>> Narrator: Live from Washington DC, it's The Cube. Covering .conf2017, brought to you by Splunk. >> And welcome back to .conf2017 here on The Cube. We continue our coverage from the Walter Washington Convention Center. Dave Vellante, John Walls, if you're wondering where we are, I mean physically, the White House is about a mile that way, and the U.S. Capitol is about a mile that way. So we're kind of sandwiched between where it's all happening, Dave. >> Yeah, I mean this exhibit hall is about a mile that way and a mile that way. (laughing) >> Yeah, if you're hungry, leave now for lunch. It's going to be a bit of a hike. We're going to talk about analytics, obviously, at this show, but with Cisco's Altaf Karim, Senior Manager of service line and product lead, so a practice lead. So Altaf, thank you for being with us here. >> You're very welcome. >> Thanks for the time. Let's talk about the Cisco network optimization service, and obviously how that comes into play with analytics, what that's all about. I know that's certainly near and dear to your mission. >> Sure. So as you mentioned, Cisco's network optimization service, it's a consulting-based service offer that we provide to hundreds of customers globally, where we're actually providing some experts in the field of Cisco products. These consultants know Cisco products in and out. Our span reaches globally in many different industries, and what we do is we really work with our customers first, our consultants work with our customers first to identify what sort of business outcomes that they're trying to achieve. These could be related to things like high availability, performance, and then really work from there to understand what types of things need to happen from an assessment standpoint, or architecture, or deployment standpoint, that they can optimize to make the most use of their network. Some of the key benefits of Cisco optimization service are increased productivity for our customers, better user experience, as well as customers who have made an investment in IT. Our consultants are able to work with them and devise a strategy on faster time to value of that investment. So those are some of the key tenets of-- >> Mr. Vellante: So this is a for-pay service, correct? >> Yes. >> Okay, and it starts presumably with an assessment, where you got to get the right people in the room, and maybe you have some automated tooling to help me do discovery, and things like that, and you're maybe looking at machine data and so forth. Take us through the life-cycle of an engagement. Where does it start? How do we engage? How does one engage with you? Where does it start and where does it go? >> Yeah, sure. So, it all starts with our consultants working with our customers first, as I said, to understand what types of business objectives are they trying to accomplish. We then essentially backtrack from there, and understand what things in the network can we control. For example, high availability, process of change management, improved performance on their network, and essentially devise KPIs and metrics that essentially back into the business outcome that they're trying to accomplish. And of course, we have a whole slew of capabilities around analytics, that our consultants bring to the table to essentially become proactive, and help the customer achieve those business outcomes. >> So it might be a customer comes to you and says hey, I'm having problems with my network. It's down too much, it's not performing the way I want. I think it's change management related, you know it probably is, but I don't know where to start. So you bring a tiger team in, and then what? You use all kinds of tooling and other expertise to surface the problem? >> Yeah, sure. So, your question actually delves into what types of KPI can our consultants provide to our customers, to show them how their network is doing, right? And so there's a couple of different ways to do this. One is, you can take a look at what data is available to you, and start to sift through that. And that can be a very cumbersome process that is lengthy. You're really looking for that needle in the haystack to try to figure out what types of insights you can find to make an impact to the business outcome. Another way to approach it is the way we do it from a process standpoint, is inwards from the customer's business outcome. What exactly are we trying to impact? Is it network performance? Is it high availability? And then, our consultants will actually come up with metrics and KPIs based on intellectual capital that our service offer has, and essentially create custom applications based on Splunk, to essentially provide those insights and views and visibility into the network, back to the customer. >> So is it fair to say that Splunk would be the primary ITOM tool, if I can use that term? Splunk doesn't really talk about ITOM, I guess, directly, but to me it's ITOM, IT operations management, but that is the primary platform that you guys would use and deploy? >> I would say that's one of the primary components. Splunk plays a very, very strategic role in how our consultants interact with our customers. So if you think about the premise behind and the value proposition behind network optimization service, is our leading-edge and world-class expertise in networking. And that's what we're known for. And so now when you think about analytics, especially proactive and predictive, you really need the right mixture in ingredients of things to come together, to provide meaningful analytics back to customers. And really, if you think about a trifecta of domain expertise, data science, as well as an understanding of potentially open-source technologies and platforms. But in this case, we're actually strategically using Splunk to play the piece of that last bit. And so what that means is we have consultants who are world-class, leading experts in networking, but we're also training them and asking them to walk a little bit in the shoes of data analysts. And, if you think about an audience or a constituent that is highly technical, quantitative-minded, Splunk is a pretty easy platform for them to learn and start to make an impact by creating custom applications, KPIs, and metrics, for their own customers, that they can use to be proactive and be preemptive, and provide those insights back to the customer. So that's the role that Splunk plays in our service. How much of your business is sort of Aspirin versus vitamin? In other words, how much is it, I got a pain point, I need a tactical solution to that pain point, versus you know what? I'm thinking about re-architecting my network, east west problem, right? Help me think that through, how I sort of transition from my legacy network to a more modernized network. How much is each of those? >> I would say they both play a pretty significant fare. Depending on where the customer is in the life cycle and what they're trying to accomplish, we certainly have a healthy dosage of customers who we work with transactionally, to architect new networks, to deploy new technology, to help them realize their IT spend in a quicker way. But then, a very significant part of our business also is, what do you do on the day two? You can build all this great stuff, right? But if you don't optimize it for peak performance, if you don't optimize it for high availability, or if it's not keeping up with your evolving needs and standards, then you might get in trouble. You're not using the most out of your network. So that's a healthy business as well. >> You mentioned KPIs. What are you tracking? And, what data matters? How do you determine what's relevant, what's not? You know, big problems, or big challenges at least. >> Yeah. That's a very important question, right? And to me, coming from a services background, it's very much rooted in knowing what your domain is about, because as I mentioned before, if you start with all the plethora of data that's available to you, and start to sift through it, you may or may not find something, right? But, our consultants work with the customer and identify what are specific things that we care to monitor, and what are specific KPI that we want to essentially do trending on, or to identify patterns around, so that we can accomplish some sort of business outcome. So for example, if you care about network performance, you're looking at metrics about capacity or bandwidth, or QOS. If you care about customer experience, you're probably, from a wifi standpoint, looking at signal strengths, looking at disassociations, how often and how quickly customers can connect to wifi networks. So really, it depends on what the customer is looking for. And our approach is that we have solid expertise in a number of networking disciplines ranging from routing, switching, wireless, data center, and others. So we have analytic service offers that go deep into each of those technology areas, and we can figure out what KPI to monitor to best achieve that business outcome, but then we also can bring all of that back together and provide that holistic network perspective, and one of the key things that we want to look at, to make sure network is operating optimally. >> Does your practice bleed into the security vector at all? Is that an adjacent area, or is that sort of a main area? >> Yeah. I would say security is paramount for our customers. For the network optimization service, it's actually an adjacent area, but it's definitely something that we work to include into all of our consultative guidance and recommendations to our customers. >> To whom do you sell, I mean, typically? When you initiate an engagement, is it a head of network? Is it a CIO level? And who do you get involved in the sort of initial meeting, and throughout the lifecycle of the project? >> Yeah. That's a really good question, and I would say that it varies depending on what types of analytics that they're also looking for. So let me give you a couple of different examples. So one example is the IT director or IT manager, who is really looking for a tool or analytics, visibility, insights, into how pieces of their network are performing so that they can achieve high availability, increase in network performance, or can better process their change management. So that's one type of buyer. But the other type of buyer is also at the CIO level, which is increasingly also more interested in using analytics to figure out where they are, and benchmark themselves against how others in their industry, or their peers, may be doing. So we've actually started to begun a lot of interesting conversations there, where some of the analytics that we can provide to our customers who opt in, is really rooted around benchmarking how they're doing in different areas such as performance, their software feature, their software or hardware or feature diversity compared to others in their own industry, and really can identify along with our consultative guidance which areas are really important for them to pay attention to, because they're doing something potentially different than everyone else in their industry. >> How about this challenge of IT networks, they're organic, they're constantly changing. So are you coming in, fixing a problem, and then I got to call you back? Or are you teaching me how to fish? >> I would say we're doing a little bit of both. So there's definitely reactive and remediation portions of our service offer. Unfortunately, that happens more than you would like, because you don't think about what to fix until something actually goes wrong. But, one of our flagship service offers, the network optimization services, is all about proactive and optimizing an existing network, so you make sure you're never getting to a place where you end up having to remediate something. And it's not just about remediation or fixing something that's broken, it's really about fine-tuning a well-oiled machine, to make sure that you're getting the most out of your IT investment. >> Yeah, but what kind of a, you talk about machine learning here, capabilities, what do you have in that vein? >> Yeah, so that's a really good question. When we start talking about proactive, and the predictive aspects of our consulting as well as our analytics, machine learning plays a pretty significant role, and I can only expect the contribution that will make to increase exponentially over time. A perfect example, one example of how we use machine learning is actually the machine learning tool kit inside of Splunk. So, if you think about our main premise behind network optimization, is to provide consulting, and provide recommendations on how to optimize the network. But when you think about what a network is, and it's a living and a breathing thing, each network is different, right? No network is the same. So, what machine learning, and especially the machine learning toolkit from Splunk, allows us to do is for a specific customer, it actually allows us to create a baseline of normalcy. What is normal for hundreds and thousands of KPIs and variables, for that specific customer? I think if we asked a human to do that, they'd probably still be going on-- (imitates gunshot) exactly, right? And so, that's an example of how we use machine learning toolkit from Splunk, and not only identifying what is normal for that customer, but then we can use supervised learning to start to identify anomalies and trends and patterns, and really begin to enable our consultants with the data and foresight around what types of things are happening on that network, so that they can in turn be proactive, and be predictive and preemptive in their exchanges with the customer. >> And these services are done on a T&M basis, or a fixed fee, or both? >> They're done both ways. We're pretty flexible, and there's a whole slew of offers outside of what I just talked about, that are available as well. >> What's typical of people? It just depends, right? >> I would say for pinpoint specific things that need to get done, they're more transactional in nature. And then when you're looking for entire lifecycle in a suite of services to help you optimize and be proactive and predictive and preemptive, that's where we have a subscription-based offer that is our optimization offer. >> Okay, and then you guys will actually, well you'll do this mostly remotely, I presume, but you go on site periodically to just impress the flesh and feel-out the culture? >> Absolutely. When we actually start an engagement with a customer, it's quite common for us to go on site, work to get to know the customer, the players, the network, understand what the business outcomes are, make sure that we're devising our deliverables in a way that actually impacts some sort of outcome, and they're not just rooted in some networking measures that don't necessarily make any impact there, right? So that's really important to us. So we definitely go on site. But of course, one of the value propositions of our offer is our intellectual capital. And when we talk about some of the analytics applications that engineers are building for a specific customer, now talk about that happening across hundreds of customers and engineers, devising new ways to create insights and visibilities in their own customer, and the sharing that happens between the engineers, so that they can bring those learning back to their own customer. >> Well, the door's open for business at Cisco, and Altaf Karim, we appreciate your time sharing with us why and how, and what you're doing, and wish you all the best of luck down the road too. Thanks for being with us here, first time on The Cube, right? >> First time on The Cube. >> Alright. >> Thank you for having me. >> You are now an alum. Welcome to the club. >> Great. >> Alright, Altaf Karim, joining us here on The Cube. We'll continue live from Washington D.C., right after this. (electronic theme music)