(upbeat music) >> From Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D.C. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest but a long-time customer of ScienceLogic, Karl Fosburg, who's the senior director of systems integration at Hughes. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so we're here in D.C., and that's important 'cause first of all, you're based down here, and ScienceLogic is based down here. >> Yup. Bring us back a little bit. You said you'd been a customer a long time as to... maybe give us a little bit of the before picture, if you could. >> Sure, so yeah, we've been a customer for 12 years now, and we picked ScienceLogic for a big list of reasons, actually wrote the RFI itself, and probably 20 pages long. Lots of people came back and gave us responses. ScienceLogic was one of the short-listed candidates that we picked out. We did a bake-off with a couple other vendors, and ScienceLogic was the clear winner. >> All right. So Karl, lets zoom out for a second here >> Okay. and just give us a level set on Hughes, what Hughes is today. You know, I'm familiar with what Hughes was back in the day and there's certain pieces that are no longer there so give us a level set on the company in the business. >> Yeah, sure. So, Hughes is formally known as Hughes Network Systems, were owned by EchoStar Corporation and we're a managed service provider. We have a consumer business where we provide broadband internet to folks that live really out in the countryside and can't get cable, or DSL, or FIOS, things like that. We have about 1.4 million subscribers in our consumer business. We've also launched consumer services in South America, Brazil, Ecuador, Columbia, places like that. Really serving under-served areas for giving them broadband. We also have an enterprise business where we sell to credit card processing, gas and oil, pipelines, fast foods, places like that. >> Okay. So Karl, is it safe to say you use satellites but no longer put them into space? >> We use satellites, that's correct. We contract that out now. Yeah, we are the last remaining Hughes company. >> Yeah. So, service providers are always fascinating to me because we talk about enterprise IT and how fast things are changing. At least for my entire career, when I talk to service providers, change and growth is really just baked into the DNA. >> Yep. I need to move fast. When you talk about scale, it means something very different and living in that complex world, and just give us a little bit about what things are like in 2019 for you. >> Sure, yeah. The scale is always our challenge. Like I like to say, we have sales people too and they're out there selling new products and services constantly. So we needed to be able to grow with those sales. We started out with a couple thousand devices that needed monitor in applications. Now we're up to almost 30 thousand Nox systems that we monitor. Also, we're keeping track of nearly 2 million terminals and the status of them and things like that. So, yeah, scale is super important to us. >> Okay. So, bring us inside, where ScienceLogic fits into your equation. >> Sure. So when we put out our FI to industry years ago, we were trying to replace a whole bunch of different tools. We had other vendor products and things like that. We really wanted to consolidate tools as much as possible into a single platform. Traditional ICNP, SNMP monitoring is how we originally started. Now we have lots and lots of integration with other tools, APM products, different streaming media products. We're integrating more and more with streaming services now in terms of getting data into the platform. So, yeah ... >> Yeah. Karl, I'd love to get your viewpoint. Something that came through to me in the keynote is on the one hand the years like, oh, well AIOps is going to replace things like some of the traditional players here, but then you see onto the stage it's like, oh okay, we're actually going to have integrations with a number of these tools. So yes, there's overlap but it needs to be integrated. How do you look at that as, is this the primary product? Is this a piece of the product? How do data collection between all these various tools go together? Well, that's a great question 'cause that's exactly what we and lots of other folks are grappling with right now. We've got data producers all over the place now, and we're really focused on the data production and high quality data back at the source into a real pub-sub type of architecture of which we believe that ScienceLogic will be both a producer and consumer of that pub-sub architecture, and whether it's the one tool to rule them all or not? Probably not, no ones going to be that, and we've got lots of vendors that purport to be the one tool to rule them all. But really, we're focused on ScienceLogic at this point to be really the focus, especially for our operations folks. We've got 24/7 staff. They use ScienceLogic as their main tool that they go to. So that's really where we want the data to end. That's where we want as much intelligence to end as possible. >> So, I'd be curious... You've been using the tool for a dozen years now. 12 years ago the discussion of data wasn't no where near what it was today. >> Correct. Can you bring us through a little bit of that journey, and you mentioned data a bunch, but how important is that? Where are you in your journey for... There was that maturity model that was put up there, the role of data today, and where do you see it going? >> Well, data is everything today. 12 years ago we were grappling with things like naming conventions and simple firewall rules and whatnot. Those days are long, long past. Now, the data quality and the pipeline is what we're focused on right now 'cause like Dave said in the keynote, "Garbage in, garbage out". We're really really focused on trying to get good quality data by focusing on the source of the data. As opposed to fixing it after it's been moved into whatever platform it ends up in. So we're using proper scheme of management and trying to bake-day the governance into the actual engineered products, and if it's not governed data then you don't get to look at it. And that's really our focus. We're an engineering company at heart so we actually write most of our own software. So we're kind of in control of our own destiny there, and we're really focused on pushing that back because we think the benefits in the long run are going to be worth that investment to get clean data all the way back to the source. >> Yeah. So Karl, one of the big shifts I've seen in the last few years... When you talked about managing and monitoring, I used to as the administrator or controller, used to be able to go and touch all of those pieces. Today, there's more and more some of those pieces I need to manage not just the stuff that's in my environment or my hosted environment, but outside of my environment and doing public clouds. >> Yep. >> Bring us up to speed as to where does Cloud fit? What's your Cloud strategy? >> Sure. We're actually launching some of our first applications in GCP right now. So we're working with our Google partners in this particular case to integrate the data that they can collect natively in their systems, bring it back in as actionable events into ScienceLogic platform, while keeping the vast majority of the data native to their platform. No need to bring back application specific data unless we're actually going to do something with it, or if we need to cross-correlate it with other information. The data sources live in our data centers, not in GCP. So we need to combine it with information we know about, our on-prem equipment, plus the applications running there. So that's the data we'll bring back to cross correlate. >> How do you decide what lives where, and where does ScienceLogic fit in the whole discussion? >> Yeah, that's a good question. What lives where... We kind of go back to license models and cost models. We're pretty good sticklers about focus on doing proper upfront analysis to make sure we don't end up with some six or seven figure bill at the end of the year from a Cloud provider. We also tend to do a lot of stuff on-prem because a lot of our systems have to run in one of our data centers. If you've ever driven past our building you'll see these large large dish's antennas outside. A lot of our equipment has to be within milliseconds or microseconds even of those dishes. So we actually have a large data center presence kind of scattered around the country and around the world. So, we have the compute resources to do it ourselves. >> Yeah, and even I would think edge computing something that plays into what you're doing. What do you see as some of the main challenges as the kind of footprint for what you're doing and things to spread out more? >> Yeah. Keeping, let's say pet projects, and shadow IP projects, keeping them in check is a really big focus right now, and also with DevOps sort of the "I'll do everything, I'm going to be my own IP department" philosophy is a new challenge that we're facing. So integrating with what the DevOps guys are building into our overall monitoring strategy, that's when a new challenge has really creeped up or it last, lets say six months or a year. >> Okay. Is there an intersection between your use of the ScienceLogic in the DevOps team yet? >> Not a big one yet. I think we're still learning DevOps at this point. I consider it a lifestyle change, not really a thing that you go get. So, I think we're still kind of early adoption for DevOps, and really only greenfield projects at this point in time. >> Okay. How about the term of the show is AIOps, so what's your act in the AIOps? Where do things like machine learning and automation fit into your environment? >> Yeah. We actually have quite a few used cases where we really think that machine learning is going to help us a lot. Cross-correlation is a big area for us. We have lots of information, but figuring it out, feeding like the APMs and Cisco ACI software defined networking, and those bits of information all into one product, we've been challenging ScienceLogic on this for quite a while. It's like, okay, you guys know about everything now. Tell us something that we didn't know before, and that's kind of where we're at, and seeing the announcements from this morning was really encouraging that we're finally see the horizon at this point. >> Yeah. If you can, (mumble), but how has ScienceLogic been doing on the roadmap? What helps between ScienceLogic and your vendor ecosystem out there? What more could they be doing to make your life easier? >> Yeah, that's a good question. So, if you would ask me that a year ago I probably wouldn't have been as encouraged as I am today. It was a challenge and they're engineering company, we're an engineering company. Sometimes you have to focus on foundation, and it's not cool, it's not sexy, it's not shiny, but you have to do it. And I think they've been focused a lot on their foundational aspects of the product which will actually enable doing things like machine learning. There's no point in doing machine learning if you have bad data or if you have a platform that doesn't support very very fast queries, and the graph QL database. We think that we're going to use that extensively and through the API, not even through the UIs. So, I think foundation is important. I think they focused on it for the last couple of years. I think we're finally going to start to see the benefits of it. Both single factor sort of machine learning, anomaly detection, but we really want to see it on a cross domain. I want to be able to see in ScienceLogic impacted by in our full stack environment. >> Yeah. I'd expect you probably had some visibility into what was coming up in the Big Ben release. Is there anything that jumped out at you, or that you're ready to use day one? >> The automations, for sure. We'll use that definitely day one. The way they've gone through and really made it a lot easier to use. You don't have to be a python developer anymore to actually get a lot of benefits out of the product. So I can turn that over to some of our junior engineers to actually handle those things, and we get a lot more sophisticated with them now. Primarily we used to focus on, "oh, let's send an email" type of thing. Now we can actually execute back-end actions without having to have a programmer to do it. So that right away we're going to use out of box. >> Okay. And in that forward looking piece, without breaking any visibility you have into their roadmap, what would you like to see more? >> I'd like to see more getting performance data into their real scalable, laterally scalable back end. And that's certainly an area that I'd love to see as much progress as fast as possible on. Also the Pub-Sub subscribing to streams coming out of our Kafka cluster. We want that to be in the product as soon as possible 'cause we really believe that that's where the majority of our data of the future is going to come from. Also, new applications, they come and go. Docker containers spin up, spin down. So the state of something is no longer fixed and we need to be able to integrate with Kubernetes and our open shift platform to be able to know, "Well what should be running right now?" So, those are the things that are on our roadmap that we need out of the product as soon as possible. >> Yeah. So it definitely came to me that ScienceLogic's listening. Are they moving fast enough for you? >> No. No ones ever moved fast enough. So, yeah, they're moving so that's good, but yeah, I could use it today if they had it. >> All right. Karl, last thing, you've been to a few of the ScienceLogic events in the past. You've been to other industry shows, what's special about the show? What brings you and your team to ScienceLogic symposiums? >> One of the things that ScienceLogic does a really good job is they bring a lot of resources here, and actual resources that actually know stuff. It's not just telling me, "Oh, that shiny new object is going to be in the platform at some indeterminate time in the future." It's the actual engineers, people writing code, product managers, things like that. So having access directly to the people who actually do the platform updates and changes is super valuable. The new sensor where we can touch and feel, take attires on new things has been excellent this year. So I think that's probably the thing, just quick access to all the resources. We have a bit of an advantage, we're only 45 minutes up the road. We can come down here as need be to visit their headquarters but having everyone here at one time is great. >> All right. Well Karl Forsberb, really appreciate you sharing your history and experience in future direction as to where things are going on your end. >> All right. >> I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from ScienceLogic 2019. Thanks for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and after many travels around the globe with theCUBE, really happy to be back in the Boston area studio, and happy to welcome to the program first time guest and first time we've had OpenLink on the program, Rich Grossi who's the CEO. Coming up from Long Island, appreciate you joining me up here and looking forward to discussing with you. >> Understood. >> So, first OpenLink, as I said, company, first time we've had on theCUBE. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of background, how long the company's been existing and what the focus is. >> Well, we're celebrating this year our 25th anniversary. So we serve the energy, financial, trading and treasury markets. We're based in Long Island with offices around the world serving about 500 clients or so in those different markets. I'm happy to be here today to talk about some of the innovation that we have going on. >> Great. Before we get into the OpenLink, Rich, give us a little bit about your background. You've been with OpenLink for a good part of the journey. >> I have. I've been with the company for 21 years in a variety of different roles. I've spent some time in operations, in development. Prior to the CEO position I spent some time in operations and prior to this role I was the CTO of the company. >> Okay, well congrats on the new role, Rich. So tell me, what is OpenLink today? You talked about kind of the industries you focus on. How do you fit in the markets today? >> So we are the market leader for the categories I mentioned. So we'll play in the energy and the commodity space. I will plan the financial services, banking, treasury space. We're well-known for our risk management capabilities and we serve top-tier clients in all those markets around the globe. >> Yeah, Rich, it's interesting. I think there's not a single segment in the market that's not going through some significant change. Disruption is on everyone's mind. What's changing for your customers and how is OpenLink really kind of adjusting to meet those needs? >> Yeah, it's always been a high degree of sensitivity towards risk. That's been our strong point as a company for a long time, and we serve the clients through kind of advanced analytics that provide them with that capability. But more frequently, we're seeing total cost of ownership driving a lot of the decisions made by our clients, right. So in markets that have some head wounds coming in and just kind of steady-state markets, looking for how to use technology to benefit them but also reduce the total cost of ownership. >> Okay, and so explain what that means. You say things like risk, things like analytics, you know, data, super important to all customers. How do we make sure they have the right data, how do they make sure that they're not getting a tax on what they have. Where does OpenLink help their-- what do the products look like? >> Yes, I mean, so we have a pretty advanced trading and risk-management platform. We also provide treasury and cash management solutions. And in those spaces what we're doing is we're providing our clients with the ability to manage their risk, manage their positions, take a peek ahead to see what's coming in the markets. Do sensitivity analysis to ensure that as they trade and as they train dex, and to your point, as they manage to the logistics. It's all done with a system capture from front to back, and it's all done with a view towards the risk of the application and a risk of the markets that they're in. >> Okay, you had a recent launch that was OpenCloud. Maybe explain what that is, how that fits with the broader discussion of Cloud. >> Sure, OpenLink's been in the private Cloudspace now for about 11 years. So this was our hosting application. And through those years, we built up the technology to support more of the, kind of, online, so predominantly we're a perpetual-based company, on-prem. And now our clients are looking for a little bit more ownership. A little bit more security. And they're looking for that single vendor to manage their applications within the could. So there's a big transformation in our markets where many of our large tier one energy financial services clients are looking for that reduction of total cost, and they're looking for OpenLink to be the provider that can offer them that service within the could environments. >> Okay, so is this a SAS offering? Is it living on some of the public Clouds? Help us, kind of, get our weeds a little bit. You're a former CTO. >> Sure, so, I mean, it's a similar technology to what we've built over the years. So, we're still managing scaleability and performance. We still have created security in the application. Still managing a lot of the monitoring and logging in application security within that. But it is in the Microsoft Azure environment, so we're working with Microsoft, partnered with them to build up a Cloud environment for our customers, such as they can manage this remotely as you would in any Cloud environment, and then provide all the advantages of Microsoft Azure on top of the technology that OpenLinks built over time. >> Okay, so it sounds, you know, similar to what you were doing before, but a lot of changes. How organizationally do you have to change for this, and maybe walk us through a customer, why would they choose one versus the other? What are the big advantages of the new way? >> Sure, so organizationally, we do have Cloud-dedicated teams now, right? So a lot of knowledge required to take your product, not only Cloud-enable it, but make it feature functionality-rich for the clients within the could. So we've built Cloud operations teams, we built SOx and NOx. We leverage our employee base around the world. We put a lot of technology advantages into the new software that is Cloud enabled. So, things like performance is just a big topic for us. So, allowing our clients to drive greater performance through scaleability and dynamic scaleability within the could. That's a big advantage to our clients. >> Yeah, you think back a couple of years ago if you talked about Microsoft and Google, and the Amazons of the world, it's like, 'Well, I'm worried about the security, the government is challenging.' I was just at one of the bigger Cloud shows and they said security is actually opportunity. You get to kind of get a re-do on security. Government seems to be something that we're sort of doing-- what's your customer's experiences? Is there still hesitancy, or are people, you know, kind of jumping in the waters nice? >> Well, I think there's still the question, and I think it's changing very rapidly for our client base. So, a couple years ago our clients were interested in the could but not necessarily moving to the could. And I think you're absolutely right in the sense that some of them were concerned about the security of their trading data being out in something like Microsoft Azure. Many of them recognize today that the security benefits of a Microsoft Azure, as an example, could be far greater than what they're doing in-house today. And as you look at the technology of OpenLink we've built layers of security on top of everything we used to have within the core application, encryption and the like. And now using some of the key vault technologies and some of the scaleability technologies of Microsoft Azure, we feel like we're able to provide a higher level of security than they even have on-prem using the could up close. >> Yeah, one of the other big advantages if you plug into, kind of, that ecosystem and platform of the public Cloud, what opportunities there-- Microsoft, you think of, like, you know, active directory, all of the business functionality. What do you gain today and maybe give us a little roadmap as to what this looks like down the road? >> Yeah, so our clients are looking for a handful of things. So they're looking for that reductioning of ownership. We've been able to save them on average about 30 per cent, just coming from them their on-prem or their data centers today. They're also looking for that single source of support. So today, we're working with their network engineers and they're DBAs. In the could version we're able to provide them with those same services, coupled with our support applications so that we're providing single line of visibility into their overall trading and risk-management application. And they're also looking for performances, I mentioned before, and security. So with the could application, we're not only able to provide them with the feature functionality of our application, but also the could technology that sits around it. >> One of the other things if you look at, kind of managing the environment versus going to the public Cloud, usually the public Cloud, you know the joke I have is: What version of Azure are you running on? Well, Microsoft takes care of it. A similar thing in your environment? >> Very similar. So, the ability to upgrade, the ability to leverage the scaleability of Microsoft Azure, the new technology coming out in Microsoft Azure. All the could feature functionality, that all comes with it for free. And to your point, providing our clients with a manage service so that we can manage not only their day-to-day environment, but we can also manage the infrastructure and the business needs that they have in using our application. So, all that combined has provided our clients with a great leg up in terms of how they use our software and how they manage it moving forward. >> Yeah, I'm curious: do the customers have to choose one over the other? The on-prem or the could? Do you have some customers that may be migrating, being to the Hybrid Multi-Cloud is kind of a big issue for a lot of customers these days. >> Yeah. So we have a large number of clients today that are still on-prem, and they're probably staying on-prem for awhile. But the evolution of the could as it relates to our client-base is quite rapid. So, a couple years ago we would talk to our clients and they were interested. Last year we announced our proof of concept coming and what we were building. We launched our public Cloud just in quarter three of this year. And the feedback from our client-base was dramatic. So now they're all looking to migrate over. We respond to ROPs quite often and I would estimate maybe about nine per cent of those coming have some interest in the public cloud moving forward. >> Okay, Rich, what do you want your clients to really know about OpenLink? And, the two pieces, just kind of today, and if they knew OpenLink, say, five years ago. You know, what's the big change? >> Yeah, well I think, well we have a tagline that says we like to solve the complex, right? And make it simple. You'll see many of our clients, the bigger names, avengers that are out there using our software to solve really complicated problems, right? So our software is pretty configurable and also addresses some of the larger challenges that we have within the spaces that OpenLink sits in. So, our clients are well-known in that area, and OpenLink is well-known in there, and our ability to solve those problems. When you take that, and you take the total cost of ownership, and you take the public Cloud capabilities and you build all that technology that we've advanced over the past, you know, 25 years, it's a pretty compelling application and company that we work for. >> Alright, well, Rich, appreciate the updates on everything happening at OpenLink. Wish you the best of luck with the could offering. We'll be back with more coverage here. Always check out thecube.net for all the coverage, and thanks for watching this, theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)