from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host still minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and this is a cube conversation from our Boston area studio happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest on the program but from knit scout who we've been digging into the concept of visibility without borders dr. Vikram Saxena who's with the office of the CTO from the for mention net scout thank you so much for joining us thanks to it thanks for having me all right dr. Zana before we get into kind of your role why don't you go back give us a little bit about you know your background you and I have some shared background comm we both work for some of the arms of you know Ma Bell that's right back in the day yeah you work a little bit more senior and yeah you know probably a lot more patents than I have my current count is still sure happy to do that you're right I started in 82 which was two years before the breakup of Marbella so you know and then everything started happening right around that time so yeah I started in Bell Labs you know stayed there close to 20 years did lot of the early pioneering work on packet switching before the days of internet frame relay all of that happened it was a pretty exciting time I was there building up we built up the AT&T business from scratch to a billion dollars in the IP space you know in a voice company that was always challenging so and then I moved on to do startups in the broadband space the two of them moved to the Boston area and then moved on to play the CTO role and public companies sonnez networks Tellabs and then you know came to an EPS card about five years ago yeah you know I I love talking about you know some of those incubators of innovation though I you know historically speaking just you know threw off so much technology that's right been seeing so much the media lately about you know the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 that's so many things that came out of NASA Bell Labs was one of those places that helped inspire me to study engineering that's you know definitely got me on my career but here we are 2019 that's you're still you know working into with some of these telcos and how they're all you know dealing with this wave of cloud and yeah I know the constant change there so bring us inside you know what's your role inside net Scout that office of the CTO yes so net Scout is in the business of you know mining Network data and and what we excel at is extracting what we call actionable intelligence from network traffic which we use the term smart data but essentially my role is really to be the bridge between our technology group and the customers you know bring out understand the problems the challenges that our customers are facing and then work with the teams to build the right product to you know to fit in to the current environment okay one of our favorite things on the cube is you know talking to customers they're going through their transformation that's what you talk about the enterprise you know digital transformation that's what we think there's more than just the buzzword there yeah I've talked to financial institutions manufacturing you know you name it out there if it's a company that's not necessarily born in the cloud they are undergoing that digital transformation bring us inside you know your customer base that this telcos the service providers you know most of them have a heavy tech component to what they're doing but you know are they embracing digital transformation what what does it mean for them so you know as you said it's it's a big term that catches a lot of things but in one word if I described for the telcos it's all about agility if you look at the telco model historically it has been on a path where services get rolled out every six months year multiple years you know not exactly what we call an agile environment compared to today you know but when the cloud happened it changed the landscape because cloud not only created a new way of delivering services but also changed expectations on how fast things can happen and that created high expectations on the customer side which in turn started putting pressure on the on the telcos and and the service providers to become as agile as cloud providers and and and as you know the the network which is really the main asset of a service provider was built around platforms that were not really designed to be programmable you know so they came in with hardwired services and they would change at a very low timescale and building around that is the whole software layer of OS SPSS which over time became very monolithic very slow to change so coupling the network and the software layer created a very slow moving environment so this is what's really causing the change to go to a model where the networks can be programmable which essentially means moving from a hardware centric model to a software centric model where services can be programmed on-demand and created on the fly and maybe sometimes even under the control of the customers and layering on top of that changing the OS s infrastructure to make it more predictive make it more actionable and driven by advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to make this entire environment extremely dynamic in agile so that's kind of what we are seeing in the marketplace yeah I totally agree that that agility is usually the first thing put forward I I need to be faster yeah it used to be you know faster better cheaper now like a faster faster faster I can actually help compensate for some of those other pieces there of course service riders usually you know very conscious on the cost of things there because if they can lower their cost they can usually of course make them more competitive and pass that along to their ultimate consumers you know bring us inside that you know you mentions this change to software that's going on you know there are so many waves of change going on there everything from you know you talk about IOT and edge computing yeah it's a big you know massive role at a 5g that ya even gets talked about in the general press that these days and at government states they're so you know where are you know your customers today what are some of the critical challenge they have and yeah you know where is that kind of monitoring observability that that kind of piece fit in so so good so let me give to backdrop points first of all you mentioned cost so they are always very cost-conscious trying to drive it down and the reason for that is the traditional services have been heavily commoditized you know voice texting video data they've been commoditized so the customers worn the same stuff cheaper and cheaper and cheaper all the time right so that puts a pressure on margins and reducing cost but now you the industry is at a point where I think the telcos need to grow the top line you know that's a challenge because you can always reduce cost but at some point you get to a point of diminishing returns so now I think the challenge is how do they grow their top line you know so they can become healthier again in that context and that leads to whole notion of what services they need to innovate on so it's all about once you have a programmable Network and a software that is intelligent and smart that becomes a platform for delivering new services so this is where you know you see on the enterprise side Sdn Enterprise IOT all these services are coming now using technologies of software-defined networking network function virtualization and 5g as you mentioned is the next generation of wireless technology that is coming on board right now and that opens up the possibility for the first time to new things dimensions come into play first not only a consumer centric focus which was always there but now opening it up to enterprises and businesses and IOT and secondly fixed broadband right the the the era where telcos used to either drive copper or fiber slow cumbersome takes a lot of time right and the cable guys have already done that with coaxial cable so they need to go faster and faster means use Wireless and finally with 5g you have a technology that can deliver fixed broadband which means all the high definition video voice data and other services like AR VR into the home so it's opening up a new possibility rather than having a separate fixed network and a separate wireless network for the first time they can collapse that into one common platform and go after both fixed and mobile and both consumers and enterprise force yeah we said what one of the big topics of conversation at Cisco live was at San Diego just a short time ago it was 5g and then it you know Wi-Fi six the next generation of that because I'm still going to need inside my building you know for the companies but the 5g holds the promise - give me - so much faster bandwidth so much dense for environment I guess some of the concerns I hear out there and maybe you can tell me kind of where we are and where the telcos fit in is you know 5g from a technology standpoint we understand where it is but that rollout is going to take time yes you know it's great to say you're going to have this dense and highly available thing but you know that's gonna start the same place all the previous generations all right it's the place where actually we don't have bad connectivity today it's you know it's in the urban areas it's where we have dense populations you know sometimes it's thrown out there o5g is gonna be great for edge and IOT and it's like well you know we don't have balloons and planes you know and you know the you know the towers everywhere so where are we with that rollout of 5g what side of timeframes are your customer base looking at as to where that where that goes to play so I think from what I'm seeing in the marketplace I think there is a less of a focus on building out ubiquitous coverage because you know when the focus is on consumers you need coverage because they're everywhere right but I think where they are focusing on because they want to create new revenue a new top-line growth they're focusing more on industry verticals IOT now that allows you to build out networks and pockets of air your customers are because enterprises are always focused in the top cities and you know heck top metro areas so before you make it available for consumers if you get an opportunity to build out at least in the major metropolitan area an infrastructure where you're getting paid as you're building it out because you're signing up this enterprise customers who are willing to pay for these IOT services you get paid you get to build out the infrastructure and then slowly as new applications emerge I think you can make it widely available for consumers I think the challenge on consumer side is the smart phones have been tapped out you know and and people are not going to get that excited about 5g just to use the next-gen I found right so there it has to be about new applications and services and things that people talk about always on the horizon are a are we are and think like that but they are out there they're not there today because it device has to come on board that becomes mass consumable and exciting to customers so while the industry is waiting for that to happen I think there's a great opportunity right now to turn up services for enterprise verticals in the IOT space because the devices are ready and everybody because enterprises are going through their own digital transformation they want to be in a connected world right so they're putting pressure on telcos to connect all their devices into the network and there is a monetization opportunity there so I think what the carriers are going to do is sign up verticals whether it's transportation health care so if they sign up a bunch of hospitals they're going to deploy infrastructure in that area to sign up hospitals if they're going to sign up manufacturing they're going to build their infrastructure in those areas where they're right so by that model you can build out a 5g network that is concentrated on their customer base and then get to ubiquitous coverage later when the consumer applications come yeah so I like that a lot because you know when I think back if we've learned from the sins of the past it used to be if we build it they will come let's you know dig trenches across all the highways and with as much fiber as we can and then the dot-com burst happens and we have all of this capacity that we can't give away yeah what it sounds like you're describing is really a service centric view yes I've got customers and I've got applications and I'm going to build to that and then I can build off of that yeah piece there could talk a little bit about that focus and you know where yeah where your customers are going yeah so maybe just likely before that what I want to talk about the distributed nature of the 5g network so you mentioned edge right so one of the things that are happening when you want to deliver low latency services or high bandwidth services you need to push things closer to the edge as you know when cloud started it's more in the what we call the core you know the large data centers the hyper scale data centers where applications are are being deployed now but when you demand low latency let's say sub 15 millisecond 10 millisecond latency that has to be pushed much more closer to the customer now this is what's for saying the edge cloud deployment in 5g and then what that does is it also forces you to distribute functionality you know everything is not centralized in the core but it's distributed in the edge and the code the control plane maybe in the core but the user plane moves to the edge so that changes the entire flow of traffic and services in a 5g Network they are no longer centralized which means it becomes more challenging to be able to manage and assure these services in a highly distributed telco cloud environment which has this notion of edge and core now on top of that if you say that you know this is all about top-line growth and customer satisfaction then your focus on operationalizing these services has to change from in network centric view to a service centric view because in the past as you know when we were both in Bell Labs in AT&T you know we were pretty much you know focused on the network you know focused on the data from the network the network elements the switches and the routers and all of that and making sure that the network is healthy now that is good but it's not sufficient to guarantee that the services and the service level agreements for customers are being met so what you need to do is focus at the service layer much more so than you were doing it in the past so that changes the paradigm on what data you need to use how you want to use it and how do you stitch together this view in a highly distributed environment and do it in real-time and do it all very quickly so the customers don't see the pain if anything breaks and actually be more proactive in lot of cases be more predictive and take corrective actions before the impact services so this is the challenge and and clearly from a net Scout point of view I think we are right in the center of this hurricane and you know given the history we sort of have figured out on how to do this yeah you know the networking has a long history of we've got a lot of data we've got all of these flows and things change but right exactly as you said understanding what happened at that application that is we've been really tie to make sure it's just IT sitting on the side but IT driving that business that's my application those data flows so yeah you maybe expound a little bit more net Scouts fit there yeah and you know what why it's so critical for what customers need today yeah happy to do that so so if you look at what are the sources of data that you actually can use and and what you should use so basically they fall into three buckets what I call first is what I call infrastructure data which is all about data you get from hypervisors we switches they're telling you more about how the infrastructure is behaving where you need to add more horsepower CPU is memory storage and so on so that is very infrastructure centric the second one is from network elements you know what the DNS servers give you DHCP servers what your routers and switches are giving you the firewalls are giving you and they are also in a way telling you more about what the network elements are seeing so there's a little bit of a hybrid between infrastructure and a service layer component but the problem is that data is it's very vendor dependent it's highly fragmented across there because there's no real standards how to create this data so there is telemetry data there are sis logs and they all vendors do it what they think is best for them so the challenge then becomes on the service provider side and how do you stitch together because service is an end-to-end construct or an application it starts at a at a at a user and goes to a server and you need to be able to get that holistic view n2n so the most appropriate data that net scout feels is what we call the wire data or the traffic data is actually looking at packets themselves because they give you the most direct knowledge about how the service is behaving how it's performing and not only that you can actually predict problems as opposed to react to problems because you can trend this data you can apply machine learning to this data and be able to say what might go wrong and be able to take corrective action so we feel that extracting the right contextual information relevant implicit information timely information in a vendor independent way in a way that is universally if we available from edge to core those are the attributes of wire data and we excel in processing that at the source in real-time and converting all of that into actionable intelligence that is very analytics and automation friendly so this is our strength what that allows us to do is as they are going through this transition between 4G and 5g between physical and virtual across fixed and mobile networks you know you can go through this transition if you have it stitched together end to end view that crosses these boundaries or borders as we call it visibility without borders and in this context your operations people never lose insight into what's going on with their customer applications and behavior so they can go through this migration with confidence that they will not negatively impact their user experience by using our technology yeah you know we've thrown out these terms intelligence and automation for decades yes in our industry but if you look at these hybrid environments and all of these changes come out if an operator doesn't have tools like this they can't keep up they can go so I need to have that machine learning I have to have those tools that can help me intelligently attack these pieces otherwise there's no way I can do it yeah and one point there is you know it's like garbage in garbage out if you don't get the right data you can have the most sophisticated machine learning but it's not going to predict the right answer so the quality of data is very important just as the quality of your analytics in your algorithms so we feel that the combination of right data and the right analytics is how you're going to get advantage of you know accurate predictions and automation around that whole suite okay love that right data right information right delusion why don't want to give you right analytics I want to give you the final word final takeaways for your customers today so I think we are in a very exciting time in the industry you know 5g as a technology is a probably the first generation technology which is coming on board where there is so much focus on on things like security and and new applications and so on and and I think it's an exciting time for service providers to take advantage of this platform and then be able to use it to deliver new services and ultimately see their top lines grow which we all want in the industry because if they are successful then via suppliers you know do well you know so I think it's a pretty exciting time and and vyas net scout are happy to be in this spot right now and to see and help our customers go to go through this transition alright dr. Vikram Singh Saxena thank you so much for joining us sharing with us everything that's happening in your space and it glad to see the excitement still with the journey that you've been on thank you Stu happy to be here all right and as always check out the cubed on net for all of our content I'm Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching the cube [Music]