on their keyboard and type in notes about what occurred on a call. Sometimes those notes are accurate, sometimes they're not. Same with dispositioning. I may have a pull-down menu and disposition a call. It may be accurate, oftentimes it's not. Well, with the technology that available to us today, we can auto-disposition, if you will, or let the system disposition the call, let the system put in the relevant notes, and let the agent move on to their next call. The key there is, tomorrow, when I call back, if Lisa answers my call, Lisa can say, oh great. I see you talked to Stu yesterday for 20 minutes, and you talked about X, Y, and Z. Is that why you're calling? A much more personalized conversation. >> So since customers are going to these great lengths to record and store these conversations, and as you're saying, there's so much value there, way besides training, what are some of the barriers that you're finding that they need help getting over to actually start mining that data to dramatically improve their competitive advantage, reduce churn, increase CLV? How do you help them get over that, all right we have to invest here. >> Yeah, great. Some of the barriers historically have been just the sheer accuracy. There's been speech to text technology and algorithms available on the market for many years. They just haven't had the accuracy rate of that of a human. So we've always relied on the humans to extract the detail and be able to transcribe. The trouble is going from a active conversation to transcribing what I really just heard... a lot gets lost in that translation as well. And so with human levels of accuracy of the new technology coming from companies like Google and others, to be able to transcribe that information, then we need to then apply the NLU to that same text. And so those historically have been the challenges. Now that we're there with the technology, it becomes for companies like us to be able to apply that technology in a way that's fitting for the customer. >> Dan, I expect you're meeting with a lot of customers at a show like this, and just in your job you talk to a lot of customers. When we've been talking to many of your partners here at the show, we hear about, uh, you know, if only we could get greater adoption, we need to help people train up, we need to help them get over the barrier of learning something new. What, is that one of the main challenges you hear from your users or are there anything else that's kind of rising up as the, kind of, the biggest challenges that your customers face today? From a distribution standpoint, and channel perspective, we have lots of channels that are embracing Five9 and bringing for the first time in many cases a Cloud solution to their customers. Historically that's been met with mixed results because they felt like, hey, there's a large CAPX solution that I can sell, or I can go on a subscription basis, and I don't see that revenue for many years to come. And so we're finding that that channel is really opening up nicely for us. And that goes from everything from a regional VAR that may have been providing and selling the premises-based solutions to the large global CDWs of the world that have global reach and global scale. And then, of course, like I mentioned earlier, the SIs like Deloitte and Accenture and those that have strategic value that they bring to their clients. So we're seeing it hit on many different cylinders to help fuel our expansion, and that's what's really, what we're looking forward to go from, you know, the, the, the 250 million to 500 million to a billion. Those are the types of channels that will help us scale much more effectively. >> Yeah, the last thing I wanted to, to ask about is your Cloud-based solution, but my understanding is you still treat this, it's white glove, every customer, you're engaging there. It's not some hands-off relationship there. >> Right. Could you talk a little bit about that? That differentiation for Five9? >> Yes, that's an excellent point, and it's something that I brought over from my previous experience of selling into larger enterprises. We said, you know there's this misnomer about, oh if it's in the Cloud, it's off the shelf, and it's not as customizable. That's... Nothing could be further from the truth, for one. We have to... All of our enterprise customers have a different deployment and a different effective implementation of our solution. Uh, and having built out 300 REST-based APIs, we give tremendous flexibility and allow our customers to get very creative on how they customize it, whether that be for integrating to back-office data systems, building their own UIs or dashboards that are in the look and feel that the want, there's a variety of different ways that they can leverage and customize the product. So it's important for us to have a solution that has that flexibility, and um, it allows customers to move to the Cloud and yet still have that much greater flexibility than they had with premises systems. Um, and that's come about over the last several years. >> Okay, Dan, last question. Let's bring it home. You're on the road all the time. You talk with a ton of customers. Give us one by name, if you can, or industry that really epitomizes the breadth and the strength that Five9 and your channel partners can deliver. >> Yeah, so, getting back, and I'll touch on the channel partners first. The channel partners element of them being able to recognize, the first step we want for them is to leverage and empower them to recognize a Cloud offering or an application that might be a fit for Five9. And then we're now in the process of enabling them not only on the pre-sale side but on the post-sale side to be able to leverage their expertise from a services perspective. So when you look at customers that really want to take that and go to the next level, a lot of them have been brought to us by I'll us Deloitte as an example. When Deloitte first brought us in to Lili, they were able to bring us in and help Lili transform their global centers over to Five9. And they're taking out and migrating their premises-based solutions over the last three years, over to Five9. And it has to do with the program management and the strategic nature in which Deloitte helps them time those projects and the technology that Five9 brings to the table to allow us to eventually take on their entire enterprise, move it over. >> Wow. Dan, thank you so much for sharing all of this great excitement about what you're doing at Five9 and how you're really helping to move the business forward. Stu and I appreciate your time. >> Excellent. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. Great to be here. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)