(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE Studios for another CUBE conversation where we go in depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology. I'm Peter Burris and today we're going to be talking about some of the challenges enterprises face as they try to do a better job of gaining visibility into their user-oriented, digital experience. Now what do we mean by that? We mean basically as a company moves to a digital business, digital engagement model, they increasingly are mediating their conversations with their customers through digital means. And if you don't have visibility into how that's going, you're going to end up with unhappy customers. Now to have that conversation, you've got Alex Henthorn-Iwane VP of product marketing from ThousandEyes. Alex, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Peter. >> Let's start by saying a little bit about ThousandEyes. What is ThousandEyes ? >> So ThousandEyes is a company that delivers visibility into digital experiences that are running over the internet as well as your own networks, of course. And the whole point of that is that when you move to the cloud enter these sort of cloud-based ecosystems that everybody's using to deliver digital, you are losing a lot of control. You no longer own the software and the infrastructure and the networks that you are connecting over, the users are connecting over. When you lose that control, you really, really need the visibility so that you can optimize and then you can also fix issues when they happen because they do happen. So that's really what we deliver. We deliver that visibility. >> So that's a big promise, but let's focus in on kind of the more proximate thing. You guys have just delivered a report that looks specifically at digital experience. What is the problem that the report's addressing? >> Right, so the problem that we are trying to address with this report, this digital experience performance benchmark report that we've released is one of trying to take away the subjectivity around performance management because when you're dealing with the internet, right, it's kind of a black box. What constitutes the minimum bar of good? Where should you be at minimally? And then, how are you doing competitively? How do you compare with the top folks in your peer group as an industry. That's the thing we wanted to address with this particular report. >> So if I think about, then, the challenges the company's facing, there are so many moving parts. You think you're getting a single service, but there are so many moving parts even within that service or even within that application that you want to be able to compartmentalize and break it down and start to isolate some of the issues will that be technology or service supply issue. So what are some of they key considerations that are contributing to say, better or worse digital experience? >> Well, the way we looked at this just to kind of get a little context and to answer your question is we thought well, let's look at top 20 websites, consumer websites across retail, media and entertainment and travel and hospitalities. So 60 in all. And then, let's measure them as how users will experience them and to the point of providers, pretty much all of them rely on a content delivery network, a CDN provider. There's a variety of them obviously in the market and so what doing is we're saying let's measure when we go from about 36 cities with a browser, you know, this is all automated obviously. >> Right, right. >> Using our monitor agency- >> You're simulating users. >> Simulating users. Let's go and measure what that experience is and let's tease out some of the performance factors and look at those things 'cause those are the kind of things that web operations teams and digital operations teams are really concerned with. That stuff is the foundation that you have to build from a performance point of view so that all the other subjective kind of things that you build into your website experience really have a time budget to work in. >> So those performance factors are kind of those foundational elements that have higher level impacts on a variety of other application characteristics. What are some of the key performance factors that you identified as being important? >> So we looked at a few different metrics that you can measure. One of the most foundational ones that people forget about a lot is DNS. That's the process when you type in Urls, something has to convert that into a numeric kind of address that internet can actually get to. >> Right. >> So that's the DNS look up, so that's one piece. A second piece is what's the network's speed or latency, right, of from a user where a user's sits to that server that's caching your content? You know, that CDN provider server. So we looked at that on a round trip basis. The reason we looked at that just by the way is that when you first interact with a website, before you get the first byte of content delivered, you have to take 11 one way trips across the wire, which means the internet. So that network time is important. So with DNS network. Then, what we did is look beyond that to the point the time it takes to deliver that first byte that's also called HTTP response time and the to get somewhat of an experiencial lens, we took one more measurement which is the page load time. Page load time is essentially the time it takes to load the content into the browser and it's starting to render. So that's something a little bit more experiential, but it's kind of like there's that stack of performance metrics. >> So set up the conversation or find who you're conversing with, set up the conversation and then, get that first bit of information back, but the page load is going to be significantly subjective because different pages are different sizes, but that's kind of what you set up these benchmarks to do. >> Right. >> Find the site, set up the session, and then get that first byte back. So what kinds of numbers are you suggesting that people start to benchmark themselves against? >> So one of the things that we found when we talked with customers is this sense of we don't know what minimum bar of good is. So what we decided to do is find what we're calling an internet performance bar and what we did is said, let's look at the averages, the median, you know, sort of numbers and we took 300 plus million unique measurements in this study and we looked at things like well, what correlates to delivering well in terms of the top end, you know, that page load, the HTTP response time. So we said all right, based on that, we decided that for those, for three of these metrics, we could define what thought is a minimum bar of good in the U.S. market, right, because go outside of the U.S. to other geographies, things could differ a lot and they do. And basically what we said is all right, for DNS we should be at 25 milliseconds response time >> Let me write these down. 25 milliseconds for DNS >> 25 milliseconds for DNS. 15 milliseconds, round trip latency, >> For the network. >> For form the user to the CDN edge server and then 350 milliseconds to deliver that first byte. That's HTTP response time. So 25, 15, and 350 milliseconds and what we find is that if you're delivering at that level in the U.S. market, you're in pretty good shape generally speaking when you compare to those top 60 websites and that would correlate pretty well to being able to deliver a good page load time. >> So if the page load time was equal or the amount of data being loaded on the page was equal, those would be the things that ultimately determine how fast or what the digital experience of the user was. >> Right, exactly. They build the foundation. A strong foundation. Now, on top of that, we also, of course, looked 20 websites for each of these sort of vertical industries >> Got it. >> And what we did is then charted out scatter plots and things like that so you can see, all right well, where are there any patterns there that are helpful for me as a retailer? E-commerce provider for example, to say well, you know, for example, we found that there were two major clusters for performance and retail in terms of HTTP response time. One cluster was 300 milliseconds or better and one cluster was sort of 4 to 500 milliseconds and when we share this with retailers, of course they say, "I know which one I wannna be in. I want to be in the faster level, right?" But just knowing that is helpful to say because let's say 350 milliseconds is minimum bar of good internet performance bar, but if you said hey, I'm looking at the cohort that I'm competing against and a bunch of them are doing better than that maybe even significantly better than that. That helps me, between those two things, make good investment decisions. >> But to go back to the notion of budget, what that basically means is that if I am at a disadvantage on these foundational metrics, my budget for the complexity and experience value that I can put into my digital assets is reduced. >> Right, because digital experience runs on a clock, right? Human, you know, visual sort of recognition is in the it's like 13, 14 milliseconds, but human response time to visual stimulus about 250 milliseconds roughly. >> Right. >> Right, So that's what happens in that sort of customer experience with all the content and, you know, digital assets. So what you're doing is building a strong time budget to deliver all the rest of it. >> Right, so now, let's talk a little bit about then what would people do with this information because the report articulates very nicely the nature of the problem, provides benchmarks that people can actually use. >> Right. >> Provides insight into how they can benchmark themselves against generalities, but also specific industries and as you said cohorts, but one of the things that you guys do is you guys use this basic tool for generating visibility to capture data that looks at other things as well, cloud, DNS look-ups, etc. and I've noticed that you actually can start mapping out topologies >> Right. >> regarding how traffic if moving in this end-to-end world. How does a customer use that information to get themselves inside the good cohort group or improve their performance relative to a competitor? >> So, there's a couple of things that you can do with that kind of data. One is to look at it and decide based on the benchmarks and your performance and the kind of topology insights we provide which is exactly how all this stuff connects over the internet. There's two things. One is you can say, look, if I'm not meeting at the bar in a market that I care about, I'm going to go to my provider and hold him accountable to do better because I know that this is achievable. All right, so that's one thing. I may make make some network architecture decisions. Well maybe there's a broadband provider that runs a little slower, maybe I'll get a private connection to them, so I, my user experience runs well. But the third thing is operationally, it's the internet. Things go wrong sometimes. Providers make mistakes. >> No. (laughs) >> And the thing is, the problem is in a cloud, there's so many factors, it's really hard without good visibility, without that topology view to know even who to call. So with the data we provide you operationally, you can now go and hold the provider, the right kind of provider, accountable to fix a problem or optimize a performance when things, you know, things go wrong. >> But because your visibility, it's not just the right provider. It's actually then saying and this is what I would like you to do. >> Right, exactly because you can share very rich information with them so they can take action. I mean, if you'd to put yourself in the shoes of the provider, they probably get blamed a lot of the times for things that really aren't their fault. So what do they do? They provide the service, they create a defensive mechanism of 12 layers of support and there's a lot of plausible deniability there, right? Because they don't want to be chasing things that aren't actually their problem. If you give them the kind of visibility that we provide with all this rich data, deep views into the internet, well one, you're going to lower the defenses 'cause they have got something to work with. Two, they're actually going to have enough information to do something about it and that's how you actually manage the internet in a sense. You manage it through your providers, but you have to have good information for them. >> So I think it was Sigh Sims, the old, the guy who sold clothing to men for many years said that an informed customer is, or a knowledgeable customer is the best customer. >> Right. >> And so, what you're really trying to do is to, with this report, establish what the problem is, establish this benchmark so people should be pointing to, give them the opportunity, give your customers the opportunity to compare themselves where comparisons are meaningful, but then, very importantly, use that knowledge of their operations to become a more informed purchaser of services or architect of their own assets. >> Have I got that right? >> Yeah, exactly because if you are able to partner effectively with all those providers and, I mean, in an e-commerce setting, I thing you're probably dealing with tens, dozens of different third party service providers. >> Sure. >> Just, you know, all the API content you're sucking in plus all the ISPs, CDNs, everything else. It's a lot, it's a big ecosystem. If you can partner effectively, you're just going to do a better job. You're going to get better service, you're going to get better outcomes, and ultimately deliver better experience which is great for the top and bottom line. >> Absolutely and so it's really a way of tying the business outcome of the improved service, the ability to increase or the value of the service by altering the way you use your time budget. >> Right. >> And then using that as a basis for establishing very high quality operations both inside your own shop, but also in the connections that you have these third party providers. >> Absolutely, yes. So the whole point of our research generally, we have multiple of these reports is provide that context so that when you use that kind of data that we provide for you, you have the bigger picture in mind. You know what's normal, what's not. And so that you know that you're making a really reasonable request to hold that provider accountable to a certain level of performance for example. >> All right. So what's next? >> So, you know, we have a, we have a few different reports that we have done in the past. We did public cloud network performance report, we did a global DNS report- >> Oh, by the way, I looked at that one and it was really interesting. >> There's some fascinating findings in all these things. You know, we've got some other research planned for this year. We're looking at things like maybe, looking to China for example. Performance in China. But also we'll be refreshing these reports we did last year. We're going to at least go on an annual refresh for them so we're trying to build out a body of research over time that compliments obviously all the product and solution things the we do. That, and we know that from talking to customers they really appreciate that they can look at something a little bit bigger lens. >> But it all starts with this premise of, look this is a really important problem, let's segment this into different classes or domains. So you have the benchmark, so you know what constitutes good versus bad. >> And then use the data from tools and what not visibility tools and what not to then improve your set of operational capabilities. >> Absolutely. >> Excellent. Alex Hawthorn-Iwane, Vice President of Product Marketing at ThousandEyes, thanks very much for being on theCUBE! >> Thanks very much for having me. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris, until next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's the Cube! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone and we're live here at Cisco Live, 2019 in Europe. It's the Cube's three days of wall-to-wall coverage, day two. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Vellante co-hosting with me as well as Stu Miniman who's been in and out on interviews. Our next guest is Alex Henthorn-Iwane, vice president of marketing for company Thousand Eyes. welcome back to the cube, welcome to the show. >> Thanks great to be here. >> So talk about what you guys do first, you guys do a very interesting business, a rapidly growing business. What is Thousand Eyes, what do you guys do, What's your product, who is your customer? >> OK, so the vision of thousand eyes was really to help organizations deal with all the connected experiences that they have to deliver. So we're giving visibility into those connected experiences but not just how there, you know if they're working or not but all the external dependencies that they rely on. So we developed a ton of expertise on how the internet works how the networks work, how routing works and all that. And we can give that insight so that all the things that IT now no longer controls and owns, but has to own the outcome for, we're giving that visibility. >> And when you guys sell a Saas Solutions, the software, what's the product? >> Yeah >> Who's the buyer? >> So we're Saas Platform and the way that we gather this data is we're primarily doing active monitoring at a few different layers; so we're monitoring the app layer things like HTTP and page loads and things like that you would think of that as synthetics classically but we've paired that with some patented ways of understanding how everything connects from a user out in the internet or from a branch office or from a data-center out to somewhere else typically across the internet all those networks the cloud networks going through things like Z-scaler all those complex pieces that again you don't control. We can trace all that and then map it down even to internet routing. One other kind of cool thing that we added to all that we do that on an agent basis so we have agents around the world that you can put them in your data-centers your VPC's and your branches. >> And the value proposition is what; visibility in the patterns; optimization; what's the outcome for the customer? >> The outcome is ultimately that we're going to help IT deliver the digital experiences for their employees for their customers that could be e-commerce, e-banking, it could be open banking or PSD2 here in Europe and UK. >> So full knowledge of what's going on >> Right >> But the name talks to that >> Yeah >> It talks to the problem you're solving >> Right, and it's really, the focus is and our specialty is all the external things, right. You've always had a lot of data, maybe too much data on the stuff that you did own, right, in IT. Okay, you could collect packets and flows and device status and all that sort of this and sort of, the challenge was always to know what does that mean, but whether or not that's perfect it exsited, but you simply can't get that from outside, you've got your four walls >> Yeah >> So you just have this big drop off in visibility once you get to the edge of your data-center etcetera >> Now, lets talk about the dynamics in IT; we were talking before we came on camera here about ya know, our lives in IT and going back and look at the history and how it's changed but there are new realities now >> Right >> Certainly Cisco here talking about intent based network ACI anywhere, Hyperflex anywhere, the ecosystem is growing the worlds changed. >> Right >> Security challenges, IOT, the whole things completely going high scale, more complexity. >> Right, Yeah. >> IT? What's the impact to IT? What's the structural change of IT from your prospective? >> Well, the way we see it what's happening with IT is the move from owning and controlling all the stuff, you know and managing that granting access to that. To a world where you really don't own a lot of the stuff anymore. You don't own the software, you don't own the networks. You don't own the infrastructure increasingly. Right? So how do you operate in that role? Changes. What the role of IT is in that role, really changes. And then out of that comes a big question. How does IT retain relevance? In that role? And a lot of that role is shifting away from being the proprietor, to being more of like a manager of an ecosystem. Right? And you need data to do that. So I think that's a really big step. >> So this is now, an actual job description kind of thing? >> Yeah. The roles and make up of the personnel in IT is changing. Because of the SAAS cloud, Hybrid cloud, Multi cloud? >> Right. It's more of like a product management role, than it is the classic operations role. You know? And we observed some really big changes in just operations. So, when you own all the stuff you can find a fix. Right? That's a classic statement of IT operations. But when all the stuff is outside, You can't fix it directly. So you go to what we call an evidence in escalation. You have to actually persuade someone else to fix it for you And if you can't persuade them, you don't have governance you don't have accountability and you don't have the outcome that you're supposed to deliver. >> So the infrastructure is to serve it's players; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, more SAAS All of this is taking data away from your control? >> Right >> And obviously network visibility? >> Sure >> So how are you guys dealing with that? What are some of the nuances of whether it's SAAS, or different infrastructures of service providers? >> And I would add to that SUN, Shift to the internet I would add to that just the increasing number of digital experiences that companies offer to customers. Right? >> Right. So the way that we deal with that is, that we believe that you need a highly correlated way of understanding things. Because at the top layer, if the outcome that IT is supposed to deliver is a digital experience. Right? The customers at the center now, not the infrastructure. Right? So I have to start with experience. So we need to look at, how is the app preforming? How is it delivering to that end user? And now you have to think about it from a persona basis. To who? Where? Right? So that's why we have all these agents floating around the world in different cities. Because if you're offering a let's say e-banking portal, and your surveying 100 cities as markets. You need to see from those cities, right? You also then need to be able to understand the why. When something is not working well, whose fault is it? Right? Is it us? >> Its the network guys! (laughing) >> What you don't to get is the everlasting war room circular firing squad kind of scenario. Where nobody actually knows, right? This is what happens, because the issue is that often times you suspect its not you. Maybe. Right? That search for innocents. >> Yeah. >> But again that's not enough because, the whole point is to deliver the experience. So, now who could it be? Say you're offering e-banking or e-commerce. Is it your CDM provider? Is it that your DMS manage provider is not responsive? Or somethings down? Are you under a D DOS attack? Or some of your ecosystem is. Is one of your back end providers, like your Braintree payments not working right. Right? There is so many pieces, is there an ISP in the middle there? That's being effected? >> There's so many moving parts now. >> If from each persona or location just to get to 1 URL. Could be traversing several ISP networks. Dozens of HOPS across the internet. How on earth are you supposed to isolate, and go an even find who to ask for help? That's a really sticky problem. >> So this will expose all those external credits? >> So we expose all those things. We expose all these multiple layers, and we have some patenting correlation, visual correlation. So you can say alright I see a drop in the responsiveness of a critical internal application or of .. I mean, we never have. Butt lets say like if SAAS like sails course, or something like that. And it may not be their fault by the way, its not them being a problem. But the users having a problem. So you see this drop and say well where's it happening? You can now say is it a network issue? Is it an app issue? Now if it is a network issue I can look at all the paths, from every where and say aha there's a commonality here. For example, we could surface through our collective intelligence that there's an ISP outage in the middle of the internet that's causing this. Or we could say, hey you know your ISP is having an issue. Or guess what? Sales force is maybe, you know things happen. People have problems in data centers sometimes. It's nothing you know, it's not.. >> So there's two things there's the post mortem view, and there's the reactive policy based intention. >> Right >> To say okay hey we've got an outage, go here do somethings take some action. >> Right. So some of those things you can automate. But the fact of the matter is that, automation requires learning. And machines need to be taught, and humans have to teach them. I mean that's one of the sort of sticky parts of automation. (laughing) Right, its not auto-magic its automation. >> So you guys are in the data business basically? >> Right, visibility, data. Right. >> Big data, its about data. You're servicing data. Insights, actionable insights, all this stuffs coming together. So the question is on AI. Cause AI plays a role here. IT OPS and machine learning you've got deterministic and non deterministic behavior. >> Sure. >> How do you solve the AI OPS problem here? Because this is a great opportunity for customers, to automate all this complexity and moving parts. To get faster time to data or insight. >> Okay so I would say that the prime place where you could do AI and ML is where you have a relatively closed system. Lets say an infrastructure that you do control. And you have a ton of data. You know like a high volumetric set of data-streams. That you can then train a machine to interpret. The problem with externalities is that One, you have sparse data. For example we have to use agents, cause you can't get all that traditional data from it. Right? So that means that that's why we built this in a visually correlated way. It's the only way to figure it out. But the other aspect to that is that, when your dealing with external providers you have an essential human part of this. There's no way as far as I know to automate an escalation process with your service providers. Which now we have so many, right? First of all, we have to figure out who. And then you have to have enough evidence, to get an escalation to happen to the right people. Empowered people. So they don't go through the three D's of provider response. Which is Deny, Deflect and Defer. (laughing) Right? You know you have to overcome plausible deniability, and that's very human interaction. So the way we deal with that. All this interactive correlated data we make it ridiculously easy, To share that. in an interactive way, with a deep link that you send to your provider and say "just look and see" and you can see that it's having issues. >> So get the evidence escalated, that's the goal as fast as possible? >> Right so then your time, like your mean time to repair now in the cloud is dependent on mean time to effective escalation. Right? >> Who are some of your customers? >> So, we have our kind of foundational customers. We have 20 of the top 25 SAAS companies in the world, as our customers. We have five of the top six US banks, four of the five top UK banks. 100 plus of global two thousand and growing fast. A lot of verticals, I would say enterprise I started with financials not surprisingly. But now we see heavy manufacturing, and telecom and oil and gas and all that. >> What's going on here at Cisco Live? What's your relationship with Cisco? >> So with Cisco we have a number of integration points, we have our enterprise agents. We have these could agents pre deployed, same software as what we call the enterprise agent. That's been certified as an VNF or as container deployments, on a variety of Cisco Adriatic platforms. So that's kind of our integration point. where we can add value and visibility from those you know, branch or data center or other places you know out to the cloud or outside in as well. >> And who's your buyer, typically? >> So I would say a couple of years ago we would be very network central. But now because of the change in IT, and our crossover into the largest enterprises we find that now it's the app owners. It's the folks who are rolling out sales force to forty thousand people and their adopting lighting. Right? You know or they're putting Office 365 out, and they're dealing with the complexities of a CDM based service or a centralized service like SharePoint. So we're seeing those kind of buyers emerge, along with the classic IT operations and network buyers. >> So it only gets better for you, as more API centric systems get out there. Because as its more moving parts, its basically an operating system. And you look at it wholistically, and you got to understand the IO if you will? >> Right. The microservices way of doing everything, means that when you click something or you interact with something as a user. There are probably 20 things happening at a back end, at least half of which are going off across the internet. And all of them have to work flawlessly. Right? For me to get that experience that I'm expecting. Whether I'm trying to buy something or, just get something done. >> What's your secret sauce in the application? >> So I'd say our secret sauce comes down to a couple really key things. One is the data that we generate. We have a unique data center from all these vantage points that we have now. That's what allows us to do this collective intelligence. No body else has that data. And an example we did a study, a couple studies last year. Major resource studies using our platform to look at public cloud performance from the internet within regions. Inter regions, and between clouds. And we found some really interesting phenomenon. And no body else had ever published that before. A lot of assumptions, a lot of inter-claims, we where actually able to show with data, exactly how this stuff performs. >> I'm sorry, you guys have published that? Where can we find that? >> Yeah, so we have that published, we also did another major report on DNS. >> Is that on your website? >> It's on our website, so definitely something to check out. >> Alright, Alex well thanks for coming on, give the quick plug, what's up for you guys? Hiring? What's new? Give the quick two cents. >> So here in Europe we're scaling up, hiring a lot and expanding across Europe. We have major offices in London and Dublin, so that's a big deal. And I think in this next year you'll see some bigger topped out ways that we can help folks understand. Not just how the internet is effecting them, but more of like the unknown of unknowns of internet behavior. So there's going to be some exciting things coming down the pipe. >> Well we need a thousand eyes on all the instrumentation as things become more instrumented having that data centric data. is it going to help feed machine learning? And again its just the beginning of more and more complexity being abstracted away by software on network Programmability. theCUBE bringing you The Data Here from Barcelona, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 stay with us for more day 2 coverage after the short break. I'm Jeff Furrier here with Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. ( upbeat music )