>> Narrator: From around the globe it's "TheCUBE" presenting accelerating automation with DevNet brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage theCUBE virtual's coverage of DevNet Create Virtual, we're not face to face, theCUBE's been there with DevNet and DevNet Create, since the beginning DevNet Create was really a part of the DevNet community looking out at the external market outside of Cisco which essentially is the cloud native world which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here who's been on theCUBE many times, we've been talking to them, recently acquired by Cisco ThousandEyes we have Joe Vaccaro with us Vice President of Product. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Great and thanks for having me. >> You have the keys to the kingdom you're the Vice President of the Product which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside figure it all out make everything run on ThousandEyes, You guys have been running common language across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud-native. This is really a hard area, it's converging multiple theaters and technology, a super important I want to get into that with you but first ThousandEyes is recently acquired by Cisco big acquisition, super important. The new CEO of Cisco, very clear API everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at DevNet Create. The ecosystem of Cisco is going outside their own their walls, outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers, talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us as the COVID hits you get acquired by Cisco. Tell us what's happening. >> Yeah, surely been an exciting six months for a ThousandEyes and the entire team and our customers as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think that change alone really kind of amplified even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And SaaS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever not only to run your business but to enable your employees to be productive but you don't own them. And if you don't own them then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what ThousandEyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >> Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses. I've talked to many CXOs, CSOs, chief security is huge. Talk track we'll get to in a second. But it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint as people start to look at their priorities and on hey, we going to have a connected experience. We going to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs are passe, maybe it's SD-WAN maybe it's something else, they're on a backbone, they're connecting to the internet. A lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running for these networks. This is a huge issue, COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what is ThousandEyes thinking about this? >> If you think about the kind of legacy application delivery it went from largely users internet office connected over say a dedicated corporate network largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a fairly simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now as you mentioned distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application. Those three things together, ultimately are creating that level of complex service chain. It really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the IT organization is really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure but delivering the right experience. And yet then have a way to be able to see to gain that visibility that experience to measure it and understand and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it to be able to ensure that your employees as well as your customers are getting the right overall approach to being able to elaborate those assets. >> It's funny you know I was getting to some of these high scale environments a lot of these concepts are converging. We had terms like automation, self healing networks. You mentioned microservices earlier, you earlier mentioned the clouds of the new data center or when's the new land. Have you ever look at it, it's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on the automation piece of networking and internet outages for instance. Because there's so many outages going up and down it is like catching looking for a needle in a haystack, right? So we've had this conversation with you guys on theCUBE before. How does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? What's important to look at? Can you comment on and react to the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >> Yeah, it was really great and as you mentioned automation really in a place that a key when you think about the just a broad problem that IT is trying to drive you know from our lens we look at it in really three ways. First off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points you want to inspect them. But what we talked about RightSide Data alone doesn't solve that problem as you mentioned that needle in the haystack. Data just provides the raw metrics that are streaming across the screen you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. You need to enable that data to become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly to allow you to be able to see the unseen. To allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your IT workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine to be able to then make the fundamental changes back the network fabric whether that is dressing your modifying your BGP peering that we see happen within our customers using ThousandEyes data built around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months or to be able to then use that data to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers as well as our employees. >> Classic policy-based activities taken to a whole another level. I going to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay, because most IT people like Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane sandy but now with COVID everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent work from home which puts a lot of pressure on everything. So I got to ask you now that employees are working at home how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >> Yeah, that's a great question. As you we saw within our own customer base when COVID hit and we saw this rise of work from home IT teams were really scrambling and said, okay I have to light up this say VPN infrastructure or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network. And people were then using ThousandEyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CPP and infrastructure across back into the corporate network as well as in using our ThousandEyes end point agents that runs on a local user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. Because when a user calls up support and says I'm having trouble say accessing my application whether that's Salesforce or something else what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU memory utilization. It could be the WiFi and the signal quality within your WiFi network. It could be your access point. It could be your local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that can go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application and to be able to understand that full end to end path. >> IT teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well but you've got the Cloud. How has your technology help the IT teams? Can you give some examples there? >> Yeah great way is how people use ThousandEyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem again that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action. And where in the past you might be able as an IT administrator to walk over to their network team say hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing? Now that's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as an IT organization? We think a ThousandEyes and how our customers are using a ThousandEyes becomes a common operating language. It allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure through those different layers of the network. What's happening and where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore within ThousandEyes in terms of enabling that data sharing ecosystem leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say you know what here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the IT organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times as well as over the course of people using ThousandEyes. They take those share links that actually send them to their external providers. Because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own IT organization they're having worked collaboratively with the different ESPs that they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're leveraging or the SaaS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >> So I got to ask you the question what you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for IT teams, you see a lot of benefits with ThousandEyes. You pointed out a few of them. So I got to ask you the question. So if I'm an IT person in the trenches are you guys have an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah, give me a couple Advils and aspirins but also >> Yeah. you're an enabler too. The new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. Talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for IT teams. >> Yeah, that's a great analogy you're thinking like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum ThousandEyes is the trusted tool the source of truth for IT organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing as they are generating the different on call to be able to jump into a war room situation. ThousandEyes is that trusted source of truth that allow them to focus to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But ThousandEyes is also when you think about baselining your experience what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging ThousandEyes on a continuous basis it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience to understand how your network is changing cause as you mentioned networks are constantly evolving, right? The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore you can be begin to use that as you mentioned in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy you'd be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light as people using say ThousandEyes as part of say SD-WAN roll out. Where you're looking to say benchmark and again confidence as you look to scale out either benchmarking different ISP within that I feel like connectivity where as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >> That's great insights classic financial model ROI you got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out and the upside music experience connectivity, application performance which drives revenue, etc. So great point great insight Joe, thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. Who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things, but as the trend starts going on as everything is a service or SaaS as it's called certainly Cisco is going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service. Because at the end of the day everything will be a service but without automation you really can't have services, right? So, automation, automation, automation great drum to bang all day long but then also you've got the same business side saying as a service pushing that into the products. Means it's not trivial. Talk about how you look at automation and everything as service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >> Yeah, ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve and ultimately, what is the deal that they're trying to face? And in many ways right, they're being exploded with increase of data they need to be able to not only process and gather but then be able to then make use of. Then from that as we mentioned once you've processed that data and you still gather the insights from it you need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that IT experience becomes even more complex as more, more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. Ultimately you need with the level of automation you'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as a broad of a way as possible. And data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate and then ultimately how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >> Its like a feature (laughs). It's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning all the goodness in the software. That's really kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it? >> Hmm. >> Final question for you as we wrap up DevNet Create really again is going beyond Cisco's DevNet community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. These are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want you know, you guys got that. That was nice thanks so much. You take care of that I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services these new automation, these new capabilities what's your message? >> Ultimately I think when you look at ThousandEyes from a product perspective we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience and from a developer standpoint what I'd say is that, while you're developing in your silo you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. And your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon but the network its connected to and then ultimately the user and the sense of that user. If I leveraging a ThousandEyes and being able to then integrate ThousandEyes into how you think closely on that experience that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developers looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is while you need to focus on your role as a developer having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of how your users will access that application is critical. >> Awesome Joe, thank you so much again. Trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction. Congratulations to everyone at ThousandEyes. Thanks for coming on sharing. >> I appreciate it thanks for having me. >> Joe Vaccaro vice president of Product here with ThousandEyes is now part of Cisco. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE Virtual for DevNet Create Virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)