>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf19, brought to you by Splunk. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here inside for Splunk.conf, their 10th-year conference. We've been here seven years. I'm John Furrier, the host. Our next guest is Sherrie Caltagirone, founder and executive director of the Global Emancipation Network, a cutting-edge company and organization connecting different groups together to fight that battle combating human trafficking with the power of data analytics. We're in a digital world. Sherrie, thanks for coming in. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So love your mission. This is really close to my heart in terms of what you're doing because with digital technologies, there's a unification theme here at Splunk, unifying data sets, you hear on the keynotes. You guys got a shout-out on the keynote, congratulations. >> Sherrie: We did, thank you. >> So unifying data can help fight cybersecurity, fight the bad guys, but also there's other areas where unification comes in. This is what you're doing. Take a minute to explain the Global Emancipation Network. >> Yeah, thank you. So what we do is we are a data analytics and intelligence nonprofit, dedicated to countering all forms of human trafficking, whether it's labor trafficking, sex trafficking, or any of the sub types, men, women, and children all over the world. So when you think about that, what that really means is that we interact with thousands of stakeholders across law enforcement, governments, nonprofits, academia, and then private sector as well. And all of those essentially act as data silos for human trafficking data. And when you think about that as trafficking as a data problem or you tackle it as a data problem, what that really means is that you have to have a technology and data-led solution in order to solve the problem. So that's really our mission here is to bring together all of those stakeholders, give them easy access to tools that can help improve their counter posture. >> And where are you guys based and how big is the organization? What's the status? Give a quick plug for where you guys are at and what the current focus is. >> Yeah, perfect, so I am based in San Luis Obispo, California. We have just started a brand new trafficking investigations hub out at Cal Poly there. They're a fantastic organization whose motto is learn by doing, and so we are taking the trafficking problem and the tangential other issues, so like we mentioned, cyber crime, wildlife trafficking, drugs trafficking, all of this sort of has a criminal convergence around it and applying technology, and particularly Splunk, to that. >> Yeah, and I just want to make a note 'cause I think it's important to mention. Cal Poly's doing some cutting-edge work. Alison Robinson, Bill Britton, who runs the program over there, they got a great organization. They're doing a lot of data-oriented from media analysis, data, big focus there. Cal Poly quite a big organization. >> They are, and they're doing some wonderful things. AWS just started an innovation hub called the DX Hub there that we are a part of, really trying to tackle these really meaty problems here that are very data-centric and technology-centric. And Cal Poly's the best place to do that. >> Great, let's get into some of the details. One of the things around the news, obviously seeing Mark Zuckerberg doing the tour, Capitol Hill, DC, Georgetown, free speech, data. Facebook has been kind of blamed for breaking democracy. At the same time, it's a platform. They don't consider themselves as an editorial outlet. My personal opinion, they are, but they hide behind that platform. So bad things have happened, good things can happen. So you're seeing technology kind of being pigeonholed as bad. Tech for bad, there's also a tech for good. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, publicly said technology's neutral. We humans can shape it. So you guys are looking at it from shaping it for good. How are you doing it? What are some of the things that are going on technically from a business standpoint that is shaping and unifying the data? >> Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely certain that technology has facilitated human trafficking and other ills throughout the world. It's a way that people bring their product, in this case, sadly, human beings, to the market to reach buyers, right? And technology absolutely facilitates that. But, as you mentioned, we can use that against them. So actually here at Conf we are bringing together for a first time the partnership that we did with Splunk for Good, Accenture, and Global Emancipation Network to help automatically classify and score risky businesses, content, ads, and individuals there to help not only with mitigating risk and liability for the private sector, whether it's social media giants or if it's transportation, hospitality, you name it, but also help ease the burden of content moderators. And that's the other side of it. So when you live in this space day in and day out, you really exact a mental toll here. It's really damaging to the individual who sits and reads this material and views photos over and over again. So using technology is a way to automate some of those investigations, and the identification of that content could be helpful in a variety of ways. >> In a way, it's a whole other adversary formula to try to identify. One of the things that Splunk, as we've been here at Splunk Conference, they've been about data from day one. A lot of data and then grew from there, and they have this platform. It's a data problem, and so one of the things that we're seeing here is diverse data, getting at more data makes AI smarter, makes things smarter. But that's hard. Diverse data might be in different data sets or silos, different groups. Sharing data's important, so getting that diverse data, how difficult is it for you guys? Because the bad guys can hide. They're hiding in from Craigslist to social platforms. You name it, they're everywhere. How do you get the data? What's the cutting-edge ingestion? Where are the shadows? Where are the blind spots? How do you guys look at that? Because it's only getting bigger. >> Absolutely, so we do it through a variety of different ways. We absolutely see gathering and aggregating and machining data the most central thing to what we do at Global Emancipation Network. So we have a coalition, really, of organizations that we host their scrapers and crawlers on and we run it through our ingestion pipeline. And we are partnered with Microsoft and AWS to store that data, but everything goes through Splunk as well. So what is that data, really? It's data on the open web, it's on the deep web. We have partners as well who look at the dark web, too, so Recorded Future, who's here at Conf, DeepL as well. So there's lots of different things on that. Now, honestly, the data that's available on the internet is easy for us to get to. It's easy enough to create a scraper and crawler, to even create an authenticated scraper behind a paywall, right? The harder thing is those privately held data sets that are in all of those silos that are in a million different data formats with all kinds of different fields and whatnot. So that is where it's a little bit more of a manual lift. We're always looking at new technologies to machine PDFs and that sort of thing as well. >> One of the things that I love about this business we're on, the wave we're on, we're in a digital media business, is that we're in pursuit of the truth. Trust, truth is a big part of what we do. We talk to people, get the data. You guys are doing something really compelling. You're classifying evil. Okay, this is a topic of your talk track here. Classifying evil, combating human trafficking with the power of data analytics. This is actually super important. Could you share why, for people that aren't following inside the ropes of this problem, why is it such a big problem to classify evil? Why isn't it so easy to do? What's the big story? What should people know about this challenge? >> Yeah, well, human trafficking is actually the second-most profitable crime in the world. It's the fastest-growing crime. So our best estimates are that there's somewhere between 20 million and 45 million people currently enslaved around the world. That's a population the size of Spain. That's nothing that an individual, or even a small army of investigators can handle. And when you think about the content that each of those produce or the traffickers are producing in order to advertise the services of those, it's way beyond the ability of any one organization or even, like I said, an army of them, to manage. And so what we need to do then is to be able to find the signal in the noise here. And there is a lot of noise. Even if you're looking at sex trafficking, particularly, there's consensual sex work or there's other things that are a little bit more in that arena, but we want to find that that is actually engaging in human trafficking. The talk that you mentioned that we're doing is actually a fantastic use case. This is what we did with Splunk for Good and Accenture. We were actually looking at doing a deep dive into the illicit massage industry in the US, and there are likely over 10,000 illicit massage businesses in the US. And those businesses, massages and spas, that are actually just a front for being a brothel, essentially. And it generates $2 billion a year. We're talking about a major industry here, and in that is a very large component of human trafficking. There's a very clear pipeline between Korea, China, down to New York and then being placed there. So what we ended up needing to do then, and again, we were going across data silos here, looking at state-owned data, whether it was license applications, arrest filings, legal cases, that sort of thing, down into the textual advertisements, so doing NLP work with weighted lexicons and really assigning a risk score to individual massage businesses to massage therapist business owners and then, again, to that content. So looking, again, how can we create a classifier to identify evil? >> It's interesting, I think about when you're talking about this is a business. This is a business model, this business continuity. There's a supply chain. This is a bona fide, underground, or overt business process. >> Yeah, absolutely, and you're right on that too that it is actually overt because at this point, traffickers actually operate with impunity for the most part. So actually framing it that way, as a market economy, whether it's shadowy and a little bit more in the black market or completely out in the open, it really helps us frame our identification, how we can manage disruptions, who need to be the stakeholders at the table for us in order to have a wider impact rather than just whack-a-mole. >> I was just talking with Sonia, one of our producers, around inclusiveness and this is so obviously a human passion issue. Why don't we just solve it? I mean, why doesn't someone like the elite class or world organization, just Davos, and people just say they're staring at this problem. Why don't they just say, "Hey, this is evil. "Let's just get rid of it." What's the-- >> Well, we're working on it, John, but the good thing is, and you're absolutely right, that there are a number of organizations who are actually working on it. So not just us, there's some other amazing nonprofits. But the tech sector's actually starting to come to the table as well, whether it's Splunk, it's Microsoft, it's AWS, it's Intel, IBM, Accenture. People are really waking up to how damaging this actually is, the impact that it has on GDP, the way that we're particularly needing to protect vulnerable populations, LGBTQ youth, children in foster care, indigenous populations, refugees, conflict zones. So you're absolutely right. I think, given the right tools and technology, and the awareness that needs to happen on the global stage, we will be able to significantly shrink this problem. >> It's classic arbitrage. If I'm a bad guy, you take advantage of the systematic problems of what's in place, so the current situation. Sounds like siloed groups somewhat funded, not mega-funded. This group over here, disconnect between communications. So you guys are, from what I could tell, pulling everyone together to kind of create a control plane of data to share information to kind of get a more holistic view of everything. >> Yeah, that's exactly it. Trying to do it at scale, at that. So I mentioned that at first we were looking at the illicit massage sector. We're moving over to the social media to look again at the recruitment side and content. And the financial sector is really the common thread that runs through all of it. So being able to identify, taking it back to a general use case here from cyber security, just indicators as well, indicators of compromise, but in our case, these are just words and lexicons, dollar values, things like that, down to behavioral analytics and patterns of behavior, whether people are moving, operating as call centers, network-like behavior, things that are really indicative of trafficking. And making sure that all of those silos understand that, are sharing the data they can, that's not overly sensitive, and making sure that we work together. >> Sherrie, you mentioned AWS. Teresa Carlson, I know she's super passionate about this. She's a leader. Cal Poly, we mentioned that. Splunk, you mentioned, how is Splunk involved? Are they the core technology behind this? Are they powering the-- >> They are, yeah, Splunk was actually with us from day one. We sat at a meeting, actually, at Microsoft and we were really just white boarding. What does this look like? How can we bring Splunk to bear on this problem? And so Splunk for Good, we're part of their pledge, the $10 million pledge over 10 years, and it's been amazing. So after we ingest all of our data, no matter what the data source is, whatever it looks like, and we deal with the ugliest and most unstructured data ever, and Splunk is really the only tool that we looked at that was able to deal with that. So everything goes through Splunk. From there, we're doing a series of external API calls that can really help us enrich that data, add correlations, whether it's spatial data, network analysis, cryptocurrency analysis, public records look-ups, a variety of things. But Splunk is at the heart. >> So I got to ask you, honestly, as this new architecture comes into play for attacking this big problem that you guys are doing, as someone who's not involved in that area, I get wow, spooked out by that. I'm like, "Wow, this is really bad." How can people help? What can people do either in their daily lives, whether it's how they handle their data, observations, donations, involvement? How do people get involved? What do you guys see as some areas that could be collaborating with? What do you guys need? How do people get involved? >> Yeah, one that's big for me is I would love to be able to sit in an interview like this, or go about my daily life, and know that what I am wearing or the things that I'm interacting with, my phone, my computer, weren't built from the hands of slave labor. And at this point, I really can't. So one thing that everybody can do is demand of the people that they are purchasing from that they're doing so in a socially viable and responsible way. So looking at supply chain management as well, and auditing specifically for human trafficking. We have sort of the certified, fair-trade certified organic seals. We need something like that for human trafficking. And that's something that we, the people, can demand. >> I think you're on the right track with that. I see a big business model wave where consumer purchasing power can be shifted to people who make the investments in those areas. So I think it's a big opportunity. It's kind of a new e-commerce, data-driven, social-impact-oriented economy. >> Yep, and you can see more and more, investment firms are becoming more interested in making socially responsible investments. And we just heard Splunk announce their $100 million social innovation fund as well. And I'm sure that human trafficking is going to be part of that awareness. >> Well, I'll tell you one of the things that's inspirational to me personally is that you're starting to see power and money come into helping these causes. My friend, Scott Tierney, just started a venture capital firm called Valo Ventures in Palo Alto. And they're for-profit, social impact investors. So they see a business model shift where people are getting behind these new things. I think your work is awesome, thank you. >> Yeah, thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the shout-out on the keynote. Appreciate it. The Global Emancipation Network, check them out. They're in San Luis Obispo, California. Get involved. This is theCUBE with bringing you the signal from the noise here at .conf. I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Global Cloud and Block Chain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE live coverage in Toronto for the Block Chain-Cloud Convergence Show. This is the Global Cloud Block Chain Summit part of the Futurist Event that's going on the next two days after this. Our next guest is Kesem Frank, AION co-founder and CEO of MavenNet. Doing a lot of work in the enterprise and also block chain space around the infrastructure, making it really interoperable. Of course, Jenna Pilgrim, co-founder and COO of a new opportunity called Network Effects. Welcome to the cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, John. >> You guys were just on a panel, The Real World Applications of Block Chain. IBM was on it, which, been doing a lot of work there. This is real world, low hanging fruit, block chain, everyone's pretty excited about. A lot of people get it, and some don't. Some are learning. So you've got the believers, the I want to believe, and then the nonbelievers. Let's talk about the I want to believe and the believers in block chain. Some real world applications going on. As it's evolving, so there's evolution of the standards, technology, but people are putting it to use. What's going on in the sector around some of the real world cases you guys talked about? >> I think we're seeing a lot of collaboration as far as real world applications go, because I think people are sort of starting to understand that if a distributed network is going to work or is going to be secure, it needs diversity and it needs mass scale. If lots of different parties can work together, then they can actually form a community that's really working. As far as real world applications, there's some really interesting one as far as supply chain. Kathryn Harrison at IBM talked about their pilot about shipping, bringing together the global supply chain of distribution. There's a bunch of interesting ones about food providence and bringing together different parties just to make sure that people know what they're eating and that they are able to keep themselves safe, so I think those are two definitely interesting ones. >> Kesem, block chain, supply chain, value chains, these are kind of key words that mean something together. >> Right. >> Making things work in a new way, making things more efficient, seems to be a trend. You're kind of in that world. Is it efficient? (laughing) How's the tech working? What are some of the core threshold issues that people have to get over? >> So you know, John, that's exactly the question to ask. A lot of folks out there are looking at block chain and the promise it represents, and the one big question that keeps echoing over and over is when is this going mainstream? When are we going to see something, a domain, a use case, that is actually natively on a block chain? I think that, essentially, we kind of owe it to ourselves and to everyone that cares about this stuff to ask what's working today, August 2018 and what is still kind of pending? I co-founded a project called AION. For us, interoperability is really one of the key facets that you need to be able to solve for to make block chains real. And again, here's the 60 second argument. If you're going to grow all these solutions that are centric around the use case, they solve for different pinpoints and different stakeholders care about them. They don't really create the cohesive kind of ecosystem until they can all talk to each other, and then you have to ask yourself is the original hypothesis where it's going to be one main net, one chain that's going to rule them all, and everybody gets to play on it and everybody deploys their Dapps on stuff like Fabric or R3 or Ethereum, or whatever it might be. That is absolutely not the way we're seeing enterprise actually shaping into this domain of block chain. What we're seeing is big consortiums that already have value, tangible today, out of doing stuff on chain, and the biggest thing to solve is how do I take, to Jenna's point around supply chain or food providence, whatever it is, how do I actually open it so I can now start writing insurance events, payment events, banking, underwriting, auditing, regulation? There's this gigantic ecosystem that needs to be enabled, and again we are actively saying it's not going to be by an organic model where you and I do everything on top of a single solution. There will be a multitude of solutions, and what we need to solve for is how do we convert them from disparate islands that don't talk to each other into a cohesive ecosystem? >> This is a great point. We were talking on our intro, and we talked last night on our panel, about standards. If you look at all the major inflection points where wealth was created and value was created around innovation and entrepreneurship and industry inflection points, there's always some sort of standard thing that happened. >> Right. >> Whether it's the OSI model during the early days of the internet to certain protocols that made things happen with the internet. Here, it's interesting because if you have one chain and rule the world, it's got to be up and running. >> Yeah. >> It's not. There's no one thing yet, so I see that trend the cloud has, private cloud, public cloud, but public cloud was first but people had data centers. >> Right. >> Both not compatible, now the trend is multi-cloud. You can almost connect the dots of saying multi-chain >> Right. >> Might be a big trend. >> Right. >> This is kind of what you're teasing out here. >> That's exactly what we're about, and I think it's very interesting, the point you're making about dissimilarities between the two domains. We are in a cloud convention, and to me it means two things. One, we absolutely see the mainstream people, the mainstream players in industry, starting to take this seriously. It used to be a completely disparate world where you guys are a bunch of crazies with your Bitcoin and ether and what not. They're definitely taking this seriously now. The second thing, when you think of cloud as a model, how cloud evolved, we used to have these conversations around are you crazy, you're telling me that my data is not going to be on premise? >> It's not secure, now it's the most secure. >> Oh my God! It's in the cloud, what's a cloud? (laughing) You think of the progression model that was applicable back then, right? 10 years, 15 years back, where we started privately and we tell them OK, we'll take this side step of hybrid and then fully public. Took them a while, took them almost 20 years to get their heads around it. >> There's no one trajectory. What's interesting about block chain and crypto with token economics, there's no one trend you can map an analog to, you can't say this is going to be like this trend of the past. It's almost developing it's own kind of trajectory. A lot of organic community involvement. Different tech involvement. >> Totally. >> Different engineering mindsets coming together. You're seeing an engineering-led culture big time going on. That's propelling it up to the conversations of let's lay down the pipes, let's start running apps, but I'll do it within a two year window (laughing). >> I think the big thing to understand about that is yes, you need a whole host of developer talent to build distributed systems, but at the end of the day those systems still have to be used by people. They still have to be used by society, you still have to understand how to talk to your chief executives about what's happening within your company or what your tech teams are doing. There's a growing need for marketers, for PR people, for people who speak, I don't want to say plain English, but people who understand how-- >> Translate it to the real world. >> Yeah, they need to translate it, and how to bridge the gap between legacy systems and how do you take what you were doing before and transform it to a distributed ledger system? How do you do that without just paving the cow path? >> It's interesting, it's almost intoxicating, 'cause you got two elements that get people excited. You got the token economics, which gets people to go, "Whoa," the economics and the liquidity of money and/or value creation capture equations completely changing some of the business model stuff, which could be translated to software and Dapps and software general stuff or SaaS, et cetera. Then you got the plumbing or the networking side of it where things like latency, interoperability, absolutely matter, so with all that going on in real time, it's kind of happening at 30,000 feet and trying to change the airplane engine out. People are failing, and so there's some false promises, there's also false hopes that have not been achieved, so this clouds up the real big picture which is this is an innovative environment. We're seeing that trend. But when you get to the end of the day, what are people working on, to me, is the tell sign. Kesem, what's your project, talk about AION and the work you're doing, specifically give some examples of some of the things that you're doing in the trenches. >> Sure. >> What are you trying to solve, what are some examples you're running into and how does that relate to how things might evolve going forward? >> Sure, so there is a multitude of different problems that we work on but if you want to stick just to the fundamentals? Let's take one gigantic issue that everyone's kind of tackling from different perspectives, let's talk about scale. Scale is, especially in block chains especially challenging just because of how the technology works. How decentralized can you get before you're faced with gigantic latencies and before transaction cost are kind of through the roof? When you think about it, that is all a result of how we kind of contemplate these early stage networks. It was always the one network that is going to scale to infinity. Absolutely not the way it's going to work out. So from my perspective, again, sticking to this one issue, if you could actually give me a decentralized rail that maintains consensus throughout two networks, I can now actually have two trusted kind of go-tos instead of always putting the full brunt of the throughput on one single network. For us, that's kind of a no brainer application to interoperability. If you could actually give me all these trusted networks that work in tandem, I could now start splicing throughputs across many different parallel kind of rails. Not to similar than how we can solve for super computing. We understood there is a limit on how fast can a single CPU go and we started going wide. >> That's an interesting point, I want to just double click on that for a second because if you think about it, why would I have multiple rails and multiple systems? Maybe the use cases are different for them. >> Correct. >> You don't want to have to pick one cloud or one chain to rule them all because it's not optimized. We saw that with monolithic systems and cloud is all about levels of granularity and micro service and micro everything, right? >> Correct. >> And I would also say that gets into a security issue as well, right? You're talking about multiple layers but you also will have multiple layers of permission. You'll have multiple layers of how much information someone can see and what I think is emerging, if data is the new oil, then what's emerging is for the first time we're now able to trust data that we do not own. For corporations who say, "I don't know to market to you "if I don't know everything about you." But at the end of the day, they want to be able to leverage your data but they don't need to secure it and I think that cybersecurity issue is a huge, huge thing that's definitely coming. >> I want to get both of your thoughts on this, because we were talking about this last night. We were riffing on the notion that with cloud compute and data really drove scale. So Amazon is a great example and their value now is things like Kinesis and Aurora, some of their fastest growing services. You got SageMaker, probably will be announced at re:Invent coming up as the fastest growing service, right now it's Aurora. All data concepts. So the dataization really made cloud, great. >> True. >> Okay what's the analog for crypto and block chain? Tokenization is an interesting concept. There's almost an extension of cloud where you're saying, hey, with tokenization, the tokenization phase, how do you explain that to a common person? You say, is token going to be the token and the money aspect of and the economics the killer app? How's it transverse the infrastructures, plural? >> Yeah, or is the wallet going to be the browser? Or how are all of these things happening? >> How do you make sense of this? What's your reaction to that trend? >> So I actually get excited when I think about what token, on the most profound level, actually means. When you kind of think of where value happens in the context of these gigantic enterprises, right? You think of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, any of them, and you kind of think of what the product is, it's all about the data and it's all about how do you convince people to give up data so they can monetize on it. And then you have two distinct, like literally gigantic groups of stakeholders at play. You have the users, that essentially get something free, right? I get to post on Facebook or I get to write an e-mail on Gmail. Then you have the stakeholders that actually extract all that value from my activities. A token, I think most profoundly represents, how do we actually get to a unified group where the user himself is the stakeholder that gets to extract the data? And again, the proposition is pretty straightforward. The more you use a network and the more the network becomes valuable and grows, the more value the token that drives at it. >> So it changes the value capture equation? >> Correct, different model altogether. >> The value creators get to capture the value and obviously network effects plays a big part in this? >> Yes. >> Which is your wheelhouse. (laughing) >> Yeah, definitely. I think it really comes down to core principles. Now you're able to really get down, to what Kesem was talking about, about when you're designing a token or if you're designing an incentive mechanism, you're really going down to the sort of deep game theory of why people do specific things and if we can financially incentivize people to do good rather than punish them or fine them for doing bad then we can actually create value for everyone. We're designing a new economy that now has the ability to propel itself in a fair and prosperous way, if done correctly, obviously that's the disclaimer afterwards, but. >> I love what you're saying there because if you look at collective intelligence a lot of the AI concepts came around from collective intelligence, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics all came around using data to create value. I always talk about fake news because we have a cloud of media business that's kind of tokenized now but fake news it two things, it's payload, fake news, the fake content and then the infrastructure dynamics that they arbitraged, with network effects. They targeted specific people, fake payload, but the distribution was a network effect. Again, this was the perverse incentive that no one was monitoring, there was no- >> Well and I think in that case, yes there is news that is inherently false information but then there's also a whole spectrum of trueness, if you want to call it that so now we have this technology that allows us to overlay on top of that and say, "Well what is the providence of my information?" And with different layers of block chain systems you're actually able to prove the providence of your information without exposing the user's privacy and without exposing the whole supply chain of the media because there's like media buyers, go through all kinds of hands. >> And we believe the answer to fake news, frankly, is data access, collective intelligence and something like a block chain where you have incentive systems to filter out the fake news. >> Totally. >> Exactly. >> Reputation systems, these things are not new concepts. >> It's all about stake at the end of the day, right? It's how do you keep a stakeholder accountable for their action? You need backing so I think we're definitely on the same page. >> I love, I could talk about fake news all day because we think we can solve that with our CUBEcoin token coming out soon. I want to shift gears and talk about some of the examples we've seen with cloud. >> Sure. >> And try to map that to some navigation for people in how to get through the block chain token world. One of the key things about the cloud was something they called shadow IT. Shadow IT was people who said, hey, you know what? I could just put my credit card down and move this non core thing out in this cloud and prove to my boss, show them, not pitch 'em on the Power Point deck, to say look it, I just did this for that cost in this timeframe, and that started around 2009/2010 timeframe, the early digerati or the clouderati kind of did that but around 2012 it became, wow, this shadow IT is actually R and D practice. >> Mm-hmm. >> Right. >> You started to see that now, so the question that we see for people evaluating in the enterprise is how do you judge what's a good project? Certainly people are kicking the tires and doing a little bit, I won't call it shadow IT, but they're taking on some projects as you were talking about on the panel. How should they, the enterprises in general, the large companies, start thinking about how to enable a shadow IT-like dynamic and how should they evaluate the kind of projects? I think that's an area people just don't know what to look for. Your thoughts? >> I want to add a premise to that, because I think that's absolutely the right question to ask. We also need to add the why. Why should we, as people that do native crypto currency, even care about enterprises? A lot of people kind of theorized when Bitcoin was created to say it was anti institutional is an understatement, right? Aren't we meant to kill enterprise? The thing is, I don't think it's going to be a big bang. I don't think it's going be we wake up and nobody's using banking anymore or nobody's using the traditional healthcare or government and you know whatever insurance policies. We care about block chain in the context of enterprise because we think block chain is a fundamentally better model of doing things. It kind of does away with the black box where I need to be in business, I need to blindly trust you and it introduces a much more transparent and democratic model of doing things. We absolutely want to introduce and make block chain mainstream because that's important for us. When you think of how we do it, to your question, AION is all about interoperability, right? We create a solution that helps scale and helps different networks, decentralized networks, communicate to each other. What we also do with MavenNet, the company I run, is essentially make that enterprise friendly. It's extremely hard to do adoption and implementation within an enterprise, they're very immune to change. >> Antibodies as they say. >> Oh. >> The antibodies to innovation, they kill innovation. >> Totally, so going back to your original question, it all starts with a P and L. If somebody is going to authorize, you know, an actual production system in enterprise for block chain, it needs to create a tangible value, a tangible return, quickly and that's the key. The model that actually scales is you start by flushing out inefficiency plate. You show the enterprise how you could actually achieve, I don't know 20%/30%, that's the order of magnitude that they care about, efficiency by moving some part of your value chain on top of a block chain. >> It has to have an order of magnitude difference or so. I mean cloud was a great example, too, it changes the operating model. >> Yeah. >> They achieve what they wanted to achieve faster and more efficiently and operated it differently. >> Correct. >> And people were starting at it like a three headed monster like what is this thing, right? The cloud thing. And throwing all kinds of fud out there, but ultimately at the end of the day, it's a new operating model for the same thing that they're trying to do with the old stuff. >> Mm-hmm. >> I mean, it's almost that simple. >> Yeah, I think in some cases you need to really, in my previous life at the Block Chain Research Institute, we encouraged a lot of our clients to really take a step back and say, well will I actually, A, will I have this problem in eight years or seven years or 20 years or 50 years, if we're really fundamentally building a new financial system or a new way of doing things that is fundamentally different? Are we building it on old technology? We need to make sure that, and that's why you've seen banks were the first in the door to say, "Yeah, payments, that sounds great, that sounds great." But the real applications that we're seeing from banks are in loyalty, they're in AMLKYC, they're in the sort of fringe operations. Something like payments is going to take a really long time to push through because of those legacy systems because payments is the fundamentals of what banks do. >> This is an interesting point, I want to get your thoughts to end the segment because I think one of the things that we've certainly seen with cloud that over the generational shifts that have happened, the timeframe for innovation is getting shorter and shorter, so timeframe is critical so if the communities are fumbling around hitting that time to value, it seems to be trending to faster and we don't want to hear slower because these systems are inadequate, they're antiquated. >> Mm-hmm. >> These are the systems that are disrupted so the timing of, whether it's standards, or interoperability or business models, operating models, they got to be faster. >> Yeah. >> That's the table stakes. >> I think it all comes down to collaborative governance. >> People have to figure out block chain faster. >> Yeah. >> What's holding us back? Or what's accelerating us? What's the key for the community at large from the engineering community and the business community to make it go faster? Your thoughts? >> Right, so I think we're still searching for the next killer app. If Bitcoin is the reason we're all sitting here today and I profoundly believe that. >> Yeah. >> What is the next thing that drives change on a global scale? That's kind of what we're trying, collectively as an industry, to figure out. Sure, many kind of roadblocks on the way. Some of them educational, perceptional, regulation, technology, but the next big wave that's going to accelerate us to the next ten years of block chain is that next killer app. Organizations such as myself, Jenna, that's our day job, we wake up and that's what we do. >> I mean I've always said, and Dr. Wong, who's the founder of Alibaba Cloud agreed with me, I've been saying that the TCPIP protocol, that standard really enabled a lot of interoperability and created lots of diverse value up the stacks of the OSI model, Open Systems Interconnect, seven layer model, actually never got standardized. It's kind of stopped at TCPIP and that was good, everyone snapped at the line, that created massive value. >> But that's a collaborative governance thing. That's people coming together and saying that these are the standards that we wish to adhere to. >> We need the moment right now. >> Yeah, so you see organizations like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance coming out with a prospective list of standards that they think the community should adhere here. You know you have the ERC20 standard, you have all these different organizations, the World Economic Forum is playing a role in that and the UN is playing a role, especially when it comes to identity and those kind of really big, societal issues but I think that it comes down to that everyone plays a role that I'm doing my best, I think it's going to be somewhere in the realm of data so that's where I've chosen to sort of make my course. >> I think this is a good conversation to have, and I think we could continue it. I mean, I read on Medium, everyone's reading these fat protocols, thin protocols but at the end of the day what does that matter if there's no like scale? >> Yeah. >> You can have all the fat protocols you want, more of a land grab I would say but there's certainly models but is that subordinate or is that the cart before the horse? This is the conversation I think is in the hallways. >> Totally agree, totally agreed. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Breaking down real world applications of block chain we're at the Global Cloud and Block Chain Summit. It's an inaugural event and think it's going to be the kind of format we're going to see more of, cloud and block chain coming together. Collision course or is it going to come in nicely and land together and work together? We'll see, of course theCUBE's covering it. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more all day coverage. Part of the Futurist Conference coming up the next two days. We're in Toronto, we'll be back with more after this short break. (theCUBE theme music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back. Here on theCUBE, we continue our coverage of .conf2017, Splunk's get together here with some 7,000 plus attendees, 65 countries, we're right on the showfloor. A lot of buzz happening down here and it's all good. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We are live, as I said, in our nation's capital, and we're joined by a guest who represents her organization that is a member of the Splunk4Good program. We're going to explain that in just a little bit, but Sherrie Caltagirone is the founder and executive director of the Global Emancipation Network, and Sherry, thanks for being with us. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much for having me on, John. >> So your organization has to do with countering and combating global trafficking, human trafficking. >> That's right. >> We think about sex trafficking, labor trafficking, but you're a participant in the Splunk4Good program, which is their ten year pledge to support organizations such as yours to the tune of up to $100 million over that ten years to all kinds of organizations. So first off, let's just talk about that process, how you got involved, and then we want to get into how you're actually using this data that you're mining right now for your work. So first off, how'd you get involved with Splunk? >> Absolutely. It was really organic in that it's a really small community. There are a lot of people in the tech space who I found really want to use their skills for good, and they're very happy to make connections between people. We had a mutual friend actually introduce me to Monzy Merza, who's the head of security here at Splunk, and he said, "I'm really passionate about trafficking, I want to help "fight trafficking, let me connect you with Corey Marshall "at Splunk4Good." The rest is really history, and I have to tell you, yes, they have pledged up to $100 million to help, and in products and services, but what's more is they really individually care about our projects and that they are helping me build things, I call them up all the time and say, "Hey let's brainstorm an idea, "let's solve a problem, "let's figure out how we can do this together, and they really are, they're part of my family. They're part of GEN and Global Emancipation Network. >> That's outstanding. The size of the problem struck me today at the keynote when we talked about, first off, the various forms of trafficking that are going on; you said up to two dozen different subsets of trafficking, and then the size and the scale of 25 to 40-some million people around the globe are suffering. >> Yeah. >> Because of trafficking conditions. That puts it all in a really different perspective. >> You're right. Those weren't even numbers that we can really fathom what that means, can we? We don't know what 20 million looks like, and you're right, there's such a wide discrepancy between the numbers. 20 million, 46 million, maybe somewhere in between, and that is exactly part of the problem that we have is that there is no reliable data. Everyone silos their individual parts of the data that they have for trafficking, all the the different stakeholders. That's government, NGOs, law enforcement, academia, it's all kinds. It runs the gamut, really, and so it's really difficult to figure out exactly what the truth is. There's no reliable, repeatable way to count trafficking, so right now it's mostly anecdotal. It's NGOs reporting up to governments that say, "We've impacted this many victims," or, "We've encountered so-and-so who said that the "trafficking ring that they escaped from had 20 other people "in it," things like that, so it's really just an estimate, and it's the best that we have right now, but with a datalet approach, hopefully we'll get closer to a real accurate number. >> So talk more about the problem and the root of the problem, how it's manifesting itself, and we'll get into sort of what we can do about it. >> Yeah. It's really interesting in that a lot of the things that cause poverty are the same things that cause trafficking. It really is, you know, people become very vulnerable if they don't have a solid source of income or employment, things like that, so they are more willing to do whatever's necessary in order to do that, so it's easy to be lured into a situation where you can be exploited, for example, the refugee crisis right now that's happening across Europe and the Middle East is a major player for trafficking. It's a situation completely ripe for this, so people who are refugees who perhaps are willing to be smuggled out of the country, illegally, of course, but then at that point they are in the mercy and the hands of the people who smuggled them and it's very easy for them to become trafficked. Things like poverty, other ways that you're marginalized, the LGBTQ community is particularly vulnerable, homeless population, a lot of the same issues that you see in other problems come up, creates a situation of vulnerability to be exploited, and that's all trafficking really is: the exploitation of one individual through force, coercion, fraud, position of authority, to benefit another person. >> These individuals are essentially what, enslaved? >> Yeah. It's modern day slavery. There's lots of different forms, as you mentioned. There's labor trafficking, and that's several different forms; it can be that you're in a brick factory, or maybe you're forced into a fishing boat for years and years. Usually they take away your passport if you are from another country. There's usually some threats. They know where your family lives. If you go tell anyone or you run away, they're going to kill your family, those sorts of things. It is, it's modern day slavery, but on a much, much bigger scale, so it's no longer legal, but it still happens. >> How does data help solve the problem? You, as an executive director, what kind of data, when you set the North Star for the organization from a data perspective, what did that look like, and how is it coming into play? >> Well, one of the benefits that we have as an organization that's countering trafficking is that we are able to turn the tables on traffickers. They are using the internet in much the way that other private enterprises are. They know that that's how they move their product, which in this case is sadly human beings. They advertise for victims online. They recruit people online. They're using social media apps and things like Facebook and Kick and Whatsapp and whatnot. Then they are advertising openly for the people that they have recruited into trafficking, and then they are trying to sell their services, so for example, everyone knows about Backpage. There's hundreds of websites like that. It runs the gamut. They're recruiting people through false job advertisements, so we find where those sites are through lots of human intelligence and we're talking to lots of people all the time, and we gather those, and we try to look for patterns to identify who are the victims, who are the traffickers, what can we do about it? The data, to get back to your original question, is really what is going to inform policy to have a real change. >> So you can, in terms of I guess the forensics that you're doing, or whatever you're doing with that data, you're looking at not only the websites, but also the communications that are being spawned by those sites and looking to where those networks are branching off to? >> Yeah. That's one of the things that we really like to try to do. Instead of getting a low-level person, we like to try to build up an entire network so we can take down an entire ring instead of just the low fish. We do, we extract all the data from the website that we can to pull out names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, things like that, and then begin to make correlations; where else have we seen those phone numbers and those addresses on these other websites that we're collecting from, or did this person make a mistake, which we love to exploit mistakes with traffickers, and are they using the same user handle on their personal Flickr page, so then we can begin to get an attribution. >> John: That happens? >> Absolutely. >> It does, yeah. >> Sherrie: Without giving away all my secrets, exactly. >> Yeah, I don't to, don't give away the store, here. How much, then, are you looking internationally as opposed to domestically, then? >> We collect right now from 22 different countries, I think 77 individual cities, so a lot of these websites are usually very jurisdictionally specific, so, you know, like Craigslist; you go into Washington state and click on Seattle, something like that. We harvest from the main trafficking points that we can. We're collecting in six different languages right now. A lot of the data that we have right now is from the U.S. because that's the easier way to start is the low-hanging fish. >> What does your partner ecosystem look like? It comprises law enforcement, local agencies, federal agencies, presumably, NGOs. Will you describe that? >> Yeah. We do, we partner with attorneys general, we partner with law enforcement, those are the sort of operational partners we look for when we have built out intelligence. Who do we give it to now, because data is useless unless we do something with it, right? So we we build out these target packages and intelligence and give it to people who can do something with it, so those are really easy people to do something with. >> How hard is that, because you've got different jurisdictions and different policies, and it's got to be like herding cats to get guys working with you. >> It is, and it's actually something that they're begging for, and so, it's a good tool that they can use to deconflict with each other, 'cause they are running different trafficking-related operations all the time, and jurisdictions, they overlap in many cases, especially when you're talking about moving people, and they're going from one state to another state, so you have several jurisdictions and you need to deconflict your programs. >> Okay, so they're very receptive to you guys coming to them with they data. >> They are; they really want help, and they're strapped for resources. These are for the most part, not technically savvy people, and this is one of the good things about our nonprofit is that it is a staff of people who are very tech-savvy and who are very patient in explaining it and making it easy and usable and consumable by our customers. >> So if I'm an NGO out there, I'm a non-profit out there, and I'm very interested in having this kind of service, what would you say to them about what they can pursue, what kind of relationship you have with Splunk and the value they're providing, and what your experience has been so far. >> It's been wonderful. I've been over at the Splunk4Good booth all day helping out and it's been wonderful to see not only just the non-profits who have come up and said, "Hey, I run a church, "I'm trying to start a homeless shelter for drug-addicted "individuals, how can you help me," and it's wonderful when you start to see the light bulbs go off between the non-profit sector and the tech sector, between the philanthropic organizations like Splunk4Good, the non-profits, and then, we can't forget the third major important part here, which is, those are the tech volunteers, these are the people who are here at the conference and who are Splunk employees and whatnot and teaching them that they can use their skills for good in the non-profit sector. >> Has cryptocurrency, where people can conduct anonymous transactions, made your job a lot more difficult? >> No, it hasn't, and there's been a lot of research that has gone into block chain analysis, so for example, Backpage, all the adds are purchased with Bitcoin, and so there's been a wonderful amount of research then, trying to time the post to when the Bitcoin was purchased, and when the transactions happen, so they've done that, and it's really successful. There are a couple of other companies who do just that, like Chainalysis, that we partner with. >> You can use data to deanonymize? >> That's correct. It's not as anonymous as people think it is. >> Love it. >> Yeah, exactly. We love to exploit those little things like that. A lot of the websites, they put their wallets out there, and then we use that. >> Dave: You're like reverse hackers. >> That's right. It's interesting that you say that, because a lot of our volunteers actually are, they're hacker hunters. They're threat and intel analysts and whatnot, and so, they've learned that they can apply the exact same methods and techniques into our field, so it's brilliant to see the ways in which they do that. >> Dave: That's a judo move on the bad guys. >> Exactly. How long does this go on for you? Is this a year-to-year that you renew, or is it a multi-year commitment, how does that work? >> It's a year-to-year that we renew our pledge, but they're in it for the long haul with us, so they know that they're not getting rid of me and nor do they want me to, which is wonderful. It's so good, because they help, they sit at the table with me, always brainstorming, so it's year-to-year technically, but I know that we're in it together for the long haul. >> How about fundraising? A big part of your job is, you know. >> Of course it is. >> Fundraising. You spend a lot of time there. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, absolutely. Some of our goals right now, for example, is we're really looking to hire a full-time developer, we want a full-time intelligence analyst, so we're always looking to raise donations, so you could donate on our website. >> John: Which is? >> Which is globalemancipation.ngo. Globalemancipation.ngo. We're also always looking for people who are willing to help donate their time and their skills and whatnot. We have a couple of fundraising goals right now. We're always looking for that. We receive a lot of product donations from companies all over the world, mostly from the tech sector. We're really blessed in that we aren't spending a lot of money on that, but we do need to hire a couple of people so that's our next big goal. >> I should have asked you this off the top. Among your titles, executive director and founder, what was the founder part? What motivated you to get involved in this, because it's, I mean, there are a lot of opportunities to do non-profit work, but this one found you, or you found it. >> That's right. It's a happy circumstance. I've always done anti-human trafficking, since my college days, actually. I started volunteering, or I started to intern at the Protection Project at Johns Hopkins University, which was a legislative-based program, so it was really fantastic, traveling the world, helping countries draft legislation on trafficking, but I really wanted to get closer and begin to measure my impact, so that's when I started thinking about data anyways, to be able to put our thumb, is what we're doing. Working. How are we going to be able to measure success and what does that look like? Then I started volunteering for a rescue operations organization; the sort of knock down the doors, go rescue people group, and so, I really liked having the closer impact and being able to feel like hey, I can do something about this problem that I know is terrible and that's why it spread. A lot of the people I worked with, including my husband, come from the cyberthreat intelligence world, so I feel like those ideas and values have been steeped in me, slowly and surely, over the last decade, so that just ages myself a little bit maybe, but yes, so those ideas have been percolating over time, so it just kind of happened that way. >> Well, you want to feel young, hang around with us. (laughing) I should speak for myself, John, I'm sorry. >> No, no, you're right on, believe me. I was nodding my head right there with you. >> Can you comment on the media coverage? Is it adequate in your view? Does there need to be more? >> On trafficking itself? You know, it's really good that it's starting to come into the forefront a lot more. I'm hearing about it. Five years ago, most of the time, if I told people that there are still people in slavery, it didn't end with the Civil War, they would stand at me slackjawed. There have been a few big media pushes. There's been some films, like Taken, Liam Neeson's film, so that's always the image I use, and that's just one type of trafficking, but I'm hearing more and more. Ashton Kutcher runs a foundation called Thorn that's really fantastic and they do a similar mission to what I do. He has been able to raise the spotlight a lot. Currently there's a debate on the floor of the Senate right now, too, talking about section 230 of the CDA, which is sort of centered around the Backpage debate anyway. Where do we draw the line between the freedom of speech on the internet, with ESPs in particular, but being able to still catch bad guys exactly. The Backpage sort of founder idea. It's really hot and present in the news right now. I would love to see the media start to ask questions, drill down into the data, to be able to ask and answer those real questions, so we're hoping that Global Emancipation Network will do that for the media and for policy makers around the world. >> Well it is extraordinary work being done by an extraordinary person. It's a privilege to have you on with us, here on theCUBE. We thank you, not only for the time, but for the work you're doing, and good luck with that. >> Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it. >> You bet. That's the Global Emancipation Network. Globalemancipation.ngo right? Fundraising, always helpful. Back with more here on theCUBE in Washington D.C., right after this. (electronic beats)

foreign welcome back to thecube's coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here at Moscone West we're with about seven to ten thousand folks here so really good attendance at this first event since 2019 and the First with the new name Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jeff seraki the senior director of product management at Lumen as our next guest Jeff great to have you thank you for having me welcome so looked at the website I always love to see what taglines are and and lumen's website says welcome to the platform for amazing things talk to the audience a little bit about Lumen it's Mission Vision value prop would love to so much like a lot of the Enterprises that are out there today in the market lumens in the process of transforming we're transforming to a technology company from our Network routes but we also have roots in the I.T infrastructure business so we're bringing those together and creating that platform for amazing things uh we believe that our purpose is if you further human progress through technology and how we do that is we're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution so moving in to the digital age where everything is it's all about data it's about real-time use of that data you machine learning artificial intelligence autonomous Cars Smart cities so the key tenet that we have around the fourth Industrial Revolution is data you need to acquire it and once you acquire it you need to analyze it then you need to act upon it because when you think about it data is just growing and growing and growing from the phones in your pocket to the devices that are sitting in front of us it's not going to stop and information that data is critical to driving business value and outcomes for customers so um so with that the I totally lost my train of thought sorry um uh the ability to to leverage that is critical um you know driving driving the revenue from that so for example like machine learning you can't have machine learning without data to feed the machine so they can start learning so they can look at pictures like oh look this is a picture of a dog this is a picture of a kangaroo so that's what our platform enables and that's what we're building we're building it brand new sitting on top of the Lumen networking capabilities of Global Network one of the largest IP backbone providers so we're super excited about what we have so these days every company has to be a data company to be competitive to you know well even to survive talk a little bit about enabling lumens customers to become data companies while enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution those two seem to be hand in hand yes so with the services that we provide particularly with our partnership with VMware we provide private cloud services that we can deploy on the customer premises or so whether it's a corporate office manufacturing facility a you know logistical facility so we can provide compute there or we can provide it in one of our plus 60 Edge data centers that are located in plus 60 metros so you don't have to put equipment on premises that's all connected by the Lumen Network Dynamic networking capabilities that connect from a customer Prem to Edge data center third party data center all the way into the public Cloud so we can stitch all of that together so I know you mentioned that you know you're you're you know based on your history you're moving further up the value chain with your customers but I'm still fascinated by kind of the history of lumen and when you when you refer to this Lumen Network um tell us a little more about that because that that's kind of a secret sauce ingredient to what you're doing yes so roots and Telecom roots and fiber and we have one of the largest fiber networks in the world and with that comes not only breath but also capillarity going to the markets we have over a hundred and eighty thousand fiber fed Enterprise buildings so with that imagine if your compute's there or if it's in a one of our Edge data centers how quickly you can transmit information from that Prem to the compute all the way into the cloud to acquire analyze and act on that data so that's really kind of the secret sauce we have that as you mentioned is that is that fiber backbone so I'm going to use the word capillarity at least once a day for the next week that's one of my favorite words awesome awesome word in it because and it actually it's evocative of exactly what I know you're what you're referencing but so you you guys are experts in latency bandwidth throughput those underpinnings of making sure that you can get data where it needs to be you can communicate between between environments um you've got that you've got that down so that's a very very strong Foundation to build off of is I guess the point that I wanted to see if I was correct definitely understanding and um just with that capability it really it comes down to outside the data is the user experience and with application performance you know one of the levers you can pull to drive application performance is is network but also location so you can put more bandwidth at it you can take put it on a network with less hops that's one of the advantages of our large backbone or you move the compo compute closer to the point of digital interaction which is what we're doing with our Edge platform so whether it's an edge data center on-prem yeah one thing one thing at the cube that we like to do is we we dive into those things that sometimes people think are inane and banal because we know how important they are we have a whole series on the question of does Hardware matter and so so we understand that you're delivering higher value to your customers but we also want to acknowledge just how important it is for you to have that Foundation yes underneath yeah and we're I mean the customers that in the marketplace they're expecting more and more services up this stack they don't want to have to worry about speeds and feeds well the way we're looking at it is the network has compute endpoints on it and everything has compute customers want to run their applications they don't want to worry about everything underneath it so that's why we're moving up so we want to be able to create that platform you worry about your applications you worry about development and execution of your applications and we'll take care of everything else talk a little bit about the VMware partnership I see Lumen Edge private Cloud on VCF talk a little bit about that how you guys are working together and some of the value of what's in it for me as a customer okay we've been working with for VMware for decades they're one of our best partners and our Flagship private Cloud product is based upon the cloud Foundation and it's a tried and true platform that the market understands and they have confidence in so it's something that they can relate to and they already have experience in so they're not trying to learn something new like trying to go out and find resources that can manage kubernetes like that's probably one of the hottest jobs out there probably took the wrong career path but anyways it's it's new it's emerging whereas VMware people know it there's a lot of people that know it so why spend time as an Enterprise retooling and learning and going to a different platform so with that VMware brings that foundation and the security of that that cohesive ecosystem that comes with VCF so we can provide that dedicated solution to our customers that they know and they Trust trust is critical right I mean it's it's table Stakes for businesses and their vendors and suppliers you know here we are at the VMware explore event that called uh the center of the multi-cloud universe which just sounds like a Marvel movie to me haven't seen any superheroes yet but there's got to be somebody around here in a costume in any event talk about how Lumen and VMware are enabling customers to navigate the the multi-cloud world that they're in by default and really turn it into a strategic advantage uh sure it's tied to the network um as much as I'm trying to say we opsificate it but it's um network is the critical part to it because you do have to physically connect things and the cloud is their computer somewhere so there is a physical behind everything but with the connectivity that we have and the partnership with VMware and the ability to take that platform and either from on-prem Edge data center third party data center or we can also provide that service with uh vmc and AWS we can provide it in the cloud so you have a ubiquitous platform that looks and feels the same no matter where it is and then that's critical to our customers again that the switching costs of learning it's it's a great product VMware is a great partnership to help bring that all together so what is a delighted customer sound like you're interacting with a delighted customer they're not gonna they're not going to pick up the phone and tell you you know what I love your network what what are they going to be what are they going to tell you they're happy about a delighty customer wouldn't talk about our infrastructure at all our virtual machines work our applications work our software Engineers they can develop against it our costs are optimized that's what they're going to care about if they start talking about oh our virtual machines or servers and that means there's probably something wrong so we need to make sure that platform that we're providing as a service and managing works so it's really if your application if you want to talk to me about your application that's what's top of mind for you we're doing our job now you share that love with the folks in your organization responsible for making sure that that infrastructure works right yes you let them know it's like look no no one is no one is touting what you do but it really still is important it is very you want to make sure keep those folks happy yes very important talk a little bit Jeff about how your customer conversations have evolved over the last couple of years as we saw you know two and a half years ago businesses in every industry scrambling to go digital have you seen priorities shift up the c-suite stock over to the board in terms of the infrastructure and the network that powers these organizations yeah I mean over the past couple years with the proliferation of public cloud you know the edicts of got to go to the cloud we got to go Cloud go to the go to the cloud so everything goes to the cloud it's great it's good for a lot of applications but not for all applications and the customer conversations were having a lot of it are okay what what comes back because with Cloud cream and costs it just yeah if you're looking at a permanent VM basis you know public Cloud works but when you have an entire ecosystem of virtual machines and applications to support entire Enterprise that cost can get out of hand pretty quickly are you saying that we we yeah we hear the term repatriation yes used are you saying a fair fair amount of that yes we're seeing that then the other part that we're seeing is getting out of the data center business that's expensive especially if an Enterprise has their own like that's you're talking about 10 million dollars per megawatt just of capital cost there so and then if they're in a third party you still have physical space and power you have servers there you have to assume someone's optimizing those servers and even if you have a hypervisor sitting on top of it that's a lot of work that's a lot of resources and human capital that our private Cloud solution with VMware takes away so that they can again they can worry about their applications providing business value providing customer experience versus is there anything on this server or not does somebody need this virtual machine what are all these public Cloud spend items we have how's this out of control it allows them to focus so that's kind of how things have have evolved and changed over the years one of the things that VMware talked about this morning in terms of the journey the cloud journey is going from cloud chaos which is where a lot of businesses are now to Cloud smart how does Lumen facilitate that transition of a business from cloud chaos to Cloud smart what is a cloud smart strategy from lumen's lens look like first of all you have to have a strategy as an Enterprise you'd be surprised how many of those that are out there that they don't know what to do and part of not knowing what to do is do we even have the right people looking at this and so what Lumen what we bring is that consultative capability to start breaking down some of those issues so maybe they do have a hybrid Cloud strategy okay have you implemented it no why not we don't have enough people okay those are resources we can bring in because not only you provide network and infrastructure but we also have managed surface capabilities managed Services capabilities we can sit on top of that we have Cloud migration practices we have centers of excellence around sap and other services so let us help dissect your problem let's take a let's look at the landscape you have out there find out where everything's buried and dig it up and then we figure out okay how do we move from one place the other you don't just lift and shift and so that those are the other services that Lumen brings in and that's how we help them and our private Cloud product we have it sitting on our Edge right in those 60 metros they can spin up a private Cloud instance tomorrow and they can start moving virtual machines from their data center to that cloud as a staging point to either keep it there you know move it to another place or move it into the public Cloud if that's where the application needs to live I'm curious about lumen's go to market strategy customers have a finite number of strategic seats at the table when it comes time to planning things out like what you just were referencing you know what what do we do next uh what's lumen's path to a seat at that table are you are you generally seeking to directly engage separately with that end user customer or are you going in partnering with others what does that look like in the real world in the real world it's Partners working together no one single entity can provide everything we have to work together and with our infrastructure layer we want to find the right partners that can help provide vertical specific Solutions that then you know they can be Hardware Partners they can be software Partners but then we can collectively go talk to the market talk to our customers about what we can help them with and then with our managed Services capabilities that's how we can kind of glue it all together so that's the direction we're going in so be very focused we're focused on manufacturing you're focused on retail because we see the largest opportunities there that's where we have a strong customer base strong customer relationships and that's how we're doing it we don't want to have an infrastructure conversation we want to outcome and application conversation that's what every customer is talking about it's all about outcomes is there Jeff a favorite customer story in manufacturing or retail that you think really articulates the value of what Lumen and VMware are delivering together yeah it's a yeah we kind of use this one a lot but it's it's uh it's a really good one um and we've seen um uh clones of this and and other opportunities manufacturing smart manufacturing you need to have the equipment that takes that information again that data from all the iot devices analyze it operate your manufacturing facility because most of it's all automated now so you can run that facility at optimal production with that compute you don't necessarily want that compute you know a thousand miles away you want it as close as possible particularly if you look at what if there's a fiber cut your network goes down okay then your factory goes down that's millions of dollars so with that compute there we allow that smart manufacturing capabilities and that's running on Lumen private cloud based upon VMware on vcloud foundation and it's working great and it's it's an opportunity for us to continue to expand I've seen similar use cases in logistics it's yeah I mean it's phenomenal what we can do when you're in conversations with prospects what's the why what's the pitch that you give them about why they should be working with Lumen to help them really maximize the value of their Edge Solutions it's really the resources we bring to bear like you know we we keep talking a lot about Network and uh trying to get away from the sniper that's my cousin the network is is key to the value proposition but it's not what people look at first but it's those other resources the ability to to manage I.T infrastructure which have been doing for decades a lot of people don't know that but we've been doing this a very long time and then with those areas of expertise managed Services it's providing that all together and with lumen's history the Partnerships we have I mean we have a lot of Partnerships so we have the ability to bring all these resources to provide the best solution for the customer and we like to use the term best execution venue so each application has an optimal place to live and we'll help help customers find that out and it's really I mean it's that simple we just need to sit down and have a conversation we can figure out where we can help you and we can get started as soon as the customer is ready so obviously some some changes coming up for VMware in the next few months or so what are you excited about as you continue this long-standing partnership and evolving it forward I'm most excited about us working together even more because we have not only do we have our private Cloud products uh we're leveraging them for kubernetes but also our sassy product we're partnered with VMware on that so we're really tight at the hip with these Cutting Edge Products that we're taking to Market to help customers solve those problems that we were just talking about so I'm just looking forward us coming together more and just getting out there and helping people threatening of the partnership excellent Jeff thank you for joining Dave and me on the program talking about what's going on with Lumen how you're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution enabling customers to really become data companies we appreciate your time on your insights thank you for Jeff saraki and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022. you're watching thecube the leader in Live tech coverage [Music]

(bright music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE Studio here in Palo Alto. We're here for our next segment, The Future of Networking. We're going to experience the future of networking through a demo of SD-WAN in action with Riverbed. I'm here with Josh Dobies, the vice president of product marketing, and Vivek Ganti, senior technical marketing engineer. We're going to give a demo of SteelConnect in action. Guys, thanks for joining me on this segment. Let's get into what are we going to show here, showing SD-WAN in action. This is experiencing the future of networking. >> Thanks, John. So what's exciting about this next wave of networking is just how much you can do with minimal effort in a short amount of time. So in this segment, we're actually going to show a typical transformation of a company that's going from a traditional, 100% on-premises world into something that's going to be going into the cloud. And so we're going to kind of basically go in timelapse fashion through those phases that a company will go through to bring the internet closer to their business. >> Great, Vivek, you're going to show a demo, set up the demo, what is the state? It's a real demo, is it a canned demo, what's going on under the hood? Tell us through what's going to happen. >> It's an absolutely real demo. Everything you'll see in today's demo is going to be real, the real appliances, the links you'll see are going to be real. The traffic is going to be real. And it's going to be a fun demo. >> Well the future of networking, and experiencing it is going to be exciting. Let's get through in the demo. I'll just say, as someone who's looking at all the complexity out there, people want to be agile. There's so much complexity with IoT and AI and all this network connections, people want simplicity. >> Right. >> So you can show simplicity and ease of use and value, I'm all interested. >> That's exactly it. Step one is we have to get out of the world of managing boxes. And we have to get into a software-defined world that's based on policies. So one of the first things that a company needs to do to start realizing these benefits of efficiency is to get away from the provisioning work that's involved in bringing up a new site. So that's the first thing that Vivek's going to show right now. >> John: Vivek, jump into it, show us the demo. >> Absolutely, so what you're looking at right now is the web console of SteelConnect manager. This Riverbed's SD-WAN solution. You're looking at a bunch of sites for a company called Global Retail, which is spread all over the world. What I'm going to do now is bring up a new site, really zero touch provisioning in Dallas, sitting here in Palo Alto. So let's get started. I'm going to jump right into network design and look at sites. I'll click here on add sites and really just enter a few physical location details for my site in Dallas. And the moment I click here on submit, not only is a pointer being created on the map for me, but there's a lot of automation and orchestration happening in the backend. What I mean by that is that there's a default uplink created for my Dallas site, and there's also a VLAN created for my site in Dallas. Of course I can go and add more uplinks and VLANS for my site, but then a lot of this heavy lifting in terms of creating these is automatically done for me by SteelConnect. But right now it's just a pointer on the map. It's not a real site. We don't have an appliance. But that's the beauty of it, John. What SteelConnect lets me do is it gives me the flexibility and the freedom to deploy my entire site from ground up, my entire network from ground up, before I deploy the first piece of hardware. The way I'm able to do that is with this concept called shadow appliance, which is really a cardboard cutout of what will be once I have the hardware appliance. So I'm going to click here on add appliances. I'm going to say create shadow appliance. >> So shadow appliance, the customer knows the appliance, they might have the serial number. >> Yeah. >> But it's not connected, it's not even there yet. >> No, it's not even there yet. >> They're doing all the heavy lifting, preparing for it to drop in. >> Yeah, think of it as just designing it or drawing it on white paper, except you get to see what your network's going to look like before you deploy anything. So I'm going to drop, let's say an SDI-130 gateway, add my site in Dallas, which I just created, and click here on submit. And that's the beauty of this, that now with this shadow appliance, I can click on this and really configure everything, right down to the very port level. And once I do have the hardware, which I ship to someone and have someone plug it in. >> So now you're configured. Now the appliance gets shipped there, someone, it could be anybody, could be a non-employee, just says, instructions: plug it in and put this ethernet cable in. >> Yeah, and sitting here in Palo Alto, I'm entering my appliance serial number. Click here on submit, and now that the appliance is connected to the internet, it knows to contact core services in the cloud, download its configuration, it knows what organization it belongs to, and it comes online in a matter of seconds, really. You'll see that it's already online as I was talking to you. >> John: Let's look at that, hold on. Dallas, right there, online, okay. >> Vivek: Yeah, and when it says pending, it means that it's actually downloading its current configuration. It's going to be up to date in less than a minute. And once it does that, when I look at the dashboard, this checkmark will be green, and it's going to start forming all those IPSec VPN tunnels, there you go. It's going to now start forming all those IPSec VPN tunnels to all my other existing sites, automatically forming so that I don't have to do any of the heavy lifting. >> John: So it does a self-discovery of the network. It just went red there, real quick. >> Josh: That's okay, this is where it's going to start creating the VPN tunnels. >> Vivek: Right, it's basically associating all those, it's negotiating all the security associations with all my other appliances. >> So no one's involved? No humans involved, this is the machine, get plugged in, downloads the code, then goes out and says where do I got to connect to my other networks. >> Yeah, the power of this is what you're not doing, right? So you could do all this by hand. And this is the way that legacy networks are configured, if you're still, you know, hardware-based approach. You have to go in and really think hard about the IP addresses, the subnets for each individual box, if you're going to create that full mesh connectivity, you're going to have to do that at an exponential level every time you deploy a new piece of hardware. So with this approach, with the design first, you don't have to do any staging. And when you deploy, the connectivity is going to happen, you know, for you automatically. >> John: Let's take a look at the site, see if it turned green. >> Vivek: Yeah, it's right now, if I click on it, you'll see that my appliance is online, but right now all the lines are red because it's still in the process of creating those IPSec VPN tunnels. But you'll see that in the next couple of minutes or so, all these lights will turn green, and what that means is now I have a single unified fabric of my entire network. But while we're waiting on that, let's actually move ahead and do something even cooler. Let's say our company called Global Network, Global Retail, wants to transition some of its applications to the cloud, because as we know, John, a lot of companies want to do that. For a few pennies on the dollar, you can make a lot of things somebody else's problem. So we've worked really hard with AWS and Microsoft to make that integration really work well. What I mean by that is when I click here on network design and AWS, I have a cross-account access going between my SteelConnect manager and AWS Marketplace so that I don't ever have to log back into the AWS Marketplace again. Once I do that, I can see all of my VPCs across all of my regions so that with a single click, and that's what I'm going to do here, I'm going to say connect to all my subnets in Frankfurt, I can choose to deploy a gateway of instance of my choice in the Frankfurt site. So what I'm going to do now- >> John: So you're essentially telling Frankfurt, connect to my Amazon. >> Vivek: Yes. >> John: And I'm going to set up some cloud stuff for you to work with. >> Vivek: So you already have your VPC infrastructure or your VNet infrastructure on AWS or Azure. What I'm doing is I'm providing optimized, automated connectivity for you. So I can choose to deploy- [John] All with just one click of the button. >> Vivek: All with one click of the button. So you see that I can choose an EC2 instance of my choice for the gateway. I'm going to leave it to t2.medium, and then SteelHead, because, WAN optimization because the moment we start migrating huge data sets to the cloud in Frankfurt or, say, Ireland in Azure, latency becomes a real issue. So we want to be sure that we're also optimizing the traffic end to end. I'm going to leave redundancy to on so that there's high availability, and I'll leave AWS routing to auto, and I'll talk about that in just a bit. So when I click here on subnet, what's happening is SteelConnect is logging into my AWS account. It's looking at all my VPCs, it knows what subnets it has to connect to, it's going to plop a gateway appliance as well as a WAN optimization appliance, do all the plumbing between those appliances, and make sure that all traffic is routed through the SteelHeads for WAN optimization, and it creates all those downloads for me automatically. And the beauty of this solution, again, is that not only does it provide automated connectivity for me between, say, different regions of AWS but also between AWS and Azure. We've suddenly become the cloud brokers of the world. We can provide automated, optimized connectivity between AWS and Azure. So let me show that to you also. >> John: Yeah, show me the Azure integration. >> Vivek: So I'm going to search for maybe subnets in Europe, Ireland, I'm going to connect to that. The workflow is exactly the same. Once I do connect, it gives me the option to deploy an instance of my gateway and my SteelHead. So I'm going to select that and then click on submit. So now when I go back to my dashboard, you'll see that, oh by the way, my Dallas site is now online. And when I click on it, you'll see all my tunnels have also come online. >> John: Beautiful. >> Vivek: Going back to what we just talked about- >> John: Frankfurt and Ireland are up an running. >> Vivek: Exactly. >> John: With Amazon and Azure piece there. >> Vivek: Yeah, it does take about four or seven minutes for those appliances to come online, they download their latest firmware, but that's nothing- >> John: Minutes aren't hours, and that's not days. >> Vivek: Exactly, not hours, not days, not weeks. >> Right, I mean a key use case here, when you think about cloud connectivity today, it's still rather tedious to connect your on-premise location into these cloud-based, virtual environments. And so what network operators do is they do that in as few locations as possible, typically in a data center. And what that means is now you're limited, because all the traffic that you need to go into those environments has to get backhauled into your data center before going there. So now, because this is automated, and it's all part of that same secure VPN, if you have some developers that are working on an app and they're using infrastructure as a service, you know, as part of their work, they can do that from whichever remote office they're sitting at or their home office or at a coffee shop. And there's no need to create that additional latency by backhauling them to the data center before going to the cloud. >> So all that stuff gets done automatically, on the networking side, with you guys. >> Exactly, exactly. So step one is really creating this easy button to have connectivity, both on premises and in the cloud. >> Connectivity with all those benefits of the tunneling and stuff, that's either pre-existing or that's been set up by an instance. >> Exactly, secure VPN, full mesh connectivity across all the places where you're doing business or you need assets to run in the cloud. Then the second phase is, okay, how do you want to dictate which applications are running over which circuits in this environment? And this is where, again, with a legacy approach, it's been really tedious to define which applications should be steered across one link, if you can identify those applications at all. So what Vivek's going to show next is the power of policy and how you can make it easy to do some things that are very common: steering video, steering voice and dealing with, you know, SaaS applications in the cloud. So you want to give them a taste of that? >> Vivek: Absolutely. So let's go to rules, and let's create a new traffic rule, say, I want to make sure that across all my sites for my organization, I want video, which is a bandwidth-intensive application, as you all know, doesn't really choke up my MPLS link, which is my most precious link across all my sites. I should be able to configure that with as much ease as I just said it. So let's do that. We can do that with the software defined intelligence of SteelConnect. I can apply that rule to all my sites, all my users, and I'm going to select applications, where I search for video. There's already a pre-configured application group for video. I'm going to select online collaboration and video. And under path preference, I'm going to say that for this application, don't use my MPLS as my primary, but use my internet link as the primary. >> John: And the reason for that is to split traffic between the value of the link's cost or >> Vivek: Exactly. >> John: Importance. >> Vivek: Exactly. Load balance gets really important. So I'm going to save that as my primary- >> John: So plenty of people that are watching YouTube videos or, you know. >> Vivek: (laughs) Right, exactly. >> Exactly, video is one of the biggest hogs of bandwidth. It's basically creating an insatiable demand, right, so you definitely need to look for your best option in terms of capacity. And with internet broadband, maybe you're going to sacrifice a little bit on quality, but video, you know, deals with that pretty well. But it's just hard to configure that at each and every single box where you're trying to do that, so. >> Vivek: Yeah, as opposed to configuring that on each and every individual box or every individual site, I'm creating this globally applied rule to all my sites. And I'm going to select MPLS as a secondary. I'm going to select a path quality profile, which means that if there's some severe degradation in my internet link, go ahead and use my MPLS link. So I'm going to say latency sensitive metrics, and I'm going to apply a DSCP tag of high, click here on submit, and the moment I turn this rule on, it automatically updates all of the IPs, all of the uplinks, all of the routes across my entire organization. >> John: So you're paying the quality of service concept to all dimensions of apps. >> Vivek: Absolutely, whether it's video- >> John: Video, Snapchat, livestreaming, to downloading, uploading. >> Vivek: Yeah, and I can create the same kind of rule even for voice, where maybe I have my MPLS, since that's my primary and most precious link available for all my sites, have that as a primary and my secondary as my route VPN, which is my- [John] If you're a call center, you want to have it probably go over the best links, right? >> Vivek: Exactly. And assign it the DSCP tag of urgent so that that traffic gets sent at the expense of all my other traffic. >> John: Awesome, that's great stuff. Policy is great for cloud. What about security? Take us through a demo of security. >> So that's a really good question. I mean, as soon as you're starting to use internet broadband connectivity in these remote locations, one of the first things you think about is security. With the secure VPN connectivity, you're assuring that that traffic is encrypted, you know, end to end, if it's going from branch to data center or even branch into cloud. And that was really step one that Vivek showed earlier. Step two is when you realize, you know what, there are certain applications that are living in the cloud, things like Office 365 or Salesforce.com that truly are a trusted extension of your business. So let's turn that spigot up a little bit, and let's steer those applications that we trust direct from branch to the internet, and by doing that we can avoid, again, that backhaul into the data center. And with an application-defined approach, this becomes really easy. >> Vivek: Yeah, and I can do that with a very simple rule here, too. I'm going to apply that rule to all my sites. I'm going to say for applications, let's say trusted SaaS apps like Salesforce, Dropbox, and Box, I'm going to select a group called trusted SaaS apps, and now under path preference, I'm going to say for these applications, I know that I've set an organizational default that for all my traffic, go over my MPLS link and break out to the internet that way, but for some applications that I've defined as trusted SaaS apps, break out to the internet directly. >> John: Those are apps that they basically say are part of our business operation. >> Vivek: Yeah. >> John: Salesforce, Workday, whatever they might be. >> Vivek: Absolutely. So you're opening that spigot just a little bit, as Josh was talking about. And I can choose to apply a path quality profile so that there's a dynamic path quality-based path selection and apply a QoS priority. I'm going to leave it to high and submit. And the powerful thing about this is even though I've applied this to all my sites, I can choose to apply this to individual sites or maybe an individual VLAN in a site or an individual user group or even a single user for follow the user policies. And that's the entire essence of the software-defined intelligence of SteelConnect. The ease with which we can deploy these rules across our entire organization or go as granular to a single user is a very powerful concept. >> Josh: One of the things too, John, in terms of security, which you were asking about earlier, is that not only is a policy-based approach helping you be efficient at how you configure this but it's also helping you be efficient in how you audit that your security policies are in place because if you were doing this on a box-by-box basis, if you really, truly wanted to do an audit with the security team, you're going to have to look at every single box, make sure there's no typo whatsoever in any of those commands. But here we've just made a policy within the company that there are certain applications that are trusted. We have one policy, we see that it's on, and we know that our default is to backhaul everything else. And so that becomes the extent of the audit. The other thing that's interesting is that by just turning off this policy, that becomes your roll back, right? The other thing that's really hard about configuring boxes with lots of commands is that it's almost sometimes impossible to roll things back. So here you have a really easy button on a policy-by-policy basis to roll back if you need to. >> John: And just go, you know, clean sheet. But this path-based steering is an interesting concept. You go global, across all devices, you have the roll back, and go in individually to devices as well. >> Josh: That's right, that's right. Now, this next click of bringing that internet closer to you, is where you say, you know what? In addition to trusted SaaS applications, let's go ahead and have even recreational internet traffic go straight from the branch out to the internet at large. >> John: Love that term, recreational internet. (laughing) It's basically the playground, go play out there in the wild. (laughing) >> Josh: Exactly. >> John: There's bad guys out there. But that's what you mean, is traffic that's essentially, you're basically saying, this is classified as, assume the worst, hope for the best. >> Right, exactly. And that's where you do have to protect yourself from a network security standpoint. So that next step is to say okay, well instead of backhauling all of that recreational, dangerous internet traffic, what if we could put some more powerful IDS, IPS capabilities out there at the edge? And you can do that by deploying traditional firewall, more hardware, at those edge devices. But there's also cloud-based approaches to security today. So what Vivek is going to show next is some of the power of automation and policy that we've integrated with one cloud security broker named Zscaler. >> Vivek: Zscaler, yeah, so- >> John: Jump into it. >> Vivek: Our engineers have been working very closely with engineers from Zscaler, and really the end result is this, where we do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of connecting to the Zscaler cloud. What I mean by that is what you're looking at on the SteelConnect interface, going back to that entire concept of single pane of glass, is that you can see all your Zscaler nodes from SteelConnect right here. And on a site-by-site basis, we will automatically select for you what Zscaler nodes are the closest to you based on minimum latency. And we select a primary and a secondary. We also give you the option of manually selecting that, but by default, we'll select that for you so that any traffic that you want to break out to the internet will go to the Zscaler cloud like it's a WAN cloud by itself. So I can go to my organization and networking default and say that hey, you know what, for all of my traffic, break out by default to the Zscaler cloud as the primary so that it's all additionally inspected over there for all those IDS and IPS capabilities that Josh was talking about. And then break out to the internet from there. And that's, again, a very powerful concept. And just to remind you though, the traffic path rule that we just created for trusted SaaS apps will still bypass the Zscaler cloud because we've asked those applications to go directly out to the internet. >> John: Because of the path information. But Zscaler, talk about how that works because you mentioned it's a cloud. >> Vivek: Yes. >> John: Is it truly a cloud, is it always on? What's the relationship with- >> I mean, this is what's interesting. And the cloud is basically a collection of, you know, data centers that are all connected together. And so some of the complexity and effort involved in integrating a cloud-based security solution like Zscaler is still often very manual. So without this type of integration, this collaboration we've done with them, you would still have to go into each box and basically manually select and choose which, you know, data center of Zscaler's should we be redirecting to. And you know, if they add a new data center that's closer, you would have to go and reconfigure it. So there's a lot of automation here where the system is just checking, what's my best access into Zscaler's cloud, over and over again and making sure that traffic is going to be routed that way. >> John: And Zscaler's always on, is an always-on security model. >> Yeah, active backup, exactly. There's many of those locations. >> Alright, so visibility. Now, as the internet connections are key to the, you know, zero touch provisioning you guys demoed earlier, IoT is coming around the corner, and it's bringing new devices to the network. That's more network connections. >> Josh: Right. >> Usually they're who is that person out there, what's that device, a lot of unknown, autonomous, so how do I use the visibility of all this data? >> Yeah, visibility's important to every organization, and once we start talking about autonomous networks, it becomes even more important for us to dive deeper and make sure that our networks are performing the way we want them to perform. It goes back to that entire concept of trust but verify. So I'm creating all these policy rules, but how do I know that it's actually working? So if you look at my interface now, actually, let's pause for a second and just enjoy what we've done so far. (laughing) >> John: A lot of green. >> Vivek: You'll see that my, a lot of green, and a lot of green lines. So this is my site in AWS, which I just brought up, and this is my site in Ireland. So if I click on the tunnel between- >> John: Are those the only two cloud sites? Are the rest on premise? >> Vivek: The rest are all on premise, exactly. So if I want to, say, click on the tunnel over here between my Azure site and my AWS site, which I just brought up, it gives me some basic visibility parameters, like what's my outbound and inbound throughput, what's my latency and packet loss. We don't see any real values here because we're not sending any data right now. >> John: But if you would, you would see full connection points so you can make decisions or like, workloads to be there, so as you look at- >> Vivek: Absolutely. >> John: Connection to the cloud. >> Vivek: It's all real time data. But if you want to dive in deeper, we can look at what we call SteelCentral Insights for SteelConnect so you can look at- >> John: Hold on, you're going too fast. Back up for a second. This is an Insight's dashboard. >> Vivek: Yes. >> John: Powered by what data? >> Vivek: Powered by the data that is being pulled from all of those- >> John: Those green- >> Vivek: All those gateways. >> John: All those points. >> Vivek: All those green points. >> John: So this is where the visualization of the data gives the user some information to act on, understand, make course corrections. >> Vivek: Exactly. >> John: Okay, now take us through this again. >> Vivek: So you can look at what your top uplinks are. So I'm looking at my site in New York City. So I can look at what my top uplinks are, what my top applications are, who are my top users? Who's using BitTorrent? I can see here that Nancy Clark is using the BitTorrent. So I might have to go ahead and create a rule to block that. >> John: You know what kind of movie she just downloaded, you know, music? >> Josh: Exactly, exactly. >> John: So you can actually look at the application type. So you mentioned BitTorrent. So same with the video, even though you're path steering, you still see everything through this? >> Vivek: Absolutely. >> Exactly, I mean this is application defined networking in action, where, you know, the new primitives that network administrators and architects are now able to use are things like application, user, location, you know, performance SLA, like the priority of that application, any security constraint. And that's very much aligned to the natural language of business. You know, when the business is talking about, you know, which users are really important for which applications that they're sending to which locations, I mean, now you have a pane of glass that you can interact with that is basically aligned to that. And that's some of the power there. >> John: Alright, so what are you showing here now? Back to the demo. >> Vivek: Back to the demo. The next part of the demo is, it's actually a bonus segment. We're going to talk about our integration with Xirrus Wifi. We recently announced that we are working with Xirrus. We bought them, and we're really excited to show how these two products, Xirrus access points, Xirrus wifi, and SteelConnect, can work hand in glove with each other. Because this goes back to the entire concept of not just SD-WAN but SD-LAN for an end-to-end software-defined network. So what I want to show you next is really hot off the presses. >> John: This is new tech you're showing, new technology? >> Vivek: Yes. >> Josh: So when SteelConnect was launched last year, there are wifi capabilities in the gateways that Vivek showed during the zero touch provisioning part. Xirrus is well regarded as having some of the, you know, most dense capabilities for accessing- >> John: Like stadiums, we all know that, we all lived that nightmare. >> Josh: Exactly. >> John: I got all these bars on wifi but no connectivity. >> Josh: Exactly, so stadiums, conventions, you know, when you think about the world of IoT that's coming and just how many devices are going to be vying for that local area wifi bandwidth, you need to have an architecture like Xirrus that has multiple radios that can service all of those things. And so what we've been doing is taking, you know, the steps as quickly as possible to bring the Xirrus wifi, in addition with the wifi that SteelConnect already had, into the same policy framework, right? Cause you don't want to manage those things, necessarily, going forward as different and distinct entities. >> John: So SteelConnect has the wifi in the demo. >> Exactly, so I'm now moving to a different org, where we have about four or five sites, and I'm going to go ahead and add an appliance. And I'm going to add this Xirrus access point and deploy it in my site at Chicago. So I just click here on submit, and you'll see that the access point will come online within, in less than a minute. And once it does come online, I can actually start controlling this Xirrus access point, not just from the XMS cloud, which is the Xirrus dashboard, but also from SteelConnect manager, going back to that concept of single pane of glass, so- >> John: So we have another example of zero touch provisioning. >> Vivek: Zero touch provisioning. >> John: Send the device, and someone just plugs it in and installs it, doesn't have to be an expert. Could be the UPS guy, could be anybody. >> Vivek: Yeah, anybody. Just connect it to the right port and you're done. And that's what it is here, so you see that this appliance in Chicago, which is a Xirrus access point, is online. And now I can go ahead and play with it. I can choose to deploy an SSID and broadcast it at my site in Chicago. You see that I'm only broadcasting Riverbed dash two, and when I go to my XMS dashboard, and can see that one access point is actually up. This is the same access point that we just deployed in the Chicago site, and that profile called Chicago is already configured. So when I click on it, I can see that my SSID is also displaying over here, and I can do so much more with this interface. >> John: It really brings network management into the operational realm of networking. >> Vivek: Absolutely. >> John: Future experience of networking is not making it as a separate function, but making it an integral part of deploying, provisioning, configuring. >> Exactly, and the policies to automate how it's all used, right, so if we just take a step back, what we literally did in just a few minutes, we deployed a new location in Dallas without anybody needing to be there other than to plug in the box. We extended the connectivity from on premises, not only into one cloud but two clouds, AWS and Azure. We started leveraging public internet in these remote sites to offload our MPLS for video. We steered SaaS applications that were trusted out there directly to the internet. And then we pulled in a third-party capability of Zscaler to do additional security scrubbing in these remote locations. That applies to every single site that's in this environment. And we literally did it while we were talking about the value in the use cases, you know? >> Great demo, great SD-WAN in action. Josh, Vivek, thanks for taking the time to give the demo. Experiencing the future of networking in real time, thanks for the demo, great stuff. >> Thanks, John. >> This is theCUBE, watching special SD-WAN in action with Riverbed, thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier. (bright music)