(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's the CUBE. With digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hello, and welcome back to the CUBE's coverage. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. It's three weeks we're going on, we're on the ground here in Palo Alto. Doing the remote CUBE, CUBE virtual. We are virtual CUBE here. Wall-to-wall coverage over the three weeks. Got a great segment here, Steven Long regional CTO for AppDynamics and Ron Teeter chief architect with Jobvite. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me on the segment. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the CUBE Virtual. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> I wish we were in person. Normally we are, but with the pandemic, it's hard. Steven at AppDynamics. I want to ask you, you've got a customer here. We're going to dig into the use cases of the transformation journey, multiple wave transformation which I'm excited to talk about. But talk about AppDynamics. What's the big story for you guys at re:Invent, quickly get 10 seconds to explain. >> Yeah, sure. AppDynamics is the number one world's leading APM vendor and we're there to be the full stack observability platform. And in that we're talking today about our deep code insights, really to gain that visibility into production, securely capture data and really get that context through a dynamic application. So that you can find the problem and fix it right the first time. >> Great. Thanks. Thanks for that insight. Ron, I want to get into you're the chief architect which means you get the keys to the kingdom at Jobvite. You got to look over the landscape. You got to have the 20 mile stare out to the future but you also got to deal with the reality present here. And it's a tough one. When you go back, this is a terrible year a lot of weirdness, a lot of craziness but everyone's hurting, but they're retooling or they have a tailwind behind their back. So they're either accelerating faster or they're retooling. What does transformation mean to you these days? >> Yeah, so for Jobvite we had a distributed workforce prior to the pandemic shutdown. And what it did for us is it actually forced us to go all in on why can't we work remote all the time? Why do we care where we have facilities? And so we've gotten really good at scaling our organization and being productive remote. Now we actually can hire anywhere we want to, right? And that gives us more leverage and opportunities to scale our DMS going into '21. >> Awesome. Now from a technology standpoint, I'm hearing a couple of different stories, there's two extremes is the... I'll say airlines or those kinds of markets where there's not a lot of business happening, but they're retooling. And then you got obviously video or anything virtual modern applications. It's a surge in business so you have to move faster. Speed is critical. How do you retool in an environment where you've got remote which is totally productive, get that. But now I got more teams. I got to coordinate, I got to communicate. I got to make decisions, architectural decisions. They're big ones. And cloud certainly is here. You've got hybrid and you got the edge big themes this week. How do you look at that? >> The way we look at it, Jobvite has the longevity to remember what it was like from 2008 to 2013. we took that economic recession to build two additional products and launch them into the market in 2013 so that we could ride that wave of growth to drive our business objectives. And we're doing the same thing now. Hiring is a fluid market and this year hiring was way down, right? We saw a 60% drop in open requisitions on our platform alone. And you could see it just dive in March but it started coming back in August and September. And so at this point, we're now post pandemic. So the hiring rates right now are higher than they've been all year. They're very close to where they were last year for the same time. And we expect that to continue to climb as businesses continue to evaluate whether or not it's safe to scale. For us, this lull means we've got an opportunity to make changes to our infrastructure, that aren't going to be disruptive to our customers. But also allow us to get out in front of that so that we can go into '21 with a very strong product focus by taking care of some of the technical debt now. That's exactly what we've been doing is investing in ourselves so that we can operate faster with more agility next year. >> That's worth calling out and mentioning. That's great insight. It really is. You got to come out of the pandemic with a growth strategy. I hear all the CXOs and CSOs in particular dealing with all the security uses but they've got to have the growth strategy. Steven, this is where I think the cloud speed scale the operating model of software networks compute. You're seeing that now get back into the swing of things. That's always been the holy trinity, if you will, of technology, network compute, and storage. Now it's got the cloud and you've got an operating model. We're back to kind of a groove swing here. How does AppDynamics and the Amazon all fit together into this kind of journey? >> Yeah, and if we really look at AppDynamics, we focus on that digital experience. And I think when the pandemic hit we saw 95% of customers that we surveyed in our agents of transformation COVID survey that their priorities shifted. And 95% of those said, within that shift the digital experience became front and center. And so when you're operating in the cloud and you want to have that full stack observability not just from the end user and not just from your application perspective but also from your business perspective. And in any given business the application is the north star of the business. So placing the emphasis on that AppDynamics and surfacing what's actually happening at eliminating blind spots during this pandemic where it's more important than ever to have the best digital experience because that's the brand loyalty really, is that digital experience. >> Ron, I want to ask you, you mentioned something earlier you were talking about how you seized on the opportunity to virtual at home and you retool. But also you mentioned some of the macro conditions in the market, jobs are down, the other on the backup on the upswing. But the geographic hiring is a huge deal. I can almost imagine that's kind of an unforeseen use case where, I mean, it's kind of like working at home. Yeah, X percentage of people be working at home. We plan for that in our disaster recovery or disruption management whatever they do, now 100% people work at home. Now, 100% people looking for jobs. You probably need to rethink the use case because when you have a platform, you've got to think, okay how do I serve my customers who might have a need to recruit from more geographical places? That's a coding thing. So how do you do that stuff? Take us through the mindset of what goes on in your world. >> Yeah, so one of the nice things about building Jobvite as a hiring platform and a sourcing engine is, we use it, right? We now need to solve the same kinds of problems internally that our customers are facing, right? And so we control the software, we understand the problem. And so it's just a matter of deciding these are the things that we're going to prioritize next. We saw a very active summer of social justice outrage, and a lot of that stems from the lack of diversity and inclusive in hiring. And we're already responding to that by delivering features into the product line to help our customers address that in their places. And the key to this is speed. I think you mentioned it and Steve's talked about it as well, right? The ability to move quickly, safely it's the grail that everybody's looking for. And you have to have the right partners to make that successful. >> So I got to ask you then, what are the main benefits you see as you've got working at AppDynamics obviously you're a good customer there. As we're talking through it, you've got a great environment. You're a leader, and how to take advantage of these opportunities and code and shift. What's the benefits of AppDynamics in that equation? >> The key there that we see with AppDynamic's Cisco is the scale and the amount of innovation that they can drive through their product line. One of the things that Steve and I were talking about earlier this year during their transform event, was this deep code insights component which is really production runtime debugging. So imagine I can knock out my meantime to repair, my zero trust and my accelerated solutions of early detection in one solution, right? I can take something that would normally take hours, if not days, into minutes to resolve. The impact on an organization of just one simple feature like that is tremendous when people understand what it can do for them. And it's been invaluable for us. >> Well, you got the speed and the scale with the cloud. So take me through that impact. Because one of the things that's being discussed heavily here at re:Invent and in the industry is the new normal and the new realities we're living in, post pandemic as well. What's going to come out of it. And that is the expectations of the users and is going to drive the new experiences. That's kind of the theme. So the question is whether that's developers or end users or consumers or business users. That's huge, for applications to know what the user experience may be because we don't know what they expect and you don't have the right security (laughs). It kind of all crashes. So what's your... I mean you're nodding your head, weigh in, please. >> Yeah, so I heard a comment earlier from one of my peers in the industry, that is basically saying that nine months ago he had 400 facilities and now he has 18,000. Trying to imagine securing that environment For us, the way we think about it is, work is where you're at. And so we solve the access problems and the tooling problems a long time ago for Jobvite. But we'd been doing for our customers is delivering mobile recruiting solutions. So imagine I don't even need my desktop to complete the hiring process. I can work through the negotiations with a recruiter. I can talk to the candidate, I can text them. One of the big things that we released in early access last month was our new intelligent messaging platform. So that recruiters and hiring managers can have a much more rich conversation with candidates on the mobile device where the candidate is, right? And that's how we're trying to bring this new reality to the marketplace and say, "I can't assume that somebody has a browser and an email client anymore," right? Texting-- >> I mean that's a huge point. I mean, the joke Steven is, it's just distributed computing again 'cause there's really no cloud, there's no... If you think about the edge it's everything is the operating environment. Edge is the data center, edge is the cloud, edge is someone else's place. So if you're thinking about what Ron just said, 18,000 facilities, their homes or wherever, everything has to be looked, that's distributed computing we've been there before, right? I mean. >> Yeah and I think the way Ron, I think describes it, is highly accurate in his company, obviously, but in many companies where, if you've got those 18,000 end points in distributed computing you need to be able to gain visibility into production. And production could be a piece of code living anywhere. And if you can gain that and do that in a secure way which what we do AppDynamics, with our deep code insights, then you can look at data on demand and you can begin to understand the context of what's happening for that end user experience. And you can line up a watch point to watch the code that's executing. And then if it's not working you can actually see how it's not working, recreate that and actually fix it right the first time because you can actually see the code and production in the cloud in this distributed environment. And really be it's more powerful way to operate to reduce time when something happens that you need to fix. >> I was talking to a friend yesterday about this. We weren't on camera. I wish the cameras were rolling. But I'd love to get you guys' reaction to this, because we were saying... I remember when I broke into the business as a young CS major in the late '80s. We had to install everything by hand the software, you install stuff on a server. Or had stuff on a machine and then you put it on a server, you put it in a data center, all those things, right? The young kids then come in and saying, "Okay, I just use the cloud." The next generation and they never installed anything. They don't even know what an installation pack is. Now the next generation's not going to have versions. So you start to get into this notion of evolution with software, because if it's software operated you don't know what version you're running. It shouldn't be disruptive. And the point is this is where I think you guys are getting to here is, the holy grail is there's no disruption. You're running your software at home. Your reaction to that kind of evolution. >> Yeah, you want to take that Steve first? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, it's like you said, the way that code has gone to be delivered and executed is it explodes and disappears. And if there is no way to track that and trace that and understand it, the generation we're in of code, that's a femoral. What's it going to be next? And where's it going to go? And will it ever live anywhere that's alive? The technologies are really being pushed and that's the exciting part. And that's why from an AppDynamics perspective, we're investing in open telemetry is distributed tracing. So as you got distributed computing, we do distributed tracing. And we really look at the problem and provide solutions for our customers. >> Awesome. Ron, your time. I mean, observability, if you can't observe it, you can't measure it. You don't understand, it opens up a lot of things. You got to have the observation space and that's everything. It's hard. >> Yeah. Yeah. And especially as we transition from visual physical servers to virtual hosts, to virtual processes, to virtual functions, right? At some point it's the, I don't even know how to measure capacity for a function in the cloud, right? Let alone try to understand well, what's the cost going to be before I actually deploy it and measure what it's going to cost, right? So these are some of the areas where I think a lot of companies are struggling in understanding how do I move something I'm traditionally very comfortable with. This, I know how much a host costs and I can put my software on there and I can run the CPU at 100% and then I know what I'm getting. But as you start moving into virtual processes and virtual functions, it makes it so much more difficult to think about how you do that capacity planning and budgeting exercise in advance. One of the things that we do with observability is we can test it and we can measure it. And then based on that measure we can make predictions about, okay, this is what it looks like in Def, let's extrapolate what that looks like in production, just by scaling the load. And in areas where you've taken IO and network out of the equation that kind of extrapolation works very well. >> That's awesome. Congratulations on a great a use case, Ron. Thanks for sharing your story, Steven. >> Of course. >> Thanks for coming along and highlighting this great use case and congratulations on having a killer product with observability of AppDynamics. We've been following your work as a company and now at Cisco. So yeah, it's killer software. >> Thanks. Modern software is upon us again the next levels here, gentlemen, thank you for your time. Appreciate the insight >> It been a pleasure. >> Welcome. Thank you for the opportunity. >> Okay, This is the CUBE's virtual covers. We are the CUBE virtual. This is what we do now. We're not in person, but we're remote. When we get back to real life, we'll be back on the scene. We're still doing the interviews. Thanks for watching re:Invent coverage 2020 virtual. (soft music)

(lively techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering, DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> And welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Peter Burris and this is the last of two days of great presentations here at Cisco DevNet Create. A show set up specifically to help software developers and networking professionals start to co-mingle their ideas and look at business problems differently to create new ideas, new innovations, new inventions that can change the way the world does things so that we can improve the quality of digital business and life overall. And, I'm very excited that, our last session, we actually have a real live software engineer, here on theCUBE to talk about some of the things that are happening. And it's a very important one, 'cause it's in AppDynamics. Balwinder Kaur, nice to meet you and welcome to theCUBE >> Nice to be here. Thanks, Peter! >> So, Balwinder is a principal software engineer at AppDynamics, which is a Cisco property that came in within the last year. >> Yes. >> And has been especially important in thinking about how we're going to embed additional software controls and metrics into applications to make them more network-friendly. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, so let's start off by asking you this questions, Balwinder. You're a software engineer, you're a developer. You're at this show, first inaugural show that Cisco's put forward, what do you think of it? >> I think it's very interesting that Cisco is doing something for DevOps, for the cloud, for IoT that is not completely network-focused, so, it's great. >> Well, most of the content, as Cisco said, is coming out of the community. It's coming out of contributors, and others that are part of this process. Has there been any particular theme or message that you've seen from the community as it's kind of come together that surprised you or really resonated with you? >> Well, I definitely, Since we are very new to the Cisco family, I got a chance to meet with other companies and other parts of Cisco here. And I got a better picture of how different pieces, like Jasper and Meraki and AppDynamics together can provide a wonderful insight for the customer base and that's very valuable, whether it's insights into the networking layer, application layers. Again, within the applications, whether they're web applications, Java, .NET, or they're Android, iOS and embedded application, the Internet of Thing applications, whether they're multiple applications on one box or dedicated applications. So I think it's very exciting and the potential is just immense. >> Peter Burris: AppDynamics has been at the vanguard of thinking about this notion of network-ability of applications for quite some time. As AppDynamics has evolved and matured, and you almost had an exit that went to the public and you ended up with an exit that went to Cisco. How has the audience, the community around application development responded to AppDynamic's vision of the idea of better instrumenting applications to make them more successful on networks and have networks be more appropriate for application developers? >> So... your question was quite complicated. >> Peter Burris: True. >> (laughs) >> But hey, you got five minutes. >> I will try to answer it. So, definitely, the response with AppDynamics being part of Cisco has been positive from the customers because now there's a lot of backing from a very big company and definitely there are synergies. Cisco's big in the enterprise. AppDynamics is also big in the enterprise. And as applications become more and more of the business, definitely the customers like that part. And I don't know how closely you've been following what AppDynamics does, but we've gone from just application monitoring into business IQ, different parts of your business and providing more and more intelligence to our customers, so I think it's a good place and a good time to be. >> We like to say that digital business is really how you use your data. The difference between business and digital business is the idea that data is an asset and can be applied differentially to greater serve customers. And the trend to add new digital capabilities to business means that software and data are getting embedded deeper and deeper and deeper into business pieces. Both as process, for analytics and a number of other things. And it sounds as though AppDynamics, and this is for that core sort of enterprise customers, are also being embedded more deeply in the business as software takes on more responsibility for the core and differentiating capabilities that a business performs. Is that accurate? >> That's definitely one way of putting it. We like to say, at AppDynamics, that the application is becoming the business. So we have application-focused and more and more businesses are moving into the applications space and so IT organizations are not a support function, but getting to be more of the core function. So yes, it's two ways of representing, probably, what is very close. >> Peter Burris: So as you move from monitoring to monitoring and analytics for crucial software applications, what new approaches or what new insights is your customer base gaining about how best to set up these capture points and how to use the data associated with application performance? >> So, there's different paths of the application, right? And application architectures are changing, so you need to have solutions that can cater to all of them, for example microservices is a big trend now. Containers like Docker, and so you need your monitoring solutions to be able to cater to all of that. The other piece is the depth of instrumentation, so not just in the application layer; your database, your network monitoring. So the complete suite of all of this. And then, not isolated, right? Being able to correlate all the data. And that's sort of within the data center, but the outside world we call the end-user monitoring. We have browser and Android and iOS, but we're also building solutions now for the Internet of Things, which is basically traditionally connected embedded devices, but now they're talking to cloud services. And so, definitely a lot of these things are now very developer-centric. So just like Cisco has this conference geared toward developers, yes, we definitely understand that embedded systems, they need more and more developer-centric features where they have control of what performance data to pick up, what business data to pick up, when to send the data. And so, yeah, just having the wide, rich variety of support for different platforms, different form factors and different languages also, right? And then being able to all view it in a single pane, I think that's the strength of AppDynamics. >> Peter Burris: But you also need more developers, because there's going to have to be an enormous amount of software to bring all these devices, these IoT events, and everything else we're talking about when we think about digital business in under the umbrella of an AppDynamics or related type of technology. So, bringing new developers in and having them be familiar with the value that these kind of tools can bring to the party is crucial. How is AppDynamics looking at the challenges of attracting whole new classes of application developers into the fold so that you can, in fact, have greater end-to-end visibility about how applications are performing and behaving? >> Balwinder Kaur: So, we have dedicated teams now, which are looking at increasing developer mindshare and catering to them. Also, there's, especially in this whole Internet of Things, it's a very well-understood fact around the industry that you don't have as many embedded engineers to build all the applications and that's why there is all the platforms are now coming with more support for JavaScript developers, Java, which nobody used to think could run heavily on embedded devices. It's a big player. Python, Javascript. And so, I think catering, using embedded engineers to build tools so that the web application developers can write applications that turn on embedded devices is the trend and we recognize it and absolutely support all those developers. >> Peter Burris: So time is crucial, especially at the edge, where you have to be able to ... Often an event has to happen within a certain, prescribed period of time and the round-trip can be challenging. So, what is the role that monitoring, and metering, well not so much metering, but monitoring and event-management plays as we start to deploy these more complex applications, especially IoT-like applications? >> So, I just finished the talk here, recently. And basically, at design time, just you know how they say that security has to be built in at design time? Similarly, all solutions that get deployed now need to be built in with hooks for performance-monitoring, right? If your devices are now talking to the cloud, you need to be able to know that when your hundreds and thousands of devices are there, which one of them's are suffering from a network latency problem and which ones are not. And that is where AppDynamics comes in. You put the agents there, they correlate back and they correlate to all different parts of your businesses, whether the traffic is originating from a mobile device, a browser, or it's originating from an embedded device. And I think that's performance monitoring is absolutely crucial. It's not a luxury to have any more, it is a must-have and I think, as more and more solutions get deployed into the field, the realization will be there. I think right now, people are still in the IoT world, still focused more on other problems, like security, interoperability, connectivity. But this will become a growing pain once some of the other hurdles have been bypassed. >> Well, what are some of those lessons that you learn about how you appropriately embed performance-management and monitoring hooks into applications? Where should people be looking? >> So, if you're looking at the embedded side, then people should look at definitely small footprints. Agents should be configurable. Because different devices and use cases have different expectations. Some of the devices, they only want the performance data to be sent when they are done with whatever they are designed to do. Others don't want the battery to be up, so they want the performance data to be sent when they are powered up, not in deep-sleep mode. Then again, off-line mode also varies from application to application. There are some devices that go offline for up to weeks. And they just want to store local data and upload it later on. There are others that can not store more than one hour. So basically, you are looking for agents that are configurable. The developer can control when they want to send data, when do they want to store data, how much they want to store data. Then at the back end, you should be able to correlate all this. Because in isolation, it doesn't give you the problem. There is a lot of complexity on the end-user side as well as there's a lot of complexity on the web application side, right? There are micro services, Docker containers. So any solution that provides end-to-end monitoring and then is able to correlate data across different pieces to be able to give a true picture of performance is a good solution to have. >> So we want to make sure that the agent isn't forcing particular behaviors, but is in fact responsive and fits within the environmental constraints and considerations of whatever it is that that local device does. >> Balwinder Kaur: Yes. So, you're looking for a lot of flexibility on the embedded side. There are other where auto-instrumentation and ease of use, and not necessarily development time is important. There are other factors there, but for the Internet of Things side, this is what is important. >> So as we think about increasing, as we think about the evolution over the next few years of software, to what degree does the ability to re-use software get tied back to having visibility in how software performs? Being able to move from one cloud supplier to another, have depend upon, having greater visibility into how software performs. The ability to reapply software to new roles or purposes that weren't originally anticipated, dependent upon knowing how that software performs. It seems as though an AppDynamics tool is going to have a much greater set of propositions over the course of software as opposed to just at design time. Would you agree with that? >> Yes, absolutely, right? Because, so multi-cloud is definitely one. You want to be able to see your performance data, how your business is performing, right? Because your business is the application, how is it performing as solutions move across different clouds or performance of the different cloud change. So there're already conversations about multi-cloud for sure. And then, yes, absolutely, developers getting real-time feedback of their new deployments. Did it impact the performance or not? Yes, those are going to be very important trends. >> So, we've talked a lot over the past few days about DevOps and the role that DevOps is likely to play in digital business as well as within the way the entry is evolving. Can you just relate the role that AppDynamics and, again, this class of tools has to facilitating, collaboration, and communication, and working relationships between operations and development people? >> So, we already internally, we have applications, because we had a SAS solution tool. And so we are very acutely aware of, we have to keep our systems up as well. And we are acutely aware of how, when we develop and deploy new solutions, what does it mean? How the performance can be monitored and that's a trend that definitely we are keeping an eye on. But is there something to suggest that we have tools right now? I don't think that is something that we can ta-- >> But can the data be used by both parties? Does application performance data, can it be a lingua franca? For both operations and developers-- >> Absolutely. >> As they think about making sure that, operations people saying, "This is what works." And application developer saying, "This is what I need." That data can kind of start bringing them together and giving them a common thing to talk about. >> Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, right? >> Well, so, one last question here. This is the first, the inaugural Cisco DevNet Create. What do you think? You looking forward to future DevNet Creates? >> Absolutely. >> And what would you like to see coming out of this show as a consumer of the information, not as a presenter? But what would you like to see more of as these communities start to co-mingle and cross-pollinate ideas? >> I think some of the things that is a friction and will stay a friction until the embedded and operations teams come closer with the IT teams. And so I think best practices from both sides; being able to know what best practices are and then brainstorming and coming up with things that work for everybody is one. And maybe put people in each other's shoes, right? Like IT Ops doesn't always understand everything about what happens on the OT side and vice versa, so you know, like putting them in a situation where they get better hands-on, like a lab, right? Where they have better hands-on experience and now I understand what they are dealing with, right? Like, the people that have never been inside a NOC and they now can sit there and experience some of that. >> Which is not the most fun thing in the world to do. (laughs) >> Yeah, so then we need to make it more fun, right? >> (laughs) Yes. A NOC as World of Warcraft. >> (laughs) >> Alright, so, Balwinder Kaur, thank you very much. >> Thanks, Peter. >> Balwinder Kaur is the principal software engineer, or a principle software engineer at AppDynamics. And this is it, guys. Two days of Cisco DevNet Create. It's been a very successful conference. We've talked about some fascinating things. A lot of sessions on talking about DevOps. A lot of sessions on multi-cloud and the role that software's going to play inside businesses, digital business transform. This has been theCUBE. More of this in upcoming shows. Thank you very much for watching us over the course of the past couple days. For John Furrier, Peter Burris. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy...