>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 20 >>20 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual. Is the Cube virtual not there in person this year because of CO of it? I'm John for your host of the Cube. Got David wants to meet him in all the Cube folks covering, of course, with VM Ware and VM World 2022. Great guest here to talk about the future of the workforce solutions and the impact of network security and partnerships. Tom Gala, senior vice president general manager of networking and security business unit at VM Ware and put it, Men OSHA. Who's the VP of business development and corporate development at Z Scaler. Two great companies all doing extremely well as customers are dealing with Cove it And the reality is this market and putting plans in place for coming out with a growth strategy. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today. >>Yeah, John, thanks for having us. >>Thanks for having us, >>Tom. I want to start with you. Actually, the partnership with the scaler is the discussion of this topic. But you guys do have some hard news around the future of workforce solutions. What's the hard news and has that relate to all this? >>Yeah, we sure do, John. So you know, networks were built in a very different time. Networks were built when work was a place that you came. Now, work is the thing that you do. Oftentimes you do from your living room or your den. As I am on DSO, it really calls into question some of the fundamental principles of how we build a deploy networks. In the old model, we would set up something like a branch office and we would back haul traffic using a dedicated circuit like an mpls circuit back, haul it to one of a handful of locations that we called the DMZ or Demilitarized and those locations where you would stitch together a security ensemble made out of dedicated hardware appliances, firewalls, Web proxies, I PS systems and the like And that model service? Well, Azan industry for many decades, three. I'd say 30 years. Um, all of a sudden, the whole notion of the workplace has changed and changed dramatically We're all living through that and experiencing it firsthand. And so the original model of back hauling traffic to some point in, you know, precipitating New Jersey so that you can run it through some magic black box because the model doesn't apply anymore. And so at the end, where we have a new vision for how we can take the security, the reliability, the performance that you get when you're on the corporate network and extended into people's homes. And this is in line with what industries air calling, sassy or secure access services edge. And so the news that we're announcing is we have a complete, sassy solution that involves zero trust access. It involves firewall I. D. S I. P s capability, Advanced security services and then importantly ah, very strong partnership with the scaler on. We can walk through how that works, but it's really driven by this new shape of the workplace. >>Put it, Talk about the partnership with VM where we've been following see scaler for a long time. What a great success story. Great technology team. Great business model growth in your marketplace. Congratulations on your success as you guys continue to grow the world has spun in this disruption kind of world we're in now. You guys are well poised for that. Talk about your partnership with VM Ware. >>Thanks, John. And thank you, Tom, for that quick overview. You know, just to play out this idea we started over it over a decade ago. The basic idea was you know, the users, uh, pretty much everywhere, and the applications are moving to the cloud. And so back to Tom's comment. You know, we had these networks where you were back hauling. Maybe I'll just give a very simple analogy the CIA off Nestle, you know, when he first deployed, uh, Z skater, you know, and and realized a tremendous amount of cost savings that a security. But then, more importantly, the employees off Nestle actually started blogging that the Internet had gotten faster. And when the CEO came to ah customer advisory board meeting, he made a very simple analogy. Imagine having to get out to the Internet through four major international airports worldwide. All right, so you couldn't drink directly traverse from point A to point B. But you have to transit through these four. It would be very inefficient it would really slow you down. And more often than not, you'll be complaining that was the old network architectural. And what we have chosen to do here from a security standpoint at sea Scaler, is make that security closer to the end user. Now we pride ourselves from a security standpoint, and we certainly need networking to also adapt to that. And that's where we have found our partnership with VM Ware, to be particularly strategic. We started partnering with VM were actually prior to them, acquiring Vettel Cloud, which is the software defined when, uh, networking provider, uh, just primarily because they were a cloud based networking player. And this idea off locally breaking out to the Internet Getting out to the end destination as quickly as possible is something that they did quite seamlessly. And so we started this journey, this partnership with them a few years ago and today at VM. Well, we're enhancing that, expanding the partnership not only from a product standpoint, but then, more importantly, we're leaning in from a sales go to market customer support standpoint. >>You know, that's a great point. What? I've been saying this in the queue for a while with the joke was, um the When is the new Land E? I mean, we used to have the old days, remember? Oh, campus connecting networks drive to the airport as you mentioned, the great analogy there, by the way, has to be better. People are working at home. You got technically a land un security, you know, working at home. People are realizing this. These core services have to change. It's not just connect to the Internet the old way. It's everywhere. It's networking everywhere. This is the reality of the kinds of Internet things that used to go on where it's kind of cool and secure. You know, you've got a perimeter. Everything was working. Great. Put it. You mentioned it. Why drive to the airport? Four airports with world. That's a great analogy, Tom. This points to the future. Ready concept, access anywhere. Services that are needed for the security and, more importantly, the user experience. I don't want to slow down to go faster. I wanna I wanna I wanna make it. I wanna make a good experience happen. What's your thought? >>Yeah, well, I mean, I think we're all living through this new world where we're working from home, and sometimes the user experience is less than perfect. In fact, on this broadcast you may see stuttering and break up of the video, and you know, that's that's a problem that I think needs to be solved. It's a problem that we're able to solve with virtualization. So the idea behind virtualization by putting a layer of software on top of a physical asset, you could make it easier to manage that asset. You could make that asset more efficient. We certainly did that with servers. It was really obvious. Now we're doing it to the network itself. So what this means is we have some customers. We have one customer that is in the health care industry, like during the height of the crisis, all of their doctors and researchers had to work from home, and yet they needed to use video communication tools like we're doing here. And they needed a consistently good and user experience. And so we were able to ship these customers more than 8000 boxes over the course of two weeks into people's homes. So think of a little tiny device about the size of a set top box shows up in your house and all of a sudden your zoom or your WebEx sessions just work, no more stuttering. And we're breaking up because we're able to manage the network and virtualized prioritized traffic and deliver consistently good and user experience. So managing the quality of services, a foundational capability, and we have a unique ways to do that with virtualization that I think never existed before the second step is I wanna make sure not only that it's a good user experience, but my security. All of those controls that used to live in black boxes that those replied, This is where our partnership with the scaler is so important. So the scaler has the same philosophy that we do of like, let's put this stuff in many points of presence around the world. I think you know you're in like, 100 or so points of presence, so we weren't 150. And so whatever an end user is, you just find that nearest point of presence, connect and make the shortest route possible to deliver good quality and user experience and also consistent world class security. It's zero. It's >>interesting. First of all. We'll sign up for the Cube Virtual. We need that video late challenges. But we're you know what? We shouldn't have to be video engineers to manage the packets on the round trip. This software, I mean, you know, Web Zoom, they build their entire application to manage these kinds of intellectual property challenges. So that >>brings the >>complexity of applications. So, you know, people are gonna have all these new complexities. And how do you integrate it all? >>Yeah, you know, obviously, Zoom and WebEx companies are, you know, this is court or what they do. The challenges they gotta control both ends of the wire, and and so so with with our network virtualization, we actually control the wire itself, right? We can make the wire behave in a way we can prioritize traffic so that your zoom goes ahead of Xbox Live or Netflix do things like traffic shaping, which are techniques that are actually well understood, but difficult to deploy in a physical world. In a virtual world, we could employ these techniques constantly adapting and changing to make sure that engineer experience is smooth and easy on. That's really pretty impactful. >>Put it. What's your reaction all of this because you know I'm a customer, you know? You know, I'm like, What's in it for me, guys? Integration with the scale of VM Ware. What's in it for me? Because I got now multi clouds in the horizon. I'm dealing with multiple clouds today. I got complexity and applications themselves, and I want to create the nirvana that you laid out, which is access anywhere. High speed eso I might not have the expertise in house. What do I do? What's in it for me? Take me through the value proposition. >>Absolutely. So you know, Tom touched on it. You know the idea of bringing security as close to the end user as possible. If you step back for a minute and you start to think about security usually security and user experience off a contradictory Usually if you add more security, you lose use of experience and vice versa. That's sort of what Ziese killers start to go solve. And so, you know, over a decade ago, you know, when we started to build the architectures, it was built with a few core principles in mind, right? The idea of being completely distributed today we're in over 200 points of presence worldwide. That gives us a pretty good footprint to be as close to the end user. We absolutely could not compromise own security. So this idea that if you have a finite appliance, maybe the appliance has a, you know, a limited amount of CPU or horsepower And so I will tweet the security s so that I could get more performance, not the case with how we ran about, you know, offering security. All security services run all the time. Right? So without any compromise to the end user, and then finally, you know, when it comes to the actual security itself architectures based on something called a proxy. And usually again, if you start to think about a proxy and security was, uh people don't think in a very favorable manner, they usually think it slows things down. It adds Leighton, see, it breaks applications. And again I go back to, you know, the foundational elements of the skater. When we started this journey, it was with this idea that we're gonna build this proxy from the ground up. Very high performance. Mike was second, like late and see something that you would not see in the market anywhere with this partnership. Now, right? Seamless integration between VM Wednesay skater You are now able to set up these tunnels instantly automatically, so go back to Tom's. Example. 8000 set top boxes like devices sent out to this healthcare institution. Right? You can automatically set up tunnels such that the traffic is pointing to Z scale. There's feel over capabilities, so any and all of that has been instrumented in in software. The end customers sets that up. You know can automate that templates all across those 8000 devices. You now have security at the same time with user experience. A passed away to go adapt to business needs agility, you know, being able to keep up and lower your costs because you're substantially reducing the Mpls footprint. So there's a whole bunch of disparate, uh, you know, advantages that an enterprise gets. But the biggest one off amongst them, in my mind, is just being able to address the business needs. I mean, how Maney CEO is today with Colvin are starting to realize my network is not adapting to this new normal right, and so that's sort of where this partnership between VM Ware and Z scaler comes in. It's very timely. >>Everyone's like they want more about their network, and that's like, you know, everyone's banging on the table. Great. Great point there. Thanks for taking that great explanation. I wanna just follow up with you if you if you don't mind, compare that what you just said in terms of the value of Z scaler with this partnership versus the old way, because you what you just laid out was, you know, dynamic provisioning, setting up connections, having software, automate things, compare what it was like before because, remember, I mean, people have been around the industry. No, the pain in the butt that it's been and human error Compare what the old way it was like And now with this experience, can just just >>really And I let Tom talk about, you know, things on the network side. You know, where you might have had a large behemoth like a Cisco box where you try to tweak some policy and the entire box would fall over or something along those lines from a security standpoint. Usually when you had a a box, you know, You know, folks would call it a youth name box that God about box with, You know, as much security as you could push into a finite amount of appliance unified threat management function. Usually what would end up happening the old way was, you know, you would, you would you would have some basic security capabilities. Maybe it was. It's a traditional DMC that Thoma alluded to. You know, there's a firewall, there's an I. P s. There's some Web proxy capabilities and and that that was the that was the journey that a customer had, you know, So they would replicate this box and all those various locations. Or in the case of Nestle, before the scaler, they had those Dems es in four locations around the world, right? And the moment security, security keeps changing, right, the threat landscape keeps adopting. I mean, today, within disease killer cloud, we provide over 125,000 updates everyday, right? That's how dynamic security is. And so because the threat keeps changing, usually one of the things that vendors will try and do is add more security to that existing appliance. Right? So you're trying to make sure that a customer bottom appliance on, they need to make sure that they recoup the full investment. Let's add a little more security to it. Let's add a little more security to it so that I can keep up with the latest threats. Well, the problem with that is, when you have a finite amount of horsepower within the appliance, the performance starts to drop. And so usually that was the trade off that enterprises were making. With the security now being in the cloud right, And this idea that you're in the way, you sort of have infinite compute. Uh, you are now decoupling security from those those branch devices that Tom just alluded to. I mean, that 8000 boxes, right? One of the key points of a sassy framework that Tom alluded to is a very lightweight branch. And that's the piece That's the North Star that I think both VM Ware and Czyz killer have had right that that that low end not not lowering but of a thin branch and let the heavy lifting whether it's on the US side from the networking standpoint, whether it's security, um, you know, as it related to Z skater. Let that heavy lifting be done in the cloud. >>Yeah, and of course, there's a lot of lot of moving parts, so it's It's might be lower in lightweight, but it's more functionality. That's what the cloud Because I get that point, by the way, that anyone in the D M Z knows that as you add more stuff in there, get more, you know, cooks in the kitchen. Nothing good comes from that. Um, Tom, I'm gonna get your thoughts for the your audience out there and your customers and your prospects. What does the Z scale of partnership mean for them? >>Well, like I said, it zone opportunity to think differently about how we build a deploy enterprise networks. This a dramatic change. Most of us have been familiar with the old model where you had a spoon. It was referring to those big heavy boxes, the VPN concentrators and at the same time, most of us have been employees of those companies on. We've had the, you know, sort of less than stellar experience of turning the VPN on, and all of a sudden interest in Internet go slow. That's that's not what we want Thio achieve, and so so having the ability to use a distributed architectures. It's being forced upon us. Everyone is distributed where they like. They like it or not, Right? And so having a distributed architecture where I can put security and quality of service network controls closer to the end user is really, really critical. And I think just as puny was saying they started with this idea of of pushing security closely on user. We started with fellow Cloud with the idea of virtual izing the network in lots of physical places. So retail locations. So you've got thousands of stores around the world. You need to deliver video and audio services into those stores with a very high quality. So we were designed to have a very light, uh, entry point, and a light interviewing can just be pure software. It could be a small box three advantage of a small boxes. It's so turnkey it's designed that totally unskilled operator can use this retail people. A store manager gets a little box in the mail. You plug it in, you know, snap to Internet cables into it, and it just works again, Put it referred to this. This is part of our value. Proposition is, you plug this thing in a zone and used all you know is the Internet just got faster. You don't have to configure proxy settings. What's my I p range? Like that stuff's? Yeah, exactly. Well, and this is so many of us are feeling it now when you have, you know, sub optimal network connections. So being able to deliver a quality and user experience, >>you know, Cove, it accelerated a lot of a lot of opportunities. Also exposes the scabs and and, you know, things that been laying around and some suboptimal projects. I mean, and everyone's gonna be doubling down on things that are working and probably, you know, putting on the back burner or killing projects that don't make sense. So, um, this is a great opportunity, and I think forces things right in you guys. Wheelhouse is so I appreciate taking the time for the last minute that we have left Tom and putting. If you don't mind, I'd love to get your thoughts real quick on what's next after cloud. Obviously, cloud brings up all these benefits you're talking about. Um, what do you guys see is what's next after cloud Tom will start with you. >>I think that the you know, the range of services that will deliver in this format is not at all limited to traditional DMC services. So thank ap. I gateways. Think about core infrastructure offerings like DNS. Pretty much everything that we used in the network can actually now be delivered as a service in software more efficiently, Um, then standing up boxes and and racking, stacking yourselves. And so our view is that that cove, it has killed the appliance once and for all. And that's broadly. That's not just at the at the edge. That's in the core of the data center, things like load balancers. They're all moving to software with scale out scale out infrastructure software running on X 86 on DE. So I think that change of that magnitude will still take a while to roll out. But it's happening, >>Cove. It killed appliance. That's the headline right there. Love that. Put it after cloud. What's next? >>Well, you know, I'll say this job very similar to what Tom just mentioned. I think we're in the early innings, you know, when we would talk to our customers about transforming the network and adapting to this new normal. You know, we had some early adopters, but there was still a fair number of people that was skeptical and that loved their appliances. Covert has changed a lot of that. And so we have seen, in general acceleration of the business. The market is moving in our direction, and we feel that with this partnership you have to market leaders coming together. Right? VM ware on the networking side on the cloud networking side on the data center z scaler as it relates to cloud security user base security. This idea that we are a zero trust exchange that allows users to connect your applications to the Internet in a safe manner and at scale. That's the beauty off. You know, this'll, uh, partnership that we have brought together. And we are hopeful that customers will embrace it with confidence. And I'm mindful that we're in the early innings. >>Great points, gentlemen. Awesome stuff, great insights. And I think the cloud native integration shows that people in the ecosystem is evolving to be cloud native toe have these kinds of integrations these value points physical virtualization. Tom. Great point. I mean, we're not in face to face, but we're here. Virtually the The Cube is gonna be virtual. It's suffered to find operations. The world has changed. I think everyone is now seeing it. Thanks for the insight. And congratulations, Tom. On the news putting. Thank congratulations on the partnership with VM. Where sounds like it's great for customers looking forward to digging in. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Okay. That's the cube coverage here. We're in Palo Alto, California. We're in the Bay Area, but this is the emerald virtual. We're not in person, but we're virtual. I'm showing for your host for coverage of the emerald 2020. Thanks for watching.