(energetic classical music) >> Welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman. Here with the CEO and co-founder of ThousandEyes Mohit Lad. Thanks so much for joining us here in our Palo Alto studio. >> Thanks too. I'm excited to be here. >> Alright, we always love when we get the founders on. So before we get into the company, take us back. What was the why, what were you seeing in the marketplace, and bring our audience a little bit about your background in the team and what you bring to the table. >> Sounds good. So, my background, personally, is I finished my PhD at TCLA and studied computer science, focused more on the Internet. And one of the reasons we focused-- my co-founder was my colleague as well-- and one of the reasons we focused on studying the Internet was we believed that it was going to dramatically transform our lives, and the quality of our life eventually will be highly dependent on the quality of the Internet. So that's essentially the reason we focused on researching on the Internet, on connectivity and performance. And then as we came out of grad school, and looked at the market, it was clear to us that the ship of the enterprise was dramatically changing because of the adoption of cloud, and SaaS, and infrastructure of service, and that the Internet was going to be a key component of what an enterprise looks like, and it was a black box. So our thesis behind starting the company was to really help companies understand how to manage Internet-centric WAN environments, which is what today's world looks like. >> Okay, for people that don't know ThousandEyes give us how long's the company been in business, the state of the product, how many customers you have, funding, and the like. Give us a snapshot. >> Yeah, so we started in 2010. We had an odd start in many ways because we didn't start with venture funding, so started with a small national SAANS foundation grant. And the result of that was we were very focused on customers from the early days. So for the first two years, very small, about three or four people, and then raised our first round funding in 2012 through Sequoia Capital. As of today, we're about 220 plus employees headquartered in San Francisco. And we split our engineering between San Francisco and London, so these are the two hubs. We also have offices in Austin and New York. And in terms of customers, close to 500 customers at this point of time, a heavy concentration in the mid to high end of the market, so we have more than 50 Fortune 500s, a large concentration of the top financials, and really what excites us is the fact that we're helping decode some really, really complex environments that are becoming more and more complex. >> Yeah, I loved that starting point. You find, in the networking world, there's a lot. It's government, it's scientific, need to understand this. Internet's been a distributor of architecture since the early days, but it's been going through a lot of transformations. Heck, even the TV show Silicon Valley's even talking about a "new Internet." And it's so funny for me to watch that because I'm like, oh wait, I'm talking to the people in here in Silicon Valley that are actually building that with blockchain and decentralization and the like, so its mirroring what's happening in the real world. >> Yeah, and the thing that people sometimes don't realize is the Internet was not built for enterprises. And I tell customers that when you're going to Office 365, when you're going to Amazon, you're relying on the same Internet that your kids are using to watch cat videos. And that's what's carrying your production traffic, and it's really difficult for enterprises to actually make sense of what's slowing things down, where the risk is, what's breaking, and that's where we really help companies understand and take control and thrive in these connected environments. >> It was funny, years ago we used to talk about "the consumerization of IT," and what people use at home will work its way into the enterprise, but you're right. What do businesses need that's different? ThousandEyes has, I believe you call it "Network Intelligence." How is that different than the public standard Internet that you like, and tell us a little bit about what your secret sauce is and what you're bringing to the customers. >> If you think about enterprises from 20 years ago, all the applications would be on the data centers, and it would be a pretty closed environment connected through MPLS connections and so on. So you could deploy the standard APM technologies on the data center to understand what's going on with the applications. And now if you fast forward to today, when you're using something like Office 365 or SalesForce or Workday, or so on, the applications don't sit on your premises anymore, and your network is not just your priority network, but a large portion, in fact, majority of your environment is actually the public Internet. So what is needed for you to thrive in this environment is the ability to actually understand what you depend on and be able to map out not just the user experience of applications that you don't control anymore, but the underlying factors that are impacting that application. And so what we're doing is essentially creating a huge, humongous data set on public performance of the Internet, of different components of the Internet. And we do this with some tremendous data collection but also a lot of smart heuristics that we've built on top, which makes sense of it. And then we marry this data with data we also collect from inside the enterprise. So what we're creating is this environment of a seamless network, and take off this notion of networks today are borderless, right? They really don't have any sort of borders around where the edges and so on. And what we're doing is making sure that customers can look at these hybrid environments as if it's their own private network. >> It's interesting, I think back, when we moved from the client/server era to now, the SaaS environments, like, oh, it'll just magically all work anywhere. I think back to Citrix, has a very heavy networking piece to be able to make those work anywhere. What needs to be fixed, what's kind of under the covers that most people don't understand that in a SaaS environment, solutions like yours are helping to make sure that I can have the promise of anywhere, any device, any cloud? >> Yeah, so a few different things. It's not just the applications are moving to cloud, SaaS. The users are also starting to be a lot more remote and mobile, and what that creates is an environment where a user may be unhappy with the performance of Office 365, and IT's responsible for solving that issue when the traffic is entirely bypassing the corporate environment. So it's going from a Starbucks coffee shop to Office 365 servers, and that's the environment that you're responsible for even though you don't physically control that. And as you think about that, the way we thought about the solution was not just essentially give people visibility into these complex environments, but also create an ecoystem where all these SaaS companies that you rely on as an enterprise are ThousandEyes customers. And we help them decode the Internet, and to large extent, deal with the Internet when they're delivering an application. But as an enterprise, if you're using one of these top SaaS applications, by using ThousandEyes you can not only understand the performance, but you can speak the same language with them when you are trying to troubleshoot and come into a consistent understanding of what the performance is. >> So, you're working with the SaaS providers, you're working with the enterprise, sounds like you're working with both. If I'm an enterprise CIO, and okay, yes, I'm pushing my people to work remote and everything like that, I can't worry about 10,000 employees and the network that they had. Help explain how that works. >> Right, so the requirements of a solution for today's world is beyond just giving visibility. Even if you rewind to the world from 20 years ago, you would find that when there's an issue, there's a lot of finger-pointing going on between the server team, the app team, the network team, and that finger-pointing has become worse in a multi-tenant environment, especially as you use third parties for your applications. So as an example from a few weeks ago, Amazon had a major outage in the East coast. And not only did it take down applications that were hosted on Amazon, but we had customers that were surprised that their applications were not working, and the reason they were not working was they were making, for example, API calls, where the API provider was hosted in Amazon. So they did not even realize the dependencies that they were bringing into their environment. So we had a situation where if we're using a messaging service, and I can't message the person sitting in front of me, because it's going through the Amazon environment. And so its really important in this ecoystem that we as a technology provider create something that helps you connect with each other, rather than just be a siloed solution and that's a huge part of our value chain is to make sure that we can provide you the technology that helps you see through different environments, but also establish good communications back and forth. >> Mohit, networking as an industry has tended to be one of the slower moving pieces of our market. The WAN has been going through such a transformation. You launched in 2010, from 2010 to now 2018, cloud is a much bigger piece, SDWAN wasn't part of our vocabulary. How are thing different now than when you launched the company and how has that impacted your product and your engagement with customers? >> That's a great question. One of the things that I see a lot is this shift in, at least some of the leading customers that we have, a shift towards the notion of network as a core competency. And what I mean by this is when you had environments which were static, so, you're familiar with Visio. People would use Visio to do their network topology maps. They would not change for five years, or maybe three years, depending on the customers. But if you do a Visio map of your extended environment today, it's invalid one second after it's done because the Internet is constantly changing. And so the notion of this network being a static thing is not valid anymore, and companies that need to thrive have to really treat the network as a core competency--and by network, it's not just a network, it's a skill set around networks. Coming back to the trends, the trends that you're seeing are essentially being driven by the fact that you do need to take control of the network, you do need to actually manage it, much more than you used to manage it in the past, and that will give you an edge when it comes to performance to cloud applications, better connectivities, sometimes in situations like SDVAN, it's around reducing cost through MPLS links. >> You've got kind of opposing forces when you look at that. Networking should be a core competency, but don't we have to have to have more intelligence in the network? Leverage all the analytics: machine learning and AI should manage that, 'cause it's changing so fast I can't wait for a person to do that. How do you balance that, how do your customers look at that, and how's that fit into your product? >> So absolutely right, I think networking should be a core competency but networking is not just about connecting devices and using wires to connect things. It's around really understanding what's happening, even understanding what the network actually looks like, because that's something you don't control. There's a lot of focus that we put on analytics, and one of the notions that we've developed over the many years is this notion of network intelligence. And the idea is pretty straightforward. When you're using an Amazon or an Azure, you're going through the same public environments that other customers are going through, and what we do is we essentially mine our entire data set, really understand what are the aspects of the network that are affecting multiple customers, and bridge that into a single cohesive view that is beneficial for you guys. So for example, if you have connectivity issues from the offices here at the CUBE to an Amazon, you would not only know whether it's just you, but you would have more perspective on, hey, this is a larger segment of the customer base of ThousandEyes is actually going through an issue, and here's where the specific issues are. So one of the benefits that the ThousandEyes ecosystem brings to customers is every customer that we add creates more value in the data set. >> How will some of the big waves coming like 5G, IoT, all of the Edge pieces, does that tie into the offering that you have? >> Ultimately, the common denominator for all of this is the Internet, right? Some of these technologies are more towards the last mile, but they have to go through the same core, the Internet, and it's really interesting because one of the user events we did in London a couple weeks ago, we had one of our customers, a large manufacturing company, and they were talking about how they were drilling in Texas, but the drilling was controlled through a site in Belgium, and all of this only worked because the connectivity was reliable. So they were using ThousandEyes to actually ensure that the connectivity between their giant 50 ton driller was maintained to their headquarters. So those are the kinds of applications that, we didn't build it for this specific application, but the fact is we find new ways that ThousandEyes is being used, essentially because there's more and more reliance on the Internet to make things work. >> Any other customer use cases that you want to highlight? Any customer case studies you can share? >> Yeah, so we primarily help with very broadly two sorts of use cases. So one aspect is if you are providing an online service that really depends on the Internet, has a global audience, or even a large regional audience, we help those customers really understand the user experience across the Internet and understand what parts of the Internet may be impacting the applications. So think about all the major SaaS companies that use ThousandEyes, all the major retail banks, they have an online asset that they care about, that's one use case. And then the other use case is enterprise companies. So this is everything from oil and gas, to tech enterprises, to financials. They depend more and more on the Internet when they are going into Cloud and SaaS, and for them it's really unnerving when they look at the environment they're getting into and have no visibility into this black box. So that's where we provide them intelligence into this extended environment and help them understand why a user may be having issues to Office 365 or WebEx, or all of the WYS or IP solutions that are also more and more Internet dependent. >> Mohit, how are your customers doing with the rapid pace of change here? You've talked about networking is a skillset. Finding the right skillset and training people up has always been a big challenge, but what are you seeing in the customers you're talking to? How are they doing these days? >> So the customer's very, depending on the maturity and the transition that they're going through, I still find in a lot of regions that the cloud is still new, SaaS is still new, and we're in many ways in a bubble in the value. Things happen pretty quickly here, but as you step outside you realize that some of the companies are ready to scorse and still making their first strides into SaaS and cloud, and one of the things we help these sets of customers with is essentially helping them plan towards that move. So if you have a large deployment, if you're making a large shift in your infrastructure, even, you think about, let's say a situation where I want to get rid of MPLS, I want to rely on direct Internet circuits, that's a big change, and we can help you measure the performance of MPLS performance of Internet and help you make that data-driven decision. Coming back to the notion of how our customer is doing, there are customers that have realized that network skillsets and engineering around that is core, so they invest a lot of efforts into building that core mindset. There are customers that are starting to build that, and there are customers that are looking at partners to bring that expertise in. So these customers will never build a core set of function around networking, but they look at partners, managed service providers that can bring that expertise into the environments. >> Last thing I want to ask you. You're talking about global networks, we haven't talked about security. Governance and compliance is usually some of the biggest challenges that we are having. The macroeconomic challenges of the Internet. We interviewed the president of ICANN a few years ago, and he gave a warning to our audience that said we might not have one Internet in this near future. We already are starting to see a fragmented Internet, and that could be a huge challenge. Security, governance, compliance, big topics here, but maybe bring us home on that as to what you're seeing and how that affects. >> So one of the things the Internet does, it connects people, right? And when it connects people it also makes it easy for the bad guys to reach the good guys, and so things that concern our audiences in terms of security. The way the Internet works, it's very easy for somebody to announce your address space, for example, and this has happened on several occasions, which creates a denial of service, a different denial of service where all the traffic would go to a party, which is announcing your address space, but not you. So there's all these issues where DNS mapping could be changed, the routing could be changed, and our DDoS attack that happens takes a lot of the upstream environment that you have out of the equation. And so as every day passes, there's more and more things that are being discovered in terms of how attacks can be generated, and how organizations can be brought down. So one example I'll give you which is very specific I've seen is in denial-of-service attacks, this is starting to become pretty routine in today's world. It started with the solutions being on-prem solutions that would detect the volume of traffic and try to filter traffic, and then it moved to using cloud-based solutions, because the volume of traffic would be so high, that you could not actually do this on your end. So you use these cloud-based solutions. You would turn them on when you would detect an attack, and then turn them off. And the financials in particular were always under attack, so now they've gone to a model where they're always turning these things on. A DDoS mediation service, which is based in the cloud. And what has happened, this is a really interesting phenomenon that we've seen, is, let's say, a particular bank, let's say Bank of America is under attack. The same provider that's protecting Bank of America is also protecting Wells Fargo and JP Morgan, and that infrastructure under stress could mean that Wells Fargo could actually have availability issues even though they are not under attack. So one of the things we see in the Internet is this notion of collateral damage, where you may not be the actual victim or target of an attack, but because of shared infrastructure, you're collateral damage. These are the scenarios which place more and more of an importance on gathering this intelligence on what's going on in the Internet. >> Mohit Lad, really appreciate you coming to help share with our audience everything that's happening in the WAN, network intelligence, multi-cloud, global environment world. Look forward to catching up with you more in the future. This has been a CUBE Conversation, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching the CUBE. (energetic classical music)