(funk music) (funk music) (funk music) (funk music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every enterprise is responding to the opportunities of cloud with significant changes in people, process, how they think about technology, how they're going to align technology overall with their business and with their business strategies. Now those changes are affecting virtually every aspect of business but especially every aspect of technology. Especially security. So what does it mean to envision a world in which significant new classes of services are being provided through cloud mechanisms and modes, but you retain and in fact, even enhance the quality of security that your enterprise can utilize. To have that conversation, we're joined today by a great guest, Amit Sinha is president and CTO at Zscaler. Amit, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So before we get into it, what's new at Zscaler? >> Well, at Zscaler our mission is to make the internet and cloud a secure place for businesses and as I engage with our global 2000 customers and prospects, they are going through some of the digital transformation challenges that you just alluded to. Specifically for security, what is happening is that they had a lot of applications that were sitting in a data center or in their headquarters and that center of gravity is now moving to the cloud. They probably adopt their Office 365, and Box, and Salesforce, and these applications have moved out. Now in addition, the users are everywhere. They're accessing those services, not just from offices but also from their mobile devices and home. So if your users have left the building, and your applications are no longer sitting in your data center, that begs that question: Where should the security stack be? You know, it cannot be your legacy security appliances that sat in your DMZ and your IT closets. So that's the challenge that we see out there, and Zscaler is helping these large global organizations transform their security and network for a more mobile and a cloud-first world. >> Distributed world? So let me make sure I got this right. So basically, cause I think I totally agree with you >> Right. >> Just to test it, that many regarded the cloud as a centralization strategy. >> Correct. >> What we really see happening, is we're seeing enterprises more distribute their data, more distribute their processing, but they have not updated how they think about security so the presumption is, "yeah we're going to put more processing data out closer to the action but we're going to backhaul a whole bunch back to our security model," and what I hear you saying is no, you need to push those security services out to where the data is, out to where the process, out to where the user is. Have I got that right? >> You have nailed it, right. Think of it this way, if I'm a large global 2000 organization, I might have thousands of branches. All of those branches, traditionally, have used a hub-and-spoke network model. I might have a branch here in Palo Alto but my headquarters is in New York. So now I have an MPLS circuit connecting this branch to New York. If my Exchange server and applications and SAP systems are all there, then that hub-and-spoke model made sense. I am in this office >> Right. >> I connect to those applications and all my security stack is also there. But fast forward to today, all of those applications are moving and they're not just in one cloud. You know, you might have adopted Salesforce.com for CRM, you might have adopted Workday, you might have adopted Office 365. So these are SaaS services. Now if I'm sitting here in Palo Alto, and if I have to access my email, it makes absolutely no sense for me to VPN back to New York only to exit to the internet right there. What users want is a fast, nimble user experience without security coming in the way. What organizations want is no compromise in their security stack. So what you really need is a security stack that follows the user wherever they are. >> And the data. >> And the data, so my data...you know Microsoft has a front-door service here in Redwood City and if if you are a user here and trying to access that, I should be able to go straight with my entire security stack right next to it. That's what Gartner is calling SASE these days. >> Well, let's get into that in a second. It almost sounds as though what you're suggesting is that the enterprise needs to look at security as a SaaS service itself. >> 100 percent. If your users are everywhere and if your applications are in the cloud, your security better be delivered as a consistent "as-a-service," right next to where the users are and hopefully co-located in the same data center as where the applications are present so the only way to have a pervasive security model is to have it delivered in the cloud, which is what Zscaler has been doing from day one. >> Now, a little spoiler alert for everybody, Zscaler's been talking about this for 10-plus years. >> Right. >> So where are we today in the market place starting to recognize and acknowledge this transformation in the basic security architecture and platform that we're going through? >> I'm very excited to see that the market is really adopting what Zscaler has been talking about for over a decade. In fact, recently, Gartner released a paper titled "SASE," it stands for Secure Access Service Edge and there are, I believe, four principal tenets of SASE. The first one, of course, is that compute and security services have to be right at the edge. And we talked about that. It makes sense. >> For where the service is being delivered. >> You can't backhaul traffic to your data center or you can't backhaul traffic to Google's central data center somewhere. You need to have compute capabilities with things like SSL Interception and all the security services running right at the edge, connecting users to applications in the shortest path, right? So that's sort of principle number one of SASE. The second principle that Gartner talks about, which again you know, has been fundamental to Zscaler's DNA, is to keep your devices and your branch offices light. Don't shove too much complexity from a security perspective on the user devices and your branches. Keep it simple. >> Or the people running those user devices >> Absolutely >> in the branches >> Yeah, so you know, keep your branch offices like a light router, that forwards traffic to the cloud, where the heavy-lifting is done. >> Right. >> The third principle they talk about is to deliver modern security, you need to have a proxy-based architecture and essentially what a proxy architecture allows you to do is to look at content, right? Gone are the days where you could just say, stop a website called "evil.com" and allow a website "good.com," right? It's not like that anymore. You have to look at content, you know. You might get malware from a Google Drive link. You can't block Google now, right? So looking at SSL-encrypted content is needed and firewalls just can't do it. You have to have a proxy architecture that can decrypt SSL connections, look at content, provide malware services, provide policy-based access control services, et cetera and that's kind of the third principle. And finally what Gartner talks about is SASE has to be cloud-native, it has to be, sort of, born and bred in the cloud, a true multitenant, cloud-first architecture. You can't take, sort of, legacy security appliances and shove it in third-party infrastructure like AWS and GCP and deliver a cloud service and the example I use often is, just because you had a great blu-ray player or a DVD player in your home theater, you can't take 100,000 of these and shove it into AWS and become a Netflix. You really need to build that service from the ground up. You know, in a multitenant fashion and that's what we have done for security as a service through the cloud. >> So we are now, the market seems to be kind of converging on some of the principles that Zscaler's been talking about for quite some time. >> Right. >> When we think about 2020, how do you anticipate enterprises are going to respond as a consequence of this convergence in acknowledging that the value proposition and the need are starting to come together? >> Absolutely, I think we see the momentum picking up in the market, we have lots of conversations with CIO's who are going through this digital transformation journey, you know transformation is hard. There's immune response in big organizations >> Sure. >> To change. Not much has changed from a security and network architecture perspective in the last two decades. But we're seeing more and more of that. In fact, over 400 of global 2000 organizations are 100 percent deployed on Zscaler. And so that momentum is picking up and we see a lot of traction with other prospects who are beginning to see the light, as we say it. >> Well as you start to imagine the relationship between security and data, between security and data, one of the things that I find interesting is many respects to cloud, especially as it becomes more distributed, is becoming better acknowledged almost as a network of services. >> Right. >> As opposed to AWS as a data center here and that makes it a cloud data center. >> Right. >> It really is this network of services, which can happen from a lot of different places, big cloud service providers, your own enterprise, partners providing services to you. How does the relationship between Zscaler and kind of an openness >> Hm-mm. >> Going to come together? Hm-mm. >> So that you can provide services from a foreign enterprise to the enterprise's partners, customers, and others that the enterprise needs to work with. >> That's a great question, Peter and I think one of the most important things I tell our customers and prospects is that if you look at a cloud-delivered security architecture, it better embrace some of the SASE principles. One of the first things we did when we built the Zscaler platform was to distribute it across 150 data centers. And why did we do that? We did that because when a user is going to destinations, they need to be able to access any destination. The destination could be on Azure, could be on AWS, could be Salesforce, so by definition, it has to be carrier-neutral, it has to be cloud-neutral. I can't build a service that is designed for all internet traffic in a GCP or AWS, right. So how did we do that? We went and looked at one of the world's best co-location facilities that provide maximum connectivity options in any given region. So in North America, we might be in an Equinix facility and we might use tier one ISPs like GTT and Zayo that provide excellent connectivity to our customers and the destinations they want to visit. When you go to China, there's no GCP there, right so we work with China Unicom and China Telecom. When we are in India, we might work with an Airtel or a Sify, when we are in Australia, we might be working with Telstra. So we work with, you know, world class tier one ISPs in best data centers that provide maximum connectivity options. We invested heavily in internet exchange connectivity. Why? Because once you come to Zscaler, you've solved the physics problem by building the data center close to you, the next thing is, you want quickly go to your application. You don't want security to be in the way >> Right. >> Of application access. So with internet exchange connectivity, we are peered in a settlement-free way or BGP with Microsoft, with Akamai, with Apple, with Yahoo, right. So we can quickly get you to the content while delivering the full security stack, right? So we had to really take no shortcuts, back to your point of the world is very diverse and you cannot operate in a walled garden of one provider anymore and if you really build a cloud platform that is embracing some of the SASE principles we talked about, you have to do it the hard way. By building this one data center at a time. >> Well, you don't want your servicers to fall down because you didn't put the partnerships in place >and hardend them Correct. >> As much as you've hardened some of the other traffic. So as we think about kind of, where this goes, what do you envision Zscaler's, kind of big customer story is going to be in 2020 and beyond? Obviously, the service is going to be everywhere, change the way you think about security, but how, for example, is the relationship between the definition of the edge and the definition of the secure service going to co-evolve? Are people going to think about the edge differently as they start to think more in terms of a secure edge or where the data resides and the secure data, what do you think? >> Let's start off with five years and go back, right? >> We're going forward. >> Work our way back. Well, five years from now, hopefully everyone is on a 5G phone, you know, with blazing-fast internet connections, on devices that you love, your applications are everywhere, so now think of it from an IT perspective. You know, my span of control is becoming thinner and thinner, right? my users are on devices that I barely control. My network is the internet that I really don't control. My applications have moved to the cloud or either hosted in third-party infrastructure or run as a SaaS application, which I really don't control. Now, in this world, how do I provide security? How do I provide user experience? Imagine if you are the CIO and your job is to make all of this work, where will you start, right? So those are some of the big problems that we are helping our customers with. So this-- >> Let me as you a question 'cause here's where I was going with the question. I would start with, if I can't control all these things, I'm going to apply my notion of security >> Hm-mm. >> And say I am going to control that which is within >> Right. >> my security boundaries, not at a perimeter level, not at a device level, but at a service level. >> Absolutely and that's really the crux of the Zscaler platform service. We build this Zero Trust architecture. Our goal is to allow users to quickly come to Zscaler and Zscaler becomes the policy engine that is securely connecting them to all the cloud services that they want to go to. Now in addition, we also allow the same users to connect to internal applications that might have required a traditional VPN. Now think of it this way, Peter. When you connect to Google today, do you VPN to Google's network? To access Gmail? No. Why should you have to VPN to access an internal application? I mean, you get a link on your mobile phone, you click on it and it didn't work because it required a separate form of network access. So with Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access, we are delivering a beautiful service that works across 150 data centers. Users connect to the service and the service becomes a policy engine that is securely connecting you to the destinations that you want. Now, in addition, you asked about what's going to happen in a couple of years. The same service can be extended for partners. I'm a business, I have hundreds of partners who want to connect to me. Why should I allow legacy VPN access or private circuits that expose me? I don't even know who's on the other end of the line, right? They come onto my network and you hear about the Target breaches because some HVAC contract that had unrestricted access, you hear about the Airbus breach because another contract that had access. So how do we build a true Zero Trust cloud platform that is securely allowing users, whether it's your employees, to connect to named applications that they should, or your partners that need access to certain applications, without putting them on the network. We're decoupling application access from network access. And there's one final important linchpin in this whole thing. Remember we talked about how powerless organizations >> Right. >> feel in this distributed model? Now imagine, your job is to also ensure that people are having a good user experience. How will you do that, right? What Zscaler is trying to do now is, we've been very successful in providing the secure and policy-based connectivity and our customers are asking us, hey, you're sitting in between all of this, you have visibility into what's happening on the user's device. Clearly you're sitting in the middle in the cloud and you see what's happening on the left-hand side, what's happening on the right-hand side. You know, you have the cloud effect, you can see there's a problem going on with Microsoft's network in the China region, right? Correlate all of that information and give me proactive intelligence around user experience and that's what we launched recently at Zenith Live. We call it Zscaler Digital Experience, >> Hmm. >> So overall the goal of the platform is to securely connect users and entities to named applications with Zero Trust principles. We never want security and user experience to be orthogonal requirements that has traditionally been the case. And we want to provide great user experience and visibility to our customers who've started adopting this platform. >> That's a great story. It's a great story. So, once again, I want to thank you very much for coming in and that's Amit Sinha, who is the president and CTO at Zscaler, focusing a lot on the R&D types of things that Zscaler's doing. Thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> It's my pleasure, Peter. Always enjoy talking to you. >> And thanks for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (funk music) (funk music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering Boomi World 19. Brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome back, everyone, we are here live at Boomi World 2019. It's theCUBE's coverage here for two days. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Lisa Martin who stepped away, she'll be back. Les Rechan, President and CEO of Solace, is back on theCUBE. Cube alumni was with us in 2013. Les, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. You know we're on our 10th year of theCUBE, so it's 10 years we've been in business. You're early on with us, thanks for coming back. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you're an entrepreneur, you're on board, you're doing some investing. You see many ways of innovation. We are in one now that's really got a lot of waves coming together, convergence of multiple things happening. You're in the middle of it as the CEO. What's going on, what's your view? What's happened in the marketplace and what're you doing? >> Oh, I think, I agree this is early days. We've got this, everything's transforming, customers are re-imagining their businesses to be innovators, to move the world forward. And along with that, to enable it, we're dealing with a whole new IT infrastructure: hybrid cloud, multicloud, distributed microservices, IoT, real-time, so it's early days of that, and so we're in the business of helping those innovators move the world forward with smart data movements, so we're very excited about it. >> I want to get into your company that you're leading now and some other endeavors you're onto, but I want to get your take on how you see the market and how you talk to customers and friends and people in the industry. What's the biggest story going on in your mind right now? What's the top-line, high-order bit, trend or element or enabler, disruptive enabler. That's really powering the industry right now that's changing it for the better and creating opportunities. What's the big story in your mind? >> Well, time and data are the currency, and when you think about dealing with customers, you're listening to them, you're personalizing your engaging, and this is all about what I would call the event-driven customer journey experience. Business is a series of events. You want to get those events moving and flowing and really, when you think about it, that can be competitively advantaged for your business. >> You know it's interesting we had the folks on from Boomi here. I use the bloodstream as an example, but data movement is how the business we're in. We live in a digital world and it's combining. It's not mutually exclusive with the analog world. And you have, now, the coming together of a digitized society where things are instrumentable. You can actually get the data. And then you got to know what to look for. So, now, the challenge is with data become a big... This is a big, hard problem people try to crack the code on. Is there a formula in your mind to be truly data-driven or data-enabled or data-fed, leveraging the data? Do you see a playbook that companies can adopt to do that? >> Yeah, I think that companies are sitting on top of a lot of data. The key is to liberate it, to get it moving, but within your enterprise and then out to your partners and the customer world, so I think that you really want to just take advantage of it, you want to move it to where it needs to be, you want to augment the intelligence of the people within the enterprise and your customer set, so I talk about an event mesh, we call it. An event mesh enables the intelligent enterprise to deliver value. >> It's a nice concept, it's like connective tissue, or glue layers as a tech term-- >> Les: Digital river, central nervous system, whatever you want to call it. >> Great stuff, talk about the market you're going after. What's the market you're targeting? What's the size of it? What are you going after, what's the territory you guys are trying to take down? >> So, traditionally, we came out of what used to be called messaging-oriented middleware. So we're a messaging system. Now the term would be we're an advanced event broker. This thing used to be a couple-billion-dollar market now when you think about this hybrid multicloud, IoT. This thing has probably exploded by a factor of 10 or more. >> It's interesting RPA seems to be taking hot evaluations these days. Is that the same kind of thing, RPA and automation? They seemed like-- >> I think RPA, when you think about hybrid integration, you've got API management, you've got what Boomi does, the iPaaS, we're the advanced event broker, so we're talking about moving these events around. It could be request/reply, it could be pub/sub, async, synchronous, all these different patterns for all these different use cases that are out there, but that's really what we do as opposed to RPA. >> Got it, what's your business model? What's the business look like? How big is the company? Is it a cloud service? How do you make money? What are some of the details there? >> Well, we're a private company. We're growing very rapidly. We're about 300 people, it's a global enterprise. We're doing great things all over the world. We're enabling Digital India, for example, with companies like Airtel and Reliance, so instead of taking 30 minutes to do a mobile phone recharge, we do it in seconds. In Singapore, we're working with smart transportation, land transport, next-generation payments, 1.4 million connected cars and buses, getting that data flowing to optimize traffic, is another example. Safety-critical data in and out of the airplane which is a huge amount of events. Equities, transactions, we process 85% of the equities, transactions in Canada and the list goes on. We came out of capital markets. Now we're into these other industries 'cause everything's moving to this real-time, real-time sensitive type environment. >> And the intelligence of software. Is that the business model: you make money selling software? What is the--? >> Yeah, that's a great question. We've got multiple deployment models. We've got a hardware appliance, we've got software, we've got cloud. We are for subscriptions or operating expense or capital expense. This thing is a platform, so you've got the broker itself, you've got integration connectors, you've got the governance layers on top monitoring capability, so it's a solution set. We're very flexible and adaptable to the customer's business model in terms of subscriptions or cap packs, whatever you want. >> So you keep it flexible. >> Les: It's very flexible. >> Because, if you're running an IoT, running traffic lights, for instance, or doing some smart cities thing, then it's got to go over to another use case. They're different. >> Yes, we talk about being dynamic, open, and simple. Dynamic in terms of the agility of different types of use cases with one solution, open meaning running everywhere, and simple meaning easy to deploy and manage. >> Yeah, machine learning and data is going to be a nice substrate layer to innovate on, so awesome business model. Let's talk about the technology and the secret sauce. What's going on there? Explain the magic, what's going on with the tech product? >> The secret, this is all we do. Smart data movement is all we do. And we're the only company out there that's really-- >> John: What's smart data movement mean? Define that term. >> Smart data movement would be, I've got to get something from point A to point B. I want it to get there in a guaranteed, persistent way. That's kind of what we do as opposed to taking that payload and transforming it, so we're just moving the data around. We're making sure that it gets there, that you can recover it, et cetera, so that's what we do. >> We heard this on theCUBE this morning: "Apps come and go, but data always remains." And so this has been the theme. What's different with you guys in terms of differentiation? Because I've seen service brokers, they've come and gone. Service brokers are everywhere. It's a key part of a system architecture. You're dealing with solutions that have to think like a system. And systems have consequences. You got to think holistically, so what is your differentiation? What's the role of the broker? Just take us through that value proposition and what's differentiated. >> Yeah, I think the differentiation here is we're a platform. The dynamism and the agility is definitely unique in that we can do WAN optimization really well, we can deal with different use case patterns, so the dynamism and the agility, we can do ultra-low latency, we can do high volume, we can do general purpose across the same platform. The other point of differentiation would be openness, so we're open protocol. We support, whether it's AMQP, whether it's MQTT, we're an open system, and we support openness across all the hyperscalar platforms, across the passes. So dynamic, open, and then simple in terms of it being a single solution set, be it hardware, be it software, be it cloud, and successful. Our customers are very successful. The use cases that we support are compelling. We helped innovators move the world forward, so I'd say it's dynamic, open, simple, and successful. >> Who's the target audience: developers, C-suite? 'Cause you got to code this stuff. Those are two primary target audiences. >> Yeah, I think it's, really, it's both. It's business-driven, IT-enabled, so we tend to work with the architects, the CIO's, the middleware teams on one hand to support this reinvention of your business. On the other hand, when you think about transforming the business and doing something different and innovating, it's got to be business-driven. So here we are at Boomi World. The theme is Accelerated Outcomes, which is key. So it's really driving an outcome, but IT-enabled, so you got to support both sides. >> All right, you got a large growing market, you got a good business model, you got some secret sauce. Now, final segment, so customers, customers and societal benefits because, look, there's a tech for good angle in here, but also, there's a big wave of tech for bad, so all I hear in the news is: tech's evil, this is bad stuff, oh my god. So you got real customers, where's the benefits? Take us through some of the success stories and the opportunities for a tech-for-good component here 'cause I can see the benefits, it's on infrastructure side: deploying new capabilities, compelling, but benefits to society are super important too. >> Yeah, I would say just one example would be Digital India as an example where you're saying you've got hundreds of millions of people who really need to access different capabilities, different services with smartphones. You need to deal with huge volumes. Let's give them that access, let's make it quick, so enabling Digital India is one example of really doing something that helps, helps people live better, reduces their time doing things that they maybe would've taken a long time before. Another example would be Singapore, smart cities. If you can move the traffic flows around better, you've got a population that's increased by a million people in the last several years, that's another example, making payments faster, whatever the case may be. >> So I know you got a hard stop, you got to meet the CEO of Boomi, Chris McNabb, great guy, among theCUBE yesterday, Cube alumni as well. Final question for you is: is there any requirements that need to be in place to work with you guys? 'Cause I would say it's a huge task. Are there dependencies? Are there certain signs that customers need? When does someone know to deploy? I would say, if someone say, hey, I want to modernize my X, what's the tell sign for you guys to know where there's alignment with a project or customer? >> Yeah, I would say that it's a real-time sensitivity. Ideally, it's one where I want scalability. It's one where I want security. I want to be able to get the data to where it needs to be in a guaranteed way, and, at the same time, I want to do it in an affordable way. I want to have one platform for different use cases so that's what I would say around that. >> Les, thanks for taking the time to come on, share your insights in real time here on theCUBE. One final, final question, 'cause I look at the final, final question. You've seen a lot of waves, you've been in a lot of experiences, you've run companies, you're on a lot of boards. A lot of young people coming into the marketplace. I sometimes go on my rant: get off my lawn. Your kids don't know how good you had it. It's a great time to be young and the rescaling going on is an all-time high. What's your advice to the young, upwardly mobile tech, soon-to-be-tech, totally tech-savvy, future employees of the world? Because there's a lot of hard projects to tackle. Tons of jobs: cybersecurity, what you're doing. Do they know how good they have it and what's the advice that you would give people watching here, knowing how robust this environment is? >> Oh, I think it's a great environment and you're right. I think it's all about: people matter most and winning with talents, so the talent supply chain is a big issue. And one is: every day is a learning day. Make it a learn-it-all, keep learning every day 'cause this business is moving very quickly. At the same time, being a good team member, I would say, being compassionate, being empathetic to your teammates, and really using that to your advantage, is huge. It's one thing to have the domain skills, but it's also another thing to have those human skills that really make a difference. >> That's the team sport. It takes a village these days, stack is coming. Les, thanks for coming on. It's theCUBE coverage here in D.C. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching, be right back. >> Thanks. (upbeat electronic music)