(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios, in Palo Alto California, for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Anybody that's read any Wikibon research or been a part of any conversation with anybody here at SiliconANGLE, knows we're big believers in the notion of digital business, and digital business transformation. Simply put, the difference between a business and a digital business is the role that data plays in a digital business. Digital businesses use data to change their value propositions, better manage and get greater visibility and utilization out of their assets, and ultimately drive new types of customer experience. That places an enormous burden on the technologies, the digital technologies that have historically been associated with IT, but now are becoming more deeply embedded within the business. And that digital business transformation is catalyzing a whole derivative set of other transformations. Including for example, technology, data centers, security, et cetera. It's a big topic, and to start to parse it and make some sense of it, we're joined by two great guests today- Michael Segal is the area vice-president of strategic alliances at NETSCOUT Systems, and Eric Smith is the senior product line manager of NETSCOUT Systems. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here, Peter. >> Okay, so, Michael let's get going on. Give us a quick update on NETSCOUT Systems. >> Yeah, so maybe just a quick introduction of what NETSCOUT actually does. So, NETSCOUT assures service performance and security for the largest enterprises and service providers in the world. And the way we accomplish it is through what we refer to as offering visibility without borders. Now, this visibility without borders provides actionable intelligence that enables, very quickly and efficiently to enterprises and service providers, ensure their service performance and security, understand, discover problems, root cause, and solution. So it overall reduces their mean time to repair, and it's being used to assure that digital transformation and other transformation initiatives are executed effectively by the IT organization. >> All right, so let's jump in to this notion of transformation. Now, I know that you and I have spent, on a couple different occasions, talked about the idea of digital business transformation. What does digital business transformation mean to NETSCOUT, and some of the other derivative transformations that are associated with it? >> Right, so as you described very very concisely in your introduction, the business transformation is about enabling the business through digital services and data to differentiate itself from competition very very effectively. Now, one of the aspects of this digital transformation is that now more than ever before, the CIOs are taking a very active role in this transformation because obviously, information technology is responsible for digital services and processing and analyzing data. So with that in mind, the CIOs now need to support the business aspects of agility, right? So if your business agility involves introducing new services very quickly and efficiently, the IT organization needs to support that, and at the same time, they also need to assure that the employee productivity and end user experience is maintained at the highest levels possible. So this is exactly where NETSCOUT comes in, and we support the IT organization by providing this visibility without borders, to assure that employee productivity and end user experience is maintained and any issues are resolved very quickly and efficiently. >> Especially customer experience, and that's increasingly the most important, end users that any digital business has to deal with. At this point in time Eric, I want to bring you in to the conversation. When we talk about this notion of greater visibility, greater security, over digital assets, and the role that the CIO is playing, that also suggests that there is a new class of roles for architects, for people who have historically been associated more with running the networks, running the systems, how is their role changing, and how is that part of the whole concept of data centered transformation? >> Right, so, the guys that have typically been in what you might consider network operations types of roles, their roles are evolving as well, as the entire organization does. So as Michael mentioned beforehand, no longer is the digital business wholly and solely confined to an IT department that is working just with their employees. They're now part of the business. They're not just the cost center anymore, they're actually an asset to the business. And they are supporting lines of business. So the folks that have traditionally had these roles have just maintained the network, maintained the applications, are having to become experts in other aspects. So as certain applications disaggregate, or potentially move out partially into the cloud, they kind of become cloud architects as well, whether it's a public cloud or a private cloud, they have to understand those relationships and they have to understand what happens when you spread your network out beyond your traditional data center core. >> So let's build on that, because that suggests that the ultimate solution for how we move forward has to accommodate greater visibility, end-to-end, across resources, not only that we have traditionally controlled, and therefore could decide how much visibility we had, if the tooling was right, but also resources that are outside of our direct purview. How does that work as we think about building this end to end visibility to improve the overall productivity and capability, as you said, the productivity and end user experience, of the systems we're deploying? >> Yeah, so maybe we can start with the end in mind, and what I mean by that is what you just described as end user productivity and user experience, so how do we measure it, right? So in order to measure it, what we need to look is the visibility at the service level. And what I mean by visibility at the service level is actually looking, not just at once specific component that is associated with the servers such as application, it's one component, however application is running on a network, you have service enablers, for example to authenticate, to do accounting, to do DNS resolution, so you need to look at all of these components of a service and be able to effectively provide visibility across all of them. Now, the other aspect of this visibility, as you mentioned, end-to-end, which is an excellent observation as well, because you're looking at the data center, which is still very strategic assets, your crown jewels are still going to be in the data center, some of the data will remain there, but now you are expanding to the edge, maybe colos, maybe microdata centers in the colos, then you move workloads, migrate them to public clouds, it can be IaaS, you have more SaaS providers that provide you with different services. So this aspect of end-to-end really evolves into geographically dispersed, very complex and highly scalable architecture. >> Yeah, we like to say that the cloud is not an architecture, not a strategy, for centralizing resources. Rather, it's a strategy for greater distributing resources, allowing data to be where it needs to be to perform the function, or where it gets captured, allowing the service to be able to go to the data, to be able to perform the work that needs to be conducted from a digital business standpoint. That suggests that even though a customer, let's call it the end user, and the end user experience, may get a richer set of capabilities, but the way by which that work is being performed gets increasingly complex, and partly, it sounds like, that it's complexity that has to be administered and monitored so that you don't increase the time required to understand the nature of a problem, understand the nature of the fix. Have I got that right? >> You got it absolutely right, and I would add to this that the complexity that you described is being further magnified by the fact that you lose control to some extent, as you mentioned before, right? >> Or because, let's put it this way, it becomes a contracting challenge as opposed to a command and control challenge. Now the CIO can't tell Mike, "Go fix it", the CIO has to get on the phone with a public cloud provider and say, our service level says, and that's a different type of interaction. >> Right, and usually the service provider would say, the problem is not on my side, it's on your side, so the traditional finger pointing in war rooms now, is being expanded across multiple service providers, and you need to be able to very effectively and quickly identify this is the root cause, this is why it's your fault, service provider, it's not our fault, please go and fix it. >> So let's dig into that if we can, Eric, this notion of having greater visibility so that you are in a better position to actually identify the characteristics of the problem, and where the responsibilities lie. How is that working? >> So, in the past, or when the digital transformation started it's initial rise, it wasn't. And what was happening is, as you both have alluded to a moment ago, I can no longer call Mike and Suzie downstairs, and say you know, voicemail is not working, things are just, not working. Well, you can go sic them on it and they go fix it. What's happening now is that data is leaving your data center, it may be going through something like a colo, which is aggregating the data, and then sending it on to your partner, that is providing these services. So what you have to have is a way to regain that visibility into those last mile segments, if you will, so that as you work with your partners, whether it's the colo or the in-software provider, that you can say look, I can see things from here, I can see things to there, and here's where it goes south, and this is the problem, help me fix it. And so, as you said a moment ago, you cannot let your mean time to resolution expand simply because you're engaging in these digital transformation activities. You need to remain at least as good as you did before, and hopefully better. >> Well, you have to be better, because your business is becoming more dependent on your digital business capabilities, increasingly it's becoming your business. So let me again dig a little more deeper technically into that. A lot of companies are attempting to essentially provide a summary view of that data, that's moving around a network, moving across these different centers and locations, edge, colo, et cetera, what is the right way to do it? What constitutes real truth when we talk about how these systems are going to work? >> So NETSCOUT believes, and I think most people wouldn't argue with us, that when you can actually see the packet data that goes across the network, you know what elements are talking to which ones, and you can see that, and you can build metrics, and you can build views upon that, that is very high fidelity data, and you absolutely know what's going on. We like to call it the single source of truth. So as things come from the deep part of the data center, whether it's a virtualized server farm, all the way through this core of the network, and your service enablers like Michael mentioned, all the through the colos, and out into an IAS or SaaS type of environment, if you're seeing what's actually being on the wire, and who's talking to whom, you know what's going on, and you can quickly triage and identify what the problem is so that you can solve it. >> Now is that something that increasingly architects or administrators are exploiting as they use these new classes of tools to gain that visibility into how the different services are working together? And also, is that becoming a feature of how SLAs and contracts are being written, so that we can short circuit the finger pointing with our service providers? >> Yeah, so there's kind of like you said, two parts that, the first is I think, a lot of the traditional IT operations folks, as you mentioned earlier, are learning new roles, so to some degree, it is new for them, and I don't know that everybody has started to make use of those tools yet, but that's part of what our story is to them, is that we can provide those tools for you, so that you can continue to isolate and solve these problems. And I'm sorry, what was the second part of your question? >> Well, the second part is, how does that translate into contracting? Does that knowledge about where things actually work inform a contracting process to reduce the amount of finger pointing, which by the way, is a major transaction cost and a major barrier to getting things done quickly. >> Absolutely, and so you since you have this high fidelity data at every step of the way, and you can see what's happening, you can prove to your partners where the problem lies. If I find it on my side of it, okay, no harm no foul, I'll go fix it and move on with my life. But with that data, with that high fidelity data, and being able to see all the transactions and all the applications, and all the communications that happens end-to-end, through the network between me and my partner, I can show them that they are outside of their SLA. And to your point, it should shorten the time between the finger pointing, because I have good data that says, this is the problem. You can't dispute that. And so, they're much more inclined to work with you in a hopefully, very good way, to fix the problem. >> So that brings us back to the CIO. And I want to close with you on this, Michael. That's got to make a CIO happier, who is today facing a lot of business change, and is trying to provide a lot, you said agility, I'll use the word an increasing array of business and strategy options based on digital technology. Ensuring that they have greater certainty in the nature of the services, the provider of the services, and in the service levels of the services, has got to be an essential feature of their decision making toolkit as they provide business with different ranges of options, right? >> Absolutely correct. In fact, the high fidelity data is so critical in order to accomplish this, right, so in order for the CIO to be able to demonstrate to the CEO and other key executives that his objectives are met, the KPIs for that are along the lines of your efficiency, your service delivery capabilities, and being able to monitor everything in real time. So, the high fidelity data, I just want to elaborate a little bit more on what it means, because that's the difference between having these key performance indicators that are relevant for the CIO, and relevant also for other key stakeholders, and having something that is best guess, and maybe it's going to help. So high fidelity data, the way that NETSCOUT defines it, has several components. First of all, because it's based on traffic, or packet data, or wire data, it means that we continuously monitor the data, continuously analyze it, and it's the single source of truth because there's consistency in terms of what data is being exchanged. So the more visibility you get into the data that's being exchanged between different workloads, the more intelligence you can glean from it. The other aspect is that it's really, we mentioned, the service level, and if you think of packet data, it's all layers two through seven, so you have the data link layer, you have the network, you have the transport, you have the session, you have application, you can holistically identify any application, and provide you with error codes and in context, say you know the log and latency and error codes give you the overall picture. So this all together constitutes very high fidelity data. And at the end of the day, if the CIO wants to accelerate the digital transformation with confidence, this is the kind of high fidelity data that you need in order to assure that your key performance indicators, as CIO, are being maintained. >> This is the as is truth. >> Exactly. >> All right, Michael Segal, Eric Smith, I want to thank you both for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you very much Peter, for having us. >> And thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Michael Smith, he is the director of infrastructure at HKS, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey thanks for having me, excited to be here. >> So Mike, HKS, tell us, you're based in Dallas you're an architecture firm, tell us about some of the big projects that you have worked on. >> Sure, yeah, so I've been with the firm since April. Really excited to get on board and really kind of understand the rich history, we actually turn 80 this year so we'll have a really big celebration of the company. So yeah, HKS, we do a lot of sports entertainment so Dallas Cowboys, AT&T stadium, the Vikings home, L.A. Rams, so about 30% of our mix is sports entertainment so you may not know the company but you certainly know the buildings we design. >> Some well known buildings, exactly. >> Actually when you talk an 80 year old firm, and I think of those two buildings, well I'm a techie, I'm a geek, there's a lot of technology that goes into that. I'd love just a viewpoint as to how the company looks because 80 years ago I'm sure they didn't have the tech people in there, design is very much there, how does that you know the culture and inside the company a little bit? >> Sure, yeah so that's really the neat thing right, so everyone thinks that it's a company full of architects right and for the most part it is, but we have nurses on staff right, why? Because we build hospitals. We have people that understand how buildings work. So part of our five stakeholders, the community, is actually one of those stakeholders. So we're not just listening to the client who's asking us how to build it, we're seeing how that building is going to fit into the community, into its surroundings, and how it's really going to interoperate right cause these buildings are going to be around for what, you know 10, 15, 20 years until the next one gets built. >> So what are you doing here at this conference? What are the kinds of people you want to meet, the kind of connections you want to make? >> Sure, yeah, so first off I made some great connections. And that's one of the things I love about coming to things like Ignite. This is my first time here but I've loved it. I tell ya I really enjoy hearing people and hearing about the same challenges that I'm facing and then there's understanding how they're using the various pieces of technology to kind of piece that together. >> Alright so Mike, you're director of infrastructure, so we know infrastructure well, it is our first time at this show but we have been doing infrastructure shows for many years, maybe give us a little bit about your background and what's under your domain at HKS? >> Sure, yeah, so yeah I've worked for the last 20 years mainly for architectural engineering firms right, and so and there's a lot to be said for understanding the specific industry that you're working in right, so obviously it's not just about Word documents and Excel files, you're talking about very large CAD files and having to traverse from office to office right, and so you have to have a very robust infrastructure. So I've got basically the entire networking servers, WAN, LAN, Internet, VoIP, oh yeah and I've got cyber security under my profile as well. We run a small shop at HKS, but yeah so the company's doing really really well and we've got 24 offices globally, 19 here in the US and like I said we manage that really a 24/7 shop. >> Alright so you've got a number of locations, when we talked to infrastructure people the role of data and how do I manage it, how do I do things like disaster recovery and like usually are pretty important, how is it in your world? >> Yeah so obviously disaster recovery, to me that's the backbone of IT right, specifically of my group, and if we can't do that right, if we can't do a data protection correctly then to me we really shouldn't be working on any other project. And that's really where Cohesity comes into the equation right, so when I came on board we had a legacy solution, it was working right, it just and talking with the business really partnering and understanding what their expectations were, we realize that there were some gaps. And ended up talking to Cohesity through a vendor did an amazing whiteboarding session with just some folks that I really felt like cared about and understood our business and then yeah so we've been I guess since about mid-July, we've been implemented on our Cohesity solution for data protection globally, we're about 75% of the way there in what, just a month and a half? So from a speed of implementation standpoint right. But we've really made some leaps and bounds, gains and kind of those requirements that our customers are asking of us and kind of returning, you know basically returning them back to work. >> Yeah, can you paint a little picture of kind of the before and after for us? >> Sure yeah so we've always had a cloud strategy, so we've been partnered with Microsoft for several years, great Office 365, we've used Azure for backup, but I wouldn't say that it was really an optimized solution. And so if we had an actual outage, what we were talking about is you know a fairly long time to pull those resources back down to on-prem and so what we've implemented with our Cohesity solution is basically a system now where when our customers come in and 95% of the time they can get their files back on the phone with the first level technician. So before I was going to a third level sysadmin, basically requiring them to stop what they're doing, work on their restore right, and in some instances it may have been a day before we returned that customer back to work so if you can think about the ability to really just return them back into their normal work process, almost instantaneously, I mean the RTO is really incalculable when you start talking about soft dollars like that. >> Talk about, you mentioned how coming here you talked with lot of people in your industry or people maybe not even in your industry, but you realize you all share similar challenges, and you just talked about the disaster recovery and how that can really keep you up at night. Can you talk about a few of the other problems and challenges that you encounter and how Cohesity has helped you? >> Sure, yeah, so you know I think obviously in the forefront of everybody's mind is security right, and the fact that I have security within my group so understanding that in the topics of data in motion, data in rest right, topics of encryption so you know all of our data as it's pulled into Cohesity is encrypted and so obviously and then as that sits in Azure that's encrypted so that transaction is secure. You know I think the overall management of the infrastructure really having that single pane of glass that Cohesity can offer, that was huge challenge when I came onboard because the solution that we were using was really meant for file replication and so in order to find out if something worked we had to go to 81 disparate sources to see if that worked right. And so today I can come in in the morning, I got a guy that starts at 6 a.m. God bless him, and by the time I get in anything that happened overnight is completely remediated, I can look at one single pane of glass, I can see a bunch of green and honestly if there's red I can see it and I know that something failed and I can pinpoint exactly what we need to do to fix it. >> Mike you said you were about 75% of the way deployed. Walk us through where you're going with it, what you've been learning along the way, and any lessons learned along the way that you could share with your peers, as to how the experience has been, what they might want to do to optimize things. >> Sure, yeah, so I think we're about 75% of the way, we've got a lot of our international sites that are coming onboard now, we're learning a lot about our network. We're learning a lot about different things and so I would say before you do an implementation of this size, really make sure that you have a good handle on patching. Making sure that all of your resources are patched. The last thing you want to do is find out you have a resource problem with slow latency and it's due to a patch not being applied right. And then just understanding you know the time frames involved right? So we've targeted about 75 days to get fully onboard but we're talking almost a petabyte of data across one gigabit connectivity right, and so when you start talking about that there's lot of, we're doing a lot of mix and mashing, bandwidth throttling and all that kind of fun stuff in order to get up and running. >> Yeah so I'm kind of laughing a little bit over here because it's been a punchline in the Microsoft community, it's like oh well you know is it patch Tuesday yet or things like that. We've come so far yet there's still some things that hold us back, that leads me to my next question is you know what's exciting you in the industry in tech and your job, what's working great and what on the other hand are you asking your vendors, what would make your job and your group's job even better whether that be Cohesity, Microsoft, or others? >> Yeah so I think as a company that, we have a lot of data right, and at first as the role of the person responsible for that data, you know it was oh my gosh we have a lot of data. And it was actually a couple of months ago, something clicked in my head and I said, we have a lot of data. (hosts laughing) And guess what? We can do analytics on that data. And so you know I think machine learning is going to be huge right. I think being able to do a lot of those tasks that we count on, you know I have people that are doing things two to three times a week, maybe between eight and five. Well those are things that with machine learning we can have those algorithms basically running 24/7 and so we can start making leaps and bounds progress over what we're doing today. HKS is really big into understanding what the value add is in building a building right? It's not just about the architecture. There's value to that, and so what other value items can we provide to our customers that because you know to be honest technology is becoming a commodity right? How much longer before core services like your architecture and your engineering start to become commodities? And so that's really where I think analyzing that data. And so I was at VMworld a few weeks ago and I was talking to a Cohesity engineer and I really expected him, I said what's next on the road map from data analytics? And I expected to hear x, y, and z. And he looked at me and he goes, What do you want to see next? What do you want to do with your data? Let's partner with you and make that happen right. Now I'm smart enough to go, I don't know what that next thing is but we have really smart PhD-type people that do so we're really looking forward to that next phase. >> I'm interested in teams because you talked about the very diverse employee base at HKS. You said you've got nurses on the team, I'm imagining you have hospitality experts, you've got the PhD types, you've got the science people, and the architects. So how do you get all these people with very different functional expertise to work together and pull together and all be on the same page? >> That's actually a great question. So interestingly enough, I sit right next to a librarian and she's in IT right, and they work in our Global Knowledge Management group which does SharePoint so who better to understand how to start to classify and organize information than someone who's a trained librarian right? So I think what we're really excited about is our IT team has really been really rebuilt say over the last two years and it's been rebuilt with people who have a real passion for their industry but also kind of a broad understanding of how everything interconnects and so we're really kind of building a culture that says if there's information there, it's shareable. We're not holding anything close to the vest. If you want to understand, if I use too many acronyms when I talk, then ask me what they are right. And so I think that right there, that fosters a lot more involvement and people give more of themselves incrementally when they understand that hey there's skin in the game and yes I'm a librarian and I may not know the technological things that you do, but if I say well hey what if we do it this way, we're not just going to blow that idea off and we're going to actually incorporate that into the greater solution. >> Great, Mike we talk a lot about AI at the show and IoT and you're doing buildings, I'm curious how things like all the censors and everything impact what you're doing, how you partner with your clients on that. >> Sure, yeah, so we've got a great team that really focuses on that entire extended set of technologies so obviously drone technologies, sensor technologies, and so I think a lot of those, those are I won't even say that they are even forward looking anymore. Those are, especially sensor technology, so I mean I've worked in environments where we had 24 by seven cameras on a job site so general contractor probably hates it but a PM from anywhere in the world can look at his project, his or her project, and they can see their progress right? Well you know then at what point does that extend to, well I'm going to launch a drone here and I'm going to go look at a very specific piece and a very part of that technology. And so yeah I think it's one of those things if you ever start sitting on your laurels in IT, if your feet ever get off of the toes moving forward, you're already behind. So you know I think things like AI, machine learning, you know I've talked to some people that'll go, well we're two to three years away from that. And I said, in two to three years those will be things of the past right? You have to, you don't have to be bleeding edge, but you have to understand where you can leverage those technologies for your business. >> Give us a little candy here. Paint a picture of what the building of the future is, whether it's the stadium of the future, the hotel of the future, just get us excited here. What are some of the things >> Sure yeah. that you're looking at? >> So I actually talked to a gentleman a couple weeks back and they're building a hotel and this hotel has Bluetooth sensors in the room right, can't do any kind of cameras or anything like that but basically what it can do is based upon the signal saturation of the Bluetooth, it can tell you how many people are in that room cause it understands the dissipation of the signal through the normal human body right. So take that down to your typical occupancy sensor that so you leave the room, maybe you're sleeping late, well the room doesn't think anybody's in there so it turns the temperature up, turns the lights on, does whatever it does right. Well with this new technology it can't do that. So fast forward on and maybe it's a little bit more scary. So now you go from your room and you walk down to the lobby bar, you walk past the lobby bar. Well the wireless devices know the MAC address of your phone because you used that number when you checked in, so as you get close it pops you a hey, you want to 15% or how much do you want to free drink at the bar if you come in here? So I think understanding the connectiveness of everything and then really not being afraid of it. There is a Big Brother aspect to all of this, but just kind of understanding that you know, kind of in the Elon Musk vein is that we have to understand and we have to control where that technology is going but I think if you're afraid of it like that and you know, I'm not going to, I'm never going to stay at that hotel because of the things that they do, then I think you're missing out. >> Right, exactly. Well thank you so much Mike, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much >> A lot of fun talking to you. I appreciate the opportunity. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida coming up just after this. (light techno music)