our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back they're ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios today to have a conversation with a really exciting company they've actually been around for a while but they've raised a ton of money and they're doing some really important work in the world in which we live today which is a lot different than the world was when they started in 2010 so we're excited to welcome to the studio he's been here on before Mohit ladee is the CEO and co-founder of Thousand Eyes mode great to see you great to see you as well as pretty to be here yeah welcome back but for people that didn't see the last video or not that familiar with Thousand Eyes tell them a little bit kind of would a thousand eyes all about absolutely so in today's world the cloud is your new data center the Internet is your new network and SAS is your new application stack and thousand eyes is built to be the the only thing that can really help you see across all three of these like it's your own private environment I love that I love that kind of setup and framing because those are the big three things and as you said all those things have moved from inside your control to outside of your control so in 2010 is that was that division I mean when you guys started the company UCLA I guess a while ago now what was that the trend what did you see what yes what kind of started it so it's really interesting right so our background as a founding company with two founders we did our PhD at UCLA in computer science and focused on internet and we were fascinated by the internet because it was just this complex system that nobody understood but we knew even then that it would meaningfully change our lives not just as consumers but even as enterprise companies so we had this belief that it's going to be the backbone of the modern enterprise and nobody quite understood how it worked because everyone was focused on your own data center your own network and so our entire vision at that point was we want people to feel the power of seeing the internet like your network that's sort of where we started and then as we started to expand on that vision it was clear to us that the Internet is what brings companies together what brings the cloud closer to the enterprise what brings the SAS applications closer to the enterprise right so we expanded into into cloud and SAS as well so when you had that vision you know people had remote offices and they would set up they would you know set up tunnels and peer-to-peer and all kinds of stuff why did you think that it was gonna go to that next step in terms of the internet you know just kind of the public Internet being that core infrastructure yes we were at the at the very early stages of this journey to cloud right and at the same time you had companies like Salesforce you had office 365 they were starting to just make it so much easier for companies to deploy a CRM you don't have to stand up these massive servers anymore its cloud-based so it was clear to us that that was gonna be the new stack and we knew that you had to build a fundamentally different technology to be able to operate in that stack and it's not just about visibility it's about making use of collective information as well because you're going from a private environment with your own data center your own private network your own application stack to something that's sitting in the cloud which is a shared environment going over the Internet which is the same network that carries cat videos that your kids watch it's carrying production traffic now for your core applications and so you need a different technology stack and you need to really sort of benefit from this notion of collective intelligence of knowing what everybody sees together as one view so I'm here I think I think Salesforce was such an important company in terms of getting enterprises to trust a SAS application for really core function which just sales right I think that was a significant moment in moving the dial was there a killer app for you guys that was you know for your customers the one where they finally said wait you know we need a different level of his ability to something that we rely on that's coming to us through an outside service so it's interesting right when we started the company we had a lot of advisors that said hey your position should be you're gonna help enterprises enforce SLA with Salesforce and we actually took a different position because what we realized was Salesforce did all the right stuff on their data centers but the internet could mess things up or enterprise companies that were not ready to move to cloud didn't have the right architectures would have some bottlenecks in their own environment because they are backhauling traffic from their London office to New York and then exiting from New York they're going back to London so all this stuff right so we took the position of really presenting thousand eyes as a way to get transparency into this ecosystem and we we believe that if we take this position if we want to help both sides not just the enterprise companies we want to help sales force we want to have enterprise companies and just really present it as a means of finding a common truth of what is actually going on it works so much better right so there wasn't really sort of one killer application but we found that anything that was real-time so if you think about video based applications or any sort of real-time communications based so the web access of the world they were just very sensitive to network conditions and internet conditions same with things that are moving a lot of data back and forth so these applications like Salesforce office 365 WebEx they just are demanding applications on the infrastructure and even if they're done great if the infrastructure doesn't it doesn't give you a great experience right and and and you guys made a really interesting insight too it's an it's an all your literature it's it's a really a core piece of what you're about and you know when you owned it you could diagnose it and hopefully you could fix it or call somebody else to fix it but when you don't own it it's a very different game and as you guys talked about it's really about finding the evidence or everyone's not pointing fingers back in and forth a to validate where the actual problem is and then to also help those people fix the problem that you don't have direct control of so it's a very different you know kind of requirement to get things fixed when they have to get fixed yeah and the first aspect of that is visibility so as an example right you generally don't have a problem going from one part of your house to another part of your house because you own the whole place you know exactly what sits between the two rooms that you're trying to get to you don't you don't have run into surprises but when you're going from let's say Palo Alto to San Francisco and you have two options you can take the 101 or 280 you need to know what you expect to see before you get on one of those options right and so the Internet is very similar you have these environments that you have no idea what to expect and if you don't see that with the right level of granularity that you would in your own environments you would make decisions that you have you know you have no control over right the visibility is really important but it's giving that lens like making it feel like a google maps of the internet that gives you the power to look at these environments like it's your private network that's the hard part right and then so what you guys have done as I understand is you've deployed sensors basically all over the Internet all at an important pops yeah an important public clouds and important enterprises etc so that you now have a view of what's going on it I can have that view inside my enterprise by leveraging your infrastructure is that accurate correct and so this is where the notion of being able to set up this sort of data collection environment is really difficult and so we have created all of this over years so enterprise companies consumer companies they can leverage this infrastructure to get instant results so there's zero implementation what right but the key to that is also understanding the internet itself and so this is where a research background comes in play because we studied we did years of research on actually modeling the internet so we know what strategic locations to put these probes that to give good coverage we know how to fill the gaps and so it's not just a numbers game it's how you deploy them where you deploy them and knowing that connectivity we've created this massive infrastructure now that can give you eyes on the internet and we leverage all of their data together so if let's say hypothetically you know AT&T has an issue that same issue is impacting multiple customers through all our different measurements so it's like ways if you're using ways to get from point A to point B if Waze was just used by your family members and nobody else it would give you completely useless information values in that collective insight right and then now you also will start to be able to until every jamel and AI and you know having all that data and apply just more machine learning to it to even better get out in front of problems I imagine as much as as is to be able to identify it so that's a really interesting point right so the first thing we have to tackle is making a complex data set really accessible and so we have a lot of focus into essentially getting insights out of it using techniques that are smarter than the brute-force techniques to get insights out and then present it in manners that it's accessible and digestible and then as we look into the next stages we're going to bring more and more things like learning and so on to take it even further right it's funny the accessible and digestible piece I've just had a presentation the other day and there was a woman from a CSO at a big bank and she talked about you know the problem of false positives and in in early days I mean their biggest issues was just too much data coming in from too many sensors and and too many false positives to basically bury people so I didn't have time to actually service the things that are a priority so you know a nice presentation of a whole lot of data that's a big difference to make it actual it is absolutely true and now that the example I'll give you is oftentimes when you think about companies that operate with a strong network core like we do they are in the weeds right which is important but what is really important is tying that intelligence to business impact and so the entire product portfolio we've built it's all about business impact user experience and then going into connecting the dots or the network side so we've seen some really interesting events and as much as we know the internet every day I wake up and I see something that surprises me right we've had customers that have done migrations to cloud that have gone horribly wrong right so we the latest when I was troubleshooting with the customer was where we saw they migrated from there on from data center to Amazon and the user experience was 10x worse than what it was on their own data the app once they moved to Amazon okay and what had happened there was the whole migration to Amazon included the smart sort of CDN where they were fronting your traffic at local sites but the traffic was going all over the place so from if a user was in London instead of going to the London instance of Amazon they were going to Atlanta they were going to Los Angeles and so the whole migration created a worse user experience and you don't have that lens because you don't see that in a net portion of that right that's what we like we caught it instantly and we were able to showcase that hey this is actually a really bad migration and it's not that Amazon is bad it's just it's been implemented incorrectly right so ya fix these things and those are all configurations all Connecticut which is so very easy all the issues you hear about with with Amazon often go back to miss configuration miss settings suboptimal leaving something open so to have that visibility makes a huge impact and it's more challenging because you're trying to configure different components of this environment right so you have a cloud component you have the internet component your own network you have your own firewalls and you used to have this closed environment now it's hybrid it involves multiple parties multiple skill sets so a lot of things can really go wrong yeah I think I think you guys you guys crystallize very cleanly is kind of the inside out and outside in approach both you know a as as a service consumer yep right I'm using Salesforce I'm using maybe s3 I'm using these things that I need and I want to focus on that and I want to have a good experience I want my people to be able to get on their Salesforce account and book business but but don't forget the other way right because as people are experiencing my service that might be connecting through and aggregating many other services along the way you know I got to make sure my customer experience is big and you guys kind of separate those two things out and really make sure people are focusing on both of them correct and it's the same technology but you can use that for your production services which are revenue generating or you can use that for your employee productivity the the visibility that you provide is is across a common stack but on the production side for example because of the way the internet works right your job is not just to ensure a great performance in user experience your job is also to make sure that people are actually reaching your site and so we've seen several instances where because of the way internet works somebody else could announce that their google.com and they could suck a bunch of traffic from the Internet and this happens quite routinely in the notion of what is now known as DP hijacks or sometimes DNS hijacks and the the one that I remember very well is when there was the small ISP in Nigeria that announced the identity of the address block for Google and that was picked up by China Telecom which was picked up by a Russian telco and now you have Russia China and Nigeria in the path for traffic to Google which is actually not even going to Google's right those kinds of things are very possible because of the way the internet how fast those things kind of rise up and then get identified and then get shut off is this hours days weeks in this kind of example so it really depends because if you are let's say you were Google in this situation right you're not seeing a denial of service attack T or data centers in fact you're just not seeing traffic running it because somebody else is taking it away right it's like identity theft right like I somebody takes your identity you wouldn't get a mail in your inbox saying hey your identity has been taken back so I see you have to find it some other way and usually it's the signal by the time you realize that your identity has been stolen you have a nightmare ahead of you all right so you've got some specific news a great great conversation you know it's super insightful to talk people that are in the weeds of how all the stuff works but today you have a new a new announcement some new and new offering so tell us about what's going on so we have a couple of announcements today and coming back to this notion of the cloud being a new data center the internet your new network right two things were announcing today is one we're announcing our second version of the cloud then benchmark performance comparison and what this is about is really helping people understand the nuances the performance difference is the architecture differences between Amazon Google ad your IBM cloud and Alibaba cloud so as you make decisions you actually understand what is the right solution for me from a performance architecture standpoint so that's one it's a fascinating report we found some really interesting findings that surprised us as well and so we're releasing that we're also touching on the internet component by releasing a new product which we call as Internet insights and that is giving you the power to actually look at the internet more holistically like you own the entire internet so that is really something we're all excited about because it's the first time that somebody can actually see the Internet see all these connections see what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely owned the environment so are people using information like that to dynamically you know kind of reroute the way that they handle their traffic or is it more just kind of a general health you know kind of health overview you know how much of it do I have control over how much should I have control over and how much of I just need to know what's going on so yeah so in just me great question so the the best way I can answer that is what I heard CIO say in a CIO forum we were presenting it where they were a customer it's a large financial services customer and somebody asked the CIO what was the value of thousand I wasn't the way he explained it which was really fascinating was phase one of thousand eyes when we started using it was getting rid of technical debt because we would keep identifying issues which we could fix but we could fix the underlying root cause so it doesn't happen again and that just cleared the technical debt that we had made our environment much better and then we started to optimize the environments to just get better get more proactive so that's a good way to think about it when you think about our customers most of the times they're trying to just not have their hair on fire right that's the first step right once we can help them with that then they go on to tuning optimising and so on but knowing what is going on is really important for example if you're providing a.com service like cube the cube comm right it's its life and you're providing it from your data center here you have two up streams like AT&T and Verizon and Verizon is having issues you can turn off that connection and read all your customers back live having a full experience if you know that's the issues right right the remediation is actually quite quite a few times it's very straight forward if you know what you are trying to solve right so do you think on the internet insights this is going to be used just more for better remediation or do you think it's it's kind of a step forward and getting a little bit more proactive and a little bit more prescriptive and getting out ahead of the issues or or can you because these things are kind of ephemeral and come and go so I think it's all of the about right so one the things that the internet insights will help you is with planning because as you expand into new geo so if you're a company that's launching a service in a new market right that immediately gives you a landscape of who do you connect with where do you host right now you can actually visualize the entire network how do you reach your customer base the best right so that's the planning aspect and if you plan right you would actually reduce a lot of the trouble that you see so we had this customer of ours that was deploying Estevan software-defined man in there a she offices and they used thousand eyes to evaluate two different ISPs that they were looking at one of them had this massive time-of-day congestion so every time every day at nine o'clock the latency would get doubled because of congestion it's common in Asia the other did not have time of day congestion and with that view they could implement the entire Estevan on the ice pea that actually worked well for them so planning is important part of this and then the other aspect of this is the thing that folks often don't realize is internet is not static it's constantly changing so you know AT&T may connect to where I is in this way it connects it differently it connects to somebody else and so having that live map as you're troubleshooting customer experience issues so let's say you have customers from China that are having a ton of issues all of a sudden or you see a drop of traffic from China now you can relate that information of where these customers are coming from with our view of the health of the Chinese internet and which specific ISPs are having issues so that's the kind of information merger that simply doesn't happen today right promote is a fascinating discussion and we could go on and on and on but unfortunately do not have all day but I really like what you guys are doing the other thing I just want to close on which which I thought was really interesting is you know a lot of talked about digital transformation we always talk about digital transformation everybody wants a digital transfer eyes it but you really boiled it down into really three create three critical places that you guys play the digital experience in terms of what what the customers experience you know getting to cloud everybody wants to get to cloud so one can argue how much and what percentage but everybody's going to cloud and then as you said in this last example the modern when as you connect all these remote sites and you guys have a play in all of those places so whatever you thought about in 2010 that worked out pretty well thank you and we had a really strong vision but kudos to the team that we have in place that has stretched it and really made the most out of that so excited good job and thanks for for stopping by sharing the story thank you for hosting always fun to be here absolutely all right well he's mo and I'm Jeff you're watching the cube when our Palo Alto studio is having a cube conversation thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back here ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios today to have a cube conversation with a really exciting company they've actually been around for a while but they've raised a ton of money and they're doing some really important work in the world in which we live today which is a lot different than the world was when they started in 2010 so we're excited to welcome to the studio he's been around before Mohit lad he is the CEO and co-founder of thousand ice mode great to see you great to see you as well thrilled to be here yeah welcome back but for people that didn't see the last video or not that familiar with thousand ice tell them a little bit kind of would a thousand eyes all about absolutely so in today's world the cloud is your new data center the Internet is your new network and SAS is your new application stack and thousand eyes is built to be the the only thing that can really help you see across all three of these like it's your own private environment I love that I love that kind of setup and framing because those are the big three things and as you said all those things have moved from inside your control to outside of your control so in 2010 is that was that division I mean when you guys started the company UCLA I guess a while ago now what was that the trend what did you see what yes what kind of started it so it's really interesting right so our background is a founding company with two founders we did our PhD at UCLA in computer science and focused on Internet and we were fascinated by the internet because it was just this complex system that nobody understood but we knew even then that it would meaningfully change our lives not just as consumers but even as enterprise companies so we had this belief that it's gonna be the backbone of the modern enterprise and nobody quite understood how it worked because everyone was focused on your own data center your own network and so our entire vision at that point was we want people to feel the power of seeing the internet like your network that's sort of where we started and then as we started to expand on that vision it was clear to us that the internet is what brings companies together what brings the cloud closer to the enterprise what brings the SAS applications closer to the enterprise right so we expanded into into cloud and SAS as well so when you had that vision you know people had remote offices and they would set up they would you know set up tunnels and peer-to-peer and all kinds of stuff why did you think that it was going to go to that next step in terms of the Internet you know just kind of the public Internet being that core infrastructure yes so we were at the at the very early stages of this journey to cloud right and at the same time you had companies like Salesforce you had office 365 they were starting to just make it so much easier for companies to deploy a CRM you don't have to stand up these massive servers anymore its cloud-based so it was clear to us that that was gonna be the new stack and we knew that you had to build a fundamentally different technology to be able to operate in that stack and it's not just about visibility it's about making use of collective information as well because you're going from a private environment with your own data center your own private network your own application stack to something that's sitting in the cloud which is a shared environment going over the Internet which is the same network that carries cat videos that your kids watch it's carrying production traffic now for your core applications and so you need a different technology stack and you need to really sort of benefit from this notion of collective intelligence of knowing what everybody sees together as one view so I'm curious force was such an important company in terms of getting enterprises to trust a SAS application for really core function with just sales right I think that was a significant moment in moving the dial was there a killer app for you guys that was you know for your customers the one where they finally said wait you know we need a different level of visibility to something that we rely on that's coming to us through an outside service so it's interesting right when we started the company we had a lot of advisors that said hey your position should be you're gonna help enterprises enforce SLA with Salesforce and we actually took a different position because what we realized was Salesforce did all the right stuff on their data centers but the internet could mess things up or enterprise companies that were not ready to move the cloud didn't have the right architectures would have some bottlenecks in their own environment because they are backhauling traffic from their London office to New York and then exiting from New York they're going back to London so all this stuff right so we took the position of really presenting thousand eyes as a way to get transparency into this ecosystem and we we believe that if we take this position if we want to help both sides not just the enterprise companies we want to help sales force we want to have enterprise companies and just really present it as a means of finding a common truth of what is actually going on it works so much better right so there wasn't really sort of one killer application but we found that anything that was real-time so if you think about video based applications or any sort of real-time communications based so the web access of the world they were just very sensitive to network conditions and internet conditions same with things that are moving a lot of data back and forth so these applications like Salesforce office 365 WebEx they just are demanding applications on the infrastructure and even if they're run great if the infrastructure doesn't it doesn't give you a great experience right and and and you guys made a really interesting insight to its and it's an all your literature it's it's a really a core piece of what you're about and you know when you owned it you could diagnose it and hopefully you could fix it or call somebody else to fix it but when you don't own it it's a very different game and as you guys talked about it's really about finding the evidence or everyone's not pointing fingers back in and forth a to validate where the actual problem is and then to also help those people fix the problem that you don't have direct control of so it's a very different you know kind of requirement to get things fixed when they have to get fixed yeah and the first aspect of that is visibility so as an example right you generally don't have a problem going from one part of your house to another part of your house because you own the whole place you know exactly what sits between the two rooms that you're trying to get to you don't you don't have run into surprises but when you're going from let's say Palo Alto to San Francisco and you have two options you can take 101 or 280 you need to know what you expect to see before you get on one of those options right and so the Internet is very similar you have these environments that you have no idea what to expect and if you don't see that with the right level of granularity that you would in your own environments you would make decisions that you have you know you have no control over right the visibility is really important but it's giving that lens like making it feel like a google maps of the internet that gives you the power to look at these environments like it's your private network that's the hard part right and then so what you guys have done as I understand is you've deployed sensors basically all over the Internet all at an important pops yeah and a point in public clouds and important enterprises etc so that you now have a view of what's going on it I can have that view inside my enterprise by leveraging your infrastructures that accurate correct and so this is where the notion of being able to set up this sort of data collection environment is really difficult and so we have created all of this over years so enterprise companies consumer companies they can leverage this infrastructure to get instant results so there's zero implementation in what right but the key to that is also understanding the internet itself and so this is where a research background comes in play because we studied we did years of research on actually modeling the Internet so we know what strategic locations to put these probes that to give good coverage we know how to fill the gaps and so it's not just a numbers game it's how you deploy them where you deploy them and knowing that connectivity we've created this massive infrastructure now that can give you eyes on the internet and we leverage all of their data together so if let's say hypothetically you know AT&T has an issue that same issue is impacting multiple customers through all our different measurements so it's like ways if you're using ways to get from point A to point B if Waze was just used by your family members and nobody else it would give you completely useless information values in that collective insight right and then now you also will start to be able to leverage ml and AI and you know having all that data and apply just more machine learning to it to even better get in get out in front of problems I imagine as much as as is to be able to identify so that's a really interesting point right so the first thing we have to tackle is making a complex data set really accessible and so we have a lot of focus into essentially getting insights out of it using techniques that are smarter than the brute-force techniques you get insights out and then present it in manners that it's accessible and digestible and then as we look into the next stages we're going to bring more and more things like learning and so on to take it even further right it's funny the accessible and digestible piece I was just had a presentation the other day and there was a woman from a CSO at a big bank and she talked about you know the problem of false positives and in in early days I mean their biggest issues was just too much data coming in from too many sensors and and too many false positives to basically bury people so they didn't have time to actually service the things that are a priority so you know a nice presentation of a whole lot of data makes a big difference to make it action it is absolutely true and now that the example I'll give you is oftentimes when you think about companies that operate with a strong network core like we do they're in the weeds right which is important but what is really important is tying that intelligence to business impact and so the entire product portfolio we've built it's all about business impact user experience and then going into connecting the dots or the network side so we've seen some really interesting events and as much as we know the internet every day I wake up and I see something that surprises me right we've had customers that have done migrations to cloud that have gone horribly wrong right so we the latest when I was troubleshooting with the customer was where we saw they migrated from there on from data center to Amazon and the user experience was 10x worse than what it was on their own data of the app once they moved to Amazon okay and what had happened there was the whole migration to Amazon included the smart sort of CDN where they were fronting your traffic at local sites but the traffic was going all over the place so from if a user was in London instead of going to the London instance of Amazon they were going to Atlanta or they were going to Los Angeles and so the whole migration created a worse user experience and you don't have that lens because you don't see that in a net portion of that right that's why we like we caught it instantly and we were able to showcase that hey this is actually a really bad migration and it's not that Amazon is bad it's just it's been implemented incorrectly right so yeah fix these things and those are all configurations all Connecticut which is so very easy all the issues you hear about with with Amazon often go back to miss configuration miss settings suboptimal leaving something open so to have that visibility makes a huge impact and it's more challenging because you're trying to configure different components of this environment right so you have a cloud component you have the Internet component your own network you have your own firewalls and you used to have this closed environment now it's hybrid it involves multiple parties multiple skill sets so a lot of things can really go wrong I think I think you guys you guys crystallized very cleanly is kind of the inside out and outside in approach both you know a as as a service consumer yeah right I'm using Salesforce I'm using maybe s3 I'm using these things that I need and I want to focus on that and I want to have a good experience I want my people to be able to get on their Salesforce account and book business but but don't forget the other way right because as people are experiencing my service that might be connecting through and aggregating many other services along the way you know I got to make sure my customer experience is big and you guys kind of separate those two things out and really make sure people are focusing on both of them correct and it's the same technology but you can use that for your production services which are revenue generating or you can use that for your employee productivity the visibility that you provide is is across a common stack but on the production side for example because of the way the internet works right your job is not just to ensure a great performance in user experience your job is also to make sure that people are actually reaching your site and so we've seen several instances where because of the way internet works somebody else could announce that their google.com and they could suck a bunch of traffic from the internet and this happens quite routinely in the notion of what is now known as DP hijacks or sometimes DNS hijacks and the the one that I remember very well is when there was the small ISP in Nigeria that announced the identity of the address block for Google and that was picked up by China Telecom which was picked up by a Russian telco and now you have Russia China and Nigeria in the path for traffic to Google which is actually not even going to Google's right those kinds of things are very possible because of the way the internet how fast those things kind of rise up and then get identified and then get shut off is this hours days weeks in this kind of example so it really depends because if you are let's say you were Google in this situation right you're not seeing a denial of service attack to your data centers in fact you're just not seeing traffic running in because somebody else is taking it away right it's like identity theft right like I somebody takes your identity you wouldn't get a mail in your inbox saying hey your identity has been taken back so easy you have to find it some other way and usually it's the signal by the time you realize that your identity has been stolen you have a nightmare ahead of you alright so you got some specific news a great great conversation you know it's super insightful to talk to people that are in the weeds of how all the stuff works but today you have a new a new announcement some new and new offering so tell us about what's going on so we have a couple of announcements today and coming back to this notion of the cloud being a new data center the internet your new network right two things were announcing today is one we're announcing our second version of the cloud then benchmark performance comparison and what this is about is really helping people understand the nuances the performance difference is the architecture differences between Amazon Google as your IBM cloud and Alibaba cloud so as you make decisions you actually understand what is the right solution for me from a performance architecture standpoint so that's one it's a fascinating report we found some really interesting findings that surprised us as well and so we're releasing that we're also touching on the internet component by releasing a new product which we call as internet insights and that is giving you the power to actually look at the internet more holistically like you own the entire internet so that is really something we're all excited about because it's the first time that somebody can actually see the Internet see all these connections see what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely owned the environment so are people using information like that to dynamically you know kind of reroute the way that they handle their traffic or is it more just kind of a general health you know kind of health overview you know how much of it do I have control over how much should I have control over and how much of I just need to know what's going on so yeah so it just me great question so the the best way I can answer that is what I heard CIO say in a CIO forum we were presenting at where they were a customer it's a large financial services customer and somebody asked the CIO what was the value of thousand I wasn't the way he explained it which was really fascinating was phase one of thousand eyes when we started using it was getting rid of technical debt because we would keep identifying issues which we could fix but we could fix the underlying root cause so it doesn't happen again and that just cleared the technical debt that we had made our environment much better and then we started to optimize the environments to just get better get more proactive so that's a good way to think about it when you think about our customers most of the times they're trying to just not have their hair on fire right that's the first step right once we can help them with that then they go on to tuning optimizing and so on but knowing what is going on is really important for example if you're providing a.com sir is like cube the cube comm right it's its life and you're providing it from your data center here you have two up streams like AT&T and Verizon and Verizon is having issues you can turn off that connection and let all your customers back live having a full experience if you know that's the issues right right the remediation is actually quite quite a few times it's very straightforward if you know what you're trying to solve right so do you think on the internet insights this is going to be used just more for better remediation or do you think it's it's kind of a step forward and getting a little bit more proactive and a little bit more prescriptive and getting out ahead of the issues or or can you because these things are kind of ephemeral and come and go so I think it's all of the about right so one the things that the internet insights will help you is with planning because as you expand into new geo so if you're a company that's launching a service in a new market right that immediately gives you a landscape of who do you connect with where do you host right as now you can actually visualize the entire network how do you reach your customer base the best right so that's the planning aspect and if you plan right you would actually reduce a lot of the trouble that you see so we had this customer of ours that was deploying Estevan Software Defined one in there a she offices and they used thousand eyes to evaluate two different ISPs that they were looking at one of them had this massive time-of-day congestion so every time every day at nine o'clock the latency would get doubled because of congestion it's common in Asia the other did not have time of day congestion and with that view they could implement the entire Estevan on the ice pea that actually worked well for them so planning is important part of this and then the other aspect of this is the thing that folks often don't realize is Internet is not static it's constantly changing so you know AT&T might connect to Verizon this way it connects it differently it connects to somebody else and so having that live map as you're troubleshooting customer experience issues so let's say you have customers from China that are having a ton of issues all of a sudden or you see a drop of traffic from China now you can relate that information of where these customers are coming from with our view of the health of the Chinese Internet and which specific ISPs are having issues so that's the kind of information merger that simply doesn't happen today right promote is a fascinating discussion and we could go on and on and on but unfortunately do not have all day but I really like what you guys are doing the other thing I just want to close on which which I thought was really interesting is you know a lot of talk about digital transformation we always talk about digital transformation everybody wants the digital transfer eyes it but you really boiled it down into really three create three critical places that you guys play the digital experience in terms of what what the customers experience you know getting to cloud everybody wants to get to cloud someone can argue how much and what percentage but everybody's going to cloud and then as you said in this last example the MA when as you connect all these remote sites and you guys have a play in all of those places so whatever you thought about in 2010 that worked out pretty well thank you and we had a really strong vision but kudos to the team that we have in place that has stretched it and really made the most out of that so excited good job and thanks for for stopping by sharing the story thank you for hosting always a fun to be here absolutely all right well he's mo and I'm Jeff you're watching the cube when our power out the studio's having a cute conversation thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

(energetic classical music) >> Welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman. Here with the CEO and co-founder of ThousandEyes Mohit Lad. Thanks so much for joining us here in our Palo Alto studio. >> Thanks too. I'm excited to be here. >> Alright, we always love when we get the founders on. So before we get into the company, take us back. What was the why, what were you seeing in the marketplace, and bring our audience a little bit about your background in the team and what you bring to the table. >> Sounds good. So, my background, personally, is I finished my PhD at TCLA and studied computer science, focused more on the Internet. And one of the reasons we focused-- my co-founder was my colleague as well-- and one of the reasons we focused on studying the Internet was we believed that it was going to dramatically transform our lives, and the quality of our life eventually will be highly dependent on the quality of the Internet. So that's essentially the reason we focused on researching on the Internet, on connectivity and performance. And then as we came out of grad school, and looked at the market, it was clear to us that the ship of the enterprise was dramatically changing because of the adoption of cloud, and SaaS, and infrastructure of service, and that the Internet was going to be a key component of what an enterprise looks like, and it was a black box. So our thesis behind starting the company was to really help companies understand how to manage Internet-centric WAN environments, which is what today's world looks like. >> Okay, for people that don't know ThousandEyes give us how long's the company been in business, the state of the product, how many customers you have, funding, and the like. Give us a snapshot. >> Yeah, so we started in 2010. We had an odd start in many ways because we didn't start with venture funding, so started with a small national SAANS foundation grant. And the result of that was we were very focused on customers from the early days. So for the first two years, very small, about three or four people, and then raised our first round funding in 2012 through Sequoia Capital. As of today, we're about 220 plus employees headquartered in San Francisco. And we split our engineering between San Francisco and London, so these are the two hubs. We also have offices in Austin and New York. And in terms of customers, close to 500 customers at this point of time, a heavy concentration in the mid to high end of the market, so we have more than 50 Fortune 500s, a large concentration of the top financials, and really what excites us is the fact that we're helping decode some really, really complex environments that are becoming more and more complex. >> Yeah, I loved that starting point. You find, in the networking world, there's a lot. It's government, it's scientific, need to understand this. Internet's been a distributor of architecture since the early days, but it's been going through a lot of transformations. Heck, even the TV show Silicon Valley's even talking about a "new Internet." And it's so funny for me to watch that because I'm like, oh wait, I'm talking to the people in here in Silicon Valley that are actually building that with blockchain and decentralization and the like, so its mirroring what's happening in the real world. >> Yeah, and the thing that people sometimes don't realize is the Internet was not built for enterprises. And I tell customers that when you're going to Office 365, when you're going to Amazon, you're relying on the same Internet that your kids are using to watch cat videos. And that's what's carrying your production traffic, and it's really difficult for enterprises to actually make sense of what's slowing things down, where the risk is, what's breaking, and that's where we really help companies understand and take control and thrive in these connected environments. >> It was funny, years ago we used to talk about "the consumerization of IT," and what people use at home will work its way into the enterprise, but you're right. What do businesses need that's different? ThousandEyes has, I believe you call it "Network Intelligence." How is that different than the public standard Internet that you like, and tell us a little bit about what your secret sauce is and what you're bringing to the customers. >> If you think about enterprises from 20 years ago, all the applications would be on the data centers, and it would be a pretty closed environment connected through MPLS connections and so on. So you could deploy the standard APM technologies on the data center to understand what's going on with the applications. And now if you fast forward to today, when you're using something like Office 365 or SalesForce or Workday, or so on, the applications don't sit on your premises anymore, and your network is not just your priority network, but a large portion, in fact, majority of your environment is actually the public Internet. So what is needed for you to thrive in this environment is the ability to actually understand what you depend on and be able to map out not just the user experience of applications that you don't control anymore, but the underlying factors that are impacting that application. And so what we're doing is essentially creating a huge, humongous data set on public performance of the Internet, of different components of the Internet. And we do this with some tremendous data collection but also a lot of smart heuristics that we've built on top, which makes sense of it. And then we marry this data with data we also collect from inside the enterprise. So what we're creating is this environment of a seamless network, and take off this notion of networks today are borderless, right? They really don't have any sort of borders around where the edges and so on. And what we're doing is making sure that customers can look at these hybrid environments as if it's their own private network. >> It's interesting, I think back, when we moved from the client/server era to now, the SaaS environments, like, oh, it'll just magically all work anywhere. I think back to Citrix, has a very heavy networking piece to be able to make those work anywhere. What needs to be fixed, what's kind of under the covers that most people don't understand that in a SaaS environment, solutions like yours are helping to make sure that I can have the promise of anywhere, any device, any cloud? >> Yeah, so a few different things. It's not just the applications are moving to cloud, SaaS. The users are also starting to be a lot more remote and mobile, and what that creates is an environment where a user may be unhappy with the performance of Office 365, and IT's responsible for solving that issue when the traffic is entirely bypassing the corporate environment. So it's going from a Starbucks coffee shop to Office 365 servers, and that's the environment that you're responsible for even though you don't physically control that. And as you think about that, the way we thought about the solution was not just essentially give people visibility into these complex environments, but also create an ecoystem where all these SaaS companies that you rely on as an enterprise are ThousandEyes customers. And we help them decode the Internet, and to large extent, deal with the Internet when they're delivering an application. But as an enterprise, if you're using one of these top SaaS applications, by using ThousandEyes you can not only understand the performance, but you can speak the same language with them when you are trying to troubleshoot and come into a consistent understanding of what the performance is. >> So, you're working with the SaaS providers, you're working with the enterprise, sounds like you're working with both. If I'm an enterprise CIO, and okay, yes, I'm pushing my people to work remote and everything like that, I can't worry about 10,000 employees and the network that they had. Help explain how that works. >> Right, so the requirements of a solution for today's world is beyond just giving visibility. Even if you rewind to the world from 20 years ago, you would find that when there's an issue, there's a lot of finger-pointing going on between the server team, the app team, the network team, and that finger-pointing has become worse in a multi-tenant environment, especially as you use third parties for your applications. So as an example from a few weeks ago, Amazon had a major outage in the East coast. And not only did it take down applications that were hosted on Amazon, but we had customers that were surprised that their applications were not working, and the reason they were not working was they were making, for example, API calls, where the API provider was hosted in Amazon. So they did not even realize the dependencies that they were bringing into their environment. So we had a situation where if we're using a messaging service, and I can't message the person sitting in front of me, because it's going through the Amazon environment. And so its really important in this ecoystem that we as a technology provider create something that helps you connect with each other, rather than just be a siloed solution and that's a huge part of our value chain is to make sure that we can provide you the technology that helps you see through different environments, but also establish good communications back and forth. >> Mohit, networking as an industry has tended to be one of the slower moving pieces of our market. The WAN has been going through such a transformation. You launched in 2010, from 2010 to now 2018, cloud is a much bigger piece, SDWAN wasn't part of our vocabulary. How are thing different now than when you launched the company and how has that impacted your product and your engagement with customers? >> That's a great question. One of the things that I see a lot is this shift in, at least some of the leading customers that we have, a shift towards the notion of network as a core competency. And what I mean by this is when you had environments which were static, so, you're familiar with Visio. People would use Visio to do their network topology maps. They would not change for five years, or maybe three years, depending on the customers. But if you do a Visio map of your extended environment today, it's invalid one second after it's done because the Internet is constantly changing. And so the notion of this network being a static thing is not valid anymore, and companies that need to thrive have to really treat the network as a core competency--and by network, it's not just a network, it's a skill set around networks. Coming back to the trends, the trends that you're seeing are essentially being driven by the fact that you do need to take control of the network, you do need to actually manage it, much more than you used to manage it in the past, and that will give you an edge when it comes to performance to cloud applications, better connectivities, sometimes in situations like SDVAN, it's around reducing cost through MPLS links. >> You've got kind of opposing forces when you look at that. Networking should be a core competency, but don't we have to have to have more intelligence in the network? Leverage all the analytics: machine learning and AI should manage that, 'cause it's changing so fast I can't wait for a person to do that. How do you balance that, how do your customers look at that, and how's that fit into your product? >> So absolutely right, I think networking should be a core competency but networking is not just about connecting devices and using wires to connect things. It's around really understanding what's happening, even understanding what the network actually looks like, because that's something you don't control. There's a lot of focus that we put on analytics, and one of the notions that we've developed over the many years is this notion of network intelligence. And the idea is pretty straightforward. When you're using an Amazon or an Azure, you're going through the same public environments that other customers are going through, and what we do is we essentially mine our entire data set, really understand what are the aspects of the network that are affecting multiple customers, and bridge that into a single cohesive view that is beneficial for you guys. So for example, if you have connectivity issues from the offices here at the CUBE to an Amazon, you would not only know whether it's just you, but you would have more perspective on, hey, this is a larger segment of the customer base of ThousandEyes is actually going through an issue, and here's where the specific issues are. So one of the benefits that the ThousandEyes ecosystem brings to customers is every customer that we add creates more value in the data set. >> How will some of the big waves coming like 5G, IoT, all of the Edge pieces, does that tie into the offering that you have? >> Ultimately, the common denominator for all of this is the Internet, right? Some of these technologies are more towards the last mile, but they have to go through the same core, the Internet, and it's really interesting because one of the user events we did in London a couple weeks ago, we had one of our customers, a large manufacturing company, and they were talking about how they were drilling in Texas, but the drilling was controlled through a site in Belgium, and all of this only worked because the connectivity was reliable. So they were using ThousandEyes to actually ensure that the connectivity between their giant 50 ton driller was maintained to their headquarters. So those are the kinds of applications that, we didn't build it for this specific application, but the fact is we find new ways that ThousandEyes is being used, essentially because there's more and more reliance on the Internet to make things work. >> Any other customer use cases that you want to highlight? Any customer case studies you can share? >> Yeah, so we primarily help with very broadly two sorts of use cases. So one aspect is if you are providing an online service that really depends on the Internet, has a global audience, or even a large regional audience, we help those customers really understand the user experience across the Internet and understand what parts of the Internet may be impacting the applications. So think about all the major SaaS companies that use ThousandEyes, all the major retail banks, they have an online asset that they care about, that's one use case. And then the other use case is enterprise companies. So this is everything from oil and gas, to tech enterprises, to financials. They depend more and more on the Internet when they are going into Cloud and SaaS, and for them it's really unnerving when they look at the environment they're getting into and have no visibility into this black box. So that's where we provide them intelligence into this extended environment and help them understand why a user may be having issues to Office 365 or WebEx, or all of the WYS or IP solutions that are also more and more Internet dependent. >> Mohit, how are your customers doing with the rapid pace of change here? You've talked about networking is a skillset. Finding the right skillset and training people up has always been a big challenge, but what are you seeing in the customers you're talking to? How are they doing these days? >> So the customer's very, depending on the maturity and the transition that they're going through, I still find in a lot of regions that the cloud is still new, SaaS is still new, and we're in many ways in a bubble in the value. Things happen pretty quickly here, but as you step outside you realize that some of the companies are ready to scorse and still making their first strides into SaaS and cloud, and one of the things we help these sets of customers with is essentially helping them plan towards that move. So if you have a large deployment, if you're making a large shift in your infrastructure, even, you think about, let's say a situation where I want to get rid of MPLS, I want to rely on direct Internet circuits, that's a big change, and we can help you measure the performance of MPLS performance of Internet and help you make that data-driven decision. Coming back to the notion of how our customer is doing, there are customers that have realized that network skillsets and engineering around that is core, so they invest a lot of efforts into building that core mindset. There are customers that are starting to build that, and there are customers that are looking at partners to bring that expertise in. So these customers will never build a core set of function around networking, but they look at partners, managed service providers that can bring that expertise into the environments. >> Last thing I want to ask you. You're talking about global networks, we haven't talked about security. Governance and compliance is usually some of the biggest challenges that we are having. The macroeconomic challenges of the Internet. We interviewed the president of ICANN a few years ago, and he gave a warning to our audience that said we might not have one Internet in this near future. We already are starting to see a fragmented Internet, and that could be a huge challenge. Security, governance, compliance, big topics here, but maybe bring us home on that as to what you're seeing and how that affects. >> So one of the things the Internet does, it connects people, right? And when it connects people it also makes it easy for the bad guys to reach the good guys, and so things that concern our audiences in terms of security. The way the Internet works, it's very easy for somebody to announce your address space, for example, and this has happened on several occasions, which creates a denial of service, a different denial of service where all the traffic would go to a party, which is announcing your address space, but not you. So there's all these issues where DNS mapping could be changed, the routing could be changed, and our DDoS attack that happens takes a lot of the upstream environment that you have out of the equation. And so as every day passes, there's more and more things that are being discovered in terms of how attacks can be generated, and how organizations can be brought down. So one example I'll give you which is very specific I've seen is in denial-of-service attacks, this is starting to become pretty routine in today's world. It started with the solutions being on-prem solutions that would detect the volume of traffic and try to filter traffic, and then it moved to using cloud-based solutions, because the volume of traffic would be so high, that you could not actually do this on your end. So you use these cloud-based solutions. You would turn them on when you would detect an attack, and then turn them off. And the financials in particular were always under attack, so now they've gone to a model where they're always turning these things on. A DDoS mediation service, which is based in the cloud. And what has happened, this is a really interesting phenomenon that we've seen, is, let's say, a particular bank, let's say Bank of America is under attack. The same provider that's protecting Bank of America is also protecting Wells Fargo and JP Morgan, and that infrastructure under stress could mean that Wells Fargo could actually have availability issues even though they are not under attack. So one of the things we see in the Internet is this notion of collateral damage, where you may not be the actual victim or target of an attack, but because of shared infrastructure, you're collateral damage. These are the scenarios which place more and more of an importance on gathering this intelligence on what's going on in the Internet. >> Mohit Lad, really appreciate you coming to help share with our audience everything that's happening in the WAN, network intelligence, multi-cloud, global environment world. Look forward to catching up with you more in the future. This has been a CUBE Conversation, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching the CUBE. (energetic classical music)