(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's the Cube! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone and we're live here at Cisco Live, 2019 in Europe. It's the Cube's three days of wall-to-wall coverage, day two. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Vellante co-hosting with me as well as Stu Miniman who's been in and out on interviews. Our next guest is Alex Henthorn-Iwane, vice president of marketing for company Thousand Eyes. welcome back to the cube, welcome to the show. >> Thanks great to be here. >> So talk about what you guys do first, you guys do a very interesting business, a rapidly growing business. What is Thousand Eyes, what do you guys do, What's your product, who is your customer? >> OK, so the vision of thousand eyes was really to help organizations deal with all the connected experiences that they have to deliver. So we're giving visibility into those connected experiences but not just how there, you know if they're working or not but all the external dependencies that they rely on. So we developed a ton of expertise on how the internet works how the networks work, how routing works and all that. And we can give that insight so that all the things that IT now no longer controls and owns, but has to own the outcome for, we're giving that visibility. >> And when you guys sell a Saas Solutions, the software, what's the product? >> Yeah >> Who's the buyer? >> So we're Saas Platform and the way that we gather this data is we're primarily doing active monitoring at a few different layers; so we're monitoring the app layer things like HTTP and page loads and things like that you would think of that as synthetics classically but we've paired that with some patented ways of understanding how everything connects from a user out in the internet or from a branch office or from a data-center out to somewhere else typically across the internet all those networks the cloud networks going through things like Z-scaler all those complex pieces that again you don't control. We can trace all that and then map it down even to internet routing. One other kind of cool thing that we added to all that we do that on an agent basis so we have agents around the world that you can put them in your data-centers your VPC's and your branches. >> And the value proposition is what; visibility in the patterns; optimization; what's the outcome for the customer? >> The outcome is ultimately that we're going to help IT deliver the digital experiences for their employees for their customers that could be e-commerce, e-banking, it could be open banking or PSD2 here in Europe and UK. >> So full knowledge of what's going on >> Right >> But the name talks to that >> Yeah >> It talks to the problem you're solving >> Right, and it's really, the focus is and our specialty is all the external things, right. You've always had a lot of data, maybe too much data on the stuff that you did own, right, in IT. Okay, you could collect packets and flows and device status and all that sort of this and sort of, the challenge was always to know what does that mean, but whether or not that's perfect it exsited, but you simply can't get that from outside, you've got your four walls >> Yeah >> So you just have this big drop off in visibility once you get to the edge of your data-center etcetera >> Now, lets talk about the dynamics in IT; we were talking before we came on camera here about ya know, our lives in IT and going back and look at the history and how it's changed but there are new realities now >> Right >> Certainly Cisco here talking about intent based network ACI anywhere, Hyperflex anywhere, the ecosystem is growing the worlds changed. >> Right >> Security challenges, IOT, the whole things completely going high scale, more complexity. >> Right, Yeah. >> IT? What's the impact to IT? What's the structural change of IT from your prospective? >> Well, the way we see it what's happening with IT is the move from owning and controlling all the stuff, you know and managing that granting access to that. To a world where you really don't own a lot of the stuff anymore. You don't own the software, you don't own the networks. You don't own the infrastructure increasingly. Right? So how do you operate in that role? Changes. What the role of IT is in that role, really changes. And then out of that comes a big question. How does IT retain relevance? In that role? And a lot of that role is shifting away from being the proprietor, to being more of like a manager of an ecosystem. Right? And you need data to do that. So I think that's a really big step. >> So this is now, an actual job description kind of thing? >> Yeah. The roles and make up of the personnel in IT is changing. Because of the SAAS cloud, Hybrid cloud, Multi cloud? >> Right. It's more of like a product management role, than it is the classic operations role. You know? And we observed some really big changes in just operations. So, when you own all the stuff you can find a fix. Right? That's a classic statement of IT operations. But when all the stuff is outside, You can't fix it directly. So you go to what we call an evidence in escalation. You have to actually persuade someone else to fix it for you And if you can't persuade them, you don't have governance you don't have accountability and you don't have the outcome that you're supposed to deliver. >> So the infrastructure is to serve it's players; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, more SAAS All of this is taking data away from your control? >> Right >> And obviously network visibility? >> Sure >> So how are you guys dealing with that? What are some of the nuances of whether it's SAAS, or different infrastructures of service providers? >> And I would add to that SUN, Shift to the internet I would add to that just the increasing number of digital experiences that companies offer to customers. Right? >> Right. So the way that we deal with that is, that we believe that you need a highly correlated way of understanding things. Because at the top layer, if the outcome that IT is supposed to deliver is a digital experience. Right? The customers at the center now, not the infrastructure. Right? So I have to start with experience. So we need to look at, how is the app preforming? How is it delivering to that end user? And now you have to think about it from a persona basis. To who? Where? Right? So that's why we have all these agents floating around the world in different cities. Because if you're offering a let's say e-banking portal, and your surveying 100 cities as markets. You need to see from those cities, right? You also then need to be able to understand the why. When something is not working well, whose fault is it? Right? Is it us? >> Its the network guys! (laughing) >> What you don't to get is the everlasting war room circular firing squad kind of scenario. Where nobody actually knows, right? This is what happens, because the issue is that often times you suspect its not you. Maybe. Right? That search for innocents. >> Yeah. >> But again that's not enough because, the whole point is to deliver the experience. So, now who could it be? Say you're offering e-banking or e-commerce. Is it your CDM provider? Is it that your DMS manage provider is not responsive? Or somethings down? Are you under a D DOS attack? Or some of your ecosystem is. Is one of your back end providers, like your Braintree payments not working right. Right? There is so many pieces, is there an ISP in the middle there? That's being effected? >> There's so many moving parts now. >> If from each persona or location just to get to 1 URL. Could be traversing several ISP networks. Dozens of HOPS across the internet. How on earth are you supposed to isolate, and go an even find who to ask for help? That's a really sticky problem. >> So this will expose all those external credits? >> So we expose all those things. We expose all these multiple layers, and we have some patenting correlation, visual correlation. So you can say alright I see a drop in the responsiveness of a critical internal application or of .. I mean, we never have. Butt lets say like if SAAS like sails course, or something like that. And it may not be their fault by the way, its not them being a problem. But the users having a problem. So you see this drop and say well where's it happening? You can now say is it a network issue? Is it an app issue? Now if it is a network issue I can look at all the paths, from every where and say aha there's a commonality here. For example, we could surface through our collective intelligence that there's an ISP outage in the middle of the internet that's causing this. Or we could say, hey you know your ISP is having an issue. Or guess what? Sales force is maybe, you know things happen. People have problems in data centers sometimes. It's nothing you know, it's not.. >> So there's two things there's the post mortem view, and there's the reactive policy based intention. >> Right >> To say okay hey we've got an outage, go here do somethings take some action. >> Right. So some of those things you can automate. But the fact of the matter is that, automation requires learning. And machines need to be taught, and humans have to teach them. I mean that's one of the sort of sticky parts of automation. (laughing) Right, its not auto-magic its automation. >> So you guys are in the data business basically? >> Right, visibility, data. Right. >> Big data, its about data. You're servicing data. Insights, actionable insights, all this stuffs coming together. So the question is on AI. Cause AI plays a role here. IT OPS and machine learning you've got deterministic and non deterministic behavior. >> Sure. >> How do you solve the AI OPS problem here? Because this is a great opportunity for customers, to automate all this complexity and moving parts. To get faster time to data or insight. >> Okay so I would say that the prime place where you could do AI and ML is where you have a relatively closed system. Lets say an infrastructure that you do control. And you have a ton of data. You know like a high volumetric set of data-streams. That you can then train a machine to interpret. The problem with externalities is that One, you have sparse data. For example we have to use agents, cause you can't get all that traditional data from it. Right? So that means that that's why we built this in a visually correlated way. It's the only way to figure it out. But the other aspect to that is that, when your dealing with external providers you have an essential human part of this. There's no way as far as I know to automate an escalation process with your service providers. Which now we have so many, right? First of all, we have to figure out who. And then you have to have enough evidence, to get an escalation to happen to the right people. Empowered people. So they don't go through the three D's of provider response. Which is Deny, Deflect and Defer. (laughing) Right? You know you have to overcome plausible deniability, and that's very human interaction. So the way we deal with that. All this interactive correlated data we make it ridiculously easy, To share that. in an interactive way, with a deep link that you send to your provider and say "just look and see" and you can see that it's having issues. >> So get the evidence escalated, that's the goal as fast as possible? >> Right so then your time, like your mean time to repair now in the cloud is dependent on mean time to effective escalation. Right? >> Who are some of your customers? >> So, we have our kind of foundational customers. We have 20 of the top 25 SAAS companies in the world, as our customers. We have five of the top six US banks, four of the five top UK banks. 100 plus of global two thousand and growing fast. A lot of verticals, I would say enterprise I started with financials not surprisingly. But now we see heavy manufacturing, and telecom and oil and gas and all that. >> What's going on here at Cisco Live? What's your relationship with Cisco? >> So with Cisco we have a number of integration points, we have our enterprise agents. We have these could agents pre deployed, same software as what we call the enterprise agent. That's been certified as an VNF or as container deployments, on a variety of Cisco Adriatic platforms. So that's kind of our integration point. where we can add value and visibility from those you know, branch or data center or other places you know out to the cloud or outside in as well. >> And who's your buyer, typically? >> So I would say a couple of years ago we would be very network central. But now because of the change in IT, and our crossover into the largest enterprises we find that now it's the app owners. It's the folks who are rolling out sales force to forty thousand people and their adopting lighting. Right? You know or they're putting Office 365 out, and they're dealing with the complexities of a CDM based service or a centralized service like SharePoint. So we're seeing those kind of buyers emerge, along with the classic IT operations and network buyers. >> So it only gets better for you, as more API centric systems get out there. Because as its more moving parts, its basically an operating system. And you look at it wholistically, and you got to understand the IO if you will? >> Right. The microservices way of doing everything, means that when you click something or you interact with something as a user. There are probably 20 things happening at a back end, at least half of which are going off across the internet. And all of them have to work flawlessly. Right? For me to get that experience that I'm expecting. Whether I'm trying to buy something or, just get something done. >> What's your secret sauce in the application? >> So I'd say our secret sauce comes down to a couple really key things. One is the data that we generate. We have a unique data center from all these vantage points that we have now. That's what allows us to do this collective intelligence. No body else has that data. And an example we did a study, a couple studies last year. Major resource studies using our platform to look at public cloud performance from the internet within regions. Inter regions, and between clouds. And we found some really interesting phenomenon. And no body else had ever published that before. A lot of assumptions, a lot of inter-claims, we where actually able to show with data, exactly how this stuff performs. >> I'm sorry, you guys have published that? Where can we find that? >> Yeah, so we have that published, we also did another major report on DNS. >> Is that on your website? >> It's on our website, so definitely something to check out. >> Alright, Alex well thanks for coming on, give the quick plug, what's up for you guys? Hiring? What's new? Give the quick two cents. >> So here in Europe we're scaling up, hiring a lot and expanding across Europe. We have major offices in London and Dublin, so that's a big deal. And I think in this next year you'll see some bigger topped out ways that we can help folks understand. Not just how the internet is effecting them, but more of like the unknown of unknowns of internet behavior. So there's going to be some exciting things coming down the pipe. >> Well we need a thousand eyes on all the instrumentation as things become more instrumented having that data centric data. is it going to help feed machine learning? And again its just the beginning of more and more complexity being abstracted away by software on network Programmability. theCUBE bringing you The Data Here from Barcelona, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 stay with us for more day 2 coverage after the short break. I'm Jeff Furrier here with Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. ( upbeat music )