>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Vellante.\ We're going to talk about unified communications and its role in digital transformations. Ray Krug is here. He's a solutions architect at NETSCOUT. Ray, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hi Dave, good to be here. >> So talk a little bit about NETSCOUT. You guys are into a lot of different things, but give us the overview. >> Yeah, NETSCOUT, what they're primarily focused on is providing the visibility to assure digital business initiatives, to provide availability assurance, performance assurance, as well as security assurance as well and we do this using our smart data and smart analytics platform. We kind of do this for, okay, got a huge customer base, we do this for over 90% of the Fortune 500, 95% of the carrier service providers, so we scale to these large enterprises, sophisticated service providers, providing the visibility they need to assure their services. >> So as a solution architect what specifically is your role? >> Probably worthwhile giving a bit of history because I know we're talking about unified communications. So I have been with NETSCOUT now for about eight years it's been and I came from an acquisition. The acquisition was from a British company, a spin-out of British telecom called Psytechnics and we specialized, this is eight years, well 10 years ago, in analyzing the IP network for voice and video traffic and actually being able to understand how we can take impoundments in the network and how that translates to impoundments in voice quality over a voiceover IP. So that was the original data transformation project, the so-called digital transformation from TDM networks to IP. So yeah, we took those analytics and basically figured out how to do that. >> So deep understanding of actually what's going on in the network? >> Yeah absolutely, and what was exciting, and back to NETSCOUT, is when they acquired Psytechnics, they took this technology and put that into their pro-technology, they did that within three or four months. Our technology was in their probe monitoring the voice, both voiceover IP networks, and then what was interesting, within 12 months, all our workflows that we created for insured performance of voiceover IP networks got embedded into the NETSCOUT portfolio of products. And since then, eight years, winding on forward, we've been embedding more and more technology into our InGenuis One platform to give you better and better voice, video, and unified communication analytics. >> I love that story, Ray, because the vast majority of mergers and acquisitions fail to meet their original objectives, they take too long to integrate so some companies are good at it, some not so good at it, so it must've been pleasing to see that happen, and see your baby actually scale like that. All right, lets talk about big picture. What are the big trends that you see sort of driving unified communications today? >> Yeah, unified communications is getting more and more complex, and perhaps on one accord, sophisticated, but you kind of think, okay, most common used case for us is to be a contact center because at the end of the day, contact center, the customers are demanding more and more ways to interact with the business, traditionally it was voice but now they want web, web chats, video, whatever it might be, so contact centers a big consumer of unified communications. And then there's the different technology trends like, of course, Microsoft Skype for business, evolving into Microsoft Teams, or Cisco Jabber, unified communications and all that sort of thing. A whole bunch of other topics going on, again, part of digital transformation initiatives, SIP trunking, we're still seeing that going on. So I was talking about TDM to IP, so that was back in my day in Psytechnics, now it's taking those and transferring IP to SIP trunking to save costs, that's the main thing, but it is a change and it is more, not instrumentation, but more appliances on a network, like session border controllers in order to add your SIP trunking, and of course there's also other technology, migration to the cloud as well, which ends up, from our perspective what we're seeing is in very hybrid environments. So now you've got a lot of on-prem stuff and some cloud stuff, it's all going to work together in order to make voice, video, unified communications successful. >> Isn't another sort of challenge, I'll call it give the people what they want, you talk about contact centers being a primary source, people want to communicate in different ways. Young people maybe want to use chat, some people like me want to pick up and talk to a human. Is that part of the challenge, is bringing all those together to service all these different constituents? >> Yeah, absolutely, because at the end of the day, it's a contact center, you want to make sure you provide an engaging experience to your customers, however that might be. Omnichannel or whatever word you want to do it. The longer and happier the customer is dealing with your business, perhaps the more money they'll spend with your business, perhaps the better brand awareness they have of your business as well. >> So double click into some of the challenges of actually bringing this stuff together, making it work, is it cost, you mentioned complexity before, is it understanding the analytics, who's using what, predicting, double click on that. >> That's a big topic, but we talked about new features and immersive experience from unified communications, so that's all brilliant. The trouble is, high quality is key. You got to make sure that it's successful, so any migration project, you need to be successful to make sure that you've succeeded. Okay, so that's number one. Quality is key, but also in terms of cost, sometimes these initiatives about cost savings, so SIP trunking is a good example of that. I want to make my service the same as it was before, have some sort of future upgrade capability, but kind of make it cheaper, that's what SIP trunking does for you as well. So those are some of the reasons for doing it, but then that introduces more components in your infrastructure to make all that stuff work and it's not just about voice and video, it's all about the other backend servers as well to make it all happen whether that's mail or chat or presence or whatever it might be. Lots of components now that have to work together, stuff that you control but also stuff that you don't control like SIP trunks is a good example, or gateways out to the PSTs, things that you don't control, and that makes it kind of really tricky to deal with. There's a bunch of other stuff as well that's important, network convergence, you've got all these applications converging onto that one network infrastructure, how do you manage that? >> Quick tangent. So you mentioned SIP trunking, explain what that is for our audience so they don't have to google it. (Ray laughs) >> Yeah, so SIP trunking, basically, if you think about gatewaying out to the PSTN in terms of making your plain old telephone calls, dialing a number and sending out, SIP trunking does that all from an IP perspective. So the idea is, you don't necessarily do a conversion to TDM, traditional phone systems, it all goes IP. So basically, you then send everything out, IP, over the network, it gets to the other end, and the whole purpose of that, it's a service that you buy from your service provider and it's cheap. >> Okay, you talked about these challenges. Generally, how does the industry approach solving these problems and specifically how does NETSCOUT solve them? >> Great question. So traditionally, let's sort of rewind a little bit, I talked about a lot of components that need to work together to make your unified communications experience. Lots of servers, lots of network infrastructure, firewalls, session boarder controllers and all that. Traditionally, what you do is monitor each of those devices. Take a look at their CPU utilization, or take a look at how the servers are performing, and often, very little is taken into account about the network and how that's behaving, because again, I've said it's a converged network. So you end up with a picture saying, all my servers are working fine, but then you end up with the problem, but users are complaining because they can't dial, users are complaining because the quality is bad. So that's kind of the problem with trying to bring all those together using the different metrics and coming up with some sort of conclusion. >> And then it's finger pointing, right? >> Oh yeah, classic. >> Which mole to whack. >> Yeah, in constant use cases, war rooms, okay, all my lights are green for every person in that war room but the people are still complaining, absolutely. >> Okay, so talk more about how NETSCOUT approaches this. >> So, the name gives it away, really. We always focus on what's going on in the network, wherever that network may be, so we're taking a look at that, we call it Y data, it's packet data, and we're able to translate that. Whatever's going over the wires, whether it be an application going over the wires or whether it be unified communications going over the wire like voiceover IP, RTP, or signaling, SIP as an example of those. So we're able to get that picture of how everything is communicating with each other, and we're being able to raise that level. So packets are notoriously hard to interpret, but we've cracked it, we've got a sort of technology, it's a patented technology called ASI, adaptive service intelligence, we call it smart data, but it's converting that Y data into meaningful keeper points metrics. So you name it, you name the application, we've got performance metrics. So whether that be voice, voice quality, mean opinion score, we're taking that from the Y data. Whether it be application performance from a database that might be running, or a mail server that might be running, we have performance. Whether it's this signaling that goes on to get data and all that, we have performance metrics about that. So we're using the same data set, the Y data, bringing it up to our analytics, our ASI layer, and then we have an understanding of what component's failing. Is it the voice that's failing? Is it this part of the network that's failing? And then, for voice, there's a whole topic on how we understand that, remembering my background and the analytics behind that. >> So, your secret sauce is you've got this deep probe into the network, you've got this ASI, this patented technology, and you've got an architecture to leverage that capability, and that is really your big differentiator from a technical perspective? Is that right? >> Well, from a technical perspective, absolutely. And from an obvious perspective, we solve, in the easiest way, the most complex problems. It's kind of where it's coming, 'cause these are tricky problems to do, they sometimes go unseen for ages, but because we've got that overall visibility, we get to that root cause very quickly. >> Okay, let's talk about the business impact. Maybe you can give us some examples, customer examples, and how it affected their business? >> Yeah, so that's important. A couple of things, let's imagine you're contact center, a service company, so I've got one in mind, and the one that I have in mind, six contact centers, they take up to about 100,000 calls in a day. So it's important. They're a service company so people phone them up to have their service. If you can't make contact with your service company, maybe the impact of that is, okay, that service is rubbish, I'm going to go to a competitor, as an example. Or you don't get your service that you require. So there's huge implications. In this example, we've found that calls were dropping, as an example, so people are connecting with their agent, calls are dropping, okay, hopeless. It's really problematic. And it's interesting that you pointed out about war rooms and finger pointing, and that's exactly what happened. What they'd done, they'd engaged in a SIP trunking project to deploy SIP trunking they were going to save a million dollars a month by implementing this SIP trunk. So that's huge, okay yet, when they deployed this, they were having a bad experience, so that's critical, so they needed to achieve that successful migration, so they had tours but nothing that could spot what was going on with these calls dropping. So along come NETSCOUT, we deployed our probe, and very quickly, it's just amazing, very quickly we were to able to analyze the reason for the call dropping. Turned out it was a firewall issue, complex network so it's kind of difficult to know where the traffic is routing. We were able to figure that out, give it the evidence to say the signaling, the SIP, was dropping, and we were able to pinpoint that and they got that fixed very quickly. >> Which meant that they were able to realize that million dollar a month savings. >> Precisely, yes exactly. Let alone that any business that might've been affected by the fact that people couldn't call in. >> Any other examples you can share? >> Yeah, I've got a really great one, probably closer to a lot of people's hearts, and relates to a hospital, and they were going through a digital migration project. It's as simple as changing their phone handsets from one vendor to another in some respect, about 2,000 phones that they were replacing, so it's kind of interesting. So I've now got a nice new shiny phone on my desk, when I pick up the phone I get very bad quality and stuff like that, and just blame the phone and all that sort of thing. Sometimes that's change, people don't like change, they like all the buttons on their old phone, and sometimes it's real, but in a way, the business impact for that one is, if I'm a customer, a patient, I'm phoning up my doctor for some records, and the phone quality is bad, then I'm not going to have that much confidence that the doctor's going to be able to cope with my ailment that I might have. So it's really important to have quality, and when it's about your health, then it's really important that it's there. >> Awesome. Let's end on some advice that you would give to customers. So you got people trying to do digital transformations, they're trying to pull all these different communication systems together, trying to understand where the exposures are, the performance issues. What advice would you give to people that are struggling with these problems, where should they start, and what should their journey look like? >> In some respects, I think visibility is key, both before pre-migration, during migration and afterwards. So in my example before, having visibility of the performance of the phones before, in this migration issue, and then as I go through the migration, being able to just check that when they deployed the new phones, everything's working. And then of course, once, if there were any problems, so in my example, it was QOS problem. QOS, quality of service, so that's a networking problem and it goes back to, because we're in the network, we're looking at the network, as much as that's the most complex problem to solve, and it's everywhere, QOS problems are everywhere, it's the simplest thing for us to fix. So monitoring during migration, seeing what the behavior of the phones are, during that process, correcting everything quickly, so that the migration project is successful, and then post-migration, business as usual, monitoring, so if there are any problems you can quickly react to it. >> Got it, okay, so you're going to through a business case, you're going to make this part of your digital transformation, you're going to bring together all the stakeholders but I think your point is, if you don't have visibility on what's going on in the network, there are going to be some blind spots that you potentially run into. If you have visibility in the network, you're going to be able to remediate those, and the example you gave of the services company, you're going to be able to achieve your expectations and your ROI results and have confidence that you're going to be around for the next project. So Ray, thanks very much for coming on and sharing with us. And thank you for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. (bright synth music)