(techno music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier at the Cube for a special presentation with Riverbed and the Cube called getting started with SD-WAN, with two CTOs, Hansang Bae CTO, and Frank Layonnet, Deputy CTO with Riverbed, thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, obviously you guys are the CTOs, chief technology officers, deputy and the chief here. What's going on under the hood? Because when you talk about the SD-WAN in action, really the number one thing comes in, it's networking, and everyone wants networking to go faster, and they want it automated. Now you're hearing about all this great programmatic stuff, what's happening? >> Yeah, I think, the difference between previous generation, which SDN, right? SDN was very hot for a while, didn't really go too far. The difference here is that we're solving tactical problems for the business, so that's very different than solving the problem for the IT folks, right? So, I'll give you an example. IP sec, turns out, kind of a pain to do. Very laborious, prone to errors, et cetera. Well, SD-WAN, as a first step takes care of that. It eliminates it completely. Out of the box, you have a secure transport. No thought involved. So that solves the IT problem, sure, but, step ahead of that, get ahead of that, you can now seamlessly service your business because the thorny problem of difficult IT goes away, right? So this is about frictionless IT, that allows your business to have a competitive edge. >> Frank, talk about the use cases involved in SD-WAN, because there's everything from I need bandwidth, better bandwidth, cost perspective. To full transformation of the organization. So networking is, you got to move the packets around, but at the same time it's strategic in that it's now an asset to the organization. >> Yes, definitely there multiple definitions out there for SD-WAN, and we must not be mistaken, it cannot be only about savings on bandwidth costs. This is something we have been doing for 10 years or more. So now SD-WAN is really connected to a business driver. This is digital transformation by the way, that is the first thing that is the source of everything we have been seeing, in terms of SD, including SD-WAN. So we have been seeing customers starting with saving on bandwidth costs, but then we discovered that there's more. There's definitely something that pertains to optimizing the way they are doing operations, agility, so the pressure from the business is coming there. But it's also about, according the fact that as a bunch of their applications are in the cloud, they cannot do networking just like they were doing before. So with this addition of the cloud, that is the first real movement toward SD-WAN. How do you connect your SAS applications back to your user, and things? so this is a real question and there's multiple options out there. There's also a bunch of challenges that need to be solved. So this is the first of those instances. >> Yeah and I think one of the good ways to kind of sum that up, is to say, you know, what if you could live in a world, as an IT guy, where when the business says, hey I need to roll out, and oh, by the way, give me 10 times the capacity, done, right? Push of a button, that's what automation brings to you. What if business says, by the way, Frank, I'm rolling it out in Australia, can we make sure we have enough bandwidth there, oh and by the way, I need it next week. Now for the first time with SD-WAN, infrastructure people can say, next week? Don't you want it tomorrow? 'Cause I'm ready to hit the button, right? So SD-WAN, is that revolutionary. It's not an incremental a better routing, easier this, it's a revolutionary way of thinking about how IT can make businesses be more competitive. >> The software piece is interesting, because you look at networking. There's an operational aspect of it, you mentioned the bandwidth. That's basic, you got to have basic needs. (laughing) >> [Frank] Of course. >> Got to move the packets around the network, you know, do all that stuff, check. You're getting at something different here, which is, I want to tune into the business speed. So the speed of the business really becomes the next table stakes, which is what the cloud's doing. >> [Hansang] That's right. >> So now, how does that change networking? Because we've seen with cloud, no perimeter, different kind of provisioning capabilities, automatic provisioning, now you have multi cloud. You guys can do that kind of multi cloud stuff right now. This is not obvious to many people. >> That's right. >> What's the magic behind it? >> See I guess, if we take SD-WAN as something that is an evolution that we are forced to go into, this can be the same part of some of the customers. Yes, okay, we need to move to SD-WAN, because we need automation. But if you flip that around, what you want to achieve is unleash the capacity of the business to innovate. So we have organization, interestingly enough, that completely took that into account, and are already finding the way they are organized. It's not something very common, but we have the first occurrence of customers that are interested to still connect, well their title is not networking head, but more like Dev Ops head. So this is the starting point of a lot of organization that want to fully embrace the full power of the cloud. >> That's a full wholesale change, you're talking about a new scenario, the third one, which is, I want to completely transform my business. But in the spirit of getting started with SD-WAN, I want to ask you guys a question. >> [Frank] Absolutely. >> See how you guys can come with this one. IT people come in two flavors, I'm freaking out, or I'm jumping for joy. Because that's really kind of what's happening here, you have Ops guys, hey lock down the network, you know, we're going to check all the boxes. Then you have other people who say, oh, we're liberated with Dev Ops, it's going to be freedom. Automatic provisioning. So, where's the balance, and describe your reaction to that, that phrase, freaking out, versus jumping for joy. >> I think I can answer this this way. So, I'm sure everybody can relate to this, is that every outage I've ever been involved in, and some, spectacularly big, has always been, the root cause has always been, we had a template, we had a standard, we just didn't have time to roll it out. Or, I had a template, but I made a mistake. Human latency, right? People are very very bad at doing mundane tasks at 2:00 a.m. When network changes happen, no surprise. So SD-WAN takes care of that drudgery, of the very important work, which is IT. So SD-WAN says, you know what, make your decisions, and go from whiteboard concept with your business, to implementation in less than a week. It can be shorter than that. But let's not bring too much shock to the system. So the whole idea of SD-WAN is, don't freak out about your job, because we're enabling the IT people to meet he business demand at their speed. >> So speed's a double edged sword, on one side, the fear of going too fast, and breaking stuff, or making something go down, also there's the other side of the coin, which is you can bring it back as fast. >> That's correct. >> Talk about that dynamic because I think that's interesting conversation. >> So I think the biggest difference is yes, so let's put it out there, right? Failure at the speed of automation, is fantastic, fantastically terrible. But at the same time, the big difference is that the recovery from that is automatic as well. Because in the world of SD-WAN, it's enable, disable, it's not about touching every single end device, to fix the problem that you might have caused. Because let's face it, today, if you roll out, and I know some of you are thinking, I have an automated way of pushing out a template. And that's great, that's a start. But to recover from that, means you have to touch every device, yet again. Where as with automation, from an SD-WAN perspective, it's all centralized. You push it from a central location, you withdraw it from a central location. So it's a different recovery-- >> On those outages you mentioned earlier, you've been involved in the past, where they've had a bit of human error, or a template issue, what was the recovery like? Probably just as bad, right? So the slowness is on both sides, right? >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, the biggest problem too is, and this is something that not too many SD-WAN vendors talk about, is visibility. If I had a dollar for every time there was an outage, and someone said "Who's impacted?" And it would be at least 45 minutes to an hour before anybody can say definitively, these groups of business, or this location is impacted. So we have the luxury of having a BU, who's sole purpose in life is to bring visibility from application user, and network level. So we're bringing that to bear, and marrying that with Software Defined win. So like Frank said, we don't stop at just making it easy for the IT folks, right? IP sec example that I gave you. What we're talking about is allowing the business to be just as agile, just as flexible, and including multicloud, what if you could, as an IT person, forget about, is it Azure? Amazon? Google? Soflare? Whatever cloud vendor you're talking about, what if that didn't matter, right? Because with the right SD-WAN philosophy, there is no difference between a branch, a laptop at a hotel, a datacenter, Azure, or Google, or Amazon. It's just a connectivity point from beginning to end, all you have are publishers of application, and subscribers of that application. Everything else goes behind it, don't get me wrong, it takes design, and like you said, packets have to go somewhere, but the complex design goes away with SD-WAN. >> So I, go ahead Frank. >> Yeah, so, I want to relate that to one of the use case that we have been seeing, which is isolation of some of the traffic, let's take the example of IOT, that we understand, I mean it's a recommendation that is everywhere, we want to isolate IOT, derive it from the rest of the traffic. How do you do that without SD-WAN? Okay, I put some DNS there, I put some VRF there. What do I do in the cloud? So there's really that notion of slows on which you provide some manual type of processes to implement that segmentation. Source VFR, and you defeat the purpose of segmentation. >> It's a bandaid, you're throwing pre existing stuff at a problem. >> And it's a complex thing to do, and we know that there will be errors, therefore holes, right? Suddenly defeat the purpose of your protection. So SD-WAN, especially in the context of steel connect, is allowing to have one single policy that is, you know, define wherever the workloads are, wherever the users or things are. So this is the kind of top level benefit that we can bring, and only SD-WAN can bring. >> I like that example, SD-WAN is growing up, and your use case of internet of things, IOT, is really spot on because that highlights the growing up, and that's happening very very fast. IOT is really becoming a tactical, strategic, board agenda item, and going down to the technical folks. Because IOT is now blending the physical world, and a lot of digital. >> Yeah. >> And so people are connecting, that's a network issue, put on the network, it's now an IOT device. You mentioned that's anything. But cloud also highlights this, 'cause now with compute, and analytics, the cloud really makes that connect well. So you guys have this multi cloud thing. Take me through that, because I'm a customer of yours, if I'm a CIO, or I'm running an IT department, you got my attention, 'cause I've heard everyone talk multi cloud all day long, I don't believe it. I don't think it could work, I've looked at latency between clouds, I got my office 365 and Azure, I run some stuff on Red Shift, I do some stuff with Google. Those apps are down beside me on those clouds. >> And to prove that point, just for kicks, 'cause it's easy, I connected every instance of Amazon in the world as part of my routing infrastructure. I had access, I could ping, bring up servers to every instance of Amazon, and by the way, I can do that with Azure as well. To me, there is no difference between a server running in a datacenter, running in Amazon, running in Azure, right? What that means, again from a tactical, so what what does it mean to me as a business person? Well, what if you can enforce your active directory log in services to Amazon? Because it's not Amazon Azure anymore, it's your VPC. The fact that it runs on a different cloud system, doesn't matter, because we automatically connect those two together. So as a business person, and as an infrastructure person, don't worry about what cloud it's in. Because we'll seamlessly connect it together, and the perfect example is Azure active directory service, being presented to Amazon. You can do that, because it's your VPC. Do with it as you will, and by the way, when you're done, turn it off. >> So this is interesting, so the sequence of operations here are relative to getting started with SD-WAN, is take care of the bandwidth costs, no problem, check. But it's the hybrid, it's the SAS applications, now when you get into multi cloud, you now take that through. So take me through the impact, what does it mean to the customer to have that multi cloud capability? What's the benefit? What's in if for them? >> So I think I'll start first, and then we'll go into some of the more used cases, is that the bigger challenge, which, by the way, it sounds awesome, is that infrastructure people tend to think of and solve problems from the tools that they know how to use today. SD-WAN is very different. So the first advice that I have, is stop thinking though the lens of the tools that you have today, right? And this is that whole Dev Ops, versus infrastructure argument that's raging these days, and the bottom line is it's either IT keep pace, or perish, right? And that sounds ominous, but guess what, the other side of that coin is, you get to join the party, you're no longer a call center, you're no longer, at worst case, a necessary evil, right? >> [John] So be open to new tooling? >> That's right, be open to new tooling. The power that the new tooling brings, right? This is something that DevOps folks have had and enjoyed, so why is it that infrastructure people are laggards in this? And I'll tell you why, and I had this conversation, because one of the application guys said, "You IT guys, man, I got 8,000 servers, what's the big deal?" And my point was, you have 8,000 servers for you app? I have two backbones for my company. That's it, so slow and steady wins the race, it's in our DNA. And SD-WAN says now you can have both. You can have that agility, but that stability, right? So when you have agility and stability, the cost savings automatically happen. >> I think that's the big deal, because again, a lot of my friends are networking guys, and a lot of dogma in networking, but it's for the right reasons. Networks can't go down. (laughing) When networks go down, you know what hits the fan. So take us through that scaling, 'cause agility and stability is really a good message. What does that mean, how does a customer do that? How do they get there? >> Yes, you have to put some trust onto vendors like us to take care of stability and just get the benefit of agility, which is that extra thing that you really can leverage to support a business. So I think that it's important to send a message there, that SD-WAN will not take over the job of anybody. It's just changing the way people will operate, the way people will think, and it's amazing to see some customers that I know for 10 years, 15 years. And yes, walls where CCIEs, you know, network specialists, and when I'm coming back to them with steel connect, I mean they are really evolved, just like we have evolved. (laughing) We know all together, that's it's about changing the overall, be if you're moving to Dev Ops, and discerning what's going on with the cloud. We are techies, so it's good stuff in fact, for everybody to understand that. And those customers that went through different steps of evolving, maturing that idea, they are really taking us into, use cases again, where it's really about, okay, now I've got a request for my business, which is to deploy that new work load, and by the way, on both sides that exist over there, but I need to add that to some of our sides. We tell, pop up stores, right? I want to do some digital marketing on pop up stores. Okay, what do I do? And I had a customer doing me a demo, we have a script provisioning back end, you know the blue in front in, and in a few clicks, provisioning connectivity. >> [John] Yeah. >> To that workload on the pop up store, right? With just an internet connection, this is amazing. >> IOT and all that stuff is great. IOT all these new paired ups is essentially networking. (laughing) I mean edge of the network, you just talked about provisioning. Think about how hard that was. That was a campus a couple years ago. >> That's right. >> That's an office. Remote office, the notion of a retail space that pops up, is just another remote edge point. So this is not new concepts, but the software makes it a difference. So, I think that's where I see the connection. So I'd ask you this question, when you walk around with steel connect, which we saw the demos on the last episode, really impressive. What are customers saying? I mean for folks that have never seen it before, what's their reaction, and for folks that work with you guys, what is their reaction for steel connect? >> I think I can give you some customer quotes, without mentioning their names. I had one customer who, after sitting through their presentation, said, "If this stuff works, we need to rethink our strategy." This is coming from a head of architecture, that reported to the CIO, right? Think about that statement and break it down. Yes there has to be trust, about it's a nascent field, new field, I get that. But when you truly embrace SD-WAN, not just from a cost perspective. That's a great catalyst, everybody wants that, because it's an feather in their cap. Once you go beyond that, and you start to think about the possibilities that SD-WAN, in our version of SD-WAN, which we call steel connect, can bring to you, it's a different conversation with a business, you're not talking about give me time. Imagine that pop up store, or you say, you know what, give me two weeks and I might have something for you. In this world of SnapChat, kids are changing their minds on a day by day basis, nevermind two weeks. >> It could delay the opening of the retail outlet, and all kinds of interesting business side effects. >> Absolutely, that's correct. And again, I keep going back to the business agility. It's high time that IT people keep up with the business, and in fact, surpass it using cloud of cloud for example. >> Hansang and Frank, we were talking before we came on the segment here, about video conferencing, and having kind of town hall meetings, and you know we were kind of joking, when something goes down in a business, you can see how fast something can move the mob, now that we're all connected on SnapChat, things go viral instantly. Like the United Airlines comment, we were talking about United Airlines, okay they have this big viral thing. Took them like three days to respond, next thing you know their brand suffered. I mean, imagine the impact of their business. They could have had a town hall meeting, let's take through that use case. Hey let's set up a network. We're going to have all these people dial in, and perusing it up, well that's going to take two weeks. Every day the stock is getting the hammer. I think they lost $1,000,000,000 in market cap in the first day. So there they need the provision of video network. Okay, take us through that, what would you guys do with SD-WAN? >> So, for me it's easy. With the right SD-WAN, I'll compare and contrast, okay? Today, you have to go and touch every edge device, and you have to change your quality of service. Because video, AF class, AF 41 for example, has a certain amount of quality of service that it can use. So you have to go and touch every device, every infrastructure device, at every location, to give it that bandwidth that's required, okay? So now, that takes maybe a week, maybe two weeks, depending on the size of your network. But that time, how much did they lose? $1,000,000,000 overnight? You can do the math, versus the new world of SD-WAN, where I say, you know what, between 2:00 p.m., and 4:00 p.m. eastern, video is going to have top quality of service marking. And then when I'm done, I'm going to turn it off. That's the actual difference between today's workflow, and the brave new world of SD-WAN. >> And by the way, video, just to point out, not in that one use case. Video is becoming the number one app for users, whether you want to accentuate it, in this case highlight it, or in some cases, not let everyone watch Game of Thrones Monday morning from their desk. Or those kinds of things are going on. You guys have that policy based capability. >> That's right. >> Yeah, so I'd like to pick up on the change management. Let's be honest in fact, us people in the networking space, we're a bit of laggards, when it comes to providing that capability. Because on the other aspects of IT, it's no brainer of course, we can do that. We can do that adaptation in a breeze. But what about the later, we're stuck into a solution, where yes, change management was something that was nightmare, and everybody talks about QS being a nightmare for so long, right? Now obviously we have steel connect with SD-WAN, we can fix that. >> My final question for you guys we we wrap up this segment is competition. For folks out there looking to get started and evaluate SD-WAN, because right now software define everything is happening. We're seeing it across the board, it's software and data. You guys from a networking angle, SD-WAN. How should your customers, and potential customers evaluate you, vis-a-vis the competition. Riverbed versus the competition. What should they look for, and how should they evaluate it for them? >> I'll give a couple of different quick books to successful proof of concept, if you will. It does start with that IP sect, that secure tunnel that can separate and differentiate traffic and quality of service. It does involve making sure that the right important applications get preferential treatment, and oh, by the way, move over to a different lane. Creating HOV lanes on demand is what SD-WAN is about, right? It can be time based, it can be user based. So it's not just a static configuration, it's very very fluid. As an HOV lane, think of it this way. It's an HOV lane, from your house, to your work, because you have an important job that day, right? SD-WAN says you can do that, I can get quality of service down to a user level, with a few click of a button. So, from a competitive landscape, IP sec is important. But differentiating application and user by name, not IP addresses, in the world of SAS, IP addresses doesn't mean anything, is also important. And then the other one is, the cloud, right? Think of the cloud as your datacenter. So whatever you do, in the world of SD-WAN, should be just as easy at branch, datacenter, cloud, and cloud of clouds, right? And if it encompasses all of that, then you've found the right SD-WAN vendor. >> I think that's exactly right. We need to help customers to understand that it's not about replicating what we have been doing with the new cool technology, that is slightly more automated. This is about rethinking the way you are connecting that work. And this is something we've been hearing from analysts that I've been personally seeing over the past couple years. It's now down to not only networking people, but also the cloud people, but also the security people to sit together and look at all the use cases around the one, and obviously this has evolved to our SAS, to our yes, to a lot of things that pertains to automation. So this is really the advice that I would give to customers, don't fall into the trap of comparing SD-WAN with win, it has to be something more. It has to include the cloud. >> And I'll give you the secret sauce that I've been dying to get out there. It was the biggest differentiator for us. We removed the pain of latency for applications. We've been doing it for over 10 years. So, yes bandwidth is plentiful. I have a gigabyte service at home, it's wonderful. But it still doesn't take away the latency when I have to interact with folks in Sydney, or in Singapore, and we take that pain of latency away, have been doing that for over 10 years. It's a perfect marriage made in heaven. As the network grows to include cloud, where theoretically it shouldn't matter if your instance is in Ireland, if it's in Singapore, if it's in Korea, if it's in Germany, or San Jose, or in Virginia. But because of latency, it matters. What if you could have a vendor that makes that pain go away as well? And that's our secret sauce. >> What's interesting is that the world's changing, so the network used to dictate what applications could do, now applications are dictating what the networks are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Which means it has to be programmable. >> That's right. >> And that is interesting because that flips it upside down. >> That's correct, and that's that business agility that we've been harping on this whole time. >> Talking about marriage, let me add a third to the problem, we have also visibility, right in the portfolio, and it's amazingly important. Because you know, in one click, I can deploy policy. I mean, one click I can kill. (laughing) Through my wrongly configured policy, a bunch of our closed, so it's super important to be in a position to provide new tools, new ways of verifying what's going on. I have an intent, I want the network to be like this. I need to verify immediately whether or not I'm going the right direction, right? (laughing) To just like, you drive, you have your super powerful wheel that brings you everywhere. You need to know where all that will go there. >> And that's that trust but verify motto, right? I trust that it's doing the right thing, but I want to be able to verify it. And with SD-WAN, it's build in. >> Riverbend you guys have been doing some great work, I was joking with my friend over the weekend, we were just talking about SD-WAN in general, just as we do on the weekends. >> [Hansang] Who doesn't? >> I said, I mean it's interesting, the world is a win now, the network is global. That's essentially a wide area network, it's called the internet. >> That's right. >> And you treat it a win, and there it is, end points, you have remotes. >> That's right, and sun computer, unfortunately was right, they were just decades early, right? The computer, or the network is the computer. And with the SD-WAN and cloud movement, it really can be anywhere. >> I got a funny anecdote, at the table interview, and I interviewed Scott McNealy, and he was like, "I just should have called the cloud." >> [Hansang] There you go, that's all you needed. >> Guys thanks so much for spending the time here inside the Cube studios, I'm John Furrier with Riverbed, on getting started with SD-WAN. Thanks for watching. (techno music)