>> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day two of CloudNative Security CON 23. Lisa Martin here in studio in Palo Alto with John Furrier. John, we've had some great conversations. I've had a global event. This was a global event. We had Germany on yesterday. We had the Boston Studio. We had folks on the ground in Seattle. Lot of great conversations, a lot of great momentum at this event. What is your number one takeaway with this inaugural event? >> Well, first of all, our coverage with our CUBE alumni experts coming in remotely this remote event for us, I think this event as an inaugural event stood out because one, it was done very carefully and methodically from the CNCF. I think they didn't want to overplay their hand relative to breaking out from CUBE CON So Kubernetes success and CloudNative development has been such a success and that event and ecosystem is booming, right? So that's the big story is they have the breakout event and the question was, was it a good call? Was it successful? Was it going to, would the dog hunt as they say, in this case, I think the big takeaway is that it was successful by all measures. One, people enthusiastic and confident that this has the ability to stand on its own and still contribute without taking away from the benefits and growth of Kubernetes CUBE CON and CloudNative console. So that was the key. Hallway conversations, the sessions all curated and developed properly to be different and focused for that reason. So I think the big takeaway is that the CNCF did a good job on how they rolled this out. Again, it was very intimate event small reminds me of first CUBE CON in Seattle, kind of let's test it out. Let's see how it goes. Again, clearly it was people successful and they understood why they're doing it. And as we commented out in our earlier segments this is not something new. Amazon Web Services has re:Invent and re:Inforce So a lot of parallels there. I see there. So I think good call. CNCF did the right thing. I think this has legs. And then as Dave pointed out, Dave Vellante, on our last keynote analysis was the business model of the hackers is better than the business model of the industry. They're making more money, it costs less so, you know, they're playing offense and the industry playing defense. That has to change. And as Dave pointed out we have to make the cost of hacking and breaches and cybersecurity higher so that the business model crashes. And I think that's the strategic imperative. So I think the combination of the realities of the market globally and open source has to go faster. It's good to kind of decouple and be highly cohesive in the focus. So to me that's the big takeaway. And then the other one is, is that there's a lot more security problems still unresolved. The emphasis on developers productivity is at risk here, if not solved. You saw supply chain software, again, front and center and then down in the weeds outside of Kubernetes, things like BIND and DNS were brought up. You're seeing the Linux kernel. Really important things got to be paid attention to. So I think very good call, very good focus. >> I would love if for us to be able to, as the months go on talk to some of the practitioners that actually got to attend. There were 72 sessions, that's a lot of content for a small event. Obviously to your point, very well curated. We did hear from some folks yesterday who were just excited to get the community back together in person. To your point, having this dedicated focus on CloudNativesecurity is incredibly important. You talked about, you know, the offense defense, the fact that right now the industry needs to be able to pivot from being on defense to being on offense. This is a challenging thing because it is so lucrative for hackers. But this seems to be from what we've heard in the last couple days, the right community with the right focus to be able to make that pivot. >> Yeah, and I think if you look at the success of Kubernetes, 'cause again we were there at theCUBE first one CUBE CON, the end user stories really drove end user participation. Drove the birth of Kubernetes. Left some of these CloudNative early adopters early pioneers that were using cloud hyperscale really set the table for CloudNative CON. I think you're seeing that here with this CloudNative SecurityCON where I think we're see a lot more end user stories because of the security, the hairs on fire as we heard from Madrona Ventures, you know, as they as an investor you have a lot of use cases out there where customers are leaning in with getting the rolling up their sleeves, working with open source. This has to be the driver. So I'm expecting to see the next level of SecurityCON to be end user focused. Much more than vendor focused. Where CUBECON was very end user focused and then attracted all the vendors in that grew the industry. I expect the similar pattern here where end user action will be very high at the beginning and that will essentially be the rising tide for the vendors to be then participating. So I expect almost a similar trajectory to CUBECON. >> That's a good path that it needs to all be about all the end users. One of the things I'm curious if what you heard was what are some of the key factors that are going to move CloudNative Security forward? What did you hear the last two days? >> I heard that there's a lot of security problems and no one wants to kind of brag about this but there's a lot of under the hood stuff that needs to get taken care of. So if automation scales, and we heard that from one of the startups we've just interviewed. If automation and scale continues to happen and with the business model of the hackers still booming, security has to be refactored quickly and there's going to be an opportunity structurally to use the cloud for that. So I think it's a good opportunity now to get dedicated focus on fixing things like the DNS stuff old school under the hood, plumbing, networking protocols. You're going to start to see this super cloud-like environment emerge where data's involved, everything's happening and so security has to be re imagined. And I think there's a do over opportunity for the security industry with CloudNative driving that. And I think this is the big thing that I see as an opportunity to, from a story standpoint from a coverage standpoint is that it's a do-over for security. >> One of the things that we heard yesterday is that there's a lot of it, it's a pretty high percentage of organizations that either don't have a SOCK or have a very primitive SOCK. Which kind of surprised me that at this day and age the risks are there. We talked about that today's focus and the keynote was a lot about the software supply chain and what's going on there. What did you hear in terms of the appetite for organizations through the voice of the practitioner to say, you know what guys, we got to get going because there's going to be the hackers are they're here. >> I didn't hear much about that in the coverage 'cause we weren't in the hallways. But from reading the tea leaves and talking to the folks on the ground, I think there's an implied like there's an unlimited money from customers. So it's a very robust from the data infrastructure stack building we cover with the angel investor Kane you're seeing data infrastructure's going to be part of the solution here 'cause data and security go hand in hand. So everyone's got basically checkbook wide open everyone wants to have the answer. And we commented that the co-founder of Palo Alto you had on our coverage yesterday was saying that you know, there's no real platform, there's a lot of tools out there. People will buy anything. So there's still a huge appetite and spend in security but the answer's not going to more tool sprawling. It's going to more platform auto, something that enables automation, fix some of the underlying mechanisms involved and fix it fast. So to me I think it's going to be a robust monetary opportunity because of the demand on the business side. So I don't see that changing at all and I think it's going to accelerate. >> It's a great point in terms of the demand for the business side because as we know as we said yesterday, the next Log4j is out there. It's not a matter of if this happens again it's when, it's the extent, it's how frequent we know that. So organizations all the way up to the board have to be concerned about brand reputation. Nobody wants to be the next big headline in terms of breaches and customer data being given to hackers and hackers making all this money on that. That has to go all the way up to the board and there needs to be alignment between the board and the executives at the organization in terms of how they're going to deal with security, and now. This is not a conversation that can wait. Yeah, I mean I think the five C's we talked about yesterday the culture of companies, the cloud is an enabler, you've got clusters of servers and capabilities, Kubernetes clusters, you've got code and you've got all kinds of, you know, things going on there. Each one has elements that are at risk for hacking, right? So that to me is something that's super important. I think that's why the focus on security's different and important, but it's not going to fork the main event. So that's why I think the spin out was, spinout, or the new event is a good call by the CNCF. >> One of the things today that struck me they're talking a lot about software supply chain and that's been in the headlines for quite a while now. And a stat that was shared this morning during the keynote just blew my brains that there was a 742% increase in the software supply chain attacks occurring over the last three years. It's during Covid times, that is a massive increase. The threat landscape is just growing so amorphously but organizations need to help dial that down because their success and the health of the individuals and the end users is at risk. Well, Covid is an environment where everyone's kind of working at home. So there was some disruption to infrastructure. Also, when you have change like that, there's opportunities for hackers, they'll arbitrage that big time. But I think general the landscape is changing. There's no perimeter anymore. It's CloudNative, this is where it is and people who are moving from old IT to CloudNative, they're at risk. That's why there's tons of ransomware. That's why there's tons of risk. There's just hygiene, from hygiene to architecture and like Nick said from Palo Alto, the co-founder, there's not a lot of architecture in security. So yeah, people have bulked up their security teams but you're going to start to see much more holistic thinking around redoing security. I think that's the opportunity to propel CloudNative, and I think you'll see a lot more coming out of this. >> Did you hear any specific information on some of the CloudNative projects going on that really excite you in terms of these are the right people going after the right challenges to solve in the right direction? >> Well I saw the sessions and what jumped out to me at the sessions was it's a lot of extensions of what we heard at CUBECON and I think what they want to do is take out the big items and break 'em out in security. Kubescape was one we just covered. They want to get more sandbox type stuff into the security side that's very security focused but also plays well with CUBECON. So we'll hear more about how this plays out when we're in Amsterdam coming up in April for CUBECON to hear how that ecosystem, because I think it'll be kind of a relief to kind of decouple security 'cause that gives more focus to the stakeholders in CUBECON. There's a lot of issues going on there and you know service meshes and whatnot. So it's a lot of good stuff happening. >> A lot of good stuff happening. One of the things that'll be great about CUBECON is that we always get the voice of the customer. We get vendors coming on with the voice of the customer talking about and you know in that case how they're using Kubernetes to drive the business forward. But it'll be great to be able to pull in some of the security conversations that spin out of CloudNative Security CON to understand how those end users are embracing the technology. You brought up I think Nir Zuk from Palo Alto Networks, one of the themes there when Dave and I did their Ignite event in December was, of 22, was really consolidation. There are so many tools out there that organizations have to wrap their heads around and they need to be able to have the right enablement content which this event probably delivered to figure out how do we consolidate security tools effectively, efficiently in a way that helps dial down our risk profile because the risks just seem to keep growing. >> Yeah, and I love the technical nature of all that and I think this is going to be the continued focus. Chris Aniszczyk who's the CTO listed like E and BPF we covered with Liz Rice is one of the most three important points of the conference and it's just, it's very nerdy and that's what's needed. I mean it's technical. And again, there's no real standards bodies anymore. The old days developers I think are super important to be the arbiters here. And again, what I love about the CNCF is that they're developer focused and we heard developer first even in security. So you know, this is a sea change and I think, you know, developers' choice will be the standards bodies. >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah. >> They decide the future. >> Yeah. >> And I think having the sandboxing and bringing this out will hopefully accelerate more developer choice and self-service. >> You've been talking about kind of putting the developers in the driver's seat as really being the key decision makers for a while. Did you hear information over the last couple of days that validates that? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's clearly the fact that they did this was one. The other one is, is that engineering teams and dev teams and script teams, they're blending together. It's not just separate silos and the ones that are changing their team dynamics, again, back to the culture are winning. And I think this has to happen. Security has to be embedded everywhere in making it frictionless and to provide kind of the guardrail so developers don't slow down. And I think where security has become a drag or an anchor or a blocker has been just configuration of how the organization's handling it. So I think when people recognize that the developers are in charge and they're should be driving the application development you got to make sure that's secure. And so that's always going to be friction and I think whoever does it, whoever unlocks that for the developer to go faster will win. >> Right. Oh, that's what I'm sure magic to a developer's ear is the ability to go faster and be able to focus on co-development in a secure fashion. What are some of the things that you're excited about for CUBECON. Here we are in February, 2023 and CUBECON is just around the corner in April. What are some of the things that you're excited about based on the groundswell momentum that this first inaugural CloudNative Security CON is generating from a community, a culture perspective? >> I think this year's going to be very interesting 'cause we have an economic challenge globally. There's all kinds of geopolitical things happening. I think there's going to be very entrepreneurial activity this year more than ever. I think you're going to see a lot more innovative projects ideas hitting the table. I think it's going to be a lot more entrepreneurial just because the cycle we're in. And also I think the acceleration of mainstream deployments of out of the CNCF's main event CUBECON will happen. You'll see a lot more successes, scale, more clarity on where the security holes are or aren't. Where the benefits are. I think containers and microservices are continuing to surge. I think the Cloud scale hyperscale as Amazon, Azure, Google will be more aggressive. I think AI will be a big theme this year. I think you can see how data is going to infect some of the innovation thinking. I'm really excited about the data infrastructure because it powers a lot of things in the Cloud. So I think the Amazon Web Services, Azure next level gen clouds will impact what happens in the CloudNative foundation. >> Did you have any conversations yesterday or today with respect to AI and security? Was that a focus of anybody's? Talk to me about that. >> Well, I didn't hear any sessions on AI but we saw some demos on stage. But they're teasing out that this is an augmentation to their mission, right? So I think a lot of people are looking at AI as, again, like I always said there's the naysayers who think it's kind of a gimmick or nothing to see here, and then some are just going to blown away. I think the people who are alpha geeks and the industry connect the dots and understand that AI is going to be an accelerant to a lot of heavy lifting that was either manual, you know, hard to do things that was boring or muck as they say. I think that's going to be where you'll see the AI stories where it's going to accelerate either ways to make security better or make developers more confident and productive. >> Or both. >> Yeah. So definitely AI will be part of it. Yeah, definitely. One of the things too that I'm wondering if, you know, we talk about CloudNative and the goal of it, the importance of it. Do you think that this event, in terms of what we were able to see, obviously being remote the event going on in Seattle, us being here in Palo Alto and Boston and guests on from Seattle and Germany and all over, did you hear the really the validation for why CloudNative Security why CloudNative is important for organizations whether it's a bank or a hospital or a retailer? Is that validation clear and present? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think it was implied. I don't think there was like anyone's trying to debate that. I think this conference was more of it's assumed and they were really trying to push the ability to make security less defensive, more offensive and more accelerated into the solving the problems with the businesses that are out there. So clearly the CloudNative community understands where the security challenges are and where they're emerging. So having a dedicated event will help address that. And they've got great co-chairs too that put it together. So I think that's very positive. >> Yeah. Do you think, is it possible, I mean, like you said several times today so eloquently the industry's on the defense when it comes to security and the hackers are on the offense. Is it really possible to make that switch or obviously get some balances. As technology advances and industry gets to take advantage of that, so do the hackers, is that balance achievable? >> Absolutely. I mean, I think totally achievable. The question's going to be what's the environment going to be like? And I remember as context to understanding whether it's viable or not, is to look at, just go back 13 years ago, I remember in 2010 Amazon was viewed as an unsecure environment. Everyone's saying, "Oh, the cloud is not secure." And I remember interviewing Steve Schmidt at AWS and we discussed specifically how Amazon Cloud was being leveraged by hackers. They made it more complex for the hackers. And he said, "This is just the beginning." It's kind of like barbed wire on a fence. It's yeah, you're not going to climb it so people can get over it. And so since then what's happened is the Cloud has become more secure than on premises for a lot of either you know, personnel reasons, culture reasons, not updating, you know, from patches to just being insecure to be more insecure. So that to me means that the flip the script can be flipped. >> Yeah. And I think with CloudNative they can build in automation and code to solve some of these problems and make it more complex for the hacker. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And increase the cost. >> Yeah, exactly. Make it more complex. Increase the cost. That'll be in interesting journey to follow. So John, here we are early February, 2023 theCUBE starting out strong as always. What year are we in, 12? Year 12? >> 13th year >> 13! What's next for theCUBE? What's coming up that excites you? >> Well, we're going to do a lot more events. We got the theCUBE in studio that I call theCUBE Center as kind of internal code word, but like, this is more about getting the word out that we can cover events remotely as events are starting to change with hybrid, digital is going to be a big part of that. So I think you're going to see a lot more CUBE on location. We're going to do, still do theCUBE and have theCUBE cover events from the studio to get deeper perspective because we can then bring people in remote through our our studio team. We can bring our CUBE alumni in. We have a corpus of content and experts to bring to table. So I think the coverage will be increased. The expertise and data will be flowing through theCUBE and so Cube Center, CUBE CUBE Studio. >> Lisa: Love it. >> Will be a integral part of our coverage. >> I love that. And we have such great conversations with guests in person, but also virtually, digitally as well. We still get the voices of the practitioners and the customers and the vendors and the partner ecosystem really kind of lauded loud and clear through theCUBE megaphone as I would say. >> And of course getting the clips out there, getting the highlights. >> Yeah. >> Getting more stories. No stories too small for theCUBE. We can make it easy to get the best content. >> The best content. John, it's been fun covering CloudNative security CON with you with you. And Dave and our guests, thank you so much for the opportunity and looking forward to the next event. >> John: All right. We'll see you at Amsterdam. >> Yeah, I'll be there. We want to thank you so much for watching TheCUBES's two day coverage of CloudNative Security CON 23. We're live in Palo Alto. You are live wherever you are and we appreciate your time and your view of this event. For John Furrier, Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching guys. We'll see you at the next show.

>> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California. In our remote studio, we have a quarantine crew here during this COVID-19 crisis. Here talking about the crisis and the impact to business and overall work. Joined by a great guest Dustin Kirkland, CUBE alumni, who's now the chief product officer at Apex Clearing. This COVID-19 has really demonstrated to the mainstream world stage, not just inside the industry that we've been covering for many, many years, that the idea of at-scale means something completely different, and certainly DevOps and Agile is going mainstream to survive, and people are realizing that now. No better guest than have Dustin join us, who's had experiences in open source. He's worked across the industry from Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, Google, Canonical. Dustin, welcome back to the CUBE here remotely. Looking good. >> Yeah, yeah, thanks, John. Last time we talked, I was in the studio, and here we are talking over the internet. This is a lot of fun. >> Well, I really appreciate it. I know you've been in your new role since September. A lot's changed, but one of the things why I wanted to talk with you is because you and I have talked many times around DevOps. This has been the industry conversation. We've been inside the ropes. Now you're starting to see, with this new scale of work-at-home forcing all kinds of new pressure points, giving people the realization that the entire life with digital and with technology can be different, doesn't have to be augmented with their existing life. It's a full-on technology driven impact, and I think a lot of people are learning that, and certainly, healthcare and finance are two areas, in particular, that are impacted heavily. Obviously, people are worried about the economy, and we're worried about people's lives. These are two major areas, but even outside that, there's new entrepreneurs right now that I know who are working on new ventures. You're seeing people working on new solutions. This is kind of bringing the DevOps concept to areas that quite frankly weren't there. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that. >> Yeah, without a doubt, I mean, the whole world has changed in 30 short days. We knew something was amiss in China. We knew that there was a lot of danger for people. The danger for business, though, didn't become apparent until vast swathes of the work force got sent home. And there's a number of businesses and industries that are coping relatively well with this. Certainly those who have previously adopted, or have experienced, doing work remotely, doing business by video, teleconference, having resources in the cloud, having people and expertise who are able to continue working at nearly 100% capacity in 100% remote environments. There's a lot of technology behind that, and there are some industries, and in particular, some firms, some organizations, that were really adept and were able to make that shift almost overnight. Maybe there were a couple bumps along the way, some VPN settings needed to be tweaked, and Zoom settings needed to be changed a little bit, but for many, this was a relatively smooth transition, and we may be doing this for a very long time. >> Yeah, I want to get your thoughts, before we get into some of the product stuff that you guys are working on and some other things. What's your general reaction to people in your circles, inside industry and tech industry, and outside, what are you seeing a reaction to this new scale, work from home, social distancing, isolation, what are your observations? >> Yeah, you know, I think we're in for a long haul. This is going to be the new normal for quite some time. I think it's super important to check on the people you care about, and before we get into dev and tech, check on the people you care about, especially people who either aren't yet respecting the social distancing norms and impress upon them the importance that, hey, this is about you, this is about the people you care about, it's about people you don't even know, because there are plenty of people who can carry this and not even know. So definitely check on the people that you care about. And reach out to those people and stay in touch. We all need one another more than ever, right? I manage a team, and it's super important, I think, to understand how much stress everyone is under. I've got over a dozen people that report to me. Most of them have kids and families. We start out our weekly staff meeting now, and we bring the kids in. They're curious, they want to know what's going on. First five, 10 minutes of our meeting is meet the family. And that demystifies some of what we're doing, and actually keeps the other 50 minutes of the meeting pretty quiet in our experience. But it's really humanized an aspect of work from home that's always been a bit taboo. We laugh about the reporter in Korea whose kid and his wife came in during the middle of a live on-air interview. There's certainly, I've worked from home for almost 12 years, like, those are really uncomfortable situations. Until about a month ago, when that just became the norm. And from that perspective, I think there's a humanization that we're far more understanding of people who work from home now than ever before. >> It's funny, I've heard people say, you know, my wife didn't know what I did until I started working at home. And comments to seeing people's family, and saying, wow, that's awesome, and just bringing a personal connection, not just this software mechanism that connects people for some meeting, and we've all been on those meetings. They go long, and you're sitting there, and you're turning the camera off so you can sneeze. All those things are happening. But when you start to think about, beyond it being a software mechanism, that it's a social equation right now. People have shared experiences. It's been an interesting time. >> Yeah, and just sharing those experiences. We do a think internal on our Slack channel every day. We try to post a picture. We call it hashtag recess, and at recess we take a picture of walking the dogs, or playing with the kids, or gardening, or whatever it is, going for a run. Again, just trying to make the best of this, take advantage of, you know, it's hard working from home, but trying to take advantage of some of those once in a lifetime opportunities we have here. And my team has started pub quiz on Fridays, so we're mostly spread across, in the U.S., so we're able to do this at a reasonable hour, but the last couple of Fridays, we've jumped on a Zoom, downloaded a pub trivia game, most of us a crack a beer, or glass of wine, or a cocktail, and you know, it's just, it actually puts a punctuate mark on the end of the week, puts a period on the end of the week. Because that's the other thing about this, man, if you don't have some boundaries, it's easy to go from an eight or nine hour normal day to 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days, Saturday bleeds into Sunday bleeds into Monday, and then the rat race takes over. >> You got to get the exercise. You have a routine. That's my experience. What's your advice for people who are working at home for the first time? Do you have any best practices? >> I actually had a blog post on this about two weeks ago and put up almost a shopping list of some of the things that I've assembled here in the work from home environment. It's something I've been doing since 2008, so it's been there for a good long while. It's a little bit hard to accumulate all the technology that you need, but I would say, most important, have a space, some kind of space. Some people have more room or less, but even just a corner in a master bedroom with a standup desk, some space that is your own, that the family understands and respects. The other best practice is set some time boundaries. I like to start my day early. I'll try to break more a little bit for that recess, see the family some, and then knock off at a reasonable hour, so establish those boundaries. Yeah, I've got a bunch of tips in that blog post I can shoot you after this, but it's the sort of thing that, be a bit understanding, too, of other people in this situation for the first time, perhaps. So you know, offer whatever help and assistance you can, and be understanding that, man, things just aren't like they used to be. >> That's great advice. Thanks for the insights. Want to get to something that I see happening, and this always kind of happens when you see these waves where there's a downturn, or there's some sort of an event. In this case it's catastrophic in the way it vectored in like this and the impact that we just discussed. But what comes out of it is creativity around entrepreneurial activity, and certainly reinvention, businesses reforming, retrenching, resetting, whatever word, pivot, digital transformation, there's plenty of words for it. But this is the time where people can actually get a lot done. I always comment, in my last interview I did, you know, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was sheltering in place, and Isaac Newton invented calculus, so you can actually get some work done. And you're starting to see people look at the new technology and start disrupting old incumbent markets, because now more than ever, things are exposed. The opportunity of recognition becomes clearer. So I wanted to get your thoughts on this. You're a product person, you've got a lot of product management skills, and you're currently taking this DevOps to financial market with fintech and your business, so you're applying known principles and software and tech and disrupting an existing industry. I think this is going to be a common trend for the next five years. >> Yeah, so on that first note, I think you're exactly right. There will be a reckoning, and there will be a ton of opportunities that come out of this for the already or the rapidly transformed digital native, digital focused business. There will be some that survive and thrive here. I think you're seeing a lot of this with the popularity of Zoom that has spiked recently. I think you're going to see technologies like DocuSign being used in places that, some of those places that still require wet signatures, but you just can't get to the notary and sign a, I don't know, a refi on your mortgage or something like that. And so I think you're going to see a bunch of those. The biggest opportunities are really around our education system. I've got two kids at home, and I'm in a pretty forward thinking school district in Austin, Texas, you know, but that's not the norm where our teachers are conducting classes and assignments over Zoom. I've got a kindergartener and a second grader. There's somewhat limits to what they can do with technology. I think you're going to see a lot of entrepreneurial solutions that develop in that space, and that's going to go from K through 12, and then into college. You think about how universities have had to shift and cancel classes, and what's happening with graduation. I've got a six and an eight year old, and I've been told I need to save $200,000 apiece for each of them to go to college, which is just an astounding number, especially to someone like me, who went to an inexpensive public university on a scholarship. Saving that kind of money for college, and just thinking about how much more efficient our education system might be with a lot more digital, a lot more digital education, digital testing and classes, while still maintaining the college experience, what that's going to look like in 10 years. I think we're going to see a lot of changes over these next 18 months to our educational system. >> Dustin, talk about the event dynamics. Physical events don't exist currently. Certainly, when they do come back, they should, and they will, the role of the virtual space is going to be highlighted and new opportunities will emerge. You mentioned education. People learn, not just for school, whether they're kids, whether they're professionals, learning and collaboration, work tools are going to reshape. What's your take on that marketplace, because we got to do virtual events. You can't just replicate a physical event and move it to digital. It's a complex system. >> Yeah, you're talking about an entire industry. We saw the Google Events, Google Next, Google IO, the Microsoft Events, just across the, I'm here in Austin, Texas, all of South by Southwest was canceled, which is just, it's breathtaking. When does that come back, and what does it look like? Is it a year or two or more from now? Events is where I spend my time, and when I get on a plane, and I fly somewhere, I'm usually going to a conference or trade show. Think about the sports industry. People who get on a plane, they go to an NFL game. John, I don't have all the answers, man, but I'm telling you, that entire industry is rapidly, rapidly going to evolve. I hope and pray that one day we're back to a, I can go back to a college football game again. I hope I can sit in a CUBE studio at a CUBE Con or an Open Stack or some other conference again. >> Hey, we should do a rerun, because I was watching the Patriots game last night, Tom Brady beating the Chiefs, October from last year. It was one of the best games of the season, went down to the wire, and I watched it, and I'm like, okay, that's Tom Brady, he's still in the Patriot uniform on the TV. Do we do reruns? This is the question. Right now, there's a big void for the next three months. What do we do? Do we replay the highlights from the CUBE? Do we have physical get togethers with Zoom? What's your take on how people should think about these events? >> Yeah, you know, the reruns only go so far, right? I'm a Texas Aggie, man. I could watch Johnny Football in his prime anytime. But I know what happened, and those games are just not as exciting as something that's a surprise. I'm actually curious about e-sports for the first time. What would it look like to watch a couple of kids who are really good at Madden Football on a Playstation go at it? What would other games that I've never seen look like? In our space, it's a lot more about, I think, podcasts and live content and staying connected and apprised of what's going on, making-- Oh, we locked up there for a second. It's, I think it's going to be really interesting. I'm still following you guys. I certainly see you active on social media. I'm sort of more addicted than ever to the live news, and in fact, I'm ready to start seeing some stuff that doesn't involve COVID-19, so from that perspective, man, keep churning out good content, and good content that's pertinent to the rest of our industry. >> That's great stuff. Well, Dustin, take a minute to explain what you're doing at Apex Clearing, your mission, and what are you guys excited about. >> Yeah, so Apex Clearing, we're a fintech. We're a very forward-focused, digitally-focused fintech. We are well positioned to continue servicing the needs of our clients in this environment. We went fully remote the first week of March, long before it was mandatory, and our business shifted pretty seamlessly. We worked through a couple of hiccups, provisioning extra VPN IP addresses, and upgrading a couple of service plans on some of the softwares, the service we buy, but besides that, our team has done just a marvelous job transitioning to remote. We are in the broker, dealer, and registered advisor space, so we provide the clearing services, which handles stock trades, equity trades, in the back end, and the custodial services. We actually hold, safeguard, the equities that our correspondents, we call our clients correspondents, their retail customers end up holding. So we've been around in our current form since about 2012. This was a retread of a previous company that was bought and retooled as Apex Clearing in 2012. Very shortly after that, we helped Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, a whole bunch of really forward-looking companies reinvent what it meant to buy and sell and trade securities online, and to hold assets in a robo advisor like Betterment. Today, we are definitely well-known, well-respected for how quickly and seamlessly our APIs can be used by our correspondents in building really modern e-banking and e-brokerage experiences. >> So you guys-- >> So that went-- >> Are you guys like a DevOps platform-- >> We're more like software as a service for fintech and brokerage. So our products are largely APIs that our correspondents use their own credentials to interact with, and then using our APIs, they can open accounts, which means get an account number from the systems that allows them to then fund that account, connect via ACH and other bank connectivity platforms, transfer cash into those accounts, and then start conducting trades. Some of our correspondents have that down to a 60-second experience in a mobile app. From a mobile app, you can register for that account, if you need to, take a picture of an IED, have all of that imported, add your tax information, have that account number associated with your banking account, move a couple hundred dollars into that banking account, and then if the stock market's open, start buying and selling stock in that same window. >> Great, well, I wanted to talk about this, because to the earlier bigger picture, I think people are going to be applying DevOps principles, younger entrepreneurs, but also, reborn, if you will, professionals who are old school IT or whatever, moving faster. And you wrote a blog post I want to get your thoughts on. You wrote it on April second. How we've adapted Ubuntu's time-based release cycles to fintech and software as a service. What is that all about? What's the meaning behind this post? You guys are doing something new, unique, or-- >> To this industry and to many of the people around me, even our clients and customers around me, this is a whole new world. They've never seen anything like it. To those of us who have been around Linux, open source, certainly Ubuntu, Open Stack, Kubernetes, it's just standard operating procedures. There's nothing surprising about it, necessarily. But either it's some combination of the financial services world, just the nature of proprietary software, but also the concept of software as a service, SaaS, which is very different than Ubuntu or Kubernetes or Open Stack, which is released software, right. We ship software at the end of an Ubuntu cycle or a Kubernetes cycle. It's very different when you're a software as a service platform, and it's a matter of rolling out to production some changes, and those changes then going live. So, I wrote a post mainly to give some transparency, largely to our clients, our correspondents. We've got a couple hundred customers that use the Apex platform. I've met with many of them in a sort of one-on-many, one-to-one, one-on-many basis, where I'll show up and deliver the product road map, a couple of product managers will come and do a deep dive. Part of what we communicate to those customers is around, now, around our release cycles, and to many of them, it's a foreign concept that they've just never seen or heard before, and so I put together the blog post. We shared it internally, and educated the teams, and it was well-received. We shared it externally privately with a number of customers, and it was well-received, and a couple of them, actually a couple of the Silicon Valley based customers said, hey, why don't you just put this out there on Medium or on your blog or under an Apex banner, because this actually would be really well-received by others in the family, other partners in the family. So I'm happy to kind of dive into a couple of the key principles here, and we can sort of talk through it if you're interested, John. >> Well, I think the main point is you guys have a release cycle that is the speed of open source to SaaS, and fintech, which again, proprietary stuff is slower, monolithic. >> Yeah, the key principle is that we've taken this, and we've made it predictable and transparent, and we commit to these cycles. You know, most people maybe familiar with Ubuntu releasing twice a year, right, April and October, Ubuntu has released every April and October since 2004. I was involved with Ubuntu between 2008 and 2018 as an engineer, an engineering manager, and then a product manager, and eventually a VP of product at Canonical, and that was very much my life for 10 years, oriented around that. In that time, I spent a lot of time around Open Stack, which adopted a very similar model. Open Stack's released every six months, just after the Ubuntu release. A number of the members of the technical team and the committee that formed Open Stack came out of either Ubuntu or Canonical or both, and really helped influence that community. It's actually quite similar in Kubernetes, which developed independent, generally, of Ubuntu. Kubernetes releases on a quarterly basis, about every three months, and again, it's the sort of thing where it's just a cycle. It happens like clockwork every three months. So when I joined Apex and took a look at a number of the needs that we had, our correspondents had, our relationship managers, our sales team, the client-facing people in the organization, one of the biggest items that bubbled straight to the top is our customers wanted more transparency into our road maps, tighter commitments on when we're going to deliver things, and the ability to influence those. And you know what, that's not dissimilar from any product managers plight anywhere in the industry. But what I was able to do is take some of those principles that are common around Ubuntu and Kubernetes and Open Stack, which by the way, are quite familiar. We use a lot of Ubuntu and Kubernetes inside of Apex, and many of our correspondents are quite familiar with those cycles, but they'd never really seen or heard of a software as a service, a SaaS vendor, using something like that. So that's what's new. >> You've got some cycles going now. You've got schedules, so just looking here, just to get this out there, 'cause I think it's data. You did it last year in October, November, mid-cycle in January of this year. You've got a couple summits coming up? >> Yeah, that's right, we've broken it down into three cycles per year, three 16-week cycles per year. So it's a little bit more frequent than the twice a year Ubuntu, not quite as frenetic as the quarterly Kubernetes cycles. 16 weeks time three is 48. That leaves us four weeks of slack, really to handle Thanksgiving and Christmas and end of year holidays, Chinese New Year, whatever might come up. I'll tell you from experience, that's always been a struggle in the Ubuntu and Open Stack and Kubernetes world, it's hard to plan around those cycles, so what we've done here is we've actually just allocated four weeks of a slush fund to take care of that. We're at three 16-week cycles per year. We version them according to the year and then an iterator. So 20A, 20B, 20C are our three cycles in 2020, and we'll do 21A, B, and C next year. Each of those cycles has three summits. So to your point about we get together, back in the before everyone stopped traveling, we very much enjoyed twice a year getting together for CUBE con. We very much enjoyed the Open Stack summits and the various Ubuntu summits. Inside of a small company like ours, these were physical. We'd get together in Dallas or New York or Chicago or Portland, which is the four places we have offices. We were doing that basically every six weeks or so for one of these summits. Now they're all virtual. We handle them over Zoom. When they were physical, we'd do the summit in about three days of packed agendas, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Now that we've gone to virtual, we've actually spread it a little bit thinner across the week, and so we've done, we've poked some holes in the day, which has been an interesting learning experience, and I think we're all much happier with the most recent summit we did, spreading it over the course of the week, accounting for time zones, giving ourself, everyone, lunch breaks and stuff. >> Well, we'll have to keep checking in. I want to certainly collaborate with you on the virtual digital, check your progress. We're all learning, and iterating, if you will, on the value that you can do with these digital ones. Try to get that success with physical, not always easy. Appreciate, and you're looking good, looking good and safe. Stay safe, and great to check in with you, and congratulations on the new opportunity. >> Yeah, thanks, John. >> Appreciate it. Dustin Kirkland, chief product officer at Apex Clearing. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE, checking in with a remote interview during this time when we are getting all the information of best practices on how to deal with this new at-scale, the new shift that is digital, that is impacting, and opportunities are there, certainly a lot of challenges, and hopefully, the healthcare, the finance, and the business models of these companies can continue and get back to work soon. But certainly, the people are still sheltered in place, working hard, being creative, be the coverage here in the CUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright electronic music)

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to another great CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, our CUBE Studio, I'm John Furrier. We've got a great conversation with a friend Saar Gillai CUBE alumni. Saar is an executive, coaching startups, investing, was in Silicon Valley, sees a lot of the landscape, knows networking, knows cloud. Saar, great to see you. Thanks very much. >> It's great to be here again as always. >> Yeah, love having you come in and be an analyst for us and help us squint through some of the big mega trends that we're following. As you know, we believe that cloud is here to stay. And I'm always chirping, certainly online about how Amazon clearly way ahead of Microsoft Google has a great network, and you and I we going to to talk more about that. But the game is just getting started and compute is phase one of the game of cloud. >> Saar: Correct. >> Completely been commoditized it's serverless, a lot of great things are helping developers. This next wave of networking is going to be the next battleground of innovation and certainly transformation. This is your wheelhouse, you've seen this movie, from old school networking to telcos to now, we're in the middle of it. What's your take on networking? Because we're going to be at Cisco Live Barcelona next week. But you have a good view into the overall landscape. Tell us what are you seeing? >> Sure, no, I mean, I think you said it right. I mean, basically if you look at what happened in computing in the last decade plus or minus in terms of the the advent of the public cloud and the cloud model and automation, even if you're using private cloud, you know, that is all going to, what happened last 10 years there is going to happen in networking in the next 10 years. Because, you know, there's no reason why these things aren't going to happen. The cloud has changed the model people work, people expect to be as a service. More and more of the network traffic is moving from the enterprise into the cloud, or to reach the cloud and that's changing how important is in a network, it's changing how the network's going to operate. >> The cloud certainly has been game changing. And I want to get your thoughts on this. You call it, and before we came on camera I'll make sure we get this out, the cloudification of networking. >> Saar: Correct. >> And this is a term that you coined, what is that mean? Tell us what is cloudification of networking? >> Sure well there are different elements to it, right. But, you know, I think if you look, I think the first thing that's important is to look at it from the user perspective, like what does it mean from a user, right? So if you look at the classic network, you know, 10 years ago most of your traffic is in your campus and in your own data center. And you're using standard Cisco switches, you know, you've got, you know, some hierarchical system you've got your data center, you're using six K's in there, set of nexuses whatever, you've got your end switches some WiFi, that's what the world looks like, that's where everything goes. And you may have someone WAN with MPLS and maybe things like that. But, you know, that's not a big use or some internet use, the internet, but that's not your mission-critical network. If you now fast forward to 2020. I can't even say that >> It's like you've been 10 years. >> 2020 is like, you know, God, all of a sudden, from user perspective, where are you getting your packets from, right? Most of your stuff in a public cloud. So your traffic, whether you're in enterprise or at home, is typically going toward the cloud. The cloud itself has its own very complicated network of 100 gig up to even getting going to 400 gig at some point connections, massive, massive data centers, fully automated, right? In the campus is all Wi-Fi, but again most of the traffic is back and forth to the cloud. So if you look at the network architecture the network architecture you have, the cloud now has completely changed the network architecture from being mostly internal to all being from you to the public cloud. And the public cloud itself now has become such a super compute system, that's like a massive computer. And of course massive computer has massive networking. Now when you think about cloud, so that's from a user perspective. Now let's talk about what this actually means. So first of all, you know, when you think about the cloud, okay, what has enabled the cloud? I mean, the cloud there's nothing special about the cloud. It's a bunch of CPUs and coordinate jobs, okay, but it can happen fast. Why can it happen fast? 'Cause it's automated, right? It's all automated it's all software, right? It's CICD develop, deploy, boom, boom, boom, right? There's nothing you're doing there that you couldn't do 20 years ago it just would take a year instead of a day because nothing was automated, okay. Now you look at networking right? That means that everything is going to be automated and software-centric. So, you know, if you look at the way the network is today, classically, right, it's not really automated. Yes, people have done some scripting and so forth, but it's not an automated dynamic environment that is software-centric. So if you look at, for example, the data center that people are building, if you look at the big public cloud guys have deployed, right, they have deployed a very automated system. You look it and say, "Well how many SIS admins "there are per how many nodes right?" And the ratio is in these public clouds are things that you've never seen in enterprise. So you're seeing the data centers becoming these very cloud-centric networks. And then you're seeing the whole traffic pattern change, where you're mission-critical network now is from where you are to the public cloud over the WAN. And this is what's driving, you know, the evolution of SD-WAN. >> So essentially WAN used to be old school, you had your local area network you mentioned the data center and PCs all connected, hubs and printers. And then you go out over the wide area network to something else, another building another data center maybe third party cloud and and other storage. Now you're saying it's all, essentially, going to the cloud. So WAN is the new LAN then. >> And what happens also is that you quickly get on one of these big networks. So you, you know, you think about, okay, what does the LAN look like, right? Historically the WAN was a bunch of links between data centers, you know, you had leased lines you could go from, you know, you had like every enterprise had I don't know 20, 30 data centers worldwide and then be linked in the WAN. Now what you do is you get on the first connection into an Amazon or Google or Microsoft network and then you're in their network. And so these guys have massive networks. Like, if you ask me, "Who's got the biggest "most impressive WAN? It's Google. They built it for themselves, right. If you put a-- >> So you're saying Google's the best network. of all the clouds? >> Yes, and it's not necessarily long, they don't have it long term, but Google has always been crazy about performance, right. They're crazy about performance because that, you know, it's about how fast can you get a search result and so on-- >> And they had (chuckles), that's money, speed is money to Google, right. >> Speed is money to Google and so Google have, from day one, looked at ways to optimize their network, their internal network, and the Google Cloud gets the benefit of that, right. They are crazy about performance. So they have, Microsoft is getting better, they're working a lot on it. And Amazon I think is now, Amazon is very good inside their network. So they built a lot of, they've been very focused on how fast their internal, like, their data center between the servers and so on. They did Annapurna and they did all kinds of optimizations there, which have actually led the industry. But when you go into the WAN, that hasn't been a big focus for Amazon to date. >> And Google's got great security too they've have lot of security. >> So, you know, from a inside a data center perspective I would say that Amazon is top. Once you start talking about the WAN connection, Google is the best. >> All right, so I'm trying to pull this together. So the cloudification of networking means, if I hear you correctly is, what the LAN used to mean with the data center. You had a data center and you had LANs there was a campus or whatever, is now the cloud. The cloud is now the new data center, and that's the WAN is now the new LAN? >> Correct, exactly correct. The data center is the cloud, the LAN is the WAN, yep. >> So, okay, I get that. By the way I agree with that, I think there's going to be a massive disruption-- >> And again there's a long tail. So you can easily say to me, "No, well look, look at all these LAN's." Sure my future is here, it's not evenly distributed, okay. There's a long tail, nothing's disappearing, but today-- >> How many NICs are in the PCs on the desk these days? Probably not a lot of PCs and no, NICs only Wi-Fi. >> It's Wi-Fi and also, look, there's the question you have to ask is, how many data centers does the average enterprise have? How many new data centers have been commissioned? You know, when I was at HP a decade ago whatever, right? We had data centers up the wazoo, that's where everything was, right. Nobody commission's data centers now. The only people buying data centers are cloud guys. >> Yeah, and we'll get to Equinix comp share I want to get to the Outpost with Amazon, 'cause I think that hybrid edge is an interesting trend that will come into the whole network edge thing. But let's stay on this WAN thing because if you're saying, and I'm agreeing with you, that what the LAN was to the data center you have WAN to the cloud. >> Saar: Correct. >> So if the cloud disrupts and creates an innovative enabling opportunity for startups and the clouds to create new value, it's going to be there. So with that being said, if you believe that, what happens to the old SD-WAN markets because the old SD-WAN was a riverbed was a box you connected one thing to another, in other words-- >> So again, first of all on paper it's a revolution, in the market it's an evolution (laughs). And so, you know, SD-WAN itself has been moving in different directions, you know, it started off with just, okay, we do choices. Now, it's more about WAN and you still have the telcos who are offering services with boxes in front of them. And that's not a bad businesses, it's growing. But, over time, the question you want to have to ask is, if the Amazon or the Google or whatever network becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, how many hops do I need before I just get on their cloud, and then I'm just under cloud and they have a massive internal network? >> I love the expression it's not your grandfather's blank, has always been am expression. So it's not your grandfather's SD-WAN would mean, like, if you look at, like, all the incumbent players you got Cisco even with VMware, they all SD-WAN players. But SD-WAN's different now. So what does SD-WAN look like because you have startups coming out, you have security companies, I'm covering the news on security companies that are becoming SD-WAN. >> Because the firewall, the firewall and your Wanax is becoming the same thing. So if you're a Palo Alto, if you're a firewall company, or if you're an SD-WAN company's security and if your firewall company, right, you need to have SD-WAN, it's becoming the same thing. The firewall used to be the entry point into your network. And now it's SD-WAN, because that's like a distributed firewall, right, that's your perimeter. And so now the difference what's happening in SD-WAN is, you know, in the early days of SD-WAN it was about choice like you basically said, okay, "I can put my slow traffic "or my less important traffic on standard internet "and I can put my important traffic "on my expensive MPLS links, right?" Problem is MPLS is not very dynamic, and people want a lot more capabilities. And so now it's much more intelligent where you have various players saying, "No, I can give you a faster link" not over, like, Teridion the company I used to work for did that, as well as other companies, as well, and so now it's becoming a lot more sophisticated in that. It's like, okay, give me the traffic and I'll figure out how to get it across. And a lot of people are saying you don't even need MPLS anymore. But the thing that's important to understand about the SD-WAN is-- >> That was locked down traffic routes that was essentially application workloads that were earmarked to be high priority or value. Now you have dynamic-- >> Now it's dynamic, but I think the important thing that, the question that you need to ask yourself all the time is. What is the goal? Why does SD-WAN exist? >> John: That's my question. >> So SD-WAN, so why does WAN exist, right? So WAN exist because you want to connect to resources that are further than the LAN right? SD-WAN exists because the existing connections were either too expensive or too inflexible. So we figured out a software way to do that, which is better. But, if all you're trying to do is get to the cloud resources, and the cloud is expanding it's going to eventually push on SD-WAN. >> John: So I've got to ask you, why is there been a renaissance in SD-WAN, what's the reach? >> I don't think there's been a renaissance I think that-- >> John: It's kind of seems to be growing. >> But, it's not a renaissance, it's been growing I don't think it ever stopped. I mean, there was there software-defined networking, which was sort of all talk-- >> Why is SD-WAN exploding in popularity? >> It's exploding because of the cloud. Because what happens is, if you're an enterprise all your traffic now is going to the cloud, and you need a dynamic WAN to support that. MPLS isn't going to cut it anymore for you right? It's not dynamic, it's not flexible. Even if it's not expensive, it's too complicated and internationally too expensive. So if you have like offices all over the world and all they want to do is access your cloud your Salesforce and so forth. It doesn't work very well. It's not dependable. It's not a, unless you tie in a bunch of MPLS lines all the time, it's not very reliable. And so you want something that can do that reliably. >> And SaaS drives that the cloud and SaaS. >> SaaS drives it correct the consumption model of SaaS is driving the need for a better WAN. The current solution for a better WAN is different flavors of SD-WAN. >> I want to ask you about Cisco because one of the things I'm really been focused on is the evolution of Cisco. They own the routes, they have BGP, cloud has networking but there's some needs that the enterprise's might have, certainly at the edge and with the edge of the network, and Cisco has that position. The future of networking in the cloud application of networking if we take this to the next level is, puts a bulls eye on Cisco. It certainly shines a spotlight on their market position and potentially opportunities or losses that they may incur from it. So there's opportunities, there's scenarios of where they can gain big time. And there's scenarios where they could get flat-footed. What your thoughts on their position. >> That's a really good, I think that's a really good point. Look, the good news, so yes, if you look at what happened to the various incumbents in compute, you know, the move to cloud was interesting at best for them, right? And so obviously the cloudification of networking and the fact that more of it will be in the public cloud is going to present some challenges to the existing network players, The biggest one of course and probably the most capable of them being Cisco, of course. But the change will be different because networking, as all the networking geeks always say, is a bit different, right. I think the first thing that, the first challenge that Cisco faces is, you know, we're moving to, as a service, right? And they've started to understand that and, you know, you have like Meraki that provides everything as a service. So I think, they're just a business model thing, they would have to figure out, okay, well how do we charge? Because, you know, people are used to cloud, they're saying well I want everything as a service. I think the bigger challenge that I think-- >> That's working up for some, Nutanix took a year. They took a loss on their stock price for a year but the pivot moved. >> They have to move. And again you have to decide when you make that switch, the innovators dilemma right? Especially someone like Cisco's got massive business you know, you can't just say, "Oh this is cool let's go do that." >> John: Next week. >> So it's a difficult, it's obviously-- >> So they can do as a service. What else do you see? >> The can do as a service. I think the bigger issue for them is when you start doing as a service then the question is what assets do you own in the network on the WAN, right? Today, they tried to do this, when the cloud came up they had their multicloud, I forgot what they called it, and that really didn't play out because they weren't really a compute provider to do that, so that made sense. I think in the network they have a lot more assets. But I think they're going to have to own some assets I think to provide a network as a service they can go two ways, they can rely on the telcos. But, you know, I think CISCO's a bit more agile than the telcos, and I don't know that's going to work. They're trying to do that-- >> There's a new chip coming out. >> They're trying to do that to rely on the telcos to do this as a service. But I think ultimately they're going to have to figure out how to own some networking assets if they truly want to be a player here. >> When you say assets what do you mean by that? more assets-- >> A network, own networks, own a network. Like if you're looking at the, if you look at Amazon or Google so forth, right? They're owning, they're building out networks. If you want to do a network as a service and you don't own some assets, right. >> John: You're relying on someone else. >> You're relying on someone else, and, you know, that works, but, you know, like apple if you want to control the experience you need to own it. Now they understand, the good news about Cisco is, you know, they, Cisco understands all of this, they understand networking, they're very close to their customers, they see what's going on. But, you know, they have innovators dilemma they've got to deal with. >> I would agree, you think they understand what's going on? >> Yes. >> And they just haven't made their moves yet? >> They haven't made moves that are obvious. And also, you know, dilemmas are difficult, right, innovators dilemma, there's a reason why it's called the dilemma. If it wasn't a dilemma, then you'd just go, "Okay let's do this," right (chuckles). So it's easy to sit here and pontificate while they're protecting a whatever $50 billion business. I think that they understand they've got to make choices and they've got to pick the timing of when they do certain things. >> That's the key point. Sometimes the best decision is not to move, but also the time that they waste you can't get that back. So, timings everything here. Just in your opinion, if you were at Cisco what would you do? Get some assets? >> I think that historically when Cisco had to wanted to make big moves like this the way they got around waiting is acquisitions. So, you know, I think that they will have to acquire some, if they want to make this move they choose to make this move it will involve acquisitions, maybe deeper partnerships with some people who currently own networks. There are various players in that area, in that space. But historically, at least, that's been their playbook and that way, because they have a big checkbook, they can make up for the fact that they took their time. >> Yeah, but, also John Chambers addressed transitions with a lot of M&A and it ended up biting them in the butt a little bit because you've got to integrate it all. I personally think that Cisco's opportunity is to be the on ramp for multicloud, to own the edge, and I think they need to find their TCP/IP moment. If you go back to the OSI stack, that changed the game, that created Internetwork, and that created Cisco the open standards. And I see the whole world almost going to proprietary. I remember those days you had DECnet, SNA proprietary NAS, right, and what's interesting now is everyone's going back to these proprietary walled garden kind of models, you know, open source with a twist. So the question I'm looking at is that, is there going to be this interoperable layer, abstraction layer that could exist between creating cloudification of networking and more value? >> Look I think the opportunity, right, but again that opportunity requires a big investment. And Cisco has the ability to make that investment, is to be the on ramp to the multicloud. But that means your network has to be better than the cloud guys because you're honest broker, and to have a map, but you only have one massive footprint whether it's through partnerships or whatever, you have to have massive footprint, that footprint costs money. So like I said, I think if someone could do it, Cisco could do it, but, you know, they have the service providers who are their partners. So, you know, they may not be that happy, requires a big investment, requires a different mindset. I think they understand the challenge. I think, again, they have innovators dilemma, but it's an opportunity and a threat for them. >> Well, Saar, it's great to see you. I know you're just chilling out now advising, investing, you're clipping coupons sitting on the beach. >> Beats is hard, but you know. >> You're doing some fun things. Let's get you back in, there're some things I wanted to chat next time, 5G network automation. I think the analytics, auto tuning, AI is going to be a big thing. I think Wi-Fi application awareness. These are topics I would love to have you come in and do a drill down on, appreciate it. >> Always great to be here. >> Great. Saar Galli, friend of theCUBE. Now analysts here in our studio for future of networking. We're going to continue the series, more networking. Cloudification of networking a big trend, theCUBE is on it. It's going to impact the edge, it's going to impact enterprises, it's going to impact how we do business. And more importantly how software is being built. This is theCUBE here in Palo Alto I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching (upbeat instrumental)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation >> lover on Welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. The Cube Studio. I'm John for the co host of the Cube Weird Sylvan shop. Who's the head of solution Architecture and open systems securing Esti win of right of other cloud to point out like capabilities. Very successful. 20 plus years. Operation Civil was the one of the first folks are coming over to the US to expand their operation from Europe into New York. Now here in Silicon Valley. Welcome to the Cube conversation. Thank you. So instituting trivia. You were part of the original team of three to move to the U. S. From Switzerland. You guys had phenomenal success in Europe. You've come to the U. S. Having phenomenal success in the US Now you moving west out here to California on that team, you're opening things up at the market. >> It's been a chance, Mikey. Things can presented themselves step by step, and I jumped on the trains and it's been a good right. >> Awesome. You guys have had great success. We interviewed your CEO a variety of your top people. One of the things that's interesting story is that you guys have been around for a long time. Been there, done that, riding this next next wave of digital transformation. What we call a cloud two point. Oh, but really is about enterprise. Full cloud scale, securing it. You have a lot of organic growth with customers, great word of mouth. So that's not a lot of big marketing budgets, riel. Real success there. You guys now are in the US doing the same thing here. What's been the key to success for open systems wide such good customers? Why the success formula is it you guys are on the right wave. What is it? The product? All the above. What's the What's the secret formula? >> So multiple things I say. And we started as a privately owned company like broad banks to, um, to the Internet email into one back in the nineties. And, um, yeah, we started to grow organically, as he said were by mouth, and Indiana is we put heavy focus on operations, so we wanted to make our customers happy and successful, and, um, yeah, that's how we got there like it was slow organic growth. But we always kind of kept the core and we tried to be unconventional, tried to do things differently than others do. And that's what brought us to where we are today and now capabilities Being here in the Valley, um, opens up a lot of more doors. >> It's got a nice office and we would see I saw the video so props for that. Congratulations. But the real to me, the meat on the bone and story is, is that and I've been really ranting on this whole SD win is changing. SD Win used to be around for a long, long time. It's been known industries known market. It's got a total addressable market, but really, what has really talks to is the the cloud. The cloud is a wide area network. Why do we never used to be locked down? He had the old way permitted based security. Now everything is a wide area. That multi cloud in hybrid club. This is essentially networking. It's a networking paradigms. It's not lately rocket science technically, but the cloud 2.0 shift is about, you know, data. It's about applications, different architectures you have everything kind of coming together, which creates a security problem, an opportunity for new people to come in. That's what you guys? One of them. This is the big wave. What? It explain the new s t win with, you know, the old way and the new way. What is the what? What should people know about the new S D win marketplace? >> Yeah. So let me start. Where do Owen has come from and how digital transformation has impacted that. So typically corporate wider networks were centered around the Clear Data Center where all applications were hosted, storage and everything and all traffic was back holding to the data center. Typically, one single provider that Broady, Mpls links on dhe. It was all good. You had a central location where you could manage it. You had always ability security stack was there. So you had full control. Now new requirements from natural transformation broad as users are on the road, they're on their phones ipads on the in, restaurants in ah, hotels, Starbucks. Wherever we have applications moved to the cloud. So their access directly You wanna have or be as close as possible Unify Communications. I OT It's all things deposed. Different requirements now in the network and the traditional architecture didn't were wasn't able to respond to that. It's just that the links they were filled up. You couldn't invest enough thio blow up your Nampula slings to handle the band with You lost visibility because users were under road. You lost control, and that's where new architectures had to be found. That's where Ston step them and say, Hey, look now we're not centered around the headquarter anymore were sent around where the applications are, your scent around, where the data is, and we need to find means to connected a data as quickly as possible. And so you can use the Internet. Internet has become a commodity. It's become more performance more stable, so we can leverage that we can route traffic according to our policies. We can include the cloud, and that's where Ston actually benefits from the clown. As much as the club benefits from SD went because they go hand in hand and that's also what we really drive to say, Hey, look, now the cloud can be directly brought into your network, no matter where, where data and where applications. >> Yeah, and this is the thing. You know, Although you've been critical of S t when I still see it as the path of the future because it's networking. And the end of the day networking is networking. You moving packets from point A to point B and you're moving somebody story you moving from point A to store the point C. It's hard. And you brought this up about Mpls. It's hard to, like rip and replace You can't just do a wholesale change on the network has the networks are running businesses. So this is where the trick is, in my opinion. So I want to get your thoughts on how companies were dealing with this because, I mean, if you want to move, change something in the network, it takes a huge task. How did you guys discover this new opportunity? How did you implement it? What was the and how should customers think about not disrupting their operations at the same time bringing in the new capabilities of this SD win two point? Oh, >> yeah, that's it's a perfect sweet spot, because in the end is, um, nobody starts at a green field. If you could start with a green field. It's easy. You just take on the new technology and you're happy. But, um, customers that we look up large enterprises, they have a brownfield. They haven't existing that work. They have business critical applications running 24 7 And if you look at what options large enterprises have to implement and manage a nasty when is typically three approaches, they either do it themselves, meaning they need a major investment in on boarding people having the talent validating technology and making the project work already. Look at a conventional managers provider. In the end, that is just the same as doing yourself. It's just done by somebody else, and you have the the challenge that those providers typically, um, have a lot of portfolio that they manage. And they do not have enough expertise in Nasty Wen. And so you just end up with the same problems and a lot of service, Janey. So even then you do not get the expertise that you need. >> I think what's interesting about what you guys have done? I want to get your reaction to this is that the manage service piece of it makes it easier to get in without a lot of tinkering with existing infrastructure. Exact. And that's been one of that tail winds for you guys and success wise. Talk about that dynamic of why they managed service is a good approach because you put your toe in the water, so to speak, and you can kind of get involved, get as much as you need to go and go further. Talk about that dynamic and why that's important. >> Yeah, technology Jane is very quickly. So you need people that are able to manage that and open systems as a pure play provider. We build purposely build our platform for us, he went. So we integrated feature sets. We we know how to monitor it, how to configure it, how to manage it. Lifecycle management, technology, risk technology management. All this is purposely purposely built into it, so we strongly believe that to be successful, you need people that are experts in what they do to help you so that you and your I t people can focus in enabling the business. And that's kind of our sweet spot where we don't say we have experts. Our experts operating the network for you as a customer and therefore our experts are your experts. And that's kind of where we believe that a manage service on the right way ends up in Yeah, the best customer. >> And I think the human capital pieces interesting people can level up faster when you when you're not just deploying here. Here's the software load. It is the collaborations important. They're good. They're all right. While you're on this topic, I want to get your thoughts. Since you're an expert, we've been really evaluating this cloud 2.0, for lack of a better description. Cloud 2.0, implying that the cloud 1.0 was Amazon miss on The success of Amazon Web service is really shows Dev Ops in Action Agility The Lean startup Although all that stuff we read reading about for the past 10 plus years great compute storage at scale, amazing use of data like you, said Greenfield. Why not use the cloud? Great. Now all the talk about hybrid cloud even going back to 2013 We were of'em world at that time start 10th year their hybrid cloud was just introduced. Now it's mainstream now multi cloud is around the corner. This teases out cloud 2.0, Enterprise Cloud Enterprise Scale Enterprise Security Cloud Security monitoring 2.0, is observe ability. Got Cooper All these new things air coming on. This is the new clout to point out what is your definition of cloud two point? Oh, if you had to describe it to a customer or a friend, >> it is really ah, some of hybrid cloud or multi cloud, as you want to name it, because in the end, probably nobody can say I just select one cloud, and that's going to make me successful because in the end, cloud is it's not everywhere, as we kind of used to believe in the beginning, but in the end, it's somebody else's computer in a somebody else's data center. So the cloud is you selectively pick the location where you want to for your cloud instances and asked if Cloud Service providers opened up more locations that are closer to your users in the or data you actually can leverage more possibilities. So what we see emerging now is that while for a long time everything has moved to the cloud, the cloud is again coming back to us at the sietch. So a lot of compute stuff is done close to where data is generated. Um, it's where the users are. I mean, Data's generated with with us. Yeah, phones and touch and feel and vision and everything. So we can leverage these technologies to really compute closer to the data. But everything controlled out of central cloud instances. >> So this brings up a good point. You essentially kind of agreeing with cloud one detto being moved to the cloud. But now you mentioned something that's really interesting around cloud to point out, which is moving having cloud, certainly public clouds. Great. But now moving technology to the edge edge being a data center edge being, you know, industrial I ot other things wind farms, whatever users running around remotely you mentioned. So the edges now becomes a critical component of this cloud. Two point. Oh, okay. So I gotta ask the question, How does the networking and what's the complexity? And I'm just imagining massive complexity from this. What are some of the complexities and challenges and opportunities will arise out of this new dynamic of club two point. Oh, >> So the traditional approaches does just don't work anymore. So we need new ways to not only on the networking side, but obviously also the security side. So we need to make sure that not on Lee the network follows in the footsteps of the business of what it needs. But actually, the network can drive business innovation and that the network is ready to handle those new leaps and technologies. And that's what we see is kind of being able to tightly integrate whatever pops up, being able to quickly connect to a sass provider, quickly integrate a new cloud location into your network and have the strong security posture there. Directly integrated is what you need because if you always have to think about weight, if I add this, it's gonna break something else, and I have to. To change is here. Then you lose all the speed that your business needs. >> I mean, the ripple effect of it's like throwing a stone in the lake and seeing the ripple effect with cloud to point. You mentioned a few of them. Network and Security won't get to that in a second, but doesn't change every aspect of computing categories. Backup monitoring. I mean all the sectors that were traditional siloed on premise that moves with the cloud are now being disrupted again for the third time. Yeah, you agree with that? >> It's true. And I mean your club 0.1 point. Oh, you say a lot of things will be seen his lift and shift and that still works like there is a lot of work loads where it's not worth it to re factor everything. But then, for your core applications, the business where the business makes money, you want a leverage, the latest instead of technologies to really drive, drive your business there. >> I got to get your take on this because you're the head of architecture solutions at Open Systems. Um, is a marketing tagline that I saw that you guys promote, which I live. I want to get your thoughts on. It says, Stop treating your network like a network little marketing. I love it, but it's kind of like stop trying your network like a network implying that the networks changing may be inadequate. Antiquated needs to modernize. I'm kind of feeling the vibe there on that. What do you mean by that? Slow Stop treating your network like a network. What's what's the purpose >> behind that? But yeah, in the end, it to be a little flaw provoking. But I mean, even est even in its pure forms, where you have a softer controller that steers your traffic along different path. Already. For me, as an engineer, I'm gonna lose my mind because I want to know where routing is going. I want deterministic. Lee defined my policy, so I always have things under control. But now it's a softer agent that takes care. Furred takes care of it for me so that already I lose control in favor off. Yeah, more capabilities. And I think that's cloud just kind of accelerate. >> So you guys really put security kind of in between the network and application? Is that the way you're thinking about it? It used to be Network was at the bottom. You built the application, had security. Now you're thinking differently. Explain that the the architectural thinking around this because this is a modern approach you guys were taking, and I want to get this on the record. Applications have serving users and machines network delivers packets, and then you're saying security's wrapping up between them explain. >> So when we go back again to the traditional model Central Data Center, you had a security stack full rack of appliances that the care of your security was easy to manage. Now, if you wanna go ask you when connect every brand side to the Internet, you cannot replicate such an infrastructure to every branch. Location just doesn't skill. So what do you do? Why do you say I cannot benefit of this where I use new methods? And that's where we say we integrate security directly into our networking stack. So to be able to not rely on the service training but have everything compiled into one platform and be able to leverage that data is passing through our network. You've eyes. But then why not apply the same security functions that we used to do in our headquarter directly at the edge and therefore every branch benefits of the same security posture that I typically were traditionally only had in my data center? >> You guys so but also weighing as a strategic infrastructure critical infrastructure opponent. I would agree with that. That's obvious, but as we get into hybrid cloud and multi cloud infrastructures of service support. Seamless integration is critical. This has become a topic, will certainly be talking about for the rest of the year Of'em world and reinvented other conferences like Marcel that night as well. This is the big challenge for customers. Do I invest in Azure A. W as Google in another cloud? Who knows how many clouds coming be another cloud potentially around the corner? I don't want to fork my development team. I want to do one of the great different code bases. This has become kind of like the challenge. How do you see this playing out? Because again, the applications want to run on the best cloud possible. I'm a big believer in that. I think that the cloud should dictate the AP should dictate which cloud runs. That's why I'm a believer in the single cloud for the workload, not a single cloud for all workloads. So your thoughts, >> I think, from an application point of view. As you say, the application guys have to determine more cloud is best for them, I think from a networking point of view, as a network architect, we need to we can't work against this but enable them and be able to find ways that the network can seamlessly connect to whatever cloud the business wants to use. And there's plenty of opportunity to do that today and to integrate or partner with other providers that actually have partnered with dozens of cloud providers. And as we now can architect, we have solutions to directly bring you as a customer within milliseconds, to each cloud, premise is a huge advantage. It takes a few clicks in a portal. You have a new clouds instance up and running, and now you're connected. And the good thing is, we have different ways to do that. Either. We spin up our virtual instance virtual esti one appliance in cloud environments so we can leverage the Internet to go. They're still all secured, all encrypted, ordering me again. Use different cloud connect interconnections to access the clouds. Depending on the business requirements, >> you guys have been very successful. A lot of comfort from financial service is the U. N. With NGOs, variety of industries. So I want to get your thoughts on this. I've been we've been covering the Department of Defense is joining and Chet I joint and the presentation of defense initiative where the debate was soul single purpose Cloud. Now the reality is and we've covered this on silicon angle that D O D is going multi cloud as an organization because they're gonna have Microsoft Cloud for collaboration and other contracts. They're gonna win $8,000,000,000. So that a Friday cloud opportunities, but for the particular workload for the military, they have unique requirements. Their workload has chosen one cloud. That was the controversy. Want to get your thoughts on this? Should the workloads dictate the cloud? And is that okay? And certainly multi cloud is preferred Narada instances. But is it okay to have a single cloud for a workload? >> Yeah, again, from if the business is okay with that, that's fine from our side of you. We see a lot of lot of business that have global presence, so they're spread across the globe. So for them, it's beneficial to done distribute workloads again across different regions, and it could still be the same provider, but across different regions. And then already, question is How do you now we're out traffic between those workloads? Do we? Do you love right? Your esteem and infrastructure or do you actually use, for example, the backbone that the cloud provider provides you in case of Microsoft? They guarantee you the traffic between regions stay in their backbone. So gifts, asshole, new opportunities to leverage large providers. Backbone. >> And this is an interesting nuance point because multi cloud doesn't have to be. That's workload. Spreading the workload across three different clouds. It's this workload works on saving Amazon. This workload works on Azure. This workload works on another cloud that's multi cloud from a reality standpoint today, so that implies that most every country will be multi cloud for sure. But workloads might have a single cloud for either the routing and the transit security with the data stored. And that's okay, too. >> Yeah, yeah, and keep in mind, Cloud is not only infrastructure or platform is the service. It's also software as a service. So as soon as we have sales forests, work day office 3 65 dropbox or box, then we are multiplied. >> So basically the clouds are fighting it out by the applications that they support and the infrastructure behind. Exactly. All right, well, what's next for you? You're on the road. You guys doing a lot of customer activity. What's the coolest thing that you're seeing in the customer base from open system standpoint that you like to share with the audience? >> Um, so again, it's just cool to see that customers realized that there's plenty of opportunities. And just to see how we go through that evolution with our customers, were they initially or little concerned? But then eventually we see that actually, the network change drives new business project and customers air happy that they launched or collaborate with us. That's what that's what makes me happy and makes me and a continuing down that path >> and securing it is a key. Yeah, he wins in this market Having security? >> Absolutely. Yeah, Sylvia saying mind and not wake up at 2 a.m. Full sweat, because here >> we'll manage. Service is a preferred for my people like to consume and procure product in So congratulations and congressional on your Silicon Valley office looking for chatting more. I'm John for here in the keep studios for cute conversation. Thanks for watching

(upbeat jazz music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alta, California. This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, welcome to the Cube Studio for another Cube Conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology. I'm your host Peter Buriss. As enterprise is look to take advantage of new classes of applications like AI and others that make possible this notion of a data first or data driven enterprise in a digital business world. They absolutely have to consider what they need to do with their stored resources to modernize them to make possible new types of performance today, but also sustain and keep open options for how they use data in the future. To have that conversation we're here with David Floyer, CTO and co-founder of Wikibon. David welcome to the conversation. >> Thank you. >> So David you've been looking at this notion of modern storage architectures for 10 years now. >> Yeah. >> And you've been relatively prescient in understanding what's gonna happen. You were one of the first guys to predict well in advance of everybody else that the crossover between flash and HDD was gonna happen sooner rather than later. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time quizzing you. What do you see as a modern storage architecture? Let's, just let it rip. >> Okay well let's start with one simple observation. The days of standalone systems for data have gone we're in a software defined world and you wanna be able to run those data architectures anywhere where the data is. And that means in your data center where it was created or in the cloud or in a public cloud or at the edge. You want to be able to be flexible enough to be able to do all of the data services where the best place is and that means everything has to be software driven. >> Software defined is the first proposition of modern data storage facility? >> Absolutely. >> Second. >> So the second thing is that there are different types of technology. You have the very fastest storage which is in the in the DIRUM itself. You have NVDIMM which is the next one down from that expensive but a lot cheaper than the DIMM. And then you have different sorts of flash. You have the high performance flash and you have the 3D flash, you know as many layers as you can which is much cheaper flash and then at the bottom you have HDD and even tape as storage devices. So how. The key question is how do you manage that sort of environment. >> Where do we start because it still sounds like we still have a storage hierarchy. >> Absolutely. >> And it still sounds like that hierarchy is defined largely in terms of access speeds >> Yeap. >> And price points. >> Price points. Yes. >> Those are the two Mason and bandwidth and latency as well are within that. >> which are tied into that? >> which are tied into those. Yes. So what you, if you're gonna have this everywhere and you need services everywhere what you have to have is an architecture which takes away all of that complexity, so that you, all you see from an application point of view is data and how it gets there and how is put away and how it's stored and how it's protected that's under the covers. So the first thing is you need a virtualization of that data layer. >> The physical layer? >> The virtualization of that physical layer. >> Right right. >> Yes. And secondly you need that physical layer to extend to all the places that may be using this data. You don't wanna be constrained to this data set lives here. You want to be able to say Okay, I wanna move this piece of programming to the data as quickly as I can, that's much much faster than moving the data to the processing. So I want to be able to know where all the data is for this particular dataset or file or whatever it is, where they all are, how they connect together, what the latency is between everything. I wanna understand that architecture and I want to virtualize view of that across that whole the nodes that make up my hybrid cloud. >> So let me be clear here so, so we are going to use a software defined infrastructure >> Yeah. that allows us to place the physical devices that have the right cost performance characteristics where they need to be based on the physical realities of latency power availability, hardening, et cetera. >> And the network >> And the network. But we wanna mask that complexity from the application, application developer and application administrator. >> Yes. >> And software defined helps do that, but doesn't completely do it. >> No. Well you want services which say >> Exactly, so their services on top of all that. >> On top of all that. >> Absolutely. >> That are recognizable by the developer, by the business person, by the administrator, as they think about how they use data towards those outcomes not use storage or user device but use the data. >> Data to reach application outcomes. That's absolutely right. And that's what I call the data plane which is a series of services which enable that to happen and driven by the application requirements themselves. >> So we've looked at this and some of the services include end end compression, duplication, >> Duplication. backup restore, security, data protection. >> Protection. Yeah. So that's kind of, that's kind of the services that now the enterprise buyer needs to think about. >> Yes. >> So that those services can be applied by policy. >> Yes. >> Wherever they're required based on the utilization of the data >> Correct. >> Where the event takes place. >> And then you still have at the bottom of that you have the different types of devices. You still have you still won't >> A lot of hamsters making stuff work. >> You still want hard disk for example they're not disappearing, but if you're gonna use hard disks then you want to use it in the right way for using a hard disk. You wanna give it large box. You want to have it going sequentially in and out all the time. >> So the storage administration and the physical schema and everything else is still important in all these? >> Absolutely. But it's less important, less a centerpiece of the buying decision. >> Correct. >> Increasingly it's how well does this stuff prove support the services that the business is using to achieve your outcomes. >> And you want to use costs the lowest cost that you can and they'll be many different options open, more more options open. But the automation of that is absolutely key and that automation from a vendor point of view one of the key things they have to do is to be able to learn from the usage by their customers, across as broad a number of customers as they can. Learn what works or doesn't work, learn so that they can put automation into their own software their own software service. >> So it sounds like we talking four things. We got software defined, still have a storage hierarchy defined by cost and performance, but with mainly semiconductor stuff. We've got great data services that are relevant to the business and automation that mask the complexity from everything. >> And a lot of the artificial AI there is, automated >> Running things. Fantastic. David Floyer, talking about modern storage architectures. Once again thanks for joining us on the Cube Conversation. And I'm your host Peter Burris. See you next time. (jazz music)

(lively funk music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBEConversation. >> Hi, welcome to the CUBE Studio for another CUBEConversation where we go in-depth with the thought leaders driving outcomes with technology. I'm your host, Peter Burris. One of the biggest challenges that enterprises face is how to appropriately apply artificial intelligence. Now, let's be clear, the basic precepts and concepts and approaches to artificial intelligence have been around for a long time. One might argue decades. It's happening now because the technology can perform it. And one of the technologies that's especially important, and is absolutely essential to determining success or failure in AI, is storage. So what we're gonna do now is have a conversation with David Floyer, the CTO and co-founder of Wikibon, about that crucial relationship between AI and storage. David, welcome to the conversation. >> Thanks very much, indeed, Peter. Interesting subject. >> Oh, very interesting subject, so let's get right into it, David. >> Sure. >> What is it about AI and storage that makes the two of them so essential to the co-evolution of each? >> Absolutely, so first of all, you've got different parts of AI. So you've got the part where you're developing all of the models themselves, where you've got a large amount of data. You're trying to capture that data. You're trying to find out what's important in that data. And then you're developing models which you're going to use to do something. Either automate something or give information to somebody about the business process. >> All right, so that's the first one. What's the second one? >> So the second one, they're both concerned with inferencing. There's inferencing close to that data, the overall data, and there's inferencing right at the Edge itself. And they both important and driven in different ways. The inferencing close to the applications, the centralized applications-- >> So inferencing in the data center, so to speak. >> In the data center itself. Those are going to be, essentially, most of them, real-time decisions that are being made. For example, if I am trying to find out what sort of customer you are, what sort of price that I'm gonna give you, what sort of delivery, what sort of terms I'm gonna give you, that's information that I'm gonna have to get from a whole number of different sources, push them all together, and give that information to my systems of record. They are gonna make those decisions and they're gonna push them down to maybe an Edge or Apple-type device to give you the answer to that. That's going on in real-time and has to be extremely rapidly done. >> And now we've got inferencing at the Edge. >> And then you've got inferencing at the Edge. Now here's all of the data coming in, whether it be a mobile Edge or a stationery Edge, huge amounts of data coming in to cameras to other senses of one sort or another. >> Or being generated right there where the-- >> Absolutely, generated, that's the first time that status has ever existed. And what you want to do with that is put the inference there and take what's important from that data. Because 99% or 99.9% of that data is absolutely free of value. So you're trying to extract that 0.01% of data and do actions locally with that and also pass those up the line. So you're actually getting rid of a huge amount of data at the Edge. >> All right, so that's an overall AI taxonomy. >> Yeah. >> How does storage influence what happens at the modeling and development level? What's the relationship between AI modeling and storage? >> So AI modeling is about lots and lots of data. Lots and lots of small files. Imagine thousands of millions of pictures going through millions of any sort of artificial intelligence you're trying to generate on that. So, that's one thing is, it's large amounts of data and you don't do modeling just once. You reuse the data. You run it again. You check it against something else. You're constantly looking for new types of data, new data, large amounts of data, lot of large-scale processing of that data to create models of one sort or another. >> You're not gonna do that on disk. >> You're not gonna to that on disk. That has to be flash. Has to be fast flash. And what you want, if you can, is to integrate the processing and the data, all as one, so that it fits in, it can be viewed as a system for the data scientists, which it sits there and does what they want to do and then can be managed from a storage point-of-view by the professionals. >> So in the center, it's gonna be very fast, very high-performance, very scalable, and flash. >> Yes. >> What about at the Edge? >> So, well, (laughs) >> What about at the activity Edge, let's call it? >> Yeah, activity, that again, is here you've got real-time processing. So again, the emphasis is on flash most of the time. And you've, in fact, got other technologies like, for example, envidems, which are coming in and increasing. So you've got a hierarchy there which you want to be able to use the right sort of storage for that job. But a lot of that's gonna be extremely rapid. And you want to be able to take your current systems of record, squeeze those down to allow space for all this inference work to be added in so that everything is real-time. So that's really, it's much faster. Of course, it doesn't mean you get rid of all of the things like data services and all of the things which you've collected. >> Well, on the contrary, doesn't it mean that those types of things become more important? >> Become more important. >> Well, so here's a hypothesis that I've had for a while and we've talked about, that the traditional storage notion of data, which was size, class, format-- >> Latency. >> IOPs. >> Yeah. >> Those types of things-- >> Bandwidth. >> Means nothing to the data scientists. >> Correct. >> AI is a business problem driving business observations so data services, in many respects, are a way of mediating the performance and other realities at the device level with the business and tool chain requirements at the AI level, right? >> Absolutely, absolutely, and you've gotta have those services. And, indeed, with hybrid computing, you want to move that processing to where the data is created, as much as you can. So if it's created in the Cloud, you go to the Cloud. If it's created-- >> Created or used? >> If you can, you want to do it where the data is created. The less data you move around, the better. So it's much better to send a request to that data where it's created, as close as possible to that. >> Okay, subject to the realities of latency. >> Absolutely. >> So, in many respects, it's still gonna be you want the data where it's gonna be used, but if you don't have to move it to where it's used, because the latency envelope is large enough, then keep it where it's created. >> Keep it where it's created. >> Got it. >> Absolutely, yes. And now, if we go to the Edge, there you really want to avoid having to store data at all. There's 99% of that data is useless. 99.9% of that data is useless. You wanna get rid of that. You want to use the inferencing to store only what is necessary. Now, to begin with, when you're still in the data modeling stage of AI, you may want to send some of that back, quite a lot of it back. But once you get into a normal running of it, you want to get rid of as much of that possible data as you can, take the core of that data, what it matters, the exceptions, etc. Send that up and get rid of it. Just destroy it. >> Well, this is one area where you and I, we generally agree. You say 99%, maybe it's 95%, maybe it's 90% of the data gets, you know, gotten rid of. Because there's always gonna be derivative opportunities to use data in valuable ways. But that's something we're gonna discover over the next few years. >> Sure. >> But we're not gonna go through that process if we don't have storage that can handle these workloads. >> Absolutely. >> All right. >> Yep. >> David Floyer, talking about the relationship between AI and storage. Thanks again for being on the CUBE. >> You're welcome. >> And thanks for joining us for another CUBEConversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time. (lively funk music)

(electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome once again to Wikibon's weekly research meeting from the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. This week we're going to build upon a conversation we had last week about the idea of different data shapes or data tiers. For those of you who watched last week's meeting, we discussed the idea that data across very complex distributed systems featuring significant amounts of work associated with the edge are going to fall into three classifications or tiers. At the primary tier, this is where the sensor data that's providing direct and specific experience about the things that the sensors are indicating, that data will then signal work or expectations or decisions to a secondary tier that aggregates it. So what is the sensor saying? And then the gateways will provide a modeling capacity, a decision making capacity, but also a signal to tertiary tiers that increasingly look across a system wide perspective on how the overall aggregate system's performing. So very, very local to the edge, gateway at the level of multiple edge devices inside a single business event, and then up to a system wide perspective on how all those business events aggregate and come together. Now what we want to do this week is we want to translate that into what it means for some of the new technologies, new analytics technologies that are going to provide much of the intelligence against each of this data. As you can imagine, the characteristics of the data is going to have an impact on the characteristics of the machine intelligence that we can expect to employ. So that's what we want to talk about this week. So Jim Kobielus, with that as a backdrop, why don't you start us off? What are we actually thinking about when we think about machine intelligence at the edge? >> Yeah, Peter, we at the edge, the edge of body, the device be in the primary tier that acquires fresh environmental data through its sensors, what happens at the edge? In the extreme model, we think about autonomous engines, let me just go there just very briefly, basically, it's a number of workloads that take place at the edge, the data workloads. The data is (mumbles) or ingested, it may be persisted locally, and that data then drives local inferences that might be using deep layer machine learning chipsets that are embedded in that device. It might also trigger various tools called actuations. Things, actions are taken at the edge. If it's the self-driving vehicle for example, an action may be to steer the car or brake the car or turn on the air conditioning or whatever it might be. And then last but not least, there might be some degree of adaptive learning or training of those algorithms at the edge, or the training might be handled more often up at the second or tertiary tier. The tertiary tier at the cloud level, which has visibility usually across a broad range of edge devices and is ingesting data that is originated from all of the many different edge devices and is the focus of modeling, of training, of the whole DevOps process, where teams of skilled professionals make sure that the models are trained to a point where they are highly effective for their intended purposes. Then those models are sent right back down to the secondary and the primary tiers, where act out inferences are made, you know, 24 by seven, based on those latest and greatest models. That's the broad framework in terms of the workloads that take place in this fabric. >> So Neil, let me talk to you, because we want to make sure that we don't confuse the nature of the data and the nature of the devices, which may be driven by economics or physics or even preferences inside of business. There is a distinction that we have to always keep track of, that some of this may go up to the Cloud, some of it may stay local. What are some of the elements that are going to indicate what types of actual physical architectures or physical infrastructures will be built out as we start to find ways to take advantage of this very worthwhile and valuable data that's going to be created across all of these different tiers? >> Well first of all, we have a long way to go with sensor technology and capability. So when we talk about sensors, we really have to define classes of sensors and what they do. However, I really believe that we'll begin to think in a way that approximates human intelligence, about the same time as airplanes start to flap their wings. (Peter laughs) So, I think, let's have our expectations and our models reflect that, so that they're useful, instead of being, you know hypothetical. >> That's a great point Neil. In fact, I'm glad you said that, because I strongly agree with you. But having said that, the sensors are going to go a long ways, when we... but there is a distinction that needs to be made. I mean, it may be that that some point in time, a lot of data moves up to a gateway, or a lot of data moves up to the Cloud. It may be that a given application demands it. It may be that the data that's being generated at the edge may have a lot of other useful applications we haven't anticipated. So we don't want to presume that there's going to be some hard wiring of infrastructure today. We do want to presume that we better understand the characteristics of the data that's being created and operated on, today. Does that make sense to you? >> Well, there's a lot of data, and we're just going to have to find a way to not touch it or handle it any more times than we have to. We can't be shifting it around from place to place, because it's too much. But I think the market is going to define a lot of that for us. >> So George, if we think about the natural place where the data may reside, the processes may reside, give us a sense of what kinds of machine learning technologies or machine intelligence technologies are likely to be especially attractive at the edge, dealing with this primary information. Okay, I think that's actually a softball which is, we've talked before about bandwidth and latency limitations, meaning we're going to have to do automated decisioning at the edge, because it's got to be fast, low latency. We can't move all the data up to the Cloud for bandwidth limitations. But, by contrast, so that's data intensive and it's fast, but up in the cloud, where we enhance our models, either continual learning of the existing ones or rethinking them entirely, that's actually augmented decisions, and augmented means it's augmenting a human in the process, where, most likely, a human is adding additional contextual data, performing simulations, and optimizing the model for different outcomes or enriching the model. >> It may in fact be a crucial element or crucial feature of the training by in fact, validating that the action taken by the system was appropriate. >> Yes, and I would add to that, actually, that you might, you used an analogy, people are going from two extremes where they say, some people say, "Okay, so all the analytics has to be done in the cloud," Wikibon and David Floyer, and Jim Kovielus have been pioneering the notion that we have to do a lot more at the client. But you might look back at client server computing where the client was focused on presentation, the server was focused on data integrity. Similarly, here, the edge or client is going to be focused on fast inferencing and the server is going to do many of the things that were associated with a DBMS and data integrity in terms of reproducibility, of decisions in the model for auditing, security, versioning, orchestration in terms of distributing updated models. So we're going to see the roles of the edge and the cloud rhyme with what we saw in server. Neither one goes away, they augment each other. >> So, Jim Kovielus, one of the key issues there is going to be the gateway, and the role that the gateway plays, and specifically here, we talked about the nature of again, the machine intelligence that's going to be operating more on the gateway. What are some of the characteristics of the work that's going to be performed at the gateway that kind of has oversight of groupings or collections of sensor and actuator devices? >> Right, good question. So the perfect example that everybody's familiar with now about a gateway in this environment, a smart home hub. A smart home hub, just for the sake of discussion, has visibility across two or more edge devices. It could be a smart speaker, could be the HVAC system is sensor equipped and so forth, what it does, the pool it performs, a smart hub of any sort, is that it acquires data from the edge devices, the edge devices might report all of their data directly to the hub, or the sensor devices might also do inferences and then pass on the results of the inferences it has given to the hub, regardless. What the hub does is A, it aggregates the data across those different edge devices over which it has this ability and control, B, it may perform it's own inferences based on models that look out across an entire home in terms of patterns of activity. Then it might take the hub, various actions autonomous by itself, without consulting an end user or anything else. It might take action in terms of beef up the security, adjust the HVAC, it adjusts the light in the house or whatever it might be, based on all that information streaming in real time. Possibly, its algorithms will allow you to determine what of that data shows an anomalous condition that deviates from historical patterns. Those kinds of determinations, whether it's anomalous or a usual pattern, are often taken at the hub level, 'cause it's maintaining sort of a homeostatic environment, as it were, within its own domain, and that hub might also communicate up the stream, to a tertiary tier that has oversight, let's say, of a smart city environment, where everybody in that city or whatever, might have a connection into some broader system that say, regulates utility usage across the entire region to avoid brownouts and that kind of thing. So that gives you an idea of what the role of a hub is in this kind of environment. It's really a controller. >> So, Neil, if we think about some of the issues that people really have to consider as they start to architect what some of these systems are going to look like, we need to factor both what is the data doing now, but also ensure that we build into the entire system enough of a buffer so that we can anticipate and take advantage of future ways of using that data. Where do we draw that fine line between we only need this data for this purpose now and geez, let's ensure that we keep our options open so that we can use as much data as we want at some point in time in the future? >> Well, that's a hard question, Peter, but I would say that if it turns out that this detailed data coming from sensors, that the historical aspect of it isn't really that important. If the things you might be using that data for are more current, then you probably don't need to capture all that. On the other hand, there have been many, many occasions historically, where data has been used other than its original purpose. My favorite example was scanners in grocery stores, where it was meant to improve the checkout process, not have to put price stickers on everything, manage inventory and so forth. It turned out that some smart people like IRI and some other companies said, "We'll buy that data from you, "and we're going to sell it to advertisers," and all sorts of things. We don't know the value of this data yet, it's too new. So I would err on the side of being conservative and capturing and saving as much as I could. >> So what we need to do is, we need to marry or we need to do an optimization of some form about how much is it going to cost to transmit the data versus what kind of future value or what kinds of options of future value might there be on that data. That is, as you said, a hard problem, but we can start to conceive of an approach to characterizing that ratio, can't we? >> I hope so. I know that, personally, when I download 10 gigabytes of data, I pay for 10 gigabytes of data, and it doesn't matter if it came from a mile away or 10,000 miles away. So there has to be adjustments for that. There's also ways of compressing data because this sensor data I'm sure is going to be fairly sparse, can be compressed, is redundant, you can do things like RLL encoding, which takes all the zeroes out and that sort of thing. There are going to be a million practices that we'll figure out. >> So as we imagine ourselves in this schemata of edge, hub, tertiary or primary, secondary and tertiary data and we start to envision the role that data's going to play and how we conduct or how we build these architectures and these infrastructures, it does raise an interesting question, and that is, from an economic standpoint, what do we anticipate is going to be the classes of devices that are going to exploit this data? David Foyer who's not here today, hope you're feeling better David, has argued pretty forcibly, that over the next few years we'll see a lot of advances made in microprocessor technology. Jim, I know you've been thinking about this a fair amount. What types of function >> Jim: Right. >> might we actually see being embedded in some of these chips that software developers are going to utilize to actually build some of these more complex and interesting systems? >> Yeah, first of all, one of the trends we're seeing in the chipset market for deep learning, just to be there for a moment, is that deep learning chipsets traditionally, when I say traditionally, the last several years the market has been dominated by GP's graphic processing unit. Invidia of course, is the primary provider of those. Of course, Invidia has been along around for a long time as a gaming solution provider. Now, what's happening with GPU technology, in fact, the latest generation of Invidia's architecture shows where it's going. The thing that is more deep learning optimized capabilities at the chipset level. They're called tensor processing, and I don't want to bore you with all the technical details, but the whole notion of-- >> Peter: Oh, no, Jim, do bore us. What is it? (Jim laughs) >> Basically deep learning is based on doing high speed, fast matrix map. So fundamentally, tensor cores do high velocity fast matrix math, and the industry as a whole is moving toward embedding more tensor cores directly into the chipset, higher density of tensor core. Invidia in its latest generation of chip has done that. They haven't totally taken out the gaming oriented GPU capabilities, but there are competitors and they have a growing list, more than a dozen competitors on the chipset side now. We're all going down a road of embedding far more technical processing units into every chip. Google is well known for something called GPU tensor processing units, their chip architecture. But they're one of many vendors that are going down that road. The bottom line is the chipset itself is becoming authenticated and being optimized for the core function that CPU and really GPU technology and even ASIX and FPGAs were not traditionally geared to do, which is just deep learning at a high speed, many cores, to do things like face recognition and video and voice recognition freakishly fast, and really, that's where the market is going in terms of enabling underlying chipset technology. What we're seeing is that, what's likely to happen in the chipsets of the year 2020 and beyond, they'll be predominantly tensor core processing units, But they'll be systemed on a chip that, and I'm just talking about future, not saying it's here now, systems on a chip that include some, a CPU, to managing real time OS, like a real time Linux or what not, and with highly dense tensor core processing unit. And in this capability, these'll be low power chips, and low cost commodity chips that'll be embedded in everything. Everything from your smart phone, to your smart appliances in your home, to your smart cars and so forth. Everything will have these commodity chips. 'Cause suddenly every edge device, everything will be an edge device, and will be able to provide more than augmentation, automation, all these things we've been talking about, in ways that are not necessarily autonomous, but can operate with a great degree of autonomy to help us human beings to live our lives in an environmentally contextual way at all points in time. >> Alright, Jim, let me cut you off there, because you said something interesting, a lot more autonomy. George, what does it mean, that we're going to dramatically expand the number of devices that we're using, but not expand the number of people that are going to be in place to manage those devices. When we think about applying software technologies to these different classes of data, we also have to figure out how we're going to manage those devices and that data. What are we looking at from an overall IT operations management approach to handling a geometrically greater increase in the number of devices and the amount of data that's being generated? (Jim starts speaking) >> Peter: Hold on, hold on, George? >> There's a couple dimensions to that. Let me start at the modeling side, which is, we need to make data scientists more productive or we need to push out to a greater, we need to democratize the ability to build models, and again, going back to the notion of simulation, there's this merging of machine learning and simulation where machine learning tells you correlations in factors that influence an answer. Whereas, the simulation actually lets you play around with those correlations, to find the causations, and by merging them, we make it much, much more productive to find the models that are both accurate and to optimize them for different outcomes. >> So that's the modeling issue. >> Yes. >> When we think about after we, which is great. Now as we think about some of the data management elements, what are we looking at from a data management standpoint? >> Well, and this is something Jim has talked about, but, you know we had DevOps for joining the, essentially merging the skills of the developers with the operations folks, so that there's joint responsibility of keeping stuff live. >> Well what about things like digital twins, automated processes, we've talked a little it about breadth versus depth, ITOM, What do you think? Are we going to build out, are all these devices going to reveal themselves, or are we going to have to put in place a capacity for handling all of these things in some consistent, coherent way? >> Oh, okay, in terms of managing. >> In terms of managing. >> Okay. So, digital twins were interesting because they pioneered or they made well known a concept called essentially, a symmetric network, or a knowledge graph, which is just a way of abstracting what is a whole bunch of data models and machine learning models that represents the structure and behavior of a device. In IIoT terminology, it was like an industrial device, like a jet engine. But that same construct, the knowledge graph and the digital twin, can be used to describe the application software and the infrastructure, both middleware and hardware, that makes up this increasingly sophisticated network of learning and inferencing applications. And the reason this is important, it sounds arcane, the reason it's important is we're building now vastly more sophisticated applications over great distances, and the only way we can manage them is to make the administrators far more productive. The state of the art today is, alerts on the performance of the applications, and alerts on the, essentially, the resource intensity of the infrastructure. By combining that type of monitoring with the digital twin, we can get a, essentially much higher fidelity reading on when something goes wrong. We don't get false positives. In other words, you don't have, if something goes wrong, it's like the fairy tale of the pea underneath the mattress, all the way up, 10 mattresses, you know it's uncomfortable. Here, it'll pinpoint exactly what gets wrong, rather than cascading all sorts of alerts, and that is the key to productivity in managing this new infrastructure. >> Alright guys, so let's go into the action item around here. What I'd like to do now is ask each of you for the action item that you think users are going to have to apply or employ to actually get some value, and start down this path of utilizing machine intelligence across these different tiers of data to build more complex, manageable application infrastructures. So, Jim, I'd like to start with you, what's your action item? >> My action item is related what George just said, modeled centrally, deployed in a decentralized fashion, machine learning, and use digital twin technology to do your modeling against device classes, in a more coherent way. There's not one model that won't fit all of the devices. Use digital twin technology to structure the modeling process to be able to tune a model to each class of device out there. >> George, action item. >> Okay, recognize that there's a big difference between edge and cloud, as Jim said. But I would elaborate, edge is automated, low latency decision making, extremely data intensive. Recognize that the cloud is not just where you trickle up a little bit of data, this is where you're going to use simulations, with a human in the loop, to augment-- >> System wide, system wide. >> System wide, with a human in the loop to augment how you evaluate new models. >> Excellent. Neil, action item. >> I would have people start on the right side of the diagram and start to think about what their strategy is and where they fit into these technologies. Be realistic about what they think they can accomplish and do the homework. >> Alright, great. So let me summarize our meeting this week. This week we talked about the role that the three tiers of data that we've described will play in the use of machine intelligence technologies as we build increasingly complex and sophisticated applications. We've talked about the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary data. Primary data being the immediate experience of sensors. Analog being translated into digital, about a particular thing or set of things. Secondary being the data that is then aggregated off of those sensors for business event purposes, so that we can make a business decision, often automatically down at an edge scenario, as a consequence of signals that we're getting from multiple sensors. And then finally, tertiary data, that looks at a range of gateways and a range of systems, and is considering things at a system wide level, for modeling, simulation and integration purposes. Now, what's important about this is that it's not just better understanding the data and not just understanding the classes of technologies that we used, that will remain important. For example, we'll see increasingly powerful low cost device specific arm like processors pushed into the edge. And a lot of competition at the gateway, or at the secondary data tier. It's also important, however to think about the nature of the allocations and where the work is going to be performed across those different classifications. Especially as we think about machine learning, machine etiologies and deep learning. Our expectation is that we will see machine learning being used on all three levels, Where machine etiology is being used on against all forms of data to perform a variety of different work, but that the work that will be performed will be a... Will be naturally associated and related to the characteristics of the data that's being aggregated at that point. In other words, we won't see simulations, which are characteristics of tertiary data, George, at the edge itself. We will however, see edge devices often reduce significant amounts of data from a perhaps a video camera or something else to make relatively simple decisions that may involve complex technologies to allow a person into a building, for example. So our expectation is that over the next five years we're going to see significant new approaches to applying increasingly complex machine etiologies technologies across all different classes of data, but we're going to see them applied in ways that fit the patterns associated with that data, because it's the patterns that drive the applications. So our overall action item, it's absolutely essential that businesses that considering and conceptualizing what machine intelligence can do, but be careful about drawing huge generalizations about what the future machine intelligence is. The first step is to parse out the characteristics of the data driven by the devices that are going to generate it and the applications that are going to use it, and understand the relationship between the characteristics of that data and the types of machine intelligence work that can be performed. What is likely, is that an impedance mismatch between data and expectations of machine intelligence will generate a significant number of failures that often will put businesses back years in taking full advantage of some of these rich technologies. So, once again we want to thank you this week for joining us here on the Wikibon weekly research meeting. I want to thank George Gilbert who is here CUBE Studio in Palo Alto, and Jim Kobielus and Neil Raden who were both on the phone. And we want to thank you very much for joining us here today, and we look forward to talking to you again in the future. So this is Peter Burris, from the CUBE's Palo Alto Studio. Thanks again for watching Wikibon's weekly research meeting. (electronic music)

(energetic electronic music) >> Hello and welcome to a special CUBE presentation of the future of networking with Riverbed. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We're here with Paul O'Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of SteelHead, Steelhead Connect. SD-WAN in action. Well, good to have you on The CUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Great to be here. >> So, future of networking. This is something that we talk a lot about in our conversations, because the cloud's exploding, cloud business model. On-premise, true, private cloud. Hybrid, connecting to public clouds, is changing the game for app developers and large enterprises and how they do business. But it always comes back down to networking, 'cause everyone wants to know what's going on with networking. What is the future of networking? What's your perspective? >> Yeah, well John, as you said, everything's going to the cloud. But if you're a large multinational organization, you can't just click your finger and move your entire infrastructure to the cloud. But for the workloads that you do manage to move to AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, the good thing is that your IT organization is able to get out of the low-value-added activity of managing boxes and get into more strategic higher-impact activities and projects. So, if you think about moving a workload to the cloud, all of a sudden your organization is out of the business of managing boxes, managing servers, storage, and backup. But the challenge is that networking and the infrastructure required to connect all of that is still stuck in the past. And much of the way you manage a network really hasn't changed that much since the, certainly in enterprise networks, since the mid-90's when routers first really became popular. >> Give an example of why it's so hard, because I mean everyone wants networking to be faster. You have still move packets around the network. I mean boxes are changing. We know that the surveys are all pointing to non-differentiated labor being automated away. And that's clearly from the research. It's not a question of when, it's a question of when will, I mean not a question of how, when it's going to happen. So that puts pressure on the companies. When do they move from the manual networking to more automation? So give an example of some of the use cases. >> Yeah, so for a long time, as I said, the way you manage a network hasn't really changed. And in the last couple of years, we've seen the growth of a new market segment, or a new market, called software-defined WAN. So, taking some of the concepts of software-defined networking that had been trapped in the data center and then bringing those out onto the wide area network. And one of the big drivers was around the idea of, since there's so much more traffic going to the Internet, going to the cloud, I need a simpler way of managing that traffic. And I'd like to do it at a software level. I'd like to manage it based on policies and simple configurations that I could apply centrally as opposed to going down to the level of IP addresses and port numbers, as you have to in the sort of more traditional approach. So I think a lot of the initial impetus for people to look at new ways and new approaches to networking has been around this concept of direct-to-net, the desire to use more Internet transport, lower-cost Internet transport in the network. And that's sort of where it starts. And after that, you get to, what we at Riverbed believe is a bigger transformation of networking, which sort of begins with SD-WAN, but probably ultimately is more about really cloud networking. >> Some will say, and I'll get your reaction to this, that networking is outdated. Your thoughts? Is it outdated? Is it just moving too slow? Is it advanced? What are some of the, where's the progress bar on this conversation that's been kicking around the industry around networking needs to get updated and modernized? And is it outdated? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so as you said, at some level, you're always going to need networking, right? You've got to move packets around the network. You've got to connect applications with people and resources across the network. And it's particularly true in enterprises. But where I think the network has become stuck somewhat in terms of its evolution is that the traditional approach to configuring and managing devices, pre-staging routers and then shipping to a location where you have to do some more configuration on them, that piece of it I think has not evolved enough. But we're at a point now where a lot of the simplicity, the policy-based approach that you see in other parts of cloud infrastructure can now be applied to networking, that you can abstract away some of the complexity of the underlying network and then present that to an admin in a very simple fashion that looks very similar in terms of the experience to what happens when you deploy an application in the cloud, in AWS or Amazon. If you think about it, you can spin up an application and get it up and running in a matter of hours, if not minutes. You can deploy applications all over the world. Now, if you had asked somebody to do that 10 years ago, they would have looked at you like you're crazy. I want an application running in Frankfurt. And I want an application running in Seattle. And I want you to have it done by this afternoon, and by the way. Where it all falls down though is when I ask you to connect every root in my organization to those applications and have it done in a matter of hours or minutes. That's where it gets really hard using the traditional approaches. >> And, by the way, just to put in a point of clarification. I remember back when I was living in the 90's, 'cause what you described sounds like the 90's, that's a six-week project. Not like hours. That's like weeks. I got to make sure that the routers, we've got to configure the tables. All these manual efforts. But you're hitting on one of the things that is the future that people talk about, is really balancing the agility of doing something really fast, that's what the cloud is bringing to the table, with managing complexity. So that's one thread. So I want to talk about that. But also can I talk about the elephant in the room, which is, is my job going to go away? 'Cause, you know, a lot of those guys that are doing this command line interface stuff have built a job around their knowledge around configuring, which is not an agile. So they've got to be agile. So they're potentially at risk. So, future career. But the mandate of managing the complexity with agility. >> Yeah, so the industry obviously evolves over time. And, as you look at, again, go back to different parts of the infrastructure stack or the IT environment, you could have said just exactly the same, made exactly the same argument to me about servers and storage and backup administrators. Now, to my knowledge, those people haven't gone away. The total number of people working in the IT industry has not shrunk. If anything, it's grown significantly. So I think it's much more about freeing people from some of these laborious tasks that really don't add a lot of value and then redirecting those people to delivering on higher-impact initiatives. You know, a lot of talk in the industry these days, no matter actually what vertical you're in, about digital strategies, about transforming your business, and really what you want is to take your IT resources and your IT personnel and have them work on those projects and not have them-- >> John: The high-yield projects. >> Exactly. And to the extent possible, to automate a lot of the workflows and the way you manage day-to-day administration of the network, whether it's in the design phase, the deployment phase, or the management phase, of your network infrastructure, make that simpler and more intuitive and ultimately more like a consumer application, the types of workflows we're used to when we use web-based applications. Or perhaps, more reasonably, make it more like how you manage an application in AWS or Google Cloud or Azure. >> So your point about the server guys, the storage guys, their jobs never went away. First of all, there's more data coming than ever before, so they're always going to have a good job. So you're saying that is also applied to networking. >> Paul: Mm-hmm. >> It's still super important. >> Paul: Absolutely. >> And there's going to be more network, certainly with IOT on the horizon. You're going to have more connection points than ever before. So you're saying that tasks may go away, but the job will shift to other things, whether it's up the stack or other function that's related to adding value. >> Absolutely. So, the individual components that are deployed in the network that make the traffic, that allow the traffic to flow, that allow you to get the packets around the network, allow you to connect different parts of your enterprise, none of that goes away. But it just maybe takes a different form. And you mentioned IOT, for example. I mean that's a big question and a big challenge for a lot of organizations. How do you manage a network environment where you have more and more devices coming on the network? And instead of having, 10's, 100's of clients on a wireless network, for example, you could have 100's or 1,000's in a facility. And that's the type of new networking challenges that would be interesting to address as opposed to doing things that are, by their nature, manual and arguably can be done with a lot more automation. >> So I'm going to make a statement. And I want you to either agree or disagree or add some color to it. The future of networking is about automation, embracing automation to add value. And just as a point of validation, IOT, whatever trend that's happening right now that people get excited about, are all probably about machine learning. And everyone's saying that AI is going to solve the problem, which is simply just saying, technology's going to help with the automation. That's kind of my take on it. Your thoughts on that? Because that essentially is the validation. So the future of networking is, get used to automation. It's coming down the road pretty fast. >> So I think the first step towards taking some of that machine learning know-how and AI and applying it to networking is to automate networking. Make it easier. Make it policy-based. Don't make it about CLI commands. Make it about more manual configuration about scripting. The next step will be to apply machine learning and be able to have self-healing networks, being able to have networks which are aware of the types of-- >> Self-healing networks? Self-healing networks for having self-healing cars. Self-driving everything. I mean this is essentially the automation of what we're seeing. >> Sure, but let's start, let's not run before we can walk. Let's start with application-aware networks. How about that as an idea? Where at least the network doesn't think it's just passing packets, but actually knows what application it's using and is applying policies in an automatic fashion, whether it's to choose the optimal path for traffic or whether it's to apply security policies based on who the user is and what they're trying to do. So you should be able to do all that. And that is something that we built in our new product. >> Okay, so I would say that in hearing you, complexity is addressed by automation and software. >> Paul: Mm-hmm. >> The agility is really the application awareness of that. >> Yeah, I think that's a reasonable characterization of how to think about the future of networking, sure. >> Okay, so I want to get your thoughts on SD-WAN. We're hearing about that. With the cloud, and whether you're running true private cloud and hybrid and public, it's all an operating model. It's all a new way to think about provisioning networks and managing it. Isn't everything a WAN now? I mean, if you almost conceptually as a mind exercise say, the notion of local area networks and wide area networks are kind of, with the whole cloud thing, with the perimeter being decimated, and APIs flying around and microservices. I mean isn't everything a WAN now? >> Sure, I mean the whole concept of the WAN feels a little dated right now. I mean, if you think about it, if your kids are on the web or using their favorite social networking, and for some reason they can't get on the Internet, they rarely come down to you and say, "Hey Dad, the WAN's broken." So I mean clearly, people who live in the enterprise world still think in terms of wide area networks. But more and more, you're right. If you think about it, all of the different users who are coming on your network, whether employees or whether they're customers or partners, they're coming on using WiFi. There's a blurring of the line between the Internet, between the private enterprise network, traditionally referred to as the WAN, and the LAN. All of that is merging. And a lot of the technologies that Riverbed has been developing are really around this concept of SD-WAN, not just SD-WAN, but SD-LAN as well, and the ability to provide a single connectivity fabric across LAN, WAN, Cloud, and to the extent you still have data centers, most large enterprises will have those, data center as well. >> Great. And so competition. Let's talk about competition. You mentioned the CLI. Cisco's a market leader in all this. Your position vis-a-vis Cisco and how you look at the competition? >> Yeah, so Riverbed as a company has competed in various ways with large networking companies like Cisco for many, many years, since we started as a company. It is interesting that Cisco is trying to reposition itself, sees a need to change the way it delivers solutions for enterprise networking. It started by developing some of those capabilities within the organization and then more recently has made an acquisition of a startup, which we think is interesting, because it really validates the market now for SD-WAN. And we welcome it many ways, 'cause we think it's really the beginning of a shakeout and a maturing of the whole space. We think we're going to see that. >> You can't talk about the future of networking without talking about WiFi, because everyone who goes to a sporting event or concert, they lose their LTE, they go to the WiFi. And connectivity is like the lifeblood. You guys recently had an acquisition. What's the future like with you guys and WiFi? >> Yeah, we recently acquired a company called Xirrus, which was a company that had set out to build the fastest, most scalable, most, and this is really the key point, densest WiFi in the world in a very secure manner as well. And it was started by some of the pioneers of the WiFi industry, people who were in WiFI before it was even called WiFi. And so we thought they had an extraordinarily interesting technology. And what was particularly exciting about it is that they had also developed a cloud management approach to managing WiFi. As you said, WiFi is, on one hand you could think that WiFi is kind of a solved problem. It's been around for quite a while. But it's also become incredibly critical to not just enterprise networks, but to everyday life. We sometimes say that WiFi has become the inalienable right of every global citizen, good WiFi. If you think about the last time you checked in a hotel, what's probably the first thing you'd do is see if you can get on the WiFi. And if you have a bad WiFi experience, it doesn't matter how soft the Egyptian cotton on the sheets, on the bed is, >> John: It's plumbing. >> or how delicious the chocolate is on the pillow. >> People complain most about WiFi. >> Exactly. So if you think about it, some of our biggest customers now that we've entered the WiFi, and particularly the cloud-managed WiFi, business, our education, K through 12 and universities, on many university campuses, the users can have six, eight, 10 devices per person. Now, in the typical enterprise, maybe you don't have quite that many. But we're certainly all heading in that direction. And then you combine that with IOT and how people would like to put a lot of sensors and other devices on the network, then you're getting to a point where you really need incredibly dense WiFi. >> I mean IOT is about power and connectivity. WiFi gives great connectivity. Future of networking. Just summarize as we wrap this segment up for the folks watching who are practitioners in their jobs every day, trying to figure out the future, what's the bottom line of the future of networking? If you can give that statement and an example of how you guys are working with other practitioners. >> Sure. Well, first of all, I think the transformation that's occurring in the broader IT industry with the rise of the cloud and cloud networking and cloud computing is really extending now to the networking industry. A lot of the simplicity, the workflows, the automation and policy-based approaches is now extending to the space that network administrators have traditionally lived in. And I think that's really an opportunity for practitioners, as you call them, to really start using a set of more interesting and more capable tools that then will allow them to free themselves up from some of the lower-value-added activities to doing some really interesting things in the organization and to be an enabler of some of these new digital strategies and cloud strategies that their organizations are trying to execute. >> An example of companies you've worked with that might be a case study that you can share real quick? >> Well, what we're seeing is an awful lot of retailers, for example. So it's interesting. You see all the pressure that traditional retailers are experiencing from online e-commerce retailers. And what we're seeing is that more and more, they are using in-store WiFi. They're looking to put a lot more band-width into the stores to give customers in the store an incredibly compelling online experience while they're shopping. For two purposes. One is because they want to engage that customer while they're in the store. And also because they may want to do analytics and understand their behavior while they're in a store. But they want to do that at the same time as ensuring that some of their business-critical applications are up and running. So if you think about SD-WAN or cloud networking, it really provides the ability for us to do that, augment the WAN, deliver more band-width, lower cost band-width, into the store, but also give an incredibly compelling experience and have it all managed centrally with a simple policy-based approach. >> All right, the future of networking here at the CUBE Studio. Paul O'Farrell, Senior Vice President, General Manager at Riverbed. I'm John Furrier with the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(energetic electronic music) >> Hello and welcome to a special CUBE presentation of the future of networking with Riverbed. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We're here with Paul O'Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of SteelHead, Steelhead Connect. SD-WAN in action. Well, good to have you on The CUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Great to be here. >> So, future of networking. This is something that we talk a lot about in our conversations, because the cloud's exploding, cloud business model. On-premise, true, private cloud. Hybrid, connecting to public clouds, is changing the game for app developers and large enterprises and how they do business. But it always comes back down to networking, 'cause everyone wants to know what's going on with networking. What is the future of networking? What's your perspective? >> Yeah, well John, as you said, everything's going to the cloud. But if you're a large multinational organization, you can't just click your finger and move your entire infrastructure to the cloud. But for the workloads that you do manage to move to AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, the good thing is that your IT organization is able to get out of the low-value-added activity of managing boxes and get into more strategic higher-impact activities and projects. So, if you think about moving a workload to the cloud, all of a sudden your organization is out of the business of managing boxes, managing servers, storage, and backup. But the challenge is that networking and the infrastructure required to connect all of that is still stuck in the past. And much of the way you manage a network really hasn't changed that much since the, certainly in enterprise networks, since the mid-90's when routers first really became popular. >> Give an example of why it's so hard, because I mean everyone wants networking to be faster. You have still move packets around the network. I mean boxes are changing. We know that the surveys are all pointing to non-differentiated labor being automated away. And that's clearly from the research. It's not a question of when, it's a question of when will, I mean not a question of how, when it's going to happen. So that puts pressure on the companies. When do they move from the manual networking to more automation? So give an example of some of the use cases. >> Yeah, so for a long time, as I said, the way you manage a network hasn't really changed. And in the last couple of years, we've seen the growth of a new market segment, or a new market, called software-defined WAN. So, taking some of the concepts of software-defined networking that had been trapped in the data center and then bringing those out onto the wide area network. And one of the big drivers was around the idea of, since there's so much more traffic going to the Internet, going to the cloud, I need a simpler way of managing that traffic. And I'd like to do it at a software level. I'd like to manage it based on policies and simple configurations that I could apply centrally as opposed to going down to the level of IP addresses and port numbers, as you have to in the sort of more traditional approach. So I think a lot of the initial impetus for people to look at new ways and new approaches to networking has been around this concept of direct-to-net, the desire to use more Internet transport, lower-cost Internet transport in the network. And that's sort of where it starts. And after that, you get to, what we at Riverbed believe is a bigger transformation of networking, which sort of begins with SD-WAN, but probably ultimately is more about really cloud networking. >> Some will say, and I'll get your reaction to this, that networking is outdated. Your thoughts? Is it outdated? Is it just moving too slow? Is it advanced? What are some of the, where's the progress bar on this conversation that's been kicking around the industry around networking needs to get updated and modernized? And is it outdated? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so as you said, at some level, you're always going to need networking, right? You've got to move packets around the network. You've got to connect applications with people and resources across the network. And it's particularly true in enterprises. But where I think the network has become stuck somewhat in terms of its evolution is that the traditional approach to configuring and managing devices, pre-staging routers and then shipping to a location where you have to do some more configuration on them, that piece of it I think has not evolved enough. But we're at a point now where a lot of the simplicity, the policy-based approach that you see in other parts of cloud infrastructure can now be applied to networking, that you can abstract away some of the complexity of the underlying network and then present that to an admin in a very simple fashion that looks very similar in terms of the experience to what happens when you deploy an application in the cloud, in AWS or Amazon. If you think about it, you can spin up an application and get it up and running in a matter of hours, if not minutes. You can deploy applications all over the world. Now, if you had asked somebody to do that 10 years ago, they would have looked at you like you're crazy. I want an application running in Frankfurt. And I want an application running in Seattle. And I want you to have it done by this afternoon, and by the way. Where it all falls down though is when I ask you to connect every root in my organization to those applications and have it done in a matter of hours or minutes. That's where it gets really hard using the traditional approaches. And, by the way, just to put in a point of clarification. I remember back when I was living in the 90's, 'cause what you described sounds like the 90's, that's a six-week project. Not like hours. That's like weeks. I got to make sure that the routers, we've got to configure the tables. All these manual efforts. But you're hitting on one of the things that is the future that people talk about, is really balancing the agility of doing something really fast, that's what the cloud is bringing to the table, with managing complexity. So that's one thread. So I want to talk about that. But also can I talk about the elephant in the room, which is, is my job going to go away? 'Cause, you know, a lot of those guys that are doing this command line interface stuff have built a job around their knowledge around configuring, which is not an agile. So they've got to be agile. So they're potentially at risk. So, future career. But the mandate of managing the complexity with agility. >> Yeah, so the industry obviously evolves over time. And, as you look at, again, go back to different parts of the infrastructure stack or the IT environment, you could have said just exactly the same, made exactly the same argument to me about servers and storage and backup administrators. Now, to my knowledge, those people haven't gone away. The total number of people working in the IT industry has not shrunk. If anything, it's grown significantly. So I think it's much more about freeing people from some of these laborious tasks that really don't add a lot of value and then redirecting those people to delivering on higher-impact initiatives. You know, a lot of talk in the industry these days, no matter actually what vertical you're in, about digital strategies, about transforming your business, and really what you want is to take your IT resources and your IT personnel and have them work on those projects and not have them-- >> John: The high-yield projects. >> Exactly. And to the extent possible, to automate a lot of the workflows and the way you manage day-to-day administration of the network, whether it's in the design phase, the deployment phase, or the management phase, of your network infrastructure, make that simpler and more intuitive and ultimately more like a consumer application, the types of workflows we're used to when we use web-based applications. Or perhaps, more reasonably, make it more like how you manage an application in AWS or Google Cloud or Azure. >> So your point about the server guys, the storage guys, their jobs never went away. First of all, there's more data coming than ever before, so they're always going to have a good job. So you're saying that is also applied to networking. >> Paul: Mm-hmm. >> It's still super important. >> Paul: Absolutely. >> And there's going to be more network, certainly with IOT on the horizon. You're going to have more connection points than ever before. So you're saying that tasks may go away, but the job will shift to other things, whether it's up the stack or other function that's related to adding value. >> Absolutely. So, the individual components that are deployed in the network that make the traffic, that allow the traffic to flow, that allow you to get the packets around the network, allow you to connect different parts of your enterprise, none of that goes away. But it just maybe takes a different form. And you mentioned IOT, for example. I mean that's a big question and a big challenge for a lot of organizations. How do you manage a network environment where you have more and more devices coming on the network? And instead of having, 10's, 100's of clients on a wireless network, for example, you could have 100's or 1,000's in a facility. And that's the type of new networking challenges that would be interesting to address as opposed to doing things that are, by their nature, manual and arguably can be done with a lot more automation. >> So I'm going to make a statement. And I want you to either agree or disagree or add some color to it. The future of networking is about automation, embracing automation to add value. And just as a point of validation, IOT, whatever trend that's happening right now that people get excited about, are all probably about machine learning. And everyone's saying that AI is going to solve the problem, which is simply just saying, technology's going to help with the automation. That's kind of my take on it. Your thoughts on that? Because that essentially is the validation. So the future of networking is, get used to automation. It's coming down the road pretty fast. >> So I think the first step towards taking some of that machine learning know-how and AI and applying it to networking is to automate networking. Make it easier. Make it policy-based. Don't make it about CLI commands. Make it about more manual configuration about scripting. The next step will be to apply machine learning and be able to have self-healing networks, being able to have networks which are aware of the types of-- >> Self-healing networks? Self-healing networks for having self-healing cars. Self-driving everything. I mean this is essentially the automation of what we're seeing. >> Sure, but let's start, let's not run before we can walk. Let's start with application-aware networks. How about that as an idea? Where at least the network doesn't think it's just passing packets, but actually knows what application it's using and is applying policies in an automatic fashion, whether it's to choose the optimal path for traffic or whether it's to apply security policies based on who the user is and what they're trying to do. So you should be able to do all that. And that is something that we built in our new product. >> Okay, so I would say that in hearing you, complexity is addressed by automation and software. >> Paul: Mm-hmm. >> The agility is really the application awareness of that. >> Yeah, I think that's a reasonable characterization of how to think about the future of networking, sure. >> Okay, so I want to get your thoughts on SD-WAN. We're hearing about that. With the cloud, and whether you're running true private cloud and hybrid and public, it's all an operating model. It's all a new way to think about provisioning networks and managing it. Isn't everything a WAN now? I mean, if you almost conceptually as a mind exercise say, the notion of local area networks and wide area networks are kind of, with the whole cloud thing, with the perimeter being decimated, and APIs flying around and microservices. I mean isn't everything a WAN now? >> Sure, I mean the whole concept of the WAN feels a little dated right now. I mean, if you think about it, if your kids are on the web or using their favorite social networking, and for some reason they can't get on the Internet, they rarely come down to you and say, "Hey Dad, the WAN's broken." So I mean clearly, people who live in the enterprise world still think in terms of wide area networks. But more and more, you're right. If you think about it, all of the different users who are coming on your network, whether employees or whether they're customers or partners, they're coming on using WiFi. There's a blurring of the line between the Internet, between the private enterprise network, traditionally referred to as the WAN, and the LAN. All of that is merging. And a lot of the technologies that Riverbed has been developing are really around this concept of SD-WAN, not just SD-WAN, but SD-LAN as well, and the ability to provide a single connectivity fabric across LAN, WAN, Cloud, and to the extent you still have data centers, most large enterprises will have those, data center as well. >> Great. And so competition. Let's talk about competition. You mentioned the CLI. Cisco's a market leader in all this. Your position vis-a-vis Cisco and how you look at the competition? >> Yeah, so Riverbed as a company has competed in various ways with large networking companies like Cisco for many, many years, since we started as a company. It is interesting that Cisco is trying to reposition itself, sees a need to change the way it delivers solutions for enterprise networking. It started by developing some of those capabilities within the organization and then more recently has made an acquisition of a startup, which we think is interesting, because it really validates the market now for SD-WAN. And we welcome it many ways, 'cause we think it's really the beginning of a shakeout and a maturing of the whole space. We think we're going to see that. >> You can't talk about the future of networking without talking about WiFi, because everyone who goes to a sporting event or concert, they lose their LTE, they go to the WiFi. And connectivity is like the lifeblood. You guys recently had an acquisition. What's the future like with you guys and WiFi? >> Yeah, we recently acquired a company called Xirrus, which was a company that had set out to build the fastest, most scalable, most, and this is really the key point, densest WiFi in the world in a very secure manner as well. And it was started by some of the pioneers of the WiFi industry, people who were in WiFI before it was even called WiFi. And so we thought they had an extraordinarily interesting technology. And what was particularly exciting about it is that they had also developed a cloud management approach to managing WiFi. As you said, WiFi is, on one hand you could think that WiFi is kind of a solved problem. It's been around for quite a while. But it's also become incredibly critical to not just enterprise networks, but to everyday life. We sometimes say that WiFi has become the inalienable right of every global citizen, good WiFi. If you think about the last time you checked in a hotel, what's probably the first thing you'd do is see if you can get on the WiFi. And if you have a bad WiFi experience, it doesn't matter how soft the Egyptian cotton on the sheets, on the bed is, >> John: It's plumbing. >> or how delicious the chocolate is on the pillow. >> People complain most about WiFi. >> Exactly. So if you think about it, some of our biggest customers now that we've entered the WiFi, and particularly the cloud-managed WiFi, business, our education, K through 12 and universities, on many university campuses, the users can have six, eight, 10 devices per person. Now, in the typical enterprise, maybe you don't have quite that many. But we're certainly all heading in that direction. And then you combine that with IOT and how people would like to put a lot of sensors and other devices on the network, then you're getting to a point where you really need incredibly dense WiFi. >> I mean IOT is about power and connectivity. WiFi gives great connectivity. Future of networking. Just summarize as we wrap this segment up for the folks watching who are practitioners in their jobs every day, trying to figure out the future, what's the bottom line of the future of networking? If you can give that statement and an example of how you guys are working with other practitioners. >> Sure. Well, first of all, I think the transformation that's occurring in the broader IT industry with the rise of the cloud and cloud networking and cloud computing is really extending now to the networking industry. A lot of the simplicity, the workflows, the automation and policy-based approaches is now extending to the space that network administrators have traditionally lived in. And I think that's really an opportunity for practitioners, as you call them, to really start using a set of more interesting and more capable tools that then will allow them to free themselves up from some of the lower-value-added activities to doing some really interesting things in the organization and to be an enabler of some of these new digital strategies and cloud strategies that their organizations are trying to execute. >> An example of companies you've worked with that might be a case study that you can share real quick? >> Well, what we're seeing is an awful lot of retailers, for example. So it's interesting. You see all the pressure that traditional retailers are experiencing from online e-commerce retailers. And what we're seeing is that more and more, they are using in-store WiFi. They're looking to put a lot more band-width into the stores to give customers in the store an incredibly compelling online experience while they're shopping. For two purposes. One is because they want to engage that customer while they're in the store. And also because they may want to do analytics and understand their behavior while they're in a store. But they want to do that at the same time as ensuring that some of their business-critical applications are up and running. So if you think about SD-WAN or cloud networking, it really provides the ability for us to do that, augment the WAN, deliver more band-width, lower cost band-width, into the store, but also give an incredibly compelling experience and have it all managed centrally with a simple policy-based approach. >> All right, the future of networking here at the CUBE Studio. Paul O'Farrell, Senior Vice President, General Manager at Riverbed. I'm John Furrier with the Cube. Thanks for watching.