>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020, here in Barcelona. Our third year of the show, over 17,000 in attendance between the Cisco people, their large partner ecosystem, and the customers, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for this segment is Dave Vellante. John Furrier's scouring the show for all of the news at the event, and joining us, we have two first time guests on the program, first, sitting to my left is Patrick Smith, who is the field CTO for EMEA with Pure Storage. Sitting to his left is Eric Greffier, who is the managing director of EMEAR specialists with Cisco, so you have a slightly larger region than Patrick does, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Patrick: Great to be here. >> All right, so, we know this show, we were talking that broad ecosystem, and of course Cisco in the data center group has very strong storage partnerships, highlighted by their converged infrastructure stacks. I wrote my research many many years ago, Cisco's brilliant job was when they entered the server market, they made sure that that fragmented storage ecosystem, they made partnerships across the board. And of course, when Pure's ascendancy with the flash era made the stack, so helping to paint those data centers orange with your Cisco partnership, so Patrick, give us the update here, 2020, what's interesting and important to know about Pure Storage and Cisco customer base? >> You know, we continue to see significant adoption of FlashStack, our converged infrastructure with Cisco. Driving just great interest and great growth, both for Pure and for Cisco with the UCS platform, and the value that the customers see in FlashStack, bringing together storage, networking and compute together with overall automation of the stack, and that really gives customers fantastic time to value. And that's what they're looking for in this day and age. >> All right, and Eric, what differentiates the partnership with Pure, versus, as you said, you do work with many of the storage companies out there. >> Well, we had a baby together, it was called FlashStack, and it was couple of years ago now, and as you said, I think the key element for us is really to have those CVDs, those Cisco Validated Designs together, and FlashStack was a great addition to our existing partnership at that time, talking about a couple of years ago. And of course, with the flash technology of Pure, we've seen the demand that we'd say going and going, and it has been amazing, amazing trajectory together. >> But talk a little bit more about the CVDs, the different use cases that you're seeing. You don't have to go through all 20, but maybe pick a couple of your favorite children. >> Well, just to make sure that people understand what CVD means, it's Cisco Validated Design, and this is kind of an outcome in the form of a document, which is available for customers and partners, which is the outcome of the partnership from R&D to R&D, which is just telling customers and partners what they need to order and have in it to fit all of this together for a specific business outcome. And the reason why we have multiple CVDs, is we have one CVD per use case. So the more use cases we have together, the more the CVD's precise, and you just have to follow the CVD design principles. Of course, the later swarms, and maybe Patrick can say a word, but we've been of course doing things regarding analytics and AI, because this is a big demand right now, so maybe Patrick, you want to say a word on this. >> Yeah, you guys were first with the AI and bringing AI and storage together with your partnership with Nvidia, so maybe double down on that. >> The FlashBlade was our move into building a storage platform for AI and model analytics, and we've seen tremendous success with that in lots of different verticals. And so with Cisco we launched FlashStack for AI, which brings together FlashBlade networking, and Cisco's fantastic compute platform with capability for considerable scale of Nvidia GPUs. So an in-a-box capability to really deliver fast time to market solutions for the growing world of analytics and modern AI, people want quick insight into the vast amounts of data we have, and so FlashStack for AI is really important for us being able to deliver as part of the Cisco ecosystem, and provide customers with a platform for success. >> What's happening with modernization, generally, but specifically in Europe, obviously Cisco, long history in Europe, Pure, you've got a presence here, good presence, but obviously much newer. Larger proportion, far larger proportion is in North America, so it's a real opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing in terms of modernization of infrastructure, and apps in the European community? >> Modernization I think is particularly important, and it's more and more seen under the guise of digital transformation, because investing in infrastructure just doesn't get the credit that sometimes it deserves. But the big push there is really all around simpler infrastructure, easier management, and the push for automation. Organizations don't want to have large infrastructure support teams who are either installing or managing in a heavy touch way, their environments, and so the push towards automation, not just at the infrastructure layer, but all the way up the stack, is really key. And you know, we were talking earlier, behind us we have the DevNet sessions here, all about how customers of Cisco and by correlation Pure, can really optimize the management to their environment, use technology like Intersight, like Ansible and others, to really minimize the overhead of managing technology, deliver services faster to customers and be more agile, in this always-on world that we live in, there's no time to really add a human to the cycle of managing infrastructure. >> I think we've been very proud over the years because this notion of converged infrastructure, which was, the promise was to simplify and modernize the data centers, before it was like, "Everything needs to get connected to anything," and coming was this notion of a pod, everything converged, "We've done the job for you, mister customer, "just think about adding some pod." This has been the promise for the last 10 years, and we've been very proud, almost to have created this market, but it wouldn't have been possible without the partnership with the storage players, and with Pure, we've been one step further in terms of simplifying things for customers. >> I love the extension you're talking about, because absolutely converged infrastructure was supposed to deliver on that simplicity, and it was, let's think of the entire rack as a unit of how we manage it, but with today's applications, with the speed of change happening in the environment, we've gone beyond human speed, and so therefore if we don't have the automation that you were talking about, we can't keep up with what the business needs to be able to do there. >> Yeah, that's what it's all about, it's the rapid rate of change. Whether it's business services, whether it's supporting developers in the developer environment, more and more our customers are becoming software development organizations, their developers are a key resource, and making them as efficient as possible is really important, so being able to quickly spin up development environments, new environments for developers, using snapshot technology, giving them the latest sets of data to test their applications on, is really central to enabling and empowering the developer. >> You know, you talk about Cisco's play and kind of creation of the converged infrastructure, Mark, and I think that's fair, by the way. Others may claim it, but I think the mantle goes to you. But there were two friction points, or headwinds, that we pointed out early in the day, the first was organizational, the servers team, the storage team, the network team didn't speak together, then the practitioner told us one day, "Look, you want to solve that problem, "put it in and watch what happens." 'Cause if you try to figure out the organization you'll never get there, and that sort of took care of itself. The other was the channel. The channel likes things separate, they can add value, they have this sort of box selling mentality, so I wonder if you could update us on what the mindset is in the channel, and how that's evolved. >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think the channel actually really likes the simplicity of a converged infrastructure to sell, it's a very simple message, and it really empowers the channel to take, to your point about organization, they have the full stack, all in one sellable item, and so they don't have to fight for the different components, it's one consistent unit that they sell as a whole, and so I think it simplifies the channel, and actually, we find that customers are actively seeking out, it's shown by our growth with FlashStack that customers are actually seeking out the channel partners who are selling FlashStack. >> Yeah, and do you think the channel realizes, "Wow, we really do have to go up the stack, "add more value, do things like partner with"? >> Well for most of the partners, they were heavily specialized on storage or compute or network, so for most of them, supporting the converged infrastructure was to be able to put a foot into another market, which was an expansion for them, which was part number one. Part number two, maybe the things that we've been missing, because since the beginning we had APIs around all those platforms. I don't believe in the early days, I'm talking about five years from now, that they got, that they could really really build something upon the converged infrastructure. Now, if you go through the DevNet area here at Cisco Live, you will see that I think this is the time now for them to understand, and really build new services on top of it, so I believe the value for the channel is pretty obvious now, more than ever. >> Well yeah, it's a great point, you don't usually hear converged infrastructure and infrastructure as code in the same conversation, but the maturation of the platforms underneath are bringing things together. >> They really are, in the same way that IT organizations are freeing up more time to focus up the stack on automation and added value, the same is true of the partners. It's interesting the corollary between the two. >> So I have a question on your act two, so what got us here the last 10 years, both firms were disruptors. Cisco came in and disrupted the compute space, it was misunderstood, "Cisco getting into servers, "that'll never work!" "Well, really not getting into servers, "we're changing the game." "Ah, okay," 10 years later. Pure, all-flash, really created some havoc in the industry, injected a ton of flash into the data center, practically drove a truck through the legacy business. Okay, so very successful. What's act two for you guys, what do you envision, disruptors, are you more incrementalists, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. >> I start, Patrick. Probably for us, phase two is what you heard yesterday morning, I think Liz Anthony did a great speech regarding Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, sorry for the name, this is a bit long, but what it means is now we truly connect the infrastructure to the application performance, and the fact that we can place and discuss about converged infrastructure but in the context of what truly matters for customers, which is application, this is the first time ever you're going to see such amount of R&D put into bringing the two worlds together. So this is just the beginning, but I think this was probably for me yesterday one of the most important announcement ever. And by the way, Pure is coming with this announcement, so if you as a customer buy Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, you'll get everything you need to know about Pure and if you have to move things around the storage area, you know the tool will be doing it for you. So we are really the two of us in this announcement, so Patrick, if you want to? >> No, I mean as Eric mentioned, Intersight's important for Cisco, it's important for us, we're very proud to be early integrators as a third party into Intersight to allow that simple management, but you know, as you talk about the future, we were viewed as disruptors when we first came to market with flash array, and we consider still ourselves to be disruptors and innovators, and the amount of our revenue that we invest in innovation, in what is a really focused product portfolio, I think is showing benefits, and you've seen the announcements over the last six months or so with FlashArray//C, bringing all the benefits of flash to tier two applications, and just the interest that that has generated is huge. In the world of networking with NVMe, we have a fabric in RoCEv2, just increasing the performance for business applications that will have fantastic implications for things like SAP, time and performance-critical databases, and then what we announced with direct memory with adding SCM as a read cache onto flash array as well. Really giving customers investment protection for what they bought from us already, because they can, as you well know, Evergreen gives customers an asset that continues to appreciate in value, which is completely the opposite. >> And you're both sort of embracing that service consumption model, I mean Cisco's becoming a very large proportion of your business, you guys have announced some actual straight cloud plays, you've built an aray inside of AWS, which is pretty innovative, so. >> Yes, and as well as the cloud play with Cloud Block Store in AWS, there's Pure as a service, which takes that cloud-like consumption model and allows a customer to run it in their own data center without owning the assets, and that's really interesting, because customers have got used to the cloud-like consumption model, and paying as an OpEx rather than CapEx, and so bringing that into their own facility, and only paying for the data you have written, really does change the game in terms of how they consume and think about their storage environments. >> Patrick, we'd just love to get your viewpoint, you've been talking to a lot of customers this week, you said you've been checking out the DevNet zone, for people that didn't make it to the show here, what have they been missing, what would their peers be telling them in the hallway conversations? >> There's a huge amount as we've been talking about, there's a huge amount on automation, and actually we see it as we go into customers, the number of people we're now talking to who are developers but not developers developing business applications but developers developing code for managing infrastructure is key, and you see it all around the DevNet zone. And then, the focus on containers, I've been talking about it for a long time, and containers is so important for enterprises going forward. We have a great play in that space, and I think as we roll forward, the next three to five years, containers is just going to be the important technology that will be prevalent across enterprises large and small. >> Dave: Yeah, we agree. >> Eric and Patrick, thank you so much for giving us the update, congratulations on all the progress and definitely look forward to keeping an eye on your progress. >> Thanks very much. >> All right, Dave Vellante and I will be back with much more here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios, in Palo Alto California, for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Anybody that's read any Wikibon research or been a part of any conversation with anybody here at SiliconANGLE, knows we're big believers in the notion of digital business, and digital business transformation. Simply put, the difference between a business and a digital business is the role that data plays in a digital business. Digital businesses use data to change their value propositions, better manage and get greater visibility and utilization out of their assets, and ultimately drive new types of customer experience. That places an enormous burden on the technologies, the digital technologies that have historically been associated with IT, but now are becoming more deeply embedded within the business. And that digital business transformation is catalyzing a whole derivative set of other transformations. Including for example, technology, data centers, security, et cetera. It's a big topic, and to start to parse it and make some sense of it, we're joined by two great guests today- Michael Segal is the area vice-president of strategic alliances at NETSCOUT Systems, and Eric Smith is the senior product line manager of NETSCOUT Systems. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here, Peter. >> Okay, so, Michael let's get going on. Give us a quick update on NETSCOUT Systems. >> Yeah, so maybe just a quick introduction of what NETSCOUT actually does. So, NETSCOUT assures service performance and security for the largest enterprises and service providers in the world. And the way we accomplish it is through what we refer to as offering visibility without borders. Now, this visibility without borders provides actionable intelligence that enables, very quickly and efficiently to enterprises and service providers, ensure their service performance and security, understand, discover problems, root cause, and solution. So it overall reduces their mean time to repair, and it's being used to assure that digital transformation and other transformation initiatives are executed effectively by the IT organization. >> All right, so let's jump in to this notion of transformation. Now, I know that you and I have spent, on a couple different occasions, talked about the idea of digital business transformation. What does digital business transformation mean to NETSCOUT, and some of the other derivative transformations that are associated with it? >> Right, so as you described very very concisely in your introduction, the business transformation is about enabling the business through digital services and data to differentiate itself from competition very very effectively. Now, one of the aspects of this digital transformation is that now more than ever before, the CIOs are taking a very active role in this transformation because obviously, information technology is responsible for digital services and processing and analyzing data. So with that in mind, the CIOs now need to support the business aspects of agility, right? So if your business agility involves introducing new services very quickly and efficiently, the IT organization needs to support that, and at the same time, they also need to assure that the employee productivity and end user experience is maintained at the highest levels possible. So this is exactly where NETSCOUT comes in, and we support the IT organization by providing this visibility without borders, to assure that employee productivity and end user experience is maintained and any issues are resolved very quickly and efficiently. >> Especially customer experience, and that's increasingly the most important, end users that any digital business has to deal with. At this point in time Eric, I want to bring you in to the conversation. When we talk about this notion of greater visibility, greater security, over digital assets, and the role that the CIO is playing, that also suggests that there is a new class of roles for architects, for people who have historically been associated more with running the networks, running the systems, how is their role changing, and how is that part of the whole concept of data centered transformation? >> Right, so, the guys that have typically been in what you might consider network operations types of roles, their roles are evolving as well, as the entire organization does. So as Michael mentioned beforehand, no longer is the digital business wholly and solely confined to an IT department that is working just with their employees. They're now part of the business. They're not just the cost center anymore, they're actually an asset to the business. And they are supporting lines of business. So the folks that have traditionally had these roles have just maintained the network, maintained the applications, are having to become experts in other aspects. So as certain applications disaggregate, or potentially move out partially into the cloud, they kind of become cloud architects as well, whether it's a public cloud or a private cloud, they have to understand those relationships and they have to understand what happens when you spread your network out beyond your traditional data center core. >> So let's build on that, because that suggests that the ultimate solution for how we move forward has to accommodate greater visibility, end-to-end, across resources, not only that we have traditionally controlled, and therefore could decide how much visibility we had, if the tooling was right, but also resources that are outside of our direct purview. How does that work as we think about building this end to end visibility to improve the overall productivity and capability, as you said, the productivity and end user experience, of the systems we're deploying? >> Yeah, so maybe we can start with the end in mind, and what I mean by that is what you just described as end user productivity and user experience, so how do we measure it, right? So in order to measure it, what we need to look is the visibility at the service level. And what I mean by visibility at the service level is actually looking, not just at once specific component that is associated with the servers such as application, it's one component, however application is running on a network, you have service enablers, for example to authenticate, to do accounting, to do DNS resolution, so you need to look at all of these components of a service and be able to effectively provide visibility across all of them. Now, the other aspect of this visibility, as you mentioned, end-to-end, which is an excellent observation as well, because you're looking at the data center, which is still very strategic assets, your crown jewels are still going to be in the data center, some of the data will remain there, but now you are expanding to the edge, maybe colos, maybe microdata centers in the colos, then you move workloads, migrate them to public clouds, it can be IaaS, you have more SaaS providers that provide you with different services. So this aspect of end-to-end really evolves into geographically dispersed, very complex and highly scalable architecture. >> Yeah, we like to say that the cloud is not an architecture, not a strategy, for centralizing resources. Rather, it's a strategy for greater distributing resources, allowing data to be where it needs to be to perform the function, or where it gets captured, allowing the service to be able to go to the data, to be able to perform the work that needs to be conducted from a digital business standpoint. That suggests that even though a customer, let's call it the end user, and the end user experience, may get a richer set of capabilities, but the way by which that work is being performed gets increasingly complex, and partly, it sounds like, that it's complexity that has to be administered and monitored so that you don't increase the time required to understand the nature of a problem, understand the nature of the fix. Have I got that right? >> You got it absolutely right, and I would add to this that the complexity that you described is being further magnified by the fact that you lose control to some extent, as you mentioned before, right? >> Or because, let's put it this way, it becomes a contracting challenge as opposed to a command and control challenge. Now the CIO can't tell Mike, "Go fix it", the CIO has to get on the phone with a public cloud provider and say, our service level says, and that's a different type of interaction. >> Right, and usually the service provider would say, the problem is not on my side, it's on your side, so the traditional finger pointing in war rooms now, is being expanded across multiple service providers, and you need to be able to very effectively and quickly identify this is the root cause, this is why it's your fault, service provider, it's not our fault, please go and fix it. >> So let's dig into that if we can, Eric, this notion of having greater visibility so that you are in a better position to actually identify the characteristics of the problem, and where the responsibilities lie. How is that working? >> So, in the past, or when the digital transformation started it's initial rise, it wasn't. And what was happening is, as you both have alluded to a moment ago, I can no longer call Mike and Suzie downstairs, and say you know, voicemail is not working, things are just, not working. Well, you can go sic them on it and they go fix it. What's happening now is that data is leaving your data center, it may be going through something like a colo, which is aggregating the data, and then sending it on to your partner, that is providing these services. So what you have to have is a way to regain that visibility into those last mile segments, if you will, so that as you work with your partners, whether it's the colo or the in-software provider, that you can say look, I can see things from here, I can see things to there, and here's where it goes south, and this is the problem, help me fix it. And so, as you said a moment ago, you cannot let your mean time to resolution expand simply because you're engaging in these digital transformation activities. You need to remain at least as good as you did before, and hopefully better. >> Well, you have to be better, because your business is becoming more dependent on your digital business capabilities, increasingly it's becoming your business. So let me again dig a little more deeper technically into that. A lot of companies are attempting to essentially provide a summary view of that data, that's moving around a network, moving across these different centers and locations, edge, colo, et cetera, what is the right way to do it? What constitutes real truth when we talk about how these systems are going to work? >> So NETSCOUT believes, and I think most people wouldn't argue with us, that when you can actually see the packet data that goes across the network, you know what elements are talking to which ones, and you can see that, and you can build metrics, and you can build views upon that, that is very high fidelity data, and you absolutely know what's going on. We like to call it the single source of truth. So as things come from the deep part of the data center, whether it's a virtualized server farm, all the way through this core of the network, and your service enablers like Michael mentioned, all the through the colos, and out into an IAS or SaaS type of environment, if you're seeing what's actually being on the wire, and who's talking to whom, you know what's going on, and you can quickly triage and identify what the problem is so that you can solve it. >> Now is that something that increasingly architects or administrators are exploiting as they use these new classes of tools to gain that visibility into how the different services are working together? And also, is that becoming a feature of how SLAs and contracts are being written, so that we can short circuit the finger pointing with our service providers? >> Yeah, so there's kind of like you said, two parts that, the first is I think, a lot of the traditional IT operations folks, as you mentioned earlier, are learning new roles, so to some degree, it is new for them, and I don't know that everybody has started to make use of those tools yet, but that's part of what our story is to them, is that we can provide those tools for you, so that you can continue to isolate and solve these problems. And I'm sorry, what was the second part of your question? >> Well, the second part is, how does that translate into contracting? Does that knowledge about where things actually work inform a contracting process to reduce the amount of finger pointing, which by the way, is a major transaction cost and a major barrier to getting things done quickly. >> Absolutely, and so you since you have this high fidelity data at every step of the way, and you can see what's happening, you can prove to your partners where the problem lies. If I find it on my side of it, okay, no harm no foul, I'll go fix it and move on with my life. But with that data, with that high fidelity data, and being able to see all the transactions and all the applications, and all the communications that happens end-to-end, through the network between me and my partner, I can show them that they are outside of their SLA. And to your point, it should shorten the time between the finger pointing, because I have good data that says, this is the problem. You can't dispute that. And so, they're much more inclined to work with you in a hopefully, very good way, to fix the problem. >> So that brings us back to the CIO. And I want to close with you on this, Michael. That's got to make a CIO happier, who is today facing a lot of business change, and is trying to provide a lot, you said agility, I'll use the word an increasing array of business and strategy options based on digital technology. Ensuring that they have greater certainty in the nature of the services, the provider of the services, and in the service levels of the services, has got to be an essential feature of their decision making toolkit as they provide business with different ranges of options, right? >> Absolutely correct. In fact, the high fidelity data is so critical in order to accomplish this, right, so in order for the CIO to be able to demonstrate to the CEO and other key executives that his objectives are met, the KPIs for that are along the lines of your efficiency, your service delivery capabilities, and being able to monitor everything in real time. So, the high fidelity data, I just want to elaborate a little bit more on what it means, because that's the difference between having these key performance indicators that are relevant for the CIO, and relevant also for other key stakeholders, and having something that is best guess, and maybe it's going to help. So high fidelity data, the way that NETSCOUT defines it, has several components. First of all, because it's based on traffic, or packet data, or wire data, it means that we continuously monitor the data, continuously analyze it, and it's the single source of truth because there's consistency in terms of what data is being exchanged. So the more visibility you get into the data that's being exchanged between different workloads, the more intelligence you can glean from it. The other aspect is that it's really, we mentioned, the service level, and if you think of packet data, it's all layers two through seven, so you have the data link layer, you have the network, you have the transport, you have the session, you have application, you can holistically identify any application, and provide you with error codes and in context, say you know the log and latency and error codes give you the overall picture. So this all together constitutes very high fidelity data. And at the end of the day, if the CIO wants to accelerate the digital transformation with confidence, this is the kind of high fidelity data that you need in order to assure that your key performance indicators, as CIO, are being maintained. >> This is the as is truth. >> Exactly. >> All right, Michael Segal, Eric Smith, I want to thank you both for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you very much Peter, for having us. >> And thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (upbeat music)