(techno music) >> Hello and welcome to the special Cube presentation here in the Palo Alto studios of TheCube. I'm here with the Extend SD-Wan to the Wireless LAN segment here at Riverbed. I'm John Furrier. Our next guest is Bruce Miller, Vice President of Product Marketing at Riverbed Xirrus. Welcome to the segment: Extend the SD-Wann to the Wireless Lan Wi-Fi. [Production Man] No Wi-Fi. (sharp clap) >> Production Man: (mumbles) let's try it again. Let's get that good solid intro. >> Okay, good call. (laughing) >> Production Man: Reset please. >> Been a long day. >> Production Man: Yeah, that's okay. >> That's how long? >> Production Man: Well let's see. >> It's a tongue-twister on extend the wireless LAN. (laughing) Doesn't just roll off the tongue. (laughing) I got flustered, hold on. I got to make my font bigger. >> Production Man: You only get one mulligan. >> John: I buy mulligans when I play, or use lifesavers. (techno music) >> Hello and welcome to the special Cube presentation here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, co-host of TheCube. This special segment: Experiencing the Future of Networking With the Extend the SD-WAN to Wireless LAN segment conversation with Bruce Miller, Vice President of Product Marketing at Riverbed Xirrus. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for coming in. >> Great. Thanks for having me. >> So we had a whole segment on experiencing the future of networking with SD-WAN in action, but this is a dedicated segment really addressing the hottest area in the planet right now, relative to networking, that's wireless. Known as wireless LAN, local area networking or Wi-Fi. It's pervasive. It's everywhere. Most everyone knows about Wi-Fi if they have a device. They've had connections at large stadiums, large events, lot of use cases for it. But there's also the use case of internet of things. So this certainly is a topic of conversation for the future -- >> Absolutely. >> John: Of networking. >> Yeah and Wi-Fi is pervasive like you said. It's the connection to the internet for most people. In fact, a lot of people equate that; Wi-Fi equals the internet for a lot of teenagers for example. And as you mentioned, the IoT and where we are moving forward, you know it's all about growth and scale. And we only had maybe one or two Wi-Fi devices five or six years ago and now we're walking around with three, sometimes four. We have college students showing up with 15 sometimes, to their dorm. So it's very pervasive and the IoT, as you mentioned, billions and billions of devices coming online. So what we've seen is very much a scale and the need to scale these Wi-Fi networks. >> Yeah and then folks watching that are in the business of IT, you know we're all consumers too. So we've all been to stadiums or places where there's plenty of Wi-Fi, but you just can't get -- >> Bruce: Right. >> The (mumbles) to load. That's a backhaul issue, or in some cases there's not enough Wi-Fi frequency around. So there's been a dense challenge, there's been scale challenges. And then on the IoT side, for large enterprises, they have requirements that have to meet the network-- >> Right. >> Configuration. So there's complexity and scale on many fronts. This is the top priority companies. >> Yeah. >> How do you see that evolving? Because Wi-Fi wasn't really kind of built for that in the old days? >> Yeah. >> How has it evolved today? >> And it is actually a topic that Xirrus kind of saw very early on. And so if you go back 10, 12 years when we first put the company together, it was foreshadowing or foreseeing that this was going to happen. There was a lot of money going into the Wi-Fi devices, if you actually think about it, the Wi-Fi devices we're carrying around, but not the infrastructure itself. So we set out to solve that problem. And really the market then eventually kind of came to us in the sense of; hey, how do I get 10,000 people online at a convention center for example, or 20,000 people, 80,000 people in a stadium. Those are the extreme examples. But in general, it's just pervasive everywhere. You know you need Wi-Fi indoors, outdoors, in the elevator shafts, in the bathrooms. I mean we're called to cover any kind of scenario from that perspective. And so Xirrus, you know that was a challenge that we took on. And today I believe we solved it very, very well, because we can scale into these scenarios. And it keeps on going up into the right. I mean there's more traffic. There's more devices on the network every single day. Millions of devices in fact are provisioned to connect to Wi-Fi every single day that are new. And that keeps on, like I said, going up, and up. >> So scale and density has been your forte at Xirrus, now part of Riverbed though the acquisition. >> Bruce: Right. >> Translate that to the end-user or customer for you, which is the person either in IT or someone in operational technologies that has to deploy network fast. >> Bruce: Right. >> And they're going to use wireless Wi-Fi for that. What's in it for them? >> Yeah, and that's a very key part of it is deploying and getting this out there very simply and at scale. And you know provisioning the Wi-Fi network, deploying something that is now basically utility. You think about it, gas, water, electric, all these things are utilities. Wi-Fi's basically the same thing. In fact, I was just visiting a higher-ed customer of ours who made that statement. If the power goes out, the students are asking for Wi-Fi. They expect it to still work, right? It's more important, in fact, almost to them if they don't have that. So -- >> God forbid they lose the internet, but they're happy to live without power. >> Yeah, yeah, or water or whatever. So we see it that way. Wi-Fi is a utility. You need to make it utility-grade. You need to make it enterprise-grade, so we can scale and support those things. So you hit on a couple of those key things. How do you do it at scale? And then how do you provision and make that very ubiquitous and be able to role that out in a broad fashion? And that's key to what we do. >> I know you got a demo, we're going to get to that shortly. So stay tuned. Stay with us for the demo. We'll walk through a use case. Let's talk about the integration with Riverbed. Why is now important? Because I think we all can imagine and see how Wi-Fi is relevant. No doubt about it. Scale is a huge thing happening as more devices come online; people and machines. But when it has to connect into the network, that's a big conversation point with IT practitioners and people in these large companies. They want more Wi-Fi. They want it secure. They want it at scale. They want it with all the policies. Where's that integration with Riverbed? Can you explain how that works? >> Right. And that's key to where the acquisition came from. So we kind of talked about scale and then complexity, and how you deploy these things. The integration with Riverbed is really focused on the second one where there's the SD-WAN story that we've been talking about and the vision for running common policies across the WAN, the LAN, the WLAN into the data center, all managed though the cloud. And Xirrus fulfills that WLAN piece of that equation where it can be deployed at the wireless edge, connecting all those devices in an enterprise, or in whatever deployment you're talking about. And now the policies that are actually deployed are common with what is being put into the SD-WAN portion of it. So in the Riverbed side of things, that's a SteelConnect solution. So we're integrating in, as part of the SteelConnect solution, to support the software to find LAN, so to speak, at the edge of the network with switches and Wi-Fi access points that will support that. And so the synergies are very much there in terms of providing that vision across the entire network. >> So full integration of the SteelConnect from a management and provisioning standpoint -- demo perspective. >> Right. Yeah, configuration and the policies. Especially the application layer policies where you can say, hey I have a new CRN application I'm rolling out, or database application. And then that policy to prioritize that and insure a good user experience could be rolled out across the entire network. >> Give some quick use cases of customer industries that you guys are successful in. >> Sure. Probably the one we're best known for is what we call large public venues or LPVs. So this could be, for example, Liverpool Football Club which is a great name for us. Microsoft is another customer. So these are places where you have literally 10,000 and 20,000 people connecting at once, or 80,000 people in the stadium for example, a portion of those are connected to Wi-Fi. That is a very, very difficult scenario to actually solve. So we did some things that are very unique in the industry to support those kind of situations. Another big one for us is education. That is actually the biggest Wi-Fi market in general if you look at how many people are buying it or what kind of organizations are buying Wi-Fi. And we have some very large customers there; Brigham Young University for example and Idaho, Columbus State University. These are scenarios where they've rolled out ubiquitous Wi-Fi across campus, you know, stadiums, basketball arenas, all the way to the dorms, to the offices, to the auditoriums, to the libraries, indoor, outdoor, I mean it's very broad-use cases. And that's what you see in higher ed. >> I mean the Wi-Fi really kind of redefines, doesn't reimagine, but it redefines what a campus is. I mean in college -- >> Bruce: Yeah. >> You know what a campus is; hospitals, large venues like public flash mob contained campus. >> Yeah. >> The problem there's different. >> Yeah. >> There's 28 people trying to get into the -- >> All at the same time. >> Spectrum. >> Yeah, we call that flash traffic when you see, like at halftime maybe of a game, or some event happens. >> John: Touchdown, and all the videos. >> Yeah and everybody wants do do it at the same time. And those are very challenging to support those kind of scenarios. And that's something that we have really defined a solution that can handle very well. >> Well congratulations. Thank you for building that, because I love to get my Wi-Fi at Stanford Stadium and all the other places that need to have that. >> Bruce: Sure. >> And when I go to Liverpool to watch a soccer game-- >> Bruce: Yeah. I'll be kind of thinking about you guys. >> Bruce: Next time you're there. >> Okay, let's get into the demo. Let's take the real life, in action of extending SD-WAN to wireless LANs with Wi-Fi. >> Right. >> Show us what you got here. >> Bruce: Sure. So the first thing I want to talk about is provisioning the network. We have solution called CommandCenter that makes that very fast and easy. And this is actually a view of a dashboard that shows multiple tenants in a cloud management system. Okay, so imagine each of these as a separate customer. Or if I'm a large organization, this could be separate sites or locations. So I'm going to just do an example here and say let's create a new customer, and say TheCube is that customer. >> John: All right, I like that. >> Bruce: I will say that we're enabling you with Wi-Fi. So I'll create TheCube. And what this is actually doing is just with literally a few mouse clicks I've actually created a new cloud instance that is TheCube. And then what I can come down here and do is edit that location. And let's just say that, well let's see here, Joe is going to be the administrator of that. So he's going to have access to manage that network. And then I have identified a couple access points here. I'm just going to drag and drop those in there. And these are now provisioned to TheCube. And then the last thing I'm going to do is, let's take a profile. So let's say, I have a configuration template, or whatever, maybe I'll just call you. You have a business profile and I'm going to deploy that to your location as well. Hit deploy. And basically, just that quickly what I've done is actually spun up a new customer. So you can imagine if you're a service provider in fact, then that means you're quicker to revenue. I'm actually able to turn on a customer and start charging him for Wi-Fi. >> John: Let's stay on this example with TheCube. Because I think this is really important to the dense qua problem. So we go to Moscone Center all the time. >> Bruce: Sure. >> And they have Wi-Fi. They have large crowds come in. And we're used to doing a live broadcast there. >> Right, sure. >> So I'd love to have my own Wi-Fi provisioned. Is that what happened there? Could they potentially say, you know, dedicate this access point or this subnet of the network to TheCube? >> They could, I mean it would be a variation on this, but absolutely. I mean one of the things that we do very well is taking a Wi-Fi device or an AP and segment it out for use cases like that. >> John: AP being access point. >> Access point, exactly. So in a convention environment like that, those are actually quite challenging 'cause you have so many people on the network. And what you need to do is carve out a resource that might be dedicated to that. So if you can't get good Wi-Fi-- >> John: Like good video, like we do video production-- >> We can do that. >> and so we want to-- >> Yeah. >> Actually prioritize the video traffic. >> Bruce: Absolutely. And we'll show that a little bit later in the demo. >> The recreational. >> Bruce: Yeah, you separate it out, right. And make sure that-- >> So continue, so that on-ramping there-- >> Bruce: Yeah, so basically this was just showing you how quickly you can create TheCube. This is the environment that I basically set up. It's got a couple APs. It's ready to go. I can now start. I can plug in those access points, and that side is up and running. So that's the provisioning aspect. The second aspect of Wi-Fi that we don't talk about is access to the network itself. This is actually a challenge with a lot of environments that's how do I get all of these people onto the network at the same time and do that very easily without IT getting a phone call saying, hey help me I dunno what the password is or -- >> John: Are we onboarding users and stuff like that? >> Bruce: Yeah, onboarding. Well we have a solution there, it's called EasyPass. And that solution allows you to create the portals that you see when you log into -- >> John: Like (mumbles) tollbooths? >> Bruce: Yeah, and it basically provides a very easy way of doing that. So let's just say this is TheCube guest, and I'll create a new portal. And this is a guest network right, so I know when I came in here today, I connected to the Wi-Fi network and I had to figure out how to do that, and what was the password. So let's just say we're creating a Wi-Fi network here. This just shows how easy and quick that interface is. I can customize the page. Let's select an image. We'll select a background image here. And then actually use Facebook and Google can be optionally used to log in. So just that quickly I've created a portal that says, this is what you're going to see when you log in. Now obviously if it's TheCube you put your own logos and data there. But the idea here is that a user can come in here and either register with his email or use Facebook or Google for example to get on the network. >> John: Is that (mumbles) thing in through the preexisting credentials? >> Bruce: This is used, in this case, yeah with Facebook you're using the credential that they have to get onto their system. And You're basically using that for Wi-Fi as well, so that the user name and password is now providing access. >> John: So it's seamless to the user what their choice is. >> Bruce: Yeah. And some people use Facebook, others will just connect with their email. >> John: Some people want to register, but most people just want to connect with either Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever they have. >> Bruce: Yeah, yeah. And so this basically just shows how quick and easy it is to set up a guest page that gets somebody on the network. Very simple to use. And so IT administers love this because it simplifies their job significantly. The other thing I wanted to show here real quick is just the Microsoft Azure to Google integration. We actually have integration directly with these two ecosystems where if you already are in a Office 365 shop or a Google App shop as a lot of schools are, they can just use those credentials. The user logs in with their laptop, with their username, password, and it gets them access to Wi-Fi at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone. >> John: So if it's active directory, you got your Microsoft. If it's Google and what they use you can do that. >> Bruce: Right, yeah. So it's all in the cloud. So now this is again, moving everything into the cloud as opposed to using some local resource to do authentication and maintaining those resources. >> John: That seems to be the theme with Riverbed; simplify. >> Bruce: Right, absolutely. And this is the two big things here. We're scaling the Wi-Fi network to support these broad use cases. And then we're simplifying it with the tools to enable that to roll out very smoothly. >> Well all the research points to, that manual task that don't add value will be automated away. And those tasks will be shifted to more value activities. >> Right. >> Okay, so take us through monitoring. Now what happens when, you know I'm doing my Snapchats or Instagram, or my Facebook Lives, and you go, whoa, whoa, whoa. >> Bruce: Right. >> John: Or I'm interested in knowing if someone's downloading the latest movie on BitTorrent. >> Bruce: Yeah, yeah and that's very key. So if I go back to our solution here. The dashboard actually shows what's going on in the network. So this is actually a very flexible interface. You can move things around, create widgets, do different things. And in fact we have a map function where you would lay all the stuff out on a map and then I can actually show what the coverage is, for example that Wi-Fi and a floorplan. This happens to be my house. >> John: That's an RF metric? >> Bruce: That is actually RF coverage within this location of these access points. >> John: That is very cool. >> Bruce: Then I can jump in here and troubleshoot from there. But to your point in terms of what's going on -- >> John: So it shows overlaying clouds and channels and all those deep, deep configuration stuff. >> Bruce: All the information if you need to go there. >> John: And you just don't need to get involved in that. >> Bruce: Most of this stuff is automated. There's the auto button for a lot of this when you hook up the Wi-Fi the first time. You don't want to have to tweek all of those things. So we have the auto button that 90% of the users would use or more. And then if you needed to tune it we can go from there. But yeah, to your point in terms of application policies and controls. Here's an example of what we do here. For example, I can see what types of traffic is on this network here. So let's look at for example, YouTube. And we see that there's actually a couple users here that are using a lot of YouTube traffic. I can click on any of these applications and see what the amount of traffic is associated with that. But what's more interesting then is doing something about it. So what we have is a policy engine that recognizes 1,600 different applications and allows me to create policies on them. I can create rules and say, okay let's look at YouTube specifically, which is a streaming media application. And you can see we have hundreds in here, in fact 1,600 total. And I can block YouTube if I so desire from the network. Or maybe I allow it in there, but I limit that traffic per user to say 500 K or something like that so they maybe can't watch a 4 K video or something like that. So Enterprise is-- >> John: Make it crawl for them. >> Bruce: Yeah, you can do it, but you can't overload the network. So Enterprise is hospitals. You know schools love this because they can get that granular control of the network. And maybe this happens to be instead of Enterprise that's using a database, maybe they're an Oracle shop, and so they want to raise the quality of service on that and put that high priority. So you could do that just the same. >> John: And so whatever the priority is, they can get bandwidth through it. So if it's live gaming, and you want to have that game be, that's what I want. >> Bruce: Exactly. >> John: Or minimize it. >> Bruce: So this really, what this map ends up doing is mapping the wireless to the business needs of the organization that's deploying it. >> John: So the optimization of the network, you can look at much more clearly with the visualization, and make decisions. On the network map there with the RF. Is that for placement of access points? Or is that more for understanding propagation or -- >> Bruce: It's, yeah we have a separate design tool that allows you to design those heat maps. And then when you actually have a live network what you were looking at was actually the coverage estimation based on what's actually deployed. >> John: So it's kind of -- >> Bruce: So if an AP goes down, it turns red and then you'll see a hole in your coverage and you'll know that you have a problem that you have to go and solve. >> Okay, great. So it's (mumbles) gives you a hand. >> Yeah. >> Okay, analytics. What other analytics do you have in the demo that you could share? >> Bruce: Right, so analytics is an interesting one. We have a lot of data that we pull into the network from the Wi-Fi. So if you think about it, we know who is on the network. We know what they're doing. What applications they're going to. We know where they are, 'cause we actually calculate the location of those users. And that information is all pulled into this central location here. So if I pull in a couple of these analytics charts you actually see now what is going on in that location over time. So here we have users and how long they're actually in the network. >> John: Can you see the URL path they're using? >> Bruce: That's in the application portion. This is just kind of showing bulk, like how many users are showing in the network and how long are they there. And then how many are there, and how many are actually repeat or new. So a retail customer may be interested that, if it's like I'm getting 40% existing customers coming back, but maybe there's 60% on a given day. And then that can change over time depending on location. So the bottom line is Wi-Fi is turning, for us, into a big data challenge or solution to where I can take all that data on who, what, where, why that they're doing and then turn that into business intelligence that the retailer, that's a big one, can use for making more intelligent decisions about how they run their business. >> Okay, so bottom line for the folks watching, with respect to wireless; what's the future state that they need to be thinking about in terms of planning for Wi-Fi and to experience the future of networking by extending SD-WAN to the wireless LAN? >> Right, so there's a lot of things to consider when you look at Wi-Fi. What you're doing today is probably not going to be the same as what you do next year, and certainly not five years from now. So this is actually a big challenge for a lot of our customers to kind of get that future view of what's going to happen, because they're making a purchase decision today that's going to last them for awhile. So what we look at is solving the problems that those users might run into, which can be scale, you might be using and seeing double or triple the number of users in traffic in the next few years, so you have to solve that. You have to solve the security problems, which we didn't talk about too much today, but EasyPass is one of the solutions for that. I want to ensure those users can get on, but make sure that they're secure, my corporate data is going to be protected. And then finally the simplicity of doing that. So I know Wi-Fi is going to change. I know the network requirements are going to change. How can I simply go into an interface, though this cloud management solution we provide and make those changes that are needed and adapt to that dynamic that we're talking about. And then all of that then folds into the broader picture of the SD-WAN story that we talk about with Riverbed, where now I can do some of those things across the LAN and WAN holistically through a common control point. >> And the common control point is key because the users don't view things as LAN and WAN. They just want their stuff. >> Bruce: Yeah, right. >> Wherever they are. >> Yeah, they don't care. So they might be connected into the Wi-Fi, so that's pretty visible, but in the end the Wi-Fi could work fine, but if that WAN connection is down or compromised, or anywhere in between the data center, all these things have to be working. >> And the tools to make the integration easier, whether it's Microsoft 365, and Google, On-Premise or GoogleLogin or Facebook. >> Right, right, all those ecosystems. I mean this is the big part of what we're trying to do is tap into those systems that everybody is using anyway and make it all seamless. >> John: And easy. >> So everyone knows how to log into their Google or Facebook account, so now let's just make that part of the Wi-Fi experience. >> And security's all solid? >> Yeah, security is solid if you use it. And that's the big thing about Wi-Fi is there's a lot of open guest network still out there. And little by little you're seeing those become secure, but what tends to happen is that complexity and security are kind of at odds with each other. The more secure you make a network, the more complex. >> John: And here you're making it easier. >> That's why EasyPass and the name, that's what we do to make that as simple as possible because security is very important. >> Bruce Miller: Extending the SD-WAN to the Wireless LAN in our segment experiencing the future of networking. Thanks so much for sharing. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE presentation here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, this special segment's experiencing the future of networking with the extend the SD-WAN to Wireless LAN segment conversation with Bruce Miller, Vice President of Product Marketing at Riverbed Xirrus, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for coming in. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, we had a whole segment on experiencing the future of networking with SD-WAN in action, but this is a dedicated segment really addressing the hottest area in the planet right now, relative to networking, that's wireless. >> Mmmhmm. >> Known as Wireless LAN, local area networking, or WiFi, is pervasive, it's everywhere, most everyone knows about WiFi if they have a device, they've had connections, large stadiums, large events, a lot of use cases, for it. But there's also the use case of Internet of Things. This certainly is a topic of conversation for the future -- >> Absolutely. >> of networking. >> Yeah, and you know, WiFi is pervasive like you said, >> It's the connection to the Internet for most people. In fact, a lot of people equate that, WiFi equals the Internet for a lot of teenagers for example, so, and as you mention the IoT, and where we are moving forward, it's all about growth and scale, I mean, we only had maybe one or two WiFi devices five or six years ago, now we're walking around with three, sometimes four, we have college students showing up with 15 sometimes, in their dorms. So it's very pervasive, and then the IoT as you mentioned, billions and billions of devices coming online. So, what we've seen is very much a scale and the need to scale these WiFi networks. >> Yeah, and folks watching that are in the business of IT, we're all consumers too. We've all been to stadiums or places where there's plenty of WiFi, but you just can't get the page to load. That's a backhaul issue, or, in some cases, there's not enough WiFi frequency around. So it's been a dense challenge, it's been scale challenges, and then on the IoT side for large enterprises, they have requirements that have to meet the network configurations. >> Right. >> So, there's complexity and scale on many fronts. This is the top priority of companies -- >> Yeah. >> How are you, how do you see that evolving, because, WiFi wasn't really kind of built for that -- >> Yeah. >> in the old days. How has it evolved today? >> This is actually a topic that Xirrus kind of solved very early on, so if you go back 10, 12 years, when we first put the company together, it was foreshadowing or foreseeing that this was going to happen. There was a lot of money going into the WiFi devices, if you actually think about it, the WiFi devices we're carrying around, but not the infrastructure. So, we've set out to solve that problem, and really the market kind of eventually came to us, in the sense of, "Hey, how do I get 10,000 people online at a convention center?", for example, or 20,000 people, 80,000 people in a stadium? Those are the extreme examples, but in general, it's just pervasive everywhere. You know, you need WiFi indoors, outdoors, in the elevator shafts, in the bathrooms, we're called to cover any kind of scenario, from that perspective. And so, Xirrus, that was a challenge that we took on, and today, I believe we solve it very very well, because we can scale into these scenarios. It keeps on going, up and to the right. I mean, there's more traffic, there's more devices on the network every single day. Millions of devices in fact, are provisioned to connect to WiFi every single day that are new, and that keeps on, like I said, going up, and up and up. >> So, scale and density has been your forte at Xirrus, now part of Riverbed through the acquisition. Translate that to the end user, customer for you, which is the person in IT, or someone in operational technologies that has to deploy network fast. >> Right. >> And they're going to use wireless and WiFi for that. >> Mmmhmm. >> What's in it for them? >> Yeah, and that's very key part of it is deploying and getting this out there very simply and it's scale. And provisioning the WiFi network, deploying something that is now basically a utility, you know, think about it, water, gas, water, electric, all these things are utilities, WiFi is basically the same thing. In fact, I was just visiting a higher ed customer of ours, who made that statement, if the power goes out, the students are asking for WiFi, they expect it to still work, right? It's more important in fact, almost to them, if they don't have that. >> God forbid they lose the Internet, but they're happy to live without power. >> Yeah, yeah. Or water, or whatever. So, we see it that way, WiFi is a utility. You need to make it utility grade, you need to make it enterprise grade so it can scale and support those things. So, you hit on a couple of those key things, how do you do it at scale, and then how do you provision and make that very ubiquitous and be able to roll that out in a broad fashion. That's key to what we do. >> I know you got a demo we're going to get to that shortly, so, stay tuned, stay with us for the demo, we'll walk through a use case, let's talk about the integration with Riverbed. Why is it now important? Because I think we all can imagine and see how WiFi is relevant. No doubt about it. Scale is a huge thing happening as more devices come online, people, and machines. But when it has to connect into the network, that's a big conversation point with IT practitioners and people in these large companies, they want more WiFi, they want it secure, they want it at scale, they want it with all the policies, where's that integration with Riverbed, can you explain how that works? >> Right, and that's key to where the acquisition came from. So we kind of talked about scale and then complexity and how you deploy these things. The integration with Riverbed is really focused on the second one, where, there's the SD-WAN, story that we've been talking about, and the vision for running common policies across the WAN, the LAN, the WLAN, into the datacenter, all managed through the cloud. And Xirrus fulfills that WLAN piece of that equation where it can deployed at the wireless edge, connecting all those devices in an enterprise, or in whatever deployment you're talking about. And now the policies that are actually deployed are common with what is being put into the SD-WAN portion of it, so in the Riverbed side of things that's the SteelConnect solution. So, we're integrating in as part of the SteelConnect solution to support the software defined LAN, so to speak, at the edge of the network, with switches and WiFi access points that will support that. So, the synergies are very much there in terms of, providing that vision across the entire network. >> So full integration into SteelConnect, from a managing and provisioning standpoint, demo perspective -- >> Right. Yeah, configuration and the policies, especially the application layer policies where you can say, "Hey, I have a new CRM application that I'm rolling out", or database application. Then that policy to prioritize that, and ensure a good user experience could be rolled out across the entire network. >> Give some quick use cases of customer industries that you guys are successful in. >> Sure. So, probably the one we're best known for is what we call large public venues or LPVs, this could be for example, Louisville Pro Football Club, which is a great name for us, Microsoft is another customer, so these are places where you have literally 10,000, 20,000 people connecting at once, or 80,000 people in the stadium for example, a portion of those are connected to WiFi. That is a very very difficult scenario to actually solve. We did some things that are very unique in the industry to support those kind of situations. Another big one for us is education. That is actually the biggest WiFi market in general, if you look at how many people are buying it, or what kind of organizations are buying WiFi. And we have some very large customers there, Brigham Young University for example in Idaho. Columbus State University, these are scenarios where they've rolled ubiquitous WiFi across campus, stadiums, basketball arenas, all the way to the dorms, to the offices, to the auditoriums, to the libraries, indoor, outdoor, I mean, very broad use cases. And that's what you see in higher ed. >> WiFi really kind of redefines, it doesn't reimagine, but it redefines what a campus is. I mean college -- >> Yeah. >> You know what a campus is, hospitals, large venues like public -- >> Right. >> Flash mob contained campus. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Problem there is different. >> Yeah. >> Too many people trying to get into the -- >> All at the same time. >> Spectrum. >> Yeah, we call that flash traffic, like when you see like at halftime maybe of a game, or some event happens -- >> Touchdown all the videos -- >> Yeah everybody wants to do it at the same time, and those are very challenging to support. Those kind of scenarios, and that's something that we have really defined a solution that can handle very well. >> Well, congratulations, thank you for building that, because I love to get my WiFi at Stanford Stadium, and all the other places that need to have that. And when I go to Liverpool to watch a soccer game, I'll think about you guys. Okay, let's get into the demo, let's take a real life in action of extending SD-WAN into wireless LANs with WiFi. >> Right. >> Show us what you got here. Sure. So, the first thing I want to talk about is provisioning the network. So, we have a solution called CommandCenter that makes that very fast, and easy. This is actually a view of a dashboard that shows multiple tenants in a cloud management system. Okay? So, imagine each of these as a separate customer, or, if I'm a large organization, this could be separate sites or locations. So, I'm going to just do an example here and say, let's create a new customer. And, say theCUBE is that customer. >> John: Alright, we like that. >> Bruce: I will say that we're enabling you with WiFi, so I'll create theCUBE. And what this is actually doing is just with literally a few mouse clicks I've actually created a new cloud instance that is theCUBE, and then what I can come down here and do, is edit that location, and let's just say that let's see here, Joe is going to be the administrator of that, so he's going to have access to manage that network. And then I have identified a couple access points here, I'm just going to drag and drop those in there. And these are now provisioned to theCUBE. And then, the last thing I'm going to do is, let's take a profile, so let's say, I have a configuration template or whatever, maybe I'll just call you, you have a business profile, and I'm going to deploy that, to your location as well. Hit deploy, and basically just that quickly what I've done is actually spun up a new customer, so you can imagine if you're a service provider in fact, then that means you're quicker to revenue. I'm actually able to turn on a customer and start charging 'em for WiFi, right? >> John: Let's stay on this example with theCUBE, because I think this is really important to the dense cloud problem. So we go to Moscone Center all the time. >> Bruce: Sure. >> And they have WiFi, they have large crowds come in, and we're still doing a live broadcast, there. >> Right, sure. >> So, I'd love to have my own WiFi provisioned. Is that what that happened there? Could they potentially say, dedicate this access point, or this subnet of the network to theCUBE? >> It could, it'd be a variation on this, but absolutely. One of the things that we do very well is taking a WiFi device, or a AP, and segment it out for use cases like that. >> John: AP being access point. >> Access point, exactly. So, in a convention environment like that, those are actually quite challenging, cause you have so many people on the network and what you need to do is carve out a resource that might be dedicated to that. So, if you can't get WiFi, >> Like a video -- >> We can do that. >> We do video production, so we want to actually prioritize the video traffic. >> Absolutely, and we'll show that a little bit later in the demo -- >> or the recreational... >> Yeah, you separate it out and make sure that you're -- >> Okay, continue. So that onramping there -- >> Bruce: Yeah, so basically this was just showing you how quickly you can create theCUBE. This is the environment that I basically set up. It's got a couple APs, it's ready to go. I can now start, I can plug in those access points, and that site is up and running. So that's the provisioning aspect. The second aspect of WiFi that we're going to talk about is access to the network itself. This is actually a challenge with a lot of environments, that's, you know, how do I get all these people onto the network, at the same time, and do that very easily without IT getting a phone call saying, "Hey, help me. I dunno what the password is," >> John: So onboarding users and stuff like that? >> Bruce: Yeah, onboarding. So, what we have for a solution there is called EasyPass. That solution allows you to create the portals that you see when you log into the network. >> John: Like going through the toll booths. >> Bruce: Yeah, and it basically provides a very easy way of doing that. So let's just say this is theCUBE guest, and I'll create a new portal, and this is a guest network, right? So I know when I came in here today, I connected to the WiFi network, I had to figure out how to do that, and what was the password? So let's just say we're creating a WiFi network here, this just shows how easy and quick that interface is. I can customize a page, let's select an image, we'll select a background image here, and then actually use Facebook and Google can be optionally used to log in. So just that quickly, I've created a portal that says, "This is what you're going to see when you log in." Now, obviously, if it's theCUBE you'd put your own logos and data there, but the idea here is that a user can come in here and either register with his email, or use Facebook or Google, for example, you get on the network. >> John: Is that OAuthing in, through the pre-existing credentials? >> Bruce: This is using, in this case, yeah with Facebook you're using the credential that they have to get onto their system, and you're basically using that for WiFi as well. So that the username and password is now providing access. >> John: So it's seamless to the user what their choice is. >> Bruce: Yeah, and some people use Facebook, others will just connect with their email. >> John: Some people want to register, but most people just want to connect with Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever they have. >> Bruce: Yeah, and so this basically shows how quick and easy it is to set up a guest page, that gets somebody on the network, very simple to use, and so IT administers love this because it simplifies their job significantly. The other thing I wanted to show real quick is just the Microsoft Azure and Google integration. We actually have integration directly with these two ecosystems, where, if you're already are in an Office 365 shop, or a Google Apps shop, as a lot of schools are, they can just use those credentials, the student, the user logs in with their laptop, with their username password and it gets them access to WiFi at the same time. >> So if it's connected -- >> Kill two birds with one stone. >> So if it's active directory you got your Microsoft, if it's Google and what they use, you can do that. >> Bruce: Yeah, so it's all in the cloud. So now, this is again, moving everything to the cloud as opposed to using some local resource to do authentication, and maintaining those resources. >> John: That seems to be the theme with Riverbed. Simplify. >> Bruce: Right, absolutely. And that's, those are the two big things here. We're scaling the WiFi network to support these broad use cases, and then we're simplifying it with the tools to enable that to roll out very smoothly. >> Well that's, all the research points to that manual task that don't add value, will be automated away, and those tasks will be shifted to more value activities. Okay, so take us to monitoring. Now what happens when I'm doing my SnapChats, or Instagram, or my Facebook Lives, you go, Woah! >> Bruce: Right. >> John: Or, I'm interested in knowing if someone is downloading the latest movie on BitTorrent. >> Bruce: Yeah, that's very key. So, if I go back to our solution here, the dashboard actually shows what's going on in the network, right? So, this is actually a very flexible interface, you can move things around, create widgets, do different things, and in fact, we have a map function where you would lay all this stuff out on a map, and then I can actually show what the coverage is, for example, that WiFi had a floorplan. This happens to be my house. >> John: That's an RF map right there? >> Bruce: This is actually RF coverage within this location of these access points. >> John: That's very cool. >> Bruce: Then I can jump in here and troubleshoot from there. But to your point in terms of what's going on -- >> John: So it shows overlaying clouds and channels and all that, kind of deep configuration stuff? >> Bruce: All the information If you need to go there. >> John: And you just don't need to get involved in that. >> Bruce: Most of this stuff is automated. There's the auto button for a lot of this when you hook up the WiFi the first time. You don't want to have to tweak all those things, so we have the auto button that 90% of the users would use, or more, and then if you need to tune it we can go from there. But yeah, to your point on in terms of application policies and controls, here's an example of what we do here. For example, I can see what types of traffic is on this network here. So, let's look at, for example, YouTube, and we see that there's actually a couple users here that are using a lot of YouTube traffic, I can click on any of these applications and see what the amount of traffic is associated with that. But what's more interesting then, is doing something about it. So, what we have is a policy engine that recognizes 1600 different applications, and allows me to create policies on them. So, I can create rules, and say, okay, let's look at YouTube specifically. Which is a streaming media application, and you can see we have hundreds in here, in fact 1600 in total, and I can block YouTube if I so desire from the network, or maybe I allow it in there, but I limit that traffic per user, to say, 500K or something like that, so they maybe can't watch a 4K video or something like that. So, enterprises -- >> Make it crawl for 'em. >> Bruce: Yeah, you can do it, but you can't overload the network. So, enterprises, hospitals. Schools love this, because they can get that granular control of the network. Maybe this happens to be instead of an enterprise that's using a database, maybe they're an Oracle shop, and so they want to raise the quality of service on that, and put that high priority. So you can do that just the same. >> John: And so whatever the priority is, they can give bandwidth to it. So, if it's live gaming, if I want to have that game be -- >> Yeah. >> John: That's what I want. >> Bruce: Exactly. >> John: Or minimize it. >> Bruce: So this really, what this map ends up doing is mapping the wireless to the business needs of the organization that's deploying it, so -- >> John: So, the optimization of the network, you can look at, much more clearly with the visualization, and make decisions. On the network map there with the RF, is that for placement of access points, or is that more for understanding propagation, or -- >> Bruce: It's, yeah, we have a separate design tool that allows you to design those heat maps, and then when you actually have a live network what you were looking at was actually the coverage estimation based on what's actually deployed. >> John: So that's kind of -- >> So if an AP goes down it turns red and then you'll see a hole in your coverage, and you know that you have a problem that you have to go and solve. >> Okay great, so it's a little... because you handle it. Okay, analytics. What other analytics do you have in the demo that you can share? >> Bruce: Right. So analytics is an interesting one. We have a lot data that we pull into the network from the WiFi. If you think about it, we know, who is on the network, we know what they're doing, what applications they're going to, we know where they are, because we actually calculate the location of those users, and that information is all pulled into this central location here. So if I pull in a couple of these analytics charts, you actually see now, what is going on in that location over time. Here we have users and how long they're actually in the network. >> John: Can you see the URL path that they're using? >> Bruce: That's in the application portion, right? This is just kind of showing bulk, like, how many users are showing on the network, and how long are they there. And how many are there, and how many are repeat or new. So a retail customer might be interested in that, it's like I'm getting 40% existing customers coming back, but maybe there's 60% on a given day. And then that could change over time depending on location. So, the bottom line is, WiFi is turning for us into a big data challenge or solutional, where I can take all that data on who, what, where, why, that they're doing, and turn that into business intelligence that the retailer, that's a big one, can use for making more intelligent decisions about how they run their business. >> Okay, so, bottom line for the folks watching, with respect to wireless, what's the future state that they need to be thinking about in terms of planning for WiFi and to experience the future of networking, by extending SD-WAN to the wireless LAN. >> Right, so there's a lot of things to consider when you look at WiFi, what you're doing today is probably not going to be the same as what you do next year, and certainly not five years from now. This is actually a big challenge for a lot of our customers to kind of get that future view of what's going to happen, because they're making a purchase decision today, that's going to last them for a while. So, what we look at is solving the problems that those users might run into, which could be scale, you might be using, and seeing double or triple the number of users and traffic in the next few years. So you have to solve that. You have to solve the security problems, which we didn't talk about too much today, but EasyPass is one of the solutions for that. I want to ensure those users can get on, but make sure that they're secure, my corporate data is going to be protected. And then finally, the simplicity of doing that. So, I know my WiFi is going to change, I know the network requirements are going to change, how I can a simply go into an interface through this cloud management solution we provide, and make those changes that are needed, and adapt to that dynamic that we're talking about. Then all of that folds into the broader picture of the SD-WAN story that we talked about with Riverbed where now I can do some of those things across the LAN and the WAN holistically, through a common control point. >> And the common control point is key, because users don't view things as LAN and WAN, they just want their stuff, wherever they are. >> Yeah, they don't care, right. So, you know they might be connected to the WiFi, so that's pretty visible, but in the end, the WiFi could work fine, but if that WAN connection is down, or compromised, or anywhere in between the datacenter, all these things have to be working. >> And the tools to make the integration easier, whether it's Microsoft 365, and Google on Premise, or Google login, or Facebook. >> Right, right. All those ecosystems, I mean, this is a big part of what we're trying to do, is tap into those systems that everybody is using anyway, and make it all seamless. Everyone knows how to login to their Google or, Facebook account, so now let's make that part of the WiFi experience. >> And security is all solid. >> Yeah, security is solid if you use it. And that's the big thing about WiFi, is there's a lot of open guest networks still, out there, and little by little, you're seeing those become secure, but what tends to happen is that security and simplicity, are kind of, er, complexity, and security are kind of at odds with each other. The more secure you make a network, the more complex. >> And here you're making it easier. >> That's why EasyPass, I mean in the name, that's what we do to make that as simple as possible, because security is very important. >> Bruce Miller, extending the SD-WAN to the Wireless LAN, in our segment experiencing the future of networking, thanks so much for sharing, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)