>> From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Open Systems. The future is crystal clear with security and SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. >> Okay, welcome back, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at the Chandelier Bar at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, also known as Cosmo. We're here as part of Open Systems exclusive, expert, influencer and customer party. As part of the overall week going on, Gartner's big event going on. A lot of action. We're here and our next guest is Moritz Mann. He's Chief Product Officer, CPO of Open Systems. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks a lot. >> Yeah, good evening. >> So you got the keys to the kingdom, the product, the chief product officer has to run all the products. >> Yes, of course. You're in high demand from engineering to marketing. >> And sales of course and the customers. >> Sales, where's the product? Sales blames product, product blames sales. You know, you got to have that relationship if it's harmonious. >> Of course. >> It'll work. >> You guys are successful so it's working. >> Yeah it is and actually I think the most important part in the equation are the customers. I see more of the sales and especially customer success as kind of the gateway towards the customer to actually figure out where can we solve more problems for our customers and then create value. >> Can you step back and explain the value preposition for your product? First, describe the product or products >> Yeah. >> or core products, and the main value preposition. >> Open Systems was founded to, actually solve the key issue of a modern enterprise, which is, helping enterprises to actually master the digital transformation. And digital transformation is like a big, one of those big words, and in action it means that you have enterprises adopting multi cloud environments, connecting different locations cost efficiently, but also securing they keep business processes at the same time, so our solution comes in as a platform approach and would solve these issues by connecting, actually the end users, the business processes with the cloud and the applications and the customers. >> So operations is a big part of your success. >> Yeah, so-- >> Operating, helping operators. >> Exactly, so despite being just another yet appliance vendor, or a product vendor, or infrastructure vendor, we offer our services as a true service solution, which is-- >> Service or server? >> Service, so it's a managed service that you subscribe as a service, you consume as a service, you pay by per user, you don't have to worry about hard work, appliance costs, and actually scaling of these costs and suffer-- >> Yeah, so classic asses model. What problem are you solving for the customer? What's the way you guys are winning, why are they using you guys, why are they buying you? >> Yeah, I think one of the key, what we bring, keys that we bring is alternate key solution that comes with the operation's excellence included and manage operation's part. And one of the key differentiators is that we have an extraordinary security stack, in this SD-WAN platform, so we're not only providing and delivering applications for the users and customers but we are also protecting those applications from threats like ransomware attacks, red actors inside the network, and in the cloud environments. >> Explain the security stack piece, that's build into the SD-WAN product? >> Yeah. >> And that's a glued software you guys wrote? >> Yeah, so we have an OAM, it's like a highly scalable platform that consist of open source components with OM premium components, to do, like a DPI application detection and security threat detection, and these security functions can be enabled by use case, so for instance we have a piece that just, primarily they are to detect any lateral movement to prevent another ransomware attack like Maersk got into. >> So I'm going to ask you a question, I'll put you on the spot. So, I'm a customer. >> Yeah. >> And sometimes, I don't know, I have a problem, I'm a frog in bowling water, whatever the metaphor is, and I got issues. When do I know when to call you? What's happening around me, as a customer, to call up Open Systems to solve my problem? What are some of the symptoms I might see? What does it look like? Is it security sprawl? Are there solutions? Is it just not enough staff? What are some of these symptoms that make me want to dial you guys up? >> Great question. So one of those symptoms is that you notice that your end users are complaining so they have spotty internet, they have slow internet access, or you have SAP applications honors, for instance, that are very unsatisfied about the application's performance inside de WAN, or to the cloud. And you will notice that that's when we will get called and we will help you to actually maximize your network so you can actually focus on your core business, and not about where do I have to scare the infrastructure. >> So, performance is number one. >> It's performance. >> So basic performance stuff, what else? >> It's all about also visualizing and telling where actually do the customers have a good, or end users have a good performance of the network, and where do I have to actually expand and invest in the network and the cloud environment to actually improve customer's performance. >> Okay so here's another one: Hey, Moritz! I already got security covered. Why do I need more security, when? What gives? >> Yeah, I mean, security, you can spend endless money in security and yet have another appliance, and have another product to patch, like a Tect O problem, but you will end up in a growing stack of complexity. We'll provide you with a very strategic solution, that will help you to cover to 80% of your problems and in the end you have a budget of solutions that prevents the most of your threats to your network and to your applications. >> Okay, cool. Thanks for sharing that insight. This is like the customer dynamic. Now I want to get to the innovation piece, so as to when there used to be a bunch of network guys managing QoS, mostly packed stuff, all that good stuff, we kind of knew all that, but as the cloud comes in and as cloud operations and IT operations start to see things, like automation, AI, machine learning, data and all that stuff plays a new role, they're rethinking their architecture, so what innovations are in the horizon that you see coming? That will change the landscape of, as what SD-WAN is, and what it will become. What are the innovation areas to watch in? >> We are working already in the next generation for next year, which will enable our customers to identify any application inside of the network independent where that application is. So, it will be crucial to not think anymore in networks and how many appliances do I have where, but how fast can I get an application up and running in a new cloud. And this is where we are investing a lot, into cloud delivery, cloud integration, especially also with the partnership with Microsoft, we have a API integration to build, and actually launch new applications directly from the cloud but integrated into the SD-WAN, and including also all the security parameters that you need to secure in order to actually have a, not only application running and integrated in the network which is called Intent-Based Networking on the Gartner terms, but also have that secured in terms of business risk protection. >> What's the biggest feature request that you get asked for? Cause you're managing the product team, you're in roadmaps, you're here planning, you're marketing in sales teams, you're listening to customers, what are they asking for, what's your priorities? >> So priorities, foremost is automation and simplification, this are our core aspects in order to keep up with the, actually the new complexity that derives also in the cloud sprawl that's happening. So customers are not launching, one cloud, not two but multiple clouds in parallel, which they ask for, actually orchestration through the network and through integrated through into the cloud orchestration. And secondly, it's the whole Shadow IT, so, where do I have SAS applications I never knew about? How can we protect those applications well, and the data that we upload later too. >> Security surface area is huge. Final question for you, for people that are learning about who you guys are, Open Systems, it's expanding in the US, you're already successful you guys, great revenue, great success in the product side, so congratulations, but for the people that are learning about you, what's the culture like, and what one thing should they know about Open System, that they should know about? >> I think one cultural element that we really bring to the table is, we are unconventional in the way that how we solve customers' problems, and the amount of dedication and passion that we put into delivering the solution. So one of our core pillars is the defaults model, so that means that the engineers that are building that platform, are also at the same time your first year contacts when it comes to service management and support. That truly makes a difference in the customer experience. >> Programmable internet, programmable software, programmable deBAR as well, infrastructure as code, so you guys are like SD-WAN as code. (laughs) >> Exactly, it's similar to that. >> It's a new trend, it's like Blockchain (laughs) >> Exactly. >> You say Blockchain and anything is popular. >> We try to be as simple as that, that's true. >> Moritz, thanks for coming on theCUBE, late night here, this is theCUBE after draw, we are here, this Chandelier launch at the Cosmo, The Cosmopolitan Hotel for CUBE coverage at Open Systems' event for influencers, executives, experts and customers, of course, influencing theCUBE. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Open Systems. The future is crystal clear with security and SD-Wan. Brought to you by Open Systems. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier here in Las Vegas for special CUBE presentation. We're at the Chandelier Bar at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, the Cosmo, on the Las Vegas strip. Part of a series of a lot of events going on. Gartner's got two events happening, But we're here as part of Open Systems. You got exclusive get-together of influencers, customers, all talking about the impact the Cloud, Secure, SD-Wan, a variety of other things. Open Systems, a very successful, Switzerland-based company expanding rapidly in the United States, a global platform and we're here with the CTO, Stefan Keller, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> You guys have been very successful in this, I will say, changing SD-Wan, a completely new re-imagined SD-Wan market because with the internet and Cloud, people don't want to connect to the internet anymore, they want either direct connection, they want high-secure, wide-area network connections. They want secure connections. More important than ever when you have Internet of Things, a lot of surface area, nevermind multiple headquarters or branch offices, so SD-Wan has gone from a connection, connectivity, move packets from A to B, to a fully-integrated, secure architecture that's easy to use, that can deal with mobile embedded. You guys have been successful, with almost no marketing, all word of mouth, successful product, tell us, Stefan, as the CTO, what is the most compelling thing about the technology that's been resonating with customers? >> Well, as I said, the last couple of years there was a lot of change, technology change. The requirements of our customers changed as well. With Cloud, you'll all of a sudden have traffic pattern that you didn't have before. Before, everything was static. You had just your band connectivity to the data center and there is left, towards the internet. But with SD-Wan, you now have the capability to have very complex traffic flow at the branch office, itself. So, you have a lot of logic that you put to the branch office and the challenge is now, how can you actually control all that traffic flow in a central way? Because in the end, all our customers or companies, what they want, they want to have the flexibility to use all those new technologies, be it Cloud, be it IOT, whatever. But still have the security in mind in the sense, they want to be protected, they want to be protected. You now have the branch office with a lot of new traffic patterns. How do you control that? And that's where our integrated approach of SD-Wan and security is the perfect fit. So you really have a global policy that you assign locally. >> One of the big trends that's happening now obviously, is the Cloud has grown so big and popular that the economics, you cannot ignore the economics and the value in the cloud for what you're paying. Agility, etc., we've heard that. However, validated even more than ever is on-premises. People are going to have an on-premises and Cloud or Hybrid Cloud solution. Now, IT departments and these people managing CSOS, managing all these people have to deal with the distributed, in some cases decentralized operations. The problem is there's so many vendors. They don't have the expertise so they need things as a managed service, sometimes they want to maybe choose something on premise that's deployed. So you need a diversity of choices without compromising ease of use. So the question for you is: How do you guys make that happen because this is something that you've heard people like about your product, complex, I hate the word single-pane of glass but that's been an IT term, that's essentially dashboard, central teams can use telemetry... and data but get the benefits of.. variety of environments. Why is it so successful, what is the choices for customer? Is it managed service, is that the direction? Or and odd PRAM, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, that's a good point. In the end it's a combination because we are a managed service because, as you said, things get more complex and the talent market is challenging so it's difficult to find the right talents that can manage it. So that's where we come in as a strategic partner. We are not only in the SD-Wan market, we are also in the security market as well. So we combine security and the SD-Wan. That's what you see with all the SD-Wan vendors out there and they're very strong with SD-Wan capabilities but in order to provide security functionality they start to partner, be it with a firewall vendor, with a proxy vendor what so on. So, in the end, you as a customer, you don't deal just with one partner, all of a sudden you have four, five, or even six such partners you have to deal with. And if a managed service provider can provide a holistic approach of security and SD-Wan you have one partner you can deal with so it makes, for you, very easy. >> So a lot of peoples have say, "oh" they've been trying security, a variety, "we've seen every scheme in the book." And the easiest one was, oh, network traffic. Pack an inspection, kind of not very good. But you want to watch the bad guys move. When things are moving around, that's when you get the pattern recognition. Is there software that you guys write? How do you get that security edge? Is it watching the movement patterns, not just the packets but who has what systems, is it a variety of things? What's the underlying secret sauce for Open Systems? >> The secret sauce, well let's say, is that we are flexible to take out whatever is state of the art and put it together to a managed service in a standardized way for our customers If you look as today's companies they want to do it on their own. They may have to deal with 30, 40 different kind of vendors and components and put it together. We do that for our customers. We take state of the art technology, put it together, and make all the service of it. And the advantage is, because we have that high level of integration, we can all of a sudden, use one component for different kind of services we provide. That's the difference when you have an ecosystem like SD-Wan where you have three, four components, they don't really talk with each other, they do not have a common language. We bring that common language so that the consistent view and the consistent logic over the entire band of our customers. >> So you're the glue layer. Between all the different components. >> Right. >> Okay, so I got to ask you a question. If someone says to you "hey Stefan, this other vendor promised me all this stuff over here, some other person. I got to get current on SD-Wan." What do you think people don't know about SD, whether they should know, that might be a surprise or things that you've observed with your successful customer deployments that's a lot harder than it looks. Cause a lot of people say "oh we got that!" And it doesn't really work very well. Or is a blind spot for the CSOS team, security team, around capabilities. So you can be aspirational but you got to have the capability what are some areas that you've seen that are important for buyers to consider when architecting and then deploying and executing an SD-Wan strategy? >> I mean, When you see all those SD-Wan vendors what they say, "hey it's easy to deploy, it's zero-touch deployment." Can't be true but in the end, you have a global network you want to deploy a global policy and somehow, you have to manage that. And this is something that most of them just underestimate. You only need, really, a strategic partner who knows how to deal with it, who has the capabilities, the experience, and the know-how to deploy it easily and manage it for you So then you don't have the pain. >> Give me an example of a customer, you don't have to say their name, where the old way they did something and then the Open Systems side of it, they did it your way and watch changed, what was the impact? Did they have more efficiency with the people? Did they save time, what was some of the consequences of doing the old way versus the new way? >> The old way also then involved some kind of an MPLS network, or course, if we go with the SD-Wan approach, the really good ones convince a customer, "hey, you don't need MPLS for the application you need." For the SLA you want to have. Internet connectivity if fine and just have two or three such internet connection per location. So in the end, it was cost-saving, it was a full put agreement. Performance all of a sudden was very great and in the end they liked us because of our operational efficiency so our operations model is very efficient and helps our customers so that they can focus on their core business. >> So the applications get smarter, and then you actually saved money because, remember, it still costs a lot of money to send traffic over the network, in some cases. Okay, final question. There's a big trend towards direct connections, where do you see that going, how does that impact SD-Wan? >> I would say that's again on the security side because with SD-Wan, you have a lot of flexibility we just didn't have in the past. This means you have traffic flow all of a sudden which is not expected by many people. If you go to a single branch office, a small one, all of a sudden they have local exits, they do internet surfing, youtube video-ing, they have connections to their private data center, to their public Cloud environment, everything. So different kind of traffic pattern. And here we have just the single way, a unique approach, about a global Zone-Based Firewall. So this makes your traffic pattern all of a sudden very transparent and simple again, this helps you to control the traffic flow and to avoid any kind of leak. >> As we always say, don't send those cat videos. It still costs money to share the cat videos around. Super Content is a big part of this too, you've got all kinds of new SAS applications, talking to each other, this is another layer of abstraction that needs to be managed. That's an area you guys do? API's and applications? >> We're going in that direction, I would say we're not that far yet. We can do much more but this is the direction we have to go to. >> Final question: you come to the U.S. A lot of people are learning about you guys, If we're at a cocktail party, which we are at now, and I say "hey Stefan, bottom line me, what's the one thing about Open Systems that makes you guys great?" >> Then I'll still go back to our operational excellence. We really have a way to operate thousands of devices in a way that is so efficient and scaled very well for a huge customer base. >> Alright Stefan, thanks for coming on. Stefan Keller, CTO of Open Systems, hot start-up out of Zurich, Switzerland. A very successful company, really now exploding in the United States, expanding to Silicon Valley. We are here in Las Vegas, theCUBE coverage. Bringing all the action down here at the Open Systems influencer, expert cocktail party, here at the Chandelier Bar at the Cosmo hotel. Part of a lot of events around Gartner's events are here. Covering it all, stay with us for more after this short break. (chill electronic beats)

>> From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Open Systems. The future is crystal clear with security in SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, my name is Dave Valanti and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We are covering the Open Systems networking event. They're here as part of the two Gartner events here this week. On the heels of AWS Reinvent, a lot of action going on in Las Vegas. Steve Garson is here, he's the president and founder of SD-WAN experts consultancy in this space. Steve, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Glad to be here. >> So tell us a little bit more about your background. >> Okay. I've been in the networking space since about 2007. Initially, my company was called MPLS Experts, when companies were migrating to MPLS and not understanding, well, what carriers should I use. I helped companies re-engineer their WAN back then. As that developed, the WAN optimization came into the scene and I helped companies evaluate the right WAN optimization solution. Then I had the foresight to see the potential of SD-WAN. I pivoted the business, called it SD-WAN Experts and started writing for network world and blogging on my own sites and with a number of other websites. I've been helping enterprises worldwide re-engineer their network, make a WAN transformation that's secure and supports easy management and save a lot of money. >> So, awesome. So you have a practitioners background, right? >> Exactly. >> That's fair to say. So you know your stuff, let's get into it. So let's talk trends, I mean. At a high level we always talk at theCUBE about the cloud and how that's affecting network traffic. Going from North South to East West has a major impact on security and performance. What are the big trends in the market space that you see, that are relevant? >> Well, we see consolidation obviously. (coughs) Obviously moving to the cloud is a big driver. The WAN has been designed for a data center with an MPLS network. That's a hub and spoke architecture that really doesn't make sense anymore. Companies are moving to Office 365, they're using Salesforce.com, they're using all kinds of softwares and service. That just doesn't work with a data center. So what companies have traditionally done is they have regional secure gateways and they're sending the traffic from an office to a secure gateway and now they're going through the internet. It just is convoluted, the traffic is tromboned and the latency is higher than it has to be. They're spending more money for these expensive circuits that, ultimately, they're going to the internet anyways. >> So, there's a lot of technical debt out there. How does a company go from point A to point B without spending a zillion dollars or bringing in, you know, a huge SI to re-architect everything. Is there a path that you can advise customers, or is it just every situation is a snowflake? >> You could probably define a half-dozen different basic situations that are snowflakes. Essentially you're moving to, you know, if you have an MPLS network companies typically will need more bandwidth and instead of getting more MPLS bandwidth they'll add internet connectivity. Using SD-WAN they'll root traffic over the internet that's supposed to go to the internet. The things that are still required on their MPLS network will stay in play. When those MPLS contracts expire, then there's a question of, do I need MPLS? That's a complicated question to answer. I will not say that you can eliminate MPLS, I'll always say it depends. It depends on the latency between paths on your network. I presented a paper at O-NUG a few weeks ago in New York, in which I analyzed with a lot of empirical data. Latency, packet-loss, and standard deviation of that latency between paths like from Tokyo to New York. You might a have 200 millisecond latency. But your standard deviation over the internet might be 200 milliseconds. So that means, potentially, if you're using only the internet, you might have 400 milliseconds latency. Can your application work appropriately? >> If you need 200 guaranteed, you've got a problem. Right? >> Right, exactly. In a situation like that, you might want to use MPLS or there's a new category of connectivity called SDCore which is an MPLS network in the Cloud that you access through an IPSec VPN to pops that are typically within 20 milliseconds. So you get that stability, but you cut the cost dramatically. >> Now the Edge just confuses us even further, right? IOT, The Edge, I mean certainly a trend everybody's talking about. From your standpoint, how real is it? Is it here today? Is it coming? What is the effect going to be on all these trends? >> You mean, the Edge? >> Yeah, the Edge, IOT. >> I mean it's a complicated thing. I mean the Edge. >> The industrial internet. >> Yeah, I mean, when people talk about the Edge today the Edge used to be their router and SD-WAN devices are supplanting the router. Gartner has indicated that by 2023 nobody is going to be buying routers. Everybody is going to be using an SD-WAN device which will route. >> Amazon, we were at Reinvent last week, they might even look at the data center as the Edge. But, I digress. Let's talk about the horses on the track. Lay out the competitive environment right now. We're here at the Open Systems event. Where do they fit in the market landscape? >> Open Systems is a very unique company where people will say, who's Open Systems competitor. They really don't have a competitor because they're unique. Open Systems is a company that has a secure SD-WAN which means there's a full security stack with SD-WAN. So you have the benefits of SD-WAN, but instead of having to deal with all these different security applications like HASBY, Data-loss Prevention, and IPSIDS, authentication, VPN integration with active directory. They do all of that and it's all managed. It's a very unique offering. >> So the competition is Do-It-Yourself, right? >> The competition is Do-It-Yourself or use a managed service provider who probably doesn't have all the pieces that work together. Open Systems has been doing this for 25 years. They have developed what the customers want. I went to one of their global customer meetings. They called a cap meeting last year. Each year they get input from the customers as far as what kind of enhancements they want to see. They actually take that input and the following year the customers, I was amazed, the customers just are thrilled that the company listens and the company implements what they ask. >> Again, I've mentioned there's a couple of Gartner shows going on this week. Sounds like Open Systems wouldn't really fit cleanly into a magic quadrant. >> They don't. They don't because they're not an Edge device. They're a complete Edge security solution that's managed. >> We talked about this at theCUBE, John Ferrs has brought up several times that the magic quadrants will have to evolve as these managed services, the Cloud certainly affects that. As more and more things get co-opted by the services, you know, economy. But, your thoughts on magic quadrants, how customers are using them. My understanding is, today, you heard a talk from a Gartner analyst that was helping people understand the do's and don'ts of a magic quadrant. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, well what Gartner was talking about today is how many people use the magic quadrant inappropriately. They think this tells us which companies we should look at and really what it's telling you is how that customer's strategy fits in with the market place. But you really have to look at what your requirements are. You can't just say, okay I'm going to look at quote the top three SD-WAN vendors. What are your requirements? That's what my firm does as a consultant is we help companies figure out what their requirements are to find out what's the right solution. A story I love to tell is a company that spent a year evaluating SD-WANs. They were about to make a decision and the CIO basically told the committee after a year of evaluations hey before we sign a contract, let's get an independent sanity check that we've made the right decision. I met with the company, spent a couple weeks assessing their requirements, and I know all of the major technologies and I knew that what they had selected wasn't correct. But you can't tell a client that they've made a mistake. So we set up a meeting with the vendor, which was a carrier, and their technology provider and the committee and I asked the hard questions that the vendor couldn't answer. Which made it really clear to the client that this is the wrong solution. They went a completely different direction. >> Saved them a lot of money. I love those stories. What's your website? >> SD-WAN-experts.com >> Alright, Steve thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Sharing your knowledge. >> Thank you. >> Awesome stuff. Really appreciate it. >> Pleasure. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back from Las Vegas Cosmo hotel. Open Systems networking event. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Open Systems, the future is crystal clear with security and SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, you're watching the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering the open systems networking event. Two Gardner events this week in Las Vegas. Big month. Last week, of course, was AWS re:Invent, 53,000 people. Talking security, cloud, all kinds of cool stuff going here at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Matt Creeg is here, he's the chief revenue officer at Open Systems. 36 hours in Matt-- >> 36 hours in. >> You're an expert. >> And I'm in Vegas. >> Like, lay down the plutonium. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, it's good to see you. >> Thanks for having me, thanks for having me. >> So, first question. Why did you join Open Systems? >> You know, that's a great question. I asked myself that a lot over the past three months in discussions with the Open team. And really, it's a different offering. It's a complete offering. It's not a product, it's really a solution and a service. And I really feel like it's something that the market really needs and really wants and has really been asking for from a SD-WAN perspective, from a security perspective, from a sock perspective. It's really a solution or an offering that the market has demanded. So when I started in discussions with the Open team, it became clear, it became compelling to me, that this was something that customers wanted, customers needed, and customers have been asking for for five, eight, 10 years, really. >> Awesome. We're going to come back and unpack some of those things-- >> Okay. >> A little bit. But before we do, a little bit on your background. You're brand new here. >> 36 hours. >> Just left Cisco via the Vintela acquisition. The company we've tracked closely for V Nacarazhu, good friend of theCUBE. Tell us about your journey. >> Yeah, so-- >> Who is Matt Creeg? >> Matt Creeg was, I will claim I was the first field sales guy of Vintela. The VP of sales hired me just prior just pre-product launch. So I really started Vintela from zero customers, zero revenue, SD-WAN didn't exist when I started there, to an acquisition by Cisco and 18 months with Cisco post-acquisition continuing to build that team, continue to build that market. >> So Cisco is pretty renowned for its acquisitions, it certainly chambers big part of him building Cisco was through acquisitions. >> Absolutely. >> Made a lot of good ones, they weren't all great, but most were really quite good. The Vintela acquisition, as I understand it, when you guys plugged in to the Cisco model, you really scale to me. First of all, you had to get to the point where you were an interesting acquisition target. You had to prove some success. And then my understanding is things exploded. So you were part of that? >> It was a crazy ride. It was four and a half years later, I can't believe it's been four and a half years. It was simultaneously the longest and shortest time of my life. It was the blink of an eye. >> Awesome. So you're obviously trying to bring some of that magic to Open Systems. Let's come back to the differentiation. So, you gave us some sort of high level overview of what was different. When you look at the market, what are some of the trends that you see that this company is vectoring into that attracted you? >> So, there's a very clear trend around network architecture, WAN architecture, WAN traffic patterns changing, based on everything moving to the cloud. Really based on workloads moving around, workloads moving out of corporate data centers into AWS. You said you were at re:Invent last week. >> Yep. >> AWDS as your GCP. So we're really seeing workloads move around. We're seeing workloads move out of a corporate data center, which has changed traffic patterns substantially. That's what SD-WAN really came to the market to address those changes in traffic patterns. What Open offers over a traditional SD-WAN player is really a fully managed, full white glove network solution. So it's not just, as I said earlier, it's not just a product, it's not just an SD-WAN product. It's really a true solution and a true white glove offering. >> So one of the things we talk about a lot is the transition from north/south traffic to east/west, what people are talking about, as you just described, moving from various clouds, on-prem, SaaS is another major force. I heard a stat the other day, the average company, average global 2,000 has eight clouds. Siglo Media has eight clouds. And when you throw in SaaS, >> Eight might be a little low. >> 80, right. As I was saying, it's small companies. So, you have all this data that's now distributed. So SD-WAN helps what? Fill in the blank. >> Helps connect securely and seamlessly connect to all of those different clouds. To all of those different areas of data. And really gives customers the ability, gives IT departments the ability to provide a rich, very high user experience for connectivity to all of those different types of clouds. >> Well we used to be, we didn't realize at the time, but it used to be relatively simple. Secure the perimeter, build a moat, and we'll be good. >> And everything was in your data center. Just protect that data center and you don't have to worry. >> Control it all, I could see it all. Now that notion of perimeter is gone. Security has to be fundamental to what you do. If you're moving workloads around and data around, security is paramount. So talk about the ethos of security. Why is it a priority for you guys? And what is it about Open Systems that makes you guys qualified to be that leader? >> So it's interesting. I don't know where I heard it, but somebody quoted, or somebody said a while ago, our generation work has become something we do, rather than somewhere we go. And that really speaks to that moat experience. That everything is within those corporate walls, right? So, as we move outside of that, as we work from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, security becomes paramount. Securing that workstation, securing that endpoint that your customer, that your end user is leveraging to connect to all of your data becomes paramount. So making sure that not only is that end station secure, but the connectivity in between that end station and all of your different sources, all of your different applications, all of your your different data sources is encrypted, is authenticated. Everything is secured and controlled is key. The other thing that we're seeing is with the move to SaaS, with the move to O365, with the move to Workday and Salesforce, the ability to securely connect directly to those applications becomes key. Not traversing through a corporate data center or a corporate DMZ to get to those services is key. So really extending security all the way down to that edge or to that endpoint becomes key. And providing a full service, a full manage service, a full monitoring service around all of those endpoints becomes key. >> So performance becomes critical. And so, again, I know you're early in, but in the conversations that you had leading up to you taking this position, you probably talked to some customers, you're at the Gardner event today. What kinds of things, performance, et cetera, are customers asking for in this space? >> That's a great question. That's a very good question. So everybody is asking for the best performance, the best user experience that they can possibly get. Right? And interestingly enough it's almost become corporate IT is getting compared to consumer IT. How come when I'm at home and I'm on my Verizon Fios connection, access to Office 365 is so much better than when I'm in the corporate office? So really we're being compared to that kind of metric. We're really being compared to that always on, always accessible, instant access type of user experience. >> In a manage service though, it's almost like you bring in the cloud experience to wherever your data lives. Whether it's in a public cloud, in a SaaS, on-prem, we were just talking to hill & brand, might be IoT at the edge at some point in time. And it sounds like, if I understand it correctly, that you want to be the most secure, the highest performance, the best user experience, fully managed for those different types of installation environments. >> That's a very good, yeah, you got it. You need a job? >> I got one, but thank you. (both chuckling) Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> Best of luck. We'll be watching. High expectations, but you've done it before. Good luck in doing it again. >> Good to do it again. >> Alright, take care. >> Thanks for the time. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Cosmopolitan Hotel at the Open Systems networking event. We'll be right back.

>> From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Open Systems, the future is crystal clear with security and SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We're here at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in the Chandelier Bar. At the Open Systems networking event, two gardener events this week in Las Vegas. On the heels of last week's AWS reinvent. Suresh Manchella is here. Is the Director of Global Infrastructure at Hillenbrand. Suresh, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So, tell me about Hillenbrand. What you guys do, and what your role is. >> So, Hillenbrand owns two different companies. One is the Batesville Casket Company, which has been around about 150 years or so. And then the other side of the business is Process Equipment Group, where we do industrial pumps, separations, and heavy machinery, and things in that nature. >> Okay and your role as Global and Infrastructure, so it touches on all infrastructure presumably secure. Why don't you describe the scope of a little bit. >> So, my role is I'm the Global Director of Infrastructure from a corporate stand point. I oversee everything, you know network storage systems, compute cloud initiatives, and what not. Including some of the outside security operations as well. For Hillenbrand Corporate across all the companies that we own. >> So you guys manufacture industrial equipment, which presumably supports a time's critical infrastructure, so security is vital. What are some of the big factors that are driving your business and how do they affect your technology strategy? >> From a business standpoint, Hillenbrand, I'm in that space a lot. We try to acquire a lot of companies within that space and as a result we have many companies that are coming in and out our portfolio. With any other manufacturing companies, we have the same challenges where how do we integrate them faster? How do we integrate them in a secure and safer way? But at the same time, also enabling our businesses to take on the next step and evolve from a traditional manufacturing company to doing the digital transformation and taking advantage of technology to have the competitive advantage in the market. >> So I got to ask you, so we do a lot of these events everyone talks about digital transformation. It's become kind of a buzzword, but when I talk to practitioners like yourself, there's actually substance there and it relates to, it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but what's behind your digital transformation? Is it instrumentation, is it better collection of data? Is it using that for competitive advantage? All of the above? How would you describe it? >> You said it. It's all of the above. We have a lot of data that we're collecting over the years. About our customers. How they use our products. And what are some of the maintenance cycles that are going through our larger equipment, things of that nature. We have all of that information. I think we need to start looking at that information, and say how can we enable the business to provide the intelligence it needs to be proactive to reach out to the customers and say these machinery might need maintenance very soon, or things of that nature. So we want to provide that value to the business. >> So as part of that, Suresh, the instrumenting that machinery? Or is the machinery already instrumented? Is it translating analog to digital and providing connectivity, what's behind that? >> Some of our machinery that have been out there have been there for, you know, many many decades and many, many years. It's not they're not already there when it comes to IoT and things to that nature. But we're trying to look at some of those opportunities out there and see how we can better support our products. >> So that's a largely road map stuff. Right now, you're tryna focus on making sure that the business is working. You're getting products to market fast and winning the competitive game. Let's talk about security a little bit. Obviously Open Systems is a security company, manage security infrastructure. What's happening in security? What are the big trends, the mega trends that you see, and how are they affecting the way in which you approach technology and applying that to business advantage? >> So as a customer and as a manufacturing company traditionally we used to look at a company as you have your four walls: data center, all of your key elements are inside it and as we're going through what's the cloud transformation and everybody's talking about that cloud buzzword. Those boundaries are getting shattered. Information is everywhere. It's no longer within those four boundaries. So we have to start thinking security a different way. We used to think that, put some firewalls, put some controls around these things and things could be saved. But it's no longer the case. Everything is in the cloud. As a software as a service or platform as a service, infrastructure as a service. And they're all over the place. For the most part, you don't have access to those backing systems. So how do you protect them? We need to fundamentally change how we look at security and how do we protect it. Rather than focusing on the central systems, we have to focus on the endpoints at this point. >> So, different mindset for sure. Different sort of technology approach? Or similar practices with just different methodologies? How do you describe that? >> It's certainly a different methodology. The focus is certainly shifting. It's no longer centralized. It's decentralized. It's information everywhere. Information overload. It could be on your phones. It could be on your desktops. It could be on your laptops. It could be on servers in the cloud. Cloud service providers, there are a lot of things that come into play, when you're talking about the security the data that's scattered all over the place. >> So you're a customer of Open Systems, is that right? >> Yes we are. >> Maybe you could describe what you do with them and what your relationship has been with them? How do you apply their technique? >> Hillenbrand owns a company based out of Germany. And they've been a long standing customer of Open Systems for many, many years. So as a part of the acquisition, we got to know Open Systems and the value that their adding to in the SD-WAN spaces, and security space. Which is quite phenomenal. >> Okay, so you're part of the role as it relates to Open Systems is through that other division of the company, so how you apply their tech? What are you doin' with it? >> We utilize Open Systems as our SD-WAN provider outside the U.S. Primarily that division that we had was outside the U.S. for the most part. As we are getting to know more and more about Open Systems, over the years, it's a no brainer for us. They can provide a very reliable service that's scalable, very quick turnarounds. And that's certainly fitting in well with our MNA strategy where we acquire a company and try to integrate these things we cannot wait several months for and ambulance provider to drop a circuit and get them in, and things to that nature so with Open Systems, the SD-WAN concept, you only need an internet connection and they do all the magic behind the scenes and put it all together. >> So it's cloud like in the sense that it's sort of a managed service. But it's not necessarily remote cloud services, it could be on prim. >> Yes, it can be anywhere. >> Eventually at the edge. >> Yeah. >> So it fits into the roadmap. What's the biggest security challenge that you face as a practitioner today? >> The biggest security challenge that we have is protecting the data that's everywhere. The biggest challenge is knowing where the data is today. If anybody can solve that problem, I'd like to know. The first one to know that. It's quite a challenge for everybody lately. >> It's an arm's race, isn't it? >> It Is. >> Good. Well, Suresh, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's a pleasure meeting you. >> Thank you. >> Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back. From Las Vegas at the Open Systems networking event. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat instrumental music) >> From Las Vegas it's the CUBE. Covering Open Systems, the future is crystal clear with security and SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to the CUBE. We are here in Las Vegas in the Cosmo hotel in the Chandelier bar. Part of Open Systems get together, kind of session of smart people gathered. All part of big week here in Vegas. Garden is having a big event, a lot of things happening. We have Martin Bosshardt who is the CEO of Open Systems who's hosting the event. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining me. Okay so, I got to get this out there. You guys are in Switzerland headquarters. You've just established big presence in Silicon Valley. >> Right. >> And you've expanding rapidly in Silicon Valley, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Explain what you guys do, how you started, where you come from and what's the story of Open Systems? >> Well, originally we started as managed security service provider and I managed security infrastructure. We learned, especially if you are doing financial services, security infrastructure, if you try to update you need to go into those data centers. And that is harder to get in there, it's like entering North Korea. So we learned to operate that stuff remotely and that really brought us in more than 180 countries, especially with industry companies. Industry they manufacturing, they started to globalize their value chains, and that really helped us to globalize our foot print. And obviously to do that we used SD-WAN. So we definitely came from the security space, but today we are the largest SD-WAN, standardize SD-WAN platform we a fully integrated security staff. >> So how big is the company roughly people-wise? What's a... >> We are 200 plus people currently, and a 50 plus million revenue this year. >> How big, sounds like the customers are really large complex data centers with a lot of offices and facilities. Is that your makeup of your customer base right now? >> Our customer base really is, I think, I mean obviously financial services that's always if you start in Switzerland a company, the financial services is very important. But then also, industry, manufacturing is especially companies with globalized value chains are very interested in our services. Because you have serious complexity from regulatory point of view, but also from operational point of view to operate SD-WAN in a secured way. So this is really our sweet spot. >> So explain the difference between SD-WAN old way and the new way, because SD-WAN was simply connecting branch offices together, basic networking stuff. Mean its like connectivity. So today is much more complex. What's the difference between the SD-WAN environment thing, because there is a resurgence with SD-WAN. With cloud computing, with the internet, obviously with secure issues, it's a whole different ball game. Explain the difference between the old way and the new way. >> Well the old way was it just connected occasions and then you piped traffic through a VPN, right. And I think we learned a lot about what SD-WAN is really capable to do when we start to work for the NGO Space, when you use a lot of satellite traffic. It's very expensive to pipe everything through the satellites, so you need to slice the traffic into important stuff, less important stuff and then you decide what are you going to route through the satellite and what you going to route terrestric. And this is really where the whole magic of SD-WAN comes from. You certainly have to, the freedom to route traffic application based in a very different way. So, you're not bound to protocols anymore, so you really can route your Office 365 traffic different than your Facebook traffic. You can route, you can priortize. >> So you can differentiate between the traffic types first. That was a first, discovery. >> That was important for us, because we managed infrastructure and obviously you don't want to create congestion by managing infrastructure. So, it is really about, what traffic is important? What traffic is time critical? >> Yeah. >> And route, depending on the application needs, traffic differently. >> Yes, cost is always a big motivator. But for innovation. >> Cost performance. It's always cost performance, right? >> So, I get that's awesome and by the way that's how startups figure out innovations that don't have a lot of capital. They figure it out by being effective and making things work. When did the security piece click in for you guys? When you guys saw SD-WAN, when was the moment you said, "Okay we are going to do all these things to save costs and do this kind of routings and these kinds of policy based". I'm over simplifying, but you know what I'm saying. When did security become important? Was it from the beginning? Was it a discovery? Was it something that was a, you just caught the wave? Explain how you guys became so prolific in your product with security. >> We definitely, we came sort of from the security space and the SD-WAN was something we used to operate security infrastructure. So it's maybe, we looked at it a little bit different, but at the end of the day, SD-WAN creates so much opportunities for companies. And I believe the whole cloud movement is creating so many opportunities for companies to move fast, to create growth. Also, if you think IoT, it creates whole different business models for almost all enterprise organizations. >> Talk about the business model, that's important, because go ahead finish your thoughts. >> And now the question is, How can you embrace all that growth and managing the risks? And that's what's happening right now. We help customers to combine the security. >> So one of the things we were here last week for Amazon re:Invent big event for Amazon web services and they announce a non-premise product. No one thought they were ever going to do that. So I asked the CEO there why they were doing that, essentially he said, "latency kills". Certain latency is now the new problem. You learned that from the satellite situation where cost and latency are really important factors in determining how you architect things. But then you realize that the business models are shifting. So, I ask you, as you have need for security and low latency, people are looking for direct connections. They don't want to route traffic through internet. Who knows where it's going to go though, China? It's all these hidden problems. >> Yeah, and you know I agree basically. Latency kills, but I also disagree, because there are applications where latency is not an issue, like email. I mean you couldn't care less about latency in email. >> In fact don't deliver it. (laughs) >> But at the same time it's really important that a network understands not only how it routes, it also understands what it routes. And that is the power of SD-WAN, so you really can route different applications in different routes. >> Right time, right place kind of thing. >> Exactly and then it depends where it's consumed, where it's delivered and where do you route those >> Talk about your business model now, you got a U.S. Why the U.S. expansion? Is it right for growth? Is it a natural progression? What's the strategy, Why U.S. expansion? >> Actually, what we see the U.S. is moving very fast to the cloud right now and this is an opportunity for us to really support that, I would call it transformation. It's really an industry transformation is happening right now and we just in Europe maybe to bring down the cost of connectivity. That's still more of a business driver, and obviously, that's always exciting to bring down costs. But if you move to cloud, you really have to rethink your network structure and also you have to rethink your security posture. So this is just a way of opportunity. >> Martin, I got to ask you honestly, I've been kind of checking around Silicon Valley and you guys have a good vibe and good buzz. Certainly great reputation in Switzerland, great product, great work, but you are attracting kind of new talent from the Bay area, Cisco in particular. A lot of these high-powered people. Networking guys, developers. Who are you guys looking to attract into your office as you expand, I know you got a lot of openings. It's not a recruiting plug, but I mean as you look to put the team together, What are you guys looking for? What's the kind of individual? What's the culture of your company? What's the kind of things people can expect if they work there? >> I mean we are focused on, we just want to create the most amazing networks in a secured way. And I believe this is very attractive, what we've created the last couple of years. And that is also attractive for talent in Silicon Valley. But obviously, it's a competitive market. But it's all over the world, it's competitive market. And I believe, especially going to the market and understanding what the world needs. That's very powerful in Silicon Valley. The eco-system is very powerful, so for us is clear. We want to be there, we want to play a role. >> That's awesome, we look forward to doing more content. Final question for you, If you could have to nail down the core problem that you guys are trying to solve. As the world evolves, the landscape continues, the world gone global. You're seeing all kinds of needs, all kinds of intelligence. What have the top problems that your team is working on, to continue to iterate and solve, What are the big things you are trying to nail down? >> We want to make it for a customer very easy to consume a secure SD-WAN. And that sounds maybe simple, but it's not. To operate an SD-WAN in a secure way is really challenge. So most companies operate like 40, 50 different products to achieve that. >> Yeah. >> And we us it's like subscribing a service. >> Quick plug last minute, What's your product? 'Cause you have a deal with multiple vendors. Is this a SAS product, on-premise, cloud? >> It's a SAS, on prem available and it's availa6ble in all major cloud (mumbles), like Azuren and Amazon. So it's in all clouds premises working. >> You're literally Switzerland, for the cloud. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> They use that expression in the United States a lot. >> Yeah. >> We're Switzerland, we're neutral. >> Yeah, we're Switzerland, we're neutral. We're actually very neutral and also... >> But seriously, you can work with, if I'm the customer >> Right. >> I have multiple clouds, I have multiple vendors. I have a ton of security products. Can I use you guys? >> Right, yeah it's simple. I mean we are already a platform so we use many security products and orchestrate so they work together. >> What are the common things you get from customers that have been successful with you. And I don't want to say single (mumbles) lessons that is an old IT expression, but the world has to be smarter, faster, dashboard oriented, AP harden, APIs, a lot of data traversal. What's the ideal end state for your customers, when you guys are successful? >> You have to repeat that question. >> From a customer, what's the value purchase to me? Am I saving time? Am I integrating multiple devices? >> You save a lot of time, you save a lot of money. And I believe the most important thing is, we see ourself as weapon in a war for talent. It's just impossible for our customers to find the talents to really operate that stuff in a good way. And we make that much easier. So obviously, you cannot outsource security, but you can make security easy, manageable and that's where we... >> And operational, make it work. >> And operational, make it work, and that's I believe the key already. >> Well Martin, congratulations on the expansion strategy. Real quick, What's going on in Vegas for you guys here? What are you guys here talking about? What's the big story here for you guys? >> Well basically, obviously, we grow very fast so we also use this to bring together people. But then also, everybody is here right now. It's great to see winners, it's great to see partners. It's great to see competitors, so it's just important to understand the market. It's also, there are worst place in the world to be. >> Yeah. >> In Las Vegas. >> Build those relationships, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE, really appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm here with the CEO of Open Systems from John Furrier the CUBE, we are here at the Chandelier bar at the Cosmo. We are just getting started, we got a couple bunch more interviews still to come. We just had the FBI on, really importa6nt conversations around security, cybersecurity, enterprise security, and how to make SD-WAN work. We'll be right back with more. Stay with us after this short break. (techno music)

>> From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Open Systems, the future is crystal clear with security and SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE, We're here in Las Vegas again for another awesome set of conversations. CUBE coverage here at the Cosmopolitan hotel at the Chandelier Bar. We're here covering Open Systems having a special event in conjunction with a lot of the conference going on, Gardner has a big symposium, lot of things happening, we're here with M.K. Palmore whose the head of the FBI'S cyber security, San Francisco branch of the FBI, great to have you thanks for spending time. >> Thanks for having me, John. Much appreciated >> Chandelier Bar, everyone's having a good time, you guys had a lot of sessions today, conversations. You gave a speech today during a session around info sec and culture. >> Info sec risk and leadership. >> Okay talk about that, what will you, what was your main theme. >> Yeah, so I've over the past five years or so had the opportunity to go out and speak a lot about the cyber threat landscape. Going into this year, because the message is getting a little stayed and old, I think I want to concentrate on those issues that I think can help move the ball down the field a little bit. So, talking about cyber security risks as an enterprise risk, discussing it as a matter of an enterprises responsibility to address cyber securities as an enterprise risk is an important message to carry, and I like to add in topics and subjects about leadership, and tie all of those in because in my view, information security professionals have to be leaders as well, because we're all venturing into space that's not known to us. >> That's a great point, leadership also has to take into the new environment, your dealing with you know, a decentralized threat landscape, distributed, decentralized. >> Global. >> Back in the old days when I was in college, you get a pager, you get a new one, now you get flip phones and you can swap em out, now you're everywhere, you got social media, the ability to dodge the authorities, is easier, almost easier than ever before, requires you guys to be on your toes, to catch the bad guys, you need cutting edge technology, but you got to have a mindset in a management culture of leadership, to empower people at the edges. How are you guys thinking about, cause this is like one of the main cyber topics is, setting that system up to be nimble, reactive, used data, >> Right. >> What's your thoughts? >> Yeah so I mean, frankly the FBI is learning in new ways to approach this cyber security problem. We understand that we have to hire the right people with the right talent and that we as an organization we're used, frankly we're used to fighting you know, bad guys in the streets, are now taking this fight to the networked environment and we have to come up with new ways of tackling the problem. One of the biggest problems that we face and you touched on it, is that near 100% anonymity that criminals enjoy operating in the network environment, that ability to conduct transactions, that ability to essentially go unnoticed for long periods of time, without anyone knowing your true identity, creates a huge obstacle for law enforcement, but the good thing is that frankly it's something that we're very good at in terms of identifying whose on the other end of the keyboard, but it takes a lot of work. >> You know I'm old enough to have some friends that have graduated from you know, criminal justice majors when I was in college, I was a CS major, they went DEA, FBI, so a lot of friends and it's evolved a lot from having that branch office >> Yes. >> Focus, you now have digital, and one comment that always kind of resonated from my friends that were in the law enforcement area goes, John it's like putting the puzzle together, and you got to get the puzzle pieces to put it all together >> Right. >> Now you have a sea of puzzle pieces, it's almost like a three dimensional puzzle, because you have to get the data, you got to understand the landscape now and multiple dimensions >> Right. >> That you just mentioned. How do you guys keep up with putting that puzzle together, before it changes? >> We get a lot of help, right, so what we're used to doing is using the FBI'S special agent as the main tool of our investigations, in the cyber world we've had to add some pieces to that, not only is there specific training now for cyber agents, those agents that are charged with investigating intrusions, we have computer scientists, we have data analysts, we have folks that we bring to bear, in any one particular investigation, who add talents and tools that every, you know it's like, everyone is at the table on these investigations bringing different aspects of the investigation together and it is like you said, multiple data points and as any investigation is, lots of pieces being brought together to tell a story that we ultimately have to, you know convince the judge of, in terms of judge and a jury sometimes, of the validity of what it is that we've found. >> So timing is very important as well. >> Timing's huge, as we like to say, we want to be involved in intrusion matters as quickly, and as often as we can. Part of the challenge that we face is that there's a little bit of tug and pull between us and the private sector, and we aren't always brought in as early in a breach investigation as we would like to be, and those, it's valuable, valuable minutes, valuable days that are lost sometimes in that, in that transactional process. >> I interviewed Christine Halverson, I don't even, I'm sorry I didn't interview her, I watched her give a presentation amazon reinvent last week, she gave a key, one of the key notes during a public sector summit, Teresa Carlson's breakfast that she had, and she said something very fascinating she said, we are in a data crisis at the FBI, meaning that they have to put the puzzle pieces together and get it done quick, it was something along those lines, but she said that the FBI has been very progressive in adopting new technology, you guys are moving very very fast and she said she's excited by that but she said we need the data, whether that's being called in quickly, >> Right. >> And or getting access to other data bases, right, so it's like the data is out there, so you guys need access to that, how do you guys, how do you, how's the FBI evolving with that, architectural cloud and what not, and how are you enabling the tools for the field agents, and the people in the trenches? >> So the data analytics is an interesting area to dive deeply into, I mean we face the same challenges as any private organization, in terms of how we intake the data, how the data's organized, how it is that we then retrieve the data, look at it, how it relates to the different data points relate to one another, we face all of those same challenges and we have the added challenge, I think in the environment that we're in, in terms of how we're able to adopt private sector products that are out there that might meet our needs, I mean I've been in government now for over 30 years, it's a bit of a challenge being able to acquire the types of platforms and products that you, that you would want to have as quickly as you would like to have them, but eventually we do get down those roads, we do adopt platforms that are useful to us, and again like everyone else, we're trying to move as quickly as we possibly can in this environment to keep up with the bad guys. >> And you guys do a great job moving those antiquated inadequate systems to more real time, >> We try. >> State of the art. >> We try. >> So I interviewed General Keith Alexander once, and we talked about identity and private sector, public sector collaboration. Can you share your thoughts on that, because this is something that's become a bigger trend recently in the past five to 10 years, past three years in particular where it's a sharing culture it's not just, well I'm not going to call the FBI they're going to come in, it's no no we're going to bring them in early, whether it's a breach you think, or someone hiding, I mean the Marriot thing they didn't even know they were there! So, you guys are now spending more time collaborating with the enterprises and businesses, how has that changed your approach, your posture, how you look at the data, can you give some insight into that? >> Yeah so I mean a lot of it's about relationship building, I will tell you that, in the San Francisco division one of the priorities we have within our cyber branch, is to ensure that we have a certain level of rapport, not just with the big tech giants in the valley, but also with the medium size enterprises and the small enterprises, we spend a fair amount of time putting ourselves in front of the C-Suites, boards of directors and talking to them about one, what capabilities the FBI brings to the table, we open the lines of communication with them and we build a rapport, in such a way that it allows them the trust to then bring problems to us and we then begin an exchange of information. The point you made about, public, private collaboration, it's an absolute must, there's no way we get through this tough period that we're in, without both sides sitting down at the table, establishing some trust, and then moving together to solve these problems. >> The other thing I'd observe and you may or may not want to comment on this, love to see if you would comment, but the notion of agility, especially with data and systems and cloud computing. CIA, the Department of Defense, are moving to systems that can be as reactive and accurate as possible, and this is a changing of relationship to the suppliers! >> Right. >> You know, and the government, oh multiple suppliers, we got to do five different things, >> Right. >> But if the systems don't talk to each other, you guys can't be fast. This is seat change and the mindset. >> The whole government I think is beginning to understand that in this world, technology, we need to be much more agile in terms of our adoption of new products that will allow us to combat crime, and frankly the threat from the national security sector that we're responsible for responding to. So we understand that there's a certain level of agility historically not present, that we need to move the marker to get towards. >> Let me ask you a question, does the FBI have an app store? (John laughs) >> So what, we have secured telephones that we utilize and we certainly have an approved list of apps that we're allowed to have on our phones, so we do. The short answer to that is yes, it's a very truncated list of apps that we have available to us, but they're helpful. >> Well we were joking. Well we were joking at reinvent and all these cloud conferences because, the developer now, building a right new software apps is faster, so this whole dev ops ethos of cloud computing >> Secure DevOps yeah. >> And so secure DevOps is really interesting because now you don't have to, you can free up the data in the infrastructure and yes infrastructure is code, your going to see a renaissance of new applications, so the joke was, you know you made it when you have an app store inside the FBI, there's an app for that. Okay, final question for you, as you guys do your thing and I know you get called in a lot to mentor and also collaborate with enterprises, what's your advice on the info sec landscape? Do you talk to CSO's and CXO's, CSO's in particular are under a lot of pressure, >> Right. >> Board level kind of responsibility, not part of IT anymore they are now a critical piece of building out these teams, what's your advice to them in terms of either, whether there's observation's our best practice that you've seen, that they can think about? >> So a couple of the points that I typically hit on in my talks, that I hit on today, one is this idea of looking at cyber security as an enterprise risk which you just talked about. We need to get away from the old school thought process of cyber being an IT function, right? It's an enterprise risk, it needs to be talked about in terms of risk, the language of risk management, with the C-Suite, with the boards of directors, because when you talk in a language of the likelihood of an event happening, the impact to the organization and what that means in terms of, daily revenue, daily dollars to the business, that's a language that business owners and business leaders understand. So the oweness is on information security leaders to adopt this language, so that we can communicate our needs to our colleagues in the C-Suite and the boards of directors. It's a seat change for information security professionals because this is not a language that they are typically used to speaking. >> And they got to level up there too because this is the reality. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, final final question, what's the most exciting thing that you're working on and or you're seeing happening around you, that you get up in the morning and say, man I'm so excited to work on that. Or trend or technology. >> I'll tell you when you work for an organization like the FBI, which I've done for almost 22 years, at the end of the day it's getting exposure to people who are engaged in trying to achieve the FBI's mission on a day to day basis and at the end of the day, I don't care how much technology you have around you, I don't care how much policy you have in place, having the right people in place who are dedicated to what we're trying to accomplish, that's the thing I get the most juice out of on a day to day basis, we get to actually, in this portion of my career, really work with some of the most talented people that the FBI has. >> And their being empowered more than ever right now in this technology >> Absolutely. >> M.K. Palmore thanks for coming on theCUBE appreciate it. Head of the FBI cyber security in San Francisco. It's theCUBE here in Las Vegas at the Chandelier Bar in the Cosmopolitan, breaking it down. Part of Open Systems private event, they just had a lot of stuff going on with Gardner, lot of events happening here in Vegas, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (modern music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022, formerly Vmworld. We've been covering this event since 2010. I'm with Dave Nicholson, my cohost. We've got two sets here, live for three days, breaking down all the action, what's going on in the news, what announcements, what are the partners doing, you got the VMware execs, you got the customers, and you got the partner ecosystem, which is booming. We got Darren Wolner, Senior Director of Product Management at Lumen, SASE and SD-WAN, in the midst of it all. The internet is SD-WAN, this is all rocking. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey. Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate being here. >> Well, we know the name change LUMEN from CenturyLink. You guys have been on many times on theCUBE talking about, you know, the connective tissue. You got infrastructure, platform, now SASE. Cloud's changing. We're calling it supercloud. Some people call it multicloud. But the game is still the same. You got an on-premise environment, you got edge, could be a building. And you got now cloud-native hyperscale, cloud players, now all connecting, kind of like the old branch office days, connect here. So a lot of the same kind of concepts, but done differently. Give us the quick update from Lumen. What are you guys seeing? What are some of the big trends? >> So the quick update from Lumen is that we just launched a new service called SASE that we're extremely excited about. And this new service from Lumen takes advantage of a lot of the infrastructure that you just mentioned. So we're able to take advantage of our cloud edge 60 plus nodes to help customers move their applications closer to where they're doing business. Major performance boosts. So even though all these customers want to move the workloads to the cloud to improve their efficiency, improve their performance, we are acting quickly to make sure that that experience is a positive one. So as things are evolving and changing, so is Lumen, Aad we're pushing towards that evolution to technology. >> Take a minute to explain, just kind of set the table to the situation of how you guys relate to your customers. You mentioned SASE, which is a service I want to get into. Okay, got connectivity. What are some of the use cases? Where does SASE fit in? What is the use case with the customers? Where are you seeing the most traction? >> And you need to define SASE. It's always a party foul to use an acronym without defining it immediately after the first time you used it, so. >> Okay, so I have to recover from that foul. So, absolutely. So SASE, we view SASE as a convergence of network and security. And what we're doing with SASE is that we're delivering this package of services that are cloud based, that customers can pick and choose whichever ones they want. And that's Secure Access Service Edge. And that is what we're very excited to talk about. >> I mean, basically it's connectivity, it's application security, it's edge. So it's end-to-end. So we all get the acronym. Nice play there. But when reality comes to the customer, what is the use case that you guys are seeing the most on? Lift and shift I get. Is it lift and shift and then cloud native to on-prem? What is some of the things specifically that you guys are selling into? >> Specifically what we're seeing is we're seeing that customers, they want to evolve their networks and move to cloud environments, but not everybody's ready to do it all at the same time. That's part of the reason why SASE has become so popular right now. Because we're enabling customers to pick and choose the order in which they want to move to cloud enabled services, and we're allowing them to choose one or choose them all. And from a use case perspective, as we've just gone through COVID, and everybody knows work from home has become extremely important way of doing business, and that we want to give that flexibility. >> No one would've forecasted 100% work-from-home, VPN, move it under provisioned. (men laughing) So again, shock to the system. >> It is, it is, it is. It was, but with a solution like this, we're able to provide our customers with flexibility to run their businesses any way they want. They to be premise-based, we can support them. They want to be remote, we can support them. That is a huge use case right now. >> I mean, all joking aside, the forcing function, necessity's the mother of invention, and the pandemic really kind of changed the game. How do you guys see security evolving? Because as you look at the security, you got FourNet out there. I know you guys have a relationship with them. You got VMware. There's a lot of different tools and platforms emerging. We hear every CSO we talk to is like, hey, I want to take my 35 tools down to 24, and more platforms, and much more defensibility, not just point security. How do you discuss that with customers around the security conversation? >> So we're finding that our customers want a little bit more simplicity. You had mentioned that they want to bring down their numbers to something that's a little bit more manageable. With the service that we've just launched, we have single vendor solutions, and we're looking to simplify that path for the customer. And it's about simplicity, but it's also about optionality. We want to make sure that we can say yes to our customers. And whatever path that they want to go to, from a software perspective, we're able to support them. And the flexibility of our platform allows that to happen. >> You know, networking, Dave, we always talk about the three major pillars: networking, compute, storage. They never go away. >> No. >> They'll always be around. Networking is now front and center, especially with the abstractions going on. You're starting to see supercloud discussions. You see companies buying more cloud native, like with AWS, to take that CapEx off, but now are putting all that energy into modern application development. Which now puts pressure on, okay, well about network policies? So networking is into the fold again. It's always been there, it never left, but it's becoming different. How do you see the different conversations happening with the network component, with cloud native trend that we're seeing here? >> Well, I think the network component is really table stakes. And what's happening is, as everybody is interested in moving to the cloud, services are becoming instant, right? Digitized. But you have the network that customers are still looking for that level of support from a company like Lumen, and they know that we have a vast infrastructure. So the network conversation doesn't go away. It just evolves. What's happening is customers want to understand how they can better secure those networks. And then what's also happening is people want to use any device, anywhere, anytime. So the conversation about the network is important, but when you think about security, it's starting to move away from the network. It already has. >> There's no more perimeter. >> Exactly. So we need to be able to secure our customers wherever they are, however they want to use their devices. And for us, that path was SASE. >> So go into a little more depth in terms of how this is deployed. What is this thing that is SASE? >> Absolutely. >> Is this software living on the edge on people's servers? Does it include some sort of physical components and wizardry? >> Well... (laughs) >> Peel back-- >> Is it self-service? Is it installable? Does it need professional services? >> So, there is a little bit of wizardry. And what we put together is really an awesome digital platform where customers have the ability to go into the Lumen marketplace, and in five simple steps, purchase a SASE solution based on a few discreet choices that they need to make. And once they've provisioned that, once they've purchased that service, now they have those entitlements. We've created an all new application from the ground up called the Lumen SASE Manager where they're able to go in, take their entitlements, design, build, manage their network. So the customer can go through this journey, and it's relatively quick. And they have tons of flexibility to do that. However, if a customer prefers a seller-led journey, we're still going to help them do that as well. So really the spirit of SASE for us was to give ultimate flexibility to the customer. Consume exactly what you want, consume it the way you want to, but the simplicity factor with our digital approach I think is something that we feel is pretty game changing. >> So when one of those customers, let's say you have a campaign, thank you SASE. What are those customers thanking you for? Give me an example of what a delighted customer would point to as, "I'm really glad we made the decision to do this with Lumen." Why would they be happy? >> Why would they be happy? Because the advantage of doing this with Lumen is not only that simplified digital approach, but we're selling them essentially a cookie, right? And that cookie has two layers, and it has cream filling. And what's going on is-- >> Tastes great. >> Definitely, definitely. But everybody has different tastes, and we'll get to that in a second. But the top layer is the infrastructure that Lumen provides. And we have a vast infrastructure, 450,000 route miles of fiber, 60 plus cloud edge nodes to bring compute closer to the customer. So that's a very important layer that we're providing. And then the other layer of the cookie is the management. Different customers have different needs. Not every business looks alike. So you're going to have some businesses who have invested in their security apparatus, and they may not need enough as much help from us. So we're offering customers different levels of managed service wrapper so they can buy exactly what they need, no more, no less. So let's get to the cream filling. Everybody likes the cream filling, but not everybody likes the same kind. Every time you go down the supermarket aisle and you look at your favorite cream cookie, there's different types of flavors that are introduced from time to time. So what we want to do is to be able to say yes to our customers and give them as much variety as the cream flavors as possible. And that's where the software comes in. If you have dedicated a lot of expertise to a certain platform, we want to be able to support that software platform. And I think the flexibility of the Lumen platform and the flexibility of Lumen SASE solutions allows us to give that flexibility back. >> So you putting that wizardry at the edge, so the customer's environment, whatever they have flexes with the connectivity? >> It does, yes. >> That's what you're getting at. I mean, at the end of the day, we need the network. Everybody wants more bandwidth. >> Its not going away. >> Faster, faster, faster. >> That's right. >> We need more bandwidth. >> That's right. >> But it could be smarter. But that also implements some potential overhead. So you got to understand the end to end. That's where I think the SD-WAN interesting tie-in comes in. How do you talk to customers about that piece? Is it simply you can have your cake and eat it too, and you lose weight with Lumen? I stole that line from Victoria from VMware. I want my cake and eat it too, and I want to lose weight. >> I mean, wouldn't that be a wonderful world if we could do that? Have our cake and lose weight. >> I want to make sure. Yeah. >> But when it comes to SD-WAN, especially under our SASE umbrella, what we're looking to do is go down the road of simplicity and try to work out the amount of compute that a customer needs, and the amount of storage, I'm sorry, not storage, the amount of throughput that a customer needs. And we're getting these customers to make these decisions. They know what they have. They know what they want to run. We will consult with them. Whether they go through our digital experience, whether they go through our seller-led experience, there's always off ramps and a way to talk to a human being and make choices. So we're giving the customer enough information to make an informed decision, and we're here to support them if they need more. >> So you're customer-centric. You guys are good there. I mean, that's solid. Great track record there. I guess my final two questions are: one, how do I consume? I'm the customer. How do I consume? And what's on the roadmap going forward? I mean, look at the project management. You got the keys to the kingdom on the roadmap. And you can share if you want, but maybe you can't share some things. But what's the consumption model? Where do I find it? Is it the marketplace? Is it through channel partners and service providers? And then what's on the roadmap? >> Sure, absolutely. So you can consume this on dotcom through the Lumen marketplace. You could interact with the learn and the buy experience. And then once you've gone through that experience, you're going to consume it through the SASE manager. That's how you're going to use and interact with the service. That's how you're going to consume it. And then you're going to continue to utilize the SASE manager for reporting, access to portals, so forth and so on. You need to make a change to your service, not a problem. It's simple. You go back into the SASE manager, you add more seats to your ZTNA solution. You want to add another site, you go back into the SASE manager, you could purchase another site. We'll take care of all of it. Everything is automated. >> If you're a VMware customer, what's in it for them? >> This is great for VMware. It's the automation of the complete security stack. It's the automation of the SD-WAN portion. And we think that this total package is something that's going to be very appealing to VMware fans, VMware customers, and most importantly, when a VMware customer comes to us and says, "I have a ton of experience with VMware, and I don't want to move away from it, but I can really use the management and the infrastructure that you guys have," I'm able to say yes. >> And then you got the Aria coming out, now you got the cross-cloud, going to be very interesting. Okay, what's on the roadmap? Tell us what's the secret sauce. Reveal some secrets. >> Reveal some secrets. I dunno, there's a lot of people watching. >> They're shaking their head over there, "Don't say it! Don't say it!" (laughs) >> We have a lot of exciting things on the roadmap. I will tell you this because I think it's very important. The way we are developing services today has shifted. No longer can companies afford to roll out one product a year and wait. It takes you a year to roll that product out, and it's stale by the time it comes out, and then it takes you another year to fix it. We have moved to continuous development cycles. We are keeping track of what's going on in the market, what the hot trends are, what the hot services are, and as SASE continues to evolve, we will be able to quickly evolve. So while we do have some ideas of where we want to go on the roadmap, and I'm sure they're shaking their heads over there, what I love is we now have the ability to listen to what our customers want and act quickly. >> I call it the holy trinity. Network storage, compute, get that software intelligence at the edge which is going to be really popular. You guys are in a really perfect position. Thanks for coming on, sharing on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, thank you. >> Okay, Darren's here on theCUBE breaking it down for Lumen, formerly CenturyLink, rebranded a few years ago. Connectivity is the key. You still got to connect, network, compute, storage, and you got the data center now, the cloud hybrid, now multicloud. This is the super CUBE, covering supercloud here at VMware Explore 2022. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021 in person. So a live event, physical in-person, also virtual hybrid. So a lot of great action online, check out the website. All the videos are there on theCUBE, as well as what's going on all of the actions on site and theCUBE's here. I'm John Furrier, your host with Dave Vellante, my cohost. Finally, we've got David Brown, VP of Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2, the bread and butter. Our favorite part of Amazon. David, great to have you back on theCUBE in person. >> John, it's great to be back. It's the first time I'd been on theCUBE in person as well. A lot of virtual events with you guys, but it's amazing to be back at re:Invent. >> We're so excited for you. I know, Matt Garman and I've talked in the past. We've talked in the past. EC2 is just an amazing product. It's always been the core block of AWS. More and more action happening and developers are now getting more action and there's well, we wrote a big piece about it. What's going on? The Silicon's really paying off. You've got to also general purpose Intel and AMD, and you've got the custom silicon, all working together. What's the new update? Give us a scoop. >> Well, John, it's actually 15 years of EC2 this year and I've been lucky to be on that team for 14 years and so incredible to see the growth. It's been an amazing journey. The thing that's really driven us, two things. One is supporting new workloads. And so what are the workloads that customers have available out there trying to do on the cloud that we don't support and launch new instance types. And that's the first thing. The second one is price performance. How do we give customers more performance at a continuously decreasing price year-over-year? And that's just driven innovation across EC2 over the years with things like Graviton. All of our inferential chips are custom silicon, but also instance types with the latest Intel Ice Lake CPU's, latest Milan. We just announced the AMD Milan instance. It's just constantly innovation across the ever-increasing list of instances. So super exciting. >> So instances become the new thing. Provision an instance, spin up an instance. Instance becomes, and you can get instances, flavors, almost like flavors, right? >> David: Yeah. >> Take us through the difference between an instance and then the EC2 itself. >> That's correct, yeah. So we actually have, by end of the year, right now we have over 475 different instances available to you whether it's GPU accelerators, high-performance computing instances, memory optimized, just enormous number. We'll actually hit 500 by the end of the year, but that is it. I mean, customers are looking for different types of machines and those are the instances. >> So the Custom Silicon, it's one of the most interesting developments. We've written about it. AWS secret weapon is one of them. I wonder if you could take us back to the decision points and the journey. The Annapurna acquisition, you started working with them as a partner, then you said, all right, let's just buy the company. >> David: Yeah. >> And then now, you're seeing the acceleration, your time to tapeout is way, way compressed. Maybe what was the catalyst and maybe we can get into where it's going. >> Yeah, absolutely. Super interesting story 'cause it actually starts all the way back in 2008. In 2008, EC2 had actually been around for just a little under two years. And if you remember back then, everybody was like, will virtualize and hypervisors, specialization would never really get you the same performances, what they were calling bare metal back then. Everybody's looking at the cloud. And so we took a look at that. And I mean, network latencies, in some cases with hypervisors were as high as 200 or 300 milliseconds. And it was a number of real challenges. And so we knew that we would have to change the way that virtualization works and get into hardware. And so in 2010, 2011, we started to look at how could I offload my network processing, my IO processing to additional hardware. And that's what we delivered our first Nitro card in 2012 and 2013. We actually offloaded all of the processing of network to a Nitro card. And that Nitro card actually had a Annapurna arm chip on it. Our Nitro 1 chip. >> For the offload? >> The offload card, yeah. And so that's when my team started to code for Arm. We started to work on our Linux works for Arm. We actually had to write our own operating system initially 'cause there weren't any operating systems available we could use. And so that's what we started this journey. And over the years, when we saw how well it worked for networking, we said, let's do it for storage as well. And then we said, Hey, we could actually improve security significantly. And by 2017, we'd actually offloaded 100% of everything we did on that server to our offload cards Leaving a 100% of the server available for customers. And we're still actually the only cloud provider that does that today. >> Just to interject, in the data center today, probably 30% of the general purpose cores are used for offloads. You're saying 0% in the cloud. >> On our nitro instances, so every instance we've launched since 2017, our C5. We use 0% of that central core. And you can actually see that in our instance types. If you look at our largest instance type, you can see that we're giving you 96 cores and we're giving you, and our largest instance, 24 terabytes of memory. We're not giving you 23.6 terabytes 'cause we need some. It's all given to you as the customer. >> So much more efficient, >> Much, much more efficient, much better, better price performance as well. But then ultimately those Nitro chips, we went through Nitro 1, Nitro 2, Nitro 3, Nitro 4. We said, Hey, could we build a general purpose server chip? Could we actually bring Arm into the cloud? And in 2018, we launched the A1 instance, which was our Graviton1 instance. And what we didn't tell people at the time is that it was actually the same chip we were using on our network card. So essentially, it was a network card that we were giving to you as a server. But what it did is it sparked the ecosystem. That's why we put it out there. And I remember before launch, some was saying, is this just going to be a university project? Are we going to see people from big universities using Arm in the cloud? Was it really going to take off? And the response was amazing. The ecosystem just grew. We had customers move to it and immediately begin to see improvements. And we knew that a year later, Graviton2 was going to come out. And Graviton2 was just an amazing chip. It continues to see incredible adoption, 40% price performance improvement over other instances. >> So this is worth calling out because I think that example of the network card, I mean, innovation can come from anywhere. This is what Jassy always would say is do the experiments. Think about the impact of what's going on here. You're focused on a mission. Let's get that processing of the lowest cost, pick up some workloads. So you're constantly tinkering with tuning the engine. New discovery comes in. Nitro is born. The chip comes in. But I think the fundamental thing, and I want to get your reaction to this 'cause we've put this out there on our post on Sunday. And I said, in every inflection point, I'm old enough, my birthday was yesterday. I'm old enough to know that. >> David: I saw that. >> I'm old enough to know that in the eighties, the client server shifts. Every inflection point where development changed, the methodology, the mindset or platforms change, all the apps went to the better platform. Who wants to run their application on a slower platform? And so, and those inflects. So now that's happening now, I believe. So you got better performance and I'm imagining that the app developers are coding for it. Take us through how you see that because okay, you're offering up great performance for workloads. Now it's cloud workloads. That's almost all apps. Can you comment on that? >> Well, it has been really interesting to see. I mean, as I said, we were unsure who was going to use it when we initially launched and the adoption has been amazing. Initially, obviously it's always, a lot of the startups, a lot of the more agile companies that can move a lot faster, typically a little bit smaller. They started experimenting, but the data got out there. That 40% price performance was a reality. And not only for specific workloads, it was broadly successful across a number of workloads. And so we actually just had SAP who obviously is an enormous enterprise, supporting enterprises all over the world, announced that they are going to be moving the S/4 HANA Cloud to run on Graviton2. It's just phenomenal. And we've seen enterprises of that scale and game developers, every single vertical looking to move to Graviton2 and get that 40% price performance. >> Now we have to, as analysts, we have to say, okay, how did you get to that 40%? And you have to make some assumptions obviously. And it feels like you still have some dry powder when you looked at Graviton2. I think you were running, I don't know, it's speculated anyway. I don't know if you guys, it's your data, two and a half, 2.5 gigahertz. >> David: Yeah. >> I don't know if we can share what's going on with Graviton3, but my point is you had some dry powder and now with Graviton3, quite a range of performance, 'cause it really depends on the workload. >> David: That's right. >> Maybe you could give some insight as to that. What can you share about how you tuned Graviton3? >> When we look at benchmarking, we don't want to be trying to find that benchmark that's highly tuned and then put out something that is, Hey, this is the absolute best we can get it to and that's 40%. So that 40% is actually just on average. So we just went and ran real world workloads. And we saw some that were 55%. We saw some that were 25. It depends on what it was, but on average, it was around the 35, 45%, and we said 40%. And the great thing about that is customers come back and say, Hey, we saw 40% in this workload. It wasn't that I had to tune it. And so with Graviton3, launching this week. Available in our C7g instance, we said 25%. And that is just a very standard benchmark in what we're seeing. And as we start to see more customer workloads, I think it's going to be incredible to see what that range looks like. Graviton2 for single-threaded applications, it didn't give you that much of a performance. That's what we meant by cloud applications, generally, multi-threaded. In Graviton3, that's no longer the case. So we've had some customers report up to 80% performance improvements of Graviton2 to Graviton3 when the application was more of a single-threaded application. So we started to see. (group chattering) >> You have to keep going, the time to market is compressing. So you have that, go ahead, sorry. >> No, no, I always want to add one thing on the difference between single and multi-threaded applications. A lot of legacy, you're single threaded. So this is kind of an interesting thing. So the mainframe, migration stuff, you start to see that. Is that where that comes in the whole? >> Well, a lot of the legacy apps, but also even some of the new apps, like single threading like video transcoding, for example, is all done on a single core. It's very difficult. I mean, almost impossible to do that multi-threaded way. A lot of the crypto algorithms as well, encryption and cryptography is often single core. So with Graviton3, we've seen a significant performance boost for video encoding, cryptographic algorithms, that sort of thing, which really impacts even the most modern applications. >> So that's an interesting point because now single threaded is where the vertical use cases come in. It's not like more general purpose OS kind of things. >> Yeah, and Graviton has already been very broad. I think we're just knocking down the last few verticals where maybe it didn't support it and now it absolutely does. >> And if an ISV then ports, like an SAP's ports to Graviton, then the customer doesn't see any, I mean, they're going to see the performance difference, but they don't have to think about it. >> David: Yeah. >> They just say, I choose that instance and I'm going to get better price performance. >> Exactly, so we've seen that from our ISVs. We've also been doing that with our AWS services. So services like EMR, RDS, Elastic Cache, it will be moving and making Graviton2 available for customers, which means the customer doesn't have to do the migration at all. It's all done for them. They just pick the instance and get the price performance benefits, and so yeah. >> I think, oh, no, that was serverless. Sorry. >> Well, Lambda actually just did launch on Graviton2. And I think they were talking about a 35% price performance improvement. >> Who was that? >> Lambda, a couple of months ago. >> So what does an ISV have to do to port to Graviton. >> It's relatively straightforward, and this is actually one of the things that has slowed customers down is the, wow, that must be a big migration. And that ecosystem that I spoke about is the important part. And today, with all the Linux operating systems being available for Arm running on Graviton2, with all of the container runtimes being available, and then slowly open source applications in ISV is being available. It's actually really, really easy. And we just ran the Graviton2 four-day challenge. And we did that because we actually had an enterprise migrate one of the largest production applications in just four days. Now, I probably wouldn't recommend that to most enterprises that we see is a little too fast, but they could actually do that. >> But just from a numbers standpoint, that's insanely amazing. I mean, when you think about four days. >> Yeah. >> And when we talked on virtually last year, this year, I can't remember now. You said, we'll just try it. >> David: That's right. >> And see what happens, so I presume a lot of people have tried it. >> Well, that's my advice. It's the unknown, it's the what will it take? So take a single engineer, tell them and give them a time. Say you have one week, get this running on Graviton2, and I think the results are pretty amazing, very surprised. >> We were one of the first, if not the first to say that Arm is going to be dominant in the enterprise. We know it's dominant in the Edge. And when you look at the performance curves and the time to tape out, it's just astounding. And I don't know if people appreciate that relative to the traditional Moore's law curve. I mean, it's a style. And then when you combine the power of the CPU, the GPU, the NPU, kind of what Apple does in the iPhone, it blows away the historical performance curves. And you're on that curve. >> That's right. >> I wonder if you could sort of explain that. >> So with Graviton, we're optimizing just across every single part of AWS. So one of the nice things is we actually own that end-to-end. So when it starts with the early design of Graviton2 and Graviton3, and we obviously working on other chips right now. We're actually using the cloud to do all of the electronic design automation. So we're able to test with AWS how that Graviton3 chip is going to work long before we've even started taping it out. And so those workloads are running on high-frequency CPU's on Graviton. Actually we're using Graviton to build Graviton now in the cloud. The other thing we're doing is we're making sure that the Annapurna team that's building those CPUs is deeply engaged with my team and we're going to ultimately go and build those instances so that when that chip arrives from tapeout. I'm not waiting nine months or two years, like would normally be the case, but I actually had an instance up and running within a week or two on somebody's desk studying to do the integration. And that's something we've optimized significantly to get done. And so it allows us to get that iteration time. It also allows us to be very, very accurate with our tapeouts. We're not having to go back with Graviton. They're all A1 chips. We're not having to go back and do multiple runs of these things because we can do so much validation and performance testing in the cloud ahead of time. >> This is the epiphany of the Arm model. >> It really is. >> It's a standard. When you send it to the fab, they know what's going to work. You hit volume and it's just no fab. >> Well, this is a great thread. We'll stay on this 'cause Adam told us when we met with them for re:Invent that they're seeing a lot more visibility into use cases at the scale. So the scale gives you an advantage on what instances might work. >> And makes the economics works. >> Makes the economics work, hence the timing, the shrinking time to market, not there, but also for the apps. Talk about the scale advantage you guys have. >> Absolutely. I mean, the scale advantage of AWS plays out in a number of ways for our customers. The first thing is being able to deliver highly optimized hardware. So we don't just look at the Graviton3 CPU, you were speaking about the core count and the frequency and Peter spoke about a lot of that in his keynote yesterday. But we look at how does the Graviton3 CPU work with the rest of the instance. What is the right balance between the CPU and memory? The CPU and the Hydro. What's the performance and the drive? We just launched the Nitro SSD, which is now we've actually building our own custom SSDs for Nitro getting better performance, being able to do updates, better security, making it more cloudy. We're just saying, we've been challenged with the SSD in the parts. The other place that scales really helping is in capacity. Being able to make sure that we can absorb things like the COVID spike, or the stuff you see in the financial industry with just enormous demand for compute. We can do that because of our scale. We are able to scale. And the final area is actually in quality because I have such an enormous fleet. I'm actually able to drive down AFR. So annual failure rates, are we well below what the mathematical theoretical tenant or possibility is? So if you look at what's put on that actual sticker on the box that says you should be able to get a full percent AFR. At scale and with focus, we're actually able to get that down to significantly below what the mathematical entitlement was actually be. >> Yeah, it's incredible. I've got a great, and this is the advantage, and that's why I believe anyone who's writing applications that has includes a database, data transfer, any kind of execution of code will use the stack. >> Why would they? Really, why? We've seen this, like you said before, whether it was PC, then the fastest Pentium or somebody. >> Why would you want your app to run slower? >> Unix box, right? ISVS want it to run as fast and as cheaply as possible. Now power plays into it as well. >> Yeah, well, we do have, I agree with what you're saying. We do have a number of customers that are still looking to run on x86, but obviously customers that want windows. Windows isn't available for Arm and so that's a challenge. They'll continue to do that. And you know the way we do look at it is most law kind of died out on us in 2002, 2003. And what I'm hoping is, not necessarily bringing wars a little back, but then we say, let's not accept the 10%, 15% improvement year-over-year. There's absolutely more we can all be doing. And so I'm excited to see where the x86 world's going and they doing a lot of great stuff. Intel Ice Lakes looking amazing. Milan is really great to have an AWS as well. >> Well, I'm thinking it's fair point 'cause we certainly look what Pat's doing it at Intel and he's remaking the company. I've said he's going to follow on the Arm playbook in my mind a little bit, and which is the right thing to do. So competition is a good thing. >> David: Absolutely. >> We're excited for you and a great to see Graviton and you guys have this kind of inflection point. We've been tracking for a while, but now the world's starting to see it. So congratulations to your team. >> David: Thank you. >> Just a couple of things. You guys have some news on instances. Talk about the deprecation issue and how you guys are keeping instances alive real quick. >> Yeah, we're super customer obsessed at Amazon. And so that really drives us. And one of the worst things for us to do is to have to tell a customer that we no longer supporting a service. We recently actually just deprecated the ECG classic network. I'm not sure if you saw that and that's actually off the 10 years of continuing to support it. And the only reason we did it is we have a tiny percentage of customers still using that from back in 2012. But one of the challenges is obviously instance hardware eventually will ultimately time out and fail and have hardware issues as it gets older and older. And so we didn't want to be in a place, in EC2, where we would have to constantly go to customers and say that M1 small, that C3, whatever you were running, it's no longer supported, please move. That's just a text that customers shouldn't have to do. And if they still getting value out of an older instance, let them keep using it. So we actually just announced at re:Invent, in my keynote on Tuesday, the longevity support for EC2 instances, which means we will never come back to you again and ask you to please get off an instance, because we can actually emulate all those instances on our Nitro system. And so all of these instances are starting to migrate to Nitro. You're getting all the benefits of Nitro for now some of our older zen instances, but also you don't have to worry about that work. That's just not something you need to do to get off in all the instance. >> That's great. That's a great test service. Stay on as long as you want. When you're ready to move, move. Okay, final question for you. I know we've got time, I want to get this in. The global network, you guys are known for AWS cloud WAN serve. Gives you updates on what's going on with that. >> So Werner just announced that in his keynote and over the last two to three years or so, we've seen a lot of customers starting to use the AWS backbone, which is extensive. I mean, you've seen the slides in Werner's keynote. It really does span the world. I think it's probably one of the largest networks out there. Customers starting to use that for actually their branch office communication. So instead of going and provisioning the own international MPLS networks and that sort of thing, they say, let me onboard to AWS with VPN or direct connect, and I can actually run the AWS backbone around the world. Now doing that actually has some complexity. You got to think about transit gateways. You got to think about those inter-region peering. And AWS cloud when takes all of that complexity away, you essentially create a cloud WAN, connecting to it to VPN or direct connect, and you can even go and actually set up network segments. So essentially VLANs for different parts of the organization. So super excited to get out that out of there. >> So the ease of use is the key there. >> Massively easy to use. and we have 26 SD-WAN partners. We even partnering with folks like Verizon and Swisscom in Switzerland to telco to actually allow them to use it for their customers as well. >> We'll probably use your service someday when we have a global rollout date. >> Let's do that, CUBE Global. And then the other was the M1 EC2 instance, which got a lot of applause. >> David: Absolutely. >> M1, I think it was based on A15. >> Yeah, that's for Mac. We've got to be careful 'cause M1 is our first instance as well. >> Yeah right, it's a little confusion there. >> So it's a Mac. The EC2 Mac is with M1 silicon from Apple, which super excited to put out there. >> Awesome. >> David Brown, great to see you in person. Congratulations to you and the team and all the work you guys have done over the years. And now that people starting to realize the cloud platform, the compute just gets better and better. It's a key part of the system. >> Thanks John, it's great to be here. >> Thanks for sharing. >> The SiliconANGLE is here. We're talking about custom silicon here on AWS. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. The global leader in tech coverage. We'll be right back with more covers from re:Invent after this break. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and Alkira. I looked at many a company and Alkira seemed the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and now Alkira. I looked at many of companies and I'm curious in the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(ethereal music) >> Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of "The Cube" here in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great remote guests here having a conversation around security, security convergence with platforms around networking and security with cybersecurity at an all time high, the need for understanding how to manage the breaches how to understand them, prevent them, everything in between cybersecurity and data are the number one conversation happening in the world today. We got two great guests, we've got Nirav Shah, VP of products at Fortinet and Peter Newton's senior director of products at Fortinet. The product leaders in the hottest cybersecurity company. And guys, thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. >> So last month or so I talked to John Madison about the Fortinet new release, FortiOS 7.0, as well as highlighting the convergence that's going on between the platforms around companies trying to consolidate and or manage or grow and build, converting networking and security together. Seeing that happening in real time, still doesn't change the underpinnings of how the internet works, and how these companies are structured. But the need for security is at an all time high. Talk about the impact to the customer. Do you guys have the keys to the kingdom here, product group? What is the killer product? What are customers doing? Give us the overview of why there's such a big need for the security platforms right now. >> Yeah, absolutely John. So if you see today's environment, we have seen working from anywhere it's become normal. And as part of that, we have seen so many different network edges. At the same time, they have different devices that they're using from anywhere. So what's important is as users have different devices, different users and applications that they're consuming from Cloud, we have to make sure that we provide security across the endpoint, across all network edges, and going to the Cloud compute. And for that kind of approach, you cannot have point products provide the visibility control and management. You need to have a comprehensive cybersecurity platform, which gives you security from that endpoint, to the edge, to the user, so that you have a simple but effective management and have a solid security in place to get that working from anywhere in a much more better user experience way. And that's exactly Fortinet describes as the security fabric platform. >> It's interesting not to kind of go on a tangent here, but to illustrate the point is, if you look at all the cyber security challenges that we're facing globally, especially here in the United States, the public private partnerships are increasing. We're seeing more public sector, commercial integration, the role of data. We've covered this on SiliconANGLE and many other cube interviews, especially with you guys. And there's all this kind of new approaches. Everyone's trying everything. They're buying every product that's out there, but now there's like overload. There's too much product. And that the obvious thing that's becoming clear, as cloud-scale, the evolution of this new edge environment. And so with that becomes the importance two trends that you guys are participating in. I want to get your thoughts on this because that's called SASE and SD-WAN. We know SD-WAN, but SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge. That's I think Gartner made that term up or someone made that term up, but that's a new technology. And you've got SD-WAN, these are traditionally had been like edge for like branch offices. Now evolve now as pure network edges than a distributed computing environment. What's so important about these two topics. Nirav take us through the changes that are happening and why it's important for enterprises to get a handle on this >> Yeah John. So, as you said, SASE, Secured Access Services Edge. Really the foundation of that topic is the convergence of networking and security. And as you mentioned, Fortinet has been doing a lot of innovation in this area, right? Six years back, we pioneered the convergence of security and networking with security SD-WAN but what's happening now with the SASE is, as that working from anywhere continues to remain the dominant trend, users are looking for a Cloud-Delivered Security. And that's what Fortinet recently announced, where we can provide the most comprehensive Cloud-Delivered Security for remote users. For thin edge. You can still, anytime access from any device. To give you an example, now, our remote users, they are still at home or they can be branch of one user, but still have that always on threat protection with the consistent security given in the Cloud. So they don't have to go anymore from the branch or data center, but have a direct connectivity to the Cloud Security before they access SaaS application. That's what one of the SASE trend is. Second thing, John we are observing is users are now, as they are going back to the hybrid workforce, they are looking for a thin edge right? To your point of an edge, edge is still intelligent and a very important but there is an interesting architectural shift of, can I just use an intelligent networking there move my CapEx to OPEX and have security in Cloud? That unified security, unified policy is again becoming important. That's what SASE-- >> Okay, so I like this Cloud-Delivered Security. This is a hybrid workforce you're addressing with this marketplace, that's clear. Hybrid is a everywhere, hybrid cloud, hybrid workforce, hybrid events are coming. I mean, we love covering events physically but also now virtual. Everything's impacted by the word hybrid and Cloud. But talk about this thin edge. What do you mean by that? I mean I think thin edge, I think thin clients, the old trend. What is thin edge mean? >> Yeah, so there're different organizations are looking at the architecture in a different way. Some organizations are thinking about having a very simple branch where it is used for modern networking technologies, while security has been shifted to the Cloud deliver. What happens with this model is, now they are relying more into technologies like SD-WAN on edge to provide that intelligence steering, while everything in the security is being done in a Cloud compute way for both remote users and thin edge environment. Now the good news here is, they don't have to worry about the security patching, or any of those security capabilities. It is all done by Fortinet as they go and use the SaaS applications performance >> I want to come back and drill down on that but I want to get Peter in here in the Zero Trust equation because one of the things that comes up all the time with this edge discussion is network access. I mean, you go back to the old days of computing, you had edge log in, you'd come in, radius servers, all these things were happening, pretty simple cut paradigm. It's gotten so complicated now, Peter. So Zero Trust is a hot area. It's not only one of the things but it's a super important, what is Zero Trust these days? >> Zero Trust is indeed a very hot term because I think part of it is just it sounds great from a security standpoint, Zero Trust, you don't trust anyone, but it really comes down to a philosophical approach of how do you address the user's data applications that you want to protect? And the idea of Zero Trust and really what's driving it is the fact that as we've been talking, people are working remotely. The perimeter of the organization has dissolved. And so you no longer can afford to have a trusted internal zone and an untrusted external zone. Everything has to be "Zero Trust." So this means that you need to be authenticating and verifying users and devices on a repeat and regular basis, and you want to when you're bringing them on and giving them access to assets and applications, you want to do that with as granular of control as possible. So the users and devices have access to what they need, but no more. And that's kind of the basic tenets of Zero Trust. And that's what, it's really about prioritizing the applications and data, as opposed to just looking at, am I bringing someone into my network. >> God, the concept of Zero Trust, obviously hot. What's the difference between Zero Trust Access and Zero Trust Network Access, or as people say ZTA versus ZTNA? I mean, is there a nuance there? I mean, what's the difference between the two? >> That's actually a really good question because they both have the Zero Trust in the name. ZTNA is actually a specific term that a Gardner created or other analyst I should say, created 10 years ago. And this refers specifically to controlling application to controlling access to applications. whereas Zero Trust, overall Zero Trust access deals with both users and devices coming on to networks, how are you connecting them on? What kind of access are you giving them on the network? ZTNA is specifically how are you bringing users and connecting them to applications? Whether those applications are on premise or in the Cloud. >> So what the NA is more like the traditional old VPN model connecting users from home or whatever. Just connecting across the network with user to app. Is that right? >> That's actually a really good insight, but ironically the VPN clinical benefits of this are actually an outgrowth of the ZTNA model because ZTA doesn't differentiate between when you're on network or off network. It creates a secure tunnel automatically no matter where the user is, but VPN is all just about creating a secure tunnel when you're remote. ZTNA just does that automatically. So it's a lot easier, a lot simpler. You get a hundred percent compliance and then you also have that same secure tunnel even when you're "on a safe network" because with Zero Trust, you don't trust anything. So yes it really is leading to the evolution of VPN connectivity. >> So Nirav I want to get back to you on tie that circle back to what we were talking about around hybrid. So everyone says everything's moving to the Cloud. That's what people think. And Cloud ops is essentially what hybrid is. So connect the dots here between the zero trust, zero trust A and NA with the move to the hybrid cloud model. How does that, how does it, what's the difference between the two? Where's the connection? What's the relevance for your customers and the marketplace? >> Yeah, I think that again goes back to that SASE framework where ZTNA plays a huge role because John, we talked about when users are working from anywhere in this hybrid workforce, one of the important thing is to not give them this implicit trust right? To the applications, enabling the explicit trust is very important. And that is what ZTNA does. And the interesting thing about Fortinet is we provide all of this part of FortiOS and users can deploy anywhere. So as they are going to the Cloud-Delivered Security, they can enable ZTNA there so that we make sure this user at what time, which application they're accessing and should we give them that access or not. So great way to have ZTNA, SASE, everything in one unified policy and provide that anytime access for any device with a trusting place. >> Okay, real quick question to you is, what's the difference between SASE, Secure Access Service Edge, and SD-WAN? Real quick. >> Yeah, so SD-WAN is one of the core foundation element of SASE, right? So far we talked about the Cloud-Delivered Security, which is all important part of the security of the service. SASE is another element, which is a networking and a service where SD-WAN plays a foundation role. And John that's where I was saying earlier that the intelligent edge modern technology that SD-WAN provides is absolutely necessary for a successful SASE deployment, right? If users who are sitting anywhere, if they can't get the right application steering, before they provide the Cloud-Delivered Security, then they are not going to get the user experience. So having the right SD-WAN foundation in that edge, working in tandem with the Cloud-Delivered Security makes a win-win situation for both networking and security teams. >> So Peter, I want to talk to you. Last night I was on a chat on the Clubhouse app with some cybersecurity folks and they don't talk in terms of "I got ZTNA and I got some SASE and SD-WEN, they're talking mostly about just holistically their environment. So could you just clarify the difference 'cause this can be confusing between Zero Trust Network Access ZTNA versus SASE because it's kind of the same thing, but I know it's nuance, but, is there a difference there? People get confused by this when I hear people talking 'cause like they just throw jargon around and they say, "Oh, with Zero Trust we're good. What does that even mean? >> Yeah, we get a lot of that when talking with customers because the two technologies are so complimentary and similar, they're both dealing with security for remote workers. However sassy is really dealing with that kind of firewall in the Cloud type service, where the remote user gets the experience and protection of being behind a firewall, ZTNA is about controlling the application and giving them that secure tunnel to the application. So they're different things one's kind of that firewall and service, security and service, even networking in a service. But ZTNA is really about, how do I have the policies no matter where our user is, to give them access to specific applications and then give them a secure tunnel to that application? So very complimentary, but again, they are separate things. >> What's the landscape out there with competitive because has there products, I mean you guys are product folks. You'll get the product question. Is it all kind of in one thing, is this bundled in? Do you guys have a unique solution? Some people have it, they don't. What's the marketplace look like from a product standpoint? >> Yeah. So John, that starts back to the platform that we talked about, right? Fortinet always believes in not to develop a point product, but doing organic development which is part of a broader platform. So when we look at the thing like SASE, which required a really enterprise grade networking and security stack, Fortinet has organically developed them SD-WAN, we are a leading vendor, for the Gartner magic quadrant leader there, network firewall, including whether they deployed on Cloud, on-prem or a segmentation. We are a leader there. So when you combine both of them and ZTNA is part of it, there is only handful of vendor you will see in the industry who can provide the consistent security, networking, and security together and have that better user experience for the single management. So clearly there's a lot of buzz John, about a lot of vendors talk about it. But when you go to the details and see this kind of unified policy of networking and security, Fortinet is emerging as a leader. >> Well I always like talking the experts like you guys on this topic. And we get into the conversations around the importance under the hood. SASE, SD-WEN, we've been covering that for a long time. And now with Zero Trust becoming such a prominent architectural feature in Cloud and hybrid, super important under the hood. At the end of the day though, I got to ask the customers question, which is, "what's in it for me? "I care about breaches. "I don't want to be breached. "The government's not helping me over the top. "I got to defend myself. "I have to put resources in place, it's expensive, "and nevermind if I get breached." The criticality of that alone, is a risk management discussion. These are huge table. These are huge stakes and the stakes are high. So what I care about is are you going to stop the breaches? I need the best security in town. What do you say to that? >> Yeah this goes back to the beginning. We talked about consistent certified security, right John. So yes a SASE model is interesting. Customers are going to move to Cloud, but it's going to be a journey. Customers are not going Cloud first day one. They are going to take a hybrid approach where security is required in a segment, in an edge and on the Cloud. And that's where having a solid security in place is a number one requirement. And when you look at the history of Fortinet, over the last 20 years, how we have done, with our FortiGuard Labs, our threat intelligence and ability for us to protect over 450,000 customers, that's a big achievement. And for us to continue to provide that security but more importantly, continue to go out, and do a third-party certification with many organization to make sure no matter where customers are deploying security, it is that same enterprise grade security deployment. And that's very important that we talk to our users to make sure they validate that. >> Peter would weigh in on this. Customers don't want any breaches. How do you help them with the best security? What's your take on that? >> Well, to kind of reiterate what Nirav said earlier, we really believe that security is a team sport. And you do need best in class products at each individual element, but more importantly you need those products we talking together. So the fact that we have industry leading firewalls, the fact that we have industry-leading SD-WAN, we've got industry leading products to cover the entire gamut of the end point all the way email application, Cloud, all these products while it's important that they're, third-party validated as Nirav was mentioning, it's more important that they actually talk together. They're integrated and provide automated actions. Today's cyber security moves so fast. You need that team approach to be able to protect and stop those breaches. >> Well, you guys have a great enterprise grade solution. I got to say, I've been covering you guys for many years now and you guys have been upfront, out front on the data aspect of it with FortiGuards. And I think people are starting to realize now that data is the key, value proposition is not a secret anymore. Used to be kind of known for the people inside the ropes. So congratulations. I do know that there's a lot action happening. I want to give you guys a chance to at the end of this conversation now to just put a plug in Fortinet because there's more people coming into the workforce now. Post pandemic, young people with computer science degrees and other degrees that want to go into career with cybersecurity, could you guys share both your perspective on for the young people watching or people re-skilling, what opportunities there are from a coding standpoint, and or from say an analyst perspective. What are some of the hot openings? 'cause there are thousands and thousands of jobs give a quick plug for Fortinet and what openings you guys might have. >> Well, certainly in the cyber industry, one of the major trends we have is a work place shortage. There are not enough trained professionals who know about cybersecurity. So for those who are interested in retooling or starting their career, cybersecurity is an ongoing field. It's going to be around for a long time. I highly encourage those interested, come take a look at Fortinet. We offer free training. So you can start from knowing nothing to becoming certified up to a security architect level, and all those, all that training is now available for free. So it's a great time to star, great time to come into the industry. The industry needs you >> Any particularly areas, Peter you see that's like really jumping off the page. >> Well, it's hybrid, knowing Cloud, knowing on-prem, knowing the traffic, knowing the data on the applications, there's just so much to do. >> You're the head of product, you've got all, probably a ton of openings but seriously young people trying to figure out where to jump in, what are the hot areas? Where can people dig in and get retrained and or find their career? >> Yeah, no, I think to reiterate what Peter said, right? The program that Fortinet has built, LSE one, two, three which is free available, is a great foundation. Because that actually goes into the detail of many topics we touched upon. Even though we are talking about SD-WAN, SASE, ZTNA, fundamentally these are the networking and security technologies to make sure users are able to do the right work in the user experience. And that will be really helpful to the young people who are looking to learn more and go into this area. So highly encouraged to take those training, reach out to us. We are there to provide any mentorship, anything that is required to help them in that journey. >> Anything jump off the page in terms of areas that you think are super hot, that are in need. >> Certainly there's convergence of networking and security. There is a growing need of how and what is Zero Trust is? and how the security is applied everywhere. Definitely that's a topic of mine for a lot of our customers, and that's an area, it's a good thing to gain more knowledge and utilize it. >> Nirav and Peter, thank you for coming on. You guys are both experts and the leaders at Fortinet, the product team. The need for security platform is an all time high consolidating tools into a platform. More tools are needed and there's new tools coming. So I'm expecting to have more great conversations as the world evolves. Certainly the edge is super important. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, Cube Conversation on security here in the Palo Alto studios. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (ethereal music)

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. >>Everyone. Welcome to the cube conversation here from our Palo Alto studios. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We're here with our remote crew, getting all the interviews, getting all the stories that matter during this time were all sheltering in place during the COVID crisis. We've got a great returning guest, John Madison, EVP of products and chief marketing officer. Fordanet John. Great to see you, uh, looking good with the home studio. They're getting used to it. Yeah, indeed. Good to be here again, John. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. We're hearing a lot about sassy, which has a secure access network adjuncts, zero trust network access. Uh, what does that all mean now these days? What does this sassy? Well, there's definitely a lot of hype around the word sassy, which is the security of the age. Uh, for us actually it confirms a strategy that we've had since the beginning of the company. >>And two important concepts. One is, uh, the coming together of, uh, networking and security. We could refer to it as security driven networking, and we've been doing it using ACX and appliances for a long time. Uh, we're now going to expand it to a cloud as well as that's one concept, again, bringing together networking and security or converging them in a way. And then the second concept is more around a platform approach. So if you look at the definition of sassy, it includes, it includes web gateway as a service you a trust Caz B, a wife, et cetera. And so bringing those together in a platform approach, we refer to it as the fabric. So we're actually really happy about those two concepts coming together. Maybe the name itself could be, could be different, but definitely the concepts and the technologies play really well to our strategy. >>Yeah, it's sassy. S a S E not two ways, not like SAS softwares of service. Wait for one noses cloud. Yeah. I tried using the full name and I've reverted back to sassy again. So short and sassy, keep it short and sweet. Um, okay, well this is a super important relevant topic for multiple reasons. One is COVID is kind of accelerated the future for everybody. And you know, we've been kind of riffing on Twitter and throughout the industry I've been calling it the big IOT, uh, experiment because the unforecasted disruption of COVID is forced everyone to work at home. So the notion of work changes workplace is now home workforce, the people, how their interaction with the networks, workloads, workflows, all changing new expectations, new experiences. This is the real deal. And the edge is where the action is. That's the big, new obvious architectural highlight here. >>Yeah, so we talked last time. I think it would just be getting this work from home, uh, element, but, um, we're still here. And I think what it says is that what is forced is that, uh, enterprises and customers need to look at their edges and they're increasing. So we always, the one edge was a new one over the last two years. As we introduced us the, when they had a data center edge, they had an endpoint edge and now you have a home edge. And so you've got to apply security as a cloud edge as well. You've got to apply security to these edges. And the key is the flexibility to apply the security you want and you need against this agent. And so we're seeing some customers right now, look at setting up mini enterprise networks to protect that home age again, in that, in the homes of their executives or developers. >>And we reported with the news. You guys had a couple of months ago around just as such been a feeding frenzy for hackers and bad actors to go after the home environment. Um, as well as the it guys who are working from home, you have the cloud consumption's shifted as well. You're seeing the cloud players doing extremely well because now you have more cloud, you have more vulnerabilities at the edge with the home. This is changing completely increasing the attacks. >>Yeah. The tack factors, you know, predominantly, still actually, you know, a lot of fishing, but then if you're on the network, that attack factor is very important. So for us, and, you know, we did an acquisition last week of opaque networks because that gave us an additional consumption model and different additional form factor. So if somebody going from the home straight into the cloud, or the pairing off a branching off an SD Wang connection straight into the cloud, we can now apply that cloud edge security throughout our sassy capabilities. And so again, the ability to have security at all, these edges has become very important going forward. So for us now we've got appliances, we've got virtual machines, we've got cloud delivery, and this is becoming very important to customers. I'm not saying, and customers are not saying they're going to go to just cloud only going forward. They're going to be hybrid. And so having those options is very important. >>You mentioned opaque networks, we reported that acquisition. Congratulations. What does that mean for Fordanet and where does that technology fit? And you mentioned software. Can you just take a minute to explain the acquisition impact Affordanet and where does the tech fit? >>Well, as I said, we've been driving a lot of this conversion, sassy conversions through our appliances. Um, but it's sometimes makes sense to put that security closer to the cloud during points or wherever. And so opaque, we really liked their model of building out these hyper hearing stations and making sure they got high-speed security there as well as edges. And so, um, we bring, we're going to bring that inside our environment, uh, update it to include some of our technology, uh, but it gives us now great flexibility, uh, of applying that security at the SD wan edge, the data center agent now without edge or longer-term roadmaps will integrate orchestration capabilities. It also includes a zero trust network access capability as well. So really when we looked at our, uh, of sassy framework, uh, we had most of the things in place. This now adds firewall as a service as well as zero trust network access, giving us the most complete sassy framework in the marketplace. >>What is the security component of the work at home? You mentioned earlier, there's more networks and companies are looking to kind of up level the capabilities. Can you give an example and take us through what that like and what companies are thinking about, because it's not just, here's some extra money for your home bandwidth, your people are working there. It's like, it's gotta be industrial strength edge. Now it's not just, um, you know, temporary and their kids are home too. So you got they're gaming, they're watching Netflix, people zooming in and doing WebExes all day long. >>Yeah, it can be as simple as putting a zero trust network access, you know, an agent on there and doing some security locally, and then going back through a proxy in a, we believe actually that it's, it can be even better than that. That can apply many enterprise security in your house through a next gen firewall, give high availability through SD wan, uh, then, you know, expand out their secure access and switching and end points. And we can do that today. I think what's going to be key going forward is as you're dealing as it, uh, teams have to deal with more of a consumer approach remotely in the homes, we're gonna have to simplify the way things get set up, such that you can easily separate out, maybe home usage from corporate enterprise users. So that will be something we'll be working on over the next 18 months. >>I mean, just the provisioning, the hardware, okay, here you go. Plug it in it. Should it be plug and play? And this is kind of back to the future of where SAS is going. I mean, the old days was plug and play was the technology. Now you've hit that concept. It has to be auto configured. You have to provision pretty quickly. What's the future of sassy in your mind. >>Yeah. And so, you know, if you think about, you know, coming back to the home usage, then people have dumbed down those routers and the security is very simplistic. So we, people can just plug and play. If you, it needs to be a bit more sophisticated. Uh, you're going to need to put some tools in place. We believe longterm that the sassy model, once you've got the platforms in place, once you've got SD wan in place, your Cosby or your sassy zero trust and longterm, you're going to need an orchestration system. That's more AI driven. So we've done a lot of work on AI around security and making sure we can see things very quickly. Um, but the longterm goal, I think will be around AI ops, AI network ops, uh, where the system and the big data systems are looking across your network, across these different components to see where there may be an issue. Maybe there's a certain length has gone down across a certain ISP. We need to bring that back up. Maybe there's a certain cure or as to an application in the cloud somewhere. So we need to change the OnRamp. Uh, so once everything's in place and you have that console and policy engine that can look across everything, and then we need to get smarter by looking at the data and the logs, et cetera, and applying some of that AI technology. >>You know, John, we've been following Fordanet as you know, for many, many years and watching the evolution of you guys as a company. And also as the industry, the new waves are coming in. Um, a lot of the stuff you're doing with the fabric and now the secure driven networking has been kind of on the playbook. So I want to get your thoughts before we get into those topics and define them and kind of unpack them. But generally customers are looking at, um, a slew of vendors out there and you have 10 of two approaches. You have a platform, and then you have the we're an application or fully full stack or SAS or something. And this there's trade offs between the two. And how should customers understand the difference? Because there's different value propositions for each platforms, more enabling out of the box, SAS or point solution can solve a particular thing, but it may not have that breadth. How should customers think about a platform approach or fabric and how should they think about the value and how to engage with that longterm? >>Yeah, I'm definitely seeing more customers look towards a platform going forward. They just can't manage all the different point solutions and you don't have to train an individual in that product. You have to have a separate management console, you have to integrate it. And so more and more I'm finding customers wanting to converge, which is the basis of sassy consolidate applications onto a platform of security applications. What's important over that platform is that the consumption model is flexible enough to be an appliance, to be a virtual machine and to be cloud delivery does as a customer's networks move and their orchestration systems move into different, more cloud, or they've got their IP enabling their factories, for example, then they need that security to be flexible. So yes, you need to be a platform as the way forward. Um, but two things. One is you need a flexible consumption model for it. You know, clients, virtual machine and cloud. And also that platform needs to be very open. It needs to have connectors into the main orchestration systems that needs to allow people to build API and automation. So, uh, yes, you, you need a platform, but it needs to be open and it needs to be flexible. >>Great, great insight there. And that's exactly what the marketing, especially with cloud the kind of scale, second follow up question to that is how do you tell the difference between a tool camouflage is a platform. So I have a tool I want to sell you a tool, but no, it's a platform. So a lot of people are peddling tools and saying their platforms. How do you know the difference? >>Well, to me, a platform that has much greater scope across the attack surface festival, they attack factors whether that be email or application the network, the end point. So platforms not just of a specific attack back to go across the complete surface. And then also a platform is Wednesday organically built, allows those products to communicate. So then you can build automation across it. It's very hard to build automation across two or three different vendors. They have different scripts. So been able to build that automation. And then of course, on top of that, to have a single view, single visibility capability, as well as longterm applied that AI ops across it. So platform is very, very different from the, some of the tools I've seen in the marketplace. >>I want to get to your reaction to a comment that your CEO said about security driven, networking, and underscores what we've been saying for years, blah, blah, blah. He goes on in this era of hyperconnectivity and expanding networks with the network edge stretching across the entire digital infrastructure, um, networking and security have to be kind of be their, their convergence. You mentioned describe how you view hyper-connectivity and expanding networks and how the edge stretches across the digital infrastructure. What's what does that look like? Can you share your vision of that? >>Well, when you think about networking, if you go back 20 years, when you have these 10 megabit per second connections, learning, networking, and routing and switching, they haven't really changed that much over the last eight years, 20 years, they've just got a lot faster, gone to now to 400. You give us a second, but the basic functionality is the same. And so it's allowed them to go a lot faster. Um, security is very different, even though it started off with firewalling than VPN, and then next gen firewall, SSL inspection, all these functionalities IPS have been added, making a lot harder for it to keep up in the network. And so one of the fundamental principles of security and networking is bringing these two things together, but accelerating them either using a six and now cloud through our acquisition, uh, to allow those to run in a converged format. >>And that's very important because as I said, there's now more, you can look at it two ways. You can say the perimeter has expanded because it used to be a very narrow perimeter. The data center across these areas, or at the edges have formed as well. There's new edges sitting at the OT environment, sitting at the wan edge, sitting at the home mattress. I talked about seeing the cloud edge. And so the ability to apply that security in very high performance, very high quality security, not just a small sampling of security, a full enterprise stack, but those edges is going to be critical going forward. And the flexibility to apply in different ways is going to be very important. >>I think the convergence piece is totally relevant and honestly it consolidating into a platform is very key point there. Um, while I got you here, I would just like you I'd like you to define what is security driven networking and what does it mean to be security driven? So define security, driven, networking, and give an example of what it means. >>Yeah. And so I think it's, I think the one edge was one of the best examples of it. I mean, actually go before that next gen Fila was where you bought firewalling and then content inspection to go there. But I think the latest one is definitely the one edge or secure SD land where you had a networking function, which was to get the users to the right applications. And so they got this application now steering that goes out through there. Well, you also want to apply security to that because security into the wham, you've also got to protect the land. And so the ability to run a security stack there, whether it be IDs, right, patient control is very important. So getting all those networking functions, working at high speed, getting all the security functions, working at high speed, uh, is that it's the kind of the Genesis of security driven networking, and you can apply it there. We can also apply it in other places at the age, in the cloud. Now the home, uh, it's a very, very important concept, uh, to be able to run networking and security together. But high speed, >>Everyone has their own kind of weird definition of sassy, depending on when you're building your own or different analyst firms. Uh, I noticed you guys have a different take on this. Even Gartner has a different view on this. How do you guys diff differ from that, that definition and what should people be aware of when they hear that? What is the right definition? >>Yeah. You know, it's unfortunate. I mean, I think Ghana does some good work there and that they define it and I've come up with sassy, but this is like acronym soup. And, you know, I want a bit of next gen firewall on my sassy. It's just, it's just so many different terms. It confuses the customer. Then what makes it more confusing is that vendors look at their portfolio and go, Oh, sassy is a hot topic. I've got a sassy as well. And really, it should be very clear what the definition from Gardner is. It is bringing together security and networking. Now their definition is that they, uh, you should do that in the cloud, which we agree with as well, but it can only be in the cloud. The reason it's in the cloud is because not many people have got the ability to run on an appliance very fast. >>So we believe our different stairs that you should be able to run it on an appliance virtual machine in cloud. And then the second kind of differences that they've defined the components of Sassies being Estee, wagon, Cosby, firewalls, a service zero trust. We also think that the land age is very important. So we would add into that definition, that secure access of wifi and Ethan at switching as well. And so we try and point out, you know, the gun definition and we also point out where we differ and I think that's fair to the customer can make a good decision. >>I think it is fair. And I think one of the things I've been saying for years, and I love garden, I love the guys over there and gals. I just don't think that their business model is real time as much, but they ended up kind of getting it right down the road. But you brought up a good point. And again, I've been saying this for years, cloud changes Gartner's model because there's, if you have quadrants, it implies silos and implies categories. And one of the best things about cloud is it does horizontally scale. So some of the best vendors actually have multiple capabilities that might fall on different quadrants that may or may not be judged on a criteria that meets what cloud's doing. So, yeah, for instance, Asics, you mentioned right. That's in there too. You get cloud and ACX is that where they've got two different categories? You add the edge in there. If you do all three, really great as an integrated, converged and consolidated platform, you're technically awesome, but you might not fit in the quadrant. >>Yes. That's a really good point. I have this conversation with them all the time in that traditionally enterprises have a networking teams and security teams, and they've been in silos or I've had a networking team that just does switching or just this routing, just this SD wan. And I have a security team that does web gateway, and then they like to separate them all into different components. When you look inside those Nike quadrants, they're all different, even at the same vendor, the different products. And what we like to do is bring it all together. You a single operating system, a single appliance or cloud virtual machine. Sometimes it's not quite, it doesn't quite fit the model, but in the end, you're trying to do the same thing. Know, and COVID-19 >>One of the real realities that everyone's dealing with is it does expose everything and an expose. And again, it's been a disruption unforecasted, but it's not like an outage or a flood or a hurricane. If it happened and it's happening, it really puts the pressure on looking at the network. It's looking at how you can have continuous operations. How are you working with your people and workloads, workforces apps. You got to have it all there. And if you're not digitally enabled, you're going to be on the wrong side of history. This is what companies are facing every day. And they've got to come back and double down on the right project. So every CXO I talk about, that's the number one challenge I need to come out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and an architecture. That's going to allow me to take advantage of the new realities. Hey, it's really good for people to work at home. That's cool. Some people are going to continue to do that. Maybe that's normal. Maybe that's a new tactic >>And it's going to vary by industry as well. So if I'm a retail outlet, I absolutely need it 100% of the time, but those retail outlets cause people are ordering online and then they're driving up. And so it has changed the dynamics. It's for me working at home, I have to be on all the time. And so the ability to do really good, high quality networking, high availability, high IQ of as, with this integrated security across the different edges is super critical. >>I was talking with a network friend of mine. Again, we were having a few zoom cocktails and do a little social networking online. And we were like, and we've, and we've mentioned it before in the queue, but we keep coming back to the land is the new land. And meaning that it's in the old days, land was everything, everything, the local area network, and you were inside the data center, everything was great on premises. When is the new land? So if you think about it that way you go, okay, when edge I got a, now Atlanta at home, you got to SD wan and your house, of course you worked for Fournette. So it's a little bit beneficial for you, your, your, your, your geek there, but this is the new normal where it's all one network. It's not just a land link, it's a system. Can you react to that? What's your take on that? When is the new land kind of ref, >>First of all, it can't be too picky. He goes on the CMO as well. So there's no talk about the geekiness. Um, but, um, it's just, it just makes as a skip saying, it's, it's, it's making sure that wherever you may be, uh, you know, you're doing less traveling these days, but that may come back at some point or where they are at a branch office or a campus environment or wherever applications, and then moving around in different clouds, in different areas, in terms of consumption of workloads, um, wherever that's happening, you gotta be able to be flexible and applying that security to the different edges, land edge, one edge home edge data center edge. And so the ability to do that, uh, while providing high speed and connectivity, uh, is very important. And then again, as you go forward and you implement that platform approach. So not just the point product now, three or four products working together, uh, being able to apply that policy orchestration and AI ops is going to make sure that they get that user in the end. It's all about the user experience. Do I have a high quality of experience, whatever application I'm using? That's the key measurement in the end? >>You know, one observation I would have, if you look back at the whole virtualization trend, going back to the early days of VMware, that kind of enabled Amazon and kind of having a large scale kind of infrastructure, hyperconvergence really kind of collapsed everything together. And now you seeing things with Amazon, like outposts, you seeing, you know, these non premises devices, which is basically one cloud operations kind of highlights what you're saying here. And I want to get your thoughts on this because the combination of Asics with cloud, it's not a bug, it's a feature for you guys. That's a value proposition and it's kind of consistent with some of the big players like AWS. When you look at what they're doing and apprenticeships, for instance, what they're putting in the servers, having that combination of horsepower Asex with cloud is a guiding principle of the future architecture. Can you share your thoughts was also, you guys are, are announcing that and have that feature. >>Yeah, well, w another reason why I like the opaque acquisition as they were their major appearing pubs into the different cloud service providers that were using hardware and that hardware, uh, we, we can run hardware and with our Asics almost 50, a hundred times faster than equipment CPU. So I've got a firewall application I've gone on appliance. There, I may need a hundred virtual machines and, and CPU they're running the same thing. So again, we're coming back to our definition of security driven, networking in our minds. It can be basic, it can be virtual machine and it can be cloud. Now, imagine if we can take the best benefits of basic and combine that with cloud, uh, that's a great model going forward again, given that flexibility. So when people think cloud something has to run on something, it doesn't run in fresh air. So, you know, the big cloud vendors are putting in some Asex to accelerate some of the AI stuff, and we're going to use the same thing in some of our major, what we call 40 sassy. You know, our naming methodology is 40, whatever it does or going forward to provide us that performance and high availability now. Yeah. So you're always going to need some flexibility of virtual machines in certain areas, but we think the combination of both, it gives us a great advantage. Yeah. >>And there's definitely evidence that, I mean, there's a, there's kind of two schools of thought on hardware. Are you a box mover, you know, commodity general purpose, or are you using the hardware and a system architecture, acceleration has been a huge advantage, whether I've seen companies doing accelerated Kubernetes processing, you know, for clusters and some, you know, see GPS are out there. It's, it's, it's how you use the hardware. Yeah. That's the, really the key it's and again, back to the architecture. So, okay. So wrapping up, if you, if you believe that, and you look at the fabric that you guys are having out there, and as it evolves, what's the, what's the next level for 400. How do you see this going forward? You've got security driven networking, and you got the fabric. What's next? What are you guys working on the product side? >>I know you're public, you can't reveal any future earnings, but give us a taste of kind of the direction on the roadmap. I think, you know, we've got now all the, all the kind of component that underlying components of the platform in terms of the ability to apply appliances, deliver it by appliances or virtual machine or cloud. Um, we've got a very broad portfolio from endpoint, uh, all the way into, to the cloud and the networks, all those things that are in place. Obviously you always need some features here and there as you go forward and nest it when and next gen firewall, et cetera. Um, but I think the longterm, I think a goal for his nine is to, again, to apply a bit more intelligence, uh, both from a security perspective and from a network perspective, such that we can predict things, we can automatically change things. >>We can build automation and react to things much more quickly. So I think the building blocks are in place. Now. I think it's the ability to provide a bit more smarts across it, uh, which of course takes big data and very specific application programming. And I think, uh, definitely our customers are asking us about that. And we look very closely with our customers to build out that, to make sure it meets their needs going forward while it's great to see the platform continue to grow and, and fill in a holistic view of the, of the landscape from edge to throughout the enterprise. So a great strategy and thanks for the update, John Madison, the VP of product and CMR for that. John. Great to have you on. Thanks for coming on extra. Okay. This is the cube conversation here in Palo Alto studios. I'm Chad for a year hosting the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to the Cube's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube Dave Volante Ecosystem Minimum here all week in Barcelona, kicking off 2020 With the keynote analysis, Cisco just unveiled their looks like their plan for the year and what looks like a future direction of Cisco again. We were here past two years covering Cisco Live. We'll be at the US show this year as well. David Stew Keynote analysis. Let's get into it right away. Mostly you start to still see the messaging Positioning unfolding in front of us is clearly not there yet. A lot of people have their check boxes that rotation David get kicked it off. I mean, when we kicked it off David gentler key executive, really leading the charge here. But this is about Cisco setting the table. Let's get into it. What do you guys think? I thought it was a good keynote. I thought was a little bit lacking in the story, telling what was the thread was no common thread. Heard a lot of little cloud. I heard a lot of sis card, a lot of speeds and feeds. Everyone kind of has their turn, and all the top people were on there. What's your thoughts? >>Well, who is? Cisco was my first thought. Is your kid coming out of college? You hear that keynote, which I agree was good keynote. But I still wouldn't be sure exactly what Cisco does on. And so I think that you're right, that messaging needs to be tightened up. There needs to be a threat. At the same time, we saw some innovation. They sort of double down on the December announcements and talked about that. I really liked the collaboration that that's been a sleepy market zoom change that woke everybody up. And so we saw some interesting features. Their stuff on app d. They made a lot of claims, which I don't know if they're true or not. It seemed like VM Ware could do some of that stuff and new relic and some of the others dynatrace. But Cisco is coming at it from a networking area of strength, and, um so I guess my bottom line is, I still wanna understand what that threat is, and they talked about multi cloud. I really do think that Cisco is in the best position to connect those clouds to on Prem and Hybrid. They've got the data from the network, and they're in the best position to leverage that for value for their customers. Kind of came through, but I think it's my inference, not their claim. I was >>a little surprised. A This third year we've done this show, and usually there's, you know, the new tag line, and they were reusing the bridge to possible and feels still where things are coming together. Francisco, as you and John were saying, some of the products moving together. So it's awesome chatter on Twitter said, Oh, great Inter site and Empty, actually going to integrate and work well together on that integration messages, one that Cisco's highlighting Cisco's always had a really broad ecosystem. They put up the video about like, you know, if you know the Internet and everything you've done, we've been there, and we're going to drive that for the next generation in the collaboration space. It's not the same WebEx that you've known forever heck, you know, we're gonna have Microsoft with teams and WebEx trying to squint through that a little bit and say, Okay, well, Cisco's got a bunch of devices. Is that all it is? Is, you know, being saying great. You know, I've got Cisco Devices and therefore, if I'm you know, teams customer for Microsoft, I can plug into that. It seems like there's a lot of inter networking pieces underneath the covers there because Microsoft driving hard in that space. Zoom as you said Dave, for the quick, easy experience that that came out of Cisco. So a lot of things moving in the collaboration space. But in the hardcore data, says center space workload Optimizer is something that they were focused on. Talk about the new router Jonathan Davidson, who we'll have on the Cube tomorrow, talking about that space. So Cisco's got a very broad portfolio, and John, I think you nailed it. I did not come out of it. A consistent You know who Cisco is. The message for how we're going to partner with in the future. >>The day bring up a good point college kid looks at This is a good way to kind of zoom out of the technical world. Remember, David Gettler is a technical person. He ran engineering. He sees his big marketing word is multi domain. Come on, Multi domain is not a marketing word. It's just it's a technical feature, but >>this is a >>technical show and a lot of their audience here at the show. We are techies, and so it's clear to me that Cisco's brick by brick building the sass ification, the cloud ification of Cisco and this is something. I think they're not yet ready to pull the switch on Dave as to use a sailing analogy as they attack into the marketplace. They got to do a full turn on the boat. I think this is just the progression. I think it's natural to see Cisco spending millions of billions of dollars as we heard cloud defying and creating this subscription business model. The other notable things is you start to see some tell signs from the keynote, a few little things and I picked up out of this that shows that they're kind of going in the right direction. Still a lot more work to do, and the story needs to be up leveled a bit. I totally agree, rather than just speeds and feeds the classic enterprise. But Wendy hit it clearly. Business model is the new killer app, and I think all the things that we've discussed over the past 10 years to past five, in particular with Cloud Native is the business outcomes is what the APS are focused on. And so they're headlining the event with APP application dynamics, which makes sense. But it's not clear enough that the business model is the key to everything, and you're gonna connect businesses what Cisco does. I mean, what a Cisco Date. They connect business that's been their their mission. From day one, they >>got to take that message, bring it >>up with the applications, are driving business model changes and results. And I think that's the thread they're trying to get through and trying to thread the needle. They're they're just not ready. >>See, from an umbrella messaging standpoint, I think that would have been a lot more effective. But some of the things that I liked in the keynote, you know, Wendy Mars did talk about the importance of privacy, how Europe is leading in diversity. So so that is really important. And they also talked about how last decade was all about enabling APS. And this decade is going to be all about enabling APs and to your point, about enabling business. John. They talked a lot about bringing I t an OT together lists, and Tony really made a big point of that. When we walked into The DEV. Net zone, there was all these network engineers looking at an I O T presentation, these air I t guys trying to learn about the edge in OT. And so I think that's a really important message to the collaboration front. You know, some neat, neat features I just wanted to mention. But my understanding is that Microsoft Teams is all about taking its the old Skype business, which has, like, fallen off a cliff because everybody hates Skype and migrating at the team so they can compete more effectively with WebEx and the rest of them. So again, a lot of different parts of Cisco, but I think there was some definite innovation there, and then when I talked about they're December announcements the optics, the silicon one and the software bringing that together, you know, that is going to power service providers for the next 5 10 years, >>we'll do. I want to get your thoughts here because one of the things that we're observing and they've got hit with teams is that they're kind of groping a little bit on areas. Everyone's gonna get their time on stage. I get that. You know, the comment I made yesterday in our pre game day zero analysis was that there needs to be a Tesla of this industry and to completely change the game. So I think Cisco, if they take the business, we're connecting businesses and looking for a business model. Change is we're gonna look for the engine of the of the car of the application of the company and then what it ISS. So Cisco as a company, is the car, the engines were there, the weaknesses. So if you look at Cisco, all they do is talk about the engine and the features of the Pistons and all the technical speeds and feeds. That's great, but at the end of the day it's a new environment on the business front and I think they got to get that kind of conversion and bring that together Because, of course, they have to check the boxes on. Look, we've got a new engine. We've got new clouds modification. This is where it's at, but it's the destination that you're driving to, which is a business model Outcomes. So, you know, under the hood, are they there? So it seems to be they're still trying to get the engine fixed, and then they could roll out >>one of the things when we always look at all of these keynotes is Are they effectively letting customers tell their story? And does that resonate with what they're talking about? For the piece I saw, I only saw two customers. There was a video with Michael Bay, Great special effects. And actually, you know, I thought it kind of resonated because it's like, Okay, you know, I've got 10 locations shooting around the world and you know, there's terror, bits of information. He's like, I don't even know what a terabyte. It sounds like a dinosaur. And of course, all the networking like Ha ha. You know, you do cool exploding stuff, but you don't know what a terabyte is. And then they had Airbus and Dave, you talked about. Listen, Tony got up on stage and look at it and ot they don't play well together and that's we've done research, looking at the challenge of really delivering on I ot it is that schism between I T and OT and I would have loved to hear a little bit more because she said, Oh well, our tools just enable ot to work on anything. It's not that easy. Just >>well, I throw >>those two worlds >>together, key their security, and we're talking about securing critical infrastructure and really, that's a whole new opportunity in realm. I mean, it kind of came through, but But that's the linchpin is really securing that critical infrastructure, whether it's power plants, it roads, all kinds of logistics and a >>lot of one on Dave. I mean, this is the whole point about Cisco's challenges. One from a story standpoint is complex from a technology integration standpoint complex because you got application awareness, which is going down to the network. And then they showed a lot of that, and I thought that was a key highlight that didn't actually come through, but they did present it. They got the clarification story And then they got network automation all those things, as well as five g around the corner. Silicon One is a lot coming >>together. Nailed that, I mean, no doubt, >>a lot coming together. And I think the key is Is that Scott? Harold nailed it. I think we get clearer and the team are right on the money. On terms of the engine is intent based networking. Multi domain. Is that to me means multi cloud and hybrid. Nail that, and you can get those kinds of innovations. And I think Scott Harrell said it. Simplification is key security and inclusive of the cloud that one word to use, he said. We're talking about something that's inclusive of cloud. He really slam Cloud, he said. You know, it's a fancy place. It's Nirvana. But don't forget the intent of having the on premise basically. So I thought that was a nice thread, the three layers of insight security business in I T. But to me it's simple. I think Cisco needs to think differently around how they position themselves, because if they're going to throw WebEx out there and throw out all these analytics and data, they're a data company. They're a data first company, and they have to be a video first company of its five G. And they got to be a virtual first company because the new future workplace is about having those kinds of workloads running those kinds of app set, you know, feed the modern enterprise. And to me, my premise is, if you can automate it, it's not a feature for the modern modern enterprise has. Automation will be critical of everything, and you can't have bloated software running virtual first environment. >>But to your point, Cisco's advantage is that the data is running through the network, so they have visibility on that data. So they are in a very good position to leverage that data for automation and to connect businesses. Networks of data video is killer feature for that. I mean, they really are the only company right now in the business that can do that. >>Yeah, actually, I like the analogy. They said you should think of the network as a sensor. This is what's going to be able to drive your insight and outcomes. It's not just the plumbing anymore, but you know, that's one of the earliest areas where we drove analytics and data out of everything that's going on and set them up for that machine learning and AI world that people are driving toe extract data >>and to your point on cloud. I mean, look it. They know that you sort of reference that the cloud is slowly eating away at their opportunity because I T practitioners will tell you what the more we do in the cloud, the less we're gonna have to spend on our own network year. >>Yeah, but here's the thing that's coming out. And during the SD win section, I was making some comments >>on >>YouTube channel. SD Win is really, to me, a bellwether of how this goes because latency matters. If you're in the Cisco ecosystem, it's late in the late latency. And if the win is the new land, which is my premise than the interactions with security between the routes becomes critical, right? So you have to have that kind of insight. So we look at something like Web experiences on the collaboration side is that product truly defined for that environment? And I think you mentioned Zoom earlier as kind of waking everyone up is they've built a product around latency and around the environment around land, not the land. So WebEx and desktop is not the state of the art. So unless you got an NVIDIA graphics card designed into it and gaming rig, it's gotta be mobile. It's gonna be over a land link for virtual. And I think if the software to bloated, it's not gonna work. And I think that's gonna be an area that Cisco is going to look at and say, Does these products fit this new use case? >>Okay, so let's say three days of coverage, right? We did. Day Zero is actually four days of coverage for us. We got a lot of good guests coming on. A lot of Cisco execs. What >>are you guys looking for? This. Let's go look at the week we had a lot of guests coming on. Dave's do. What are you guys looking for? In terms of analysis? What are you looking to tease out of the show? >>Well, like any of these shows, I'm really trying to look at the substance, trying to understand the announcements that they're making, how real they are and how they map into the customer's view of what it is that they need. I say the collaboration thing is interesting to me. I was really concerned about Cisco. I thought they were just sort of sitting on their laurels. I think they're WebEx install Base is gonna really look hard at these features. If they're in fact, they're available. I want to understand from practitioners and particularly service providers, You know what they think of all this new stuff that's coming out cause it's expensive. But that's a big, big cap ex investment for these guys. And I want understanding the core Cisco business, their their data center business, their networks. They're hyper converged where they stand competitively. And the last thing is the partner ecosystem. You know, we've talked about how they have to walk a fine line between, you know, servicing guys like IBM and Netapp and then also competing with their former great partner in EMC now Dell, EMC, and how they're gonna go forward in the next 10 years. >>Yeah, you touched on the partner ecosystem and service riders. Edge is the next big opportunity for Cisco, and how will they leverage what they're doing to support all of those partners? going forward. Big thing I'm looking for this week as well as a Z you said Dave. Maturation of a lot of the pieces that they add. Where's the substance behind the announcements that they've made? How much of them are table stakes that we see some of the other environs? Collaboration Space John. As you said, Oh, here's these things on the desktop I could do all these things on my phone was so trying to understand what is differentiated >>awesome for me I'm looking for actually, we're in the Dev Net Zone Cube. I'm looking for the developer equations that came up clear, kind of last with Susie Wee. But she put the new world of developers that's going to change the whole CC certification area and on the ecosystem. And for the developers, it's a C I O T. D and a center Inter site an umbrella. Outside of that, I'm gonna be looking for how Cisco is looking at cloud ification of networking network as a service way into Cloud versus internal SD win simplification of the edge security and networking common policy to name a few know talk a WiFi. I mean, WiFi is the preferred connectivity point inside the enterprise. And how does that relate to the whole edge thing? Application awareness. I really jazzed up by app D and I think where they're going with that is really gonna be the front end of that network policy. And that application awareness is critical on finally network automation from See I CD pipeline into analytics and how that relates to Fixed Wireless the five G, which is going to be I o. T. In the subscription based model. So yeah, to me, that's the That's the big picture. I want to dig into those areas >>that you are the things if I May 1 is this gestalt of, um, I'm gonna buy best of breed or am I going to buy from, you know, one throat to choke? And I think Cisco is obviously trying to be the ladder, and I think the last for me. Security, security, security. And how is Cisco going to help practitioners implement the best security possible? >>Yeah. And John John mentioned in the DEV. Net zone. It is that modernization of the workforce, one of the last things in the keynote they want, accelerate the 1st 500 certified definite engineers out there. So what Sisi Iea's had been doing for many decades, many of them in the future are going to be part of that dev net with security being one of the key areas that we focus >>on. And, of course, we're the top story that so far out of the keynote to me, the top story so far is that Cisco is not gonna yield to the big cloud guys, They're brick by brick moving the needle on their rebooting of their products to be cloud enabled for hybrid. And then ultimately, in multi cloud. And I still think the big switches coming. They haven't pull that lever. They haven't yet made a big move, I think a lot more to come. So we're gonna be digging in to the guys. Thanks for the analysis. Keynote analysis here. Day one of Cisco live in Barcelona kicking off in setting the agenda for 2020. It's the cube coverage. I'm John for Stu Minima Dave Volante. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah

(bouncy jazz music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. We all know it's going to be a Multicloud world. How we get to that world is anybody's guess. Every enterprise is going to find themselves going on a distinct and original journey based on where they are and based on where they think they want to go. But one of the common elements that every enterprise is going to face is how to deal with the network that's going to make it easier or more difficult for them to utilize new services, place data in different places, and assure security wherever the business needs to operate. SD-WAN is a technology that's been talked about for quite some time as a technology that could make that process easier, more certain, but there are a lot of options that are relatively new that don't feature a lot of customers and a lot of experience having been built into them. So that's one of the challenges that every enterprise faces, how to utilize SD-WAN to make their journey more simple, more economical, and more complete, and to have that conversation, we're joined by a CEO today, Jeff Brown, who's a CEO of Open Systems. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, Peter. >> Pete: So, Jeff, tell us a little bit about Open Systems. I know you've only been there for three weeks, but (Jeff laughs) what's the starting point for you? >> Well I think why do you come to a company like Open Systems? For me, there was a part of it that's about the people and liking the people that are there. I haven't met anyone I didn't like so far, which is always a great sign, but, more importantly, I think it's how they treat their customers and how you see the benefits of what they're doing for their customer set out there. Companies have been in business, as you know, a long time over in Europe, and we have a very, very large customer base over there, and we're fairly well-known over there with a lot of very happy customers. And that was a big draw for me, which is, now, it's time to take the next step over in the US and other places and get the name known for that what it really is, which is a very good solution. >> Well, SD-WAN has been a concept that's growing in appeal for quite some time, but Open Systems, as you said, has a base of customers in Europe that are actually doing it. So that gives you and Open Systems kind of an interesting visibility into the real nature of the problems of this. Tell us a little bit about what your customers are telling Open Systems about the need for SD-WAN and the evolution here. >> Sure, I think about SD-WAN as sort of the on-ramp to the highway of the Cloud and all the Cloud can bring to that. One of the benefits I inherit here is 15 years or better of building a platform that's designed for this. Before, there was SD-Wan, and before there was probably a lot of the Cloud service and service as a service concept, these guys were really starting to build the underpinnings of that already, and it gives us a huge advantage because a lot of the things, the depth and the breadth that platform is already built there that other people really still have to build. So I really like the position of the company from that standpoint. We've been able to take that to a lot of customers in the financial sector and manufacturing and a whole variety of others over in Europe and have these incredibly high NPS scores that people really resonate, the service resonates with them. So I like to say, when you think about this, most people don't operate an exchange server in their office anymore. It's all moving to the Cloud. Well, your network has to move that direction as well. And SD-WAN is one of the key components of that. >> So you've seen the the nature of the problem, which is that, increasingly, resources in the tech industry are being positioned as services. Your data is not necessarily going to move. The real goal is to try to bring those services to the data. That places a special and intense demand on the nature of networks. The data is going to not always be in the same place. The service may not always come from the same source. The network has to be able to respond to that. Tell us a little bit about how this class of solution is going to make it easier for businesses to sustain and maintain operations around this increasingly flexible, changing world of Cloud services. >> Sure, and you mentioned in the intro about Multicloud and some of those things. That's clearly a direction that a lot of this is going. We have customers today that are working cross-Clouds. That's one of the things our platform can enable is Multicloud solutions. And the way we think of this is you have pillars underneath your platform, but, as I mentioned, sort of the on-ramp to all this is SD-WAN. Then, you've got security and various versions of security as to how far you want to go. Other services like a SOC as a service concept-- >> Security Operations Center. >> Yeah, as a service concept across these different things. So there's lots of things that this begins to enable when you have that really strong base that's out there, and customers are more and more demanding those kind of services. You do have to think differently now. I mean, that's essentially it. The landscape is changing just like dial-up modems wouldn't work in today's digital environment. You have to think about what's that next generation look like? >> So 15 years of workin' over in Europe, fair number of customers that you're workin' with, gettin' a fair amount of feedback from them. You've mentioned it's a platform. You mentioned it's got SAS elements to it. You're introducing new classes of services, but where in particular is Open Systems today that others are still tryin' to figure out how to get there? >> Well, you have, I think, as a core here, the concept of as-a-service. So we've been doing this, as I said, for 15 years, where we come in and said, "You don't have to do it the old way. "You don't have to buy equipment, get your own connectivity, "do all that kind of thing, "and put it together into a..." We've been doing that, and we have all the underpinnings of that. And that's the difference right there. If you're a CIO, you want to be strategic. You need to be strategic, but you're dragged into the operational on a regular basis. And is that a waste of intellectual capital? Probably, at a minimum, it's that. And so there's lot of things that we help with, and we've heard from our customers that there's a real financial benefit to being able to essentially move your network into the Cloud along with your other services. So that's the concept. >> So the vision that you have is that the CIO and the business would think about the characteristics, the capabilities that are required of the network, and then it would use Open Systems to implement that so that it becomes a working, operational platform over which data can move. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely, you're spot-on. This is, again, a solution, end-to-end solution that we can put in place that takes all the guesswork out of it for 'em. They don't have to worry about technology decisions that may or may not be right or staying state-of-the-art along the way and handling all those other services. And we see this really as a solution for the next generation network. Are we going to do everything? No. We'll have partners. We do have partners today. We're goin' be acquiring people along the way to bring pieces of this into the puzzle as well. So there's lots of things that are goin' into that, but we know that that next generation looks a lot different than what's been there before. >> Let's build on that. So given that every CIO knows that we're in the midst of a transformative period. They're very concerned about making technology bets that might run out of runway sooner rather than later. They want to be open. They want to make it possible. They want those options. Given that Open Systems has had 15 years thinking about this, what are some of the areas that you think are particularly important for CIOs to worry about to ensure they have that kind of open headroom? >> Well, one of the things is: As a service company, we get to have the luxury of controlling the entire environment. When you're building from a hardware and connectivity standpoint, you don't as a matter of fact. And a lot of places, they have mixed environments, so nothing quite works the way it should together. And I think our benefit over 15 years, as you and I both talked about, is the fact that we've prodded through a lot of this already. So the upgrades that have to happen, the changes in technology, we handle that for you, and we can implement that without a massive Box upgrade path out there in the field. So a lot of that is just, as I said, a service that we offer then to take the guesswork out of that so that the CIO can spend his time trying to figure out what the strategic direction should be for his information or the company in general rather than getting bogged down in operational details. >> So you've been strong in Europe. You're trying to expand your presence in Europe. Here in the US, European companies have brought you to the US. They brought you to Asia. That's got to be an exciting proposition for Open Systems, is thinking about expanding with your customers. Tell us a little bit about some of the priorities that you have for the company. >> Well, it's a very interesting time for us. I like to say we're the best-kept secret in the US. We have a huge number of very happy customers-- As I said, that's one of the things that attracted me to the business-- Over in Europe, and we have a number that are starting here in the US. But then, whereas we're well-known for this over in Europe, we haven't gotten the message here yet, which is part of the next stage of the company. We're doin' business in 184 countries across the world with our customer base today. And now, it's just to get the message out about what we can do, which I think is radically different than a lot of people. We're seeing some of the other people in the market try to go this direction, but as you know, it takes an awfully long time to build that platform that's strong enough to hold up to the rigors that a big company puts a network through. >> And it's very difficult. I mean, there's so many SD-WAN options out there today, (Jeff laughs) but one of the things that distinguishes you guys is you actually have a customer base, and having a customer base for a technology that is as complex, ubiquitous, platform-like as WD-WAN provides an enormous advantage because you already got people using it, telling you it works, telling you it could be better, giving you visibility in where it should go for their business. That puts you guys in a special position. So if I think in, say, 2025, 2028, where do you think this SD-WAN thing goes? Is it just still SD-WAN? Are we thinking differently about how these services are being brought to customers? >> I sort of view SD-WAN as it's the on-ramp to the freeway, right? You get into the platform or the freeway or however you want to describe it with that tool, but there's awful lot of other things you have to have to make it really go. Security obviously a big piece of that. But then, things like analytics. How do I optimize my network? A lot of our customers are huge multi-nationals that have everything from very small branch offices to big ones. How do you optimize your buy around that so that you're taking risk out as well as performing at the best, obviously dollar-wise, the best performance for you. And we can help with that. So analytics, statistics, all those kind of things are packages that go on top of that, that, much like you'd get in your Cloud services today are going to be the next generation, right? That's where you got to go, and our customers are driving us that direction, saying, "These are the kind of decisions we need to make. "Help us make them." >> Again, three weeks, you probably met with maybe half dozen, a dozen customers. Give us some of the kind of the excitement that some of your customers are talking about where they want to go. >> Well, one of them is, nothing ever works if there's not some sort of financial benefit to that, and one of the nice things that we've seen from our customer set is a very typically 25 to 30% almost immediate impact on the bottom line. They're saving money by doing this and bringing that to us. That and the fact that they no longer have to make technology or hardware bets anymore. That's gone from their thing. So they can actually focus on what the services should do and the best-in-class and those kind of things. So what I've heard from our customer set is they value the fact that we're taking away sort of the operational-- What's not fun. The operational link, making it work everyday and the applications that have to go in that, and they can then get more strategic on, "How do we make the next move with our data?" >> Spending less for more, better options. If you could do that in Wall Street, you'd be a trillionaire? (Jeff laughs) Right? (Jeff laughs) >> Jeff: Yeah, yeah. (laughs) Jeff Brown, CEO of Open Systems. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Jeff: Thanks, Peter. >> Thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time. (funky horn music)

(Techno music) >> Live from San Francisco, celebrating ten years of high tech coverage, it's The Cube. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Well we are in Moscone Center North here in San Francisco, the city by the bay. Gorgeous day outside. Day two of our coverage here on the Cube. Vmworld 2019. I'm John Walls with John Troyer. John good to see you today. >> Great to be here with you. >> Good for day two. We have a couple of authors with us today, both from VMware. Rosa Lear who is the Director of Marketing at VeloCloud, in the business unit there. Rosa thank you for being with us. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate that. And Dave Twinam, who is the Director of Systems Engineering in that business unit at VMware. And this is the book that they have collaborate on I think with 12 others, there were 14 who came together on this project. It's called SD-WAN one on one, the what, the why, and the how. This is going to answer all those riddles, all those puzzles that you have about how to software define wide area network work, where are the pitfalls, where are the challenges, what are we going to do to solve our problems. So folks what was the genesis of this? It's a hefty thing for sure, >> (Rosa) It is, yes. And really well illustrated, we'll get into that in a little bit, but what was the genesis of this? Rosa if you would first, what drove you to put this together? >> Sure, there are a lot of books out there on the market that are focused on the SD-WAN because it's such a hot topic, but what we saw was a big deficit on how does it actually work. Getting down into that second, third layer of what people are looking for. So it's not so superficial. They really want to know how does it work, how do I integrate it into my network, what are the steps that I go through. So it's not a user manual, but it definitely gives you that deep perspective of what SD-WAN can provide and how to implement it into your network. >> So the target audience would be who? >> Network engineers, we also got stuff in here for the business owners, so CTO's. We actually have two characters that help outline a lot of the comments, or a lot of the meat of the book. One is Elvina. She's the CTO, so she really describes what her business needs are. And then there's Rodney who is her network engineer who actually implements this, the architect, so it's told from their perspective and really introducing each of the chapters, the concepts, and the takeaways. >> So Dave as you've been doing this, you're talking to customers out there, what's the state of the art here, where are we with the evolution of SD-WAN? It's kind of a noisy space from my perspective. Also from a VMware perspective, this brings VMware out of the data center into the network, and network edge, and wide area network. So can you just talk a little bit about what are the problems people are seeing, and that they're solving with SD-WAN, and why are network engineers interested in taking this as their bedtime reading. >> Absolutely, clearly what we're seeing in the marketplace is that there is a lot of noise out there, there are a lot of vendors that are in the SD-WAN space. I think it's important to note though that we are number one. It's always a good place to be. So while VMware is a newer kind of entrant into the wide area market in particular we already have a leadership position via the VeloCloud acquisition, and obviously the continued enhancements to the portfolio from there. So the reality is that SD-WAN, it's kind of funny we have the why at the beginning of the book, more and more customers aren't asking the why. They know why they need it, which is it's the natural evolution of their wide area infrastructure. They know that software is the future, that's why we are here at Vmworld cause we're all about software, and understanding how they can evolve to meet those business challenges in a software framework versus the traditional rip and replace hardware based model over the past. >> And you're on one side of the equation obviously, you're supplying this information, supplying the services, developing the solutions whatever. How much listening do you do to the other side to put together something like this? Cause I would assume you had to have a real sense of what the problems are and what the questions are. What is the what, what is the why, what is the how that's going on on the customer side of this. Tell me about that process if you will. >> Sure, so one of the unique parts of this book is that with these other authors that we brought in to put this book together, and we did this within five days which is a great project, but we really took the people out of the field. So these are the engineers that helped create this book are the ones who are shoulder to shoulder with the customer. Helping them that implementation, talking to them about how they actually implement this. So they talk to the customers, this is brought out from the field. It's not some guy sitting in an ivory tower talking about what you should do. This is actually what you should do because this is the best practice, this is what we hear from customers, this is what works best for all of the people we've implemented SD-WAN with. >> You did this in five days? >> Five days, so we hired a company. >> (John) How many of you 14? >> There was 15 of us. >> 15 in five days, we're you locked up for >> Yes. 24 hours around the clock. I read you went to Miami, I remember that, but I didn't realize it was in that compressed of a time frame. >> Oh yeah, it was great. I mean we all learned, I think, a lot because we come from different geography's. We came from different deployment models and so forth. And yeah we just all got together. >> I love the idea of the book spread. So you've captured a moment in time, of the technology, of the marketplace, but you said this isn't a dummies book, isn't an intro, nor is it a how to manual right. It's not a product manual. So I'm thinking it should be somewhat conceptual and have a life span of more then just the latest release of anything right. Is that part of the goal here? Is this going to have a lifespan? >> Absolutely. >> I mean what do you envision? Again it's interesting you're both engineering and you said the CTO, the CXO level can get some understanding of why some things are going on. >> Sure, you think about it from a CXO perspective right. What are the business challenges that that individual sees. They don't necessarily care about the bits and bites of networking underneath. They know that they need a network, but they also know that it's a really expensive part of their budget. So they need to understand how does it actually support the business and ultimately how can they do more with it, and ideally what we always hear is do more with less. So how do we get to that point and understanding then that's one need that comes from the business side. Well how do we complement that from the technical side of things. How do we solve those problems. But the reality is we're not solving technical problems just to solve technical problems. We're solving them to actually meet the needs of the business. So kind of seeing both side and how they come together is critical to it and I think that's something we tried hard to put into the book. >> When you have a collaboration like this, and you said you brought 15 people together, I'm sure there has to be some disagreement at some point or some discussion. So what were some of those points that came up where somebody thought that perhaps maybe a little more attention here, maybe a little less attention there. Maybe this is something we should bring, no that's not touch that base. How about those discussions, that back and forth, and how did you settle that with so many people in the room? >> So one of the things that we first outlined when we started this process was that this is a safe space. That nobody is really wrong, cause we're also bringing in different perspectives here. So we definitely all decided that we're going to treat each other respectfully. There was a lot of arguments here and there about certain things but we all are professional so we all figured out what the right thing was to do. >> So let's talk about the order, let's talk about how you dealt with it, the what's and the whys. You said why almost didn't make the cut but did make the dress rehearsal and the publishing. How do you put together something like this, that is not a user manual, cause that's the first thing I thought of. I thought okay, you're going to show me what SD-WANS all about and how I'm going to deploy it. VMwares services or solutions rather on my network. But that's not what this is all about. How did you parts that? How did you decide this is the direction we're going to go, and not just make it a how to for people or a dummies. >> So we already have a dummies book, so you should check that out. There's also a PDF on our website, velocloud.com, so we needed another layer, another book that would go deeper on that. We needed something that, I mean you can always write a user manual. Anybody can sit in a room and put that together, but we wanted something that was different. That was actually going to, I guess, comfort customers who were looking at the solution. Give them the right idea that this is what they need, and also what they were going to get into. That's a big question, you don't understand what the implementations going to be like until you're in it. So this gives you that view. So you can use it as a pre-customer read, or you can use it post-sales and really help define what you need to do when you're implementing. >> Nice, nice. We're here at VMworld 2019, this is my you know millionth VMworld. Very interesting, a lot of talk at the top level. Apps and kubernetes and that sort of stuff. At the bottom level, networking and a lot of other things, that maybe the traditional admin, Vsphere admin, already kind of a silo busters from old rolls is already here but sometimes when the networking folks talk with the server folks the words mean different things. They're slightly different tribes lets say. App performance is an SD-WAN context may mean something completely different then app performance in a data center, server context. So you're here at the show. You've got the network edge zone down in the show floor. You've got a booth there, you've got activities, obviously a lot of break out sessions. How have the networker's mixed with the admins? How has it been? And you all are from VeloCloud which has been with VMware for? >> (Rosa) Almost two years in December. >> Talk about both that integration, both corporately and you know here at the show. >> You want to go first? >> Sure, the event has been fantastic for us. We are getting a lot of traction. We actually did a book signing for this book yesterday with six of the authors. 96 books are gone, and I feel like the conversations are really migrating to the networking space. The wide area networking space rather then just data center. You're right there is a lot of overlap in the technology and the lingo and jargon, but I think if we know what were talking about in terms of wide area networking I think those conversations can easily be fudged or gaped. >> Just I would add, I've been at VMware about five years now so I was on the NSX team prior to moving over to the Velo team. So five years ago there was virtually no presence of networking. We were the only networking people here for the most part, And that's really changed substantially. And this year in particular is the first year where there are a lot of networking folks that are roaming the halls here. Whether its understanding the NSX side of the house or whether its SD-WAN there is a significantly greater presence then there's ever been previously. So the other piece is realizing we're a networking company now and a security company right. Those components are integral as a part of the solution and so the makeup has actually begun to change a little bit and there's more co-mingling then there's ever been before in this space. >> You touch on security in the book? >> Absolutely there's an entire chapter on it. >> So C-Cell might be interested as well? >> Absolutely. >> All right so the book I've seen is for purchase here on site. >> (Rosa) Yes. >> In case somebody's watching and they're here tell them where they can get it. >> Go the the VMware book store, it's in Moscone West, and then we also will be making it available on Amazon starting next week. >> All right so here's again a look at the book. SD-WAN one on one, the what, the why and the how. Rosa, Dave thanks for being with us. Congratulations on, I assume first book? >> For me yes. >> Third for me. >> Oh okay, a practiced hand. (laughing) >> First print though. >> Not fair. Thank you both, appreciate the time. >> (in unison) Thank you. >> Back with more continued coverage here on the cube of Vmworld 2019. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Fransciso, celebrating 10 years of hi-tech coverage, it's the theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its eco-system partners. >> Welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage at VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Dave, 10 years doing theCUBE at VMworld, what a transformation, lot of technologies coming back into the center of all the action. SD-WAN's one of them, we got two great guests, two entrepreneurs, the co-founders of VeloCloud. Sanjay Uppal who's the VP and GM of VeloCloud Business Unit part of VMware, VMware bought on December 2017, Steve Woo, Senior Director of VeloCloud Business Unit. Also co-founder, you guys both strong in networking, entrepreneurs, congratulations on. >> Thank you. >> That was two years ago. Okay, so, we were reminiscing about 10 years, 2010, when we first started doing theCUBE to now, but more than ever SD-WAN, just over the past 24 months, 36 months, a lot's changing as cloud has become more obvious. Certainly public cloud, no debate, but we start talking about cloud 2.0. Enterprise requirements are much unique and different that just, you know, being born in the cloud at least like the startups are. So, whole different challenges. This is a kind of difficult, it's a networking challenge. Networking and security are the two biggest, hottest areas right now in tech as clouds scale, the enterprise comes in. What's the vision, Sanjay? >> So what's going on here as you were rightly pointing out, cloud is changing. It's no longer people just want to get from private to public, it's a multi-cloud world and it's a hybrid cloud world. Now, that's talking at it from the compute standpoint. But, other services are also moving to the cloud, security services are moving to the cloud, so when you look at it from that standpoint, our customers want to get from the clients, which could be a user, it could be a thing, it could be a machine, all the way to the container which has the application. So we're looking at SD-WAN as being that fabric that connects from the client to the cloud to the container. And as you're rightly pointing out, networking and security is the hot area right now. So how does security and networking impact this client to cloud to container world is where SD-WAN is headed toady. >> And Pat Gelsinger who just came fresh off the keynote, he'll be on tomorrow, I'm going to ask him this question directly but, we've always been saying public cloud is such a great resource, I mean, who doesn't want all that massive compute, massive storage, if you can use it? But when you start getting into hybrid, right? I said the data center's an edge. And he's talking about a thin edge and a big edge and a thick edge, so when you're a networking packet, when you're in networking you move stuff around, you're an edge and you're a center, you're a core. These are networking concepts, this is not new, I mean, this is not new. >> Yes, this is not new. And I think the concept of the edge, as he was pointing out, there's different edges everywhere and you have to really look at it from, as you're crossing the boundary, how do you get the packets from point A to point B? Making sure that the performances are short, so you get the application layer performance, but yet not increasing your attack surface from a security standpoint. And so, the facilities that Steve and myself and other folks at VeloCloud have constructed is really reducing the attack surface by segmentation. But making sure that the conversation from the client to the cloud to the container has that assured performance, particularly for real time applications. Which are actually not easy to get right because the underlying transport may not actually help in any great way. >> So, John, you said it's not really new for you networking guys, it's really not. At the same time, Pat talked about choice versus complexity so it's a much more complex world. So you've had to change the way in which, you approach from a technology standpoint I presume? The roadmap has probably shifted, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> So, absolutely. So the discussion about moving to the cloud has been about the compute, but then you have to also actually look at the network, right? They forecast that 30 to 50% of the enterprise traffic is going to go to the cloud, right? But the network in the past was built for applications going to the on premise data center. So what we've had is inequality where you've had a full enterprise grade network going to the enterprise data center, but actually your cloud access was a second grade citizen. As Sanjay was saying, I still want performance, I still want security, and then in fact, as people actually expand to the cloud but actually put more and more workloads in the cloud, they start to realize, gee, where's my automation? Where's my scaling? So that still has to be done at the branch that the remote sites that need access to the cloud, and they need this automated, secure, high performing access to all the cloud workloads. Especially even that it's now moved to multi-cloud, right? So you went from on premise, a little bit in the hybrid, private cloud, now many more instances and now multi-cloud, becomes more and more complex and that's where cloud delivered SD-WAN really addresses that problem. >> So Steve, lay out the architecture, so let's just all roleplay for a second here. I'm a CCO, CIO, I'm progressive, got my hands in all the top things, certainly security's number one concern I have. And I'm building my own stack, I love the cloud, I don't want to make it a second class citizen, I really want to re-architect this. What the playbook, what do I do, what's your recommendation? >> Alright, so the playbook is, and this is advice from the cloud compute centers as well, right? Go direct to the cloud, don't back haul it through the enterprise data center and introduce latency so you now need Internet Breakout at more locations, not just the central data center. But I still need the security, so how do I have cloud security for traffic going straight to the cloud versus going back to the east west, to the data center? So really, the advantage that the SD-WAN solution has is it's actually a hybrid that has a footprint on premise but also has a cloud footprint. So Sanjay and I and VeloCloud, we have this big network of cloud gateways so you have the footprint on prem and in the cloud to have distributed security. >> So, Sanjay, talk about, back to your original bumper sticker, client, cloud, containers. So, I see that security piece. How important has the container piece become? And what is that role of the container in the future? Is it going to be a wrapper for legacy apps, is it going to be primary for new apps? Because Kubernetes clearly is orchestrating a bunch of containers and other services so the role of the container's certainly super valuable. How does that impact some of the efficiencies that's needed for networking and to ensure security? >> Yeah, great question. You know, the networking folks, and networking was always relegated to being the underlay or the plumbing. Now what's becoming important is that the applications are making their intent aware to the network. And the intent is becoming aware. As the intent becomes aware, we networking people know what to do in the SD-WAN layer, which then shields all the intricacies of what needs to get done in the underlay. So to put it in very simple terms, the container's what really drives the need and what we're doing is we're building the outcome to satisfy that need. Now containers are critical because as Pat was saying, all of the new digital applications are going to be built with containers in mind. So the reason we call it client to cloud to container is because the containers can literally be anywhere. You know, we're talking about them being in the private cloud and then the public cloud, they could be right next to where the client is because of the edge cloud. They could be in the telco network which is the telco cloud. So between these four clouds, you literally have a network of these containers and the underlying infrastructure that we are doing is to provide that SD-WAN layer that'll get the containers to talk to one another as well as to talk to the clients that are getting access to those applications. >> You know, sometimes it takes a history lesson to figure out the future. I was talking with Steve Herrod and I want to get your reaction to a comment he made to me when we were talking about the impact of VMware back in the old days, you know, virtualization. Virtualization kind of came out as an application and then it became what it did in the server world, just changed the game. But one key thing that we talked about and he mentioned was, the key was that virtualization allowed for massive efficiencies. Not just on price and consolidation of service and efficiency on price, but it enabled more efficiencies in performance without any code changes to the application. So the question is, is that, okay, containers I buy 100%, we agree, since Docker and early days to now with the Kubernetes, containers are going to be a game changer. What's that dynamic that's going to come next? Is there a view from your perspective on that step up function of value without a lot of application rewrites or network changes? I mean, I'm just trying to figure out how that fits together what's your view on that? >> Yeah, let me drag this first and then maybe Steve can comment as well, so. The first thing is that SD-WAN, just like server virtualization did, we're doing what server virtualization was for the network. So you don't require any changes to your underlay, meaning that you don't require changes to your broadband, you don't require changes to your LTE and even 5G, as well as the NPLS network so you don't have to twiddle with those bits, we manage it all in the overlay, this is exactly similar to what VMs did when it came to server virtualization. Now, when containers come in, because we get the visibility of what the container wants, we can both in real time, as well as a priori, figure out how the network should be configured. And that is a game changer because a container could be right next to you, it could be in the cloud, far edge, thin edge, it's not just a destination, it's literally everywhere. And that underlying fabric, if the underlying fabric of the network doesn't work, your digital transformation project for containers is not going to work either. You there's a key building block over there. >> So if I get this right, you're saying is that because you have that underlay visibility without any changes, by making efficiencies there, you then can understand what the container wants so you're bringing intelligence to the container and vice versa? >> Yes, so that containers tells us what do they need to run, I mean the application tells us, which is built with containers. And what we do is we dynamically measure how the network is performing, and we adapt to what the container wants. We call this outcome driven. We know what the outcome is and we adapt the networking to deliver that outcome. >> So I want to ask you guys, so Pat talked today about 8% better improvement relative to bare metal, but it's really about the entire system, the entire network. And I'm curious as to how you guys are evolving. You know, John and I talk about cloud 2.0, how you're evolving to support that. Because it's really about application performance in total, what the user sees, not what I can measure in some on prem data center, I'm not saying Pat was doing that, but my guess to deduce the numbers for the keynote they probably did do that. So, how is your infrastructure and architecture evolving to support application performance across the network? >> Right, right. So, to add to what Sanjay was saying in terms of just being aware of the requirements of the containers and optimizing and having visibility but actually, leverage the container and virtual machine technology in the SD-WAN platform itself. So in terms of solving the network problem, it's not just about us virtualizing the network resources and then choosing the best path across the network to the applications, but actually hosting some applications that deserve to be moved out to the edge to help solve the performance problem as well. A good example is IOT, where you just have a lot of data, a lot of real time data that needs real time control response instead of necessarily going over the most efficient path to an existing cloud data center on premise, perhaps do some of the analytics actually in the SD-WAN network edge, and we can do that with containers. >> So what about the real time aspect? Because I think that's a key point, you mentioned that, Sanjay, earlier. Because, I remember, not the date myself, but I remember back in the days when policy was a revolution, oh my God, we can do policy based stuff! And provisional stuff, that was an, oh my God, static network, though, I mean everything was provisioned, buttoned up nicely, you're not dealing with a static network when you're dealing with services. So you're moving up the stack, we're talking containers now, at the application level, assuming you have the fabric down here. There's going to be a lot of stuff being turned on, turned off, things provisioning, unprovisioning, so a lot of dynamic nature going on. So, if I see this right, policy is key and enables some intelligence, it's got to have an impact on the real time so talk about what real time means, some of the challenges, is it just a transactional issue? Is it latency? And is that where the container magic happens? Just unpack that a little bit. >> So there's really four classes of real time applications that we see. Voice, video, VDI and IOT. Now, there's of course, other applications that are built from these building blocks or these types of application, sub-applications. Now, each of these has a latency requirement, but it also has a requirement in terms of dynamism, so as you know, video can change dramatically from one moment to the other, variable portrayed video, right? Voice doesn't change as dramatically but has very stringent requirements in terms of when that packet should show up. So when we look at these, and you put them on a best effort network that only says that they're going to get the packet from point A to point B, these real time applications may not work. So what we have constructed is an overlay that supports realtime applications even on best effort networks. And this is actually a fairly significant shift in the industry, like if you look at running, you know, all of us have done a voice call, on a broadband and you hear these artifacts and rubberbanding and you can't hear the other person, right? But with VeloCloud, we're able to provide guarantees running on best effort networks. And I think that is a game changer. That is going to be a game changer also as the applications get much more dynamic. I mean, you bring in containers, one of the issues is where should that application run? That can be decided in real time. VMware invented this whole vMotion idea, well how about vMotioning the container? And how are you going to vMotion it and how are you going to decide where that container should be? So all of this is really what a networking infrastructure can provide for you in real time. >> And you've got this overlay, and without performance degradation or dramatic performance degradation, right? So what's the secret sauce behind that? >> So, the secret sauce in our solution is something we call dynamic multi-path optimization. So just like virtualization was done for the data center, first continuously monitor the resource's performance, capacity of the different underlay resources and then in real time, recognizing the business priority of the different applications, instantly put the workload, or in this case, the network WAN traffic on the right resource and actually have the flexibility to move it as conditions change, as capacity changes. And further than that, if you can't stare around the problems that we may see in the network, we can actually remediate the actual traffic streams and since we're on both ends we can have a lot of optimization tricks and actually make sure that real time data applications work perfectly. >> So it's a data analysis and a math problem to solve? >> Yeah, so we use that for real time optimization, and then the other benefit is we have this huge, in the cloud, of course, huge data lake of information that we continue to share more and more with the users so they can see the overlay, so that the entire underlay environment of the WAN, where it's going in the different hybrid cloud, and also the overlay performance. There's going to be huge value in that in terms of solving network problems. >> Are the telcos a bottleneck to the future or is 5G going to solve all that, or? >> Telcos are a partner, and more than 50% of our business is done with the telco. So it's us working with the telco and then going eventually to the enterprise. >> And they're moving at the speed that you want em to move? They're saddled with pressures on costs and network function virtualization, and it's a complicated problem. >> Right, as you heard Pat say in the morning, the telcos are going through a dramatic change. Because they're shifting away from this custom proprietary hardware infrastructure into a completely software driven world, right? And so the telco is a critical partner. They are virtualizing their own network, they are virtualizing the core of the network using VMware and other technologies, and as they're doing that, they're virtualizing what goes out to the enterprise customer. And the network virtualization piece, of course, is built on SD-WAN. One thing I wanted to add to what Steve said, is that we collect almost 10 billion flow records a day. From across all of our 150,000 sites, and this is a treasure trove of information. It is this information that allows us to develop the next generation algorithms. We're the only ones who have that much information that is collected, it's rich information, it's about how the network performs, how the applications are, where it is going, how the application workloads are. And using this we generate the next generation algorithms that'll optimize the networks and make them more secure. >> And that is the benefit of SaaS, the beautiful thing about having a SaaS platform, easy to stand up, the data becomes a really critical aspect for making the network smarter, to your point, this is all those data points. It's an operating, sounds like an operating system to me. >> It's a highly distributed network operating system. >> Guys, thanks for coming on, great insight. Final question to end the segment, as two co-founders and entrepreneurs, when you started VeloCloud, knowing what's going on today, explain in your entrepreneurial mind, where this is going, because this isn't your, as they say, grandfather's SD-WAN market anymore. It's really turning into, quite frankly, next generation networking, next generation software, you mentioned it's network operating system, it's one big distributed network. And all these new things are happening, what's the vision? Is this what you thought it would be when you guys started? >> Well, you know, the amazing this is many startups usually go through a pivot, right? They start off as one thing and maybe more than one pivot, in fact, I think it was a couple of years ago that we just for grins, looked at the first few slides that Steve has made when we had got started. For our seed investor, where we actually had absolutely nothing! And it was, actually is very true, the graphics were very very poor, other than that the idea of moving to the cloud and using the cloud as the network, even at that time we said the cloud is the network. That has not changed. And so, the enduring vision here is that regardless of where you are, you're on laptops right now, clients could be sensors, actuators, all of this is going to go through a network cloud. And that network cloud is going to be responsible for getting you to any final destination. Whether it's your nearby container or whether it's running in some public cloud. And so the vision is trust the network, it's going to make sure that it'll figure out whether you should be on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or LTE or 5G or whatever have you. You just say this application's important to me. The network is going to take care of the rest of it. >> Well you guys are certainly music to our ears, we love network effects, we think network effects is not just the way media is today but also technology, the network is all interconnected it's all instrumented, you can get the data. There's no blindspots, if you can instrument it, you can automate it. You guys are pioneers, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Good to have ya. >> Thank you. >> CUBE coverage here, 10 years covering VWworld, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)