so moving on here you know one thing that's dawned on me uh for all these cloud strategy summits i think this is our sixth one we've never really talked about our capabilities in communications and i feel like that's a big gap in the the presentations we've put together because part of our legacy is is deeply uh in in communications and we have continued to grow our capabilities uh with communications enterprise communications ucas contact center and so on uh in the cloud and we've brought matt campbell on as our key subject matter expert really he's both
the product manager and solution engineer on the communication side of our business he leads our communications center of excellence our organization is broken we have several uh centers of excellence which is cross-departmental focus areas communications is one of them cloud is one obviously resiliency is another and uh matt's that's the lead there and he brings just a year's decades of experience here in this space in in both uh government and security level and also enterprise level communications and i'm really excited to have him on board matt thank you so much for joining and uh really
looking forward to your conversation thanks chris appreciate it all right so talk a little bit about cloud communications uh not completely new concept but in the grand scheme of things definitely new uh telephone systems traditionally have been on premise in uh in invokes data centers the phones on people's desks have traditionally been wired to a pbx system that sits you know in that in the corporate infrastructure and the the advent of broadband internet connections available all over the world in people's homes has really changed things and chris if you could advance the next slide please
and covid has changed things dramatically so i mean just a couple years ago we probably all went to an office we probably all sat at a cubicle or a desk or something of that nature had a phone probably provided by the company on the desk and we probably went into a meeting room and had meetings in person obviously covet hit we all kind of went into this work from home world that a few were in but not many and now it's kind of represents the norm so in order to be able to communicate have those
meetings have those conversations with our co-workers naturally from all over the world we're now heavily reliant on our unified collaboration solutions to be able to provide the telephone the the video meetings that we're doing right now chat document sharing all that thing all that type of stuff right so we had to rapidly adopt when covet hit and there has been a big change as far as how companies are going about providing these services and having employees interact with each other uh from where from wherever they might be and and also in contact centers are call
centers call centers were traditionally a bunch of people sitting in a room answering calls that they came in solving people's problems customer service help desk sales you name it and now all of a sudden you know these these contact centers are closed and the agents how do they how do they get into this system from from their home enter cloud and at all is possible chris next slide please so we've killed we've heard a lot from our customers and i've done a bunch of research uh as far as you know what the what the market's
looking for and you know when it comes to legacy on premise systems we've heard a lot of customers say well it's difficult for us to manage and to administer licenses and resources to to patch it and maintain it is cumbersome it's expensive uh when a business is expand to new locations it can be slow and expensive to you know incorporate them into the system and we've heard customers saying you know we'd like to have our system integrated better into our crm for instance like salesforce.com or something of that nature other backend databases uh and um
a lot of not so much with unified collaboration but more context and there's a lot of data uh that can be used to help the business develop better insight into how they're doing business how their customers are interacting with them such as things of that nature traditional systems you know maybe could collect the data but then what do you do with it you take a lot of time and resources to to analyze it and uh we've also heard customers saying you know when there's an internet outage power outage our system's down so with an on-premise
system legacy system unless you had redundant circuits redundant power rental locations which some do but not all that might have been an issue so cloud helps solve all these issues next slide please market trends clearly trending in the direction of cloud-based communications 82 of the businesses have moved to or planned to move to the cloud uh by 2024 which is quickly approaching 74 percent of all unified collab communications licenses will be cloud-based this is all data collected by gartner and enforce to research and others of that nature so clearly just showing that you know again
well rapid shift happening here in in the way we go about purchasing these things all right so uh on the left we have your benefits to businesses on the right we have benefits to customers and that kind of breaks down into um businesses being the unified collaboration suite of products and the customers being kind of called more so the contact center suite of products so for businesses the remote the mobility remote connectivity work from home is a huge benefit from the point experience perspective right like i mentioned before simplicity ease of use it's easier to
administer and maintain for companies a lot of times that's outsourced the backend operational stuff is outsourced to the cloud provider or perhaps in the support realm to a company such as intervision because that's something that we will do for our customers as well financial flexibility so reduced cost of ownership reduced operating expenses it's a it's a monthly bill to utility bill versus a large upfront capital expense like it would traditionally be consumed by a on-premise system uh legacy systems traditionally involve complex pricing and upfront costs smaller organizations might have difficulty swallowing that pill and and
now in a cloud-based model uh that all becomes much easier much more attainable scale and agility so that's a big one you can scale you can grow up or down quickly and easily without having to add hardware new circuits vpn connections to people's houses things of that nature and uh it's always being updated it's always being patched it's always introduced being introduced with new features by the cloud provider because that's the nature of how cloud works right so so those are all advantages of the business now on the customer side um the contact centers that
are cloud-based again you know like i said before agents can now be anywhere in the world and work for that contact center so contact centers have the ability to hire from a more diverse pool of of resources doesn't necessarily have to be local to where that that business is based [Music] the ai the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities of contact center a cloud-based contact center is is huge as far as providing better customer experience we'll get into that in a minute uh communicate on their preferred platform so that that kind of refers to the
fact that what we call omni-channel communication so in a contact center a call center is basically just that people call in on their phone right contact center is that plus uh a bunch of other ways to to reach into that business whether it be email sms live web chat social media platforms all integrated or funneled into the contact center where an agent might just be responding to a customer uh via phone call one moment and via a email or a text message or chatting with them live the next so flexibility and the customer gets to
choose how they want to reach and reach into it reach out to a company and communicate with them which is which is nice um respond faster so again you can have agents all around the world in that contact center so different time zones things of that nature of the benefit and better insights is all about analytics and all the data that you can consume from a customer interaction and how you can use that to improve your business process next cloud please next slide please all right so let's talk a little bit about what innervision provides
in the cloud communications space these are our main partnerships uh cisco has been around since we got into this space back in probably 2008 or so uh so we've been we've been leveraging cisco's call center and unified collaboration solutions for years and years and years and we we host that primarily in our own data centers so it's kind of a private cloud scenario and then our newest partnerships in the past year are with aws with their amazon connect contact center solution with 8x8 who provides both unified collaboration and contact center services and then the att
partner exchange is something we've had around for a while as well and that's really comes down to data circuits and uh and telephone lines slip trunking things of that nature all right chris if you could go to the next slide please a little bit more detail on those that i just mentioned here so here's uh the different buckets i'll call it of services so unified collaboration on the left we have uh managed eight by eight when i say manage it means eight by eight provides the core services in their cloud infrastructure and innervision manages that
supports that implements that uh to our customers right so it's not the 8x8 of yesteryear where you go direct to 8x8 this is us reselling it adding our value our managed services on top of it again we have our cisco solution uh also noteworthy that cisco's cloud calling solution webex calling is something new to us as well we're still in the process of rolling that out but it is available and something worthy of talking about as well contact center amazon connect that's a big one we'll talk about that in a moment managed eight by eight
contact center and cisco webex contact center and then again the the managed carrier services is via our at t partner exchange uh partnership and that includes sip trunking which should be telephone lines and various types of land and land circuits wireless broadband fiber metro ethernet mp elastics things of that nature next slide please all right so what is what does enervision provide on top of these cloud services so we provide fully managed solutions uh basically we take the cloud providers for service and we augment that with our value add and the primary one here would
be our manage support services so we have a 24 7 help desk we have the ability to monitor and alert when something might happen with that platform and proactively let our customers know hey you know we see an issue here and we're on top of it we're handling it for you or you know maybe there's something that you need to do so there's that user administration macds moves ads and changes a lot of companies you know don't want to deal with that kind of stuff anymore they don't want to deal with changing a password or
deleting or adding a new user so we can do that for you change management and vendor escalation being a big one so a lot of companies do not want to have to deal with the vn vendor uh maybe in a lot of situations they cannot then they have to be a partner to to deal with them so we'll do that that portion as well aside from the managed support uh we will do your monthly billing so if you consume multiple services from from intervision you have the benefit of getting one bill from one provider each
month as opposed to multiple bills from multiple providers you've got one place to go for customer service and account management and then we have a whole plethora of professional services skilled certified trained cloud communications specialists that can help with system design development migration implementation changing the environment adding on to it you name it so and also we do with some of our services offer the flexibility of you can self-service it yourself or you can have us fully manage it or maybe a combination of the two with eight by eight and with amazon connect uh their
administration panel is available for our customers to log into and and poke around and make changes if they desire uh or just have us do it if you don't mind switching to the next slide chris all right so let's talk a bit about amazon connect next slide please all right so what is amazon connect amazon connect is aws is a contact center solution it's something that amazon built from the ground up internally for their own internal use for their retail website amazon.com customer service department they built it many years ago because they couldn't find a
solution that worked for their needs they were obviously very big and had a lot of requirements but they built it and then they decided you know what we're gonna we're gonna sell this to our customers so they they commercialized it a few years ago now it's available to customers worldwide uh and so what makes it different well obviously it's cloud-based so um there's all the flexibility that i mentioned before but one of the biggest things that amazon offers is is there uh artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities so if you think about amazon alexa right
amazon alexa or your google assistant uh or your siri obviously amazon's got a pretty good handle on that technology and so they've integrated that technology into the contact center in the form of virtual agents and chat bots that are able to communicate with interact with customers recognize their voice and both respond back in text and voice formats uh without necessarily needing to involve a live live human being so you might be thinking well i don't really want to talk to a robot i want to talk to a person well that option is there too of
course but in some a lot of instances customers might only need to check a balance on an account or pay a bill or get some information that might be easily done without a human being involved and the natural language recognition capabilities of amazon connect uh are above and beyond that of what traditional contact centers have been able to do in the past so so that's a big benefit it also uh saves contact center operators money by not needing to staff a contact center with as many agents right so maybe they don't need to hire or
staff as many people at once as they used to because the the ia technology can offset a bunch of the the requests that might be coming in uh the voice recognition also has the ability to provide sentiment analysis of a call this is kind of cool so if a customer is calling in and talking to an agent and they're getting a bit heated they're getting a bit angry the the system can be analyzing that in real time in the back end and say hey mr contact center manager we've got an angry customer here and the
agent might not be maybe isn't handling it that well so they can get in there and try to solve the problem before it gets too out of control but it also is able to recommend in real time to the agent maybe some suggested answers to their problems based on what they're asking for or maybe provide links to knowledge articles or things like that so it helps the agent respond to the customer by having the computer system listening in on what the customer's saying and saying hey we think this could help that could help so interesting
interesting little uh aspect there as well uh another huge aspect is the scalability right so and then just to back up for a second i mean small businesses and large businesses have the ability to to kind of consume that that technology whereas in the past you'd have to be a pretty big organization to afford that kind of technology right now this is available to smaller business as well on the scalability side of things small businesses big businesses are like all can uh can use this if a business is growing if a business has uh needs
that kind of ebb and flow with the season for instance it's holiday shopping season right now right so a lot of companies need to hire a whole lot more staff and ramp up their contact center for a month or two and then come january they don't they they scale it down and if there's licenses involved with a traditional system that can be that could mean you have to buy more licenses than you generally need in a given period of time for a year or several years uh here it's a it's a usage-based pricing system so
you use it more this month unless the next month your bill uh is based on your usage so that's that's unique most uh most systems out there are based on the seat or the number of agents that are are working in a contact center and then uh there's the real-time analytics again as i kind of just mentioned before there's a ton of data that's generated by a contact center and having what to do with that data how to use it to your advantage as a business is is something that this system helps with because of
again the ai and the ml capabilities reliability so it's based on aws is global infrastructure it's redundant it's all over the world there's you know no patching down time for patching and updates again just like most cloud cloud services again as i mentioned before anywhere and everywhere so you can have agents around the world different time zones different states at home in the office all working seamlessly together as if they were all in the same room again usage price usage-based pricing i should mention that the monthly pricing for amazon connect includes your telco or psd
in charge that's your phone bill right so a traditional system you'd have your system you'd have your network that it rides on uh and you'd also have your phone bill from your att your verizon centurylink whoever so this includes that right so this is all kind of bundled together i guess making it simpler next next slide please sorry about that matt oh good all right so these these are um these are stats published by amazon uh just to kind of emphasize you know reduce call volume as i talked about before you can offload a lot
of the actual live call volume to the automated chat bots virtual agents things of that self-service capabilities uh shortened handle time reduce training so it's a simpler system to use so training your staff a new new staff member that might be on coming into a contact center um reduce the amount of time it takes for them to get up to speed and start working start start generating money for the company reduced system administration effort right again amazon's handling all that back-end infrastructure for you intervision is handling the support for you so there's much less to
do in-house and um again the license and the usage costs is reduced due to the uh the consumption-based pricing model all right if you can move on next slide chris so um aws is providing you with basically the infrastructure in the building blocks but who puts it together well that's where we come in right so we have the expertise we have the the cloud communications uh certified folks that can come in and take those building blocks that amazon provides put them together into a custom solution that's right for your business so that might involve just
the simple contact center but it also might involve tying it into your crm into various backend databases that you have into whatever we have the in-house capabilities of doing that lots of experience doing that as well um we have again 24 7 operations center we're in the united states we're also in india so around the clock where theirs is to support you not to say that amazon doesn't have 24 7 support either but amazon's support if you opt to use that is basically providing platform surpri support or break fix support but they're not going to
do your your user password resets and add users remove users make tweaks and changes to the code of the system but but we can and we will and then of course aws is providing you know that infrastructure as they do so well all right chris if you can move on to the next one please all right so i've kind of touched on these things already it's a little bit redundant but again you know we have the ability to provide migration services we have a ton of experience migrating customers from one system to another so take
your cisco system your via system whatever it is you might have now move it to amazon connect we've got the in-house expertise to evaluate your old system understand how it works take that translate it over to the new system uh and and do so in a systematic way so that you know there's not any downtime and uh everything is seamless as far as the customer's viewpoint goes next slide chris all right now let's talk about eight by eight so eight by eight for the last ten years in a row has been a magic quadrant leader
for ucas which is unified communications as a service and for the last seven years in a row they've been a challenger in them in the gardner magic quadrant for ccaps which is contact center and service so next slide chris one of the big advantages to eight by eight is that it provides both ucas or unified collaboration and contact center in one platform right so amazon connect is just contact center there's no there's no business phone system no pbx uh involved with that uh while they do offer um online meetings and chat and via their chime
application it's not the same platform it's a different one so different apps so so 8 really shines in the unified collaboration space and the fact that you can have your contact center and you can and your unified collaboration all together in one spot they are very big they've been around for a long time uh 20 or so years and they've got a footprint all over the world and i think it's 16 different oh yeah it says right there 16 different data centers around the world they've got some patents around their their voice encoding technology for
quality you can get phone numbers in a whole bunch of different countries if you've got international presence which is great as well so again what does this include so you've got your meetings just like we're doing now you're similar to webex you've got your chat you've got your telephone system you've got facts you've got sms for business all in in the unified collaboration side and then you've got your contact center piece if you have an operator call center all all together all right chris if you don't mind go next slide please again kind of just
showing that you've got both the contact center which would be the customer experience side of things and the phone system or unified collaboration side which should be employee experience i think all kind of integrated together and you know on the topic of analytics and ai and integrations as i was going into with amazon connect they have uh the same capabilities not to the extent maybe that amazon does but they they definitely do have those capabilities as well and they definitely have a ton of integrations with different third-party uh crm applications and help desk applications and
various things of that nature as well next slide chris all right so one of the the big value adds to us if for eight by eight is their integration and their partnership with microsoft so we see a ton of our customers asking about wanting to use ms teams as their collaboration platform a lot a bunch of people are using it by default ms teams does not include voice capabilities for calling outbound outside the company you might be able to call a another employee within the organization but to call a phone number or to have someone
call you on your phone number that's not something that's natively included the microsoft does include that or does offer that but the feature set that microsoft provides is not nearly as robust as what 8x8 provides on the on the voice side of things and it's a little bit more expensive as well so so apa when you integrate it into your microsoft teams environment you don't necessarily need to use the 8x8 app you can if you'd like to you could just use the microsoft teams native app and use the calling feature within either the the desktop
or mobile app and you don't really even know that 8x8 necessarily is involved it just integrates seamlessly into the msteams app provides you with your calling your voicemail sms texting faxing all within teams again those features are not natively included without uh buying extra packages through microsoft which can be a little bit uh confusing cumbersome and more expensive and less feature-rich than what api 8 can provide so if you're an opera ms teams user out there and you're looking for adding voice capabilities pbx capabilities into it or even contact center capabilities into it uh then
eight by eight might be a good choice for you the contact center component of it integrating with ms teams is fairly unique to them a whole lot of other folks out there doing that next slide chris okay so as i mentioned before you know with the on the one of the first slides uh intervisions manage support manage managed services uh provides a bunch of different value so here you know we're doing in the sales process we're able to do solution demos and proof of concepts for our customers you know try before you buy type of
situation we're designing it we're implementing it through our professional services we're providing you with your monthly bill which includes again your phone your phone bill so your phone bill and your and your um and your system are all combined together in one license fee customer service account management support vendor escalation all of our support professional services and uh solutions architects are certified by 8x8 to sell it so we've got 20 something folks certified by 8x8 at this point next slide chris all right and right now we happen to be running a um a no cost
proof of concept offer for amazon connect uh we can also do something similar but to a lesser scale for eight by eight should note but if you're interested in trying you know these solutions out seeing how they work testing it kicking the tires so to speak let us know because this promotion is not forever but we basically are providing you with uh the professional services free of charge up to a certain i think it's 40 or 50 hours or something like that if i recall correctly uh so please take advantage of this let us know
if you want to try one of these solutions out let us show you what the advantages are the benefits i definitely think that trying it will show you uh just how great it can be compared to whatever solution you might be using now that would be on premise or legacy based and with that i'm going to hand it back over to chris appreciate the time thanks everyone if you have any questions please let me know absolutely thank you so much matt and again i'm so glad to finally get some of our communication capabilities out here
at cloud strategy summit and i wanted to highlight this poc is just an example right we talked a lot about you know often it's like what's the first step need to look like and this is just one example of the many pocs that we have outside out there we have workshops we have uh consulting engagement several ways to get things rolling that again don't have to be massive undertakings right let us kind of demonstrate our capabilities let us prove out the total cost of ownership and how you might be able to save money or improve
your experience another big thing you know that was a big takeaway from matt's conversation just now is that you know really we're hearing more and more that customer experience and employee experience is a key differentiator and one of the ways that you know as technology leaders that we can influence that is really communication platforms right how easy is it for your customers to get a hold of you how easy is it for them to engage with you how easy is it for your employees to collaborate i know that's just a small piece but it's another
example of you know how the cloud is empowering organizations really to drive those those business outcomes
