from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation CIOs and CISOs of industries that have been hard hit see significant near term and many permanent shifts to their IT and security strategies this was the consensus of four technology executives at leading companies that are feeling the brunt of the corona virus pandemic welcome to this week's cube insights powered by ETR my name is Dave Volante and in this breaking analysis we want to accomplish three things first we want to tap into a new piece of research from ETR it involves an intimate focus group like set up via an open discussion with leading technology executives we interviewed Eric Bradley the managing director of et ours then program and we'll bring him into this discussion the next thing we want to do is we want to drill in to the various sector commentaries from the four leaders third we're gonna comment an hour take try to add some color and then share with you some of the specific vendor commentary that was called out by the executives let's start by looking at what et our event is et our van is a roundtable discussion it applies a tried-and-true methodology similar to a focus group or in-depth interviews what we sometimes in the research business call ID is ETR invites execs in from its community to participate in a private but open conversation et our clients get to listen in the names of the execs and their companies are transparent but the cube is only allowed to refer to them generically as shown on this slide now we can validate these participants they are legit CIOs and CISOs some and very well-known firms now what I want to do is summarize the CIO and seaso sentiment from this then discussion the overall budget impact for these four organizations is very very severe essentially large project projects are being put on hold although digital transformation initiatives remain a priority there were really four significant areas of emphasis that were cited by these execs cloud-first on-prem is losing out to cloud SAS and of course remote access solutions in fact the best comment on the panel was as a service is saving our SAS traditional networking is shifting to SD win especially rigid MPLS networks securing endpoints and zero trust solutions are the winners and there are a number of vendors rising to the occasion that will talk about it let's see how Eric Bradley of ETR summarizes the venn to summarize what we're seeing here was the real winners and losers are clear not everyone was prepared to have it work from home strategy not everyone was prepared to send their workers out there VPN wasn't didn't have enough bandwidth so there was a real quick uptick in spending but longer-term we're starting to see that these changes will be become more permanent so the real winners and losers right now we're going to see on the losers side traditional networking the MPLS networking isn't a lot of trouble according to all the data and the commentary that we see it's expensive it's difficult to ramp up bandwidth as quickly as you need and it doesn't support remote ok what I want to do now is I want to take a look at some of the verbatim comments and I'll just I'll read them from this slide all spending is shut down 70% of big projects are cut all next-gen projects have been shelled the relationship with our SAS vendor has been a miracle we're accelerating from MPLS to sd when on top of secure gateway technologies these will win this was interesting our business continuity plans were way too DR focused essentially we weren't prepared now let's unpack the cloud first commentary and give you some additional color I feel like all we do around here sometimes is talk about the cloud but it's clear from the data in the ETR data set surveys and the venn that in other data from the cube that that the cloud is only going to be accelerated we said this in 2008 in the 2009 downturns have been good to cloud one of the execs literally said I would like to see my data centers completely deleted Wow let's listen to Erik Bradley's take on this comment I was also shocked about that comment that gentleman also stated that his executives outside of the eyeteeth area the CEO the CFO had never ever ever wanted to discuss cloud they did not want to discuss work from home they did not want to discuss remote access he said that conversation has changed immediately so we've been talking a lot about those aspects of people and process and technology that might be permanent post kovat and clearly you see c-level execs as having a bit of an awakening for things like cloud and work from home not that they didn't see them before but these things are gonna accelerate in our view I want to spend a minute talking about networks SAS and bring cloud again into the discussion I gotta say the panel members really trashed MPLS networks in a big way let me explain MPLS stands for multi-protocol label switching you find this type of infrastructure in big telecom networks and it's there to route traffic and pls is used to create dedicated and and essentially reliable connections it enables things like VPNs quality a service management traffic engineering or shaping but well MPLS is definitely cheaper than t1 it's more expensive than Ethernet now I came into prominence well before the cloud and these execs see it is as outdated and inflexible and this is where SD wind comes into play software-defined wide area networks they're gaining popularity especially with the Sassa fication of applications and of course the general trend toward cloud here's Eric Bradley again explaining what the panel members said from his perspectives winners there or in the SD web space it's gonna be impossible to ignore that going forward and some of our CIO and even CISO panelists said that change will be also we're seeing at the same time what they were calling a on on SAS and cloud now we know these trends obviously were already happening but there be they're being exacerbated they're happening even more quickly and more strong and I don't see that changing anytime soon that of course is at the expense of network sorry data centers whether it be your own or hosted which has huge ramifications on from on from Hardware even the firewall providers so and it really seems as if as networking refresh starts to come up and it's coming up with a lot of large in writes when your network refresh comes up people are going to do an RFP for SD web they are sick and tired of paying MPLS network vendors and they really want to look at something else that was even prior to this situation now what we're hearing is this is a permanent change I particularly had one person say I wanted to find this quote real quickly by then but basically they were basically saying that from a permanency perspective the freedom from MPLS will reduce our network spend by over half while more than doubling or tripling or bandwidth now the challenge of course is customers have multiple MPLS contracts with several different vendors and often they just rubber-stamp the renewal but what customers are gonna start doing is layering in SD win and letting those agreements expire ok I want to talk about secure endpoints in this notion of zero trust solutions as I've said in the cube many many times the idea of digging a moat around the castle doesn't protect your queen anymore because the Queen ie the data has left the castle so companies that can secure gateways and secure endpoints they are going to have more momentum during and post kovat now in the panel Z scalar came up a lot in this context as well as fortunate who as I've reported has done a good job in getting its cloud products to market and of course the et our data shows that fortunate and Z scalar both have strong net scores or spending momentum and fort net especially has really strong pervasiveness in the et our dataset as I've reported previously I've also analyzed that there's been evaluation divergence between Palo Alto Networks and fortunate and house II scalar as well is a disruptor in this space I want you to listen to what Eric Bradley said specifically about Z scalar in Palo Alto Networks roll the clip yes it is and I'm glad you brought up Z scalar to very recently by client request we did a very in-depth research on Z scale and versus Palo Alto charisma access and they were very interested this is before all this happened you know does Palo Alto have a chance of catching up taking share from Z scalar and I've had the pleasure myself personally hosting J the CEO of Z scalar at an event here at City and I have nothing but incredible respect for the company but what we found out through this research is Z scalar at the moment their technology is still ahead according to their and there is no doubt however there doesn't seem to be any real secret sauce that will stop palo alto from inching up so if I had to choose that in a year from now Palo Alto might have had a better chance so in this panel as you brought up Z scalar was mentioned numerous times as just the wave of the future along with Cosby brokers right whether you're talking about a net scope or a force point they're all those people that also play in The Cosby space to secure your access zero Trust is no longer a marketing hype term it is real and it is becoming more real by the week now I personally agree with Eric that palo alto is is definitely going to be in the mix customers that we've talked to they want to work with palo alto networks but there's a sea change going on and it's being driven by sass and cloud and now accelerating because a co vid of course that the trend of remote workers is we think here to stay now i want to end by talking about some specific vendor mentions in addition to the ones we've talked about already and this chart shows some of the vendors and their logos that were called out as either being really really helpful during the this pandemic or super important to the CIOs and CISOs these executives really stressed how thankful they are to these companies and that the fact that these companies have worked very closely with them they've been flexible on pricing and payments and they also specifically mentioned how off-put they were by you know this notion of ambulance-chasing for example trials that required them to make some kind of commitment or swipe a credit card they just don't have time for that right now and then of the patience for it now let me call out a few of the companies that were cited in a positive light look at microsoft is all for the ETR data set in so many sectors Microsoft teams security solutions cloud really came up a lot on on this ven IBM was mentioned as being a great partner as what's oracle many many times we talked about fortunate and Z scalar already Cisco was called out as a strategic vendor was very helpful both the networking and with Cisco teams for collaboration CrowdStrike came up a number of times from CISOs as did Trend Micro and carbon black got a mention that's the VMware acquisition insecurity of course MobileIron that makes sense as well because they're securing and managing remote worker devices now finally interesting Lee Salesforce was brought up many times as a critical vendor one exec said that before coronavirus multiple workers could share a Salesforce license by you know sharing passwords but with the spike and work from home they had to purchase more licenses now one last thing that I want to bring up is start ups I got this question the other day from a client who said how a start-ups fair you might think that in this climate especially among for hard-hit customers that there might be risk-averse as it pertains to using startups once cio however said the following paraphrasing you always hear about the guy that says we'll pick three companies in the upper right hand corner the Gartner Magic Quadrant will test them out and this C so said that one of the things that he's always done is picked two from the upper right and one from the lower left one of the emerging techs and he gives them a shot let's listen to how Eric Bradley describes this dynamic roll the clip it's a great comment and honestly if you're in charge of procurement you'd be stupid not to do that not only just to see what the technology is but now I can play you off the big guys because I have negotiating leverage and I could say oh well I could always just take their contract so it's silly not to do it from a business perspective so it's really interesting and somewhat non-intuitive these comments on startups which of course means despite all the consolidation and acquisitions that you see in the industry you know there's still gonna be a lot of fragmentations a fragmentation especially as I've said many many times in the security space people still want best to breed and innovation and if it can drive business value they're gonna they're gonna go for it ok so look I realize that these are narrow comments from for CIOs and CISOs but they give us some added texture and flavor and color to the core ETR data set and we're going to continue to report on these trends and share more details as they become available both from the ETR data set and from other vents and remember we're gonna be digging into the latest ETR survey over the over the coming weeks as ETR exits its self-imposed quiet period so you can always check out ETR dot plus I publish weekly on wiki bang calm and on Silicon angle calm and of course our YouTube library has all these videos that's youtube.com slash silicon angle by the way these segments are also available as podcasts you can DM me or tweet me at devil ante and please by all means comment on my LinkedIn posts or email me at David Galante at Silicon angle com always appreciate the feedback thanks for watching everybody this is breaking analysis brought to you by the cube powered by ETR this is Dave Volante and we'll see you next time thanks for watching [Music]