>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE
covering Enterprise Connect 2019.
Brought to you by Five9.
>> Good afternoon.
Welcome to Orlando, Florida.
TheCUBE is here at Enterprise Connect 2019.
I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman.
Stu and I have been here starting on day two Stu.
Good afternoon.
>> Hey Lisa! Great to see you.
Yeah day two of three Enterprise Connect.
It's not that sunny here in the sunshine state,
but the nice thing about the Gaylord is it's a nice
controlled environment.
Walked by, saw the alligators for a bit.
They've got some nice planting.
I love in the atrium there, there's great branding
of the EC19.
Everybody's taking photos of it.
I saw some drone footage in the keynote this morning
showing some of the setting here.
So it's a nice event.
We said 6,500 in attendance, which is nice.
It's not one of these 20, 30 thousand,
you're just buried by people.
It's a big expo hall, but you can really get
to talk to some people and enjoy the size of this show.
>> Yeah I agree.
The size is great.
It does, no pun intended facilitate that collaboration
and communication you mentioned via number of attendees.
About 140 vendors
and you can hear the noise behind Stu and me
as we're in the expo hall in the booth of Five9.
And lots of conversations going on.
This is an event that I find very interesting Stu
because we talk about the ConTech Center.
We're all consumers everyday and we talked about this
with a lot of our guests yesterday that the customer
experience is absolutely table stakes for an organization.
That it's essential to deliver
an omnichannel customer experience.
Meaning with the consumer wherever they want to be
and also facilitating a connected conversation,
so that if a chat is initiated
and then the consumer goes to social or makes a phone call,
that problem resolution is actually moving forward.
Before we get into today's keynote,
a couple of really interesting things that you and I
learned yesterday with some of the guests that we had on.
When we were talking with Blair Pleasant,
one of the things that she and Five9 uncovered
with some research is that employee satisfaction was lower
on the ratings for a lot of corporate decision makers,
which was surprising from a collab and communications
perspective that if employees,
especially those agents on the front line
are having some challenges,
it's going to be directly relating
to customer lifetime value.
>> Yeah it was a little bit surprising.
You know, if you just think about just IT in general,
often the admin is not the key focus there.
It's I need to get business outcomes.
I need to get ROI,
and what I care about is how is my customer doing.
But at the end of the day,
if you talk about the contact centers.
If I don't have an agent that's engaged,
really how is that conversation
going to go with the customer.
So they need to think about that.
You know, how will the technology help them
do their job better, help them gain mastery faster.
There were some things that I saw really paralleled
to conversations we're having about cloud in general.
Which is, there's lots of technologies out there,
but it's often it's not the technology issue,
it is the organization and the people issue.
In the keynote this morning, there was a big customer panel
and that was definitely something we've heard.
I love one of the customers actually said
"we're going to make all these changes
and they had the 'don't panic' towels,
which of course draws back
to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
So we know that things are going to change.
There might be some things that you need to work through,
but don't worry, we're there to help
and we will get through this
and at the end it should be better.
>> No, I like that you brought that up.
I loved that towel 'don't panic,'
because we were talking yesterday a lot
about the customer experience,
the expectations of this rising empowered consumer,
also the agent experience.
But then of course there's the internal collaboration
that's essential to all of this
and as the gentleman you're referring to was from
Continental AG, talking about
hey, we don't have all the answers
but adoption of these tools internally is critical
but it's also a cultural sort of step wise process.
I thought that was very cool that they actually
were very transparent with their people.
We identified that this is not going to be smooth sailing,
but it's an essential part of our business growth.
>> Yeah I tell you it was really interesting
listening to the panel.
There was one of the companies up there,
they're pretty large,
they said "look, we're going to standardize in a single tool
and everybody's going to get on board"
and I actually bristled a little bit when I heard that
because the engineering group versus the marketing group
versus the contact center.
There's certain things that they need to be able
to collaborate,
but saying like "one tool to rule them all"
sounds a little bit tough out there.
Yes, there needs to be some standardization,
but you know we see that in the cloud world
it turns out that customers are using multiple clouds
out there because there should be
a main one that we focus on,
but if I need a best of breed piece for here
or there's a feature functionality
that I can't get elsewhere, I need to have that.
And we see that at this show.
There's just such a diversity
because as you mentioned there's 140 of them.
There's the people that make device,
there's all these software pieces,
there's some big hubs,
and then there's all the ancillary things
that help plug and enhance and do this.
Because there is some great innovation going on here,
some cool software things
that are helping to take everything from whiteboard
and voice to speech and globalization to the next phase.
>> Yeah that was very interesting,
especially in the Microsoft Teams demo
that Laurie Wright and team did this morning.
The panel though that you talked about,
there were seven customers from a variety of industries.
Hertz was there.
Continental we mentioned.
I think Paychex.
I'm curious to get your thoughts on when they were talking
about their plans to migrate to cloud.
All in.
Some percentage.
Considering the numbers that we heard yesterday,
Stu, in terms of the cloud penetration
for the contact center market.
What were your thoughts there about those
saying all in, depends on what makes sense?
>> Yeah it reminds me of what we were talking about
in the public cloud discussion two years ago.
We know cloud is growing at a very fast pace.
Look at our friends here at Five9.
They're growing at a much faster pace
than the contact center overall.
I believe they're growing somewhere what 25%
as opposed to the industry as a whole
is growing at about 9%.
So we understand that cloud
is growing faster than the market overall.
And what one of the moderators of the panel said
that today is about a third, a third, a third.
On premises, hybrid, and public.
And where that kind of steady state will be,
I think it's still too early to tell in this industry,
just as it is in cloud overall.
But absolutely I bristled a little bit
when it's like "you will never do this one this way,"
well you know never is not something
that we like to say in IT
because you never know when that will be possible.
My background, I worked on virtualization,
started out in test dev and it reached a point
where really there was no technical reason
that it couldn't do it.
When you hear oh the really large companies
will never use cloud for it.
Um really?
Who is better at scaling and updating
and making sure you can manage an environment
than those hyper scale players?
Microsoft's got a big presence here.
You don't ask a Microsoft customer,
oh you're running Office 365, you're living on Azure,
what version of that are you running
and do you have the latest security patch?
As opposed to, if I have a Windows desktop
and I'm not doing.
Oh wait, have I done my patching,
have I done all this stuff?
And you amplify that by thousands of agents
and the contact center.
We know that cloud has certain speed agility
and being able to get new features
and updates in there that I can't do nearly as well
if it is something that I am installing
and having to maintain myself
or with a service organization.
>> Right and so we talked yesterday with a number of guests
about what are some of the imperatives to move to the cloud
on some of the non-obvious ones.
Cost is obviously one that we talk about all the time.
Right, so at any show that we're at.
But also the opportunity for businesses to leverage
the burgeoning power of AI.
Of course every show we go to, AI is a buzz word.
Machine learning and of course the cloud provides
that opportunity for there to be more data
to train the machines to be better
at contact center overall.
And of course internal communications.
>> Right and something that I like to hear at this show is
start talking about API compatibility,
talk about the partnerships that are going on.
It is not one software stack.
We're talking about platforms.
We're talking about how integrations can happen
so that if somebody has a cool new thing that does,
you know a real-time engagement better
than what I have before,
well I can probably plug that in
and it's going to work on my platform.
Everybody here talks about,
well whether you're a Webex in Microsoft Teams,
a Zoom shop,
or you know any of those various environments out there.
Everybody is working across those environments.
We've had some standardization here,
so that whichever one I've chosen,
I'm not locked into one environment
and you know I can help modernize the pieces as I need.
Take advantage of those new innovations when they come.
>> Absolutely.
Alright so Stu, you're a man on the street last night.
Tell us some of the interesting things that you heard
and some of the folks that you met after we wrapped.
>> Yeah it's interesting.
I think we talked about it in our open yesterday.
There are a number of companies that have been around
for a while and what are they doing today?
What is their focus?
And a couple of companies have done rebranding,
so the big party, there was a line
and I managed to get myself in is Poly.
So Poly has rebranded,
of course it was PolyCom and Plantronics coming together.
How many times did we it hear it in the keynote stage
that they mentioned that?
Everywhere you go their branding is there.
So look, kudos to their branding and messaging team.
We're going to have their CEO on the program tomorrow.
But you know, the CEO talked about their new logo.
It's like, the meaning behind it, of course poly means many,
but there's three P's and if you look at it,
it looks like the iconic conference phone,
so you know the room was in there.
Everybody was enjoying the appetizers and the open bar,
but people know PolyCom.
Heck in our conference room
we've got one of those speaker phones in there.
In the 90's I used to sell their conference phones
and their video conferencing
when I worked for what's now Avaya,
but was Lucen at the time.
There's a lot of intersections.
The other thing I've really found,
it feels like everybody here at one point in their career
either worked for Cisco or worked for the Lucen family.
Of course AT&T back in the day had the whole telecomm space.
It is like many other shows that we go to.
A rather interconnected community here and we guess on it.
It's like, Sysco, Skype, and now at Five9.
It is friendly.
You don't see some of the, some places we go,
there's bitter rivalries between key competitors.
And yeah while all the contact centers don't love
that their brothers and sisters at the competitor there.
Chances are they've worked with half the people there.
You know sometime in the future
will be working with them again.
It's a good atmosphere.
The people I've talked to really enjoy coming to this show
as we said at the top.
>> And this show has evolved over the last.
What were we talking about yesterday?
28, 29 years starting out as being called PBX
and then rebranding to Voice Con
and then about 2011 to Enterprise Connect.
It's interesting because the word innovation comes up
all the time, as does evolution of communications
and collaborations but when the keynote was kicked off
this morning they talked about this is
the biggest ever Enterprise Connect that they've had.
You can feel and you can hear it behind us,
the momentum, the excitement.
You talked about that there's a lot of comradery here.
There's a lot of 2 degrees of separation in tech.
But the opportunities for every business
whether you're selling a small product and service
on the Amazon Marketplace or you're a big global enterprise,
the opportunity to connect and deliver
a superior competitive advantage
to your customer experience,
that's table stakes these days.
If you don't have that opportunity, those capabilities
there's going to be somebody to come
and replace you in a heartbeat.
>> Absolutely.
Lisa, I have backgrounds in this space
but there were places where I walked around
and said "wow, there's applicability for our business."
We use a number of the collaboration suites.
I've got apps for not just the Google suite,
but all the collaboration tools
and there's technology that I'm like
oh gee, I want to understand that.
A lot of them are download an app,
you can start using them for free
and then there's a freemium model,
and others are more enterprise licenses.
And it's been interesting to watch some of that dynamic
as to you know the pricing is more built
for the mobile and cloud world than the traditional,
you know I'm going to buy boxes
and have a huge capital expense up front.
>> So what do you think if you look back to your early days
in the call center where you were just a young pup,
how much easier would your job had been
if you'd had some of the capabilities
that we're talking about now?
>> Oh Lisa, I wish.
Back in the 90's, if I'd just had LinkedIn alone
I could have supercharged so much of what I did.
But all these other tools,
putting at my fingertips information,
it was like, you know Lisa.
I date myself, in the 90's taking a call
where everybody that worked in the call center
you knew the area code of every single environment.
It didn't tell you where it was.
You would be like
oh yeah, 212 hi ya New York, how you doing?
Whether you're saying good morning or good afternoon
based on what part, oh wait, I'm talking to Arizona
they don't follow daylight saving time.
We'd remember all that stuff.
Today there's too many exchanges.
Everybody takes their phone numbers wherever they go.
So it was a smaller country back then.
But on the other hand the technology is actually going to
give us the opportunity to be able to imbue that
and allow humans to focus on the empathy and connectedness
that today's digital age
sometimes tries to tear away from us.
>> Exactly we need that empathy and that connectedness.
So Stu we have a great program today.
Stick around, we've got some folks from Selligent
and we've got Service Now on the program.
Ribbon communications, Fuse, Triviex, Five9 of course
and Verin.
>> And Zoom.
>> And Zoom this afternoon.
Yes, thank you.
At five o'clock.
For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE.
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