(energetic music) >> From Washington D.C., It's theCUBE! Covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> Welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. Happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests from ScienceLogic, to my left is Leslie Minnix-Wolfe, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing. And to her left, is Russ Elsner, who's the Senior Director of Product Strategy. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you sir. >> Good, good to be here. >> All right, so Leslie let's start with you. Talk a lot about the product, a whole lot of announcements, Big Ben on the keynote this morning. Everybody's in, getting a little bit more of injection in the keynote today. Tell us a little bit about your roll, what you work on inside of ScienceLogic. >> Okay, so I am basically responsible for enterprise product marketing. So my job is to spin the story and help our sales guys successfully sell the product. >> All right, and Russ. >> I'm part of the product strategy team. So, I have product management responsibilities. I work a lot with the analytics and applications. And I spend a lot of time in the field with our customers. >> All right so, Leslie let's start with enterprise, the keynote this morning. The themes that I hear at many of the shows, you know we talk about things like digital transformation. But, we know the only constant in our environment is change. You know, it's good. I've actually talked to a couple of your customers and one of them this morning he's like "Look, most people don't like change. "I do, I'm embracing it I'm digging in, It's good." But, you know, we have arguments sometimes in analyst circles. And it's like are customers moving any faster. My peers that have been in the industry longer, they're like, Hogwash Stu. They never move faster they don't want change, we can't get them to move anything. I'm like, come on, if they don't the alternative is often, You're going to be... You know, you're competitors are going to take advantage of data and do things better. So, bring us a little bit of insight as what you're hearing from your customers both here and in your day to day. >> Sure, yeah, change is constant now and so one of the big challenges that our customers are facing is how do I keep up with it. The traditional manual processes that they've had in place for years are just not sufficient anymore. So they're looking for ways to move faster, to automate some of the processes that they've been doing manually. To find ways to free up resources to focus on things that do require a human to be involved. But they really need to have more automation in their day to day operations. >> All right, so Russ when I look at this space you know, tooling, monitoring has been something that in my career, has been a little bit messy. (laughter) Guess a little bit of an understatement even. It's an interesting... When I look at, kind of, that balance between what's happening in the infrastructure space and the application space. I went through, one of your partners over here is like "from legacy to server lists and how many weeks." (laughter) And I'm like okay that sounds good on a slide but, these things take awhile. >> Absolutely. Bring us inside a little bit, kind of the the application space an how that marries with the underlying pieces and monitoring. >> Yeah, you have a lot of transformations happening. There's a lot of new technologies and trends happening. You hear about server lists or containers or microservices. And that does represent a part of the application world. There are applications being written with those technologies. But, one of the things is that those applications don't live in isolation. It's that there part of broader business services and we're not rewriting everything and so the new shiny application and the new framework has to work with the old legacy application. So, a big piece of what we see is how do we collapse those different silos of information? How do we merge that data into something meaningful? You can have the greatest Kubernetes based microservice application but, if it requires a SAP instance it's on PRIM it's on Bare Metal. Those things need to work together. So, how do you work with an environment that's like that? Enterprise, just by it's nature is incredibly heterogeneous, lot's of different technologies and that's not going to change. >> Yeah. It's going to be that way. >> You're preaching to the choir, here. You know, IT it always seems additive the answer is always and. And, unfortunately, nothing ever dies. By the way you want to run that wonderful Kubernetes Docker stuff and everything. I could do it on a mainframe with Z Linux. So, from that environment to the latest greatest hypercloud environment >> Right. Talk a little bit about your customers. Most of them probably have hundreds of applications. They're working through that portfolio. What goes where, how do I manage all of those various pieces, and not kill my staff? (laughter) One of the things we're spending a lot of time with this, is that obviously, we come from a background of infrastructure management. So, we understand the different technologies different layers and the heterogeneous nature and on top of that runs application. So they have their own data and there's APM space. So we're seeing a lot of interest in the work we're doing with taking our view of the infrastructure and marrying it to the application view that we're getting from tools like Appdynamics or Dynatrace or New Relic. And so, we're able to take that data and leverage it on top of the infrastructure to give you a single view which aids in root cause analysis, capacity planning and all the different things that people want to do. Which lead us to automation. So, this idea of merging data from lots of sources is a big theme for us. >> All right so, Leslie who are some of the key constituents that you're talking to, to messaging to. In the industry we talked about silos for so many time. And now it's like oh, we're going to get architects and generalists. And you know cloud changes everything, yes and no. (laughter) We understand where budgets sit for most CIO's today. So, bring us inside what you're seeing. >> Sure. Yeah, we're seeing a tremendous change. Where before we use to talk more to the infrastructure team, to the folks managing the servers, the storage the network. We're really seeing a broader audience. And a multiple constituent. We're looking at directors, VP's, CIO's, CEO's, architects. We're starting to see more people that are tools managers, folks that are involved in the application side of the house. So, it's really diverged. So, you're not going in and talking to one person you're talking to lots of different teams, lots of different organizations that need to work together. To Russ's point in about being able to bring all this data together. As you bring it together, those different stakeholders have more visibility into each others areas. And they also have a better understanding of what the impact is when something goes down in the infrastructure, how it effects the app and vice versa. >> Leslie, the other thing I'm wondering if you can help me squint through, when I looked at the landscape, it's, you know, my ITSM's I've got my logging, I've got all my various tools and silos. When I hear something like, actually, your CEO Dave just said "Oh, we just had a customer that replaced 50 tools." with there it's like, How do you target that? How does a customer know that they have a solution that they have a challenge that you fit, Because, you understand, you can't be all things to all people. You've got certain partners that might claim that kind of thing. >> Right But, where you fit in the marketplace how do you balance that? >> Well, so I think what we're seeing now is that there have been some big players for a long time. What we refer to fondly as the Big Four. And those companies really haven't evolved to the extent that they can support the latest technology. Certainly at the speed with which organizations are adopting them. So, they might be able to support some of the legacy but they've really become so cumbersome, so complicated and difficult to maintain people are wanting to move away from them. I would say five years ago, most organizations weren't willing to move down that path. But with some of the recent acquisitions, The Broadcom acquisition, Microfocus acquisition. You're seeing that more organizations are looking to replace those tools in their entirety. And as a result of that they're looking at how can I minimize my tool set. I'm not going to get rid of everything and only have one vendor. But, how do I pick the right tools and bring them together. And this is one of the areas where we do extremely well in that we can bring in data, we can integrate in other tools, we can give you the full picture. But, we're kind of that hub, that central. And I think we heard that earlier today from Bailey at Cisco, where he talked about ScienceLogic is really the core to their monitoring and management environment, because we're bringing the data and we're feeding the data in to other systems as well as managing it within ScienceLogic. >> Russ, I actually heard, data was emphasized more that I expect. I know enough about the management and monitoring space. We understand data was important to that, I'm a networking guy by background, we've been talking about leveraging the data for network and using some automation and things like that but it's a little bit different. Can you talk some about those relationships to data? We understand data's going to be everywhere and customers actually wrapping my arms around it make sure I can manage it, compliance and to hopefully get value out of that is one of the most important things in today. >> Absolutely, so one of the things we stress a lot when we talk about data, it use to be that data was hard to come by. We were data poor and so how do we get... We don't have a probe there so how do we get this data, Do we need agent? That's different now, data is... We are drowning in data, we have so much data. So, really the key is to give that data context. And so for us that means a lot of structure, and topology and dependencies across the layers of abstraction, across the application. And we think that's really the key to taking this, just vast unstructured mess of data that isn't useful to the business and actually be able to take... Apply analytics, and actually take action, and ultimately drive automation by learning and maintaining that structure in real time automatically, because that's something a human can't do. So, you need machine help, you need to automate that. >> So, Leslie, there was in the keynote this morning that to start discussion of the AI Ops maturity model >> Right >> And one of the things struck me is there was not a single person in the poll that said, yes I've gone fully automated. And first, there's the maturity of the technology, the term and where we are. But, there's also that, let's put it on the table. That fear sometimes, is to "Oh my gosh, the machines are taking our jobs" (laughter) You know, we laugh, but it is something that needs to be addressed. How are you addressing that, Where are your customers with at least that willingness, because I use to run operations for a number of years, and I told my team, look you're going to have more work next year, and you're going to have more things change, so if you can't simplify, automate. Get rid of things, I've got to have somebody helping me, and boy those robots would be a good help there. >> What we're seeing is, I mean let's be real, people don't like to do the mundane tasks, right. So you think about, When you report an issue to the service desk. Do you really want to open that ticket? Do you want to enter in all that information yourself? Do you want to provide all the details that they need in order to help you? No. People don't do it they put in the bare minimum and then what ends up happening is there's this back and forth, as they try collect more information. It's things like that, that you want to automate. You want to be able to take that burden off of the individuals And do the things, or at least allow them to do the things that they really need to do. The things that require their intelligence. So, we can do things like clean up storage disk space when your starting to run out of disk space. Or we can restart a service, or we might apply a configuration change that we know that is inconsistent in environment. So, there's lots of things like that that you can automate without actually replacing the individual. You're just freeing them up to do more high level thinking. >> Russ, anything else along the automation line. Great customer examples or any successes that you've seen that are worth sharing? >> Yeah, automation also comes in the form of connecting the breadcrumbs. So, we have a great example. A customer we worked with, they had an EPM tool, one of the great ones, you know, top of the magic quadrant kind of thing, and it kept on reporting code problems. The applications going down, affecting revenue, huge visibility. And it's saying code problem, code problem ,code problem. But the problem is jumping around. Sometimes it's here, sometimes it's there. So, it seemed like a ghost. So, when we connected that data, the APN data with the V center data and the network data what it turned out was, there was a packet loss in the hypervisor. So, it was actually network outage that was manifesting itself as a code problem, and as soon as they saw that, they said what's causing that network problem? They immediately found a big spike of traffic and were able to solve it. They always had the data. They had the network data, they had the VMware data they had the JVM data. They didn't know to connect the dots. And so, by us putting it right next to each other we connected the dots, and it was a human ultimately that said I know what's wrong, I can fix that. But it took them 30 seconds to solve a problem that they had been chasing after for months. That's a form of automation too is get the information to the human, so that they can make a smart decision. That's automation just as much as rebooting a >> Exactly server or cleaning a disk >> Well right, It's The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Sometimes, the answers are easy if I know what question to ask. >> Exactly, yes. (laughter) >> And that's something we've seen from data scientists too. That's what their expertise is, is to help find that. All right, Leslie give us a little view forward. We heard a little bit, so many integrations, the AI ops journey. What should customers be looking for forward? What are they asking you, to help bring them along that journey? >> Oh gosh. They're asking us to make it easier on all counts. Whether it's easier to collect the data, easier to add the context to the data, easier to analyze the data. So, we're putting more and more analytics into our platform. So that their not having to do a lot of the analysis themselves. There's, as you said earlier, there's the folks that are afraid they're going to lose their job because the robots or the machines are taking over. That's not really where I see it. It's just that we're bringing the automation in ways and the analytics in ways that they don't want to have to do, so that they can look at it and solve the really gnarly problems and start focusing on areas that are not necessarily going to be automatable or predictable. It's the things that are unusual that their going to have to get involved in as opposed to the things that are traditional and constant. So, Russ, I'd love for you to comment on the same question. And just a little bit of feedback I got talking to some of the customers is they like directionally where it's going, but the term they through out was dynamic. Because, if you talk about cloud you talk about containers. Down the road things like serverless. It's if it pulls every five minutes it's probably out of date. >> oh, Absolutely. I remember back when we talked big data, real time was one of those misnomers that got thrown out there. Really, what we always said is what real time needs to mean is the data in the right place to the right people to solve the issue >> Absolutely. >> Exactly. So, where do you guys see this directionally, and how do you get more dynamic? >> Well see, dynamic exists in a bunch of different ways. How immediate is the data? How accurate is the dependency map, and that's changing and shifting all the time. So, we have to keep that up to date automatically in our product. It's also the analytics that get applied the recommendations you make. And one of the things you can talk to data scientists and they can build a model, train a model, test a model and find something. But if they find something that was true three weeks ago it's irrelevant. So, we need to build systems that can do this in real time. That they can in real time, meaning, gather data in real time, understand the context in real time, recognize the behavior and make a recommendation or take an action. There's a lot of stuff that we have to do to get there. We have a lot of the pieces in place, it's a really cool time in the industry right now because, we have the tools we have the technology. And it's a need that needs to be filled. That's really where we're spending our energy is completing that loop. Closed loop system that can help humans do their jobs better and in a more automated way. >> Awesome. Well, Leslie and Russ, thanks so much for sharing your visibility into what customers are doing and the progress with your platforms. >> All right, thank you Stu. >> And we'll be back with more coverage here from ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (energetic music)