>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's the Cube. With digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our commudity partners. >> Okay, Welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We are, coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with our continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 digital this year, like everything in 2020 but we're excited to welcome back to The Cube. He's been on a number of times, he's Russ Currie. The vice president enterprise strategy for Netscout systems. Russ great to see you. >> Great to see you, Jeff. Thank you. >> Absolutely. So before we jump into there's so(laughs), so many things going on in 2020. What I do want to do is, is reflect back a little bit. You were first on The Cube at AWS reinvent 2017. So it's been about three years. And I remember, one of the lines you had said, I believe that was your guys' first, AWS show as well. So I wonder if you could reflect on kind of how the world has changed in terms of your business, and the importance of AWS and public cloud within the infrastructure systems of your clients. >> Yeah, well, it was interesting, right? We were just getting our feet wet at that point, and had just introduced some of our technology for use in AWS, and it was kind of a interesting little adventure. So we were looking at it and saying, okay where's this going to lead us? And ultimately now we're just really waist deep in it, and really having a great partnership with AWS, and delivering new technologies, new capabilities, and our customer base also is becoming so much more reliant on public cloud in particular AWS and the services that they can provide. So as we've gone and they've gone it's been a journey that we've taken together, and it's been quite, fruitful and exciting. >> Right, right. And it really reinforces this concept of I think you'd mentioned it before, a blended, you know kind of a blended infrastructure approach. So there's a lot of conversations about public cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud, et cetera, et cetera. But at the, at the end of the day from a customer perspective, as you've mentioned it's really kind of a blended network, right. And it's really application centric, and you put the applications where those applications need to be to be the most appropriate, and that might even change over time from, from test dev to really roll out to, to scale. So you're seeing that consistency. Consistency, >> Absolutely. Yeah. The, the blended environment that in it it's so incredibly complex of our customers. As they take a look at the way that the world has changed, right? When we take a look at what has happened with people working remotely, working from home and having to come into access services in such a, a completely blended and hybrid environment as you say, not only the move to the cloud, but the move to Colo, and bringing all of this together for interconnect, it's definitely a complex environment that they have to have their fingers on the pulse of. Right? >> Yep, yep. And then of course there was this little thing that happened this year with COVID. And really right in March, April timeframe light switch moment, everybody worked from home, whether you're ready or not. And that was a very different kind of situation. Cause we had to get people secure and safe, and get them up and operating. So I'm sure you(laugh) saw a lot of interesting stuff at your business there, but I'm even more interested in how that's evolved over time. Here we are at the end of 2020, there's going to be you know, some version of this for the foreseeable future. And a lot of companies are saying that, you know there'll be a lot of, kind of work from anywhere pieces that continue forward. So again, with your customers and looking kind of the change between what happened in the spring, and now what's happening as they really of kind of put in the systems that'll enable them to continue to support, you know people working from anywhere, not even really working from home, but working from anywhere. >> Right. Exactly. I mean, as our customers had to bring up more connectivity, new connectivity, and start to add licenses for virtual desktop or for their VPN connectivity ultimately how they got it done, most of our customers said, you know we're running hot, but stable. And I think that that was, that was great for most folks. But now they're leaning into it and saying, okay how do we continue to make this happen? And how do we provide the visibility that we need to ensure that the services that we're delivering are, making it possible for their users to be productive and successful. A user doesn't want to feel that they're not contributing as much as someone else that may be able to make it into the office. And, it's a, it's a challenging time, but with that being said, technology has really stepped up, and in particular, the way that they're able to stand up services in the cloud, and the automation, and potential cost savings that they get from standing up in the cloud has really been a bood for most of our users. And some of the users, you know, the high end enterprise that we're a little bit slow to adopt, now are just turning it on as fast as they possibly can. >> Yeah, it's pretty wild. And then, we had another representative from Netscout on earlier this year. One of the, the kind of recurring themes that we've seen is you know, changes in the threat landscape. So clearly the increased attack surfaces as more and more people are working from home. They're not working from the secure environment at the office. But you guys notice some interesting things about what's happening, and we've, we've seen a little bit too in terms of kind of, ransomware and the increase in ransomware as a particular type of attack that, that seems to be growing in popularity. And these, these people are a little bit more thorough in the badness that they caused before they, they throw in the ransom request, and that they're looking for a little bit more fundamental disruption to enable them to basically extract that ransom is which they hope to do. >> Yeah. I mean the amount of DDoS attacks that we've seen has just grown incredibly over the past several months. And these extortion attacks they come in and they often hit the customer quickly and hard, and then say, turn it back for a bit and say, pay us, or we're going to shut you down. And they're really coming in more towards the back office aspects of things. So, going in and attacking that part of the business is kind of a new environment for a lot of folks. But one of the other interesting(laughs) challenges here with us is that, oftentimes those extortion notes don't make it through to the people that really need to act on them because they get caught in spam filters or they like so they're finding these DDoS attacks, and don't necessarily understand that they're under an extortion attack. So it's a real challenge for folks. And we've seen a good uptake with our on-prem capabilities to provide that kind of protection, right at the top of the security stack with our Arbor edge defense products. So it's been something that we're trying to get out there and help our customers as much as we can. And even that new, folks. >> Yeah. It's a, it's an interesting environment. And we found out from somebody too that sometimes if you actually pay the bad guys you can be breaking other rules for doing business with countries >> Yeah. >> Or people that we're not supposed to be doing business with. Like, that's the last thing you need to think about when you're trying to get all your data, and your company back online. >> Right, yeah, I mean, are you trying to make sure that you're keeping yourself stood up right? And, it's tough and you know kind of the rule one is never pay the extortion right? But you kind of got to take a look at it and say, hey, you know, what do I do? >> Right, right. So, you guys been around for a while. I wonder if we could dive in a little bit, we're at reinvent. Some of the things you guys are doing specifically on the product side to, basically increase your, your AWS capabilities. >> Sure. Thanks, yeah. We've been working really closely with AWS as they start to roll out new technologies. Last year, we were fundamental in the VPC ingress routing announcement that they have. We've been working with them with their traffic mirroring capabilities. So technology-wise, we keep in close touch with them in terms of everything that they are delivering. But also on the business side of it, we have our networking competency and just last week got our migration competency. So what we're really doing is, trying to both work the technical and the business relationship, as much as we can to try and expand our overall capabilities of book print with AWS. And, having that visibility and being able to kind of provide that same level of control and capability that you had, on-prem in your enterprise network as you move into the public cloud is a great benefit to a lot of our customers. They really have the ability now, to deliver services the way they have been delivering it for years and years. >> Now, what do you mean specifically, when you say migration competency or networking competency? >> So, they have these different competency programs for their technology partners. And the networking competency is, that you've demonstrated capabilities in your ability to provide network monitoring, or network management capabilities, or network connectivity. In the applica--, migration side you've really provided the ability to show that you have the tools, and solution set to drive, and help people become successful migrations into AWS. As you can imagine right now, a lot of folks are just lifting and shifting, putting stuff into AWS as quickly as they can to try and take advantage of the automation and the operational efficiencies that you get when you move into public cloud settings. As you make those migrations, you want to ensure that you're not either leaving something behind, that needed to move with it, or building a dependency onto something that's in the background that's going to have an adverse effect on, user experience. And ultimately, it really all comes down to the user experience that are, delivering to your customers and or your user base. Right? >> Right. Right. So what are the things you talked about in a prior interview was kind of the shifting dynamic in terms of network traffic. As there's more and more, you know kind of SAS based applications, and there's more kind of an application centric, and in this kind of API interface between all the applications that, you know the North-south is still significant, but the growth in the East-west traffic, meaning, you know kind of inside, if you will. And that some of the unique challenges that come from that from kind of a network monitoring. I wonder if you can share a little bit more color on that, as to, and are you continuing to see this increase in East West relative to North-south, and what kind of special opportunities and challenges that that presents? >> Yeah, absolu--. There is an absolute growth in terms of the East-west connectivity and, traffic that exists out there. In particular, when we take a look at the way that people are implementing software defined networks, NSX, for example NSXT has now provided the ability to blend your environment whether you're going to any cloud, any vendor as you move between these environments having that ability to deliver network services under the same framework is really beneficial to our customer base. And we've also been partnering very closely with VM-ware, and a lot of our customers are implementing VMware cloud on AWS. So, they have that ability to stand up services in a consistent manner whether it be in their legacy environments, or into the public cloud environments, and have that same ability to provide visibility down into the East-west traffic so that you can see that. So when you're part of the NSX framework, what you're able to do is really leverage the service framework that they have the service and search it, and be part of the clusters and host groups that are exchanging traffic East-west. And our ability to see into that really exposes chall--, not, exposes challenges but exposes potential issues that(laughs) our customers might be having in delivering high quality services. So that visibility is really what we've been keying on. >> Right. I'm just curious to get your take, you know as people kind of, as you said, make this move to public cloud, and, you know, you talked about wholesale migrations, and wholesale lifts and shifts. You know, there, there's kind of a couple trains of thought. One is, you know, using cloud for just pure economics, and trying to save money, and the flexibility. The second one is, is to is to add this automation as things grow in this, these great opportunities to automate, and try to reduce air. But the third one, right, the big one is to drive innovation, and to unlock innovation enable better innovation, and speed of delivery, and, you know, moving at the speed of business, pick your favorite buzzword. I'm curious whether your customers, as you have you seen them all jumping in? How much of it is still, you know, to save money or to, or to, you know, kind of use the basic, you know cost saving economics versus people really embracing the opportunity to use this as a method to drive innovation, and change within their own business? >> So I, I think the realities of 2020 have been forcing people to look at primarily from operational and cost efficiency perspectives, however with an eye towards innovation, and as they start to get themselves into a, zone where they're comfortable, they look to see how they can leverage the cloud to provide new services, and new ways in which they provide their services, and avail themselves of, the underlying technologies that are there to build something that's new and exciting in their overall portfolio. So, I think that 2021 is probably going to be a little bit more of where can I innovate as opposed to, how do I get there? (Jeff laughs) >> It's probably an unfair question here at 2020 cause priorities certainly got turned upside down in the middle of the year. So maybe, maybe innovation got pushed down a little bit from, you know, let's get people up, let's get people safe, and let's make sure they can access all the systems and all this crazy stuff that we've got available to them from wherever they are. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Not just within the, within the home office. >> I was listening to a, panel from federal government a couple of weeks ago, and it was really the way the they've adopted kind of commercial cha-- commercial capabilities to meet some of these challenges things that they wouldn't normally look at. But now it's a set of innovation that they're looking at, to try and make sure that they can avail themselves of the services that are out there and available in the public cloud. >> Yeah. Well, that's great, Russ. It's great to catch up. I'm sure you must be as amazed as anybody as the rapid acceleration of this, you know since the short time you went to your first re-invent and, >> Yeah. >> And clearly AWS and Amazon generally is an execution we're seeing. So, I think they'll keep doing it. So I think you're, you're probably sitting in a good spot. >> I think so. (Jeff laughs) Thank you. (Russ laughs) >> All right. Thank you Russ for, for stopping by and sharing your insight. Look forward to catching up next time. >> Thanks a lot, Jeff. Really appreciate it. >> Alrighty. He's Russ, I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube's, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, the virtual event. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

(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)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: 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. Michael Segal is the product manager, or Area Vice President of Strategic Alliances in NetScout Systems. Michael, we are sitting here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in November of 2019, re:Invent 2019 is right around the corner. NetScout and AWS are looking to do some interesting things. Why don't you give us an update of what's happening. >> Yeah, just very brief introduction of what NetScout actually does. So, NetScout assures service, performance and security for the largest enterprises and service providers in the world. We do it for something we refer to as visibility without borders by providing actionable intelligence necessary to very quickly identify the root cause of either performance or security issues. So with that, NetScout, partnering very closely with AWS. We are an advanced technology partner, which is the highest tier for ISVs of partnership. This enables us to partner with AWS on a wide range of activities including technology alignment with road map and participating in different launch activities of new functionality from AWS. It enables us to have go-to market activities together, focusing on key campaigns that are relevant for both AWS and NetScout. And it enables us also to collaborate on sales initiatives. So, with this wide range of activities, what we can offer is a win-win-win situation for our customers, for AWS, and for NetScout. So, from customers' perspective, beyond the fact that NetScout offering is available in AWS marketplace, now this visibility without borders that I mentioned, helps our customers to navigate through their digital transformation journey and migrate to AWS more effectively. From AWS perspective, the win is their resources are now consumed by the largest enterprises in the world, so it accelerates the consumption of compute, storage, networking, database resources in AWS. And for NetScout, this is strategically important because now NetScout becoming a strategic partner to our large enterprise customers as they navigate their digital transformation journey. So that's why it's really important for us to collaborate very, very efficiently with AWS. It's important to our customers, and it's important to AWS. >> And you're going to be at re:Invent. You're actually going to be speaking, as I understand. What are you going to be talking about? >> So we are going to be talking about best practices of migrating to AWS. NetScout also is a platinum sponsor for the re:Invent show. This demonstrates our commitment to AWS, and the fact that we want to collaborate and partner with them very, very efficiently. And beyond that also, NetScout partnered with AWS on the launch of what is referred to as Amazon VPC traffic mirroring. And, this functionality enables us to acquire traffic data and packet data very efficiently in AWS. And it's part of the technology aligns that we have with AWS and demonstrates how we utilize these technology aligns to extend NetScout visibility without borders to AWS cloud. >> There's no reason to make AWS cloud a border. >> Michael Segal: Exactly. >> Michael Segal, NetScout Systems. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> And, once again we'd like to thank you for joining us for another Cube Conversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. (techno music) >> And we are back here in Las Vegas, where the weather's really nice, by the way, like 65 and sunny. But, you talk about sunshine, this show floor is just emanating that from the AWS perspective. Almost 50,000 people here jammed in, the booths are chock-full with a lot of interest. And I think it really speaks highly of this excitement and the vibrancy of the AWS community. Here we are at re:Invent along with Keith Townsend. I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Russ Currie, who is the VP of Enterprise Strategy at NetScout Systems. Russ, good to see you. >> Nice to see you guys. >> Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much, it's a pleasure to be here. >> Great, first off, tell us a little bit about NetScout, about what you all do and why you're here. >> So, NetScout Systems is a very established company. We're very present in most of the Fortune 500 in terms of running their on-prem environment. And built around looking at wire data, providing a unique perspective into the services that IT delivers. Recently, we've started to expand our portfolio to become much more relevant to the cloud environment. And this is our first trip into the AWS show, actually. So, it's a lot of fun to be here. >> Well, tell us about that shift then for you. I mean, what did you see that said, okay, this is the move that makes sense, and then what have you had to do, I wouldn't say catch up, but to get the kind of expertise in an area in which you weren't really playing with before. >> It was very interesting because one of the things that we saw is that our customers were really moving to a hybrid environment. It was really the extension of a lot of their service to leverage what was available in terms of what AWS may provide them in terms of infrastructure as a server perhaps, service, perhaps, or virtual private cloud technologies. And what they were really doing was migrating a lot of the data center front end to the cloud. So in turn, they wanted that same level of visibility that they had with us in the on-prem environment. So what we did is we disaggregated our system and started to provide a software solution that could migrate easily to the cloud. Whether it be an on-prem implementation of a software-defined network, or a public implementation of AWS. >> So, Russ, talk to me a little bit about that. I'm a traditional enterprise guy. NetScout goes back years with wire data. From appliances to software to help me analyze data. I can take those tools, virtualize them, put them in the cloud, and now they just don't give me as much inside because I don't have control of the infrastructure. Talk to me about those early conversations as customers started to come with you guys for ask of capabilities. What were some of the initial pain points in the cloud? >> Well I think you hit on a very interesting point, because you don't own that infrastructure any longer, so what can you really grab out of the cloud to be able to provide a visibility into these services. And with that also, they were becoming much more complicated. Folks implementing micro services and starting to have great complexity in the environment that they're deploying there. So what they really wanted us to do is provide that same level of understanding, like the key performance indicators, they're associated with user experience. So are the users getting the expected service levels, are they getting the responsiveness out of the application that they expect? And if not, how do I track that down? Identify where that problem exists. I moved up my complexity by maybe factors of 10 as I move into a hybrid environment. >> So let's talk about some of those complexities. In a traditional environment if I could see transaction times slowing down, I can just turn the knob up on my infrastructure, buy a bigger server, buy a bigger switch, those different cabling aspect. Very prescriptive solutions. What are some of the insights you're bringing to customers to help them easily manage, or less painfully manage those similar knobs in the cloud? What are those KPIs and what do they help give insight into? >> Well, I think it's very interesting because that's one of the things that's a little bit easier to happen in the cloud in terms of the speed of which I can turn those knobs up, right. Now I can start to go ahead and dial up and provide more and more computes real easily. I have elastic computing capabilities that exist inside the cloud. But with that comes the question, do I have the controls to understand what I'm doing there, and am I maybe spending too much in terms of putting that forward and turning up the volume, if you will, as you were saying. The aspect of it being on the on-prem, the old environment was more that I had to plan for it, I had to keep in mind, I had to build for a future environment, so I couldn't do it as quickly. So now the question is, is the business really getting what they're paying for as they move this forward. And their concern is that they lose that visibility into am I really getting the services that I need when I start to turn this up in the cloud? >> Are those the questions they're bringing to you? >> Yes. >> So Keith was just talking about what you're taking to the community, so what's the community coming to you with, then. You mentioned costs, right. All of a sudden it's like, oh my gosh, I mean, we have this great resource we didn't know was going to cost this. So they've got to kind of get their arms around that a little bit, too, don't they? >> Right, they want to contain the costs. They want to make sure that they're making sound business decisions. And they want to increase the speed at which they can roll out new services. And digital transformation's really kind of driving the velocity of business to speeds that we never expected. Well, the velocity of IT really isn't keeping up with them, and that's one of the challenges that they have. And a lot of that's a lack of visibility. If you're used to driving a car at night, and you drive fast you got this concept of out driving your lights, where you're going a little bit faster than what you can see in front of you and you run the risk of maybe running into a turn, or a stone wall, or a deer, whatever the case may be, right. A lot of our organizations are afraid of that happening to them. That they're going to be going so fast as they move themselves into these environments that they're going to hit and you have a failure that's going to be catastrophic for them. So the idea that I don't have visibility is a real challenge. >> So, on that model of cost, let's talk about NetScout's business model a little bit. Previous business model honestly bought a box or software licenses, and I owned that. Cloud really doesn't lend itself to that buy software model and own it forever. How do I buy a hybrid IT solution now from NetScout? >> So today, what we're doing is moving away, we provide our solution in a bring your own license type of environment. So they buy license capabilities from us and then move it over in. But one of the unique things that we did with our implementation of the technology we call vSCOUT is we actually make the agent, that technology, free to deploy on workloads. And it only consumes in our analytics engine in genius one. So it can be freely distributed and only turned on where you need it or when you want it. So it really provides a lot of flexibility for our customers in terms of having the same type of visibility and workflows regardless of being on-prem, private cloud, or public cloud, and that's really the big advantage that they're seeing as they can move to a software model with us. >> So, if three days from now, when you walk away from a show like this, you said first time here. >> Yes. >> What do you want to get out of this? I mean, what's your goal in terms of when you walk out of here on Thursday or whatever, that, okay, that was a good dive into the deep end. >> So I think, for us, it's really exposing ourselves to a new audience. A lot of the folks here aren't terribly familiar with who we are and what we do. Traditionally, we spoke to the network guys and the network guys, they're starting to get displaced a little bit by, you look at VMware. The implementation of NSX and where that's going in terms of providing micro segmentation. So networking is really being provided by the VMware admins oftentimes. And now with VMware on AWS, now you've got an extensible environment that allows you to have that same kind of compute environment all the way through and that level of control. So what I really want to do is end up talking to new audiences, and having conversations that are a little bit different than how much capacity do I have on a 10-gig link and what kind of applications are running on it. It's really about what kind of services am I delivering to my user community, what are my plans and how can I ensure success. >> Well from the looks of things, you've got a few people to talk to, Russ. >> I think so, there's a few. (laughing) >> Russ Currie, joining us from NetScout Systems. Thanks for being with us, Russ. Good to see you on The Cube. Thanks for spending time with us. >> Thank you very much, it was really a pleasure. Enjoyed it immensely. >> All right, good luck with the rest of the show. >> Super, thank you. >> We'll be back with more from re:Invent. We're in Las Vegas live. Here on The Cube back with more in just a bit. (techno music)