>> 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 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)

>> 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)

(upbeat dance music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the Cubes live coverage day two of three days of wall to wall coverage here in Europe, in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live! 2019. I'm John Ferrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman hosting a great load of interviews this week here for Cisco Live! Guys, kicking off day two. Day one was all the big announcements. Cisco putting in all the announcements really setting it in and the messaging coming together. The product portfolios filling out. Clearly, Cisco is adopting a path to the cloud. Taking their data centered business, securing that, bringing that data center into the cloud, kind of hybrid, Multicloud. Big message around Multicloud and then under the hood, data center. Traffic patterns are changing, it's not a rip and replace, it's an extension to the environment. Cisco's intent based networking plus cloud plus cloud center management. Lot of stuff. We did discuss that yesterday. But I want to get your take. Is Cisco's positioning viable and what does it mean vis a vis the competition because Cisco is a blue chip tech player. Certainly have zillions of customers. Very relevant. This is a huge impact, how they position themselves, Stu. >> So John, you remember a few years ago we were saying "Hyper scale clouds, the public cloud providers are going to take over the world" and boy, Cisco's in trouble because if a third or half of the market all the sudden evaporates from them, those enterprise buyers of switches and routers and everything else like that, Cisco is doomed. Well, you know, we listened to the keynote yesterday and Cisco's talking about all of their solutions anywhere and when you go through the ecosystem of public cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud. Say does Cisco have a play there? And the answer is absolutely. It's not just the AppD acquisition, which has software and AWS but SD Wan is going to be a critical component to get from my data centers to the public clouds. Cisco has software and solutions and consulting to help customers in all of these environments so we always know that there's partnerships and there's competition. There's a lot of players out there but it was good to see them talking a lot about what they are doing with Kubernetes, with Amazon because you can't talk about cloud, either public cloud or multicloud without first talking about Amazon. Last year, we were a little critical, John, and said "Okay, Google's great but Google's number three or four." So, you got to be there with Amazon, you got to be there with Microsoft, and ServiceField. We've already interviewed a couple of service providers, always been a strength for Cisco to be in there and so good positioning. We talked yesterday a bunch about the bridge to possible and where to go but the more I think about that, anywhere is what Cisco's branded everything and that's when you talk Multicloud. Multicloud really a whole bunch of clouds and a whole bunch of things and therefore, I need a player that's going to help give me coverage in all of these environments and Cisco is making a strong case to be that. >> And Dave so Stu's right. A couple years ago, we were critical of Cisco and I think rightfully so. I think the whole industry looked at them as not in the middle of the fairway and certainly the recovery shot for Cisco is really strong because a lot's changed. Go back a few years. They didn't have a good ecosystem for developers. They didn't have a good open source position. They kind of were, do I go up the stack or not but they had the core networking so a lot of people were saying, "Hey, if Cisco doesn't make a move, they're doomed." We were one of them so a lot's changed. You're seeing the adoption of microservices, containers, APIs, the growth of DevNet that Susie Wee has initiated. It's clear proof, in my opinion. Then you got the data center guys saying, "Hey, we can take networking and take this and enable cloud." So Cisco, making good moves, put themselves in pole position for growth. >> Well I think the first point is, if you roll back 10 years ago, it was not just Cisco we were critical of, it was clear to us that cloud was where all the growth was and if you didn't have a public cloud, you were going to be in trouble unless you developed a cloud strategy. So, certainly Cisco, Dell EMC, now you know Dell MC, Vmware, none of them really owned a public cloud strategy and five years ago, they had to figure it out. Well, they figured out that actually managing Multiclouds is a great opportunity and so Cisco's got a viable strategy. Networks between clouds are going to flatten, they're going to need management. It's specifically, as it relates to Cisco and maybe their competition, they have to position themselves as our Multicloud management system is higher performance, and more secure than the competition. That's what they have to sell their customers on and the second piece of that is they get a transition from selling ports to selling software. And they're making that transition so, I like their strategy by the way, I also like Vmware's strategy. They capitulated to AWS, and now they're tight with AWS. IBM went out and paid two billion dollars for software so they've got a cloud strategy. Oracle's got a cloud strategy, Microsoft's got a great cloud strategy so if you go through and tick off-- >> They have clouds so let's just understand something. There is clouds and then cloud strategies so Amazon. >> The $34 billion that IBM is paying for Red Hat is giving them a Multicloud strategy more than just saying we have a bunch of data centers and bare metal. >> So they play in both, right? And maybe not so much in the public cloud, I would argue that their public cloud has failed to meet their expectations like IBM. And that's why they had to pay $34 billion for Red Hat. I would say just the opposite about Microsoft, their public cloud strategy has been an enormous success and they're very well positioned for Multicloud. >> Okay so let's just put it on the table. So, Cisco looks at the public cloud as partners, not competitors so Amazon, Assure, Google aren't competing with Cisco. Are they or are they partnering? Well, understanding competition is all about understanding who has a cloud so I would say Cisco's strategy to partner just like SAP did, just like everyone else and Dell did, that's the competitive, not cloud so, or maybe. This is the question; are the public clouds competitive to Cisco? >> They're frienemies, John. >> Oh no, the answer is yes, there is no question about it. They're growing at 20, 30, 40% a year. Cisco and IBM, HP they're growing at much lower, single digits. >> So John, we know if Amazon, if there is a profitable space that they can offer, a competitive service, they will. Security, you said, Cisco's got a great position security both what they've had for a long time and they've done acquisitions like Duo more recently and we've seen lots of pieces of the public cloud ecosystem that Cisco's bought over the last few years. Clicker was one that we've spent some time talking about but absolutely, Amazon goes after some of those pieces so they're going to partner. Cisco's got, the last I checked, at least three dozen products on the AWS marketplace but they can live there but there will be competition. >> Cisco's got some huge assets in this game, they got 800,000 plus customers, they are 60% of the networking market so they own the install base. It's really the only market you can think of that's a major market where the dominant player still owns 60% of the market and they've never been able to. >> Cisco for networking and Vmware for the hypervisor are very similar in that case and both have now had a similar strategy as to how their going to multicloud. >> Well, that's the most interesting competitive dynamic, in my view, is Vmware and it's acquisition of Nicira and obviously Cisco. Cisco's not going to take this lying down, they've got ACI and they claim number one. They didn't say whose data that was. I was looking and squinting for that is that IDC that got their four star. >> Well lets talk about growth because you know how I always complain about market researches aren't on the mark in terms of the reality of where the market is. So, you've mentioned growth. So, are we, if we're early in cloud growth, that's where the growth is, what is the cloud adoption going to look like over the next 10 to 20 years? Is it going to look more like public cloud or is it going to look more like on premises evolving to cloud operations and if the growth of cloud operations is all things, wide area network, image and SV wan, then there's more growth coming. So, if that's the case, is Cisco going to be able to capture that growth for the future? >> Well, in terms of growth, I think AWS is on it's way to being a $100 billion revenue company. And that's pretty impressive given where they are today, I mean they're going to triple in revenue so that's where the growth is. Cisco's already participating in a huge tam. What they've got to do is hold on to that business and identify new opportunities where they can manage multicloud instances and compete effectively with Vmware who's coming at it from the hypervisor and now, as I said yesterday, try to do to networks and storage what it did for systems and then IBM, Red Hat coming at it really from the applications perspective and with a services view. Microsoft, with a foot in both camps. You got Oracle in it's little niche. It's just a really interesting. >> Well, you've got an installed base that's moving into the cloud. You got net new companies that are going to be started. Might have on prem gone full cloud, this is the question that everyone's going to ask. I think Cisco can take their existing base with moving packets from point A to B and storing and making data more intelligence. Moving data around is a big networking phenomenon. >> Here's the question; Andy Jassy would say, "We believe there are going to be far fewer data centers in the future," that most data is going to live in the public cloud. The likes of Mike Liddle, Charlie Robbins, et cetera, I think they see the world as a hybrid world. That there's going to be more data that's in a hybrid, on prem plus cloud then is going to be in the public. >> I love Andy Jassy but I'll just say, first of all and I'm saying this biased on his perspective and I think he's right at one level. Why wouldn't Amazon see people moving data centers to the cloud? I get that. I say that it's going to be in the networks. That's where the action will be. Where are the networks, are the networks in the cloud, are the networks on premise, are the networks on a phone, IOT? So, you see IOT and Edge coming together, if it's all one network, then you're going to have the values going to be in the network, not necessarily the clouds per say or in shared value. >> You talk about Edge computing and IOT, Cisco's got Meraki which is going strong. SD Wan is a critical component in this multicloud piece. They're really posed to drive this next generation of 5G, not something we've dug into a lot yet but it is finally coming really soon here and Cisco has a lot of those pieces to be able to hit the next wave. >> It always comes back to the data, in my opinion, and the leverage point for data are sass. If you own the applications business or you're doing well there, you're in a good position. All the data's running over Cisco networks so that puts them in a really good position and as we know the likes of AWS and Microsoft, Alibaba, et cetera. They are trying to get as much data into their cloud as possible. >> And what I loved yesterday in the keynote is data was actually one of the central components that they talked about which the Cisco I know of 10 or 20 years ago, that was just bits that ran over our pipes. So they understand the value of data and their drive into that market. >> Well, we've been saying on the Cube now for nine years. Data's at the center of the value proposition. Data at the center, value proposition, this is actually happening. We see a lot of growth in cloud. Dave, good commentary. Stu, well done. We're going to have Sasha Gupta, all the leaders coming on the Cube here from Cisco. We'll breakdown and we're going to ask them the tough questions. Stay with us for day two coverage here in the Cube. Live in Barcelona, I'm John Ferrier, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante breaking down all the action. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (light techno music)