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

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem. Barker's >> Welcome Back Here in the San Diego Convention Center. I'm student in my co host, David Dante, and you're watching the Cube, the leader in worldwide Tech coverage, and its Sisqo Live 2019 happening. Welcome back to the program. One of our Cuba, Lem's Russ Curie, who is the vice president Enterprise strategy at Net Scout. It's great to see you. Thanks for joining you guys. Thanks for having me. Alright, we always say, we got a bunch of Massachusetts guys that had to fly all the way across the country to talk to each other really well. So a couple hours for the beast hip, all everybody excited. But a lot of excitement here in the definite zone specifically and Sisqo live overall, 28,000 intended you've been to a lot of customer meetings, gives a little insight. What's been your take away from the show so >> far? I think that there's a lot of energy towards the multi cloud called Deployments in general Security. The whole introduction of Umbrella has got a lot of conversation started. It's amazing the amount of cos you see out there talking about just visibility in general, and that's being one of them as well. So it's been a lot of fun. >> Good show this year, Russ. I've been looking for this conversation. We heard from Chuck Robbins in the keynote. He said The network sees a lot of things, and Cisco says they're going to give customers that visibility. Of course, that ties in a lot, too. What Net scouted love, you know, give us. You know, your thoughts on Multi Cloud. How Cisco doing in the space? And how does Net Scout fit into that whole picture? >> Well, I think that one of things as Chuck talks about that, it's the cloud is the one thing, or the network is the one thing that's common for all. Coming along the devices right? I have. If I go into a different cloud, I have one set a performance metrics I might be able to gather about. You look at what device or an operating system. It's all different. But all the communications on the network T C P I. P is common. That really provides that thread that you're able to provide that level of visibility. So it really becomes one of those things that the network is a unique place to gain perspective on both the performance in the security that we're delivering to our customers. So can >> you just summarize the problem that Net Scout solves for our audience? Sure, I think that primarily it's one of these situations where I've been my own prime environment. It was pretty easy. I had access to everything. I could see what was going on. Quite readily. I started introduced visual ization and now traffic start to move much more East West and became a problem for folks. I think can Cisco recently said 85% of the traffic there seeing on the network is East West traffic, right? And then we moved to the cloud, and it's even more obvious gay that I can't see anything in new ways of network traffic. There typically live in clover and desert starting to address that, but really being able to gain that level of visibility so you can understand exactly what's happening just gaining that perspective. So let's explain it. >> I'm going to stay with the East West north seven metaphor. Why is it easier to get visibility in a column? >> Then? It is a row, I think, because in a column is everything exploding north and self. So you've got everything right there, and usually you have a place where you can look into it. But when you're flat, it starts to become really different you're looking at. But advice is talking to know the devices that don't necessarily have to traverse any part of the network it. Khun, stay within. Ah, hi provides, for example, so providing solutions lawyer game visibility into that environment is really important and the protocols that we use their change a bit so traditional tools don't necessarily fit well. So what's the general solution to >> solving that problem? And then I want to understand the Net Scouts secret sauce. But let's stop. Let's start of high level. How does the industry solved that problem? So the industry >> has been trying to solve that problem mostly by looking at the goodwill of third parties, looking at things like net blower, log events and aggregating that normalizing it. You've had solution sets that looked at network traffic, but it becomes very difficult for a lot of folks to make use of that network traffic, and what we've done is really provide the ability to look into that network. Traffic and gain gather from really anywhere it's deployed whether it's public loud, private cloud, our solution said, That's our secret sauce. Our solution. Second go anyway. >> So so add some color to that in terms of your able to inspect deeper through what just magic software you got. You got a pro you send in so >> well. Actually, we have a device. It's called a SNG, and in the virtual world we use something that we call be stream. In the physical world, we have some that we call in Finnish Stream N. G. And that leverage is a technology that we've developed, called Sai, which is adaptive service intelligence and well, also do is watch all that traffic and build meta data in real time so we can surface key indicators of performance and security events. Get that information up into a collection mechanism that doesn't have to normalize that data. It just looks at it as is way. Build it into a service Contact services context laws uses to see across a multi cloud environment in a single pane of glass. Okay, so one of >> the biggest challenges for customers is that they're changing these environment. It's what happens. Their applications, you know, applications used to be rather self contained. Even the bm They might have moved some, but now we're talking about, you know, micro services, architecture, multi cloud environment. There's there's a lot going on there, you know? What's the impact on that for your world, >> Right? That's been exactly it. Weigh three tier application was kind of pretty straight forward, even though at the point we started introducing, we thought that was a really tough stuff. Now what we're doing, as you say, it's doing micro services architectures, and I might take my presentation layer and put out in the cloud and the public cloud in particular. So I'm closer to the UN user and delivering better high performance capabilities to them lower lately, Auntie and the like and I take my application server and I split that up all over the place, and I might put some in public. Claude. I might put some in private club. I maintain some of it in the legacy. So all that interconnection, all that independency is really, really hard to get your hands around and that complexity. We looked at the street study that said 94% of the 600 respondents said that the the networks are as complex or more complex than they have been two years ago. >> Yeah, that's not surprising, unfortunately to hear that, but you know, when we talk to customers out there, it used to be, you know, the network is something You set it up. You turned all your knobs and then don't breathe on this thing because I've got a just where I want today. It can't be like that. You know, I I we know that it's very dynamic has changed. The message from Cisco has been We need to simplify things and, you know, obviously everybody wants that. But how do you make sure you ensure that application, performance and security, without having the poor admit, have to constantly, you know, be getting tickets in dealing with things >> I think are Solution really provides a common framework for visibility, and that's really what I think is really important. When you're starting to infer based upon different data sets, it becomes very difficult to put your finger on the problem and identified. That's really a problem. And it's trying to blend the organization. Let's sit this concept of the versatile list and trying to make sure that people are more capable in addressing problems in kind of a multi dimensional role that they have now in particular network and security. The organizations, they're trying to come together, God, they rely on different data sense, and that's where it kind of falls apart. If you have a common day to say, you're going to have a better perspective, Okay, >> I was just a front from that application standpoint. How much of this is just giving notification to invisibility? Intuit vs, you know? Is it giving recommendations or even taking actions along those lines? >> Yeah, I think it has. It has to give you recommendations and has to give you pinpoints. You really? You've got to be able to say there here's a problem. This is what you need to do to fix it right? I think what often when I'm talking to folks, I say it's about getting the right information to the right person at the right time to do the right thing If you're able to do that, you're going to be much more effective. Yes. OK, so you've got this early warning system, essentially, hopefully not a tulip. But that's what practitioners want. Tell me something. Tell me. Give me a a gap and tell me the action to take before something goes wrong. Ideally. And so you could do that. You could give them visibility on it, Kind of pinpoint it. And do you see the day, Russ, where you can use machine intelligence toe as Stuart suggesting start to maybe suggest remedial action or even take remedial action? Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are some things that you can really do and do quite well. Walking for security events, for example, is the primary one. We've always had the ideas in place in the early days, a lot of folks who are cautious because they wanted to have a negative impact on the business. But when we take a look at ex filtration and blocking outbound connections, if you know the bad actors and you know the bad addresses, you can stop that before it gets out of your network. So people aren't gonna have that X illustration of your information. >> All right. So, Russ, you've been meeting with a bunch of customers here at the show, What's top of mind for them And if some of the conversation I've been having this week, you know, security, you know, has been climbing that that list for many years now. But in your world, what are some of the top issues? >> Yeah, security, definitely. There's no question. I think it's one of those environments where you can almost never have enough. There is always hungry more and more and better and more accurate solutions. I I think I saw something recently. There was a top 125 security solutions that's like top 120 times really way. Doyle The Town 25 Exactly. And I think I D. C's taxonomy has 73 sub categories to the security. So security is, you know, more than a $500 word. You know, it might be a $5,000 word. It's crazy and same with club, right, because it's not like, you know, in fact, I was talking to someone recently, and it's with the club village Go. It's not a club village. A more This is everything we're doing is the cloud. So it's change in mindset. So it's It's interesting as a cloud universe. So what's next for Net Scout, you know, give us a little road map? What Khun observers expect coming from you guys more significant, pushing the security in particular. One of things we see is that our data set really has the ability to be leverage for both security and performance work. Load sport floats were integrating the products that we bought with the Harbour acquisition we bought over networks. And they have a highly curated threat intelligence feed that we're going to bring in and add to our infinite streams and have the ability to detect problems deep inside the network. You know, it's one of these things the bad actors kind of live off the land. They get in there and they know their way around slowly and methodically and drought dribble information. No. Well, the only way to catch that is like continually monitoring the network. So having that perspective so continuing to grow that out and provide again more of that, eh? I aml approach to understanding and be more predictive when we see things and be able to surf. It's that type of information. Security already used to be activists. And now it's become, you know, high crime even. Yeah, even, you know, nation states, right. And the job of ah of a security technology company is to raise the cost, lower the value right to the hacker, right to the infiltrator so that they go somewhere else. All right. Hey, make it really expensive for them. So either get through. But we ve what's like you get through, make it really hard for them to take stuff out. And that's really what you're doing. >> It was like you made sure to lock the front door now because it stopped them. But, you know, maybe I'll go somewhere else, right? It's a little bit >> different. Preventing you wanna minimize your risk, right? So if you're able to minimize the risk from performance and security problems, it's really all about understanding what you've got, what your assets are protecting them. And then when that someone's trying to look at them stopping it from happening, >> OK, last question I have for you, Russ, is being in this Cisco ecosystem out there. We're watching Cisco go through a transformation become more and more software company now, four years into the Chuckle Robin's era. So you know, how's that going in? What's it mean to partner Francisco today? >> It's going really well, and I think that we adopted a lot of way or adopted a lot of what the Sisko has done as well and really transform Nets go from what was primarily a hardware first company into a software first company. You know, it's kind of I was in a conference once and we were talking about software eating the world, right and but ultimately, its hardware. That's doing the chewing right. So I think it's one of those balancing acts. You know, it's Cisco's still of selling a ton of hardware, but it's a software solution sets so they deploy on their hardware. That makes it happen. And it's similar for us. You know, we're building out software solutions that really address the issues that people have building all these complex environments. All right, >> Russ Curie, congratulations on all the progress there and look forward to keeping up with how Netscape's moving forward in this multi cloud world. Thank you. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live, San Diego for David Dante Obst Amendment. Lisa Martin's also here. Thanks, as always, for watching the Cube.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. Good afternoon to you. No matter where you're watching, here in the US, we know it is afternoon. As we wind up our coverage for day three at AWS re:invent here on the Cube. One of seven venues we're in right now that's hosting various satellite events. Right now we're in the Sands Expo. Rebecca Knight, John Walls, with Russ Currie. The vice president of Enterprise Strategy at NetScout. Russ, good to see you sir. >> Nice to see you again. >> I've got to be careful. I've got two Bostonian's of sorts here. >> Sorry, sorry. >> So if I don't get something on the accent, you just let me know (laughs) >> We'll talk amongst ourselves. >> Sorry if your sports inferiority complex is.. We're the champions, whatever >> Russ, if you would, first off, your take about what you're seeing here. Because, here we are, day three. As you know, you've been to a lot of shows. Day three, kind of, usually hits a different gear, right? >> Right >> Slows down a little bit. There's still a lot of excitement here. There's still a lot of people around. This show has a little different vibe to it. >> It really does. It's interesting because it becomes a little bit more serious, I think. At this point, in day three for this show, it's now, people are really kind of, they've been exposed to an awful lot in the last three days. And they're really saying, "Okay, now I really want to understand the nuts and bolts of it", and they're spending a little bit more time sitting and learning, understanding what you have to offer them in terms of your solution sense. So it's been an awful lot of fun. Also we did a couple of speaking engagements, so it's really good getting the folks that went and saw our guys speak and seeing them come into the booth and say, 'I want to talk more about that'. >> Well, I want to talk more about that, so you have a new marketing campaign, but first for the viewers who are not familiar with NetScout, you're a Fortune 500 company, but tell us a little more about who you are and what you do. >> Right, so what we do is we provide visibility into the communications between servers and clients and basically see all of the traffic that traverses the network and whether the network is in a public cloud, private cloud, or an on-prem environment, and by looking at that traffic we're able to understand the performance of the services that are being delivered and ensure the security performance of those servers. But right in that perspective we give IT the tools they need to get quicker to the mean time to knowledge, identifying where a problem might be or where a risk may exist and being able to solve those tough problems. >> So it's been a year since you've been on the Cube, I know the esteemed John Walls interviewed you. >> We go way back, yes. >> What's new this year? What sort of advancements, progressions have you implemented? >> So last year when we came in was really our first entry into the public cloud environment and our first entry into AWS, since then we've got a lot of really good traction, a lot of embracing of our technology, we partnered more closely with AWS and got ourselves onto the marketplace. We also enhanced our partnership with VMware and now a part of their NetX integration so we have high levels of integration into both of those platforms, which of course is strong to this entire audience. We've introduced new features and functionality into our product to be able to provide greater visibility, even going deeper into understanding the way the applications are functioning and also added some more security profiling into our products and being able to identify threats as they come into the enterprise network and also as they go out ,so, it's been interesting, it's been a lot of fun. >> You talk about the hybrid cloud and obviously we're hearing that here, this week right, so AWS is obviously slightly shifting its perspective a bit, you know, in terms of on-prem and dealing with the public cloud as well, mind that merger. Your clients, is their any arm twisting that you still have to do or are people buying into it a little more wholeheartedly now in terms of the public cloud and that you've addressed these security concerns? >> I think actually we've become an enabler in often times for our customers, to move to the cloud with competence, where they were a little bit concerned that as they move into the cloud, what kind of investment in tools are they going to have to make? What are they going to potentially lose as they put their workloads into the cloud ? Do they lose a degree of visibility and control? And what we've been able to do is ensure that they have that same experience no matter where they deploy. We were talking earlier about one of our customers that's in the travel and entertainment business and they have been using our gear on cruise ships and in their on-prem data center, but expanded themselves into AWS to extend their capabilities and provide a better user experience for those on ship and now what they really have was the ability to have visibility from ship to shore to cloud and have that perspective and have the confidence that they're delivering a high quality experience to their customers. >> Ship to shore to cloud, not every company can say that. >> Exactly. >> But speaking of motto's, you have a new marketing campaign, visibility without borders. What does that mean? What are you trying to evoke their with your customers? >> What we we're really trying to look at there is the ability to provide visibility no matter where you're deployed. If you have a deployment in a public cloud environment like AWS, you want to have that same level of visibility in your on-prem environment, you want to have it no matter where you have a workload, wherever you have an instance that you want to manage. You want to be able to have that same perspective, one of the things we talk about a little bit, is the idea that, providing a single pane of glass into the service insurance experience and I think that often times, when people try to get to that single pane of glass, they end up with more of a single glass of pain. (laughing) You know, they're trying to aggregate so much stuff that it really doesn't come together too well. >> Right. >> But because we focus in on the data source itself then it just provides that continuity regardless of where they deploy. >> Alright and the importance of visibility, obviously when you're talking about end to end right now, whether you're on-prem or whether you're in the public cloud you're not particular, right? >> Right. >> As a user, I just want to see my operation from start to finish and I don't care where it is. >> Exactly, providing that end to end perspective and being able to understand how I'm delivering services, what the customer experiences, no matter where I deploy and especially when we look at taking advantage of some of the elastic compute capabilities and the like that exists in the cloud, you want to ensure that you're actually getting what you paid for as well, you want to have those controls in place, knowing that what you're delivering is meaningful and impacting the business in a positive way as opposed to, potentially, in a negative way, and spending too much for something that doesn't improve anything in terms of the customer experience. >> Right. >> So the customers, when they want to talk about return on investment, what excites them most? What kind of things are you showing them that is delighting them? >> Often times it's really about mean time to knowledge, we spend a lot of time pointing fingers at each other when we're trying to solve a problem instead of pointing our fingers at the problem. And that's really what we try to focus in on, really getting down into the real details of why something is not performing properly, not, what might be performing improperly. So being able to really get down to that detail and get the right people working on the right problems, I often talk about it in terms of getting the right information, to the right person at the right time, to do the right thing. And if you're able to do that, you're going to provide a better user experience to your customers. >> You mention that a lot of your personnel, a lot of your folks here have been speaking, talking to various groups, I always find that interesting right, because, it's usually the Q&A. >> Yes. >> That when things pop off. So, if you had to generalize about the kind of feedback you're getting from those sessions in terms of the questions, the concerns, the challenges, what are you hearing from folks out there? >> It's kind of funny, one of the things that we get a lot of times is, "You really can do this?" you know, "Is this real what you're showing us?", it's like, yes, this is actual traffic we're showing you exactly what we're seeing. >> Yeah. >> And then they are often pretty amazed at our ability to bring this all into something that visualizes these complex applications that they're delivering across multiple different environments and they have that ah-ah moment where they go, "Oh gosh I really need this, you know, this is really that end to end view that I've been looking for for so long, but I really can't get what I use, a bunch of disparate tools, to try and bring that together" >> So that means, what you just described, is really the definition of innovation, which is providing customers with things that they want, that they didn't even know they wanted. How do you stay innovative? I mean here we are at AWS, Amazon, one of the most innovative companies on the planet and in the history of industry. >> Absolutely. >> How does a company, you're based in Westford, Massachusetts, how do you stay on the cutting edge? >> We spend an enormous amount of time working with our customers and listening to them in terms of where they're going, what their plans are, what new technologies might they be implementing, what are their major initiatives, we regularly reach out and we have constant contact with them to get that feedback and make sure that we're developing solutions that are meaningful to them, it's really about, not what feature can I deliver but what can I provide as value, that's going to make their lives better. Because, as an IT person, it's a tough job right? You're usually the person that people look at and say "Why isn't this working?". >> Right. >> And not being able to have an answer to that, is not a good position to be in. (laughter) Right, so what we're really trying to do is provide them with that answer and give them that ability to be able to answer the tough questions and solve those tough problems. >> Talking about finger pointing, it happens right? >> It does, you know. So what we're really all about is making sure that they're able to get the problem solved as quickly as possible. One of the interesting things I've been hearing from our customers too is that they're looking to this concept of a versatilist, rather than having just a straight forward specialist coming in and work on problems, having people that are a little bit broader in terms of their capabilities and looking at things not only from the perspective, say I'm a network guy, I'm going to look at the network and the app guys going to look at the app. >> Right. >> You got to cross pollinate a little bit and provide that ability to see both sides of that problem, so that's starting to happen. >> Certainly presents a challenge for your workforce right? All of a sudden, you've got to be a little smarter and where a lot of different hats. >> Exactly. >> Versatilist, I like that. You heard it here first. >> Yeah. >> Well, Russ, if you're going to go and ship the shorter cloud, you let us know? OK? >> OK. (laughing) >> Because we want to take that journey with you, alright? >> Love to. >> Thanks for being with us again, good to see you. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> You bet, safe trip home. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent, you are watching us live on the Cube.

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