>> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> And, welcome back here on theCUBE, we're at the Moscone Center here at downtown San Francisco. Gorgeous day outside, by the way. Picture perfect day. Chamber of Commerce weather, but a lot of big news happening inside here for VMworld 2019, along with John Troyer. I'm John Walls, we're joined by Pierluca Chiodelli, who's the Vice President of Product Management at Dell EMC. And, Pierluca, good to see you, Sir. >> Thank you, it's awesome to be here. >> Great, thanks for being here. And Muneyb Minhazuddin, whose the VP of solutions product marketing at VMware. And Muneyb, I know you're right just hot off the presentation stage. >> Yes I am. >> Catch your breath, it's all going to be fine. How was your audience? I'm sure standing remotely. >> Yeah, it was thirteen hundred plus >> Excellent, yeah. Been a big week, already. >> Of course it has, yeah. >> For you and your team. So, first off, let me just, let's step back, talk about the vibe of the show, the theme of the show we saw Pat on the stage. >> Muneyb: Perfect. >> About an hour and a half this morning, just your thoughts about day one and the big announcements that VMware's been making. >> It's been a great week, and it's actually been a great approaching week. As you know, on Thursday we announced intent and acquire both Pivotal and Carbon Black for close to about $5,000,000,000. So, that's, kind of a big announcement by itself, and then how do you kind of bring in and keep day one where you're not too focused on those two, but get the narrative of VMworld across. And really, you know, where we have, you know, CUBE has been with us on this journey for a long time. >> Right. >> We've seen that data center shift into kind of two tangents. One is, you know, workloads into data center break out into public clouds. Second, rerouting into cloud native applications. And, if you've seen our strategy wall when that was kind of the key messages. Hey, we're embracing both the modern app development, the focus on Kubernetes and Tanzoo announcement, was all about to say, "VMware platforms ready "for the breakout of both tangents." First, Cloud Native, we've got Kubernetes, we're bringing it right into vSphere, so that everybody in the audience can support it. Second, the breadth of our cloud everywhere, right, so, we've gone from Amazon to IBM to Google to Ajour. So, it'll give you the infrastructure for your workloads to be your choice. Modernize or migrate. (chuckles) That was a key message for us to kind of land today. For a lot of our audience who are kind of stuck in that same piece of, "What am I doing with my workloads? "What is that platform I got to build on?" And, you know, the key foundational platform being VMware Cloud Foundation. Right, that was our strategy, and I think last year we called out VMware Cloud Foundation in Pat's keynote, because I wrote it 44 times. (laughs) (group laughter) We didn't do it that many times, this time. We only said that's the platform that lands in Amazon, GCP, Ajour, IBM, and 4,200, you know, cloud provider partners. That gives you really that public cloud extension. The second part being modern apps, Kubernetes is a new, kind of, modern app development platform, vSphere is embedded into that project pacific and the whole Tanzoo announcement, right? So, really, a powerful message, what do you think? Was that successfully landed? >> I think so. John, do you feel good about what you heard today? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think VCF is super interesting. I'm also kind of, so there was an announcement today also about the Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs for using VCF. So, VCF the layer, which is kind of the VMware stack with some extra magic in it, that can be in, can make a private hybrid cloud, you know, everywhere. So, talk to us a little bit about Dell Technologies Cloud. As I call it, "DTC." The, it's a lot, there's a lot of stuff in that as well, so, but we have two very complicated solutions stacks that are, we're talking about now, so. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Can you talk a little bit about the validated design and what came out of that? >> Absolutely, so before we go into the validated design, I think it's very important as Muneyb said. When we think about the Dell Technology Cloud, really, it's a component of the best (murmurs) technology from our storage, networking, and also compute, but we did the VMware VCS on top. So, we work very closely with VMware, and today we are announcing today the Cloud Validated Design. As we announce at the Dell Technology World in May, we said Dell Technology Cloud is this, now we want to tell to the people, how you can easily deploy this. What is make this tangible? So, what we are doing today is rapid time to value. We did design and pretested configuration, that we put in Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Design, as we said. The other important things as Muneyb said, right? It's... And, I heard this also from theCUBE. There was a debate with Stu and other people about, what is the Cloud? How I deploy the Cloud? When we think about Dell Technologies we speak with different peoples, and two set of peoples. One is the app, right? The Cloud app, all the app people that, they want to build have all the automation, DevOps operation and all these things. But, behind those people, there's still an infrastructure. So, we are speaking on both things. So, it's very important this paradigm is there, where you can have people that they can consume the technology, and understand how to build the infrastructure to be automated, and build that automation for the Cloud. So, that's what is the Dell Technologies Font Validation Design. Right. So, one of the biggest things here that we announced, is not only the Cloud Validation Design. It's the first one but also the ability to have compute, storage and network together, and also use it primary storage as a primary citizen of the VCF. So, we should talk about that later but that's-- >> Absolutely, and I think to catch onto that, you know, talking about the applications et cetera, you know, again, in the evolution of Cloud, and we've been on the journey for 10 years is, we've had, the first few years of the Cloud journey was, felt a little like a one way street, which was, kind of meant where people were shutting down data centers and going to all these public cloud providers, was always a one-way street. Now, VMware, and if you followed us closely, we had a service call VMware, you know VCHS, which is VMware Hybrid Cloud Service before the vCloud Air and then we came out with this solution, right? The idea was, we thought there's going to be movement back-and-forth but it wasn't the case. People were seriously shutting down and going one way. As we made all these partnerships of you know, Amazon, IBM, we started seeing, and you heard stories of IHS, Freddie Mac on stage where they take six weeks to move 100 applications one way into the Cloud, customers started asking us some questions, say, 'If it's so easy to go that way, is it also that easy to bring it back?' >> Come back! >> Right? And, that kind of lead to the whole kind of Dell partnership, Dell announcement within the Dell Cloud Foundation, you know, VMware Cloud Foundation, Dell Technologies Cloud Platform to say that, "Hey, it's actually..." There's a notion of not going from hardware-specific, you know, just high-tuned for workloads to commodity hardware in the Public Cloud. There's now a need for having common hardware platform on both on-PRAM, off-PRAM because there is a need for customers to take EC2 workloads or, you know, Ajour workloads and bring it on PRAM again. That was just a notion of how fast it is. I add that point because it is so critical to know that your hardware is performing in tuned, to perform for a high business critical applications. People forgot about them the first few phases of going to the Cloud, and now as they think about a hybrid, true hybrid Cloud nature, they want optimal performance in the software layer, in the hardware layer. You know, hence our announcement of Dell Technologies Cloud, Cloud Foundation, Validated Design. It's really supporting that customer notion. >> So, it's like this optimal, or maximized flexibility is what you're trying to give people. I mean, is that-- >> Pierluca: With the Cloud simplicity, that's really the key. >> But what drives that? I know that you have, you've, you know, whether you're on-PRAM or you're off-PRAM, you're going to decide what workload's going to go on what space on, so forth, but is some of that kind of hedging bets for future workloads because you can't predict where they're going to be done or where you want them done? Or is it just providing flexibility today, and let's not worry about tomorrow? You know, it just seems like there's a lot of runway here, if you will. >> Yeah, and I think there's no right or wrong answer. One of the big workshops I do with our customers is really kind of say have you figured out what's your three to five-year application strategy? Because again, in that first phase of that fast migration to the Public Cloud, people were just like CIOs I know, it's like, I have a cloud for strategy, what does that mean? I'm shutting down all data centers, I'm going to the Cloud. Right or wrong, and that's my Cloud First strategy. Now, what they've come to realize is not all workloads work effectively in the Cloud, right? So, they kind of like, hey, put an application strategy to say what are the most optimal applications that will get the benefit of Cloud? These are like, e-commerce retail. They have to have, you know, Black Friday, expanding elasticity. If you got no slow, mundane, you know backend processes doing batch processes of massive storage of in a bank ledger in the back end, they're not going to get that elasticity. I know what it is, I know how many, you know, batch processes I got to run. So, people are getting smarter about which ones get the benefit of, you know, modern app development, or Cloud elasticity, which ones don't really need to have that. So, we've seen best practice customers actually have a very good app strategy, three to five years, and then decide how much of my app strategy is gone to the right, you know, or gone to the left, right? It's pretty much to say, "I don't have to change." 60, 70% of my Eastern European customers, their banking ledgers are still on mainframes. They're not in a hurry to go to the Cloud, whereas, you know Fintech on the East Coast is going, "I'm going to the, I'm going to the Cloud", right? So, it's really that strategy that's, they should take the app strategy and decide what the infrastructure strategy is on the top shelf. >> I think from the storage business, we see that really clear, right? The app is definitely what is moving the things, right? It's not, people they're not thinking anymore because the transformation is in the way that you consume the infrastructure. They not thinking anymore about what I put there, but is about what app I need to run, how I build my app. So, it's the environment. And, I don't think personally I meet a lot of customer. There is not one right way or wrong way, it's an end, right? As you can see also in VCF we have Vsend, VxRail and primary storage. If you look at two years ago, we will be sitting here and say, you know, "It's only this, not the other things." When we, I been in governor conference, three years ago was like, it's all Cloud. It's reality is the world, the information technology world is always the same, where is a natural genius things. Because people, they need to have the trust, right? You cannot run your entire things on something that you don't know or you didn't prove. So, what we give here today with our technology is the flexibility. You can have a Cloud approach, but use the trusted PowerMax, for example, in conjunction with Vsend, in conjunction with the Unity. So, not all these is the proof that you can preserve your investment. But, is the proof that you can start to build those up. And, if you've seen what paths say today, then those app can live everywhere. So, you can go, you can move, it's much easier to move, and you can just trust what you're doing. >> And, you hit an important point on the move part, right? And, people are so easy, like, "Hey I moved a thousand applications in six weeks "to VMC and AWS." The fundamental notion where that was not possible before, was compute, network, storage. Like, we've been doing vSphere for a long time, you know that. And, it wasn't that easy because what used to happen is people thought, "Hey, a virtualized computer, I can move it." But, what did not happen as you moved that, was your databases, you know, your storage, rules didn't follow you into the Cloud. Your networking QOS and, you know, policies, and you know, priorities didn't follow you into the Cloud. So, that was kind of like, you know, you know, I'm an Australian, so it was a half-assed solution, right? (group laughing) So bear with my language, right. It was a half-assed solution, but really what needs to happen is your compute, your network, your storage has to all work together. And, that's where Cloud Foundation was powerful. And, what we're lighting with this Validated Designs is also that capability that your computer, or storage is one unit from a app. Once you package it and make it available in all the platforms, then that migration becomes six weeks, two weeks to move that. Because once you break it apart, it's a nightmare. There's not a lot of folks who have survived database migrations. (laughs) >> I mean maybe Pierluca, you can kind of sum us up here. This conversation's been a lot around evolution, right? And, there's also been an evolution of data center design and what to expect with that, you know, just buying things off the shelf and getting a Var and, you know, the VMAX, and we've been through this whole, and now, we've talked about VxRail, which can be part of this solution. But, can you talk, just, maybe, take us in, take us out with the, or into the future with the Dell Technologies Cloud as the idea of the Validated Design, the idea of this stack from Dell Technologies in storage et cetera, what can we expect in the near future? And, how much guidance will folks get? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, without breaking any NDA things, but this is only the first step. So, the Cloud Validated Design is just the first step where we said, 'Okay, we are tasked in this, "we putting this together." We are working very closely to also solve the entire things that VCF allow you to do first day deployment, allow you to expand the infrastructure, and allow you also to do life cycle management. For example, with the VxRail we already have the life cycle management part. We are working in way to do that also for our storage and other things. So, if you think about that then it becomes as you said, all the policy we put, like with Vworld, will be strategically in that sense, the policies can be carried over. So, then you can go to VMC, you can go to another place where the software and infrastructure can move back. So, because people can do this on PRAM, a replicate exactly but not only replicate the application, but replicate the (murmurs). What do you do on the QOS, all these key things that makes people running enterprise application, right? So that's, I think, it's very exciting moment. I think it's just the starting of this dream. >> Absolutely. >> Gentlemen, thanks for the time. >> Thank you. >> And you're all, you paint a pretty exciting future, don't ya? >> I hope so. >> So, I can't wait to look forward to even VMworld 2020? >> Wait 'til Barcelona, come on? (laughs) >> All right, well I'm not making that road trip, so unfortunately-- >> We going to more out there. >> But, Barcelona's going to be good. >> Yes, thank you for having us. >> No, I'm not the best guy, so, all right good. Hey, gentlemen, thank you for the time. >> Thank you >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it very much, great discussion. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Back with more from San Francisco right after this. (techno music)

>> 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)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi everyone welcome back to the theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live! Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier and my co-host Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante is out there as well co-hosting this week. Our next guest is John Apostolopoulos who's the VP and CTO for the Enterprise Networking Business, Unit Lab Director for the Innovation Labs. Here to talk with us about AI and some great innovations. John thanks for coming on theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you for inviting me, pleasure to be here. >> So, Cisco has some big announcements, the messages coming together certainly the bridge for the future, bridge for tomorrow, whatever the phrase is. You know, kind of looking at that new world connecting on premise, cloud, ACI anywhere, hyper-flex anywhere, lot of complexity, being mis-tracked the way with software, separate from the V-Comp from the hardware, lot of scale in the cloud and IoT and all around the edge. So software is a big part of this. >> Oh yes. >> So can't help but think, okay complexity, scale, you see Facebook using machine learning. Machine learning and AI operations now, a real conversation for Cisco. >> Yeah. >> Talk about what that is, how are you guys looking at AI, and machine learning in particular, it's been around for a while. What's your thoughts on Cisco's position and opportunity? >> Sure, yeah. Cisco's been investing or using AI for many, many years. What happens to Cisco, like most companies, we haven't really talked about the machine learning as a term because machine learning is a tool used to solve different problems. So you talk about, what are the customer problems we have? And then we saw, no matter how good our solution is, but we haven't really talked about the details about the how but, we've using at Cisco, like myself from past careers and so forth for many many years some machine learning. Security has been using it for multiple decades for example. >> And where's the use case for machine learnering, because it's one of things where there's different versions and flavors of machine learning. Machine learning we know powers AI and data feeds machine learning, so do you have all these dependencies and all these things going on, how do you...how should someone think about sorting through machine learning? >> Well machine learner itself that term is a very broad term, it's almost as big as computer science, right? So that's where a lot of the confusion comes in. But what happens is you can look up what types of problems we want to solve, and when you try to look at what types of problems we want to solve, some of them...for example some problems you can exploit the fact that the laws of physics that apply and if the laws of physics apply, you should use those laws. We can either figure out that if we drop this, this will fall at some speed by measuring it and using a machine learning or we have gravitational force and friction with the air and re-account for that and figure it out. So the many ways to solve these problems and we want to choose the best method for solving each one of them. >> And when the people think about Cisco, the first reaction isn't "Oh machine learning... innovator." What are you guys using machine learning for? Where has it been successful? What are you investing in? Where's the innovation? >> Sure sure, so there's a lot of problems here that come into play. If you look at...if you look at a customer problems, one example is all the digital disruption. We have on the order of a million devices, new devices coming on to the network every hour throughout the world. Now, what are those devices? How should you treat them? With machine learning we're able to identify what the devices are and then figure out what the network caches should be. For instance when IoT device you want to protect it, protect it from others. Another big topic is operations. As you know people spend, I think it was The Gardner identified that people spend about sixty-billion dollars per year on operations costs, why is it so much? Because most of the operations are manual, about 95% manual, which also means that these changes are slow and error-prone. What we do there is we basically use machine learning to do intelligent automation and we get a whole bunch of insights about what's happening and use that to drive intelligent automation. You may have heard about Assurance, which was announced at Cisco Live, one year ago at Barcelona and both in the campus with DNA Center we announced Cisco DNA Center Assurance and the data center went out, network and network analytic engine. And what both of these do is they look at what's happened to the network, they apply machine learning to identify patterns and from those patterns, identify, is there a problem, where's the problem? How can we...what's the root cause and then how can we solve that problem quickly? >> John, can you help us connect where this fits in a multi-cloud environment? Because what we've seen the past couple of years is when we talk about managing the network, a lot of what I might be in charge of managing, is really outside of my purview and therefore I could imagine something like ML is going to be critically important because I'm not going to be touching it but therefore I still need to have data about it and a lot of that needs to happen. >> Yeah, well one of the places ML helps with multi-cloud is the fact you need to figure out which...where to send your packets, and this comes with SD-WAN. So with SD-WAN we often have multiple paths available to us and let's say with the move to Office365, people are using the SaaS service and they want to have very good interactivity. One of the things we realized is that by carefully selecting which path we can use, at the branch and the campus too, we could get a 40% reduction in the latency. So that's a way we choose which colo or which region or which side of Office365 to send the packets to, to dramatically reduce latency. >> What's the role of data? Because when you think about it, you know, moving a packet from point A to point B, that's networking. Storage acts differently 'cause you store data data's got to come back out and be discovered. Now if you have this horizontal scalability for cloud, edge, core coming into the middle, get of the data 'cause machine learning needs the data, good data, not dirty data you need clean data. How do you see that evolving, how should customers then be thinking about preparing for either low-hanging use-cases. Just what's your thoughts and reaction to that? >> Yeah well the example you gave is a very interesting example. You described how you need to get data from one point to another, for instance, for my device to a data center with applications over the cloud. And you also mentioned how the many things between. What we care about, not necessarily the application data, we care about... You know we want to have the best network performance so your applications are working as well as possible. In that case we want to have an understanding of what's happening across a path so we want to pull to telemetry in all kinds of contexts to be able to understand, is there problem, where's the problem, what is it, and how to solve it. And that's what Assurance does. We pull this data from the access points the switches, from the routers, we pour, pull in all kinds of contextual information to get a rich understanding of the situation, and try to identify if there's a problem or not, and then how to solve it. >> Its the classic behavioral, contextual, paradigm of data but now you guys are looking at it from a network perspective and as the patterns changed the applications centric, programmability of the network, the traffic patterns are changing. Hence the announcements here but intent-based networking and hyper-flexed anywhere. This is now a new dynamic. Talk about the impact of that from an AI perspective. How are you guys getting out front on that? It's not just North, South, East, West, it's pretty much everywhere. The patterns are, could be application specific at any given point, on a certain segment of a network, I mean it's complex. >> Yeah, its complex. One of the really nice things about intent-based network and those, it fits in really nicely and that was by design, 'cause what happens with intent-based networking, as you know, a user expresses some intent if it's something they want to do. I want to securely onboard the SIoT device, and then it gets activated in the network, and then we use Assurance to see if it's doing the right thing. But what happens is that Assurance part, that's basically gathering visibility and insight in terms of what's happening. That's using machine learning to understand what's happening in the network across all these different parts that you mentioned. And then, what happens is we take those insights and then we make intelligent actions and that's part of the activation. So this...with intent based network in this feedback loop that we have directly ties with using the data for getting insights and then for activation, for intelligent actions. >> John, always want to get the update on the innovation lab, is there anything particular here at the show or, what's new that you can share? >> So we're looking at extending IBN to the cloud, to multi-cloud, to multiple devices so there's a lot of really fascinating work happening there. I believe you're going to be talking to one of my colleagues later, too, T.K. He's, I think, hopefully going to talk about some of the machine learning that's been done and that's already prioritized as you know in encrypted thread analytics. That's an example of where we use machine learning to identify if there's malware in encrypted traffic. Which is really a fascinating problem. >> That's a hard problem to solve. I'm looking forward to that conversation. >> So some members of Cisco, Dave McGrew, in particular, Cisco Fellow, started working on that problem four and a half years ago. Because of his work with other colleagues, he was able and they were able to come up with a solution. So it was a very complicated problem as you saw but through the use of machine learning and many years of investment, plus the fact that Cisco's access to Talos which has, they know the threats throughout the world. They're a list of data in terms of all kinds of threats that's massive. That's pretty powerful. >> The volume, that's where machine learning shines. I mean you see the amount of volume of data coming in, that's where it could do some heavy lifting. >> Exactly, that's one of Cisco's strengths. The fact that we have this massive view on all the threats throughout the world and we can bring it to bear. >> Network security foundation only just creates so much value for apps. Final question for you, for the folks watching, what's in you opinion the most important story here at Cicso Live Barcelona, that people should be paying attention to? >> I think how we are trying to extend across all these different domains and make it like one network for our customers. This is still a journey and it's going to take time but with intent based networking we can do that. We're going across campus, WAN, data center to multi-cloud. >> How hard is cross domain, just put it in perspective. Cross domains reversal and having visibility into these, from a latency, from a physics standpoint, how hard is it? >> It's quite hard, there's all kinds of technical challenges but there's even other sorts of challenges. This is WiFi, right? IEEE 802.11 defines the QoS standard for wireless and that's completely different than how the internet group ITEF defined it for wired. So even between wireless and wired, there's a lot of work that has to be done and Cisco's leading that effort. >> And having all that data. Great to have you on John, thanks for spending the time and demystifying machine learning and looking forward to this encrypted understanding with machine learning, that's a hard problem, looking forward to digging into that. Again, truly, the breakthroughs are happening with machine learning and adding values with application centric world. It's all about the data, it's theCUBE bringing you the data from Barcelona, I'm John with Stu Mini, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, at theCUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, we're here with a special conversation with Fortinet's John Maddison, senior vice president of products and solutions with Fortinet. Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Good to be here again. >> So you guys have some hard new today hitting, it's called the FortiNAC, Forti, like Fortinet, Forti, N-A-C, network access control. >> Right. >> Significant announcement for your guys, take a minute to explain the announcement. >> Yeah, so about two months ago we acquired a company called Bradford Networks. They compete, provide products in the network access control arena. Other companies in that space, so people like ForeScout or Cisco or HP. We think it's a very important space because it's going to be the foundations for IOT security. You probably heard a lot of buzz around IOT security. And there's different levels of IOT security. There's that for the enterprise, there's that for cloud, et cetera and so, for us, this is an important announcement because it gives us that added visibility now to IOT devices via the fabric. >> And the product, is it an appliance? Is it software? What's the product making? >> It's both. You can do a virtual machine version. It's also an appliance. It comes in different levels. The key for it though is the scalability because with IOT devices, we're not talking 100 devices anymore, we're talking millions of devices so what it's able to do is look across many different protocols and devices and provide that visibility of just about any device attaching to your network. >> Who's the target audience for FortiNAC? Is it the data center? Is it the cloud? Is it the remote? Where's the product actually sit? >> Well it's more by industry, so certain industries will have lots more of these types of devices attaching. So think of manufacturing for example. The medical industry as well. And so those are the real, education's another one, so it's more by vertical and it's really focused on campuses, large campuses or remote offices or even manufacturing plants where, again, these devices are attaching to your network. >> And they'll sit at the edge, monitoring what's coming in and out? Is that the purpose? >> Well that's the neat thing about it, it doesn't have to sit at the edge and see all the traffic. What it does is interrogate existing devices at the edge. It could be a switch, it could be a router, it could be an access point, and from that information it can make an assessment of what the device is attaching and then apply a policy. >> So this is part of a bigger holistic picture? We've have conversations with Fortinet in the past, a few conversations certainly around security, with cloud it's the top conversation, on premise it's the top conversation. You guys also have some complimentary products involved like the security fabric and the connectors. Does this fit into that? Take a minute to explain the relevance of how FortiNAC works with the security fabric and the connectors? >> Yeah, last time I was here I explained our fabric and so the fabric is basically something, is a set of Fortinet products, solutions in a way, that are very tightly integrated into the network or into the customer's ecosystem, and then once you've built that you then provide automation systems across for protection, detection and response. And the whole idea is to make sure you're covering what we call the digital attack surface. The digital attack surface now includes, obviously IOT devices, so gaining this visibility from FortiNAC, making sure the information is available to our fabric is crucial for us to make sure we can protect the digital attack surface. >> And for customer's the fabric is a holistic view, the NAC is a product that sits in the campuses or within the network that kind of communicates in the fabric? Is that right? >> Right. So the NAC can see all the IOT devices attaching and then it integrates back into the fabric. The fabric can then apply a policy, so the fabric can see everything now From IOT to the campus, to the WAN, to the data center, to the cloud and if, for example, those IOT devices are communicating with something in the cloud the fabric can see end to end and apply, for example, a segmentation policy, end to end, all the way through the infrastructure. >> You know what I love about having conversations with Fortinet is that you guys spark two types of conversations, use cases and then product technology conversation. This obviously is an IOT kind of product. It makes a lot of sense, you got a little SD-WAN in there. This is the top conversation around enterprises and people looking at cloud an/or looking at re-platforming around cloud operations, it's the cloud architect, it's the network architect. >> Yeah. >> These guys are really being asked to redo things, so how does the IOT fit into this? What is the product? What is the FortiNAC do for IOT from a use case standpoint and then product and technology? >> That's a good conversation because recently, maybe the last 18 months, instead of talking about a point solution, instead of talking about a specific use case, customers want to put all those use cases together and then produce a longer term, more holistic architecture. So now they have a cyber security architect, security architects as well as networking architects. And they want to look at their infrastructure, because that's the things that's changing the most right now. Sure, the threat landscape's out there and the cyber criminals are changing and stuff, et cetera but it's really that infrastructure that's changing the most because they've moving to flexible WAN systems or cloud and so they want it integrated, end to end, over a long time period. So what they want to be able to do is to automate, that's the key word, is automation. It's to make sure all these devices attaching are part of the security automation architecture and then they comply that security policy automatically to that device. >> You know one of the things that's a big trend in the industry is having network guys and people who are managing infrastructure, move from a command line interface, DLI, to automation. >> Mm. >> You mentioned that. How does the FortiNAC extend the security fabric? Because you guys essentially have that holistic view with the fabric. So now you have this IOT capability. How is that device extending the security fabric and what's the benefits to the buyer? >> Yeah, so the fabric has visibility obviously at the next generation firewall, we also have deployment of access points and switches. But obviously there are other companies with vast deployments of switches, I can name a few, and access points and so if they weren't our switches we couldn't necessarily see those devices attaching. And so what FortiNAC does, it comes in and provides us that now complete visibility. It doesn't matter if it's our infrastructure switches and APs, it can be somebody else's. FortiNAC can interrogate and talk to those devices and not only gain that visibility but if we decide there's a certain security posture we want to apply to some IOT device, we don't know what it is, we want it segmented, restrict it's access. Then the fabric can then tell the FortiNAC device to provide control and segmentation back to it. >> So they're working together? >> Working together and it gives us now complete visibility of the IOT devices. >> Let's talk about some the trends around segmentation. We heard, certainly recently at VMworld about micro segmentation's been one of the key things. A lot of top architects, both network and cloud and software are looking at micro segmentation or segmentation in general around the network. Why is it important and what are some of the use cases that you guys are seeing around segmentation? >> It's extremely important but it's a very complex problem in that even though our customer's have bought a lot of different security products from different vendors and different infrastructure, one of the things they don't always realize is they bought a lot of different orchestration systems, a lot of command and control systems and those are key in the future because those systems determine what the infrastructure looks like. You NAC system is kind of an orchestration system, allowing different devices to come on/off the network. SD-WAN has it's own orchestration system. You talked about micro segmentation, things like VMware and NSX and Cisco ACI, all the clouds have their own orchestration systems as well. AWS, Azure, and so what's interesting is none of them really talk to each other. They're more focused on looking after their part of the infrastructure. Now to do segmentation end to end you really need to have end to end orchestration across all those systems. If I want to orchestrate, as I said, that IOT communication with a select application in the cloud, I need to orchestrate all the way through those orchestration systems. >> You need an orchestration or the orchestration system that you have in the cloud. (laughing) >> You need a mother of all orchestrators in some way but I don't think that's ever going to happen and so what's going to happen, really, is your security architecture and segmentation will be specific to a platform or fabric as we're building and then your fabric has to connect into the orchestration systems to tell it what's going on within that section of the orchestration. Again, if it's a NAC system, I can just explain, I know these IOT devices are attaching, let me apply a policy to those. If I know the WAN links are a certain type then I apply that policy. >> And this is the benefit of a holistic fabric because that's kind of where it ties together, right? >> It is, so you build a holistic security fabric and then you let the different infrastructure orchestrators, like VMware, or an SD-WAN vendor or a NAC vendor, do their job, really focus on the infrastructure. >> And you guys help those guys out, big time, with the orchestration side of it? >> Well we can connect into the orchestration systems and we just use it to make sure the security component is doing well. They're more focused on making sure the infrastructure delivers the applications to the end user. >> They do their job, you do your job. >> Exactly. >> Take a minute to explain for the folks out there, explain segmentation and what it is and why is it important for networks? >> A very simple example of segmentation, a couple of years ago there was a bank that got hacked in one of the countries, I think it was the Philippines or something like that, and what they found out was that in that particular country they didn't have the same security infrastructure in place so they got in through that particular branch and came all the way back into the core network and so a very simple segmentation policy they put in place was that, I'm going to segment by countries. So I'm not going to let this country's network access the core data center, if I give it a certain trust level. Segmentation can mean physical countries. It can mean I'm going to segment my intellectual property off. I could be segmenting by functions. Don't let those sales people anywhere near the intellectual property. You can also segment by identity. So segmentation means many different things, you have to apply, I think different levels of segmentation depending on your applications. >> And this is proven, too? We've heard this in many conversations in theCUBE. We had one guy from the US government saying, "We have these critical infrastructure pieces in the United States, why would we let anyone outside the United States access it?" >> Yeah. >> That's a great example. >> I mean if you go to critical infrastructure, you're even more dangerous. I mean most of the infrastructure's been air gapped. It's been totally air gapped, you can't get at it but that's changing as more of those devices become IOT and you have to let some access that. >> And this is where IOT is a challenge that we're seeing. This is one of the problems? >> It's IOT. You know that category is often referred to these days as OT, operational technology. >> Talk about end points, we're hearing endpoints being discussed, like hey, you connect the endpoints, your endpoint strategy, network strategy. Kind of elusive for some, describe why networking the endpoints is an important feature or is it? When people think of the endpoint of the network what are they really talking about? >> Well I think it's become more important. It's interesting if you go back 10 years or so even 15 years, you have a lot of endpoint vendors. Semantics, MacAfees, Trend Micros, Microsoft, I think, is now the largest endpoint security vendor. Then you have a different set of networking vendors, ourselves and some other names out there I can't remember. But, they're totally separated and so to look at your network, give you visibility to policy and segment, you need to be able to see the endpoints and the network together. The security fabric makes sure that you can at least see the endpoint. You may not provide the full stack of security, you may leave that to your endpoint vendor still but your network should be able to see your endpoint and vice versa, and you should be able to see what's communicating between the two. >> I'd like to talk about SD-WAN, but before we go there, just to kind of close out IOT, talk about Fortinet's differentiation and advantages when you talk about convergence between IOT and access technology. >> So the base technology's NAC, network access control, which is in place there but our advantage really is now scale, we can see huge amounts of IOT devices which are attaching and then take action not only at the access level but all the way into the cloud. >> SD-WAN has become a really hot topic. It's a huge market. >> Yeah. >> It's in the billions in terms of spend, it connects devices, campuses and devices but cloud's had a big renaissance within the SD-WAN market. Talk about what's going on with SD-WAN and how the security fabric and the FortiNAC fit into that because it's not your grandfather's SD-WAN market anymore as the expression goes. >> No. Well it's in that class of everything's being software defined, fair enough. But I think this marketplace, if you go even three years ago, was dominated because all the, you've got two marketplaces. You've got what I call the retail, which is distribute enterprise, thousands and thousands inside which already went to a UTM infrastructure. And then you had the branch office, which was more connected, in fact, it just had a simple router in there, it was connected back to the data center which then would go into the internet. And so what's happened is these branch offices they need more and more access to the cloud, more cloud applications are running. You need to provider QOS against those applications and then also these large corporations have decided they don't want to pay, it's a lot of money to get certain, high quality EPLS circuits, when they can get faster circuits through DSL and other mechanisms and so they wanted more flexibility around the wide area network. >> So commodity network access which is, you know, cloud non and EPLS, were high priced, secure. You get now more cloud access, this is translating to more traffic or is it? Is that the driver in all this? >> Well that's what happens and then you get more traffic going through there, it's the same with the next gen firewall right now and people saying, "There's a refresh going, we don't know why." the reason for it is, when you're in your office you're more than likely communicating with the cloud versus your local databases and so the same for the branch office, there's more traffic going through there, it's more encrypted, they want flexibility, they want HA modes, if that goes down now, you've got a big productivity problem with your employees there. And so this whole market sprung from nowhere only three or four years ago and is already in, as you say, in the billions of dollars. There's a lot of acquisition's already happened, consolidation. In our mind it's very important but what's just a important as all those elements is security. If I open up my branch office now to an internet connection, I need best of breed securities on that device and so we've been building SD-WAN, what I call core functionality, for some time, inside our fabric. It's quite a natural integration now of security into that. In fact some recent tests we did with SS Labs, we got highly recommended, for not only the SD-WAN features but that core security. Today SD-WAN vendors will say, well I'll just go and get some security solution from somewhere and bolt it on or attach it on, provide it through the cloud and that's fine but longterm, again, if you come back to that coordination, that orchestration, across two different systems, it's going to become hard. >> And the other complicating factor in this, aside from the infrastructure component, is that a lot of the SAS applications that people are buying, whether it's shadow IT or just off the shelf, or there's Dropbox or any of these services that are SAS based, cloud based, that's creating less of a perimeter. >> Yeah, when it all comes back, technology called CASB is providing that interface into that world through APIs and it all comes back to making sure that all your mechanisms of protection, detection, control are available to all your systems. If I've got some SD-WAN device somewhere and I need to check where this is going, I can use my application database or if I need to check if I'm going to this cloud, I use my CASB API. And so it comes back to a platform approach, a fabric approach. >> John, what's the SD-WAN approach for Fortinet? How do you guys do it? Why should people care? What's the differentiation? Why Fortinet for SD-WAN? What's the approach? >> Integrated in one word. That is, you don't need two boxes, you don't need two VMs, you don't need a box plus a cloud, it's all integrated on the system, best of breed SD-WAN functionality, best of breed tested by third party security which allows you then to have a much more cost effective solution. I think our TCO in the test as a 10th, or a 100th of some of the leading vendors outside there because you're bringing two vendors together and it's gets very costly. >> Alright, I'm going to put you on spot, I'm going to put my cynical hat on. So you're saying integrate security with SD-WAN? I'm going to say, hey, why not just keep it separate? Why integrate? >> Because the two functions need to work together. Where's the firewall going to go? Is it going to go in the cloud or is it going to go here? Who decides on the policy? If something happens, segmentation, who's deciding on segmentation policy? Usually two different companies, they don't really talk apart from maybe, there's an API leak in the security capabilities but to our mind, again, it comes back to that end to end segmentation and that's what a lot of the, I would say, the larger infrastructure vendors are trying to do. I want infrastructure all the way to devices being added, through my campus, through my SD-WAN, data center and cloud and if you've got multiple vendors, again, all over the place, there's no way you're going to be able to coordinate that. >> Alright, so I'll put my IT practitioner hat on. Okay, so I get that, so probably less security manual risk for human error, but I really want to automate. My goal is to automate some of these IT functions, get better security end to end, does this fit that requirement? >> Yeah, so from an automation perspective, we're building in some tools of our own but what we're finding more and more is that from an IT, as you said, they've gone out and built some dev ops capability. Ansible's a good example there. So what we're doing is making sure that, in fact, a lot of our partners and our SEs have already built these scripts and put them on GitHub, well now Microsoft Hub or whatever you want to call it. So we're taking those in and we're QAing them, making sure they're a high quality and then making them available to our customers and our partners through there. So this dev ops world, especially with cloud moving so fast, has become very important and to us it's a very important area we want to make available to our partners and customers. >> One of the things that's talked about a lot is SSL inspection, is that important? What do you guys do there? >> I think it's extremely important in that, a lot of enterprises have switched it off. The reason they switched it off is because when you switch it on it almost kills your performance. There was a recent, again an SS Labs test that was doing next gen firewall testing for SSL and some vendors' performance decreased by 90% and basically it was useless, you had to turn it off. A lot of enterprises want to switch it on. To switch it on, you need a system that has the performance capabilities. I think we decreased around 15%. The law of physics say you've got to decrease in some way but 15%'s a lot better than 90%. And you've got to switch that on because otherwise it's just a giant hole in your firewall. >> John, talk about the cloud because cloud now has multiple tracks to it. Used to be straight public cloud. Obviously on premise is this hot hybrid cloud, multi cloud is the center of the controversies, it's been validated. We see Amazon Web Services announcing something with VMware validation that you're going to start to see an on premises and cloud and some cloud native, born in the cloud companies will be out there. How do you guys extend the security fabric for those two cloud use cases? How does the Fortinet products scale to the cloud? >> Yeah, two good points. Again, a few years ago, I'd ask customers about cloud and say, "Yeah we're going to takes some steps in AWS." Now it's I've got four clouds, what's the next cloud I'm going to put inside there? I've got global clouds around the world. It's kind of interesting that there is this mad rush and it's still going on into public cloud but then I still see some people trying to do hybrid cloud and put some stuff inside their data centers. Some customers don't want that data leaving, regardless. Some people can't move mainframe applications out there so there's always going to be a hybrid world for some time but the key is multi cloud security in that, more than likely, your AWS security systems are not going to work inside a Google cloud, are not going to work inside your Azure cloud, are not going to work inside some of the data center pieces. And so hybrid cloud and multi cloud security Are really important, so for us the ability to support all those clouds, and it's not just saying, well I can put my firewall VM inside AWS. There's a whole set of deep integrations you need to do, to make sure you're inside their automation systems, you can see visibility, there's a lot of practices around compliance, et cetera, so it's actually a big task for each of us to make sure that we're compliant across the set of functions for each of those clouds. >> My final question is going to be around customer impact. If we zoom out, look at the marketplace and I'm a CIO or CXO, I'm a big time, busy enterprise architect or CIO, I'm so busy, I've got all this stuff going on, why Fortinet? Explain to me why are you important in my world? What should I be thinking about? What are some of the opportunities and challenges that I might face? What should I look at? I want to go to the cloud as much as possible because there's some benefits there. I want on premises to be as seamless as possible to the public cloud. I want rock solid security. I want to have the ability to use SAS apps. >> Right. >> Have programmable networks and have a great development team building top line revenue for my business. How can you help me? >> Is that all? (laughing) I think CIOs and CXOs are happier dealing with less vendors. The trouble is with some very large vendors, they just slow down the development side. I think what we bring to the table and by the way we're not the third largest cyber security company out there, what we try and bring is a broad approach, a broad product set so you can have different things from us as well at integrate into your current set but we try to keep very agile and fast with our developments because otherwise you'll fall behind the infrastructure, you'll fall behind the cyber threats. You know, GDPR, for example, over the last year, you've got to keep up with that. What we bring to the table is now a reasonably large company, we're five and a half thousand employees. A very large R and D budget, we try and move very fast. A large product set, all integrated through our fabric but again, we try and stay as agile and as fast moving as possible. Where we can't do it organically, we try and do it organically so our system integrate very well, where we can't do it, then we'll go and make smaller acquisitions, Bradford Networks was an example of that for IOT but I think we're building now a much better relationship with the CIO and CXO level and becoming one of their strategic partners going forward. >> Talk about the community that you guys have built because I've noticed, and I've seen you guys, certainly over the past couple years, that RSA I think a year and half, two years ago, you're working with a lot of industry partners. It's not just Fortinet by themselves, you work within the industry itself. >> Yeah, because people are building their ecosystem and they've made some decisions and hey want you to integrate inside those so we have about 50 partners now where they use our API to provide integration so they built our API and although we've mentioned FortiNAC today, we have APIs, for example, for ForeScout and other NAC vendors so if they've chosen that specific vendor, then we're fine, we'll integrate that inside our fabric. Will it have the level of integration that we have? Probably not, but at least you can see, have visibility, for example. I think the technology we've been building in the last year or so is something called fabric connectors which is a much, much deeper integration into the platforms so we have connectors for VMware NSX, for Cisco ACI, for AWS, and this provides a two way communication and that two way communication is important for one word, and that's automation. So once you can see things, once you direct policy backwards then you can start stitching together these objects and provide that end to end automation. >> Final question for you, a lot of the leading enterprises and businesses out there that are using technology to build digital business, whether it's from developers all the way down under the hood into the network, are all betting on multi cloud. Clearly that's obvious to us and that's pretty much being picked up by mainstream now. So early adopters that are leading the charge are multi cloud. If I'm betting on multi cloud, why Fortinet? Why should I be working with you guys? >> Because we're committed to supporting all those clouds. And as I said, it's no easy task to support, I think we support six clouds now, to go through all the different items and integrations across that, we're committed to that. We've got probably the most expansive integration across the most security products inside the industry and we'll continue to do that going forward. >> John, thanks for spending the time. John Maddison, senior vice president products and solutions at Fortinet here inside the special CUBE Conversation with the big news today, the FortiNAC new product integrating with the security fabric, IOT, SD-WAN, cloud solutions for multi cloud and IT. As automation comes down the road really fast, we're here in theCUBE bringing it to you. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCube. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage at Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE with my partner in crime this week, Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon.com. Also, cohost at all the events we go to, most of the events I should say. Our next guest is Ashutosh Malegaonkar, who's the Principal Engineer at Cisco DevNet, involved in a lot of the great projects in Sandbox we're going to talk about. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thank you for having me, John. >> Thanks for coming on. >> One of the exciting stories here is the DevNet momentum continues. Congratulations to your team. >> Ashutosh: Thank you. But you're involved in a couple cool parts of the projects that we notice was getting a lot of traction, co-create a sandbox. >> Ashutosh: Yes. >> First, take a minute to talk about what that project is and why is it so popular. >> Yeah, so as you know DevNet is becoming the key core for Cisco and one of the things that we did in DevNet is like, it's a strategic initiative where we said that we are going to call it co-creations. And what that means is we are co-creating with Cisco's strategic partners, that's one. The second is that we are taking our customers, like our top 10 customers, our top 100 customers, our partners, and our developers. So we are looking at each of these three categories and saying, how can we actually help and take that to the next level with DevNet. >> So you're sharing a lot of resource. Is is the same project? Do people bring their own project to the table? How does it work? >> Yeah, so it's both. So for example, first let's talk about strategic initiatives where ... a strategic partner sorry. And in there we have Apple and Google as our strategic partners. With Apple, what we have done is we have actually created a Fast Lane Validation program and what that does is, with Fast Lane as a product, what we are doing is any app developer who wants to use application quality of service, we actually help them validate that application in DevNet. And one of the things that we noticed is app developers really don't understand quality of service, QOS, and as soon as we say quality of service they freak out. And so we have to actually handhold them, let them understand what it means and then we actually help them take their application on the path. >> I mean there's a lot of things in networks that are like that. Deep packet inspection, people freak out and QOS, but QOS is a very important feature. >> Ashutosh: It is. >> Big time. >> It is and that's one thing that we are basically saying how can network be the platform where you can use performance as a building block? And if you heard Susie and her keynote, that's what she was stressing on, right? We want to have that as a building block for developers. >> Yeah, really interesting points. One of the things we've been digging in the last few days is kind of the changing partner ecosystem. There's some partners that have been with Cisco for decades, networking, infrastructure, but Apple, not a traditional Cisco partner. The other one, you mentioned Google. >> Ashutosh: I did, yeah. >> So I believe Google's here doing some presentations. John and I have been digging in to all the C and SEF projects so what's Google doing here. >> Yeah, so with Google, what Cisco has done is we are coming up with our hybrid or multi-cloud strategy and in the hybrid cloud strategy what we are doing is there things where, if I'm an app developer, on-prem app developer and I want to access services which are in the cloud. Now what the partnership does is we have our security services all the way from on-prem to the cloud deployed in the Google Cloud system and as an app developer I can do my services on-prem but access some services which are in the cloud. So that's one application. Second is that if I'm an app developer working only in the cloud but I want to access some of the services which are on-prem, than how do I do it? And that's what this partnership is also helping out. >> Great. How's the reaction been of the Cisco Live audience here? How many people are lining up to come listen to Google talk about Istio? >> Yeah, so Istio is one part, but Kubernetes, like if you look at our sandbox, like it's becoming one our most popular sandbox in DevNet and Kubernetes is part. And with the Google partnership we are also working with Google on Istio. It's an open source project and what we have done is we have created a sandbox for Istio and that is also it's kind of an industry first, where developers are able to go through a learning lab to actually understand what it means. >> Yeah, absolutely. John and I were at the KubeCon show. We interviewed Lou from the Cisco team, heavily involved in the open source. But yeah, one of those things, how do we simplify it, how do we help people get the on-ramp? Sandbox is a great way for people to get started. >> Ashutosh: That's correct, that's correct. >> One of the things that we're excited about and this something that we're going to be doing, digging into all year is the impact of Kubernetes. And the sandboxing points to the trend of how people are partnering. I think you guys struck a really interesting form in this co-creation model because if you look at what service meshes are doing in markets is that the more that you can make it easier for developers and at the same time enabling the engineering side of it, getting down and dirty. We're talking about QOS, we're talking about plumbing stuff. There's still a lot of automation being done under the hood. This is the network opportunity, this is where we're seeing automation around provisioning and configuration management and all that good stuff. That needs to get done but it has to be addressable for true programmability. We're not there yet, but we're almost there. >> Ashutosh: We're getting there, yes. >> What's your reaction to that, a 19-year veteran at Cisco? Cisco has an inherent advantage having the network, so looking up, that's been enabling, but now you have people who want to look down and program into you. Kind of new dynamic. >> It is, it is. >> How are you guys looking at this? >> So the way I look at it, as you said, I've seen Cisco grow. I mean, I've grown up in the company and one of things, Cisco being the expert in networking, we have experts now which are getting to doing everything, in a sense. Like the edge is where a lot of stuff is happening and when you deploy edge services you also need stuff that needs to be done in the cloud. So for example, one of the examples I like to do is let's take machine learning as a good example, where I want to download some models, machine learning models onto the edge but the traffic is actually all at the edge, so I'm taking all the inputs from the edge, taking at the edge, calculating things, and then the models are being built in the cloud because I can't build those at the edge. So that's the thing that is happening now and what we see here is that Cisco is in the midst of both edge as well as cloud. >> And IoT was going to be very instrumental. If you talk to the pure networking nerds and geeks out there, they're going to say, "Edge? "We've been doing edge of the network for years." But now the edge is extending, right? To IoT so it's not a new concept for Cisco at all, is it? >> Its not. It's not new at all. Because as I said, something very similar to what we are doing for the Apple Fast Lane, as I told you before, like now the app developer has the ability to give QOS right at the app level. It's the same thing like with IoT. It's like all the devices are connected to Cisco. >> And this is what's going to be- it's fun to watch because you guys now have compute to throw at the edge, you have cloud that you can connect to the edge, but this going to change the nature of programming. Stateful and stateless applications become a really interesting dynamic. What's your reaction to that trend of as developers start to really start thinking about state? >> Sure, so one of the things that ... Again I go back to the edge thing where like if you have a tunnel and then there are cars passing by, you are actually looking at the cars as, let's say a stream of dots. Now that state you cannot be giving and storing it somewhere so you basically keep it at the edge, you figure out what's happening, compute, and take some actions there itself. >> That' where the action is. Ashutosh, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing your knowledge, appreciate it. Congratulations on the co-creation Fast Lane service you guys have, among other things. The collaboration model is the future. Cisco's really demonstrating that in the DevNet zone so props to the team. It's theCUBE, we always collaborate, sharing the best content here live in Barcelona with you. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live coverage, day two of our two days wall to wall live coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. This is theCUBE. Be right back with more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Cisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering vmworld 2015, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystems sponsors. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vallante. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in San Francisco at Moscone North Lobby. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vallante. And our next guest is Jayshree Ullal, The President of, CEO of Arista Networks. Welcome back to theCUBE. We haven't seen you in couple years, welcome back. You look great. >> Good to be here, John, Dave. I see you don't put me in the middle anymore. (laughter) >> I know, we want to stare right at you and get all the data from out of your head, and get it, share it with the audience. Well, first thing I want to say is last time we spoke, you were a private company, now you've gone public, IPO. Congratulations. What's it like? What's it like from private company to public company? Share the experience. >> It's definitely different, for starters we're not Arista Networks, we're ANET. We are a four-letter symbol, I guess. So abbreviate everything. And then people just track us a whole lot more. And, you know, there's an automatic branding, an awareness of the company, and anything we do, every time we sneeze, we get written about. Good, bad, or not. >> You guys are pacing the market, and I remember, Dave and I, when we first started theCUBE, we were in the Cloudera office, and then when we first chatted, we'd see the boxes of Arista coming in. You guys made a great mark early on around people doing large scale, lot of networking. But the market's changed. SDN has exploded, VMware bought Nicira, SDN's the hot thing. NSX is doing well, as Pat Gelsinger said. What's going on? You guys have done some things. SDN certainly is, takes the market to where you guys had originally had your vision. What's the update with that whole SDN and how does Arista play into that? >> I think if you step back and look at SDN in the beginning, there was a lot of confusion. And my favorite acronym for SDN is Still Don't Know. But I actually think we still do know now, and we've gone from it being a marketing hype to really about openness, programmability, and building an infrastructure to do network management correctly. Software clearly drives our industry, and more importantly drives capxn OPX reduction. And what's really happening is there's a lot of change where it's not just devices and users and traditional applications, but really it's about workloads and workflows. And if you can realize there's so many different types of workloads that need control, and so many different types of workflows that need telemetry, that fundamentally is the essence of SDN in my view, and it takes a whole village. Arista can't do it alone. We're doing a lot of things on programatizing our stack and making network more open and programmable, but we work with a whole slew of vendors to really make it possible. >> During the early days, open flow was the buzzword, came out of a lot of academic stuff that was being what the geeks were working on. What do people get right? And there was lot of missteps early on with open flow, and only because it's early on. What did SDN get right, or did they get it wrong? And how did you guys see that 'cause you guys were already out shipping product when this hit. So what's your observation of what went right, what didn't go right, what's going right now, can you share your insight? >> Yeah, I think, you know, our founder Ken Duda would say this very well, which is when you look at open flow, it's a little bit of a technology searching for a problem. When you look at what Arista did with our extensible operating system, we built a state-oriented, publish subscribe model to solve a problem. And the fundamental problem we were solving was, we saw the industry building monolithic enterprise stacks when everybody was moving to the cloud. What are the three attributes a cloud meets? You got to be always on, you got to have scale, right, and you have to have tremendous agility. You got to move across your workloads fast. And that, to me, is the trick behind SDN not latching onto a technology, but whether it's open stack or big data analytics or new cloud applications or bringing the LAN and the WAN together, or places in the network converging, fundamentally, we were cloudifying everything whether it's public, private, or hybrid. >> So I got to ask you, I know you're going to see Pat Gelsinger shortly after this interview. Two themes that are coming on the queue over the past year around networking has been resiliency and agile, agility. Those two factors 'cause you have vertical and now horizontally scalable things going on. What's your take on that? As someone who's been in the industry, you've seen kind of the old generation now transition to the new generation, cloudification, API-ification, these are are new dynamics that are table stakes now in cloud. >> No, they are. And yet, if you look at the, both problems are hard problems. They cannot be solved by sprinkling some pixie dust. And what I mean by that is when you look at something like high availability, in the past in networking, you had two of everything, two supervisors, two operating systems. You had something called in server software upgrade, so that you'd bring one down and then bring the other. But today, there's no tolerance for two of everything. You know, no customer wants to pay for two of everything even if the vendors want it, right. So what you really need is smart system upgrade where you're doing everything real time. You know, at the colonel level, you need to automatically repair your faults. Software has memory leaks. Software has faults. It's how quickly you diagnose them, troubleshoot them, trap them and recover from them. And then if you look at hitless upgrades, you got to do them real time, you can't wait to have an enterprise window and bring it down and bring it up. Your boot time, your convergence time has to move from minutes to seconds, and the biggest thing you have to do is, let's look at simple command like copy paste. We do this over and over and over again. Change control has to improve. Rather than doing it every time, a hundred times, wouldn't it be nice if you could just press one command and it happens across the entire switch, across all the ports, across the entire network. So I think the definition of high availability has completely changed where it's really about network rollback, time stamping, real time recovery, and not just two or three of everything. >> So, it's, tight time here with you. John mentioned a public company, you guys have beat five quarters in a row, of course, you know, you get on that slope and the pressures go. But you can't fight the whims of the market. You just have to execute, and you guys are executing very well. Great growth, you're clearly gaining share. Partnerships. You announced a deal with HP in converged infrastructure. Just saw this week, or maybe it was late last week, that HP is OEMing NSX. So now it's got a really interesting converged play with Arista against Cisco. I want to talk about the competition and that partnership. >> Well, it's not so much against Cisco. It's following the trends. And I think there are two major trends, right? And they're actually C letters, too. Cloud and converged. So if you look at what Arista's really doing, we're serving a big public crowd trend. We're in six out of the seven major cloud operators. And there's no doubt that the cloud is happening, it's not just a buzzword. >> You call 'em cloud titans. >> They're called the cloud titans. You've done your homework. Good job. And hopefully, I'll be able to come back to the theCUBE and say we're in seven out of seven, but today we're in six out of seven. >> And the cloud titan is the big hyperscale guys, is that right? >> Absolutely, and we're just in a very early inning with them. Everybody thinks we're already saturated. We're just beginning. How many innings are there in a baseball game? >> Nine. >> Nine, in cricket there are only two. >> What inning are we in? >> No, we're in the first. Of two in cricket, a long way to go. (laughter) >> Cloud Native's right around the corner. What do you think of Cloud Native? What does Cloud Native mean to you? >> So, the Cloud Native really means bringing the cloud experience to public, private, or the hybrid. So you talked about the HP partnership. And over there, it's not really building a public cloud. It's about bringing a private cloud where you bring in the compute, the storage, the virtualization, and the network as a converged experience. Now, that one we can't do alone. And I couldn't think of two strong partners, better partners or stronger partners than VMware and HP to help do that for us. >> Well, you said it's not against Cisco, but that's a great alternative for the leading products in the number one marketshare. >> Absolutely, I think the enterprise companies have to have a wake up call. They need to understand that the one neck to choke or one lock in that's all proprietary is a thing of the past. And really, it's about building best of breed building blocks. >> So I want to ask you, just on some current events, and I'll see buzzwords that get recycled in every trend, is QOS policy-based fill in the blank. Everything's policy-based now, so that makes a lot of sense, I get that. Apple just announced a deal with Cisco where they are throttling, I shouldn't say throttling, or deep packet inspection, I won't say those two things. (laughter) Giving iOS users a preferred fast lane with Cisco gear, so it brings up this notion that workloads are driving infrastructure or devops, if you will. What's your take on all that? Are we going to see more things like that? Are we going to see more customization around prioritization? >> Well, I think QOS and especially policy are definitely overused words. First step, I don't think you'd apply policy to an application to make your network better. What you really have to do is make your workloads and workflows go better and have some control for them. So I'm not a big fan of tweaking every application of the policy 'cause the applications are changing, right? But if you look at what Apple's doing, I think this is a great thing for Apple because what they're really doing is consumerizing and enterprising their systems and devices, right. You're seeing the convergence of consumer and enterprise coming together. So I see this is really about improving all of our iPhone experiences across the enterprise. >> We got to wrap up 'cause you got to go see Pat Gelsinger. But I want to ask you one final question. You're an inspiration to the industry. You've been around a long time, you know a lot and you're leading a public company. What are the opportunities that you see for folks out there, boys and girls, men and women, in science and technology and in entrepreneurial opportunities? >> Yeah, I'm glad you ask this question because I think it's too easy with everything being hot for everybody to want to go straight to the top rung of the ladder. And I was telling Dave and you before, one step at a time. First you have to build your foundation on education. Boys and girls, education is important. Follow your heart, follow your dreams with math and science. You know, my dad started the IITs and he pushed me in engineering, and I didn't like it then but I realized you can be a cool engineer, and before Moscone got started, I actually went into the manhole of every PG&E circuit to make sure that the electrical circuits were okay for this now fantastic convention center. >> Can you help with the wifi? >> Back in those days, there was no wifi. That's the next step. So I definitely say, build your foundation, follow your dreams, but go one step at a time. Don't expect to be at the top rung right away. >> I know you're a parent. We are friends on Facebook. What's your advice to the younger generation in terms of opportunities that they could pursue in science and math? There's a lot more opportunities, interdisciplinary, not just computer science or electrical engineering, like it used to be when we were growing up, but now it's much broader. What are some of the things that you get excited about? >> I get excited about science. I think when you look at engineering, it's about applying science. You know, know your fundamental math, science, you know, physics, chemistry, bio, whatever turns you on. And don't make an assumption that it's tough or hard til you've been through it. You know, I had seven years of physics in high school. I don't recommend seven for everybody, but, you know, but I didn't really care for biology. So I would say never shy away from trying something til you know. And then, of course, there's applied science, whether it's computers or programming or media arts or visualization that you can add on top of that. So you're very right. I think there's the cake, which is your foundation, and then there's the icing where you can build on top of it. >> And will they find their passion? >> Absolutely, find your aptitude and passion. You know, you don't try to do drawing or needlework if you're not good at it. I wasn't. And I know my mom despaired about that, but you go, follow both what you're good at and what you're passionate about. >> Jayshree, thanks so much for spending time. I know you're super busy. Congratulations on your successes. >> Thanks for having me here, it's always a lot of fun. >> And we got to get you back on. This is theCUBE, bringing you more signal here all the data here in the theCUBE. We'll be right back, more live from San Francisco after this short break.