(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. Two great guests Linda Tong, general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Garrick Linn, architect of operations at Match.com. Thanks for joining us. We're talking about AppDynamics, Match.com and customer experience. Mainly around cloud migration. So Linda, great to see you and Garrick, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you again. Thank you for having us. >> Same here. >> Linda, you're a CUBE alumni. we've talked about cloud migration application performance, modern application development, all powered by the Cloud, right? So this is really key and people are relying on the cloud and cloud scale and data to drive the digital transformation, the digital services and applications right now. How has the pandemic affected your customers and their expectations for digital experiences? >> Oh boy, I mean the pandemic has been, it has been rough for our customers, you know, and part of that is what Garrick's going to tell you a little bit more about today, but folks are seeing this increase in expectancy of accelerated speed and delivering innovation, building great applications and iterating on them quickly. And frankly, their customers' demands we're engaging with them through digital services. And that has led to this massive increase in, one, the types of technologies that they're consuming to build and deliver these applications. And two the complexity upon how they actually wrap their arms around it and understand what's going on and deliver these great experiences. And so it's been a rough road for our customers and what we find with AppDynamics and Cisco is our ability to partner with our customers to help them wrap their arms around that complexity. >> John: Garrick, I'd love to get your commentary on this because I'll say, Match.com has been at large-scale for many, many years, and now the pandemic comes in now a new user experience, more accelerated, more action, more things are happening, right? So this is truly the hybrid world coming together. I mean, it is kind of the same game, but kind of new patterns are emerging. What have you seen in the pandemic around the expectations and the services and you guys are providing in the digital experiences? >> Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, Match has been around for quite some time. We've been here for over 25 years. We have an interesting mix, heterogeneous, technology, some old stuff, some new stuff. A lot of the mentality that we try to bring is to innovate. The pandemic was, it brought a lot of uncertainty. We weren't really sure how people were going to react. Was it going to be everybody kind of hunkers down on dating definitely is something that requires human interaction in multiple levels. And it turned out that people were still very much interested in getting to a place where they can find human connections and you know Match as a premium product tries to make that delightful. And so we had our hands full, especially at the beginning, things like, by checking the video features, how does that work? What are the expectations? Is that going to creep people out? If we try to offer that, are they going to use it? How are they going to date? How are they going to talk? How can we make sure that they're safe? All these kinds of things went into it. And so when we have been using AppDynamics for you know, years now, well before the pandemic, and we use that in order to get a gauge, not just on the type of traffic and load, but also, "Hey, you've got these new features, "how do they fit into this huge complex environment?" And so some of those timelines that maybe were a little bit more relaxed were very much accelerated, And like a lot of companies, we had to figure out how to deliver on that. >> John: Yeah, Linda, I want to get your thoughts. We've talked about in the past, AppDynamics has been a leader in really accelerating the value for customers. Now with the pandemic, you mentioned these new experiences are being pulled in from the physical world, right? So you have things that were happening on digital in the application space. Now you have more experiences coming in because there's no places to meet face to face. Now it's coming together, but people have been seeing the value. Well, if I can't meet in person Match.com are going to do some things, new things, online chat, whatever. This dynamic of old way, new way is changing and cloud is powering that. What are you seeing in terms of your customers' journeys around what was once pre-pandemic and now post-pandemic? >> Well, a big part of that is more and more of these experiences rely on digital services and these amazing sort of ways to connect with each other and in a very digital space, expectations of customers have changed. So not only do you experience applications and you want it to be simple, easy to use, delightful, and it delivers on the needs that you want. But on top of that, you expect it to be performant. You expect it to be secure. You expect there to be frankly, no hiccups whatsoever, because now this is your way to connect with others. This is your way to find dates or go on dates. And the last thing you want, is watching your screen pixelate, as you're trying to have an important conversation. And these kinds of experiences and these challenges as people build more and more of these digital services to build these connections, frankly, require a lot more of folks like Garrick and his team. They now have to deliver amazing experiences with perfect performance, no security risks, no bumps in the night. And that's really tough, right? Expectations have gone through the roof. >> John: Yeah, the whole story on that one point, just to kind of add live in this was that that whole concept of moving fast used to take months, right? I mean, weeks, months, now it's days and hours. So months to weeks, days and hours but Garrick, this is the challenge. This is the opportunity with the cloud. Can you just take us through your cloud journey and your goals and some of the impacts that has had on your transition to the cloud? What does that look like? >> Yeah, so we've had our on-prem data centers for quite some time, and we started putting our toe in, I guess, although it was a kind of intense at the beginning, just trying to get people on board and to say, "Hey, this is possible." We started out with a fairly small SWAT team then managed within a couple of months, working closely with our developers. We have a lot of smart people, you know, with background or overall, just security folks over devs to just demonstrate that we could do it. So we managed to take something like 80% of our front end traffic for most of the day, just kind of spinning that up, learning lessons from that, knowing what we didn't know. AppDynamics, if we didn't have that would have been almost impossible to get a read if for no other reason, then just one little tidbit. We used to have a data center in Virginia. And so physics being what it is, you know, there's just been a flight that we have to contend with. And for a couple, few years, we hadn't had the 30 millisecond or so round trip latency on there. So all of a sudden we're going back to the cloud that reintroduced this latency. So what does that mean? Will you be asked to sort of glide by and absorb it? How do we track it? How can we figure out what the Delta is between, you know, here's how we've done things on-prem. Here's how it looks out here. If you are the cross, you know, calls and, you know, AppDynamics was what we used to be able to get a read and say, "Hey, look, it isn't as good as we know we can make it, but it's something, it's a starting point. Here's why, we can show you the graphs. We can show you the data. Let's do this thing." So we then pulled back and we have focused this year on actually our affinity apps, which is a collection of applications that are also going to be okay just in, and so we've been asked to get those completely migrated over. We're going to be running in hybrid mode for a while. We're going to need to be able to compare apples to apples, apples to orangutans, all that. And this is one of the main things for you, we describe. >> {John] If I can just follow up on that just real quick, because I think this is a good point. You got the data points, you double down on that. You're looking at real data, and then you look at success and you double down, that's the playbook. So, and the other thing is that you guys actually have a real operation that's running full throttled, right? (John laughs) So, yeah, so I can see that nice balance. What does the future look like beyond that? Because when you got a business that's scaling, it's running, it's like changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet. You got to continue to push the envelope. >> Yup, so, and no, exactly right. Again, we're a premium product. And so we've got to back that up. And that means, maintaining high availability. And so over the next few years, we're going to be looking at what have we already do? What can we move in piecemeal kind of way where it makes sense? What are the things that we can rethink? We're also using AppDynamics as part of our containerization initiative. You know, we've got lots of virtual infrastructure, but what is it, again, what does it look like on-prem, in a container, go down the list of different things that might be different. And then to be able to compare that to what it looks like, in the cloud. So it's going to be a while yet, but like a lot of companies, when we got into this, we didn't think it was going to be done in six months. Even if we have to deliver those features at a much faster rate, we know that the long haul, we got to make smart decisions and plan the capacity, and, you know, get there. (chuckles) >> John: That's a real pragmatic approach. Linda, you and I both are sports fans. We've talked in the past about sports, and the old adage, what inning are we in growth? It's to use that baseball metaphor. I would say it's a double header, game one won by the cloud, game two is happening now. And the trend is this end-to-end mature, operationally focused customer base. And IT, where IT has shifted to the cloud right now. And they're having this new view of what modern is. End-to-end, understanding different stacks relative to applications. It's not as simple as it was before, but it's relevant. Can you share your views on how that's playing out because, or do you agree with that? And do you see that as an important part of the customer? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's, that complexity that the IT organizations are seeing now, as they fully adopt the cloud for all their new applications and start to migrate some of their existing applications over. That world is only increasing in complexity. The way that you can virtualize your applications, break them out into millions of services, the dependencies you have on third party applications or SaaS services. These things only add that many more data points that you now have to cover and think about and make sure that those things deliver upon their SLAs, right? And wrapping your arms around that requires a partner to help you separate signal from noise. Because now you're going into a world without simplicity that you just mentioned has gotten to some point where it's beyond what you can actually sort of keep in your mind. Beyond what you can just look at data and sift through and understand, you really need tools and systems that come together, and understand that data for you and start to represent your business to you in a new way and abstract away those layers of complexity. While you do that, because I think, as you talk about those innings, that first inning, second inning, or rather first game, second game in the series, it's not a full migration to the cloud, right? There are going to be some applications that stay on-prem that stay in their traditional environments and may never move. And then some of them are going to go hybrid. Some will keep parts of the applications on-prem, and they're going to start to modularize components of it. And so it's not going to be sort of a mass scale migration. And then we're all in the promised land. And we deal with the cloud complexity. It's going to be ever increasing complexity. As we now introduce so many variants of applications, so many variants of technology, and what people are going to need is someone who can help them cover that entire estate and understand it at scale. >> John: Yeah, I mean, I think it's the enterprise conversion, if you will of cloud operations on-premises because of the reasons. And now you've got the edge. Garrick, this is the whole kind of end-to-end stack conversation view. And by the way, there isn't one tech stack to rule them all because you have different use cases. You might have an application that needs a financial gateway or have other capabilities. So integration's huge. This only increases the point Linda was making about complexity behind the scenes. How does AppDynamics help you with this for Match.com? >> So we have quite a bit of infrastructure, you know, a lot of it is shared, well, most of all, maintaining, sandboxes for user data and that sort of thing. And so now the navigating that space is always interesting. So for instance, one of the new things that we have coming out is Star.com It's out there right now. It's a dating site that's geared towards single parents. It does share some of the infrastructure, but we're realizing what that means, how is that different, how our registration flow is different, how our subscription flow is different. Where are the things that DevOps are actively trying to improve on and rethink? That's one of the things that we try to focus on when we're trying to kind of pick out, like, is this a good candidate to move over to the cloud sooner or later? Is this a good candidate for something that needs to be maybe bake a little bit more? And having established those baselines with the shared infrastructure, and having a pretty good understanding of how they react, how they work really helps us, you know, tee up these new initiatives and in front of those needs in a more efficient way. So yeah, absolutely. >> John: What's some of the activity you guys seen? And what's the peak activity on Match.com these days? >> Yeah, so dating apps in general, but not so particular we use a nested or breast fractal peak, and it's a pattern that, from what they told me back in the old days, took a little while to realize was a thing. And not just like, oh we changed something and then did this and produced that. So every evening is our peak basically. So with taking time zones into account, obviously, in the United States from about five to 10 o'clock at night or so, we get this, growing, burst of traffic. So that can be anywhere from 23% sometimes. It kind of varies. Then we have a weekly peak where every, you know, Sunday and Monday we expect a higher amount of traffic than we would other days. And it kind of makes sense from an Archer psychology kind of standpoint where, you know, you're coming off of dates, you're trying to set dates up. That's where a lot of that activity is. And then we have a yearly peak, which goes from around Christmas to President's day. Believe it or not, it's President's day, it's not Valentine's day. And so the sort of thing where when we're trying to plan for capacity and we do a lot of, what cost squeeze tests, were not quite as I guess, engineering, but hey, what does it look like if we go down in capacity by 50%, what happens? where are the weak points? A January, Monday night is very different from a May, Thursday in June (chuckles). So we have to predict, we can anticipate some of that, but we don't know for sure, a lot can change in a year. So when we're preparing for a yearly peak, we really have to pay attention. We have to prep. We have to plan for that and work with that to figure out how we can get through it and maintain that level of service. >> That's awesome, and AppDynamics to help you to do that. I'd love to get a bot to give me the optimal dating times, to share with my single friends. Great stuff. Linda, thank you for coming. Great to see you. Congratulations on a great case study. Great story. How large-scale applications and are working in the modern cloud. So congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Awesome, thank you, so good to be here. >> Okay, CUBE coverage of re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(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)

>>Fly from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 route to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the cubes live coverage. Four days here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco live 2020 kicking off the year. Great event. I'm Jafar way my co Stu Miniman, our next guest, Danny Winokur, general manager of app dynamics, part of Cisco and special keynoter headlining the event, the networking show headlining by the app development story. Any welcome to the cube. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. It's good to be here. So one of the big signals, I think it was a shot across the bow to the industry, but also internally within Cisco has been the multi-year movement around getting API APIs built into the products. You start to see dev ops become network ops. Now with app dynamics, digging down into the infrastructure provide great value, but in a DevOps way. This is, this is the top story in my mind. You've led the keynote, which was very unusual for Cisco. Was it planned that way? Tell us some of the background. >>Well, it was planned that way. And I think part of what we're recognizing is that in the world that we're now living in where applications have moved to become the center of the business, you have business initiatives encoded in applications and that's what actually drives the use of technology in the organization. So it really starts with the application. And Cisco of course recognizes that and that has implications for the way we think about the entire technology stack. And so we see it as an opportunity to actually make the infrastructure and the people that actually buy and work with the infrastructure, the infrastructure engineers and operations teams, network engineers and network operations teams, they become much more relevant by actually looking at how the technologies and the work that they do are actually placed within the context of the application and how that application and the experiences within it are delivering a business result to the larger organization. >>Yeah, and one of the big trends, how she's doing, I were early days in the cloud, watch Amazon rise up. No one kind of saw that common. Most of the insiders did, but API APIs were key, but the word dev ops was started around that time. Infrastructure as code makes a lot of sense. Programmable infrastructure. That's right. You guys picked up on that. We've been covering that for now for a four years around programmable networking and you guys have been just goes, been shifting the products, but during the keynote you mentioned biz dev ops, which I thought was a very fascinating stake in the ground. Could you explain what you meant by that? Because if I think what you're saying is true, this is now another layer of opportunity that takes advantage of all the scale. The agility. Efficiency. >>Yeah, that's right. That's right. So I mean, what's what's going on is companies that now say, okay, my business is now in my app. The app has become the business. They have to now figure out how do they iterate very, very quickly on that application. And in order to iterate very quickly, the business team, the development team and the operations teams need to work together in a closed loop operating model. Because if they don't work together closely, they have two big problems, right? One is the business initiatives which move very quickly, can't get encoded quickly enough in the application and the application falls behind and the business suffers. Number two, they can't produce winning experiences because executives like us sitting in a conference room with an idea for an experience are almost always wrong about what's going to work for the end-users. The way it works in the modern world and what we know from digital native organizations that have pioneered this is that you actually have to form user research and a hypothesis from it and it in your application and get it quickly in front of your users with real time measurement and telemetry and then you use that to inform yourself in real time around what's working and what's not. >>You reform your hypothesis, make that adjustment reimplementing code, get it back out and iterate and iterate and the more shots on goal that you're able to take with the velocity of iteration, the more likely you are to get to the winning experience. So biz dev ops is really around getting those three teams, the business team, the development team, and the operations team working together with velocity in a new operating model that allows you to actually gain the competitive advantage that's necessary in an experience driven application centric world where the infrastructure and development team and the business are now all working together in tandem, in lockstep. >>The antennae had really interesting stuff as we all know that the organizational construct in the silos often slow down that that innovation and growth we watched for years developers, they find their tools, they do their thing, but as you said, it's got to be connected with the business. I want to make sure I understand. We've seen somewhat places where some of the tooling actually is getting people together because they have common data. You give the business people things in their colors and languages as opposed to the developers. They need different things out of it, but it's a, it's a backbone or back plane buildings together. So are those business product owners or business leaders actually coming into and seeing things? Is it at that level, the >>really important point, right? The problem that we've seen in the traditional operating model is not only are the teams siloed, but the technologies and the data that they rely upon keep them siloed. And so as the changes in the market are pushing them to work together for the reasons I said, they need common tooling and common data sets. And so what we're actually doing at Cisco is connecting app dynamics to the tools that are beneath it in the stack. Like what we announced yesterday with the inner site inner site workload optimizer and what we've previously done with ACI for the software defined data center networking fabric so that you can actually have each team, each persona use a tool that they're comfortable with that's specialized for their domain, but the datasets are now connected. So it gives them a single source of truth that allows them, instead of finger-pointing when something goes wrong or they need to optimize, they're able to actually have a shared source of truth and they can say, okay, I understand my domain here, I understand my domain here, but they're telling me the same thing, and that makes it easier for them to collaborate in this closed loop, the operating model. >>Whereas it was harder to do that when they were looking at their separate tools and separate data. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, Danny, is as coming from the app dynamics side now at Cisco, you've seen a lot of modern used the word modern applications. The modern architecture is evolving. People see the picture, they know what to do. Most enterprises outside of the the pioneers, they're like, okay, I love the idea of biz dev ops, but Hey, I'm just trying to figure out which cloud I'm going to use. Right. Okay. So take me through how you engage with that because you're kind of, you might be ahead of the curve on the thought process, but I'm just trying to crop the cloud and it's impacted me as a notarized. What do you say to that? What's that? What's your answer to that? >>I mean, what we see going on right now is that in almost every single organization that has their business now running in the apps, those apps are hybrid multi-cloud apps, right? They recognize that in order to iterate quickly on the front end of the application, they probably need to use some of the latest cloud based technologies, either in the public cloud or in a private cloud on premise us. But they also have other components of their architecture that are going to be using something more like web technologies or client server technologies or in some organizations still mainframe technologies for backend data access. And so you end up with this sort of diverse array of layered tech stacks across different deployment environments in a multi-cloud world. And they have to work together seamlessly. And so part of what we've done is innovate lenses within app dynamics that actually give you a view through that complexity so that you can focus on what really matters most. >>And that was yesterday's announcement of the experience journey map that we have from app dynamics, right? It compliments what we've done before with business transactions and business IQ and adds a new lens that is focused on the screens that the end users are actually seeing in their browser or on their mobile device. And it automatically uses AI and ML technology to map a screen by screen journey flow through the application that the user's actually seen and experienced seeing and experiencing. And within that screen-based view, it gives you business data like abandonment rate and it correlates it down to the technical performance of what's actually being served to the user on that screen so that you can quickly determine where are the technology issues across this broad hybrid multi-cloud estate. Where are they actually surfacing issues or not on the screens that your users are seeing. >>So you can now prioritize the warnings on the back end based on what your users really need you to address right away. So if I hear you correctly, what you're saying is essentially cause instrumentation. You mentioned that earlier data is critical. So what you're saying is you could have abandonment rates say's an app or whatever and say maybe there's a DDoS attack on, on a switch or a firewall. So I might want to scale that up with policy. So you're seeing, you're coordinating technical remedies or architectural changes based upon what you know, the business logic, is that what you're kind of getting at? That's exactly right. So we know from data that we have from our app attention index, that 50% of users are willing to pay more for a competitor's product if it performs and gives them a better experience. And worst yet 63% of users and the app potential index have told us that if they get a subpar digital experience, they're going to go out and actually not only leave but bad mouth, the experience that they had and spread ill will about your application. >>So what has to happen in that world is you have to actually relate your business performance data to the user experience within the screen, through the experience journey map into the backend application components, which is the business transaction and then down through intersite into the layers of the infrastructure where you can actually get into the chassies, the blades, the fans, the Dems and the network. So essentially it's like auto scale and concept that will, you know, in cloud that's right. Fly to the app level and a feature by feature basis. That's right. And you can do it exactly. You can do it within the context of the key experiences that have been prioritized as the ones that contribute the greatest impact of your business results. And you can work load optimize and scale infrastructure dynamically and automatically. Final, final point on this cause a good thread here. >>So final question is, okay, now prove it to me. How much money did I make? Can you guys tie that to actual dollars? Because then on the client's side, do they have to program then? No. So you can within app dynamics, through our business IQ capabilities, tell us through the interface of their product, what are the pieces of business data that are the key measures of your business success. It could be dollars, it could be cents, it could be skews, it could be a product ID, it could be an abandonment rate or a funnel conversion through your funnel. You tell us what are those metrics that you need and we will actually introspect, pull them out and give you a real time ROI. It is. That's what it is. So, so Denny, the thing I've been trying to chomp at the bid here, I'm agreeing with a lot of what you're saying. >>There was a trend that was all over everywhere that we went in 2019 that I heard and haven't heard you use a certain word. It's observability. Certain people are like one of the biggest trends of 2020 help us understand your viewpoint on observability what you're hearing from customers because much of the language you're talking about of that systems view resonates as what we're talking about. Observability so just not fond of the word or none. Not trying to jump on that bandwagon. It's a buzzword. What I'm talking about is full stack observability. That's exactly what it is. You can go from the business to the end user experience, the application, the compute infrastructure, the network infrastructure and the security domain that wraps at all and you can actually now see with telemetry that we're pulling in from each of those layers whether it's using app dynamics or using some of the instrumentation that Cisco has across those other infrastructure layers and security layers of the stack. >>We pull that all together with AI and ML produce insights and then provide an API that allows integration with systems for automation and action that is not only full stack observability it's full stack observability paired with the ability to implement an AI ops operating model that then supports a biz dev ops way of working for the company. You might want to throw in horizontal observability too because you know with cloud you've got horizontal scalable across deployment. Exactly across your deployment environment and from an application standpoint, everything from kind of traditional model is through microservices. Do things with serverless do are absolutely we have, we have agent technologies that take care of the very latest serverless technologies. We have things for Kubernetes cluster monitoring, we have support for CloudWatch and then going all the way back to the other side. Of course, traditional job applications.net applications back to mainframes IIB. >>We monitor and support all of that. It's the broadest array of visibility of what you're going to cabbage in the company working for you, the all the cool stuff. Cloud native Coobernetti's we've tried, we let, we like to be the cool kids. Magic questions. So I got to ask you, since you've got a good view up and down the stack and across multiple domains and workloads and clouds, what do you think, going into 2020 with this show and beyond, what is the most important story you think that people are talking about and what's the most important story that you think people should be talking about? I think the most important thing that's going on right now is figuring out how to connect across the different technologies and the different layers, right? We're coming from a place where there's naturally been a specialization within each of the domains. >>The whole point now is about multi domain and actually connecting the different layers of the technology stack to produce insights that allow for movement in this lock step higher velocity model. Because what we know from all of the data and all of the experience with customers is that the winners and an experience driven world are those that can actually implement with velocity, not break things and deliver well-designed, beautiful experiences. And in order to do that, you need to be able to connect these different technologies and get the teams that traditionally run them working together in a much more collaborative, what are people missing? What should we be people be focused on. Outside of that, what other areas that either the media or customers, what are the, what are some of the hidden gems out there that people should really pay attention to? Well, I think, I mean I think there's a lot of exciting innovation that is going on in some of the new cloud native technologies in the cloud native architectures. >>The other thing that I think is a little bit of a hidden thing that a lot of people haven't realized is that the cloud is great for some of the really high velocity, fast moving things, but it's not always the most efficient or the least, sorry, the most cost effective way, least least costly way of running everything and so we actually do see some recoil back to these hybrid environments where people are actually now running some cloud technologies on premise us and so I think that's an area to watch as we see some of the public cloud players, obviously out of the traditional players bringing cloud innovation, but running that on premises in a way that connects seamlessly to elastic scalable public cloud resources that work together in tandem. I guess last >>question I had for you, I think it was in your keynote, I heard you talk about customers using app D as being agents of transformation. Just what advice do you give them? You know, where are some of the stumbling blocks that if they don't have a conversation or understand a certain architecture that they're going to run into some issues? >>Yeah. So for us, an agent of transformation is the sort of notion of a change agent in the organization that recognizes the things we've been talking about where the world is going and is seeking to be that disruptive force of change inside the company. And in order to do that, what we have found is they're most successful when they get their hands on hard cold data, right? That's how you convince an organization. You show them the data and you connect the data and the technology to a business result. And so the most effective change agents have been able to go into the depths of the technology. They've been able to correlate data sets up and down the stack and then walk into the board room at the executive level and show in an undeniable evidence based way that these layers of technology are producing this business result and the organization needs to invest to accelerate that. And that's >>jail model too. You just get the data and iterate. Double down on absolutely what you want. It brings it all the way up to the boardroom. Danny, thanks so much for taking the time to share that. Great insights. I'll give you a minute to get a plug in for app dynamics. What do you guys got going on? Which shows you're going to be at the coming year, actually Cisco live in America. Any other event you going to be there? Any investment areas? Give a quick plug for what's going on. >>Yeah, no, I appreciate it. The next big one for us is on February the 20th we're running a global virtual event called app dynamics transform 2020 which is our annual showcase where we bring together all of the latest and greatest innovations that app dynamics has across what we're doing with AI and ML. Everything that we're doing around new experiences, cloud native technologies, the AI ops operating model, our vision for the central nervous system for it, and we're going to showcase all of that demo and talk about our roadmap. So it's a global live virtual event. Come to our website, aptdynamics.com and please tune it. Right. Well, congratulations for your success and thank you. Love to have you come into our studio. Talk about what you're doing with video because that's a hard, hard problem. We talked to Sri about that. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. Thank you guys. Yeah, appreciate it. We're here in the cube AptDynamics headlining the keynote at Cisco systems. A networking company turned into a data company, a video company, an instrumentation company. Application can be all now in one. Just the cube bringing you all the data here in Barcelona. I'm John. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem. Barker's >> Welcome Back. We're here at the San Diego Convention Center for Sisqo Live 2019 30th year The show. 28,000 in attendance. I'm stupid, and we're actually at the midpoint of three days of life water wall coverage here and happy to bring back to the program to Cube alumni first. To my right is Ben I, who is the CEO of Turban on Mick. And sitting next to him is Thomas wide, who's the chief marketing and strategy officer of AP Dynamics or APD? Ia's everybody calls them here at the show. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, So, Thomas, first of all, we had you on it, reinvent like soon after the acquisition of AP ti Bisys. Go. It's been about two years, and I believe it's been about two years that turban Onyx been partnering with Cisco. So let's start with you. And you know what? What changed in those two years? >> Yeah, it's been amazing. Two years ago, we were on the doorstep of an I P O and it's been a rocketship ride ever since. You know AP Dynamics. After the last two years, the businesses more than doubled team sizes more than doubled, and today we're really happy to be the largest and fastest growing provider of application for miss monitoring in the market. But the reason why, that is, is because our customers are embarking on the sigil transformation, and the application has really become the foundation of their modern day business. That's the way brands are engaging with their users. And but now more than ever, and then the application landscape has gotten way more complex, with micro services and multiple clouds and all of the threats that go on in the infrastructure. And so what Hap Dynamics has been doing is just really providing that really time business and application performance that our customers need to ensure business outcomes. We think of ourselves as Thie Marie for the application or the infrastructure. >> That's awesome. So then, you know it's been interesting to watch in the networking space the last few years. For the most part, applications used to be That's just this thing that ran through the pipes every once in a while, I need to, you know, think about performance. I need to make sure I got buffer credits or, you know, it's now going East West rather the north south and the like. But it was solutions like turban on IQ that sat on top of it and helped understand and help people manage their application. Of course. AP ti pulling that story together even tighter. So, you know, give us the latest we've talked to you. It's just go live before an important partnership. What was the latest in your world, >> boy? The well, so one of the things we're doing is we're building an actual bundle together without D. And if you think about a PM, you're getting the application topology as well as response time and use a response time, which is critical to maintaining the brand and the digital economy that we're talking about. What when you look at every one of those hops and the application of there's a entire application stack that sits underneath a resource ing stack and what we're doing is we're bringing in a R M, which is application re sourcing management with a I so that they're automatically adjusting the resource is in all times continuously in order to support the performance needs that Abdi is showing us when you put together a PM plus a r m. You have total application performance and that customers air really, uh, queuing to so much so that we've actually decided to put this bundle officially together in the marketplace. We just became the first ap TI re sell software product, and now we're taking not to market as C one plus happy. >> Well, congratulations on that is harder ship, Thomas. Bring us inside the customers a little bit. What does this mean for them? You know what that journey we talk about, you know, for, you know, last 10 15 years, you gotta break down those silos. It's not just the networking team, you know, tossing over some band within Leighton, see and write them coming back. And I need some more. No, no, we're not going. You know, we're not going to give you any service level agreement or anything like that, because that's not our job. To what? We'll just set this up and you use what you got. So what would happen in >> trend that we're seeing is a move toward this concept of a iob, which is the really the consolidation of bringing and user application network and infrastructure monitoring closer together and tying that together with a base insights to Dr Automation and Action and very similar to what turbo gnomic specializes in here. And so what we're seeing is, you know, the combination of Cisco plus APP Dynamics. Plus, companies like Turbo is beginning to build that self healing, self learning environment where developers and environments need to be able to drive automation on that. Automation ultimately gets tomb or innovation when you can reduce the mundane tasks, really take a lot of our developers time. And so we're really excited about some of the work we're doing together when you think about the ability to take really time business insights from the application and reprogrammed the network based on the needs of the AP or change out the workloads and move them around on different servers, depending on the needs of the AP, these are all things that combination of Turbo, Cisco and epidemics are doing together. >> Yeah, actually, I did a whole show down in D. C a couple months ago, Cisco Partner. We're focused on a I ops. And, you know, we understand customers had a lot of tools that they have to deal with. We need to simplify this environment, allow them tow, you know, focus on their business, not managing this complex environment of all these tools. How does that whole concept of II ops and, you know, automating this environment managing my workloads? You know what? What do you sing with your customers? >> I think all the customers are saying, Look, there's too many tools today. They don't need another resource monitor, et cetera. What they need is they need to understand, through the lens of the application, all the resource dependencies. So instead of looking at a field of servers and saying, I have five nines availability or storage or whatever, what they really want to see is whatever the servers and storage and resource is dependent on this specific up that runs the bank or the CPD company of the manufacturer. And can I make sure that those re sources are supporting performance of the application? And that's is this total application performance concept, much more so than than whether I have five nines availability and all my other host accents? >> Yeah, absolutely. Did you have a comment on other Guy's >> gonna say We're seeing so many different customers in different verticals, Whether it's retail, hospitality, automakers, they're all benefitting from the cloud migration. And now that they have the cloud migration, the ability to have that elasticity of their workloads, they're scaling in and out based on the application demands. This is becoming critical. This is no longer a luxury for the most cloud eight of companies in the world. Enterprises with mission critical systems are all becoming dependent on these more modern technologies. And I think they need partners like ours more than ever. >> Yeah, One of the questions we've had is you talk to customers today and they are multi cloud. But that multiyear hybrid cloud is a bunch of pieces and one of our premises. We ask, from a research standpoint, how can this some of those pieces be more valuable than just the independent pieces alone, you know, kind of one plus one with, you know, an extra factor talk a little bit about the customers. And also, you know, what does this combination do that I couldn't just, you know, grab these pieces together and kind of make it work in my portfolio of those, you know, dozens of tools that I have. >> What glad. But I think the customers one of things this needed. We literally announced his partnership publicly two weeks ago and already have closed the 1st 2 just out of momentum that that folks are realizing the need to be able to say, Look, I can host my applications on Prem with a number of different vendors, I can host my applications off Prem with a number of different vendors. But the real question is, where am I going to get the most performance? Where can I do it in a compliant way with all my policies and how can I make sure that I'm doing it cost effectively? And when there's a multiplicity of tradeoffs where I can choose, then it's incumbent upon each of those vendors, strategic as they are to be able to offer the best service, the best performance, the best compliance and resource ing, and that's what we're bringing to him. And I think that's why you're seeing that a pipeline is built to several double digit millions and already deals are closing everything I'd >> add to that Is that, you know, going back to the point around a ops in the evolution of a lot of these modern ing and automation technologies. >> A lot of our >> customers have a hybrid environment of different tools and providers that they leverage. And so one of the things that were really focused on is an open ecosystem where you'd be able to ingest data sources from various different players. Some of them can be Cisco, Turman, Onyx and Abdi. But some of them can be other providers that are also have very good products in very specific domains. I think the key is that being ableto be ableto bring that data together, Dr Cross domain correlation in a more automated way than ever before, leveraging some of the more modern AI ai capabilities, which drives the action ing that people really need. And that is really the automation step is where customers start to see the benefits. But I think the better and more valuable the data that you have, the better automation you could do because your predictability of your algorithms are much better at that >> point. All right, been your customers that have rolled out that this solution I know the joint solutions brand new. But what? What is then the key metrics? Howto they define success how today they know you know that they they've reached that success. >> So first and foremost, the line of business. Who's the customer to central it? Whether it's hosted or not, they care the most. That performance does not degrade and is always improving. Okay, But when they do that and they can show that, then a ll the decision that the rest of central takes down in fromthe container layer to the pods that a virtual to the cloud I asked on Prem in off those become acceptable choices for central i t. To make because fundamentally, Lina businesses saying, Yep, we're good, right? So that's where we're seeing the value of being able to see the response time and bridging the application performance to the application resource ing that frankly hasn't ever been solved in five decades of it. And I think it goes back to a Thomas was just saying It's the quality of the analytics that comes from a iob. I don't think people need more tools to capture more data. There's a lot of data out there. The question is, can you make it actionable? And are your analytics correct? And, frankly, are they the best? And I think we see that that's been a big parcel of what we've done during the two years Cisco's told us on multiple occasions it's the fastest software O AM they've had by bringing it through, starting with the data center team and growing up through traditional Cisco and then with their purchase of Abdi two years ago. That combination makes a ton of sense, and now you've got the top all the way to the bottom. And that's a pretty special spot, I think un replicated by any other strategic today. Yeah, the other thing, >> I just added, That is the importance of being able to monitor the business in real time as well. And so a lot of what we've talked about are the technology analytics, the operational analytics that we run our business on, but being able to correlate the business transactions running through the application, so users what their journey looks like, they're, you know, abandonment, rates, revenues, you know, the ability to engage with the users, tying that back to the specific infrastructure in a way that's used to be a bit of black box before. Now that all comes a life by the combination of these technologies. >> So Thomas big trends we see at this show. So a Cisco's transformation towards a software company and the world of multi cloud abdi plays a pretty important piece of that. You know, discussion. Talk a little bit about kind of where you are and you know where do you see Cisco moving along that journey and then, you know, help tie in where turban Ah, Mick Fitz. >> Yeah. So I think it really goes back to the fact that as our customers are making this digital transformation, they're really looking at a variety of infrastructures. You know, cloud providers to be able to offer these applications. And what Appdynamics has done is really created this monitoring fabric that sits across any infrastructure and it tightly ties to the business value of the application. So if you combine that with a lot of what Cisco's doing around connectivity securing the clouds, securing the infrastructure around it and tying that Teo where we're strong and networking and bringing all that together, I think fundamentally, we've got a lot of the pieces of the puzzle to truly enable a i ops, but we don't have them all. And I think that's what's important, that we partner with people like Ben because it brings together a set of automation capability around application resource ing that we don't have and our customers are better suited working with with Ben and team on that. So how do we integrate those things in a frictionless way and make that part of our sales process? That's really what this partnerships all about. >> All right, then where do we see the partnership going down the road? >> I think it's going to get more exciting. So right now we're pulling unit Election Lee from Abdi. I think we're going to go right back the other way. That Thomas referred to, which is one of my favorite parts of Abdi. Is the business like you? Yeah, it's where you say, What is the cost of the late and see in anyone? Hop and where do the Bandon rates? Abandonment rates happen from consumers on that application right now, we can price for the first time what's the cost of the late sea in that one tear and across the across the application overall. And then, more importantly, what do we do about it? Well, that's the resource ing and the digestion is being resolved in real time. And so I think, the ability look att, the resiliency of applications both across and up and down the a p m plus the a r m and being able to guarantee or assure performance, total application performance. That's a big message. >> All right, what would I give you both? Just fun. A word here, you know, about halfway through the conference here in San Diego. Thomas, >> I would just say that the energy that we're seeing, the feedback we're getting from customers in the business insights part of the world of solutions been phenomenal. I think there's so many more developer oriented, application developer oriented individuals that's just go live than ever before. And I think that serves both of our business is quite well. >> Look, I think this has been a great show, but one of the things you're going to see is all of these vendors who have had global presence for in this case, 30 years. Sisqo live 30 years long But now being able to think through how do I become that much more application relevant? You know, if you think about transformation of application is going to come top down, not bottom up. And so, while we have all the evolution and, frankly disruption happening, digital disruption happening across it, the way to know which of the ones that are going to stick, they're going to come top down. And I think the moves that they're making all the way through buying happy all the way through partnering with C warmer turban Ah, Mick has been emblematic of what that opportunity is in the marketplace on the realization that customers care about their applications, their applications run their business. And you've got to look at the topology and you gotta look and response time and you gotta look at the resource ing. But that's a really fun spot for us to be in together. >> Bennett Thomas Congratulations on the expanded partnership and thanks again for joining us on the Cube. Thanks to you. All right, we're here in the Definite zone. Three days, Walter Wall coverage. Arms to Minuteman, David Long days in the house. Lisa Martin's here to we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching the Cube

(relaxing music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am absolutely thrilled for this segment. We are joined by leaders at Cisco AppDynamics as well as Royal Caribbean. The two have been working together for over five years, leveraging full stack observability. We're going to dig in, but first of all please welcome Alice from Royal Caribbean and Greg from Cisco AppDynamics to the show. Hey friends. >> Hi. How are you doing? >> I'm excited, clearly. How are you doing, Greg? >> I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on the show today. >> Hey, it's our, it is absolutely our pleasure. Alice, I have to start with you. I don't think there are too many industries that have gotten as much coverage as cruising has over the last couple of years. You've been working with Royal Caribbean for over a decade so you've seen it through the stormy seas of the pandemic, if you will. What has the last few years and the last few months been like for you? >> You know, it's really been a wild ride. To your point, we were sailing high, and then I don't think any other industry experienced what we did in COVID, that you walked in one day and then that day the whole industry shut down. So it was a big challenge for us. And then as soon as we shut down and we weathered the storm with COVID, then we had what we called our healthy return to service. So as quickly as it stopped, we had to start sailing again. So it's really been a challenge but we're happy to be back on our feet and heading in the right direction now. >> I really hope we can continue the sailing metaphors throughout the course of this interview. And you nailed that for a segment, Alice, I'm so here for it. I want to talk about how you've worked together but I want to give Greg a second to chime in here. So, Greg, you're the executive CTO at Cisco AppDynamics. How have you and the team weathered the last two and a half years? >> Well, you know, it's interesting, the pandemic really brought together an interesting conundrum, right? So on one hand, you had, you know, the consumers, the end users that became very reliant on digital services. They had a function in a way that was very performing, right? So, 84% of the respondents that we had come back through a report called the App Attention Index, came back and said that digital services were really instrumental for them to get back to some level of normalcy. But the interesting part that came about that is that out of those respondents, 60% of them blamed the brand if the application did not work the way they expected it. So they didn't really care about the complex- >> Wow. >> In the back end, right? So when you look at- >> Yeah. >> You look at the shift in the IT department, the IT department had to go out and quickly innovate. Quickly start to introduce new services, which ultimately brought together a sprawl in their technology stack. So, when you're adding to it you're not taking things away, you're continuously growing. So finding that the problems or the root cause of an application issue became more difficult. So that's where, you know, from a Cisco AppDynamics perspective, you know we're one of the leading observability and application performance monitoring tools. So, we help customers like Royal Caribbean to be able to zero in on root cause and ensure that their end users have that best experience. >> It's, I'm smiling as someone who was a former waitress and I can remember the amount of times I was scolded for something that happened that was far out of my control in the complex layers of the kitchen. (Greg laughs) And I think that anyone who's had a poor customer experience while interacting with a brand may or may not intentionally, you know, I think it's actually sometimes very unintentional to your point, get frustrated with said brand. I can imagine that is an experience and a priority that you have at Royal Caribbean, Alice. How has full stack observability played a role in your team's ability to serve the customers and keep your community engaged during this very kind of wobbly time? >> Yeah, you know, we have really worked hard to improve and remove friction from our guest vacation. And we want to keep them on vacation and having a great time. You know, we say we don't really sell a cruise. We sell an experience. So we use AppDynamics to monitor those key applications that our guests are interacting with to ensure that they're having that experience that we expect. You know, we've learned that just because a system or a server says, hey I'm up 99% of the time, that doesn't mean that my guests are experiencing that same type of stability, you know? So once again, we really worked well with AppDynamics. They've partnered with us to ensure that, you know, our guests are getting that vacation experience they're looking for. >> Do you think, just a follow up there, do you think that you would have advanced in the ways that you have working with Cisco AppDynamics and across functions over the last few years, without this crunch? Was necessity the mother of invention for you to any degree? >> You know, I don't think that the crunch brought it on 'cause we, like I said, we started this journey back in 2017. And we're not unlike a lot of companies where we're on this maturity ride where we want to go from being reactive, where our guests are telling us something is broken, to being preventive. Definitely, you know, COVID played into this because I think we learned to do less, you know, more with less. So, you know, it's very hard in the cruise industry. We did take a hit but we were able to use the AppDynamics tools to ensure that our systems were running with having less people also watching those systems. So less eyes on glass, more automation. >> And that's more stability, more credibility, and more transparency is definitely something that we're all looking forward. And it's nice to see that implemented, especially at scale when you're dealing with so many customers from all over the world trying to access your service and wanting that personalized experience. Greg, what does it feel like for you as a leader to hear someone like Alice say how powerful your tool has been in ensuring that customer experience? >> Yeah, that's, you know, it's absolutely fantastic. And especially, you know, Alice is absolutely right. You know, the cruise industry was really, had a very unique challenge in front of them. And I really applaud the folks at Royal Caribbean for stepping up to make sure that when the pandemic eased, so to speak, that the experience to the customer was actually even better, right? So when we were able to work and partner together to make sure that, you know, the user experience is topnotch, the availability's there, the resiliency of their platform is there. So, by working with customers like Royal Caribbean is really one of the shining stars that we can talk about that really helped make a big difference in, you know that post pandemic era to be able to really do what's right for the customer. >> How often are you engaging with customers like Alice as a team? How big is that feedback in your product roadmap? >> Oh, personally, I'm engaged with customers on a daily basis. And I see it across the map from many different industries. And, you know, a lot of folks had different challenges, but the ultimate commonality that I've seen across, you know, multiple industries is that, you know, when we're in that pandemic state, digital services were the only way that their customers were interacting with them. So, you know, when you're looking at a bank or you're looking at, you know, different types of travel agencies and organizations that, you know like Royal Caribbean as well, that really had that opportunity to focus on what's the most valuable thing to them which is user experience. It's a very, very common trend that we saw. And, you know, you see an expedited path of digital transformation happen. And really that's where we partner with, you know, customers like Royal Caribbean and many others across different industries to make sure that the business outcomes were being driven towards the proper direction as well as that, you know, the user experience. And I don't think I can emphasize user experience as being so critically important, anymore than I already have. But it's really one of the most valuable currencies most organizations have. >> One of my favorite lines is community is your first defensible asset. And you know, you can talk about user experience as much as you want on here, at the end of the day. If people aren't having a positive interaction with your brand or your product, it's probably not going to last super long unless it's legacy. And we don't have to go down that rabbit hole today. >> Especially if I can add, there's a lot of competition there. >> Of course. >> Right? There's a lot of competition out there. So if your applications do not perform or your digital services do not perform the end user has the quick ability to just quickly delete and move on. And the same thing with what Alice sees in the cruise industry, you know. You have an opportunity to rise to the top and I really applaud them for taking advantage of that opportunity. >> Yeah. Well, I'm here for both of you cheering each other on. Certainly, the water level rises together. >> That's right. >> Alice, what sort of challenges are you taking on currently that you're able to disclose? What sort of leaps do you think or it doesn't have to be leaps, but what kind of experience are you hoping to continue to enhance for Royal Caribbean customers? >> You know, right now, you know with our current connectivity it's all about managing that bandwidth. You know, we're hoping to go to that state where bandwidth isn't at a high cost. So now we're going to be even able to watch our user interaction more from ship to shore. You know, and we're maybe moving to that area where we're thinking cloud first from a shift. If you think about it, we've got 50 plus data centers floating around the world. So that connectivity is key. Now we're opening up that bandwidth. Now I need to see how the transactions are performing as we come off ship. You know, with that, once again, that cloud first mentality. It's a super exciting time for us. And I really see, you know, AppD is going to play a role in that. >> I love that visual just for a second of 50 data centers with also, surrounded by people having a very wonderful time on board. What a nice thought. I can't say that every data center I've ever been to is as glamorous, fun or sexy as being on a Royal Caribbean ship. However, I hope that we move perhaps in that direction. We were just at Super Computing a few weeks ago and it was great to see all the hardware there. So you never know. What role do you see yourself and the team and Cisco AppDynamics playing in that future for companies like Royal Caribbean, Greg? >> You know, it's really, it's really staying right lockstep with our customers as they move through that digital transformation efforts. The key piece is that we look at it from that full stack view. So we offer full stack observability, which, you know, if you look at the challenges that we want to go after. Traditional IT departments were historically siloed pretty significantly between, you know network and infrastructure, security, app dev. So I mean, ensuring that we can get our customers to be able to have that common view that shows what's the real important pieces across all domains. So when they start moving down the path of digital transformation, that's an opportunity to also revamp how their processes are, the people interact and the technology that they use to be able to deliver the proper business outcomes. So we talk a lot with our customers around full stack observability, but the key part is business context. So if you have a big effort for digital transformation, you're starting to add new services to it. How do you know if it's actually impacting the business in a positive or negative way? So by us implementing the business context to ensure that you understand the investments being made, that you can show to your business leaders, is showing an uptake in the business outcomes you're going after. It's really, really about a strong partnership with our customers. But also ensuring that their business is being positively impacted by our technology to be able to help them really align the teams and be able to have the right desired outcomes. >> I love that Greg and I love that customer first, that community first attitude. It's something that you both share. Final question for the two of you. And I'm going to start with you, Alice, since I suspect you've probably been on more cruises than Greg and I combined. Though I could be making a wild assumption. Where are you cruising to next? >> You know, I just got off a cruise. So next stop, I want to revisit the Galapagos. I think the Galapagos is the best place to go. And if you haven't done it that's absolutely where you should go. >> Oh, it's a beautiful trip. Greg, have you ever done the Galapagos? Is that going to be your next Royal Caribbean cruise? >> I have never done the Galapagos, but that may just have made it to my list. >> Fantastic. Well, I second Alice's endorsement on that. I had the pleasure of going about a decade ago. Very magical place that teaches you a lot about nature. Much like the two of you have taught us very extensively about full stack observability, how it applies to user experience, customer experience and the ocean that I am currently staring at here in Pacifica, California. Alice, thank you so much for joining us from Miami. Greg, to you in Colorado. I hope that you both continue to work in harmony together and that we can all see each other on the friendly seas soon. Thank you all for tuning in to our AWS re:Invent coverage. This is theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson. And we look forward to seeing you for our next segment. (relaxing music)

>>Hello everyone and welcome back to The Cube's Continuing coverage of AWS Reinvent. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am absolutely thrilled for this segment. We are joined by leaders at Cisco App Dynamics, as well as Royal Caribbean. The two have been working together for over five years, leveraging full stack observability. We're gonna dig in, but first of all, please welcome Alice from Royal Caribbean and Greg from Cisco App, app Dynamics to the show. Hey friends. >>Hi. How are you doing? >>I'm excited, clearly. How are you doing, Greg? >>I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on the show today. >>Hey, it's our, it is absolutely our pleasure. Alice, I have to start with you. I don't think there are too many industries that have gotten as much coverage as cruising has over the last couple of years. You've been working with Royal Caribbean for over a decade, so you've seen it through the stormy seas of the pandemic, if you will. What has the last few years and the last few months been like for you? >>You know, it's, it's really been a wild ride. To your point, we were sailing high and then I don't think any other industry experience what we did in Covid, that you walked in one day and then that day the whole industry shut down. So it was a, it was a big challenge for us. And then as soon as we shut down and we weathered the storm with Covid, then we have what we called our healthy and return to service. So as quickly as it stopped, we had to start sailing again. So it's, it's really been a challenge, but we're happy to be back on our feet and heading in the right direction now. >>I, I really hope we can continue the sailing metaphors throughout the course of this interview. And you, you nailed that for a segment. Alice, I'm, I'm, I'm so, I'm so here for it. I, I, I wanna talk about how you've worked together, but I wanna give Greg a second to chime in here. So Greg, you're the executive CTO at Cisco App Dynamics. How, how have you and the team, whether the last two and a half years? >>Well, you, you know, it's interesting, the, the pandemic really brought together an interesting conundrum, right? So on, on one hand, you had, you know, the, the, the consumers, the end users that became very reliant on digital services. They had a function in a way that was very performing, right? So, 84% of the respondents that we had come back through a report called the App Attention Index, came back and said that digital services were, were really instrumental for them to, to get back to some level of normalcy. But the interesting part that came about that is that out of those respondents, 60% of them blame the brand if the, if the application did not work the way they expected it. So they didn't really care about the, it's in the back end, right? So when you look at, yeah, you look at the shift in the IT department, the IT department had to go out and, and quickly innovate, quickly start to introduce new services, which ultimately brought together a, a sprawl in their technology stack. So when you're adding to it, you're not taking things away, you're continuously growing. So finding that that, that the problems or the, the root cause of an application issue became more difficult. So that's where, you know, from an app, Cisco AppDynamics perspective, you know, we're one of the leading observability and app application performance monitoring tools. So we help customers like Ro Caribbean to be able to zero in on root cause and ensure that their end users have that best experience. It's, >>It's, it's, I I'm smiling as someone who was a, a former waitress and I can remember the amount of times I was scolded for something that happened that was far out of my control and the complex layers of the kitchen. And I think that, that anyone who's, who's had a, a poor customer experience while interacting with a brand may or may not intentional, I think it's actually sometimes very unintentional to your point, get frustrated with said brand. I can imagine that is an experience and a priority that you have at Royal Caribbean. Alice, how, how has Full Stack Observability played a role in your, in your team's ability to, to serve the customers and your, and keep your community engaged during this, this very kind of wobbly time? >>Yeah, you know, we have, have really worked hard to improve and remove friction from our guest vacation. And we wanna keep them on vacation and having a great time. You know, we say we don't really sell a cruise. We sell an experience. So we use App AppDynamics to monitor those key applications that our guests are interacting with to ensure that they're having that experience that we expect, you know, we've learned that just because a system or a server says, Hey, I'm up 99% of the time, that doesn't mean that my guests are experiencing that same type of stability, you know? So once again, we really worked well with App Dynamics. They've partnered with us to ensure that, you know, our guests are getting that vacation experience they're looking for. >>Do you think, just a follow up there, do you think that you would have advanced in the ways that you have working with Cisco App Dynamics and across functions over the last few years without this crunch, was necessity the mother of invention for you to any degree? >>You know, I don't, I don't think that the Crunch brought it on cuz we, like I said, we started this journey back in 2017 and we're not unlike a lot of companies where we're on this maturity ride where we wanna go from being reactive, where our guests are telling us something is broken to being preventive. Definitely, you know, COVID played into this because I think we learned to do less, you know, more with less. So, you know, we, you know, it's very hard in the cruise industry. We did take a hit, but we were able to use the app dynamics tools to ensure that our systems were running with having less people also watching those systems. So less eyes on glass, more automation, >>And that's a more, with more, more stability, more credibility, and more transparency is definitely something that we're all looking forward. And, and it's nice to see that implemented, especially at scale when you're dealing with so many customers from all over the world trying to access your service and, and wanting that personalized experience. Greg, what does it feel like for you as a leader to hear someone like Alice say how powerful your tool has been in ensuring that customer experience? >>Yeah, that's, you know, it's absolutely fantastic and especially, you know, Alice is absolutely right. You know, the, the, the cruise industry was really, had a very unique challenge in front of them, and I, I really applaud the folks at Royal Caribbean for stepping up to make sure that when the pandemic eased, so to speak, that they, that the experience to the customer was actually even better, right? So when we were able to work and partner together to make sure that, you know, the, the, the user experience is topnotch, the availability is there, the, the, the, the resiliency of their platform is there. So by, by working with customers like Royal CRI and is really one of the, the, the shining stars that we can talk about that really help make a big difference in, you know, that post pandemic era to be able to really do what's right for the customer. >>How often are you engaging with customers like Alice as a team? How big is that feedback in your product roadmap? >>Oh, personally, I, I'm, I'm engaged with customers on a daily basis and I see it fr across the map from many different industries. And, you know, a lot of folks had different challenges, but the, the ultimate commonality that I've seen across, you know, multiple industries is that, you know, when you, when we're in that pandemic state, digital services were the only way that they, their customers were interacting with, with them. So, you know, when you, when you're looking at a, at a bank or you're looking at a, you know, different types of travel agencies and organizations that, you know, like rural Caribbean as well, that, that really had that opportunity to, to focus on what's the most valuable thing to them, which is user experience. It's a very, very common common trend that we saw. And, you know, you see an expedited path of, of, of digital transformation happen. And really that's where we partner with, you know, customers like Royal Caribbean and, and many others across different industries to make sure that that, that the, the business outcomes were being driven towards the, the proper direction. As well as that, you know, the, the user experience, and I don't think I can emphasize user experience as being so critically important anymore than I've already have, but it's really the, one of the most valuable currencies most organizations have. >>I, one of my favorite lines is, is community is your first defensible asset. And you know, I, you can, you can talk about user experience as much as you want on here. At the end of the day, if people aren't having a positive interaction with your brand or your product, it's probably not going to last super long unless it's legacy. And we won't have to go down that rabbit hole today, >>Especially if I can add there's a lot of competition there. Course, right? There's a lot of competition out there. So if your applications do not perform, or your digital services do not perform, the end user has the quick ability to just quickly delete and move on. And, and the same thing with, with what Alice sees in the, in the cruise industry, you know, you have an opportunity to rise to the top and I, I really applaud them for taking advantage of that, that opportunity. Community. >>Community. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm here for both of you cheering each other on certainly the, the water level rises together. That's >>Right. Alice, >>What sort of, what sort of challenges are you taking on currently that you're able to disclose? What, what sort of leaps do you think, or doesn't have to be leaps, but what, what kind of experience are you hoping to continue to enhance for Royal Caribbean customers? >>So I think, you know, one of our big challenges that we've, you know, we've announced that we do have a relationship with starlink, so that's going to improve our satellite connectivity, and it really is a game changer for our industry. It's very exciting and, and, but it puts the, it puts the user back in the forefront once again. You know, right now, you know, with our current connectivity, it's all about managing that bandwidth. You know, we're hoping to go to that state where bandwidth isn't at a high cost, so now we're gonna be even able to watch our user interaction more from ship to shore, you know, and you're, and you're, we're maybe moving to that area where we're thinking cloud first from a shift. If you think about it, we've got 50 plus data centers floating around the world, so that connectivity is key. Now we're opening up that bandwidth now I need to see how that, how the transactions are performing as we come off ship. You know, with that, once again, that cloud first mentality, it's a super exciting time for us. And I really see, you know, AppD is gonna play a role in that. >>I, I I, I love that visual just for a second of 50 data centers with also surrounded by people having a very wonderful time on board. What a, what a nice spot. I, I can't say that every data center I've ever been to is, is glamorous, fun or sexy as being on a Royal Caribbean ship. However, I, I hope that we move perhaps in that direction. We were just at super computing a few weeks ago and it was great to see all the hardware there. So you never know. What role do you see yourself in the team and, and Cisco app Dynamics playing in that future for companies like Royal Caribbean, Greg? >>You know, it's really, it's really staying right lockstep with our customers as they move through that digital transformation efforts. The key piece is that we look at it from that full stack view. So we offer full stack observability, which, you know, if you look at the challenges that we want to go after is traditional IT departments were historically siloed pretty significantly between, you know, network and infrastructure security app dev. So ensuring that we can get our customers to, to be able to have that common view that shows what's the real important pieces across all domains. So when they start moving down the path of digital transformation, that's an opportunity to also revamp how their processes are that people interact and the technology that they use to be able to deliver the proper business outcomes. So we talk a lot with our customers around full stack observability, but the key part is business context. >>So if you have a big effort for digital transformation, you're starting to add new services to it, how do you know if it's actually impacting the business in a positive or negative way? So by us implementing the, the business context to ensure that you understand the investments being made that you can show to your business leaders is showing an uptick and the business outcomes you're, you're going after, it's really, really about a strong partnership with our customers, but also ensuring that their business is being positively impacted by our technology to be able to help them really align the teams and be able to have the right desired outcomes. >>I love that Greg and I love that customer first. That community first attitude, it's something that you both share. Final question for the two of you, and I'm gonna start with you, Alice, since I suspect you've probably been on more cruises than Greg and I combined, though I could be making a wild assumption. Where are you cruising to next? >>You know, I just got off the cruise, so next up I wanna revisit the Galapagos. I think the Galapagos is the best place to go, and if you haven't done it, that's absolutely where you should go. >>Oh, it's a beautiful trip. Greg, have you ever done the Galapagos? Is that gonna be your next Royal Caribbean cruise? >>I have never done the Galapagos, but I may just have made it to my list. >>Fantastic. Well, I second Alice's endorsement on that. I, I had the pleasure of going about a decade ago. Very magical place that teaches you a lot about nature, much like the two of you have taught us very extensively about full stack absorbability, how it applies to user experience, customer experience, and the ocean that I am currently staring at here in Pacifica, California. Alice, thank you so much for joining us from Miami Greg to you in Colorado. I hope that you both continue to work in harmony together and that we can all see each other on the friendly sees soon. Thank you all for tuning in to our AWS reinvent coverage. This is the cube. My name's Savannah Peterson, and we look forward to seeing you for our next segment.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got three great guests here to talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI operations. Laura Guio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Angelstad, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada, Financial Services. And Kuberan Kandasamy, VP of Personal Insurance at Economical Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE, this great panel on Cloud Satellite and AI ops. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John, good to see you. >> Well, first, let's start with you. There's the General Manager for the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined that's the standard and multicloud is right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical. And so, obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. >> Absolutely, so John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around a supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kyndryl, our spin-off of what we were previously calling NewCo, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our Satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all of this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So, we're super excited about this. >> Real quick while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points. I just want to get to, I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NewCo and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really the center of that equation. How does that relate into all that? >> So, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing, and you know, we've got a client here with us today, Kuberan who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client. What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software, managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco couple together, really great value. >> Kuberan, you got teed up beautifully there. So, I want to go to you and then I'll go to Matthew after. But, okay, tell us more about this IBM-Cisco dynamic. You guys are a hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post-pandemic is looking good too. So, take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. >> Sure. Sure, John, thank you. You know, to appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us, let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet, an MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated, direct-to-customer digital channel, where customers can quote and buy home and auto policies online without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vyne, another MVP. Vyne is our simplified self-serve and digitized broker channel, where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers, again, without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Both Sonnet and Vyne have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And, you know, we maintain the platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered desired results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vyne platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level, so that we can monitor the pulse of, you know, every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vyne, and we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. >> On that vision real quick. How does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth in the IPO, you think in automation, I'm assuming, can you elaborate quickly? >> Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get, like it's all digitized, so we have a lot of data in there. And this is where, you know, the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting, having predictability and all that, that's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. >> Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the Financial Services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? >> Yeah, absolutely. And Kuberan was touching on this from Economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in Vyne with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So, our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multicloud and AI. >> So, if you don't mind, if you don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, this was based, again, on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then the unique to what Kuberan in Economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here, is a market-leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So, you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application, all the way through the technical infrastructure. And it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >> So, AppD and these IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's. >> Absolutely, and that's, the point is bringing together the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. >> Well, we'll talk about the dynamics again. This is, again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. (laughs) I mean, you got the Cloud Satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and maybe even Laura can add as needed. But from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid multicloud world. So, we've really evolved whether it's IBM Cloud, AWS, as some of our clients, including Economical and others. Microsoft Azure, Google. It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together. And again, stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM and our partner ecosystem, and the evolution of IBM services as well. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring the elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security. And then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for the client. >> I love the end-to-end story. I see hybrid as distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multicloud as subsystems and all is going to have to be operated together. And the software that makes that happen. And I can see tons of head room opportunity there. Kuberan, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now. Because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for a business solution. And, you know, the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster. It's helping us to reduce defect linkage through our quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together. And our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So, you know, to be able to have a robust self-healing capability. And this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability, because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with AppDynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Sonnet and Vyne, where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for, excuse me, for our customers. Right? So, hopefully that kind of stitches the picture for you. >> That's awesome, great insight. Laura, Matthew, Kuberan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the Cloud Satellite and AI. What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >> So, as IBM invest more and more in these strategic hybrid cloud solutions industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. >> All right. Matthew? >> Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, Economical in this case, to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan has stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. >> Kuberan, take us home, final word. >> Thank you. What I would say is, what we've learned from this is really standing this stuff in more like a garage style kind of a situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So, that's the benefit I've seen. >> Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco better together. This ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John. >> Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (cheerful music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's Virtual Coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person. This year because of the pandemic, we're doing it remote. We're Cube Virtual covering AWS re:Invent Virtual. I'm John for your host. We are theCUBE Virtual, two great guests here Linda Tong a general manager, AppDynamics and Dave McCann vice-president of AWS migration, marketplace and control services. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Good to see you again John. >> Linda we were talking to some AppDynamics folks and some of your customers, obviously we've been following the growth of the marketplace for many years. The confluence of the tailwinds of the innovation going on with COVID and post COVID strategies is about helping customers where they are and they're not in the office anymore. They got to get the job done. This is really important on this cloud migration of getting software in the hands of people to write these modern apps. It's a big theme. What's your perspective on this right now, because you guys are partnered with Amazon, share your vision. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you nailed it. It's with COVID-19 our customers like IT organizations are finding this need to accelerate their migration to the cloud. And what's more important is they're finding that more and more of their customers are engaging through digital experiences and with the influx of people leaning on those digital experiences during COVID, performance issues are becoming more and more apparent. And so we're helping our customers as they migrate to the cloud. And specifically to AWS, it's a big partnership for us because we need to understand how our customers and how they manage performance through these transitions can stay flawless so that they can manage those experiences for their end users. >> Yeah, Dave, I've been watching this discovery observation space, observability, service meshes, Kubernetes, cloud native higher level services have really gotten popularity have gone mainstream. So there's more and more demand for I won't call it point products. That's an old term, but in the cloud, these are just higher level services that people are adopting more of. You're seeing huge pickup in the marketplace of companies who are selling through there and engaging but it's not just selling, you're integrating. What's your vision for all of this? >> So, John, you're absolutely right. Our customers as they migrate more and more applications to the cloud and in some regulated industries they still have applications running on premise. They're really actually standing up a new operating model where they not only want observability of what's going on but I feel what we would call service management framework or a set of tools to manage the application portfolio. And companies around the world are putting together new common instance of AWS native services, such as CloudWatch CloudTrail, Service Catalog, AWS Config, Control Tower with best in class vendors like Cisco AppDynamics. And each company is building their own collection of tools into management framework that allows them to optimally modernize and manage their application portfolio. And it's a rising topic around the world. >> Linda, I want to get back to you on AppDynamics you're the leader of the team as general manager, congratulations. You know a little bit about software in the cloud and CloudScale and your career going back to Google now at AppDynamics you've seen a lot of the changes. What specifically value do you see AppDynamics and Amazon bringing to the market today? Because the world's changed. It's still large scale, there's faster speed but you can't just buy things like anymore, I've got to go in send a ticket request, go to procurement, developers want to integrate immediately. They need to integrate when they see a problem they got to integrate technology. This seems to be a trend. What's your, where is AppDynamics bringing the value of AWS to the market? >> Absolutely I think it's threefold. One it's for a lot of these developers, as they start to migrate their applications and modernize them with AWS and all the great services that are available we can partner to help them with that modernization effort while giving them visibility into the performance of those applications to make sure that they don't miss a beat as they deploy those on these new sets of services over AWS. The second thing is, for those customers that are leveraging AWS for that migration, we have a seamless integration between AppDynamics and AWS. So you can buy our service directly through AWS marketplace. So that becomes a really easy procurement. And then on top of that, as, a lot of developers have to manage hybrid employments, so new modern applications has done AWS as well as some of their traditional applications that are talking to each other. They can get that full end to end visibility leveraging AppDynamics so that they can understand what's going on across the entirety of their business as they start to lead these transformations across our organization. >> Dave, just comment on if you can, 'cause I know a little bit about some of the things you put in place, the enterprise I forget development or sales program where at the prices can be more friendly. I think this is kind of a use case where this is proving enterprises can get what they need in the marketplace that not only is it successful but you have traction with this. What's you take on... >> There's a number of motions that we're doing there John, to help large companies around the world who may have, dozens, hundreds and in comes cases with fortune 100 they're thousands of applications. And so you actually have to solve multiple challenges that the company has. On the procurement side, we're obviously working with AppDynamics to publish as a service right in AWS marketplace. And we have over 300,000 customers worldwide only AWS marketplace who are subscribing to software and provisioning out to hundreds and thousands of developers, all of whom are using their own AWS accounts. So on that provisioning and subscription experience we work deeply with the AppDynamics team to meet that a really seamless experience from discovery to provision to meter and billing. On the interoperability front, as Linda mentioned, our customers want these best in class tools like AppDynamics to work well with the other AWS services so that they can really have a very modern DevOps pipeline for those applications that are moving to more of a CICD model. And for people who are still running in a bit more of an Intel, ITSM model, they've still got to manage and monitor applications that haven't quite got there in the full modernization stack. So this is actually happening not just with the customer, the enterprise or with the ISV AppDynamics, this transitions' also working with all the consulting firms. And a lot of the large software resellers around the world, the computer centers of Europe the right spaces, the presidios of North America. The DXEs of Asia Pacific. These consulting partners are also using tools such as AppDynamics so to become a managed service provider. And in some cases on that journey to the cloud no join the customer saying I'm really busy I'm modernizing applications. Hey consulting partner, can you manage some part of my infrastructure, some part of my stack? And tools like AppDynamics and Kubernetes and AWS become really central tool kits to the new emerging managed service providers that are all around the world. >> Yeah, and I talked about this years ago with Andy Jassy and I think we were riffing on this run this new set of category creations of services and companies. Linda this appears to be one of those cases where, there's a category with existing spend and existing customers. So what he just said is interesting. And I want to get your thoughts because these are these points of these new areas where AppDynamics can potentially help enterprises. What are some of the areas that you see AppDynamics helping enterprises in their cloud adoption journey 'cause they want some cloud native we see Hybrid and all the announcements, Outpost, now Edge it's a distributed computer. You need to have software at every piece of the puzzle. So what's your, what areas can you share specifically? >> Absolutely and so, like Dave was just saying it's, as these organizations start to make these major cloud migrations, one, their applications are getting actually significantly more complex than they've ever been. And they're now spanning a much broader ecosystem than they've ever spanned before. So that the kind of coverage that IT organizations and DevOps needs to cover not only is seeing this explosion of data but it's also now spanning areas of control that some of these folks have never had to think about before. And so the value of AppDynamics is our ability to be able to ingest data from your cloud native applications your traditional applications, all different sources of domain data that you want to get including things like security data. So we can start to correlate that in a meaningful way and then tie that back to business insights. And so the way that AppDynamics is actually bringing value to the table is not only helping our customers get visibility across the entire stack, but actually only surfacing the most meaningful insights to help them act on that those performance issues that they might see and more meaningfully manage their businesses. >> Linda I think you guys are onto something really big not just on the wave and just the positioning but one of the trends that we're reporting and we're going to be teasing out all week three weeks here is automation is great but that's just baseline. Everything is a service really speaks to some of the things that you guys have to put in place 'cause the mandate is everything should be a service. Now, I mean, I'm overgeneralizing but that's generally the ivory tower C suite message. Make it as a service cloud scale is beautiful, but then you when you pass it down to the teams, that's like that's not easy boss. It's not easy to do. That's really kind of what you're getting at here. It's not just automation and DevOps. It's the business model. >> Absolutely it's the intelligence it's once you create thousands and thousands of services, how do you manage them effectively and know what matters and what doesn't? >> Dave your final word here on on this point is when you think about that if you believe that to be true, then I'm just going to be downloading services whenever I need them. So it's almost like quasi self service managed services kind of coming together in real time or with my off base there. What's your take on that? >> No, we're actually working together with that dynamic and so all these kinds of things. So as we proliferate services, John and, AWS has got over 175 services and application is made up of many components. So how do you actually correlate an associate all the resources that make up that application? And if you think about dynamics name is the application and dynamics what's going on with the application. So we actually just launched today service catalog application registry, which is a new API surface for the AWS service catalog that allows you to define NGS on all the AWS resources from a cloud formation stack set all the way down into an easy to instance and associate that's an application known. And so the higher level of abstraction is what we talked about is management of the application. And what customers want to do, CIO's want to manage the application all the resources associated through the application whether the application is running well, is it secure? Is it on budget? Whether it's actually running? So application management is kind of where people are going even though their application is made up of dozens of associated services. So this is the next frontier. >> Well you guys are just great to have on world-class partnership two leaders, AppDynamics, story history they continue to do well. And even now with the world going on, Dave congratulations on your success. Final question for both of you is, where's the partnership go from here? I think it's a great success story. What's in the store for the future? >> Linda. >> Yeah to the moon. It's look AWS is an amazing partner. And Dave is a great guy to work with and where we are going is to help our customers build world-class applications and be able to manage them and modernize those effectively. And there's no way we could do that without partners at AWS. So it's a, there's a long-term relationship here. >> Well, congratulations, Linda Tong general manager AppDynamics. Thanks for coming on, and virtually at least we'll see you on the Interwebs during the next couple of weeks here, Virtual re:Invent Dave McCann. Of course, we'll see you again and great to watch you continue to grow. Is there any new title is going to add to your thing marketplace now it's migration, control services come on. >> With innovation culture we keep innovating. >> Great to have you guys on. Thanks for, thanks for sharing, appreciate it. >> John, Linda thank you very much. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for that great insight. Really appreciate it. I'm John from theCUBE you're watching coverage of re:Invent 2020. This is theCUBE virtual. (upbeat music)