>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The pandemic precipitated what is shaping up to be a permanent shift in cybersecurity spending patterns. As a direct result of hybrid work, CSOs have vested heavily in endpoint security, identity access management, cloud security, and further hardening the network beyond the headquarters. We've reported on this extensively in this Breaking Analysis series. Moreover, the need to build security into applications from the start rather than bolting protection on as an afterthought has led to vastly high heightened awareness around DevSecOps. Finally, attacking security as a data problem with automation and AI is fueling new innovations in cyber products and services and startups. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we present our quarterly findings in the security industry, and share the latest ETR survey data on the spending momentum and market movers. Let's start with the most recent news in cybersecurity. Nary a week goes by without more concerning news. The latest focus in the headlines is, of course, Russia's relentless cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in the Ukraine, including banking, government websites, weaponizing information. The hacker group, BlackByte, put a double whammy on the San Francisco 49ers, meaning they exfiltrated data and they encrypted the organization's files as part of its ransomware attack. Then there's the best Super Bowl ad last Sunday, the Coinbase floating QR code. Did you catch that? As people rushed to scan the code and participate in the Coinbase Bitcoin giveaway, it highlights yet another exposure, meaning we're always told not to click on links that we don't trust or we've never seen, but so many people activated this random QR code on their smartphones that it crashed Coinbase's website. What does that tell you? In other news, Securonix raised a billion dollars. They did this raise on top of Lacework's massive $1.3 billion raise last November. Both of these companies are attacking security with data automation and APIs that can engage machine intelligence. Securonix, specifically in the announcement, mentioned the uptake from MSSPs, managed security service providers, something we've talked about in this series. And that's a trend that we see as increasingly gaining traction as customers are just drawing in and drowning in security incidents. Peter McKay's company, Snyk, acquired Fugue, a company focused on making sure security policies are consistent throughout the software development life cycle. It's a really an example of a developer-defined security approach where policy can be checked at the dev, deployment, and production phases to ensure the same policies are in place at all stages, including monitoring at runtime. Fugue, according to Crunchbase, had raised $85 million to date. In some other company news, Cisco was rumored to be acquiring Splunk for not much more than Splunk is worth today. And the talks reportedly broke down. This would be a major move in security by Cisco and underscores the pressure to consolidate. Cisco would get an extremely strong customer base and through efficiencies could improve Splunk's profitability, but it seems like the premium Cisco was willing to pay was not enough to entice board to act. Splunk board, that is. Datadog blew away its earnings, and the stock was up 12%. It's pulled back now, thanks to Putin, but it's one of those companies that is disrupting Splunk. Datadog is less than half the size of Splunk, revenue-wise, but its valuation is more than 2 1/2 times greater. Finally, Elastic, another Splunk disruptor, settled its trademark dispute with AWS, and now AWS will now stop using the name Elasticsearch. All right, let's take a high level look at how cyber companies have performed in the stock market over time. Here's a graph of the Cyber ETF, and you can see the March 1st crosshairs of 2020 signifying the start of the lockdown. The trajectory of cybersecurity stocks is shown by the orange and blue lines, and it surely has steepened post March of 2020. And, of course, it's been down with the market lately, but the run up, as you can see, was substantial and eclipsed the trajectory of the previous cycles over the last couple of years, owing much of the momentum to the spending dynamics that we talked about at our open. Let's now drill into some of the names that we've been following over the last few years and take a look at the firm level. This chart shows some data that we've been tracking since before the pandemic. The top rows show the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ prices, and the bottom rows show specific stocks. The first column is the index price or the market cap of the company just before the pandemic, then the same data one year later. Then the next column shows the peak value during the pandemic, and then the current value. Then it shows in the next column where it is today, in percentage terms, i.e., how far has it pulled back from the peak, then the delta from pre-pandemic, in other words, how much did the issue earn or lose during the pandemic for investors? We then compare the pre-pandemic revenue multiple using a trailing 12-month revenue metric. Sorry, that's what we used. It's easy to get. (laughs) And that's the revenue multiple compared to the August in 2020, when multiples were really high, and where they are today, and then a recent quarterly growth rate guide based on the last earnings report. That's the last column. Okay, so I'm throwing a lot of data at you here, but what does it tell us? First, the S&P and the NAS are well up from pre-pandemic levels, yet they're off 9% and 15%, respectively, from their peaks today. That was earlier on Friday morning. Now let's look at the names more closely. Splunk has been struggling. It definitely had a tailwind from the pandemic as all boats seem to rise, but its execution has been lacking. It's now 30% off from its pre-pandemic levels. (groans) And it's multiple is compressing, and perhaps Cisco thought it could pick up the company for a discount. Now let's talk about Palo Alto Networks. We had reported on some of the challenges the company faced moving into a cloud-friendly model. that was before the pandemic. And we talked about the divergence between Palo Alto's stock price and the valuations relative to Fortinet, and we said at the time, we fully expected Palo Alto to rebound, and that's exactly what happened. It rode the tailwinds of the last two years. It's up over 100% from its pre-COVID levels, and its revenue multiple is expanding, owing to the nice growth rates. Now Fortinet had been doing well coming into the pandemic. In fact, we said it was executing on a cloud strategy better than Palo Alto Networks, hence that divergence in valuations at the time. So it didn't get as much of a boost from the pandemic. Didn't get that momentum at first, but the company's been executing very well. And as you can see, with 155% increase in valuation since just before the pandemic, it's going more than okay for Fortinet. Now, Okta is a name that we've really followed closely, the identity access management specialist that rocketed. But since it's Auth0 acquisition, it's pulled back. Investors are concerned about its guidance and its profitability. And several analyst have downgraded their price targets on Okta. We still really like the company. The Auth0 acquisition gives Okta a developer vector, and we think the company is going hard after market presence and is willing to sacrifice short-term profitability. We actually like that posture. It's very Frank Slupin-like. This company spends a lot of money on R&D and go-to-market. The question is, does Okta have inherent profitability? The company, as they say, spends a ton in some really key areas but it looks to us like it's going to establish a footprint. It's guiding revenue CAGR in the mid-30s over the mid to long-term and near term should beat that benchmark handily. But you can see the red highlights on Okta. And even though Okta is up 59% from its pre-pandemic levels, it's far behind its peers shown in the chart, especially CrowdStrike and Zscaler, the latter being somewhat less impacted by the pullback in stocks recently, of course, due to the fears of inflation and interest rates, and, of course, Russian invasion escalation. But these high flyers, they were bound to pull back. The question is can they maintain their category leadership? And for the most part, we think they can. All right, let's get into some of the ETR data. Here's our favorite XY view with net score, or spending momentum on the Y-axis, and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. That red 40% line, that indicates a highly elevated spending level. And the chart inserts to the right, that shows how the data is plotted with net score and shared N in each of the columns by each company. Okay, so this is an eye chart, but there really are three main takeaways. One is that it's a crowded market. And this shows only the companies ETR captures in its survey. We filtered on those that had more than 50 mentions. So there's others in the ETR survey that we're not showing here, and there are many more out there which don't get reported in the spending data in the ETR survey. Secondly, there are a lot of companies above the 40% mark, and plenty with respectable net scores just below. Third, check out SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope, and Darktrace. Each has under 100 N's but we're watching these companies closely. They're popping up in the survey, and they're catching our attention, especially SentinelOne, post-IPO. So we wanted to pare this back a bit and filter the data some more. So let's look at companies with more than 100 mentions in the same chart. It gets a little cleaner this picture, but it's still crowded. Auth0 leads everyone in net score. Okta is also up there, so that's very positive sign since they had just acquired Auth0. CrowdStrike SalePoint, Cyberark, CloudFlare, and Zscaler are all right up there as well. And then there's the bigger security companies. Palo Alto Network, very impressive because it's well above the 40% mark, and it has a big presence in the survey, and, of course, in the market. And Microsoft as well. They're such a big whale. They skew the data for everybody else to kind of mess up these charts. And the position of Cisco and Splunk make for an interesting combination. They get both decent net scores, not above the 40% line but they got a good presence in the survey as well. Thinking about the acquisition, Al Shugart was the CEO of of Seagate, and founder. Brilliant Silicon valley icon and engineer. Great business person. I was asking him one time, hey, you thinking about buying this company or that company? And of course, he's not going to tell me who he's thinking about buying or acquiring. He said, let me just tell you this. If you want to know what I'm thinking, ask yourself if it were free, would you take it? And he said the answer's not always obviously yes, because acquisitions can be messy and disruptive. In the case of Cisco and Splunk, I think the answer would be a definitive yes It would expand Cisco's portfolio and make it the leader in security, with an opportunity to bring greater operating leverage to Splunk. Cisco's just got to pay more if it wants that asset. It's got to pay more than the supposed $20 billion offer that it made. It's going to have to get kind of probably north of 23 billion. I pinged my ETR colleague, Erik Bradley, on this, and he generally agreed. He's very close to the security space. He said, Splunk isn't growing the customer base but the customers are sticky. I totally agree. Cisco could roll Splunk into its security suite. Splunk is the leader in that space, security information and event management, and Cisco really is missing that piece of the pie. All right, let's filter the data even more and look at some of the companies that have moved in the survey over the past year and a half. We'll go back here to July 2020. Same two-dimensional chart. And we're isolating here Auth0, Okta, SalePoint CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Cyberark, Fortinet, and Cisco. No Microsoft. That cleans up the chart. Okay, why these firms? Because they've made some major moves to the right, and some even up since last July. And that's what this next chart shows. Here's the data from the January 2022 survey. The arrow start points show the position that we just showed you earlier in July 2020, and all these players have made major moves to the right. How come? Well, it's likely a combination of strong execution, and the fact that security is on the radar of every CEO, CIO, of course, CSOs, business heads, boards of directors. Everyone is thinking about security. The market momentum is there, especially for the leaders. And it's quite tremendous. All right, let's now look at what's become a bit of a tradition with Breaking Analysis, and look at the firms that have earned four stars. Four-star firms are leaders in the ETR survey that demonstrate both a large presence, that's that X-axis that we showed you, and elevated spending momentum. Now in this chart, we filter the N's. Has to be greater than 100. And we isolate on those companies. So more than 100 responses in the survey. On the left-hand side of the chart, we sort by net score or spending velocity. On the right-hand side, we sort by shared N's or presence in the dataset. We show the top 20 for each of the categories. And the red line shows the top 10 cutoffs. Companies that show up in the top 10 for both spending momentum and presence in the data set earn four stars. If they show up in one, and make the top 10 in one, and make the top 20 in the other, they get two stars. And we've added a one-star category as honorable mention for those companies that make the top 20 in both categories. Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Okta make the four-star grade. Okta makes it even without Auth0, which has the number one net score in this data set with 115 shared N to boot. So you can add that to Okta. The weighted average would pull Okta's net score to just above Cyberark's into fourth place. And its shared N would bump Okta up to third place on the right-hand side of the chart Cisco, Splunk, Proofpoint, KnowBe4, Zscaler, and Cyberark get two stars. And then you can see the honorable mentions with one star. Now thinking about a Cisco, Splunk combination. You'd get an entity with a net score in the mid-20s. Yeah, not too bad, definitely respectable. But they'd be number one on the right-hand side of this chart, with the largest market presence in the survey by far. Okay, let's wrap. The trends around hybrid work, cloud migration and the attacker escalation that continue to drive cybersecurity momentum and they're going to do so indefinitely. And we've got some bullet points here that you're seeing private companies, (laughs) they're picking up gobs of money, which really speaks to the fact that there's no silver bullet in this market. It's complex, chaotic, and cash-rich. This idea of MSSPs on the rise is going to continue, we think. About half the mid-size and large organization in the US don't have a SecOps, a security operation center, and outsourcing to one that can be tapped on a consumption basis, cloud-like, as a service just makes sense to us. We see the momentum that companies that we've highlighted over the many quarters of Breaking Analysis are forming. They're forming a strong base in the market. They're going for market share and footprint, and they're focusing on growth, at bringing in new talent. They have good balance sheets and strong management teams and we think they'll be leading companies in the future, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Okta, SentinelOne, Cyberark, SalePoint, over time, joining the ranks of billion dollar cyber firms, when I say billion dollar, billion dollar revenue like Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Splunk, if it doesn't get acquired. These independent firms that really focus on security. Which underscores the pressure and consolidation and M&A in the whole space. It's almost assured with the fragmentation of companies and so many new entrants fighting for escape velocity that this market is going to continue with robust M&A and consolidation. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to my colleague, Stephanie Chan, who helped research this week's topics, and Alex Myerson on the production team. He also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, who get the word out. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETR's website at etr.ai. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. @dvellante is my DM. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week. Be safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. (electronic music) >> Welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. Coverage of HPE Discover 2017. That's Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE. My co-host for the next three days, Dave Vellante, Chief analyst at Wikibon and co-founder with me of theCUBE. Our next guest is Partha Narasimhan, who's the CTO of Aruba, now part of HP for multiple years. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >> So chief technology officer of Aruba, we get to go under the hood a little bit, but it's really important the we kind of have that context because the wireless is beyond just wifi. I mean, wifi is joked on the internet as the lower level of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I mean, it's the biggest complaint people have. 'Where's the wifi? Is it secure?' So wifi obviously in wireless, certainly brings that digital life. Now you take wireless in an enterprise environment, unlimited possibilities with Internet of Things, campus, intelligent edge was the key part of this theme. Welcome to theCUBE and thanks for joining us. >> Narasimhan: Thank you. >> So your thoughts on the intelligent edge, what is Aruba's real innovation happening now? Where's the fruit coming off the trees, beyond just the access to wireless, because we all know is like, freedom. >> Right, and so think of it. People tend to think of wireless as just okay, getting rid of the cables. And yes, it does that, but it does a lot more than getting rid of the cables. And if you think about what it allows you to do, wireless enables mobility, right? So as people walk around and stay connected to all the things that they need connectivity to, we allow that to happen. But wireless enabling mobility also means that we have now the ability to observe things in the physical world that people reside in, right? Kinds of things that they interact with, whether it's in the workplace as part of their work, or whether it's as a customer when you enter a retail store, or when you enter a stadium or a venue for an event. How do we now gather our understanding of context from purely from a digital domain? Combine that with what we are learning about context, the other side of context from the physical domain. Blend that together, one, to either create new experiences for enthusers. Or to enhance existing ones that they're already used to, how can we make it work better? Right, and we have these used cases in- >> Is it true enabling technology and these new scenarios are new? I want to get into the used case, but I first want to get the hard news out of the way. You guys have some announcements here at HPE Discover that are notable. One is an extension to the course, which is 8400 line, real focus on the intelligent edge. And the other one is really comprehensive asset tracking. Assets could be anything, it could be people, it could be machines, devices and whatnot. This really kind of highlights the things that are possible. Obviously asset tracking is entering a change, and it's also big data, it's Internet of Things. Talk about this intelligent edge, talk about the switches and the asset tracking. What is the notable things about those two announcements? >> So let's start with the 8400, right it's a big core of new classes, Abdication switch. We don't have many of those built over the years in the industry, right? There have been very small number of instances of switches like this built in here. But the big difference with the 8400 is it's actually the first one that was completely built in an era that is defined increasingly by mobility in IoT, right? Think of mobility. With mobility, topology is never a constant. Right, I can never assume that the network topology is set and it never changes. Or changes can be controlled in some perspectives. So if you start with the given that topology is not a constant, how do we now create a switch that enables network administrators to deploy networks without having to worry about, you know, old methods of configuring and monitoring the switches, right? So, this was built ground up with the notion that it has to support today's use cases, not overlay today's use cases onto, you know a switch that might have worked many years ago. So programmability was important, modernality was important. It is built on a basic premise that you know, the entire state of the network, the switch, is stored in a database that is accessible through modern interfaces. It allows you to take that switch, plug it into existing workflows that are more modern than to try and force feed these modern workflows be constrained by technologies that were invented fifteen, twenty years ago. So that is the one that's important, right? And in addition to all of the connectivity options, the speeds and feeds that we have to go build, it's extremely interesting and there are advances and innovation on that side. The one that excites me the most is the software layer in the switch, right, that allows for the programmability, it allows for visibility, right, I'm able to get access to all of the state of the switch, and any trouble, problems that I see, I can quickly get to the bottom of, and go back and fix it. But more importantly, the biggest innovation that I think we have, is this thing that we call the Network Analytics Engine. This is what gives you the extensibility property for the switch. Where your ability to go extend the capabilities of the switch in the field, right? Not have to for our engineers to tell what features, but people in the field, either customers or our own field engineers, can extend the capabilities of the switch to go do things that we didn't think of, but exist in the field. >> So before we get to asset tracking, I love the way this press release was worded. You kind of hit on it, John. 'Setting it apart from other core aggregation switches in the market, the 8400's most unique innovation is the Aruba OSCX, a modern software foundation that is a departure from today's static, inflexible operating systems.' I'm not sure exactly who you're talking about there, but nonetheless, so when you talk about this network analytics engine, Are you suggesting that makers of static inflexible operating system designs would have to bolt something like that on? And it would just not be as effective? Or would it not be possible? >> Well you have to go deeper into the operating system, and do major surgery for that to happen. And that is very hard to do. So if you already built it for a certain static use case, and you're trying to now introduce support on certain things in there, you will always be limited by what lies underneath, compared to if you look at the operating system Aruba OSCX, it was built from the ground up with the modalality and extensibility in mind including the programmability for configuring the switches. This is not something that you can bolt on later and go fix it, because you have to go very deep into the operating system, and there's a lot of major surgery work that is for a switch of this magnitude and size, the effort is as good as starting from scratch, throwing everything away and starting from scratch and building it new. That is very hard to do. >> And tell us about the asset tracking. Let's not, I didn't want to lose that either. >> Well the asset tracking, before we get that point. Operating systems are generally about connecting things, subsystems. You mentioned the wireless as an unpredictable. Which is true, I agree with that. Now Internet of Things is even more unpredictable, and the rate of devices connecting: a watch on someone's wrist, a wearable, a phone. We saw the new Apple announcements yesterday, we covered that on SiliconANGLE.com, again more and more consumer devices, and yet, industrial equipment. This is important, I mean, it's not just machinery, it's like, it could be the air conditioning, it could be anything. Thoughts on this asset tracking concept? >> Narasimhan: I'll start the IoT's side, and how it applies to the network, and get to the asset tracking. Let me start with an example. One of our university customers, in adding to the story, right, they said one day the facilities people called and said hey, we just went out and swapped out about 400 door locks in a residence hall with wifi enabled door locks, and then they turn on the 400 of them and they don't work, and the network people are saying sure it doesn't work, we're not surprised, because the network's not built to have arbitrary things come in and start working. But if you look at it from the people that are deploying this equipment, they just think hey, it's wifi, it should just connect and work, right? Versus people running the network have certain ways in which they have configured the network either for quality of service, or security, that, you have to understand. But the network admins are also in a state where they just say that battle is probably lost. People are going to add things to my environment and my job is to go make sure that I gracefully accept them in and fit the into a profile. In the security profile that I already have. So this is why the programmability is key, right? As door locks come in, chances are those door locks don't need to communicate with everything on the network. Maybe only to a very specific server that pushes policy on which keys should open a particular door, and which one's shouldn't, but if you look at network's specifically designed with a certain notion of trust, saying okay, I have a security perimeter. Whether it's a physical perimeter that allows me entry into the building, or a digital perimeter that, you know, I have a dmz in a firewall, but once you're on the inside, you're in a safe zone. That safe zone is being challenged by IoT, right? Because these devices are not capable to begin with. Think of an electronic door lock, and compare it with many other servers, and the compute capabilities and the servers on the showfloor, versus what is available in the door lock. By itself, it's starting out at a very huge disadvantage on that front. But more importantly, the compute capabilities of a door lock are frozen in time. And they tend to stay on the door for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. Versus the compute capabilities that are available to an attacker keeps pace with technology. So over time, the ability for the door lock to protect itself diminishes, right? And this is not just true of door locks, it's true of any of these IoT type of things that are getting added to the systems. So our goal is as we gracefully accept them and get them connected to the network and provide the network guys with the tools to kind of segment them into appropriate boundaries, we also have a need to go monitor their activity all the time. Because they become juicy targets for hackers. To get into and from there, propagate out to the rest of the network. So how do we know they're not getting attacked? Their vulnerability is not getting exploited, and the only way to do this is to continuously monitor them. But more importantly, to use a machine learning approach. A behavioral approach, rather than a signature based detection. So if I baseline behaviors of a certain IoT device, whether it's a door lock or a security camera, or any number of those, and whenever I see deviations from that baseline behavior, I want to alert somebody. Because, while it is an anomaly, and not all anomalies are malicious, but it could be potentially. And you need somebody to look at it, so how do we quickly detect that, okay, there's a deviation and is it malicious, and how do we react to it, and how do we shut it down? >> Now talk about the asset tracking announcement, because that's relevant to this show. What's the status, the news? What's the notable thing about the Aruba asset tracking? >> So the asset tracking is interesting on two counts: one is, when you want to track an asset, you need to attach a tag to it, that kind of puts out some notion of identity that I can attach to that asset. But there's also the infrastructure side of it, you need an infrastructure that picks up on these signals, and can locate the asset, and can figure out where all it's been, and who's kind of used it, and how it's getting used. So while we look at asset tags as one improvement, the infrastructure is also another improvement. Aruba we started down the bluetooth low energy as one of the elements for our location based services strategy, look at Meridian team as a central gravity for all location based services. We started out with beacons, and using the beacons as an indication of location, and then providing contextual information and semantic information about that location. But over time we've also recognized that in addition to beacons, we've integrated bluetooth into our access point. So any wireless LAN infrastructure that's based off of the Aruba solution that is getting deployed today is already ready for one half of the asset tracking solution, so the other half is the tags that we're introducing that can be attached to high value assets, and then together these two combine with a back end solution that not only provides you with where the assets are and where they've been, but also uses APIs to integrate with other asset tracking larger solutions that you might have. >> Furrier: So you're feeding data into a bigger picture on the edge? Alright, so let's talk about the fun stuff now. So we can get under the hood there. Getting a little technical, which is great. There's some real sexy deployments out that you guys have been involved in. One is, we've talked about, the folks watching theCUBE know, Levi Stadium in San Francisco, for the San Francisco 49ers is highly instrumented venue next is the provider, great service provider. You guys are the provider there. But it's interesting, this other use case. So talk about how the use cases are driving the value, and how people who are discovering these new value creation opportunities, how do they get there and give us some examples. >> So Levi Stadium, okay. We tend to talk about it a lot, but it also is because we learnt a lot of things as part of being, you know, we were fortunate to be part of that exercise. We learnt a lot of things, so one key learning was the people that built the stadium were very clear from the beginning, their competition was not another sporting venue, right? It's not the Oakland Raiders fans that they wanted to attract over into the stadium. They were very clear their competition was a TV in your living room. How do I convince a fan to not watch the game on the TV in their living room but instead to come into the stadium and watch it? So they said here's a list of experiences that I want to create for the fan that you can only have in the stadium, and that is compelling enough to get a fan into the stadium to watch the game. So once you define those, then it becomes a lot easier. The rest of it underlying here is all technology, and we know how to piece it together. So this was one of the first instances where we saw the whole infrastructure build out being driven top down, right? You define your experiences and then you work your way down on what kind of pieces of technology we need to go in there. Otherwise the networking industry was largely driven by hey, here's the connectivity infrastructure, and we'll figure what hooks are available, and then we'll figure out what you can do with it. >> Furrier: You constrain, naturally, with that. >> Correct, but if you start from the top, lot's of things become easier, right, what we need can be customized to go address the problem, specific problems if we want to go in there. And this is not something new. As you look at, yes it was true for the stadium, but retail stores have a similar problem, right, how do I convince a user to not buy a particular item online, and instead come into the store to do it? And Apple's done a pretty good job of it, the whole store is not a place where you go pick items off of the shelf, put it in your cart, and check it out. It is a place where you go and interact with the item. >> Experience! >> Experience, again. >> What other verticals are hot right now, obviously retail makes sense, sports makes sense, what other verticals- >> Narasimhan: Hospitality is another one where you want to create an experience that customers associate with a brand. If I can somehow make the whole process of you checking into a hotel room, and being in the hotel room and then checking out, if that whole experience can be made significantly better, then I'm going to associate it with that brand. And the next time I'm looking for a hotel- >> So it's an opportunity for brands to extend their brand value, digitally. >> Narasimhan: Correct. It is by creating a better experience in the physical world, you tie it to your brand, and customers associate it with it. And then you go into the workplace. Again, employees and how do I help improve their productivity with what kind of experiences? More and more workplaces are shifting to more open environments, all wireless workplace, because, you know, even if I had wires, there's nothing that I can plug into. I have three devices with me in my bag. Nothing with an Ethernet port in it. And we recently moved into a new facility in Santa Clarita. in January of this year, and the one thing you'll notice is that there are no wires running to where people sit. So when you go into an all wireless workplace, you convince users that it's viable, right, and the way to convince users it's viable is that the network is always there when they need it, when they need to do something on it. But the facilities people are also excited by the possibility, because it gives them a lot of flexibility in how they want to reconfigure space. >> Furrier: It's the future of work and the future of play kind of converging with analog and digital kind of coming together with experiences at the center, and wireless is the fabric for it all. >> Correct, and wireless is what enables mobility but more importantly location is the other fabric that interconnects the two worlds. If I can sense location on the digital side, location is an attribute of the physical world. That's what bridges the two together. >> Context, interest, location. These are all new variables, a whole new way of doing things. In fact, the modern mobility we suggest on SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE is this is going to be the future of work, the future of play, all around modern mobility. >> Narasimhan: Correct. >> Partha, thanks so much for sharing your insights. The CTO here of Aruba Wireless, doing some amazing things, enabling new possibilities here in a new simplified, sounds complex to me, but it sounds like you simplifying, as the new message from HP. Thanks for sharing your insights. Of course, we're bringing that modern day to you here on theCUBE live in Las Vegas, our exclusive coverage for three days. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, we'll be right back with more after this short break. (electronic music)