(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, fellow cloud nerds, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent, here in a fabulous Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host, John Furrier. John, how you feeling? >> Great, feeling good Just getting going. Day one of four more, three more days after today. >> Woo! Yeah. >> So much conversation. Talking about business transformation as cloud goes next level- >> Hot topic here for sure. >> Next generation. Data's classic is still around, but the next gen cloud's here, it's changing the game. Lot more AI, machine learning, a lot more business value. I think it's going to be exciting. Next segment's going to be awesome. >> It feels like one of those years where there's just a ton of momentum. I don't think it's just because we're back in person at scale, you can see the literally thousands of people behind us while we're here on set conducting these interviews. Our bold and brave guests, just like the two we have here, combating the noise, the libations, and everything else going on on the show floor. Please help me welcome Mike from Science Logic and Ajay from Zebrium. Gentlemen, welcome to the show floor. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Savannah. It's great to be here. >> How you feeling? Are you feeling the buzz, Mike? Feeling the energy? >> It's tough to not feel and hear the buzz, Savannah >> Savannah: Yeah. (all laughing) >> John: Can you hear me? >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you hear me now? What about you, Ajay? How's it feel to be here? >> Yeah, this is high energy. I'm really happy it's bounced back from COVID. I was a little concerned about attendance. This is hopping. >> Yeah, I feel it. It just, you can definitely feel the energy, the sense of community. We're all here for the right reasons. So I know that, I want to set the stage for everyone watching, Zebrium was recently acquired by Science Logic. Mike, can you tell us a little bit about that and what it means for the company? >> Mike: Sure, sure. Well, first of all, science logic, as you may know, has been in the monitoring space for a long time now, and what- >> Savannah: 20 years I believe. >> Yeah. >> Savannah: Just about. >> And what we've seen is a shift from kind of monitoring infrastructure, to monitoring these increasingly complex modern cloud native applications, right? And so this is part of a journey that we've been on at Science Logic to really modernize how enterprises of all sizes manage their IT estate. Okay? So, managing, now workloads that are increasingly in the public cloud, outside the four walls of the enterprise, workloads that are increasingly complex. They're microservices based, they're container based. >> Mhmm. >> Mike: And the rate of change, just because of things like CICD, and agile development has also increased the complexity in the typical IT environment. So all these things have conspired to make the traditional tools and processes of managing IT and IT applications much more difficult. They just don't scale. One of the things that we've seen recently, Savannah is this shift in sort of moving to cloud native applications, right? >> Huge shift. >> Mike: Today it only incorporates about roughly 25% of the typical IT portfolio, but most of the projections we've seen indicate that that's going to invert in about three years. 75% of applications will be what I call cloud native. And so this really requires different technologies to understand what's going on with those applications. And so Zebrium interested us when we were looking at partners at the beginning of this year as they have a super innovative approach to understanding really what's going on with any cloud native application. And they really distill, they separate the complexity out of the equation and they used machine learning to tremendous effect to rapidly understand the root cause of an application failure. And so I was introduced to Ajay, beginning of this year, actually. It feels like it's been a long time now. But we've been on this journey together throughout 2022, and we're thrilled to have Zebrium now, part of the Science Logic family. >> Ajay, Zebrium saves people a lot of time. Obviously, I've worked with developers and seen that struggle when things break, shortening that time to recovery and understanding is so critical. Can you tell us a little bit about what's under the hood and how the ML works to make that happen? >> Ajay: Yeah. So the goal is to figure out not just that something went wrong, but what went wrong. >> Savannah: Right. >> And we took, you know, based on a couple of decades of experience from my co-founders- >> Savannah: Casual couple of decades, came into went into this product just to call that out. Yeah, great. >> Exactly. It took some general learnings about the nature of software and when software breaks, what tends to happen, you tend to see unusual things happen, and they lead to bad things happening. It's very simple. >> Yes. >> It turns out- >> Savannah: Mutations lead to bad things happening, generally speaking. >> So what Zebrium's really good at is identifying those rare things accurately and then figuring out how they connect, or correlate to the bad things, the errors, the warnings, the alerts. So the machine learning has many stages to it, but at its heart it's classifying the event, catalog of any application stack, figuring out what's rare, and when things start to break it's telling you this cluster of events is both unusual, and unlikely to be random, and it's very likely the root cause report for the problem you're trying to solve. We then added some nice enhancements, such as correlation with knowledge spaces in, on the public internet. If someone's ever solved that problem before, we're able to find a match, and pull that back into our platform. But the at the heart, it was a technology that can find rare events and find the connections with other events. >> John: Yeah, and this is the theme of re:Invent this year, data, the role of data, solving end-to-end complexities. One, you mentioned that. Two, I think the Mike, your point about developers and the CICD pipeline is where DevOps is. That is what IT now is. So, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, or its path and continue it, IT is DevOps. So the developers are actually doing the IT in their coding, hence the shift to autonomous IT. >> Mike: Right, right. Now, those other functions at IT used to be a department, not anymore, or they still are, so, but they'll go away, is security and data teams. You're starting to see the formation of- >> Mike: Yep. >> New replacements to IT as a function to support the developers who are building the applications that will be the company. >> That's right. Yeah. >> John: I mean that's, and do you agree with that statement? >> Yeah, I really do. And you know, collectively independent of whether it's like traditional IT, or it's DevOps, or whatever it is, the enterprise as a whole needs to understand how the infrastructure is deployed, the health of that infrastructure, and more importantly the applications that are hosted in the infrastructure. How are they doing? What's the health? And what we are seeing, and what we're trying to facilitate at Science Logic is really changed the lens of IT, from being low level compute, storage, and networking, to looking at everything through a services lens, looking at the services being delivered by IT, back to the business, and understanding things through a services lens. And Zebrium really compliments that mission that we've been on, by providing, cause a lot of cases, service equal equal application, and they can provide that kind of very real time view of service health in, you know, kind of the IT- >> And automation is beautiful there too, because, as you get into some of the scale- >> Yeah >> Ajay's. understanding how to do this fast is a key component. >> Yeah. So scale, you, you've pinpointed one of the dimensions that makes AI really important when it comes to troubleshooting. The humans just can't scale as fast as data, nor can they keep up with complexity of modern applications. And the third element that we feel is really important is the velocity with which people are now rolling out changes. People develop new features within hours, push them out to production. And in a world like that, the human has just no ability or time to understand what's normal, what's bad, to update their alert rules. And you need a machine, or an AI technology, to go help you with that. And that's basically what we're about. >> So this is where AI Ops comes in, right? Perfectly. Yeah. >> Yeah. You know, and John started to allude to it earlier, but having the insight on what's going on, we believe is only half of the equation, right? Once you understand what's going on, you naturally want to take action to remediate it or optimize it. And we believe automation should not be an exercise that's left to the reader. >> Yeah. >> As a lot of traditional platforms have done. Instead, we have a very robust, no-code, low-code automation built into our platform that allows you to take action in context with what you're seeing right then and there with the service. >> John: Yeah. Essentially monitoring, a term you use observability, some used as a fancy word today, is critical in all operating environments. So if we, if we kind of holistically, hey we're a distributed computing system, aka cloud, you got to track stuff at scale and you got to understand what it, what the impact is from a systems perspective. There's consequences to understanding what goes wrong. So as you look at that, what's the challenge for customers to do that? Because that seems to be the hard part as they lift and shift to the cloud, run their apps on the cloud, now they got to go take it to the next level, which is more developer velocity, faster productivity, and secure. >> Yeah. >> I mean, that seems to be the table stakes now. >> Yeah. >> How are companies forming around that? Are they there yet? Are they halfway there? Are they, where are they in the progression of, one, are they changing? And if so- >> Yeah that's a great question. I mean, I think whether it's an IT use case or a security use case, you can't manage what you don't know about. So visibility, discoverability, understanding what's going on, in a lot of ways that's the really hard problem to solve. And traditionally, we've approached that by like, harvesting data off of all these machines and devices in the infrastructure. But as we've seen with Zebrium and with related machine learning technologies, there's multiple ways of gaining insight as to what's going on. Once you have the insight be it an IT issue, like a service outage, or a security vulnerability, then you can take action. And the idea is you want to make that action as seamless as possible. But I think to answer your question, John, enterprises are still kind of getting their heads around how can we break down all the silos that have built up over the last decade or two, internally, and get visibility across the estate that really matters. And I think that's the real challenge. >> And I mean, and, at the velocity that applications are growing, just looking at our notes here, number of applications scaling from 64 million in 2017 to 147 million in 2021. That goes to what you were talking about, even with those other metrics earlier, 582 million by 2026 is what Morgan Stanley predicts. So, not only do we need to get out of silos we need to be able to see everything all the time, all at once, from the past legacy, as well as as we extend at scale. How are you thinking about that, Ajay? You're now with a big partner as an umbrella. What's next for you all? How, how are you going to help people solve problems faster? >> Yeah, so one of the attractions to the Zebrium team about Science Logic, aside from the team, and the culture, was the product portfolio was so complimentary. As Mike mentioned, you need visibility, you need mapping from low level building blocks to business services. And the end, at the end of the spectrum, once you know something's wrong you need to be able to take action automatically. And again, Science Logic has a very strong product, set of product capabilities and automated actions. What we bring to the table is the middle layer, which is from visibility, understanding what went wrong, figuring out the root cause. So to us, it was really exciting to be a very nice tuck in into this broader platform where we helped complete the story. >> Savannah: Yeah, that's, that's exciting. >> John: Should we do the Insta challenge? >> I was just getting ready to do that. You go for it John. You go ahead and kick it off. >> So we have this little tradition now, Instagram real, short and sweet. If you were going to see yourself on Instagram, what would be the Instagram reel of why this year's re:Invent is so important, and why people should pay attention to what's going on right now in the industry, or your company? >> Well, I think partly what Ajay was saying it's good to be back, right? So seeing just the energy and being back in 3D, you know en mass, is awesome again. It really is. >> Yeah. >> Mike: But, you know, I think this is where it's happening. We are at an inflection point of our industry and we're seeing a sea change in the way that applications and software delivered to businesses, to enterprises. And it's happening right here. This is the nexus of it. And so we're thrilled to be here as a part of all this, and excited about the future. >> All right, Ajay- >> Well done. He passes >> Your Instagram reel. >> Knowing what's happening in the broader economy, in the business context, it's, it feels even more important that companies like us are working on technologies that empower the same number of people to do more. Because it may not be realistic to just add on more headcount given what's going on in the world. But your deliverables and your roadmaps aren't slowing down. So, still the same amount of complexity, the same growth rates, but you're going to have to deal with all of that with fewer resources and be smarter about it. So, the approaches we're taking feel very much off the moment, you know, given what's going on in the real world. >> I love it. I love it. I've got, I've got kind of a finger to the wind, potentially hardball question for you here to close it out. But, given that you both have your finger really on the pulse right here, what percentage of current IT operations do you think will eventually be automated by AI and ML? Or AI ops? >> Well, I think a large percentage of traditional IT operations, and I'm talking about, you know, network operating center type of, you know, checking heartbeat monitors of compute storage and networking health. I think a lot of those things are going to be automated, right? Machine learning, just because of the scale. You can't scale, you can't hire enough NOC engineers to scale that kind of complexity. But I think IT talents, and what they're going to be focusing on is going shift, and they're going to be focusing on different parts. And I believe a lot of IT is going to be a much more of an enabler for the business, versus just managing things when they go wrong. So that's- >> All right. >> That's what I believe is part of the change. >> That's your, all right Ajay what about your hot take? >> Knowing how error-prone predictions are, (all laughing) I'll caveat my with- >> Savannah: We're allowing for human error here. >> I could be wildly wrong, but if I had to guess, you know, in 10 years you know, as much as 50% of the tasks will be automated. >> Mike: Oh, you- >> I love it. >> Mike: You threw a number out there. >> I love it. I love that he put his finger out- >> You got to see, you got to say the matrix. We're all going to be part of the matrix. >> Well, you know- >> And Star Trek- >> Skynet >> We can only turn back to this footage in a few years and quote you exactly when you have the, you know Mackenzie Research or the Morgan Stanley research that we've been mentioning here tonight and say that you've called it accurately. So I appreciate that. Ajay, it was wonderful to have you here. Congratulations on the acquisition. Thank you. Mike, thank you so much for being here on the Science Logic side, and congratulations to the team on 20 years. That's very exciting. John. Thank you. >> I try, I tried. Thank you. >> You try, you succeed. And thank you to all of our fabulous viewers out there at home. Be sure and tweet us at theCUBE. Say hello, Furrier, Sav is savvy. Let us know what you're thinking of AWS re:Invent where we are live from Las Vegas all week. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. My name's Savannah Peterson, and we'll see you soon. (upbeat music)

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello everyone welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto California I'm John Fourier host of the cube we are in the cube studios we're here with Ranga Rao's Senior Director of Product Management Cisco Networking group and David link the CEO of science logic tell what their part is guys great to see you thanks I come in it glad to be here so you guys had a great event by the way symposium in DC thanks a lot of momentum yeah it was fun to watch he was there eight videos up on YouTube but you guys are classic partnership here with Cisco talk about the relationship you guys are meeting in the channel got a lot of joint customers a lot of innovation talk about the relationship between science logic and Cisco Cisco and science logic have been working together because our customers demand us to work together right so across more for more than 10 years science logic has been a strong part of for Cisco working across various different business units when we started working on ACI which is application centric infrastructure which is the product that my group works on we thought science logic was a perfect partner to work with and in fact some of our joint customers including Cisco IT which is a customer of science logic two came to the table and said we needed an integration with science logic so customers are a huge part of the genesis of the partnership and that's what keeps us going together and the fact that we have such strong synergies from a technology perspective makes it really easy for us to collaborate and the fact that we have both open platforms with strong api's makes it really easy for us to collaborate and this is the real haveá-- we're here to the chalk tracks around you know these API so this abstraction software layer zci has kind of gone the next level we covered that at Cisco live Dave we talked before about your value proposition you're on the front lines Cisco obviously has this new programmability model where their goal is to leverage the value the network abstract away the complexities and allow people to get more value out of it how is that working in what and how do you guys tie into Cisco it's really an ecosystem of technologies and partnerships that deliver outcomes for customers Cisco's advancing technology so fast we've seen an innovation sprint from Cisco it's actually causing us to sprint with them on behalf of their customers but ultimately we've had to introduce deep integrated monitoring across all the fabrics that they support for software-defined and that includes visibility into the ACCAC eye fabrics but it also goes through into the virtual machines the storage layers the operating systems the application layer so when you pull all of that together that's a day to challenge for the enterprise to make sure they're delivering outcomes to the customer that are above expectations recently we supported support for multi-site and multi pod ACI fabric we're working on a CI anywhere in the cloud we're really Cisco's extending the datacenter hyper-converged solutions to deliver value propositions no matter where the applications live so that's a huge step forward and then it causes operational initiatives to say how are we going to solve that problem for our customers no matter where the application lives so that's really where we're focused helping solve problems on that day to side of make all these technologies come to collect together to deliver a great outcome for the end-user and so they're enabling you with the with the ACI if a hyper converges to go out and do your thing yes so we instrument all those different really abstracted components because what we have with container management with Software Defined it's abstraction on top of core routes which and server and hypervisor technologies that bring it together in an intuitive way ultimately what we've seen from the enterprise and service providers is they really want infrastructure delivered as a service and that's really where Cisco's headed helping make that a reality with these products we just helped bring them together with the instrumentation analytics to operate them as one system you know ranking this is a great example of what we're seeing in this modern era with the data center on premises modernization growth of the cloud the advent of you know real hybrid cloud and private cloud as well as public cloud you guys are in a good position so I want to kind of dig into some talk tracks one you mentioned day two operates I've heard that term kicked around before cuz this is kind of speaks to this modernization in IT operations you know enabling an environment for you know Network compute storage to work seamlessly this is this is the real deal what is day to operations can you like define what that is yeah so our customers essentially go through the journey of building and network for some purpose to deliver an application or a service to their end users so the we think of the process of them building the network is day zero configuring the network for the particular operator a particular service as day one and everything that they deal with which is a lot of complexity which is they where they spend 80% of their time 90% of their budget has data operations which is a very complex domain so this is the area that we have been focusing within our business unit to make our customers lives easier with products that essentially solve some of these problems and collaborating with partners like science logic to make the operations of our customers much easier a important part of data operations is making sure that we provide the light right kind of abstractions for our customers initially customers used to configure switches on a switch by switch basis using command line interfaces with obscure commands what we have done within the data center as of like 2014 is brought in the application centric abstraction so customers can configure the network in the language of the application which is the intent interesting you know I'm old enough to remember those days of standing those networks up day one day zero on day one but I think day two has become really the new environment because day 2 operates was simply you know make sure the lights are on provision the switches top of racks all that stuff that went on and then you managed it you had your storage administrator all these things we're kind of static perimeter based security all that now is kind of thrown away so I think day two is almost like the reality of the situation because you now have micro services you've got apps and DevOps manding to have the agility and programmability the network so I got to ask is if that's true and you got cloud over the top happening this means that the software has to be really rock-solid because it's not getting less complex it's getting more complex so it's what is science logic fit in today too we've been focused on all these different technologies you bring together so from an intent based perspective Cisco's been really focused on intent based solutions but that lines up to a business service the business service is made up of a lot of different technologies that can come from many different locations to deliver you an application to you where you're super satisfied with an outcome its delivering productivity to you all the great things that you're hoping to experience when you interact with an application but behind the scenes there's a whole myriad of technologies that we instrument from a fault configuration performance analytics and really an analysis perspective to see all these multivariate data streams coming together in a hub where we can analyze them and understand the relationships the context of how all of those data feeds come together to enable a service so if we know that service view again no matter where the service is coming from in Cisco is now supporting ECI anywhere so that service could be sitting in a lot of different places today and we're seeing more and more hybrid applications and I think that's around for a long time to stay for good reasons security compliance and other reasons you've got to bring all that together and understand real time the real time operational viewpoint of how is it now and more so that proactive insight to know if you have an anomaly across any one of these performance variants how that may impact the service so is it going to be impacting the service and really help operations stay proactive I think that's where the DevOps and focuses right now look at evolution of DevOps gene King was on the cube said 3% of enterprises have adopted Ewa certainly there's the early adopters we all know who they are they're there DevOps cloud native from day one but really the adoption of DevOps is not yet there on mainstream is getting there but you're speaking to day two operations as kind of like operations you mentioned developers the apps that needs to be built to require all this infrastructure program ability this is where I think a CIS can I guess you need intrument ation so you need IT ops and you got to have program ability of the network but everyone's talking about automation so to me it sounds like there's an automation story in here if you got an instrument everything you got to have move beyond command line and configuring is that how does that fit it how's the automation finish yeah absolutely first of all within the ACI fabric we have we have a controller based approach so there's a single place of managing the entire infrastructure today we have customers who use two hundred-plus physicals which is being managed by a single point that's a huge amount of automation for provisioning the network from the perspective of managing the network the controller continuously looks at what's going on and essentially we have a product core network assurance engine which look which are which is a second pair of eyes which will tell you proactively if there are problems in the network right but a broader automation is needed where you can actually look at information from various different silos because network as important as we as cisco think is one part of the whole puzzle rate information comes from many different places so there's a platform that's needed where people can funnel in pieces of information from various different places and analyze that pieces of information figure out trends find the things that are of interest to them and operate in a data-driven fashion they want to get your thoughts on this next talk track around the impact of the cloud because if this happens the automations is pretty much agreed upon the industry therefore we've gotta automate things that are repetitive mundane tasks and certainly the network's a lot of command line stuff that can be automated away value will shift to other places but with the impact of cloud operation the operational side of the data center is looking more and more cloud like so in a way whether the debate of moving to the private cloud versus on-premises goes away and it becomes more of a cloud operation story on-premises multi-cloud on public clouds is kind of a new system this is the operational shift this is where all the action is talk about your perspective on this because this is kind of like you know it's not a simple saying lift and shift and moving into the cloud it's I want cloud like economics I want cloud like elasticity I want all that benefit on premises that's day two in my opinion would you agree I do and I think that's sometimes lost on the industry that we have a lot of clouds that we have to serve and for good purpose they're gonna live in different places but back to the earlier comment you've got to then pull information into a data hub I'll just call it in an architecture of data where you've got it from multiple sources whether it's clouds or private hyper-converged the wireless to the end-user all these different layers often that are being abstracted we've got to really understand how that relates to a user experience so when we think about what are the end results we're trying to achieve we're trying to be proactive so among the things that we're working on from a vision perspective instead of thinking about waiting for a system across any one of these tiers to have a fault where it tells you I've got a problem here's a trap here's a log I've experienced this problem we really want to do a lot more on the front end that performance analytics the anomaly detection to get across multivariate all these very 'it's mean this kind of performance health and in a performance score cisco has been investing heavily here we have as well jointly for some of our customers what I'd like to see in the future our vision is that you rely less on fault management and more on the proactive analytics side so that you understand anomalous behavior and how that could impact your experience as an end-user and fix it through automation before there is a problem so that's a very different thought I'd love to say our industry should in the future worry less about event correlation and more about predictive behavior so that's where we're spending a lot I don't like so wherever the false look for the goodness to I mean where's the zag lesion but you have to have all these data streams and you have to understand how they can textually relate to one another to make those important decisions and recommendations well you know I've always said this on the cube you can you know in this world of digital you can instrument everything so you soon it's going to be a matter of time for seeing what everything's happening but knowing what to look at it's kind of like what you're getting at yes hey Rach I talked about your your perspective because again and one of the things that Dave Volante and I just do many we talk about all the time on the cube is we debate this cloud conversation because I think my opinion is it's one big distributed architecture second operating system the cliff it's all the cloud they're all edges nodes and arcs on a distributed a dissenter certainly isn't going away but if everything is a network connection well that's the edge your data center you got this is you're in the business of networking right what's your take on all this because you know if it's a cloud operations it's a shift from the old IT to the new IT what's your perspective on this so the moniker that we have been using this year is that there's nothing centered about the data centers like you said there are workloads that reside in many different environments including the cloud so customers are demanding consistent operations and consistent management capabilities across this many different environments right so you're right the data center itself is turning out more to be like a cloud and we have even seen large cloud providers like offer solutions that sit within a customer's data center right so that's one area in which the words evolving another area is in terms of all the tools that are coming together to solve some of the operational problems to be more predictive and more proactive yeah you know I like to draw horns sometimes too many minute we keep on coin the term private cloud years ago and everyone was throwing hate at them you know on the way I don't know what's this private cloud nonsense if that's what's happening there's a private cloud it's a hybrid cloud multiple clouds you have public cloud and again you're gonna have multi purpose pick the right cloud for the workload kind of environment going on kind of like the way the tools business would but it's still platform so so guys thanks for coming in and sharing your insights I really appreciate that before we go take a minute to get the plug in for what you guys are working on give the company update what's going on you're hiring revenues up what's happening give us a state of the science logic what's going on so we had a great first quarter the best first quarter in the history of the company the health of the business is good I think the underlying theme is the transform of infrastructure is causing a lot of people to rethink the monitoring tooling as to how do we need to manage in this new operating environment you mentioned DevOps I think the real key there is the developer really wants to have the application be infrastructure aware and he needs good information coming from not 50 places but from a trusted place where he can make sure the application knows about how all the infrastructure that's supporting it no matter where it is is behaving and that's really the wind behind the sales driving our business we grew quarter-over-quarter sequentially with our subscription over a hundred percent in q1 so we're really thrilled with where the business is headed excited about the momentum and this is a really important partnership for us because everybody uses Cisco all of our enterprise customer service provider government customers Cisco is embedded in virtually every customer that we work with so we have to have the best support kind of that thought leadership of support for our customers for them to entrust management of those core applications through our platform right it gives a quick plug for the data center networking group what's happening there what's the the hot items what's the with give the plug quickly so very quickly I think the journey that we have been on is a CI any where to take a CI and its management and operations paradigm to many different environments we introduced support for AWS earlier in this year we are working on support for Azure and soon we'll have support for Google public clouds in all these environments we want our customers to have consistent experience and the way we get that is through solutions working with partners where we offer consistent solutions across all these environments for our customers and working with science logic as a very important partner to solve problems for our joint customers and you guys have always had a great Channel great ecosystem now you have not new for you to partner yeah we have like open API is open platform 65 plus partners that we work with so all customer focus well let me put you on the spot one last question got you here because your guru and networking and you know you've been around the block you've seen the different waves what's the biggest wake-up call that customers are having with respect to the old way of doing networking and the new way cuz clearly everyone has come to the realization that the perimeter based security model and static networking has to be more dynamic what's the big wake-up call that you think customers are seeing now with this new modern era I think customers are realizing more and more how important technologies part of it as part of their business sometimes it even drives the techni drives the business and helps customers make ditions on what's the right path to take for their business so what this applications become really important and the nerve center which is the network that supports the application becomes really important so customers are demanding us to build the best network possible to support this modern world that's continuously evolving so did you think a stab at that customer wake-up call what's your perspective on this what's the big R from your experience over the years you can't use tools that were built 20 years ago to continue operating global networks so we see a lot of the industry it's about a ten billion dollar total addressable market changing over because the market fit of the old tools that people have relied upon for many years aren't solving modern problems Oh guys thanks for the insight appreciating and good to see the partnership doing well thanks for coming into the cube studio we have Ranga Rao senior director of product management Cisco Networking group and David Lynch CEO of science logic here for cube conversation I'm Sean Fourier thanks for watching you [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> From Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D.C. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest but a long-time customer of ScienceLogic, Karl Fosburg, who's the senior director of systems integration at Hughes. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so we're here in D.C., and that's important 'cause first of all, you're based down here, and ScienceLogic is based down here. >> Yup. Bring us back a little bit. You said you'd been a customer a long time as to... maybe give us a little bit of the before picture, if you could. >> Sure, so yeah, we've been a customer for 12 years now, and we picked ScienceLogic for a big list of reasons, actually wrote the RFI itself, and probably 20 pages long. Lots of people came back and gave us responses. ScienceLogic was one of the short-listed candidates that we picked out. We did a bake-off with a couple other vendors, and ScienceLogic was the clear winner. >> All right. So Karl, lets zoom out for a second here >> Okay. and just give us a level set on Hughes, what Hughes is today. You know, I'm familiar with what Hughes was back in the day and there's certain pieces that are no longer there so give us a level set on the company in the business. >> Yeah, sure. So, Hughes is formally known as Hughes Network Systems, were owned by EchoStar Corporation and we're a managed service provider. We have a consumer business where we provide broadband internet to folks that live really out in the countryside and can't get cable, or DSL, or FIOS, things like that. We have about 1.4 million subscribers in our consumer business. We've also launched consumer services in South America, Brazil, Ecuador, Columbia, places like that. Really serving under-served areas for giving them broadband. We also have an enterprise business where we sell to credit card processing, gas and oil, pipelines, fast foods, places like that. >> Okay. So Karl, is it safe to say you use satellites but no longer put them into space? >> We use satellites, that's correct. We contract that out now. Yeah, we are the last remaining Hughes company. >> Yeah. So, service providers are always fascinating to me because we talk about enterprise IT and how fast things are changing. At least for my entire career, when I talk to service providers, change and growth is really just baked into the DNA. >> Yep. I need to move fast. When you talk about scale, it means something very different and living in that complex world, and just give us a little bit about what things are like in 2019 for you. >> Sure, yeah. The scale is always our challenge. Like I like to say, we have sales people too and they're out there selling new products and services constantly. So we needed to be able to grow with those sales. We started out with a couple thousand devices that needed monitor in applications. Now we're up to almost 30 thousand Nox systems that we monitor. Also, we're keeping track of nearly 2 million terminals and the status of them and things like that. So, yeah, scale is super important to us. >> Okay. So, bring us inside, where ScienceLogic fits into your equation. >> Sure. So when we put out our FI to industry years ago, we were trying to replace a whole bunch of different tools. We had other vendor products and things like that. We really wanted to consolidate tools as much as possible into a single platform. Traditional ICNP, SNMP monitoring is how we originally started. Now we have lots and lots of integration with other tools, APM products, different streaming media products. We're integrating more and more with streaming services now in terms of getting data into the platform. So, yeah ... >> Yeah. Karl, I'd love to get your viewpoint. Something that came through to me in the keynote is on the one hand the years like, oh, well AIOps is going to replace things like some of the traditional players here, but then you see onto the stage it's like, oh okay, we're actually going to have integrations with a number of these tools. So yes, there's overlap but it needs to be integrated. How do you look at that as, is this the primary product? Is this a piece of the product? How do data collection between all these various tools go together? Well, that's a great question 'cause that's exactly what we and lots of other folks are grappling with right now. We've got data producers all over the place now, and we're really focused on the data production and high quality data back at the source into a real pub-sub type of architecture of which we believe that ScienceLogic will be both a producer and consumer of that pub-sub architecture, and whether it's the one tool to rule them all or not? Probably not, no ones going to be that, and we've got lots of vendors that purport to be the one tool to rule them all. But really, we're focused on ScienceLogic at this point to be really the focus, especially for our operations folks. We've got 24/7 staff. They use ScienceLogic as their main tool that they go to. So that's really where we want the data to end. That's where we want as much intelligence to end as possible. >> So, I'd be curious... You've been using the tool for a dozen years now. 12 years ago the discussion of data wasn't no where near what it was today. >> Correct. Can you bring us through a little bit of that journey, and you mentioned data a bunch, but how important is that? Where are you in your journey for... There was that maturity model that was put up there, the role of data today, and where do you see it going? >> Well, data is everything today. 12 years ago we were grappling with things like naming conventions and simple firewall rules and whatnot. Those days are long, long past. Now, the data quality and the pipeline is what we're focused on right now 'cause like Dave said in the keynote, "Garbage in, garbage out". We're really really focused on trying to get good quality data by focusing on the source of the data. As opposed to fixing it after it's been moved into whatever platform it ends up in. So we're using proper scheme of management and trying to bake-day the governance into the actual engineered products, and if it's not governed data then you don't get to look at it. And that's really our focus. We're an engineering company at heart so we actually write most of our own software. So we're kind of in control of our own destiny there, and we're really focused on pushing that back because we think the benefits in the long run are going to be worth that investment to get clean data all the way back to the source. >> Yeah. So Karl, one of the big shifts I've seen in the last few years... When you talked about managing and monitoring, I used to as the administrator or controller, used to be able to go and touch all of those pieces. Today, there's more and more some of those pieces I need to manage not just the stuff that's in my environment or my hosted environment, but outside of my environment and doing public clouds. >> Yep. >> Bring us up to speed as to where does Cloud fit? What's your Cloud strategy? >> Sure. We're actually launching some of our first applications in GCP right now. So we're working with our Google partners in this particular case to integrate the data that they can collect natively in their systems, bring it back in as actionable events into ScienceLogic platform, while keeping the vast majority of the data native to their platform. No need to bring back application specific data unless we're actually going to do something with it, or if we need to cross-correlate it with other information. The data sources live in our data centers, not in GCP. So we need to combine it with information we know about, our on-prem equipment, plus the applications running there. So that's the data we'll bring back to cross correlate. >> How do you decide what lives where, and where does ScienceLogic fit in the whole discussion? >> Yeah, that's a good question. What lives where... We kind of go back to license models and cost models. We're pretty good sticklers about focus on doing proper upfront analysis to make sure we don't end up with some six or seven figure bill at the end of the year from a Cloud provider. We also tend to do a lot of stuff on-prem because a lot of our systems have to run in one of our data centers. If you've ever driven past our building you'll see these large large dish's antennas outside. A lot of our equipment has to be within milliseconds or microseconds even of those dishes. So we actually have a large data center presence kind of scattered around the country and around the world. So, we have the compute resources to do it ourselves. >> Yeah, and even I would think edge computing something that plays into what you're doing. What do you see as some of the main challenges as the kind of footprint for what you're doing and things to spread out more? >> Yeah. Keeping, let's say pet projects, and shadow IP projects, keeping them in check is a really big focus right now, and also with DevOps sort of the "I'll do everything, I'm going to be my own IP department" philosophy is a new challenge that we're facing. So integrating with what the DevOps guys are building into our overall monitoring strategy, that's when a new challenge has really creeped up or it last, lets say six months or a year. >> Okay. Is there an intersection between your use of the ScienceLogic in the DevOps team yet? >> Not a big one yet. I think we're still learning DevOps at this point. I consider it a lifestyle change, not really a thing that you go get. So, I think we're still kind of early adoption for DevOps, and really only greenfield projects at this point in time. >> Okay. How about the term of the show is AIOps, so what's your act in the AIOps? Where do things like machine learning and automation fit into your environment? >> Yeah. We actually have quite a few used cases where we really think that machine learning is going to help us a lot. Cross-correlation is a big area for us. We have lots of information, but figuring it out, feeding like the APMs and Cisco ACI software defined networking, and those bits of information all into one product, we've been challenging ScienceLogic on this for quite a while. It's like, okay, you guys know about everything now. Tell us something that we didn't know before, and that's kind of where we're at, and seeing the announcements from this morning was really encouraging that we're finally see the horizon at this point. >> Yeah. If you can, (mumble), but how has ScienceLogic been doing on the roadmap? What helps between ScienceLogic and your vendor ecosystem out there? What more could they be doing to make your life easier? >> Yeah, that's a good question. So, if you would ask me that a year ago I probably wouldn't have been as encouraged as I am today. It was a challenge and they're engineering company, we're an engineering company. Sometimes you have to focus on foundation, and it's not cool, it's not sexy, it's not shiny, but you have to do it. And I think they've been focused a lot on their foundational aspects of the product which will actually enable doing things like machine learning. There's no point in doing machine learning if you have bad data or if you have a platform that doesn't support very very fast queries, and the graph QL database. We think that we're going to use that extensively and through the API, not even through the UIs. So, I think foundation is important. I think they focused on it for the last couple of years. I think we're finally going to start to see the benefits of it. Both single factor sort of machine learning, anomaly detection, but we really want to see it on a cross domain. I want to be able to see in ScienceLogic impacted by in our full stack environment. >> Yeah. I'd expect you probably had some visibility into what was coming up in the Big Ben release. Is there anything that jumped out at you, or that you're ready to use day one? >> The automations, for sure. We'll use that definitely day one. The way they've gone through and really made it a lot easier to use. You don't have to be a python developer anymore to actually get a lot of benefits out of the product. So I can turn that over to some of our junior engineers to actually handle those things, and we get a lot more sophisticated with them now. Primarily we used to focus on, "oh, let's send an email" type of thing. Now we can actually execute back-end actions without having to have a programmer to do it. So that right away we're going to use out of box. >> Okay. And in that forward looking piece, without breaking any visibility you have into their roadmap, what would you like to see more? >> I'd like to see more getting performance data into their real scalable, laterally scalable back end. And that's certainly an area that I'd love to see as much progress as fast as possible on. Also the Pub-Sub subscribing to streams coming out of our Kafka cluster. We want that to be in the product as soon as possible 'cause we really believe that that's where the majority of our data of the future is going to come from. Also, new applications, they come and go. Docker containers spin up, spin down. So the state of something is no longer fixed and we need to be able to integrate with Kubernetes and our open shift platform to be able to know, "Well what should be running right now?" So, those are the things that are on our roadmap that we need out of the product as soon as possible. >> Yeah. So it definitely came to me that ScienceLogic's listening. Are they moving fast enough for you? >> No. No ones ever moved fast enough. So, yeah, they're moving so that's good, but yeah, I could use it today if they had it. >> All right. Karl, last thing, you've been to a few of the ScienceLogic events in the past. You've been to other industry shows, what's special about the show? What brings you and your team to ScienceLogic symposiums? >> One of the things that ScienceLogic does a really good job is they bring a lot of resources here, and actual resources that actually know stuff. It's not just telling me, "Oh, that shiny new object is going to be in the platform at some indeterminate time in the future." It's the actual engineers, people writing code, product managers, things like that. So having access directly to the people who actually do the platform updates and changes is super valuable. The new sensor where we can touch and feel, take attires on new things has been excellent this year. So I think that's probably the thing, just quick access to all the resources. We have a bit of an advantage, we're only 45 minutes up the road. We can come down here as need be to visit their headquarters but having everyone here at one time is great. >> All right. Well Karl Forsberb, really appreciate you sharing your history and experience in future direction as to where things are going on your end. >> All right. >> I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from ScienceLogic 2019. Thanks for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(energetic music) >> From Washington D.C., It's theCUBE! Covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> Welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. Happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests from ScienceLogic, to my left is Leslie Minnix-Wolfe, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing. And to her left, is Russ Elsner, who's the Senior Director of Product Strategy. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you sir. >> Good, good to be here. >> All right, so Leslie let's start with you. Talk a lot about the product, a whole lot of announcements, Big Ben on the keynote this morning. Everybody's in, getting a little bit more of injection in the keynote today. Tell us a little bit about your roll, what you work on inside of ScienceLogic. >> Okay, so I am basically responsible for enterprise product marketing. So my job is to spin the story and help our sales guys successfully sell the product. >> All right, and Russ. >> I'm part of the product strategy team. So, I have product management responsibilities. I work a lot with the analytics and applications. And I spend a lot of time in the field with our customers. >> All right so, Leslie let's start with enterprise, the keynote this morning. The themes that I hear at many of the shows, you know we talk about things like digital transformation. But, we know the only constant in our environment is change. You know, it's good. I've actually talked to a couple of your customers and one of them this morning he's like "Look, most people don't like change. "I do, I'm embracing it I'm digging in, It's good." But, you know, we have arguments sometimes in analyst circles. And it's like are customers moving any faster. My peers that have been in the industry longer, they're like, Hogwash Stu. They never move faster they don't want change, we can't get them to move anything. I'm like, come on, if they don't the alternative is often, You're going to be... You know, you're competitors are going to take advantage of data and do things better. So, bring us a little bit of insight as what you're hearing from your customers both here and in your day to day. >> Sure, yeah, change is constant now and so one of the big challenges that our customers are facing is how do I keep up with it. The traditional manual processes that they've had in place for years are just not sufficient anymore. So they're looking for ways to move faster, to automate some of the processes that they've been doing manually. To find ways to free up resources to focus on things that do require a human to be involved. But they really need to have more automation in their day to day operations. >> All right, so Russ when I look at this space you know, tooling, monitoring has been something that in my career, has been a little bit messy. (laughter) Guess a little bit of an understatement even. It's an interesting... When I look at, kind of, that balance between what's happening in the infrastructure space and the application space. I went through, one of your partners over here is like "from legacy to server lists and how many weeks." (laughter) And I'm like okay that sounds good on a slide but, these things take awhile. >> Absolutely. Bring us inside a little bit, kind of the the application space an how that marries with the underlying pieces and monitoring. >> Yeah, you have a lot of transformations happening. There's a lot of new technologies and trends happening. You hear about server lists or containers or microservices. And that does represent a part of the application world. There are applications being written with those technologies. But, one of the things is that those applications don't live in isolation. It's that there part of broader business services and we're not rewriting everything and so the new shiny application and the new framework has to work with the old legacy application. So, a big piece of what we see is how do we collapse those different silos of information? How do we merge that data into something meaningful? You can have the greatest Kubernetes based microservice application but, if it requires a SAP instance it's on PRIM it's on Bare Metal. Those things need to work together. So, how do you work with an environment that's like that? Enterprise, just by it's nature is incredibly heterogeneous, lot's of different technologies and that's not going to change. >> Yeah. It's going to be that way. >> You're preaching to the choir, here. You know, IT it always seems additive the answer is always and. And, unfortunately, nothing ever dies. By the way you want to run that wonderful Kubernetes Docker stuff and everything. I could do it on a mainframe with Z Linux. So, from that environment to the latest greatest hypercloud environment >> Right. Talk a little bit about your customers. Most of them probably have hundreds of applications. They're working through that portfolio. What goes where, how do I manage all of those various pieces, and not kill my staff? (laughter) One of the things we're spending a lot of time with this, is that obviously, we come from a background of infrastructure management. So, we understand the different technologies different layers and the heterogeneous nature and on top of that runs application. So they have their own data and there's APM space. So we're seeing a lot of interest in the work we're doing with taking our view of the infrastructure and marrying it to the application view that we're getting from tools like Appdynamics or Dynatrace or New Relic. And so, we're able to take that data and leverage it on top of the infrastructure to give you a single view which aids in root cause analysis, capacity planning and all the different things that people want to do. Which lead us to automation. So, this idea of merging data from lots of sources is a big theme for us. >> All right so, Leslie who are some of the key constituents that you're talking to, to messaging to. In the industry we talked about silos for so many time. And now it's like oh, we're going to get architects and generalists. And you know cloud changes everything, yes and no. (laughter) We understand where budgets sit for most CIO's today. So, bring us inside what you're seeing. >> Sure. Yeah, we're seeing a tremendous change. Where before we use to talk more to the infrastructure team, to the folks managing the servers, the storage the network. We're really seeing a broader audience. And a multiple constituent. We're looking at directors, VP's, CIO's, CEO's, architects. We're starting to see more people that are tools managers, folks that are involved in the application side of the house. So, it's really diverged. So, you're not going in and talking to one person you're talking to lots of different teams, lots of different organizations that need to work together. To Russ's point in about being able to bring all this data together. As you bring it together, those different stakeholders have more visibility into each others areas. And they also have a better understanding of what the impact is when something goes down in the infrastructure, how it effects the app and vice versa. >> Leslie, the other thing I'm wondering if you can help me squint through, when I looked at the landscape, it's, you know, my ITSM's I've got my logging, I've got all my various tools and silos. When I hear something like, actually, your CEO Dave just said "Oh, we just had a customer that replaced 50 tools." with there it's like, How do you target that? How does a customer know that they have a solution that they have a challenge that you fit, Because, you understand, you can't be all things to all people. You've got certain partners that might claim that kind of thing. >> Right But, where you fit in the marketplace how do you balance that? >> Well, so I think what we're seeing now is that there have been some big players for a long time. What we refer to fondly as the Big Four. And those companies really haven't evolved to the extent that they can support the latest technology. Certainly at the speed with which organizations are adopting them. So, they might be able to support some of the legacy but they've really become so cumbersome, so complicated and difficult to maintain people are wanting to move away from them. I would say five years ago, most organizations weren't willing to move down that path. But with some of the recent acquisitions, The Broadcom acquisition, Microfocus acquisition. You're seeing that more organizations are looking to replace those tools in their entirety. And as a result of that they're looking at how can I minimize my tool set. I'm not going to get rid of everything and only have one vendor. But, how do I pick the right tools and bring them together. And this is one of the areas where we do extremely well in that we can bring in data, we can integrate in other tools, we can give you the full picture. But, we're kind of that hub, that central. And I think we heard that earlier today from Bailey at Cisco, where he talked about ScienceLogic is really the core to their monitoring and management environment, because we're bringing the data and we're feeding the data in to other systems as well as managing it within ScienceLogic. >> Russ, I actually heard, data was emphasized more that I expect. I know enough about the management and monitoring space. We understand data was important to that, I'm a networking guy by background, we've been talking about leveraging the data for network and using some automation and things like that but it's a little bit different. Can you talk some about those relationships to data? We understand data's going to be everywhere and customers actually wrapping my arms around it make sure I can manage it, compliance and to hopefully get value out of that is one of the most important things in today. >> Absolutely, so one of the things we stress a lot when we talk about data, it use to be that data was hard to come by. We were data poor and so how do we get... We don't have a probe there so how do we get this data, Do we need agent? That's different now, data is... We are drowning in data, we have so much data. So, really the key is to give that data context. And so for us that means a lot of structure, and topology and dependencies across the layers of abstraction, across the application. And we think that's really the key to taking this, just vast unstructured mess of data that isn't useful to the business and actually be able to take... Apply analytics, and actually take action, and ultimately drive automation by learning and maintaining that structure in real time automatically, because that's something a human can't do. So, you need machine help, you need to automate that. >> So, Leslie, there was in the keynote this morning that to start discussion of the AI Ops maturity model >> Right >> And one of the things struck me is there was not a single person in the poll that said, yes I've gone fully automated. And first, there's the maturity of the technology, the term and where we are. But, there's also that, let's put it on the table. That fear sometimes, is to "Oh my gosh, the machines are taking our jobs" (laughter) You know, we laugh, but it is something that needs to be addressed. How are you addressing that, Where are your customers with at least that willingness, because I use to run operations for a number of years, and I told my team, look you're going to have more work next year, and you're going to have more things change, so if you can't simplify, automate. Get rid of things, I've got to have somebody helping me, and boy those robots would be a good help there. >> What we're seeing is, I mean let's be real, people don't like to do the mundane tasks, right. So you think about, When you report an issue to the service desk. Do you really want to open that ticket? Do you want to enter in all that information yourself? Do you want to provide all the details that they need in order to help you? No. People don't do it they put in the bare minimum and then what ends up happening is there's this back and forth, as they try collect more information. It's things like that, that you want to automate. You want to be able to take that burden off of the individuals And do the things, or at least allow them to do the things that they really need to do. The things that require their intelligence. So, we can do things like clean up storage disk space when your starting to run out of disk space. Or we can restart a service, or we might apply a configuration change that we know that is inconsistent in environment. So, there's lots of things like that that you can automate without actually replacing the individual. You're just freeing them up to do more high level thinking. >> Russ, anything else along the automation line. Great customer examples or any successes that you've seen that are worth sharing? >> Yeah, automation also comes in the form of connecting the breadcrumbs. So, we have a great example. A customer we worked with, they had an EPM tool, one of the great ones, you know, top of the magic quadrant kind of thing, and it kept on reporting code problems. The applications going down, affecting revenue, huge visibility. And it's saying code problem, code problem ,code problem. But the problem is jumping around. Sometimes it's here, sometimes it's there. So, it seemed like a ghost. So, when we connected that data, the APN data with the V center data and the network data what it turned out was, there was a packet loss in the hypervisor. So, it was actually network outage that was manifesting itself as a code problem, and as soon as they saw that, they said what's causing that network problem? They immediately found a big spike of traffic and were able to solve it. They always had the data. They had the network data, they had the VMware data they had the JVM data. They didn't know to connect the dots. And so, by us putting it right next to each other we connected the dots, and it was a human ultimately that said I know what's wrong, I can fix that. But it took them 30 seconds to solve a problem that they had been chasing after for months. That's a form of automation too is get the information to the human, so that they can make a smart decision. That's automation just as much as rebooting a >> Exactly server or cleaning a disk >> Well right, It's The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Sometimes, the answers are easy if I know what question to ask. >> Exactly, yes. (laughter) >> And that's something we've seen from data scientists too. That's what their expertise is, is to help find that. All right, Leslie give us a little view forward. We heard a little bit, so many integrations, the AI ops journey. What should customers be looking for forward? What are they asking you, to help bring them along that journey? >> Oh gosh. They're asking us to make it easier on all counts. Whether it's easier to collect the data, easier to add the context to the data, easier to analyze the data. So, we're putting more and more analytics into our platform. So that their not having to do a lot of the analysis themselves. There's, as you said earlier, there's the folks that are afraid they're going to lose their job because the robots or the machines are taking over. That's not really where I see it. It's just that we're bringing the automation in ways and the analytics in ways that they don't want to have to do, so that they can look at it and solve the really gnarly problems and start focusing on areas that are not necessarily going to be automatable or predictable. It's the things that are unusual that their going to have to get involved in as opposed to the things that are traditional and constant. So, Russ, I'd love for you to comment on the same question. And just a little bit of feedback I got talking to some of the customers is they like directionally where it's going, but the term they through out was dynamic. Because, if you talk about cloud you talk about containers. Down the road things like serverless. It's if it pulls every five minutes it's probably out of date. >> oh, Absolutely. I remember back when we talked big data, real time was one of those misnomers that got thrown out there. Really, what we always said is what real time needs to mean is the data in the right place to the right people to solve the issue >> Absolutely. >> Exactly. So, where do you guys see this directionally, and how do you get more dynamic? >> Well see, dynamic exists in a bunch of different ways. How immediate is the data? How accurate is the dependency map, and that's changing and shifting all the time. So, we have to keep that up to date automatically in our product. It's also the analytics that get applied the recommendations you make. And one of the things you can talk to data scientists and they can build a model, train a model, test a model and find something. But if they find something that was true three weeks ago it's irrelevant. So, we need to build systems that can do this in real time. That they can in real time, meaning, gather data in real time, understand the context in real time, recognize the behavior and make a recommendation or take an action. There's a lot of stuff that we have to do to get there. We have a lot of the pieces in place, it's a really cool time in the industry right now because, we have the tools we have the technology. And it's a need that needs to be filled. That's really where we're spending our energy is completing that loop. Closed loop system that can help humans do their jobs better and in a more automated way. >> Awesome. Well, Leslie and Russ, thanks so much for sharing your visibility into what customers are doing and the progress with your platforms. >> All right, thank you Stu. >> And we'll be back with more coverage here from ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (energetic music)

>> From Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at The Ritz-Carlton in Washington DC. Really excited to welcome back to the program. It's the co-founder CEO and the Headmaster of Wizarding school, >> Wizarding school, yes. >> Dave Link, thank you so much for joining us. Great to be here Steve. >> All right, so Dave first of all congratulations, really been enjoying the event you know you you kicked it off in the keynote this morning great energy, really I think capturing you know where we are in you know IT in business today. We understand how things are changing so much and it's a complex world and ScienceLogic is trying to do Its part to help simplify and make it easier for IT to you know run at the speed of business and machines. >> That's exactly right. What's happening in the world right now is you've got a confluence of cloud apps, traditional legacy apps and they're colliding together and as they collide together you need new tools to manage that in a way that's different than what we've seen in the past. You're looking at lots of sources coming together to contextualize, not just seeing what's happening, understanding how systems relate to one another but acting upon them. Machine at machine speed means that automation is king and the wizard hat actually relates to a storyline we had earlier today when we think about how to educate the marketplace and the customers we realized that we needed a very new way of communicating. So videos E-Learning The Wizard of learning has been a theme of the show to help our customers to get up to speed and actually take full advantage of the application that we provide to help them deliver great service quality. >> Yeah well and we appreciate you bringing theCUBE to help with that video education of the community overall. >> That's right >> Yeah so you know look Dave you know wanted... let's step back for a second and you know we want to going to get to the business update but first you know the company is founded in 2003. You know cloud wasn't a term, some of the underlying foundations of what became cloud, you know existed back there. Those of us in the industry understand some of the waves that have happened there but you know to talk about cloud and micro services and all of these changes that have... So give us a little bit about that evolution about the original premise of the company, as we move now to you know the world of today and how you manage to keep the company moving and relevant >> I love telling this story Stu because it never gets old >> Yeah >> A lot of the original feces that we had about where service business service analysis was going, the application analysis connected to the infrastructure. Our belief was we were going to move to a world where it wasn't based on devices or nodes or systems. It was really based on this service and what we're seeing with cloud has accentuated that tenfold because services now are made up of compound things, technologies, service delivery mechanisms as a service platforms and they all have to work with one another The platform we built had an architecture that was very open that could take data streams from lots of different sources, create a common information model contextualize that and then act upon it. So now more than ever before, we really built the right platform with multi-tenancy, with role based access control with all the things that were really hard problems to solve code day one and now the thesis that we had that it was more about the service view is as important as it as it's ever been with ephemeral systems that are coming and going, with really containerized systems on top of virtual machines on top of their metal. All these abstraction layers require a different mindset but an open architecture is really at the heart of pulling lots of data streams together contextualizing it and then acting upon it >> Yeah, so I'm a sucker for Venn diagrams. so you heard that the analyst in the keynote this morning talked about AI ops and he said to the inner structure intersection of IT operations data science and machine learning >> Yes >> Data at the center of everything, it's something we've had a couple of waves of trying on intelligence and automation, are things we've been talking about for decades in IT. Give us a little bit as why some of those waves are coming together so that now and what you're doing is the right moment to really help accelerate. You've been having great growth for a number of years and project out some really strong growth for the next few. >> We have over the last five years the company has grown over five hundred and forty percent from a revenue perspective and I think that's the underpinnings of that relates to do we have the right market fit. Are we solving a problem that's material to customers that it's hard for them to solve without our product. But I really envision a future we've been working on this for a couple decades, right? The future is one I hope where from a artificial intelligence at machine speed where we're getting so predictive and understanding, through really smart scalable algorithms the future faults that may occur for you know we've both been at this for a long time. we've been talking about event correlation for many years. I envision a world where you're not doing event correlation when you've had an event, it's actually too late. Usually that's caused by a system telling you that there is a problem. So what we're really working on what we've talked a lot about here at the show is not just predictive analytics but really understanding what's abnormal and getting in front of a problem before there is a problem with the system with really super smart algorithms that help customers understand, many different data sets converge together and what they really mean so that you can get ahead of a service outage rather than have the fault that you're then working on correlating to infrastructure to application layers. >> You know the other thing that's been interesting for me to watch is, the core of where you started was really working with the service Fighters. I've had a chance to talk to a number of your service fighters >> Yes and Hughes has been with you since the early days up to you know one that just bought a couple of weeks ago and you know they're happy very. Talked about kind of the compare/contrast of the service riders and the enterprise because you know cloud is impacting you know the big hybrid hyper scale clouds are impacting both of those and the rate of change is affecting both of those in a lot of ways. So I'm curious as you see you know what what what's similar and what's different between going into those markets. >> When we thought about the problem for service providers there were two axes that we were looking at. Number one was from one instance of our platform you had to serve many customers that all had their own tenancy. But on top of that, you had to layer in a role based access control who could see what the customer had their view, the internal ops teams had their view. So building out a really complicated foundational model and an architecture that would support tenancy on steroids with one instance of our product was a really important linchpin of what's now, incredibly important to enterprises, because enterprises are getting into a moment where they're having to really act as service bureau's, service brokers and that means that all the different teams that support different technology silos, really have to work together as one and... but yet they still need their own views.So a lot of the foundational highly differentiated capabilities we built for service providers, for large scale globally distributed enterprises, actually meets a need profile that is very hard to find solutions that fit that profile and can give them that consolidated view but yet the deep dive view for the practitioner and we're finding that more and more enterprises, have follow-the-sun operations, follow-the-sun architecture teams, follow-the-sun engineering teams that need different views that is really hard to get most products that were built in this space were built for a single tenant enterprise view and that never gives you the granularity for each consumer and each persona to get the view that they need. So it's interesting that although we kind of over engineered those capabilities for the service provider needs it's becoming involved with the enterprises as they're looking at how do they need to do things as really a converged team, working as one team across many silo disciplines and that requires a very different way of thinking, a different tool space a different solution to the problem that we built kind of from the ground up. It's now really appropriate for the DevOps teams the teams that are really having to break down the silos and work as one team. >> Yeah the, the the the term that often gets misused and misunderstood is scale. But if you truly can build something that's distributed architecture for scale, It really opens up a lot of opportunities. One of the things you highlight it also is that, ScienceLogic puts a lot of investment into you know R&D and keep working on things big announcement of Big Ben, seemed I've had a chance to hear what everybody likes and the best. Talk a little bit about you know how you keep the development efforts going how you put that strong and effort on it and you know boy you know you said you worked on the UI for three years and now it sounds you know it's a bold statement to be like okay and everybody you're using this, you know you can't have the safety blanket of old away in new way for a while, >> You're constantly reinventing and refactoring code base to get to new outcomes for customers. we're spending between 35 and 40 percent of revenues on R&D. That's generally almost twice as much as many of our competitors and we're doing that because there is so much still to do. At times we have really thought carefully, could we scale back should we scale back our R&D spend but fortunately we've had a very supportive board of directors that believes in our vision. Believes in the vision that this is a unique moment in time the whole market is transitioning to a new tool set, because of all of the crosswinds of public cloud refactoring of applications containerization abstraction of the network, a storage, compute. All of these things combining together require a very different way of solving this problem We've, we've actually seen this play out in the past which again is why we're over investing in engineering. When you look at the mainframes and the compute architecture of mainframes and then we went to client-server, the tools that managed the mainframe really didn't manage the client-server. we've now gone from client-server to cloud the same things happening again. Because the needs are so different and we're going to see a very different generation of tools rule this next gen of requirements the customers have when they have a multitude of clouds that all work together to deliver an outcome to an application that you as a user are benefiting from. >> Alright so talked about the growth, talked about the investment, it's a strong industry validation today also. Gartner up on stage talked about the definition of AI ops they might not be fully in sync as to how mature the market is but it's still important that they are you know this is a trend and something to watch and it's on their hype cycle and Forrester released the wave which had congratulations ScienceLogic as the the top scorer up in the leaders category. So congratulations on that and what does that mean. >> Well we're thrilled about that because that external validation is what customers look at. It helps them with their analysis and that the talk tracks that everybody's on in our industry sometimes it's hard to discern who does what and how well each company does it to some degree from a marketing perspective many people use the same words so the good words are already used up. So sometimes it's hard to understand how each product is differentiated in the marketplace the Forrester wave report was so thorough so comprehensive, put us through over 30 use case scenarios where we had to demonstrate to get the qualifications for that ranking. So it wasn't just us responding in writing and waving our arms and throwing out a few powerpoints to get to that result we had to prove it and it feels the satisfaction of actually proving it for our team for our engineering team for everybody here at the company I'm so proud of everybody because that's really from a product perspective. We love those product recognition awards are actually sometimes more enjoyable than the growth recognition awards because that means you're really delivering a value to the customer where they're going to when they deploy the product they're going to have a good outcome. So that's what we're focused on and having Forrester put us at the top of the wave report is a special moment in the history of the company. >> Alright so Dave this is your user conference, so what I want to end on... Let's talk about the customers and here's here's my observation as you know, my first time coming to your event and I've talked to a number of seen some of the interactions there. There are certain products that customers love the relationship is an interesting and I would say a really good one the customers are really engaged and enjoying and liking it and it's almost like that friend that you can be like I really like you and your friends in their car I can be like this is how I want you to get better in ScienceLogic this is what you've done and I'm excited once on the roadmap and this is where I want you to go even more. So it's it's like you know that that friend that you can kind of hang out with and joke with and I've seen some of those relationships it's a good robust relationship and strong partnerships. It seems that you build with your customers am I getting the right vibe how do you look at your relationships with your customers. >> From a simple business perspective, I look at a couple things this is just as a run the business metric. On average our customers buy about twenty four, twenty five percent more capacity each year. On average our customers stay with us for 7-10 years. On average our customers pay us within 59 days. So I look at are we getting paid on time, do our customers buy more capacity each and every year and do we retain our customers. We retain about ninety five percent of our customers. So those metrics are really best-in-class, net subscription retention, DSO. All of those things are really good foundational indicators of we're doing a great job for our customers but what I love is this interaction that we have with them where they're they're never ending pressure on us to do better to strive for something that makes a day in their life a better day. I love that pressure it's uncomfortable many days of the week as I mentioned in my opening presentation but it makes us a better company and everybody in the company embodies this sense of how do we capture that synthesize it and then deliver against their needs and wants as quick as we can. So our innovation rates now are as high as they've ever been the throughput our of our development team this last quarter was the best we've ever seen in the history of the company, not just because we have more people but we're getting more done in the same amount of time. So all the KPIs that I look at are pointing in a really positive direction of great momentum for the business and really good alignment with customer needs and wants. We have probably the best market fit I've ever seen with the needs and wants of a net new customer and how our product fits against that. The Forrester wave report was yet another independent validation of how good our market fit in our strategy is right now to solve real problems that are very painful for customers to solve without our product >> Alright, Dave I can't let the head wizard gone without looking a little bit into the future. So as you look down the road what should we be looking as industry watchers to seem from ScienceLogic, seen from the industry you know I asked customers if they had a magic wand you know what would they do to make things better. You had a magic wand up on stage what will you be doing to make the industry better for all of us. >> There's so many things that when we think about making the industry better, it's a community and that means that among the key things that everybody's focused on right now for AI OPS is automation. So sharing those lessons learned cauterizing, validating the automation opportunities whether it's with provisioning systems, with end devices for capacity planning. All the things that we're doing we're starting to work with our customers to publish that broadly so that they can benefit from one another as quick as possible to take those best practices and throughout our community put them into production. If we do that each and every day and really focus on delivering that value across the customer base even for competitive customers. They compete with one another what we've seen is the spirit of cooperation and that to me is among the most satisfying parts of our customer and user community that it's a community that wants to help each other get better every day of the week and that's really hard mission as well. So from a trend line for the entire industry, I think we're all moving towards a moment in time where we have this autonomic capability where we know the applications are infrastructure, we're the tools that help us keep those applications running are getting smarter and smarter by the day and basically move us away from a fault and event correlation storyline to a predictive automation storyline >> Alright well Dave actually I said it on theCUBE a couple of years ago data holds the potential be that flywheel of growth for many years to come. Really appreciate you sharing the story and thanks again for having theCUBE at the event. >> Thanks too great to be here with you. Alright we'll be back with more coverage here from ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> from Washington, D. C. It's the queue covering science logic. Symposium twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Science Logic. >> Hi, I'm student men and this is the Cubes coverage of Science Logic. Symposium twenty nineteen here at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D. C. Been four hundred sixty. People here just finished the afternoon Kino, and they've actually gone off to the evening event. It's thie yet to be finished. Spy Museum. They get a good three sixty view of Washington D. C. So the hallways are a little echoing in quiet but really excited to have on the final guest of the day. Eric Gordon, who's the vice president of business development and alliances as science logic. Erik, thanks so much for joining me, >> thanks to you. Great to be here. >> All right, so busy. Dev and Alliances. I've talked to a number of your partner's. I've gone through a lot of things, but you wear, I think, just like your CEO. A few different hats. Ah, and your old let's let's get into what your role is that the company? >> Yeah, it's actually changed over time, but for the most part I've to court responsibilities. One is I'm looking after our ecosystem of technology partners. And so we have from key strategic CE that we work with in the marketplace, in the cloud space on the data center, all across the ecosystem, a lot of different technologies. But we also have products that we resell input on our priceless that combined to create a solution for our customers in the second half of what my responsible is really focused on. What is our product strategy around integration? Automation? Because those Air Corps components to our platform and I look after that with several different teams. >> So let's talk about that the ecosystem pit person, the alliances. Because I got a lot of shows. I talked to a lot of companies, and it's all too easy for companies to be like, Oh, we're we're the best and we do so many different things. And when I first heard about the space in a ops, it's like, Oh, well, I I Ops is replacing a lot of waves and, you know, your average customer replaces fourteen tools. I heard there's one customer who replaces fifty tools, but at the same time, there was a strong focus about integrations in deeper even some of the products that you say, Yeah, there's overlap in that competitive, you know, you're working with those environments, so give us a little bit of the philosophy, how you balance that, you know, we want to do it all and help our customers to do lots of different things. And especially when you get to big customers and service providers, we understand that it's a big world and there never is that, you know, mythical single pane of glass. >> Yeah, no, totally agree. And we hear this a lot. You know, I've got a tool for this. I got a tool for that and or I had to Vendor come in and say that they could do it all. And you know, really, At the end of the day, if there's there's no one vendor on DH, you know the Venn diagrams of functionalities, air overlapping. That's the nature of the industry. And when we saw this on the early days of it with the big monopolies. But I think right now it's it's around. How do we saw the customer problem? Mohr effectively, From our perspective, we look at the combination of things. First is is what solutions out there give us good data data that we can use data that we can enrich, how we can leverage that to help drive better insights from other types of data that we collect so that theirs is where integration is a keep part of this on DH. What we know is that ultimately in our space, we're doing about monitoring a core collection. We're goingto have to click with everybody, so we're gonna have to integrate with any partner that might have some form of I. P are connected through an I p address to some sort of a p I. We need that data. So we have partnerships on that side. I think really, what's interesting is when we think about things like workflow or orchestration or types of mediation, we might integrate with other technologies to enrich that data further. So we look for partners that ultimately our customers air using things that we can do consolidation and drive better outcome with that enrich date experience. >> Yes, so let's drill down one little bit if you talk about like, you know a PM and SM tools out there some recent announcements and and you digging deeper on there. What what are some of the highlights? So one >> thing is, if you already have, like, agents are often come up, Our customs says, Well, I've got an A P M. Agent that's already doing some things. Well, that's great. We can leverage that, that there's some good insight that we can gather from either to apologies or other metrics or like in user experience. But we also go deeper on other aspects, like on the network side or on the infrastructure side, or on the the cloud service aside. So, you know, ultimately, it's a conversation of say, what? What can we leverage? What, what's accurate, what's in real time? And if there's things that we can, you know, gather, then that's our primary strategy. So I you know, I do think the ecosystem plays a key role in a i ops, but really, to do that, it's run automation because anything that we do, we have to do with scale and we have to do with security. We have to do it with the intent of driving some form of outcome. And so, you know, those are the key principles behind selecting technology partners. >> Okay, Let's talk some about that automation. It was a big discussion in the keynote this morning. Really talking about the maturity model. One of the analysts up there says you really want to make sure you separate things like, you know, the machine learning piece of it with the automation. The observation I've made a couple of times is, you know, yes. We all know you can automate a really bad process. And so I need toe, you know, make sure, you know, do I have good data And, you know, how am I making automation make me better Not just, you know, to change things. >> Yeah, well, I think it's Science Lodge that we look at. Automation is in every part of what we do within the product. From the from the collection of how we automate it scale how we consolidate that data. And then we're doing a lot of the data preparation using automation technologies. And then when we start to analyze and enrich that data, we're also using it Other algorithmic approaches, for example, topology and context. So if we know that some things connected weaken Dr An automation to make an inference and that data then feeds into the final step, which is around how we action on that. So we drive automation in the classic sense to say trigger workflow or, let's say, update another system of record or system of truth like a C M G B or a notification. And so one of things that we did hear from Garden this morning is engaging in an SM process. Is a core part of AI ai ops as muchas data collection and driving other forms of automation. >> All right, Do you have some examples of you know how automation you're helping your customers love any customer stories you've got along that line? >> Well, >> really. You know, there's so many stories we're hearing the halls of Symposium, and so it's it's it's hard to pick one, but, you know, I think all ten times what we say is, what what's driving your service desk time like you've got people you know, looking at all of these different dispirit systems, and we can look at it. Let's say a top end of your most sort of frequented events or alerts, or even look at your top service desk incidents and say, How could we automate that, you know. And some of that automation could be at the technology level, you know, simplest as restarting a service or prove you re provisioning of'Em. Or it could be clearing a log or even maybe shutting down an event because it's irrelevant. So there's There's several different examples in the cloud as well. Terms of how things air provisioning attached. And if we see something out of a policy, we can alarm that say, hey, maybe my storage costs are going to accelerate because someone made a bad change. So there's different ways that we can apply automation during the life cycle. But I think enhancing the service management component perhaps is one of the most impactful ones, >> you know. So, Eric, we azan industry automation been something we've been talking about for quite a while now, and they're they're sometimes pushback of, you know, from the end, users especially, you know, some of the practitioners out there as you know. Well, I could do it better. You know, the fear that you're going to lose your job. How are you seeing that progressing and you know, how were things different today? Both from a technology standpoint, as well as from your customers. Can't wait. >> I think if you asked any enterprise CIA already service provider, service delivery manager, they'd always say, I'd love to operate as much as I can when you get down on the practitioner level. You know, obviously I think there's some sort. Like I I do my job, Thank you very much. I have my favorite wit, my process. So I think there's a conversation depending on. You know, if we're saying hey from the practitioner side, is there set of data that you need or set of scripts? Or are things that you're doing manually that we can put into a workflow? And at the at the business layer, it's like, Do you feel like you're getting the value from some of the investments you've made? And is, how is automation? Help you realize that an example there is. We see oftentimes is around the quality of data that's going into the C, M. D. B and from AA AA. Lot of times we see that their investment in technology is like service now, and other platforms is fairly high expense, and they want to optimize that, and they want to realize the power of automation at the at the service level. So if we can, if we can convince, if you will, through a set of really concrete use cases that the data coming from science logic at the speed and the quality can actually improve the seemed to be to >> the level of >> really efficient automation. All of a sudden, people start to see that as a change as an opportunity. And that's where I think a I Ops is helping change the narrative, to say how automation Khun B really, really applied rather than just being this mystical concept that is hard to do. And, you know, people don't liketo think that a robot's taking their job. I think what's gonna happen is that machine learning algorithms are going to make jobs easier and, you know, ultimately were far, far from the point where a ized doing something and some sort of, you know, crazy automata way. But I think it's the deep learning, moving a machine learning to you. No good quality data sets that dr meaningful insights that's giving us a lot better view until where automation could play in the >> future. Yeah, absolutely. It's our belief that you know, automation. There's certain things that you probably don't want to do because repetitive, it's boring or mistake prone on DH. Therefore, you know automation can really help those environments move forward. You could move up the stack. You can manage those environment. There's definitely some retraining that that needs to happen often. But you know that the danger is if you're if you're doing now what you were doing five years ago, chances are your competition is moving along and, you know, finding a better way to do it. >> You know, just a point on this soup is really around the velocity of data that's coming in. So we're seeing, you know, we talked about the three bees. You know, the volume of data. You have to use automation to be able to manage that huge amount of different data sources, the variety. There's no human that can process the amount of machine information from the amount of technologies that you have on DH that you know. Obviously it's speed, right. The velocity and that is that is clearly not going to be something that any human could be capable of doing. And so there's a relationship here between technology and human processes and science logics and a really interesting position right now to really kind of help with that process. But more importantly, accelerate the value by being all to process it and make it intelligent. >> Wait, Erica, you're saying I'm not neo from the Matrix and I can't, you know, read through everything and be able to move faster than physics allows. Give >> yourself maybe fifteen, twenty years. We might be. You know that that you know, I don't think that that many people can really predict the impact of the you know, we'LL say machinery, evolving toe, artificial intelligence and there's it's going to be very used, case specific. But we do know one thing is that algorithms? Air helping. But algorithms are dependent on that clean data stack, right? And And if you can't handle the scale, then obviously there's going. It's going to be minimized in terms. Is total utility >> alright? Well, Eric, I get the good to let you give us that the final word from science logic from Symposium twenty nineteen on the Cube. >> So you know, the first thing is is this is there's two things that we learned from this event. The first thing is, is how our customers you're evolving in this dynamic space. And what we know is that if if you don't change, it's going to be a problem. Because the only consistent thing is change and change is happening faster on it. And we call that disruption. And so what we want to do is we want to understand how science AJ is a technology company. I can really help that customer go through that transition with confidence. And then, more importantly, is what could we do? Delivering better, more enrich solutions to our customers that actually are changing the way the game is played. And so we feel like we're a disrupter in the A ops market. We are. Certainly Forrester has helped us recognize that. But But we're not done work. We're continuing on this journey. >> All right, Well, Eric, routine. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and the journey towards Aye, Aye, Ops. Thanks so much to. All right. Well, that comes to an end of what we're doing here at science Logic. Symposium twenty nineteen. I know. I learned a lot. I hope you did too. I'm stew Minutemen. Thanks so much from our whole crew. Here it's Silicon Angle Media's The Cube. Check out the cube dot net for all the videos from this show, as well as where we'LL be in the future. Reach out if you have any questions and once again, thanks for joining us.

>> from Washington, D. C. It's the queue covering science logic. Symposium twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Science Logic >> Hi, I'm student men and this is the Cubes coverage of Science Logic. Symposium twenty nineteen here at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D. C. First of all, want Welcome back to the program. Roger Putnam, Who's the vice president of Global Solutions? That science logic Thanks for coming back and what with programme A first time Rob Gruner listed is this loosened architect from Telstra. But >> Rob, I actually had >> a chance to talk to some of your co ords there, they said. Arav robs a wizard. He's an engineer that does everything. So you know, solutions. Architect. Of course, we know that they're out there. They do a lot of different things and asleep, leased. Your peers say you're somebody that does quite a lot of different >> things. Did Jack of All trades master of none unfortunate >> way? It's all right, don't you know it is in vogue now to be, you know, a generalist. It's, you know, we've gone from specialties to well, oh no, it's it's platforms and everything's going to be everything, so I have plenty of background with Telstra, but maybe talk a little bit about you know, your role in the organization and what what kind of things you're involved in. Since you know some of those trades that you >> are jack of all, >> probably our spies have come into Telstra's an acquisition. So, you know, working for small company, you tend to do everything on. For some reason, I've been allowed to continue to do that on developing expertise around science logic. And that means I've been involved across a lot of areas of the business as we've been adopting science logic more widely, and it's been quite interesting. Process means eye contact, that expertise and then see how it's applied across the organization. So it's been quite interesting, >> awesome. One of things that's been interested in me and in talking to service Friday is talking to the enterprise customers is two. You know how many tools they had, how many they replaced with science logic, but also what things it's integrating with and working with. It was a big focus on the keynote this morning is, you know, integrations with Sam and you know all these various pieces, so maybe give us a little bit of kind of the scope. You know how long's tells me you've been using science logic, How broads the deployment and you know what? What? What does it do in? What does it tie into >> a tte? The mammoth is more enterprise focused. So on. That's the area. Tell Stur I come from so it's really around delivering services to her customers. Quite recently, we've seen then looking in deploying science logic across their carriage spokes and managing services there. That's quite a large deployment. You know, we're quite happy with that in terms of what is going to be doing for the business on the integrations, their endless. So Telstra, like a lot of large organizations, has a lot of different systems to talk to. A lot of different service dis, depending on the operational areas. So in service now is one of those. But it's a hollow of other stuff on, so that's a very challenging process. And sounds objects being pretty good at, you know, spreading itself around. Those >> give us a little insight as to you know, how fast things are changing. You know, hear Kafka and Streams and, you know, constantly moving I've been looking at the, you know, communities and container stuff that's happening, which is which is fast moving. So >> are definitely say it. And Telstra's trying as hard as akin to move as quickly as the market can allowed. So definitely it's virtual izing. ITT's automating II ops is a big component of what we're doing. It is extremely important for the business. >> Okay, so Alps is something you're doing have to We're not as mature as we'd like to video. I'm not sure if you saw the keynote this morning, but they put out a maturity models So would love for you to, you know, where are you when you look at that? They kind of had the three criterias there is. There's kind of the the machine learning, there's the automation and I'm trying to remember the third piece that was there, but you know where where are you today? You know, how'd you get there? And you know what? What's what's a little bit of the road map going forward? >> I think it might be probably our ambitions to be in that the upper end of the spectrum and into remediation, But that's an ambition and I think we've got a while to go with that. So, uh, more than that, I can't coming off >> its interests. So they have that The keynote tomorrow they're going. Jean Kim speaking on the deaf ops. And, you know, I'm a big fan of the Phoenix project and they talked about, you know, the jack of all trades that does it all. He could sometimes be the bottleneck in the system. Absolutely. Because you can't be up. I need something fixed. Well, we'LL go to Rob Rob all fix it. That's great. That fire floating mode. I know I've done that in my career, and it's one of those things. Oh, jeez, you're never going to move at this job because you're replaceable. It's like that's a dangerous place to be. >> It is s >> o. You know, we talk a little bit about, you know, you said, you know, science logic. You know that they position themselves as this is going to help you move that, you know, machine speed and keep up with that. Give us a little bit the reality of what you're seeing. How what does that impact your job? Your organization? >> Look, I think sounds logic has done a wonderful job within the organization. It's it's the legacy infrastructure within any organization, particularly tells her scale. That's really holding you back on. There's a lot of Well, I think people level with Intel Street. Move as quickly as we can, but we have such a large number of legacy systems to deal with. You know, we're looking at one deployment of Sands object. We were looking at IDing systems to kill, So it's a big task >> the wonderful technical death that we've all inherited. So So you know, Roger, you know, this something we hear from all customers. It'd be lovely if I had the mythical, you know, unicorn that, you know, start from the ground up and you know, he can start afresh. But we always have to have that mix and give it a little bit about what you're seeing. You know, about the Telstra in a little bit broader, You know, >> I think what tell us she has done really well with taking advantage of our technology was they didn't come in with this attitude of would rip out everything that we have and just have a magic easy bun. Software doesn't work that way. I think we've all learned the lessons of tough deployments when you try to stay out of fix everything. So they came in with a really gradual, phased approach of Get a couple pieces done where they had gaps. You start to fill those gaps. What's happening during the last few years as we've seen the shift greater change and they've taken advantage of the platforms, nationalities a hole as they go through their digitization efforts. And so as they digitize, they taking this step by step by step approach to you know what you were saying earlier with Rob does. He doesn't answer the question of being the one man band, but they did was they build it all process wise, using software to drive the automation. So once it's done one time, you're not stuck on the person anymore. And so I think when we look at our most successful customers like Telstra, it's because they've had this gradual, phased approach where they're using software rather than single person bottlenecks. And rather than having these tiger teams to try to solve problems and moving towards a better process to take advantage of the world, we're in today. So how >> do you measure success? You know, what are some of the business outcomes or, you know, k p I's that you understand how you're moving from kind of where you were to where you want to be. >> Uh, that's a difficult one to answer because particularly sounds, logic was used in so many different context. So for a certain part of the business, we might say, Are we monitoring the full stack? I were giving customers real value invisibility through the whole dynamic of the business. And then, in another context, we using sound subject. We were just saying, We just need to deploy its scale. We need two one board as quickly as possible. We need to keep the cost down to a minimum. We need to keep events that's allow as possible. Okay, so it's more about the efficiency argument, so it's really depends and way we're trying to use it and how we're deploying it. So >> how do you have visibility across how everybody is doing and getting trained on the latest things and keeping up to date and sharing best practices? How do you manage that internally, and how do you how do you do you network with your peers on some of that? >> Well, we've tried Teo really within. Tell us we have a concept of centre of excellence. So it's really about, you know, being recognizes the business experts in particular area and allowing the business to understand. That's that. That's where the expertise sits on a certain we've done a very good job with that and then allowing and communicating that after the business as well. So it's a very tough asked. It's a big business. We have thirty thousand people so often one person doesn't know about another person, another floor on the buildings, you know, to try and spread it across the biz, since we have fifty officers worldwide. So it's a process, you >> know? I mean, Roger just want one of things that here is, you know, science logic. It's not a widget, and it's, you know, can fit in a lot of different environments and a lot of different uses. You know, I heard of, you know, strong emphasis in into training had your CEO on where in his wizard tat for for for the that the learning knowledge that was gonna happen. So you know you talk a little bit about how science logic is looking to address this, especially for some you know, large customers like Telstra. >> You know, I think there's a general skills gap in is a whole beyond our technology beyond what's taking place in the world today. And you know, I've been in the business for quite a while, and we've long focused on training the operator on how to utilize the technology to solve their specific problems. And while that those aspects really powerful, some of the things we've done recently to go a step further is when we hear similar questions. We started record all of those so our customers could watch videos of how to solve problems instead of just going onto some form and let me type some question and hope somebody responds to in the future. You have read it for that. So we've got a look at a better mechanism and video based training handheld handling the customers we can build out these use cases drives the platform value, and what Telstra does it's really unique is they use the platform less so from a perspective of can I manage X y Z technology. But what can I build on top of it? How can I break the platform to some extend? And Rob is a mad scientist for us here. I mean, could jump into this more. But they've broken the platform to solve those business needs by addressing them individually. And what we've done is we've taken his best practices, and we rolled them back out to the rest of our customers. So with Robin, tell Hsia and a couple of other really great customers were driving a better community and sense of community so less question, answer form, less traditional support, more video, more community, more share ability. And that's where you're going to get additional quality. Coming out from the products are being delivered. Makes sense to you, Robert. Absolutely. >> Yeah, Rob. I mean, I love any commentary on that. You know, the network effect of software especially would talk about Sasser as a service type things, you know, that's what sales force really came out. It was like a weight one customer. Ask for something and wake everybody. You can take advantage of that or something similar. So are you seeing that kind of dynamics today with science logic and with others >> well, perfectly within the Telstra business. Absolutely so by building a capital into one area, you can share it across. And we found that we've been able to then sell the system internally, your internal stakeholders, so they appreciate the value of it and we can build on that. And then our customers, whilst we don't necessarily lady with the product they can. They see what's going on, and they basically then take it on as a service as well. So it's very, very interesting process. >> So one thing we haven't talked about yet, but you talk about data, you know, what's the role of data in your environment is something that you know key to the platform from science logic. How you leveraging it? How's that changing in your environment? One of the opportunities there. >> It's interesting questions. So as the telco, we collect a lot of data on DA. Obviously we have federal agencies who make that a requirement as well. So we have an existing data like initiative on that's very full of moment, and science logic is where we're looking at how we can add to that the value, valuable information and provides, but like everyone else, is a lot of data to collect, and it's an interesting process to try and make sense out of it and react accordingly. I mean, as a business, we were responding to millions and millions events of a day. So it's, you know, it's a difficult thing. >> Yeah, one of things. When we look at things like you know, anything that requires training like machine learning or the like, There's the balance between I want to learn from everybody. But you know, you're in a competitive marketplace. I don't want my competitors necessarily to get things. So you know the software products usually Well, I can isolate, and it doesn't have specific information. But how do you look at that dynamic of making sure that you gain from what the industry is doing, but that, you know, you could still stay competitive in ahead of your competition? >> Uh, >> no. I don't have a necessary can answer that. I suppose my head's tied into really what I could do with a platform and how I can then bring new technologies into the company's. So that's really are spies remind spaces on, Really, it's what I'm focused on. So you know what we do with the daughter probably is. He's not necessarily big concerns. How >> about that? There was quite a lot of announcements this week. The number of integrations as well as you know, update to the product. Anything specifically that you've been waiting for or that has caught your eye, >> the service now integration. I think it is far more advanced than has been in the past. On we have aspect of the business used thinks over quite heavily. So the fact that that's now matured and much more robust and you know which sort of offering that'LL have a lot of impact on the business. So I definitely mean the machine learning is another great thing on the question of then how that develops over time. So we'LL see how that goes. You >> know, Roger loves you know what? When I've been digging into some is the feedback you've been getting from customers and what's been leading toe, you know, some of the enhancement. So I would love, love your take on what you're saying. >> You know, I think one of the things that tell Sharpe pushed us towards a few years back was we're going to build. We already have a data like we don't need you to function. Is there Data Lake? So its multiple different Veda lakes And this concept of how do I move later From one day to lake to a different data Lake lakes within lakes ponds. Whatever the terminology is today the data ocean, our family perfect. And I'm getting to that data ocean from our lake. We have to go get streaming data. So now I'm going to extremes against really geographic here. But, you know, Rob really pushed us to make sure we could go right to Kaka buses and pushed data out. So what do you do with the data? And so tell Strip has been a, you know, an early adopter of a lot of our technology. And by being an early adopter, they've pushed us in a number of directions. So I think when you see a lot of the functionality that we've released this week and we've announced, it's been because of our customer base because of our partners like Telstra, that need to drive the business for further and forward, especially the industry like Telco World, where everything is mobile everything's moving so fast and aggressively. They're really like a good sounding board for where we need to go and how do we get there and and that drive And that partnership is What I think I'm most excited about working with tell sure is they demand from us to be excellent, and that gets great product coming out. And we see the results this week with all of our customers excitingly looking at stream treating capability that Rob was pushing us for well in advance of anyone else. >> Yeah, Robin, I want to give you the final word. You know, I can't help but notice you actually co branded shirts you've got tell star on your arm wither with science logic there. So, obviously, more than just a vendor relationship there, maybe close us out with you know how important science logic is. Two to your business >> job, Critical part of the business. I mean, particularly where we're looking at the commodity aspect of many services, you know, we can't survive unless we can provide quality, invaluable information where customers and really sounds. Logic has been the key platform for that. So in some respects, we're resting, you know, an aspect of the business entirely and Scientology's hands and we're hoping they'LL deliver >> well, Robin Raj, Thank you so much for joining us. Just sharing all the progress that you've made in. You know where things were going? Thanks so much, thanks to all right. And I'm student men. This is the Cube at Science Logic Symposium twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> From Washington D.C. it's theCUBE covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at The Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C. About 460 people here, the events' grown about 50%, been digging in with a lot of the practitioners, the technical people as well as some of the partners. And for this session I'm happy to welcome to the program for the first time guest, Surendra who is the vice president and CTO for automation in IBM's global technology services. And joining us also is Dave Link who is the co-founder and CEO of ScienceLogic. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, so Surendra let's start with you. Anybody that knows IBM services at the core of your business, primary driver, large number of the presented to the employees at IBM are there. You've got automation in your title so, let's flush out a little bit for us, your part of the organization and your role there. >> Alright, so as you pointed out, IBM, a big part of IBM is services; it's a large component. And that two major parts of that and though we come together as one in terms of IBM services, one is much more focused on infrastructure services and the other one on business services. So, the automation I'm dealing with primarily is in the infrastructure services area which means all the way from resources you have in a persons data center going into now much more of course in a hybrid environment, hybrid multi-cloud, with different clouds out there including our own and providing the automation around that. And when we mean automation we mean the things that we have to do to keep our clients' environments healthy from a availability and performance standpoint; making sure that our environment then we respond to the changes that they need to the environment because it obviously evolves over time, we do that effectively and correctly and certainly another very important part is to make sure that they're secure and compliant. So, if you think of Maslow's hierarchy of the things that IT operations has to do that in a nutshell sums it up. That's what we do for our clients. >> Yeah, so Dave luckily we've got a one on one with you today to dig out lots of nuggets from the kino and talk a bit about the company but, you talk about IT operations and one of the pieces I've got infrastructure, I've got applications, ScienceLogic sits at an interesting place in this heterogeneous ever-changing world that we live in today. >> It does and the world's changing quickly because the clouds transforming the way people build applications. And that is causing a lot of applications to be refactored to take advantage of some of these technologies. The especially focused global scale we've seen them, we've used them, applications that we use on our phone. They require a different footprint and that requires then a different set of tools to manage an application that lives in the cloud and it also might live in a multi-cloud environment with some data coming from private clouds that populate information on public clouds. What we found is the tools industry is at a bit of a crossroads because the applications now need to be infrastructure aware, but the infrastructure could be served from a lot of different places, meaning they've got lots of data sources to sort together and contextualize to understand how they relate to one another real time. And that's the challenge that we've been focused on solving for our customers. >> Alright, Surendra I want to know if we can get a little bit more to automation and we talk automation, >> There's also IBM use for a number of years, the cognitive and there was the analyst that spoke in the kino this morning. He put cognitive as this overarching umbrella and underneath that you had the AI and underneath that you had that machine learning and deep learning pieces there. Can you help tease out a little bit for IBM global services in your customers? How do they think of the relationship between the MLAI cognitive piece in automation? >> So I think the way you laid it out, the way it was talked about this morning absolutely makes sense, so cognitive is a broad definition and then within that of course AI and the different techniques within AI, machine learning being one, natural language processing, national languages understanding which not as much statistically driven as being another type of AI. And we use all of these techniques to make our automation smarter. So, often times when we're trying to automate something, there can be very prescriptive type of automation, say a particular event comes in and then you take a response to it. But then often times you have situations where you have events especially what Dave was talking about; when an application is distributed not just a classic of distributed application, but now distributed of infrastructure you may have. Some of it may be running on the main frame, some of it actually running in different clouds. And all of this comes together, you have events and signals coming from all of this and trying to reason over where a problem may be originating from because now you have a slow performance. What's the reason for the slow performance? Trying to do some degree of root cause determination, problem determination; that's where some of the smarts comes in in terms of how we actually want to be able to diagnose a problem and then actually kick off maybe more diagnostics and eventually kick off actions to automatically fix that or give the practitioner the ability to fix that in a effective fashion. So that's one place. The other areas that one type of machine learning I shouldn't say one type, but deadly machine learning techniques lend themselves to that. There's another arena of causes a lot of knowledge and information buried in tickets and knowledge documents and things like that. And to be able to extract from that, the things that are most meaningful and that's where the natural language understanding comes in and now you marry that with the information that's coming from machines, which is far more contextualized. And to be able to reason over these two together and be able to make decisions, so that's where the automation. >> Wonder if we can actually, let's some of those terms I want to up level a little bit. I hear knowledge I hear information; the core of everything that people are doing these today, it's data. And what I heard, and was really illuminated to me listening to what I've seen of ScienceLogic is that data collection and leveraging and unlocking value of data is such an important piece of what they're doing. From an IBM standpoint and your customers, where does data fit into that whole discussion? How do things like ScienceLogic fit in the overall portfolio of solutions that you're helping customers through either manager, deploying and services? >> So definitely in the IT Ops arena, a big part of IT Ops, at the heart of it really is monitoring and keeping track of systems. So, all sets of systems throw off a lot of data whether it's log data, real time performance data, events that are happening, monitoring of the performance of the application and that's tons and tons of data. And that's where a platform like ScienceLogic comes in, as a monitoring system with capabilities to do what we call also event management. And in the old days, actually probably would have thought about monitoring event management and logs as somewhat different things; these worlds are collapsing together a bit more. And so this is where ScienceLogic has a platform that lends itself to a marriage of these faces in that sense. And then that would feed a downstream automation system of informing it what actions to take. Dave, thoughts on that? >> Dave, if you want to comment on that I've got some follow ups too, but. >> Yeah, there's many areas of automation. There's layers of automation and I think Surendra's worked with customers over a story career to help them through the different layered cakes of automation. You have automation related to provisioning systems, the provision and in some case provision based on capacity analytics. There's automation based on analysis of a root cause and then once you know it, conducting other layers of automation to augment the root cause with other insights so that when you send up a case or a ticket, it's not just the event but other information that somebody would have to go and do, after they get the event to figure out what's going on. So you do that at time of event that's another automation layer and then the final automation layer, is if you know predictively about how to solve the problem just going ahead if you have 99% confidence that you can solve it based on these use case conditions just solve it. So when you look at the different layers of automation, ScienceLogic is in some cases a data engine, to get accurate clean data to make the right decisions. In other cases, we'll kick off automations in other tools. In some cases we'll automate into ecosystem platforms whether it's a ticketing system, a service desk system, a notifications systems, that augment our platform. So, all those layers really have to work together real time to create service assurance that IBM's customers expect. They expect perfection they expect that excellence the brand that IBM presents means it just works. And so you got to have the right tooling in place and the right automation layers to deliver that kind of service quality. >> Yeah, Dave I actually been, one of the things that really impressed me is that the balance between on the one hand, we've talked to customers that take many many tools and replace it with ScienceLogic. But, we understand that there is no one single pane of glass or one tool to rule them all, the theme of the shows; you get the superheros together because it takes a team. You give a little bit of a history lesson which resonated me. I remember SNMP was going to solve everything for us, right? But, the lot of focus on all the integrations that works, so if you've got your APM tools, your ITSM tools or things you're doing in the cloud. It's the API economy today, so balancing that you want to provide the solutions for your customers, but you're going to work with many of the things that they have; it's been an interesting balance to watch. >> Yeah, I think that's the one thing we've realized over the years; you can't rip and replace years and years of work that's been done for good reason. I did hear today that one of our new customers is replacing a record 51 tools with our product. But a lot of these might be shadow IT tools that they've built on top of special instrumentation they might have for a specific use cases or applications or a reason that a subject matter expert would apply another tool, another automation. So, the thing that we've realized is that you've got to pull data from so many sources today to get machine learning, artificial intelligence is only as good as the data that it's making those decisions upon. >> Absolutely. >> So you've got to pull data from many different sources, understand how they relate to one another and then make the right recommendations so that you get that smooth service assurance that everybody's shooting for. And in a time where systems are ephemeral where they're coming and going and moving around a lot, that's compounding the challenge that operations has not just in all the different technologies that make up the service; where those technologies are being delivered from, but the data sources that need to be mashed together in a common format to make intelligent decisions and that's really the problem we've been tackling. >> Alright, Surendra I wonder if you can bring us inside your, you talked to a lot of enterprise customers and it helped share their voices to in this space, not sure if they're probably not calling it AI ops there, but some of the big challenges that they're facing where you're helping them to meet those challenges and where ScienceLogic fits in. >> So certainly the, yes, they probably don't want to talk about it that. They want to make sure that their applications are always up and performing the way they expect them to be and at the same time, being responsive to changes because they need to respond to their business demands where the applications and what they have out there continually has to evolve, but at the same time be very available. So, all the way from even if you think about something that is traditional and is batch jobs which they have large processing of batch jobs; sometimes those things slow down and because now they're running through multiple systems and trying to understand the precedence and actions you take when a batch job is not running properly; as just one example, right? Then what actions we want, first diagnosing why it's not working well. Is it because some upstream system is not providing it the data it needs? Is it clogged up because it's waiting on instructions from some downstream system? And then how do you recover from this? Do you stop the thing? Just kill it or do you have to then understand what downstream further subsequent batch jobs needs to or other jobs will be impacted because you killed this one? And all of that planning needs to be done in some fashion and the actions taken such that if we have to take an action because something has failed, we take the right kind of action. So that's one type of thing where it matters for clients. Certainly, performance is one that matters a lot and even on the most modern of applications because it may be an application that's entirely sitting on the cloud, but it's using five or 10 different SAS providers. Understanding which of those interactions may be causing a performance issue is a challenge because you need to be able to diagnose that and take some actions against that. Maybe it's a log in or the IDN management service that you getting from somewhere else and understanding if they have any issues and whether that provider is providing the right kind of monitoring or information about their system such that you can reason over it and understand; okay my service which is dependent on this other service is actually being impacted. And all these kind of things, it's a lot of data and these need to come together. That's where the platform something like ScienceLogic would come into play. And then taking actions on top of that is now where a platform also starts to matter because you start to develop different types of what we call content. So we distinguish the space between an automation platform or a framework plus and the content you need to have that. And ScienceLogic they talk about power packs and these things you need to have that essentially call out the work flows of the kind of actions you need to take when you have the falling signature of a certain bundle of events that have come together. Can you reason over it to say okay, this is what I need to do? And that's where a lot of our focus is to make sure that we have the right content to make sure that our clients applications stay healthy. Did that get to, I think build on what you were talking about a bit? >> Absolutely. Yes, you've got, it's this confluence of a know how an intelligence from working with customers, solving problems for them and being proactive against the applications that really run their business; and that means you're constantly adjusting. These networks I think Surendra's said it before, they're like living organisms. Based on load, based on so many factors; they're not stagnant, they're changing all the time, unless you need the right tools to understand not just anomaly's what's different, but the new technologies that come in to augmenting solutions and enhancing them and how that effects the whole service delivery cadence. >> Mr. Surendra, I want to give you the final word. One of the things I found heartening when I look at this big wave of AI that's been coming is, there's been good focus on what kind of business outcomes customers are having. >> Okay. >> Because back in the big data wave I remember we did the survey's and it was like what was the most common use case? And it was custom. And what you don't want to have is a science project, right? >> Right. >> Yes. >> You actually want to get things done. So any kinds you can give as to, I know you understand we're still early in a lot of these deployments and rollouts but what do you seeing out there? What are some of the lighthouse use cases? >> So, certainly for us, right? We've been at using data for a while now to improve the service assurance for our clients and I'll be talking about this tomorrow, but one of the things we have done is we found that now in terms of the events and incidents that we deal with, we can automatically respond with essentially no human interference or involvement I should say about 55% of them. And a lot of this is because we have an engine behind it where we get data from multiple different sources. So, monitoring event data, configuration data of the systems that matter, tickets; not just incident tickets but change tickets and all of these things and a lot of that's unstructured information and you essentially make decisions over this and say okay, I know I have seen this kind of event before in these other situations and I can identify an automation whether it's a power pack, an automotor, an Ansible module, playbook. that has worked in the situation before in another client and these two situations are similar enough such that I can now say with these kind of events coming in, or group events I can respond to it in this particular fashion; that's how we keep pushing the envelope in terms of driving more and more automation and automated response such that the I would say certainly the easy or the trivial kinds of I shouldn't say trivial, but the easy kinds of events and monitoring things we see in monitoring are being taken care of even the more somewhat moderate ones where file systems are filling out for some unknown reasons we know how to act on them. Some services are going down in some strange ways we know how to act on them to getting to even more complex things like the batch job type of thing. Example I gave you because those can be some really pernicious things can be happening in a broad network and we have to be able to diagnose that problem, hopefully with smarts to be able to fix that. And into this we bring in lots of different techniques. When you have the incident tickets, change tickets and all of that, that's unstructured information; we need to reason over that using natural language understanding to pick out the right I'm getting a bit technical here, verp no pas that matter that say okay this probably led to these kind of incidents downstream from typical changes. In another client in a similar environment. Can we see that? And can we then do something proactively in this case. So those are all the different places that we're bringing in AI, call it whatever you want, AIML into a very practical environment of improving certainly how we respond to the incidents that we have in our clients environments. Understanding when I talked about the next level changes when people are making changes to systems, understanding the risks associated with that change; based on all the learning that we have because we are very large service provider with essentially, approximately 1,000 clients. We get learning over a very diverse and heterogeneous experience and we reason over that to understand okay, how risky is this change? And all the way into the compliance arena, understanding how much risk there is in the environment that our clients facing because they're not keeping up with patches or configurations for security parameters that are not as optimal as they could be. >> Alright, well Surendra we really appreciate you sharing a glimpse into some of your customers and the opportunities that they're facing. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much for joining us. Alright and Dave, we'll be talking to you a little bit more later. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> And thank you as always for watching. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thank you. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> From Washington D.C. it's theCUBE. Covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest off the keynote stage this morning Bailey Szeto who is the Vice President of Customer and Seller Experience IT at Cisco. Thanks for coming and joining us. >> My pleasure. >> All right so Bailey, I've actually, you know I've watched, and partnered, and worked with Cisco my entire career but you actually changed my view of something about Cisco in your keynote this morning. And that's, you know, you said that 99% of Cisco's 50 billion dollars plus is transacted online so I should be thinking of you more as like Amazon.com you know, than as, you know the networking giant I've know my entire career. >> Well You know it's certainly true that most of our revenue comes through our online presence but it's perhaps in a different manner than what you're thinking right? So obviously we do do some business direct and we might have some stragglers selling, buying something with a credit card, but that's not the bulk of our business. The bulk of our business is through primarily partners, resellers and when I say online I meant B to B transactions. >> No no. I totally understand Bailey and what I love is you're in Cisco IT. >> That's right. >> And therefore we're not going to talk about a lot of the networking pieces. We're going to talk about what runs Cisco's business and you have the pieces and you know client success and support and all those run, and even, I didn't even realize the employee engagement all runs through you know Cisco.com >> That's right. >> And I love you did a nice little video. Gave all of those that have been in the industry. You kind of go through and look at the history of like oh okay there's the HTML stuff I used to code. >> That's right, that's right. >> Back in the 90s through all of the updates and yeah we definitely-- >> I was just expecting the little triangle with the guy like shoveling dirt under construction. You know the shovel right? >> Yeah the 404 not found. >> That's right, that's right. >> I know if I go to Cisco.com/go/product name that usually was a short cut to get me to some of the things I care about but for those people who weren't here for the key note or who might not know as much give us a little bit about you know your purview and kind of the scale and scope of what you do. >> Yeah so at Cisco I'm in Cisco IT. But I'm responsible for supporting all of the revenue generation portions of the company. So that's specifically marketing and what they do, sales and what sales does. Cisco services is a very big part of our company so I support the services organization. And most recently Cisco's been on a journey to really kind of move from a once and done hardware sales motion to a full reoccurring revenue type of stream. So we've stood up the whole customer success motion. And so I run the IT portions of that as well. And last but not least you heard me mention that 85% of our revenue actually comes through our partners. So I support all the systems that are partners interact with as well. >> Yeah it's interesting so we've done theCUBE at Cisco Live the last two years. >> Sure. >> And there's a observation I made a year ago when I started going to that show. And it was you know, if I'm a networking person but this applies to you know most people in IT, I used to manage stuff I could touch and go, I understand where it is and how I touch it and everything. Now a lot of what I have to deal with is outside of my purview and therefore I need to get into that environment kind of pair that with you know companies like yourself that are inquisitive. And so you have lots of change going on and lots of things that are in your environment there so we know change is the only constant in our industry. >> Without a doubt. >> So maybe give us a little bit of those dynamics and how that impact what's happening in your world. >> Yeah so I mean we talked a bit about my responsibilities and one of this is Cisco.com It's probably one of the more important platforms that I'm responsible for from an IT perspective. But I also mentioned that Cisco's a very, we grow through acquisitions a lot. It's one of our basic business strategies. And so every time we buy a company it's a big rush to kind of take that acquired company and integrate their online presence into Cisco.com right? So once a company is acquired we don't want people to think of it as a separate company both from a kind of marketing perspective but more importantly we're actually integrating that product into our Cisco ecosystem as well. So just having to move all that technology into Cisco.com is certainly a big job. But I think you are maybe asking this from a different perspective as well which is to say okay you know new technology is being introduced all the time and while it makes sense from a company portfolio perspective I think as a former IT person you're going to agree with me it makes our jobs a little bit more difficult. It's both a blessing and a curse right? From the perspective it's a blessing in that we get this great new technology to incorporate and use in our running of the business but it also adds a lot of complexity and so it's pretty important that we have both the systems and processes to be able to manage all that complexity in our infrastructure really. >> All right so infrastructure monitoring. >> Yes. >> Something you spent a lot of time talking about. I guess I'll set it up when I talked to my friends in the networking space these days or a lot of it, the joke is if you say single pane of glass they are going to spell it P-A-I-N because we understand that there's not one tool to rule them all. >> Right. >> Yes that I might have a primary piece but in the virtualization world I had to plug in to V Center and you know Cisco has you know you laid out a broad portfolio of various tools up and down and across the stack from you know security down to physical and upper layer and plus all the acquisitions. So can you lay out a little bit as to you know where ScienceLogic fits and there's a number of Cisco's tooling that that integrates in with. >> Yeah so when I talked about our journey with ScienceLogic you know Cisco of course has a number of tool and capabilities to take care of the pieces that we are known for. For example Application Dynamics is a great company that we bought and provides great insight into application health. But obviously in a network perspective right we have Cloud Management software, security software that type of thing and so I think what we realized in Cisco IT what my team realized is that it really isn't about a single system to rule them all it's about trying to find multiple platforms that can work together and really share data so as to drive richer insights. And so I think maybe the industry has been on a bit of a wrong path think it's you know it's not Lord of The Rings, one ring to rule them all or whatever right? It's about being able to use multiple applications but having the right data insides move around as needed so that depending on your lens or your role in IT whether you're a network guy or an application guy that you're going to use the tool that's more most natural to yourself but pulling in the right amount of data from those other parts to be able to get the right insight. >> Yeah I saw your closing slide mirrored the theme we've seen at the show of superheroes. So the super power everybody needs in IT today is how do I leverage my data and we understand that it probably takes more like the Avengers to be able to put those together because data is everywhere. >> Yeah the funny thing is that that wasn't actually a set theme. I think we must all have Avengers on our mind because everyone independently came up with the super hero concept. >> Yeah no spoilers on End Game either way though. >> That's right, that's right. >> Excellent so you know can you just bring us inside of some of that ScienceLogic journey? My understanding you're probably the largest enterprised employment of it so you know we always love to talk about scale and what that means and how it's been in your viewpoint. >> Yeah you know we actually before ScienceLogic we actually had our own system that Cisco IT wrote right and so you know as IT professionals we always think we can do it better than anyone else but we've reached a point where just so much technology and so much complexity came to the market that we really wanted to find a solution that would really kind of enable us to grow into the future with all the things that are happening right whether you're talking about Virtualization with Containers or you know Cloud native applications or Multicloud, these are all technology trends that have made our jobs in IT incredibly complex. And so we started to look for what could we replace our home grown monitoring platform with and ultimately we decided that ScienceLogic was the best fit for us. And since we've deployed it we as with most things we tend to stretch the scale especially with our vendors and so I think we are the largest ScienceLogic enterprise customer at this point. But we are seeing incredible benefits in terms of being able to connect ScienceLogic's Infrastructure Monitoring with our own Application Dynamics and really marry the two for those insightful bits that we get from both. >> All right so one of the big themed discussion here is that journey toward AI Ops. >> Yes. >> While we speak actually I've got a team in Mountainview that is at the DevNet Create Show which Cisco helped organize. >> Sure. >> We're doing two days of interviews there and DevSecOps is probably one of the key topics their going to be talking about. In your keynote this morning I heard IT Ops in a discussion there so bring us inside a little bit organizationally you know what you're seeing you know your viewpoint on these various trends that are you know helping to modernize you know transform operations. >> Yeah I think from a operations organization standpoint you're going to see the applications team and the infrastructure team work even closer together. Maybe one of the things that didn't really make super clear in my keynote this morning is I actually work on kind of the app side of the house right? I'm the direct interface to the business. And as such I actually don't interface with ScienceLogic directly but I'm a strong partner with my infrastructure team who are I think they are all sitting over there that do run ScienceLogic right and so in today's world you really can't just say oh this is infa problem they are going to deal with it. Because of that really big mix of well is it an infrastructure problem, is it an application health problem? And a lot of times it's both. And so organizationally it might be two separate organizations but the need to work together is you know even greater today than ever before. >> You're preaching to the choir. I mean when we launched Virtualization and then later when Containers came around there was the nirvana that oh I'm going to have some unit of infrastructure where the application people just don't need to worry about it. >> Right. >> You know serverless from it's name seems to imply that but we understand that eventually you know there's networking, there's storage, there's compute all underneath these kind of things. >> That's right. >> It's just repackaging so you know the applications important you know I'm long time infrastructure guy. >> That's right >> But, the number one rule is the reason we are here is to run that application and make sure your data you know gets where it needs to be otherwise you know we're not here just to power things. >> That's right. And I just realized I probably would get in trouble if I said it's actually the application, infrastructure, and of course the network all has to work together. >> Yeah well that's a given. Can you just we talked a little bit about App Dynamics you know when I think about Cisco you know broad portfolio, you know the SD-WAN, the ACI how do some of those fit into this discussion are there tie ins with what ScienceLogic is doing? >> It absolutely does. So as I talked about it when we talked about that collection of super heroes it's not a single super hero it's not a duo either it's really a big team. It's The Avengers right? And so when you think about Cisco's portfolio we have a lot of additional components needed to provide that modern operating IT operating platform right? So we talked about a lot about Application Dynamics we talked about ScienceLogic but what Cisco brings to the mix is things like ACI, Tetration, Policy Enforcement, Multicloud Management. So all those things again have to work together like The Avengers do to provide that modern platform. >> Yeah you mentioned multicloud and I know in your keynote you talked about AWS and GCP. >> That's right. >> How's Cloud changing things in your world? >> It absolutely is again it's I'll go back to the it's both a blessing and a curse right? The blessing is enormous capability that we get from the Cloud, enormous flexibility. As and example using Cisco.com as an example we host a lot of you know a lot of public information about our products and websites and data sheets and that type of thing on Cisco.com. And then a couple years ago we decided we're going to refresh the engagement of Cisco.com We wanted to make it much more personalized. We wanted to incorporate video. Those are all great things but the moment you try to throw video and guess what? Native video whether it be in English or French or Chinese or Japanese depending on where you are well that put an enormous strain on our infrastructure and if you had to travel if the packets had to travel from Japan to the United States to our data center that would slow things down. So we took advantage of Public Cloud to really kind of push out the content to the edges so that we could get localized content as close to the customer as possible. That's the great thing about it. But again the management of that increasing complexity right so both a blessing and a curse. AWS, GCP, we are using for doing a lot of video streaming work. And so again great capabilities from that platform as well. >> All right so we saw this week a lot of announcements of some of the integrations Service Now and App Dynamics were two of the ones that highlighted that I think impacted you. Anything from the announcements that is particularly excited you and I guess final on that is there anything roadmap wise that you know you'd be looking directionally for this phase to evolve towards? >> Yeah I think I was excited to see in fact that's one of the main reasons why we chose ScienceLogic in the first place was the quality and the amount of integrations that they have right? And so we're also a big Service Now customer and we see the benefits of automatically open cases in Service Now when ScienceLogic detects an issue as an example right? And I would say going forward we'll be looking to either have out of the box or if needed you know Cisco IT will build something even more integrations with the Cisco products. We already have App Dynamics but as I mentioned we have a lot of other components that are critical to the network and so we'll be looking for tighter integration and all this to drive really drive data together so that we can get to what I think what most people at this conference are hoping to achieve which is really driving towards automation and AI Ops right? So that's really the desire for I think for everyone attending this conference. It's certainly our desire in Cisco IT. And you know I'm looking forward to working with ScienceLogic to building out that roadmap. >> You know so I guess final question for you you talked about that automation, where are you when it comes to we look at you know things like machine learning and automation which if you listen to the analyst that spoke this morning is like you want to make sure you separate those things. >> That's right. >> We understand you know any of us that have done process and operations is you know you can automate a really bad process and it's not a good thing. >> That's right, that's right. >> So where are you on that journey? What do you see? You know what are the barriers that keep us from kind of the nirvana where you know oh geez I can actually just seal off the data center and let everything run? >> Right I think it's funny you mentioned Cisco Live so actually I present on a topic of AI at Cisco Live as well. So what this other speaker talked about really hit home with me understanding what is AI really. Because I think there's a general perception in the press that it's like this magical fairy dust you can just sprinkle on everything and it like makes everything perfect right? AI is really good at pattern recognition but you still need to put some check points and really have human beings kind of check the work of AI right? And so you know we actually have seen data center outages not Cisco but in the press when AI runs amok right? And so I think the first step of automation that's a given. We want to do that but that involves a lot of human beings kind of looking at the data and deciding okay these sequence of events can be cured by this set of automation. AI Ops is a something that's a whole different thing if you followed the definition of AI to say okay let the computer do it all on its own. I don't think we're there yet. I think we have a ways to go. And I certainly wouldn't trust want to trust our you know multi billion dollar business to AI Ops at this point in time. >> Well Bailey there's an event we did a couple years ago with a couple professors from MIT that are really forward looking on this and they say it's racing with the machines because people plus machines will always do better >> Yes. >> Than people alone or machines alone and hopefully that keeps some of us that are a little bit worried about the Skynets of the world taking over from getting a little bit too paranoid all of a sudden. >> I totally agree with that statement. In fact the quote that jumps in my head is "Better together". And I'll close with ScienceLogic App Dynamics better together. People AI better together. >> All right well Bailey since you ended on a perfect quote there thank you so much for joining and I hope to see you at Cisco Live San Diego. >> Fantastic, my pleasure. >> All right and thank you so much for watching theCUBE as always, I'm Stu Miniman here at ScienceLogic 2019 in Washington D.C. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, here at the Ritz-Carlton, in Washington, DC. Have about 460 people, it's a good mix of enterprise users, of course there's government agencies, as well as a lot of service providers, which is really where ScienceLogic started and has, many of their customers are in that space. And happy to welcome to the program, coming to us from Europe, a first time guest on the program, Luc Horee, who's RCloud and innovation Manager at Realdolmen, who's, as I said, a service provider. Thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you, no problem. >> So, you're based in Belgium, you're a service provider, tell us a little bit about Realdolmen, a little bit about the size, scope, number of users, and we'll take it from there. >> Realdolmen is an Belgium company, around 1,500 people in an country that is small compared to the U.S. So we have an total of 11 million people. One of the biggest service providers in Belgium, but we also do reselling, and we also do service integration. Our customers it's Belgium, it's what we call SMB market. But we have around, in total, I think three thousand customers in Belgium. Some only are buying products or licenses, others are in fact in full manage service operations. >> Okay great, yeah, the SMB market, as you call it, we understand, especially for service providers, really important market, help them, I don't want to have to manage my IT, I want to be able to go to experts that can do this. >> That's one of the reasons, yeah. >> RCloud and Innovation Manager, it's an interesting title, tell us a little bit about your role inside the company. >> I already worked for more than 36 years in the company, so I had a lot of jobs within the company. In the previous job I was a Operations Manager, and now I am RCloud and Innovation Manager. RCloud is our private cloud that we are using for hosting customers and serving customers. It's and active-active data center where we can do disaster recovery, set up, and so on. So for customers that are no longer interested in building their own data centers, that's what we doing. And it's for some of them also an in between on-premise data center and public clouds. So we have customers moving to Azure and AWS, and sometimes they just stay for specific reasons in our RCloud. Innovation Manger is about how do we set up, how do we improve our tooling, and how do we improve our processes in helping and unburdening our customers. >> You mentioned the public clouds like Azure and AWS, do you have relationships with them, do you have connections into some of those public clouds? >> We are Microsoft partner, so most of our customers are going to Azure, but it's also building up in Amazon, and we did receive some questions also about Google. >> Okay, great. So when we talk about operations, service providers, very rapid change environment, typically you have a lot of customers to be able to deal with, give us a little bit about what's changing in your business, the infrastructure management and the tooling space. >> In the tooling space, IT is moving, IT in motion is what we heard in the keynote this morning. Customers are expecting a lot, about dashboarding, they want to see how their business is behaving not about what is a device doing. We need to monitor more and more applications, and the business lines. So that's why we are implementing ScienceLogic, or had an implementation of ScienceLogic, and now we doing the second phase in building more runbook automations, more dashboarding, more experience levels instead of SLS or XLS. >> Great, I want to get to the automation, but first, you've only been using ScienceLogic for a couple of years now, bring us back to, was it a bunch of in-house tooling that you had created for managing before that drove us there, paint us a picture of kind of the before and how you ended up with ScienceLogic. >> We had Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager, we had Nagios, we had some plugs-in on this tooling, so it was I think in total six or seven tools, and we did some interfacing about it. But yeah, seven tools interfacing, not easy to run, a lot of management, a lot of people involved, a lot of skills required, so the reason was simplify it. >> So did you completely eliminate those seven previous tools? >> Yup, as of the 1st of April this year they are gone. >> All right, so there was a little bit of a journey, can you walk us through a little bit about there, was it prying it away from certain people, was it maturity from your side or from a product standpoint, what were some of those points that took a little while to get there. >> It took a while just to convince everybody in the company, set up an organization, it's not only the tooling it's also the organization need to be involved, a lot of communication, there's a change process going on, and we implemented, the first customers were in November 2017 on the system, and since then every month we added sometimes two, sometimes five, sometimes seven, sometimes one, as customer, so the people internally and externally need to get used to the product, so that's step-by-step, keep it simple, do it slowly but fast, and with a deadline. >> So, you talk a little bit about your organization operationally, what's the impact then to your ultimate end user, do they see anything, has it changed how, has it improved cost? >> It's changed certainly for the customers, because the old tools, there was no multi tenancy, there was not easy logon, so they had no access to the dashboards, they were just waiting for the monthly reporting and say, okay, it was up, okay we were, now they can have access, we use single sign-on to do that, so the customers are happy that they can see, they can see line of business dashboarding, and so on. And certainly internally it did improve a lot of cost savings, because a lot of the things we are doing now is automation, and we started the integration with our ITSM tool, and that will go live, normally next week. >> Okay, what ITSM tool are you-- >> It's a German tool, it's from a company called OMNINET, and the tool is called OMNITRACKER. >> Great, talk now about that automation, where have you come so far, where do you see it progressing in the future? >> We started first with some task automation, we have an 24/7 operation team, first-line, and they were doing a lot of manual tasks, so where we can, and what we first did was automate some manual tasks. And now we are progressing with ITSM integration, bi-directional integration, and then we will start with removing from old mailboxes, where we can do some restart automatically, so we will take a look at the incidents, see what we can do, see if we can do some automation with that, and we will certainly progress very far, as far as possible to do more and more automation and less manual work. >> Great, tell us, you've attended this event before, what brings you back to the event? >> First of all I want to see a lot of the demos, what's coming, because we are today, 8.12 version was announced, we are on 8.9, we will move next week to 8.10, so what is coming, so I have to talk internally to people, okay, what's coming, I need to convince all program managers, service delivery managers, I can talk to customers what is coming, what they can expect, so that's one of the reasons. The other reason is to talk to other customers of ScienceLogic, what are you doing, what's helping you, what's not, and so on. >> Yeah, I noticed one of the things they talked about is making it easier to upgrade from versions, when you think about the cloud world, as we talk about it, is, if your customers are in Azure, you don't ask them what version of Azure they're running, you're running whatever version Microsoft has it, they patch it, they update it, if security fix happens it goes there, when you talk about moving from 8.9 to 10 to 12, that process of when do I do it, how do I do it, how's ScienceLogic doing it, keeping things easy to upgrade, were there things in the keynote that you were ready to jump on? >> We started with, the first version 8.3 or 4 I think, and we always try to be in good shape in the newer releases. So we already had some experience with upgrading, and it's going smooth. And whatever I heard from the system engineers, it's going better and better and better. So normally we have only a very small outage to do that, in fact it should be minimal, sometimes they switch over or something like that, when a database is changed, but normally operations is always running 24/7, and there is no interruption for operations. >> Has there been anything at the show that you've seen so far, either through the demos, talking to some of the experts, or in the keynote, that you want to highlight? >> One of the things that I have seen is the connection with the application, with the APM tools, that's what our customers also are requesting more and more, the integration of infrastructure and application, and the multi cloud of course. >> Yeah, that's definitely something we've heard. All right Luc, I want to give you the final word, things to take away, for people that haven't come to a ScienceLogic event, what you think that they should take away from an event like this. >> For me the greatest take-away is come here to learn. Come here to see what is possible, what the future is, what AIOps will mean in the future, prepare yourself for the next three to five years, that's the main reason. >> Great, well thank you so much, preparing for the next three to five years, we know the pace of change isn't slowing down at all, so it's great to be able to talk to a practitioner that's helping to manage and deal with so many of those environments, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you. >> All right, and we'll be back with more coverage here, be sure to check out thecube.net for all interviews, I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering the ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's special coverage of ScienceLogic symposium 2019 here at the Ritz-Carlton, in Washington DC, about 460 people here, I'm told over 50% growth, from last year's event, the first time we've had theCUBE here, really excited to be able to dig in, with a number of the executives, customers and partners, and no better way, to kick off than one of the users, here at the event, actually coming here from across the pond, here to the district, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Nigel Wilks who's the Head of Global Tooling at Computacenter, based in the UK, Nigel, thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Hey, a pleasure. >> And joining him from ScienceLogic we have Clive Spanswick, who's the Vice President of Sales from EMEA, Clive thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Pleasure to be here. >> All right, so Nigel, set the stage for us, coming to the event here, tell me what brings you here, and tell us a little bit about Computacenter. >> Yeah sure, so, we're a relatively new customer to ScienceLogic so, I think, what, we signed two, three weeks ago? So, not deployed yet, but got great expectations. So, there's a lot of background research in the sessions. Finding about more what the additional capabilities that we can unlock, which will help drive our business further forward. So, Computacenter is a large IT provider, global. Based in the UK, as headquarters. My area of the business is in the Managed Services sector. So realistically, we're looking to reduce our cost to serve. Be more proactive for our customers, and, we've got great expectations of what ScienceLogic can do around those areas. Unlocking more automation, and eventually leading down the AI path. >> So Nigel, what I heard in the keynote is, some of the same themes I've been hearing around the industry, we are unparalleled as to how fast things are changing in the industry, there's just more complexity, there's more heterogeneous environments, for companies like yours, usually agility is one of those things that's coming to the top of the environment and oh my gosh, when I became an analyst about nine years ago, it was the tooling and management options out there where usually some of the things that customers would say are weak in their environment, and something I think I've heard for my entire career, so, maybe give us a little bit as to some of what you're hearing from the business side and how it makes sure that you can run your services faster and ultimately serve your customers better and how your look at, I don't know whether you call it AI Ops, but this whole space, fits into that environment. >> Sure, so-- >> Yeah. >> We've with probably a lot of organic growth within Computacenter over quite a short period of time. Also through acquisitions, we've got quite a fragmented tooling landscape globally. So, nearly two years ago, we kind of set on the journey to become more of a global entity, and certainly from my perspective a tooling landscape. Looking to consolidate those down, simplify our services, again helping reduce our cost base, and then leverage the automation stuff I talked about earlier. So, just going to ScienceLogic, we're moving away from some of the big names. And consolidating over 50 tools into the one ScienceLogic solution. >> Wow. That's great, let's bring ya into the discussion Clive, yeah, I heard in the keynote this morning, it was, the typical customer, it's at least 14 tools. >> Yes. >> That get consolidated down. I think back about five years ago, frictionless and simplicity were the terms that I heard. I talked to a lot of companies, it's like "Oh okay, yes I've got integrations I need to do "if I'm doing acquisitions, whether I be in, "if I'm in services of course that's there" But, you know, financial industries, and, heck, Cisco IT who I'm going to be talking to later, does an acquisition a month, what are you seeing, give us a little bit of the EMEA flavor and-- >> Sure. >> How what Nigel's saying, how is that resonating with your customer base? >> Yeah, absolutely Stu. So we see this a lot with the leading service providers now that are really being challenged by their customers to really extend their portfolio of services, over an ever more diverse range of technologies, and this is one of the big challenges that has driven tool sprawl over the course of the last seven to ten years, so simplification of the toolset, is really one of the key drivers to really deliver outcomes for efficiency, so a lot of the way we see modern service providers operating today really is all about automation, to get to better automation at a lower cost you have to drive simplification into the tool chain. So, we see this a lot with our customers across the region and indeed worldwide, that taking the tools landscape and really collapsing that into a much more simplified model is an essential ingredient to drive efficiencies that then in turn can be delivered to the customer as lower-cost services, so that's the real driving force that we see for customers today. >> Alright. Nigel, we'd love to hear, I know you've just gone through the process of choosing but, what are you looking for, are there specific business drivers, how will success be measured in your environment? >> Part of the process was, to look at what our business requirements were. And map those on through an RFI process. Of which ScienceLogic were one of the vendors that took part. So I think at the benchmark of everything we did, at the heart of the whole process, was that business requirements. Just making sure that whichever toolsets we selected, would go down that route. We never expected to have a single-vendor solution, which, fortunately we've got ScienceLogic which covers the majority, but with the partner ecosystem, some of those guys are here today. It kind of rounds it up for us. But moving away from our current providers, some of those, they present challenges to us as well. Tryin' to unlock data that's within the platforms, some of those tools are through acquisitions. So as much as you've got a brand name as part of a whole stable of tools, they don't inter-operate very well. And the beauty of going to ScienceLogic was, everything comes in together, even the partner tools, which allows us to really look at what we can do in the future. >> Alright, so, Nigel I've got the tough question for you. When I came into the show, one of the things that really struck me, is how data's at the center of what's important here, you know, when we look at companies, digital transformation often is a buzzword, but, we've really defined the difference between the old way and the modern environment is, how is data something that can actually drive your business, are you data-driven in your decisions, can you monetize data, what I heard in the keynote discussion is, data's such an important, not just the collecting but leveraging, and that's driving the intelligence, the automation. How much did that focus on data play into your decision, and can you give us a little bit of insight as to how your company looks at the role of data in the IT world today? >> Well, it's very important, that's quite a simple solution to that one. So for me, an infrastructure tooling perspective, being able to bring all the data into one place but contextualize it as well, means that we can then do some good stuff. Again, driving us down that automation path but from an end-user point of view we've got end-user analytics, that can open up a lot of different worlds for us, predicting what issues users have, rather than calling a service desk, theoretically, going further down the future, we'll be calling them to say, "I can see you've got a problem, "I can fix it for you remotely." Those kind of decisions that we can make from that data. But in my kind of space, the infrastructure tooling side, we need to go onto that AI Ops journey, and as you heard this morning, now, or at least a few weeks ago, to get there, it's like getting the data into a good shape, knowing what we want to do with the AI Ops moving forward. So, automation's a good candidate, that helps up achieve some of our objectives, reduces customers' downtime as well but, we've also got to be careful that we're not tryin' to automate resolution to poor behavior. >> Yeah >> Yeah, so, rather than fixing the root cause, we need to actually look at things and say, "Is this an incident-worthy event, "is this something that "we need to actually do something with, "or is it just an automation candidate?" And it's going to drive some of those behaviors for us. >> Clive, I'd love to get your viewpoint as to what you're hearing from customers, when I listened to the analyst this morning, he's like "You need to really differentiate "between that machine learning piece, "and the automation." Because any of us that've worked in operations environment, you can automate a bad process. >> Yeah. >> And data doesn't necessarily mean good information, so we need to manage those things a little bit separately, and that maturation of where customers are for both automation and intelligence, is a tough one, when they did a poll when your CEO was up on stage, nobody's fully, turn things over to the computers. >> Yep, yep. >> So, where are your customers, how are they thinking through the AIML, the use of data, and those pieces? >> So see, I think to be fair, a lot of customers today, AI Ops as we know is a relatively new term to the market, so I think a lot of businesses are struggling to recognize their own maturity, and I think, what we learned from this morning from Dave Link, our CEO, about how you characterize yourself on the journey to AI Ops maturity I think is a very valuable thing, and I think as I look at a lot of the customers and we saw from the poll earlier in the main session, that a lot of businesses today are fairly in the middle of maturity, so they're really at about the point of consolidating all the data in one place, the next big step of that of course is to clean that data up and contextualize it, so that you can start to leverage that data for the meaningful outcomes, and that's really where the smarts of machine learning and early-stage AI really start to play. We still, to be fair, still a long way off from the realization of full AI, but there are many pragmatic things that you can do, to get you very well level set, to take full advantage when those opportunities start to present themselves. >> Alright. So, Nigel, you're goin' through this process to really modernize your toolset you said you're replacing a whole bunch of things with the new one, what ultimately will this mean to your end-user customers? >> I think a more proactive service. Just dialing it back down to the simple things. If we simplify our service, we can have, from a business point of view, we can be consistent in how we deliver service globally. But from an end-user point of view. At the end of the day, most of the stuff is event-driven. End users typically find those out before systems do. Just from whole new cycles, reducing false positives and things. But it also means that, again, automation is being at the heart of what we want to try and achieve. We can automatically fix these things, so it's less downtime. And then hopefully we can just kind of prevent. Automation's great, but prevention's better. >> Yeah. How do you see your journey going forward, when you look at that automation, I mean I can't imagine you at a day one, your desk, putting everything in and everything's there, do you have a roadmap out there as to how you look at your deployment and how you're going to change things internally? Yeah. This, realistically, is going to be a catalyst to how we do things. So what starts off as a tooling replacement project, becomes that overall, we can do things global process. Working a little bit smarter than we have been before, doing things on a larger scale, but using common processes. That's quite a big shift in how we work now. But also means from our sales forces perspective, they're selling the same thing, it doesn't matter which country they're in. It becomes more about delivery location, and a language. >> Great. Clive, give us a little bit as to, what are customers like Nigel, what should they expect once they've made the deployment, how long does that transformation take-- >> Sure. >> And what's the day one and then, three months, six months out? >> Sure, great questions. So the whole journey that we're exploring, with all of our customers, is this move to AI Ops and they've done really the support of the resilient digital experience for their customers. The journey itself is continuous. So, one of the big challenges that we know to be true in the space that we operate in, is the demand for constant change. So the idea and the process that we're going on with, with computer sensor is that, we will take you through a series of maturity stages, of crawl, walk and run. And then once we get them to run, it will be a case of continuous improvement and continuous development. We expect to get to the first break of that within the first quarter, we're going to be delivering instant value from the platform pretty much from the word go, but once we get into the process of business as usual, running the operation, it really becomes about the improvement of moving, from really the stages of helping them react better to incidents, and then moving into a much more proactive and predictive state, and then finally, the endgame of this of course, is to really get to the point of, automate to avoid the incidents happening altogether, and that really, I guess, is where we start to step towards the ultimate vision of AI Ops and the things that that can bring to bear. >> Alright, so, Nigel, I want you to take me inside your team, 'cause on the one hand we say, "I have a whole bunch of tools, "I'm going to simplify and I'm going to unify "and that's going to be great." And I'm sure there's many on your team they're like, "Ah, I hate this tool, and this one's a pain "and this and that. "But we kind of know how "to do everything that I'm doing today." So, one, give us a little insight as to, is there some of that clinging to the past, and, on the other hand, are there some things that, like, "Oh my gosh, I'm glad I will never have to do "one two or three ever again, "once I've gone through this process"? >> Great, great question, so, everyone has their favorite tool, or favorite bit of software. I think, internally, we've clearly got that challenge as well. But it's fair to say, the reverse is true, there's a lot of tools out there that the user base are more than happy to get rid of. But ultimately, I think as we've gone through the cycle with ScienceLogic, and certainly we've had some good workshops with the various user base, highlighting what's possible, we've had some really really positive feedback. I still expect challenges, change, change is a big thing, most people don't like change but, I think there's a great opportunity for people to, at the end of the day learn a new tool. Something different, something fresh. And also then, they can think about what the tool can do, how can we exploit it more, so, we're not locked into the model that we were in before, the tools that we'd use for years and we've worked in the same way. We've got an exciting journey to start looking at how we can derive better services, how we can simplify our services. How we can let customers self-serve, to a degree as well. So you know, I think it's an exciting journey that we're on. And I think it'll be good to come back next year and demonstrate where we are. >> I love that, I definitely want to talk about that, Clive, give you the final word on this. What final advice to you give him, he's made the decision, he's goin' onboard. Tell him, I'm sure, unicorns and rainbows and everything's going to be phenomenal, but, what are some of the things you hear from your customers as they roll things out, give him a little bit of the "Yay" and a little bit of the-- >> Sure >> Just "Hey make sure "we've educated everybody on this." >> Yeah, again, great question Stu. So, from working with our customer base, the big thing that we see is that this is a continuous journey. The journey doesn't stop. What we do is we make things progressively easier, and the opportunities to scale and standardize are almost limitless. I guess the one word of counsel I would give is that, one of the big things that we see, with any major transformation, we're talking about the automations we can deliver around monitoring but, with any transformation it is really how you start to shift the culture of the organization to work a way around the new ways of operating, and really winning the hearts and minds of the guys that this stuff is going to make the biggest difference to. So, we're talking in the first instance of course about the operational stakeholders and the key users, having them engaged, and really working that process to get the maximum benefit out of the platform. From there, really is about the improvements that they can achieve in customer experience and of course, as Nigel has already said, a lot of that is really centered around the opportunities it's going to present them to show real innovations, around their service portfolio and my guidance there would be, don't be shy to show the world of the possible, to your enterprise customers, because they are demanding more, and there is so much that they can do with the platform to really unleash super value to their customer base. >> Yeah I love that, the world of the possible, we understand all the stresses and strains put on business and IT today so, Clive, Nigel, thank you so much for joining us, Nigel we look forward to hearin' how things go, catch up with you in a year maybe. >> Pleasure. >> Of course, thank you. >> Alright, so we'll be here all day at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington DC, ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watchin' theCUBE. 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>> Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2019 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone, this is the CUBE's live coverage in San Francisco at Moscone Center for IBM Think 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave. Volante Dave it's been in AI, it's been cloud, it's been in data changing the game. We've got two great guests here Murali Nemani, CMO of ScienceLogic, your CEO has been on the CUBE before and Joe Damassa who is the VP of strategy and offerings for hybrid cloud service at IBM. Thanks for joining us. >> Welcome. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you guys. >> Welcome to CUBE. So day four of four days coverage, yes, you can see the messaging settling the feedback settling, AI clearly front and center, role of data in that and then cloud scale across multiple capabilities. Obviously on premise multi cloud is existing already. Software's changing all this. >> Right. >> And so AI impacting operations is key. So how do you guys work together? What's the relationships in ScienceLogic and IBM? Could you just take a minute to explain that? >> I think I mean, clearly, as you talked about the hybrid nature of what we're dealing with, with the complexity of it, it's all going to be about the data. You know, software is great, but it's about software that collects the data, analyzes the data, and gives you the insights so you can actually automate and create value for our clients. So it's really this marriage, it's a technology but it's a technology that allows us to get access to the data so we can make change, it's all about the data. >> And so a lot of what IBM has been doing is building the analytics engines and Watson it's for them. Our partnership has been really building the data and the data lake and the real time aspects of collecting and preparing that data so that you can really get interesting outcomes out of it. So when you think about predictive models, when you think about the the way that data can be applied to doing things like anomaly detection that ultimately accelerate and automate operations. That's where the relationship really starts taking hold. >> So you guys are specialized in AIops and IT apparatus as that transforms with scale and data which you need machine running, you need a kind of gave it automation. >> Yes. >> And which is the devops use of operations is don't go down, right, up and running, high availability. >> Yeah. >> So on the cloud services side, talk about where the rubber is meeting the road from a customer standpoint, because the cultural shift from IT Service Management, IT operations has been this manual, some software here and there, but it's been a process. Older processes change a little bit, but this is a new game. Talk about how you guys are engaging the customers. >> Well, a part of it I mean, it's interesting when you step back and you stop breathing, you're on exhaust in terms of pushing what you're trying to sell and you listen to your customers what we're hearing is that they all understand the destination. They understand they're moving to the cloud, they understand the value that's going to bring, they're having a hard time getting started. It's how do I start the journey ? I've got all of this estate and traditional IT operations capabilities it's kind of move. How do I modernize it? How do I make it so it's portable across different environments. And so when you step back, you know, we basically said, hey, you need the portability of the platform. So what we're doing with Red Hat, what we're doing with IBM, cloud private, it creates that portable containerizing ability to take our existing workloads and start moving them, right. And then the other thing that the clients need are the services. Who's going to help me advise me on what workloads should move, which one shouldn't, most of the staff fails because you move the wrong things. How do you manage that? How do you build it? And then when you're done, and you've got this hybrid complex environment, how do we actually get insights to it and the data I need to operationalize it? How do I do IT apps, when I don't own everything within the four walls of my data set. >> Now, are you guys going to market together? You guys sell each other products, the relationship with ScienceLogic and IBM is it a partnership, is it a joint development? Can you explain a little bit more on how you guys work together? >> Well, we're one of the largest sort of services provider in the industry. So as we bring, our products, our technologies and our capabilities to market, we bring ScienceLogic into those deals, we use ScienceLogic in our services so that we can actually deliver the value to our clients. So it is sort of a co development, co joint partnership plus also our goal to market. >> So you use that as a tool to do discovery and identify the data that's in and the data that we're talking about is everything I need to know about my IT operations, my applications, the dependencies. Maybe you could describe a little bit more. >> Sure if you think about one of the things that Joe was mentioning is, today, the workloads are shifting, you're going from, let's say management performance monitoring and management platforms that you need to evolve from, to incorporate new technologies like containers and microservices and server-less architectures. That's one area of how did the tool sets fundamentally evolve to support the latest technologies that are being deployed? So think about that. Second is, how do you consolidate those set of tools now you're managing? Because you're adopting cloud based technologies or new capabilities, and so get consolidation there. And the third is, these workloads that are now migrating out of your private cloud or private data center into public clouds, right? And then that workload migration, I think it is Forrester level saying, about 20% of the total workloads are currently in some sort of a public cloud environments. So there's a lot of work to do in terms of getting to that tipping point of where workloads are now truly in a multi cloud hybrid cloud. So as IBM accelerates that transition and their core competencies in helping these large enterprises make that transition, you need a common manageable environment, that the common visibility across those workloads. So that's at the heart of what we're pulling, and then the data sets happened to be data sets that are coming either from the application layer, data coming from the log management systems, it could be data coming from a service desk in terms of the kind of CMDB based data sets, and we're building a data lake that ultimately allows you to see across these heterogeneous system. >> It could be service request to get that really touches the business process so you can now start to sort of map the value and how change is going to affect that value, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Yeah. >> I mean, what's interesting about ScienceLogic as a partner, it's the breadth of their platform in terms of the different things they can monitor, the depth, the ability to go into containers, and kind of understand what the applications are doing in them and the scale in terms of the types of devices. So when you think about, the types of devices, we're going to have to manage everything from, sensors in an Internet of Things, environment to routers, to sophisticated servers and applications that can be running anywhere, you need the flexibility of the platform that they have in order to be able to deliver that. >> And I think that's a key point when you talking about containers and Kubernetes, we heard your CEO Jeannie remitting mentioned Kubernetes, onstage like, that's great, good time(mumbles) I know no one like Kubernetes now it's mainstream. >> Yeah. >> So this is showing them what's going on the industry which is the on premise decomposition of on premise with cloud private, you guys have. >> Yes. >> Is giving them the ability to use containers to manage their existing stuff and do that work and then have the extension to cloud, public cloud or whatever public cloud. This gives them more mount modern capabilities. So the question is, this change the game we know that but how has it changed AIOps and what does it mean? So I guess the first question is, what is AIOps? And what is this new on premise with cloud private and full public cloud architecture look like in AIOps 2.0? >> So for me, it's a very simple definition. It's really using algorithmic mechanisms, right? Towards automating operations, right? It's a very simple way, simplistic way of looking at it. But ultimately, the end game is to automate operations because you need to move at the pace of business and machine speed. And if you want to go, move in machine speed, you can have, I mean, you can't throw enough humans at this problems, right? Because of the pace of change, the familiarity of the workloads spinning up and sitting down. We have a bank as a customer who turns up containers for every 90 seconds and then turn them down. Just can't keep that in that real time state of change and being able to understand the topological relationships between the application layer and the underlying infrastructure so that you can truly understand the service health because when an application degrades in performance, the biggest issue is a war room's scenario where everyone's saying, it's not me, it's not me and because everyone's green on their front, but it's now how do you get that connective tissue all the way running-- >> Well it's also not only the change, it's also the velocity of data coming off that exhaust or the changes and services is thrown off tons of data that you need machines now I mean, that's kind of the thing. >> Exactly, yeah. And I would add to that, I think part of the definition of AIOps is evolving. We know where we're coming from is more fit for purpose analytics, right? I have this problem, I'm the collect this data, I'm going to put these automations in place too address it. We need to kind of take it data Model approach that says, how do I ingest all of this data? You know, even at the start, when you're looking at which workloads and you're doing discovery and assessment of workloads, that data should go into a data lake that can be used later when you're actually doing the operations and management of those workloads. So what data do we collect at every stage of the migration and the transformation of it, and including the operational data? And then how do we put a form analytics on it, and then get the true insights? I think we're just scratching the surface of applying to AI, because it's all been very narrow cast, narrow focus, I have this problem, I collect this data, I can automate this server, it needs to move much beyond that to it... >> And services are turning up and on and off so fast as a non deterministic angle here, and you got state, non deterministic, I mean, those are hard technical computer science problems to solve >> Yeah. >> That's you don't just put a processor around say, oh, yeah. >> Well, let's back to the the scalability of the platform, the ability in real time to be monitoring and looking at that data and then doing something right. >> All right now, humans aren't completely removed from the equation, right? And so I'm interested in how the humans are digesting and visualizing all this data, especially at this speed there a visualization component? How does that all evolving? >> Yeah, I think that to me I mean, that's part of the biggest challenges. You humans are a, they have to be the ones that kind of analyze what's coming and say, what does this mean when you haven't already algorithmically built it into your automation technology, right? And then they also don't have to be the one to train, the system is doing to actually do it. So one of the things that were are that struggling with not struggling with, we're experimenting with is, how best to visualize this, right? We do some things now, we've got a hybrid cloud management platform, we're teaming with the product guys, and it's the ability to have four consoles. One from a consumption, how do I consume services from Amazon, IBM Cloud on premise, how do I deploy it? So in a Dev apps model, how do I fulfill that very quickly and operational councils, right, and then cost on asset management so you can actually have at glance say, oh, you know, I've got a big Hadoop cluster which been spun up, I'm paying $100,000 for it and it has zero utilization. So how do you visualize that so you can say oh, I'm need to put a rule in that if somebody's spinning something up on, you know, IBM Cloud and they're not using it, I either shut it down, or I sent messages out, right, for governance in top of it. So it's putting business rules and logic in terms, in addition to visualization to help automate. >> And Jeannie talked about this at our keynote efficiency versus innovation around how to manage and this is where the scale comes in. Because if you know that something's working, you want to to double down on it, you can then, kind of automate that away and then you just move someone, the humans to something else. This is where the AIOps I think it's going to be, I think, going to change the category. I mean, it's a Gartner Magic Quadrant for the IT operations. >> Right. >> AI potentially decimates that, I mean... >> Yeah, there's this argument that you know, you have these nice quadrants or let's say nicely defined market segments. You have the NPMD, the ITSM, the ITOM, you know, you have APM and so what's happening is in this world of AIOps, none of those D marks really fit anymore because you're seeing the convergence of that. And then the other transition that's happening is this movement from, you know, classic ops or Dev and a dev to Ops, Dev Ops and now dev sec Ops, you know, you're trying to get worlds to converge. And so when we talk about the data and being able to build data models, those data models need to converge across those domains. So a lot of the work we do is collect data sets from log management, from service desk and service management, from APM etc, and then build that data model in real time. So you can.... >> It kind of building an Uber or CMDB or I mean, right? (loud laughter) I mean, do most of your clients have a single CMDB? Probably not, right? >> Yeah. So this is sort of a new guidepost, isn't it? >> Yeah, a part of it is. There are these data puddles if you will, all right data exist in a lot of different places How do you bring them together so you can federate different data sources, different catalogs into a common platform because if a user is trying to decide, okay, should I spin this up on, you know, this environment or that one, you want the full catalog of capabilities that are on premise in your CMDB system with the legacy environment out of the catalogs that may exist on Amazon or Azure, etc and you want data across all that. >> It seems that everything's a data problem now. And datas are being embedded into the applications which are then the workflows are defining infrastructure, architecture, or are sole cloud, multi cloud, whatever the resource is, so we had JPMorgan Chase on top data geek on and she was talking about, we have models for the models and IBM has been talking about this concept of reasoning around the data. This is why I always like the cognition kind of angle of cognitive, because that's not just math, math is math, you do math on, you know, supervised machine learning and knowing processes to be efficient, but the cognition and the reasoning really helps get at that data set, right. So can you guys react to that? I mean, is everything a data problem? Is that how you should look at it and how does reasoning fit into all this? >> Well, I mean, that's back to your point about what is the humans role in this, right. So we're moving in a services business from primarily labor base with tools to make them more efficient to the technology doing the work. But the humans have to then say, when the technology get stumped, what does that mean? So should I build a new, how do I train it better? How do I, you know, take my domain expertise? How do I do the deep analytics to tell me all right, how do I solve those problems in the future? So the role changes I think Jenny talks about in terms of new collar workers. I mean, these are data scientists, these are people that understand the dynamics of the inner relationship of the different data, the data models that need to get built and they are guiding in effect the automation. >> I thought your CTO was on theCUBE talking about, Paul was talking about, you know, take the heavy and Rob Thomas was also on, the GM of the data plus AI team. I think he really nailed it. If you guys to take away the heavy lifting of the setup work then the data science who're actually there to do the reasoning or help assist in managing what's going on and putting guard rails around whatever business policy is. >> Today, I mean, we talked to in this about 79 percent I think it's a gardener stat of 79 percent of the data scientists. And these are these PhDs, they're highly valuable, spend their time collecting, preparing, cleansing those data models, right? So, you're now really applying that PhD level knowledge base towards solving a problem, you're just trying to make sense of the data. So one, do you have a holistic and a few? Two, is there a way to automate those things so you can then apply the human aspects towards the things that Joe was talking about. So that's a big part of what we're trying to come together in terms of the market for. >> Well guys thanks for the insight, thanks for coming on, great job. I think we talked for you know, an hour and on cultural shift because you mentioned the sets in here Ops and devs. It's a melting pot and it's a cultural shifts. I think that topic is worth following up on. But I'll let you guys just get a quick plug for you. I know you going to an event coming up and you got some work. You can talk about what you guys are doing. You got an event coming up, what your pitch, give a quick flag. >> Yeah, so we've got our symposium, which is our big user conference. It's in April. It's right in, it's on April 22 to 23rd to the 25th. It's in downtown Washington DC, Cherry Blossom festival season at the Ritz Carlton. And so a lot of that, we'll have theCUBE there as well. >> Yeah of course. >> So, we're looking forward to it. A lot of great energy to be carried over. >> We love going to the District. (laughs loudly) >> What don't we say, you guys are great, great to visit. So give the plugs with a service you're doing. Just give an update on what you guys are up to. >> Yeah, I think I mean, we're also we're investing the technology when we're full on board with the containerization, as we talked about, we're putting together a services portfolio. I think Jenny mentioned that we're taking a whole bunch of capability across IBM Global Technology Services, Global Business Services, and really coalescing into about, you know, 23 offerings to help customers advise on cloud, move to cloud build for cloud and manage on cloud and then you've seen the announcements here about what we're doing around the multi cloud management system. Those four console I talked about how do we help, you know, put a gearbox in place to manage the complexity of the hybrid nature that our customers are dealing with. >> It seems IBM got clear visibility on what's happening with cloud, cloud private, I think a really big announcement. I think it's not talked about in the show and I'll always kind of mentioned the key linchpin but you see cloud, multi cloud, hybrid cloud, you got AI and you got partnerships, ecosystem now its execution time, right? >> Yeah, exactly and, and frankly, that's the challenge, right? So we used to be able to manage it all on the four runs, right? Your SAP instances was in the data center, your servers were in the data center, your middleware is in the data center. Now I got my applications running in Salesforce.com often software as a service. I've got three or four different infrastructures of service providers. But I still have the legacy that I got to deal with. I mean the integration problems are just tremendous. >> Chairman VP of strategy at IBM hybrid cloud and Murali Nemani, CMO ScienceLogic, AI operations, bringing in hybrid clouds to theCUBE bringing all the coverage day four. I'm with Dave Volante, it's all about cloud AI developers all happening here in San Francisco this week. Stay with us from this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat inspirational music) >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier in the Palo Alto Studios for Cube Conversation. I'm here with David Link who's the CEO of ScienceLogic. David, thanks for coming in. Good to see you. >> Great to be here, John. >> So, thanks for coming in. You came in from D.C., that's where your headquarters and ScienceLogic, you guys are having good business run right now. You're self-funded early on, now you get to venture back. Take a minute to explain how you guys got started, what does the company do? >> So, this is the classic story of entrepreneurship. We started in the garage. Myself and a couple of co-founders believed that IT management operations was broken and it was broken because a lot of the industry had really focused on having silos of data, the silos of data, the network, the application, the security, the storage, now cloud, containers and every technology had its own data silo of manageability. We believe that that was intrinsically wrong to understand how the service that combined all these different applications and technologies was behaving. We wanted a service view, so we brought it all together, kicked off, really the first seven years we boot strapped the company, the first year and a half we coded, got the product to market, it grew very quickly, got to the Inc. 500 a couple times, and then we attracted a lot of financing options. We had about 250 companies approach us. We never made one outbound call and fortunately, we had some really great and strong investors in EA, then Intel Capital, and three and a half years ago, our last round of financing was with Goldman Sachs and they've really been a great catalyst to help us continue our growth over the last five years. I think we've grown about 540% on the revenue side, so it's been an exciting time. >> Well congratulations. It's always a good success story to be a hot deal when you don't have to make any calls, they come to you. >> Yes. >> And that's good, that's part of growth, but I got to ask you what year did you start the company up? >> 2003. >> So, it's not obvious then, it's obvious to you as a visionary, but now people now know IT operations is broken. Cloud highlights it in a big way. The lights get turned on, the cockroaches are running around, but web services were still booming at that time. You start to see the beginning of the whole web services movement, you guys saw this early. Now, it's well recognized that IT operations can be automated away and Cloud certainly has an automations vibe to it. AI has been a big part of the AI operations. Is this kind of where you guys started with that vision? Was the original vision kind of where it is today? Take us through kind of what you saw and what's happening today. >> So, thematically we have this next wave of the computer architecture, Cloud computer architecture, edge computing where the way you manage that kind of infrastructure is different than the classic client server. There are different needs, different requirements, and that thematically has led with the change of infrastructure. Applications are changing and applications are now more infrastructure-aware. When we started the company, usually applications sat on one system or a cluster of systems and they weren't widely distributed. So now that the applications profile is changing, the architects are changing to microservices, that really puts huge strain on our industry. The industry, the total adjustable market, is about 25 billion dollars a year annual spent on tools. John, if you can imagine that. 25 billion a year is spent. It's going through an amazing, I would say, tectonic shift because why? Infrastructure's shifting and as more people move workloads to the Cloud into what I would call ephemeral workloads where they're moving around, that causes all kinds of pressure on the systems and record to manage that so that you understand what is happening at this moment in time. Where is it? What Cloud is it running on? How's the application performing? And you really need to tie the application to the infrastructure real-time. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. I interviewed a CIO this past week for a big company. I won't say the name 'cause we haven't published the video yet, but he told me candidly, he said that, look it, we outsourced everything and we outsourced our way into oblivion and what he meant by that was is that the core competency of IT, and he reference the book, Nick Carr, IT Doesn't Matter, which kind of was true, but wasn't true. Now, IT has a competitive advantage and essentially, they had this anemic IT department that was outsourced and they lost their competitive advantage, so he's like the reinvestment in IT is more than ever now because of Cloud, because of these new environments. So, I kind of believe that to be true. I'm sure you do too, but the reaction really is is you've got a lot of Legacy vendors that were dictating how to do things. >> Yes. >> I'm IBM, I'm Oracle, you got to do it this way and you were kind of constrained, IT was constrained by that. Now, you got to be much more agile, you have workloads that are dynamic, provisioning, orchestration, this is a whole new dynamic. What's the impact to the IT buyer, the IT environment with this new model, this new modern dynamic, new modern era? >> When you think about CIOs and CEOs, the pressure that they have to be Cloud first. Cloud first is such a strong... At the Board level, there's pressure. The adoption of Cloud now is happening faster and more rapidly than the adoption of virtualization, maybe it's doubling in the speed in the time warp, but what that means is that most CIOs are dealing with as many as nine to 11 Clouds, not one. You have a federation of Clouds: Private Clouds, public Clouds, software as a service Clouds, and that's your IT landscape, so it's changing so quickly that you have to think of it in a more federated approach. That means that the way you used to manage your private systems, and now your public systems, are really different and you've got to look at them more holistically because often they're communicating with one another in hybrid architectures. So, that's really the heart at our mission, to provide the context of how all the services you're trying to deliver as a CIO are behaving. What's their availability? What's the risk of the service having a problem? And knowing that real-time is ultimately what you want to do with your Cloud first strategy, but you need the right tooling operationally to affect that kind of outcome for your team. >> So, what's the core problem that you guys are solving? 'Cause obviously, there's a lot of complexity now, it's a new environment, so I still got the baggage of some Legacy environments. Is it monitoring you're solving? I guess, what's the core problem is my question that you guys are solving? If you had to kind of finish that, the core problem is blank. >> The core problem is visibility. The Holy Grail is application to infrastructure and the problem is that's becoming so complicated because everything is moving around. The more abstraction layers where it's a container, which is abstracted on top of a virtual machine, which is on top of bare-metal server. SD-WAN is an abstraction on top of an MPLS network. So, you have all of these layers that get from a software-defined perspective, they get abstracted away from the actual equipment that it's running on. Well, when that happens, where is the problem? Because it's moving around. The problem isn't in one place. So, that application to infrastructure awareness, it's almost like one of the things that we've looked at in the world of Facebook. You've got a lot of relationships, you've got videos, you've got friends, you've got all these different connections that are constantly moving around with data streams. What we do as a company is pull all these different data streams from the technologies themselves, from the Cloud providers, from the application layer, pull it together in a data hub that we can then understand how they all relate to one another so you can really, truly understand service impact and that is the crux of the problem most companies are dealing with now. You've got to fight with your Legacy, 'cause you still have that and it's not going away tomorrow, so you've got to make sure you're good at that, you've also got Cloud, the Cloud first initiative, and then you've got in between systems that are using both. That's really where we play. We're really good at the Legacy, we're good at Cloud, and connecting the two together and that is a really tough space because most Legacy providers really didn't get good with managing hyperactive ephemeral Cloud estates. The guys who started over the last five years building tools to manage the Cloud are really good at Cloud, but they don't cover Legacy. They're not going to cover a net app or hyper-converge, typically. So, we combine the both, Legacy and Cloud together in one management system, monitoring management paradigm, and then there's an automation engine where we actually proactively remediate problems real-time. So, the three together is where algorithmic operations, AI Ops, comes together. >> David, I want to dig into the offering, but before we get there, I want to get your thoughts on two trends: one is multi-Cloud. Recently, we've seen a lot of hybrid Cloud discussion, but now the big hubbub is multi-Cloud and the other one is AI Operations. So, I've been saying on The Cube, everyone who's in IT Operations is screwed, going to get automated away by AI. It's kind of tongue in cheek, but it's kind of a reality is that those old business models that were based upon certain service levels are going to be done in software. Now, you've got multi-Cloud. So, first question is what is multi-Cloud definition that you have for that? What does it mean? What is multi-Cloud? >> In our world, multi-Cloud is... Most large organizations use more than one Cloud and half of that is driven by what Cloud is best to operate a particular application profile? Amazon's really good at a lot of application profiles, but Azure might be better at certain Microsoft profiles, and then Google has profiles, and IBM Watson has profiles. Depending upon what you're trying to do with the application, where it was born, how it's living, how it's been re-factored, you're going to use one Cloud or the other, but most customers that we see have many Clouds. There really isn't one Cloud management scape when you're using... Vendors are still reasonably proprietary in the public hyper-scales. >> Some are better than others. >> And some are better. It depends on the use case. So, we try to bring all that together so that you're not looking at four panels, you're looking at one. >> So, you make it easy with one dash port. Okay, AI Operations. This is a hot trend, a lot of venture capitals are funding companies that have AI Ops in it, machine-learning obviously booming, no doubt software automation is coming. I'm seeing it everywhere. What does that mean? What is the definition of AI Operations? I mean, I'm bombastic at saying the industry sectors is going to crumble. I kind of think it will, but it will shift, but what is the impact to IT Operations with AI and what is AI Ops? >> We like to think of it as a life cycle. So, when you look at the life cycle of operations you have at the beginning of the life cycle, provisioning, so when we think about algorithmic, there's many different layers of automation: machine learning, cognitive learning, and you're going to use different parts of algorithmic operations for different parts of the life cycle. So at the very beginning, you're going to connect generally to a provisioning system so you know what's been provisioned or de-provisioned so we can automatically align a manageability template because nobody can be on a keyboard now, John. This has to be all machine to machine. So, once then it gets provisioned, then there's the run operate part and how do you learn from the normal operating conditions that you're looking for? The anomalies that you would look for to detect things aren't behaving appropriately? And then, once you understand those anomalies and the patterns, you can remediate them proactively, adding resources, decreasing resources, changing configurations, those are the things that kind of that last tier, and then that final tier, when there is a problem, if there is a problem, you've got to then raise a ticket, you've got to then work through the incident management of that ticket so there's another multi-step layers of automation to the incident management orchestration layer of solving problems, closing out a ticket. So, we have so many different layers across that life cycle that we plug into, most of which are native to our core platform. >> And your secret sauce is managing all the workloads that are moving around really fast, so to complicate that even further, you've got a lot of stuff moving around to track it all. I love what you said about not typing on the keyboard anymore, but essentially I'll translate that from what I heard was command line interface of CLIs has been the primary mechanism for dealing with either network and or storage, which is moving packets from here to there and moving storage from now to then, storing stuff. So, CLI is moving to a programmable model? This is the big takeaway. So, I totally think this is the mega trend. The command line interface mode of operation is moving to programmable, which hits your run and operate. >> Correct. >> This is the mega trend. Your thoughts? >> It is and that's one of the layers of complication because instead of a CLI, it's an API, and it's usually a restful API or a graph API. Those APIs are very different in construct and instead of talking to one device, that one device is virtualized into a hundred or a thousand and so with one API call, you actually create a thousand devices versus one device and understanding how one system is behaving, like a CLI would be to one system, right? So, that is a layer of complication where when we make an API call, we break it up into hundreds of things that then we track and understand the tenancy of what is a multi-tenant nature of that? What is the organization? What is the service view for all these little components that are part of one API call? And that abstraction layer makes it really difficult for the enterprise because the one thing about our API economy right now, there is no standard. Every vendor chooses their own formats for their products and in some cases, many formats for products in a product family. So, that layer of complexity, John, is what we're really solving for. The customer doesn't have to worry about that. We take care of that for them, but you're right, the API has become the CLI and it's just a level of complexity beyond what most enterprises are wanting to deal with themselves. That's why they bring us in to help. >> That is so important too that the data's in the API. >> That's right. >> That's key and Cloud's got orchestration challenges, state and state-less applications. All right, let's get into ScienceLogic's offering. So, what do you guys provide to customers? Talk about the product. How do you guys deliver it? Is it software, is it Cloud, is it service, is it appliance? Take us through the offering. What's the key secret sauce? How do people buy and use your product? >> So, our product's delivered as a service. You can use it in the Cloud. We deliver it as a service in our Cloud, but we also provide it if customers are using Amazon or IBM or Google or Microsoft. They can put our product, same code-base, same product, they subscribe to it, it's a subscription license model, so it's a pay-as-you-go and you pay for the number of devices that are under management. Typically, there are some customers, whether it's in the government, financial services, or international locations where they might want to deploy our product on premise, so we offer the same mode, either in the Cloud or on premise, but most customers now are choosing to deploy the product in the Cloud and that is a really easy... It's easy to get >> That's good for you guys. >> It's great for us because there's consistency of operations, we can keep everything up to date, and most customers want technology delivered as a service. They just want it to work. They want it to solve the business problem and do it easily, efficiently, even better, solve complex problems in an easy format. >> Give some customer examples or benefits or anecdotal stories around customers that have used your service that extracted benefits and value out of it, and second part of that question is when does someone know they need your product? What are the smoke signals? Is something breaking or is it just pain? When do they know to call you guys? So first one is customer examples or stories and then how does someone know who's watching this, hey I might need these guys? >> There are four segments that we cover. We have customers all over the world. There's enterprise customers. This is really a product for large enterprise, Fortune 1000 companies, so Clorox would be a customer, Hughes Satellite would be a customer, Cisco Systems out here in the valley is a customer, Dell, EMC, so it depends on what problem we're trying to solve for the customer. >> So large IT deployments basically? >> Very large, multinational, big networks, hundreds of thousands of devices, tens of thousands of devices is where those companies have immense complexity, lots of heterogeneous technology that comes together to deliver a service. They need a really robust solution to manage that proactively. So, enterprise customers, service providers, so a lot of managed service providers, infrastructure service providers, Telcos, they all use it, so I think we have about 60% of the infrastructure as a service providers use our product to deliver managed services to their customers and then the federal government all over the world, we have government customers around the world. I think right now about 70,000 organizations use our product every day and it's fairly evenly split, AMIA and AsiaPac, and then the US is our biggest market. >> You know, it's interesting you mention heterogeneous. I always kind of smile because you mentioned client server earlier. Every wave has their reflection point and I think what's going on with Cloud and I'd love to get your reaction is that Cloud, where it's winning, is it's a scale out, large scale, pool of resources. We look at what's going on with Amazon, all this, is that you don't need to know what service they have, just get more servers, so you're scaling out. >> Yes. >> But now, you need to have heterogeneous components. It's not just X-86. You could have a GPU, you have other stuff, AI going on, so heterogeneous is different now, but it's still the same came, it's still complex, it needs to be abstracted away. Is this kind of the key area that you're riding on? Is that right? What's your thoughts about that concept? >> Well to a large degree, John, the Cloud providers have really provided a layer for you to not have to worry about that, but we've seen customers actually with hyper-converged environments that they build in-house and or systems that they built because of geo-fencing in different countries that need the data kept in the country. There are requirements that drive people to build their own system, so the real thing that we're seeing a tremendous struggle with right now is that context, understanding what connects to what. All the different technologies that come together, all the heterogeneity that comes together to deliver a service, and whether you buy best in class technologies to solve one part of the stack, the landscape of whether it's your load balancer or a caching server or the database or the server, the network, all those different components, the security layer, those components that come together, often people have chosen specific technologies to solve those problems. The Cloud kind of abstracts that away with they hyper-scalers, but often you're putting infrastructure that you have on prem combined with infrastructure in the Cloud to deliver an aggregate solution so that multi-tiered architecture, just like back in the day, a three-tiered architecture, we're seeing those emerging again with public Cloud because you might want the data that actually generates the information on the web client's side to be in your data center, but you still have to understand how the service is behaving. So, we really look at all layers of the stack to solve the problem and that's really hard to do. >> Well David, great to have this conversation. Before we end, I want you to get a quick plug in for the company. How many employees, offices? What's the revenue like? What's your goals? You don't have to share the revenue if you don't want to, but if you want to, you can. Give a plug for the company. What's happening? >> Well, I'm really proud of what the team's done. We've got a great team of employees, about 370 employees today, full-time, they're spread all over the world, probably 80% are here in the Americas and the vision for the company, we think that this is a big opportunity. We are far from done. We really started the company to disrupt the industry 'cause the industry, as I said, was a silo industry and it really is, 20 years later, it's still that way. It's not really converged into a unified solution. We have great aspirations. Every year we've been growing the business 40, 50% a year for the last several years, and this year, we'll round over 100 million within the next 12 months of our run rate, so it's an exciting time for the company. >> Well, you've got a great model, SAS, in a massively growing and changing market, complex market, heterogeneous networks, apps are all being abstracted away and automation's driving this, so I think it's a perfect storm of innovation. Congratulations and thanks for chatting on The Cube here in Palo Alto. >> Love to be here, John. Thanks for having me. >> John Ferrier here, Cube Conversation, and we're here with David Link, CEO of ScienceLogic, and also the founder. Self-funded, big venture rounds, growing like a weed, based in D.C. This is the Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (dramatic inspirational music)

(upbeat music) >> Full stack observability is all the rage today. As businesses lean into digital, customer experience becomes ever more important. Why? Well, it's obvious, fickle consumers can switch brands in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse. Technology companies have sprung into action and the observability space is getting pretty crowded in an effort to simplify the process of figuring out the root cause of application performance problems without an army of PhDs and lab coats, also known as endlessly digging through logs, for example. We see decades old software companies that have traditionally done monitoring or log analytics and or application performance management stepping up their game. These established players, you know, they typically have deep feature sets and sometimes purpose-built tools that attack one particular segment of the marketplace. And now they're pivoting through M&A and some organic development trying to fill gaps in their portfolio. And then, you got all these new entrants coming to the market, claiming end to end visibility across the so-called modern cloud and now edge native stacks. Meanwhile, cloud players are gaining traction and participating through a combination of native tooling combined with strong ecosystems to address this problem. But, you know, recent survey research from ETR confirms our thesis that no one company has it all. Here's the thing. Customers just want to figure out the root cause as quickly and as efficiently as possible. It's one thing to observe the stack end to end, but the question is who is automating the observers? And that's why we're here today. Hello, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special Cube presentation where we dig into root cause analysis, and specifically, how one company, Zebrium, is using unsupervised machine learning to detect anomalies and pinpoint root causes and delivering it as an automated service. And in this session, we have two deep dives. First, we're going to dig into this exciting new field of RCaaS, Root Cause As A Service with two of the founders and technical experts behind Zebrium. And then we bring in two technical experts from Cisco, an early Zebrium customer who ran a POC with Zebrium's service, automating and identifying root cause problems within four very well established and well known Cisco product lines, including WebEx Client and UCS. I was pretty amazed at the results and I think you'll be impressed as well. So thanks for being here. Let's get started. With me right now is Larry Lancaster, who's a founder and CTO of Zebrium. And he's joined by Rod Bagg, who's the founder and vice president of engineering at the company. Gents, welcome. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> Okay. >> It's good to be here. >> It's good to be here >> All right Rod, talk to me. Talk to me about software downtime, what root cause means, all the buzzwords in your domain, MTTR and SLO. What do we need to know? >> Yeah, I mean, it's like you said. I mean, it's extremely important to our customers and to most businesses out there to drive uptime and avoid as much downtime as possible. So, you know, when you think about it, all of these businesses, most companies nowadays, either their product is software and it's running, you know, running on the web and that's how you get a point click. Or the business depends on, you know, internal systems to drive their business and to run it. When that is down, that is hugely impacting to them. So if you take a look, you know, way back, you know, 20, 30 years ago, software was simple. You know, there wasn't much to it. It was pretty monolithic and maybe it took a couple of people to maintain it and keep it running. There wasn't really anything complicated about it. It was a single tenant piece of software. Today's software is so complicated, often running, you know, maybe hundreds of services to keep that or to actually implement what that software is doing. So as you point out, you know, enter the sort of observability space and the tools that are now in use to help monitor that software and make sure when something goes wrong, they know about it But there's kind of an interesting stat around the observability space. So when you look at observability in the context or through the lens of the cost of downtime, it's really interesting. So observability tools are about a $20 billion market, okay? But the cost of downtime, even with that in place, is still hundreds of billions of dollars. So you're not taking much of a bite out of what the real problem is. You have to solve root cause and get to that fast. So it's all great to know that something went wrong but you got to know why. And it's our contention here that, you know, really, when you take a look at the observability space, you have metrics, that's a great tool. I mean, there's lots of great tools out there, you know, around metrics monitoring that's going to tell you when something went wrong. It's very rarely it's going to tell you why. Similarly for tracing, it's going to point you to where the issue is. It's going to take you through that stack and probably pinpoint where you're being, you know where it's happening or where something is running slow, potentially. So that's great. But again, the root cause of why it's happening is going to be buried in log files. And I can expand on that a little bit more but you know, when you're a software developer and you're writing your software, those log files are a wealth of information. It's just a set of breadcrumbs that are littered with facts about how the software is behaving and why it's doing what it's doing, or why it went wrong. And it's that that really gets you to the root cause very fast. And that's our contention, is that these software systems are so complex nowadays and that the root cause is lying in those logs. So how do you get there fast? You know, we would contend that you better automate that or you are just doomed for failure. And that's where we come in. >> Great. >> Getting to that root cause. >> Thank you, Rod. You know, it's interesting you talk about the $20 billion market. There's an analogy with security, right? We spend 80, $100 billion a year on securing our infrastructure, and yet we lose probably closer to a trillion dollars a year in breaches. And there's a similar analogy here. 20 billion could be 5X in downtime impacts or more. Okay, let's go to Larry. Tell us a little bit more about Zebrium. I'm interested always to ask a founder why you started the company. Rod touched on that a little bit. You guys have invented this concept of RCaaS. What does it mean? What problems does it solve, and how does it solve the problem? Let's get into it. >> Yeah. Hey, thanks, Dave. So I think when you said, you know, who's automating the observer, that that's a great way to think about it because what observability really means is it's a property of a system that means you can see into it. You can observe the internal state and that makes it easier to troubleshoot, right? But the problem is if it's too complicated, you just push the bottleneck up to your eyeball. There's only so much a person can filter through manually, right? And I love the way you put that. So that's a great way to think about it is automating the observer. Now, of course, it means that, you know, you reduce your MTTR, you meet your service level objectives, all that stuff, you improve customer experience. That's all true, but it's important to step back and realize like we have cracked a real nut here. People have been trying to figure out how to automate this part of sort of the troubleshooting experience, this human part of finding the root cause indicators for a long time. And until Zebrium came along, I would argue, no one's really done it right. So, you know, I think it's also important you know, as we step back, we can probably look forward five to 10 years and say, everyone's going to look back and say how did we do all this manually? You're going to see this sort of last mile of observability and troubleshooting is going to be automated everywhere because otherwise, you know, people are just... They're not going to be able to scale their business. So, you know, I think one more thing that's important to point out is, you know, I think Zebrium, you know, it's one thing to have the technology but we've learned we need to deliver it right where people are today. You can't just expect people to dive into a new tool. So, you know, we're looking at, you know, if you look at Zebrium, you'll put us on your dashboard and we don't care what kind of a dashboard it is. It could be, you know Datadog, New Relic, Elastic, Dynatrace, Grafana AppDynamics, ScienceLogic, we don't care. You know, they're all our friends. So we're more interested in getting to that root cause than trying to fight, you know, these incumbents and all that stuff. Yep. >> Yeah. So, interesting. Again, another analogy I think about. You know, you talked about automation. If we're to look back and say this is what... We're never going to do this again, it's like provisioning loans. Nobody provisions loans anymore, it's all automated. >> Larry: (chuckling) That's right. >> So Larry, I'll stay with you, then the skeptic in me says, this sounds amazing, but if I, you know... It might be too good to be true. Tell us how it works. >> Larry: (chuckling) Yeah. So that's interesting. So Cisco came along and they were equally skeptical. So what they did was they took a couple of months and they did a very detailed study. And they got together 192 incidents across four product lines, where they knew that the root cause was in the logs. And they knew what that root cause was because they had had their best engineers, you know work on those cases and take detailed notes of the incidents that had taken place. And so they ran that data through the Zebrium software. And what they found was that in more than 95% of those incidents, Zebrium reflected the correct root cause indicators at the correct time. Like that blew us away. When we saw that kind of evidence, Dave, I have to tell you, everyone was just jumping up and down. It was like, you know, it was like the Apollo command center, you know when they finally, you know, touchdown on the moon kind of thing. So, you know, it's really an exciting point in time to be at the company, like just seeing everything finally being proven out according to this vision. I'm going to tell you one more story which is actually one of my favorites, because we got a chance to work with Seagate Lyve Cloud. So they're, you know, a hyper modern, you know, SaaS business, they're an S3 competitor. Zoom has their files stored on Lyve Cloud, you know, to let you know who they are. So essentially, what happened was they were in alpha, their early access, and they had an outage, and it was pretty bad. I mean, it went on for longer than a day, actually, before they were completely restored. And it was, you know, fortunately for them, it was early access. So no one was expecting, you know, uptime, you know, service level objectives and so on. But they were scared, because they realized, if something like this happens in production, you know, they're screwed. So what they did was they saw Zebrium. They went and did some research, they saw Zebrium. They went in a staging environment, recreated the exact (indistinct) that they had had. And what they saw was immediately, Zebrium pops up a root cause report that tells them exactly the root cause that they took over a day to find. These are the kind of stories that let us know we're onto something transformational. >> Dave: Yeah. That's great. I mean, you guys are jumping up and down, I'm sure. We're going to hear from Cisco later. I bet you, they were jumping up and down too because they didn't have to do all that heavy lifting anymore. So Rod, Larry's just sort of implying that, or actually, you guys both talked about that your tool is agnostic. So how does one actually use the service? How do I deploy it? >> Yeah. So let me step back. So when we talk about logs right? Like, you know, all these bread crumbs being in logs and everything else? So, you know, they are a great wealth of you know, information, but people hate dealing with them. I mean, they hate having to go in and figure out what log to look at. In fact, you know, we had one of our... Or we've heard from several of our customers now prior to using Zebrium, when they, you know, have some issue, and they know there's something wrong, something on their dashboard has told them that something's wrong, maybe a metric has, you know, taken a blip or something's happened that they know there's a problem. We've heard from them that it can take like a number of hours just to get to the right set of logs, like figuring out over these hundreds of services where the logs are, to get to them, maybe searching in a log manager. Just to get into the right context, even, can take hours. So, you know, that's obviously the problem we solve but, you know, we don't want them just looking at logs. I mean, you know, we don't want to put them back in the thing they don't like doing because people don't do that. They don't like doing it. So we put it up on the dashboard. So if something is going wrong with your metrics and that's the indicator, or maybe it's something with tracing that you're sort of digging through that you know something's wrong, we will be right on that same dashboard. So we're deployed as a SaaS service. You send us your logs, you click on one of our integrations and we integrate with all these tools that Larry's talked about. And when we detect anything that is a root cause report, it will show up on your dashboard in the same timeline as those blips in your metrics. So when you see something going wrong and you know there's an issue, take a look at the portion of your dashboard that is us, and we're going to tell you why. We're going to get you to the why that went wrong. No other work could be... You can, you know, also click down and click through to us so that you land up in our portal, if you want to do some more digging around, if you need to or whatever, maybe to get some context what have you, but it's fair that if you ever need to do that, the answer should be right there on your dashboard. And that that's how we expect people to use it. We don't want them digging in logs and going through things, we want it to be right in their workflow. >> Great. Thank you, Larry. So Rod, we talked about Cisco. We're going to hear more from them in a moment in Seagate. I would think this is like a perfect solution for a SaaS provider, anybody doing AI ops. Do you have some examples of those types of firms leaning into this? >> Rod: Yeah, a couple of great ones. Well, I mean, we've got many of them, but a couple that I'll touch on. We have an actual AI ops company that was looking for, you know, sort of some complimentary technology and so on. And so they decided to just put us through our paces by having one of their own SREs sign up for our service in our SaaS environment, and send the logs from their system to us, you know, and just see how we did. So it turned out we ended up talking back to this SRE like a week after he had installed the product, you know signed up and then, you know, started sending us logs. And, you know, he was hewing and hawing, saying that he was busy, like every SRE is, and that he didn't have a chance to really do much with us yet. And, you know, we were just, you know, having this conversation on the phone, and he comes to tell us that, yeah I've been busy because we had this, you know, terrible outage, like, you know, five days ago. And we said like, "Okay did you actually look on the Zebrium dashboard?" (chuckles) And he goes, "You know what? I didn't even think to do it yet. I mean, I'd just been so busy and frazzled." So we have an integration with that company, he hadn't put that integration in, so it wasn't in his dashboard yet, but it was certainly on ours. So he went there, and he looks and he looks on the day, you know, on the time range of when he had had this incident. And right at the very top of the page on our portal was that incident with that root cause. And he was flabbergasted. It literally would've saved him hours and hours and hours. They had this issue going on for over 24 hours. And we had the answer right there in five minutes, and it was crazy. And we get that kind of stories. It's just like the Seagate one. If you use us and you have a problem, we're going to detect it. And you're going to hear from Cisco how successful we are at detecting things. I mean, it'll be there when you have a problem. In SaaS companies, you know, one of our customers is Alchera. They do cost optimizations for cloud properties, you know, for AWS optimization, Google, Google cloud, and so on. But they use our software, and they have a lot of interaction, obviously with these cloud vendors and the APIs of those cloud vendors. So, you know, in order to figure out your costing at AWS, they're using all those APIs. So it turned out, you know, they had some issue where their services were breaking. And we had that root cause report right on the screen, again within five minutes, that was pointing to an API problem with Google. And they had changed one of their APIs and Alchera was not aware of it. So their stuff was breaking because of a change downstream that we had caught. And I'll just tell you one last one because it's somewhat related to one of these cloud vendors. You know, it was a big cloud vendor who had an outage a couple of months ago. And it's interesting because, you know, a lot of our customers will set up shared Slack channels with us, where we're monitoring or seeing their incidents as well as they are. So we get a little Slack representation of the incident that we detected for them or the root cause that we detected for them, and that's in a shared community channel. So we could see this happening when that AWS outage happened. We could see our customers getting impacted by that AWS outage, and the root cause of what was going on there in AWS that was impacting our customers that was showing up in our incidents. Now we didn't obviously, you know, have the very root cause of what was going on in AWS, per se but we were getting to the root cause of why our customer's applications were failing. And that was because of issues going on at AWS. >> Very interesting. I mean, I think one of your biggest challenges is going to be getting people's attention because these SREs are so busy, their hair's on fire. >> Rod: That's it. Right. (chuckling). You know, when you say, hey, (indistinct). >> I tell you, if you get their attention, they love it. I mean, this AI ops company, I didn't even tell you the punchline there, but, you know, they had this incident that occurred that we found. And quite literally, the next week, they ended up signing up as a paid customer. So... >> Dave: that's great. And Larry, to give you the last word. I mean, you know, Rod was talking about, you know, changes in APIs and you know, there's still a lot of scripts out there. You guys, if I understand it correctly, run both as a service in the cloud and you can run on-prem, which is important because there's a lot of sensitive information in logs that people are trying not to leave. >> Larry: That's right. Absolutely. >> Dave: But close it out here. >> Yeah. I mean, that's right, you can run it on-prem. Just like we run it in our cloud, you can run it in your cloud or on your own infrastructure. Now that's all true. You know, I think the one hurdle now that we have left as a company is getting the word out and getting people to believe that this is actually possible and try it for themselves. You don't believe it, do a POC, try it yourself. And you know, people have become so jaded by the lack of, you know, real, sort of, innovation in the software industry for the last 10 years that it's hard to get people to... But guys, you got to give it a shot, I'm telling you. I'm telling you right now, it works. And you'll hear more about that from one of our customers in a minute. >> All right guys, thanks so much. Great story. Really appreciate you sharing. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. Thanks Dave. Appreciate the time. >> Okay. In a moment, we're going to hear from Cisco who is the customer in this case example and a company that has... Look, they have quite an impressive suite of observability tooling, and they've done a pretty compelling proof of concept with Zebrium using real data on some Cisco products that you've heard of, like WebEx. So stay tuned and learn about how you can really take advantage of this new technology called Root Cause As A Service. You're watching theCube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright intro music) >> Full stack observability is all the rage today. As businesses lean in to digital, customer experience becomes ever more important, why? Well, it's obvious. Fickle consumers can switch brands in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse. Technology companies have sprung into action, and the observability space is getting pretty crowded in an effort to simplify the process of figuring out the root cause of application performance problems without an army of PhDs and lab coats, also known as endlessly digging through logs, for example. We see decades-old software companies that have traditionally done monitoring or log analytics and/or application performance management stepping up their game. These established players, you know, they typically have deep feature sets and sometimes purpose built tools that attack one particular segment of the marketplace, and now, they're pivoting through M&A and some organic development trying to fill gaps in their portfolio, and then you got all these new entrants coming to the market claiming end to end visibility across the so-called modern cloud and now edge-native stacks. Meanwhile, cloud players are gaining traction and participating through a combination of native tooling combined with strong ecosystems to address this problem, but, you know, recent survey research from ETR confirms our thesis that no one company has at all. Here's the thing. Customers just want to figure out the root cause as quickly and efficiently as possible. It's one thing to observe the stack end to end, but the question is who is automating the observers? And that's why we're here today. Hello, my name is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this special "CUBE" presentation where we dig into root cause analysis and, specifically, how one company, Zebrium, is using unsupervised machine learning to detect anomalies and pinpoint root causes and delivering it as an automated service. In this session, we have two deep dives. First, we're going to dig into this exciting new field of RCA, root cause as a service, with two of the founders and technical experts behind Zebrium, and then we bring in two technical experts from Cisco, an early Zebrium customer who ran a POC with Zebrium's service, automating and identifying root cause problems within four very well established and well-known Cisco product lines including Webex client and UCS. I was pretty amazed at the results, and I think you'll be impressed as well. So thanks for being here. Let's get started with me right now is Larry Lancaster who's a founder and CTO of Zebrium, and he's joined by Rod Bagg who's a founder and Vice-President of Engineering at the company. Gents, welcome, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> (indistinct). >> To be here. >> Great to be here. >> All right, Rod, talk to me. Talk to me about software downtime, what root cause means, all the buzzwords in your domain, MTTR and SLO, what do we need to know? >> Yeah, I mean, it's like you said. I mean, it's extremely important to our customers and to most businesses out there to drive up time and avoid as much downtime as possible. So, you know, when you think about it, all of these businesses, most companies nowadays, either their product is software and it's running, you know, running on the web, and that that's how you get a point click or their business depends on it and, you know, internal systems to drive their business and to run it. Now, when that is down, that is hugely impacting to them. So if you take a look, you know, way back, you know, 20, 30 years ago, software was simple. You know, there wasn't much to it. It was pretty monolithic, and maybe it took a couple of people to maintain it and keep it running. It wasn't really anything complicated about it. It was a single tenant piece of software. Today's software is so complicated, often running, you know, maybe hundreds of services to keep that or to actually implement what that software is doing. So as you point out, you know, enter the sort of observability space and the tools that are now in use to help monitor that software and make sure when something goes wrong, they know about it, but there's kind of an interesting stat around the observability space. So when you look at observability in the context or through the lens of the cost of downtime, it's really interesting. So observability tools are about a $20 billion market, okay? But the cost of downtime, even with that in place, is still hundreds of billions of dollars. So you're not taking much of a bite out of what the real problem is. You have to solve root cause and get to that fast. So it's all great to know that something went wrong, but you got to know why, and it it's our contention here that, you know, really, when you take a look at the observability space, you have metrics. That's a great tool. I mean, there's lots of great tools out there, you know, around metrics monitoring that's going to tell you when something went wrong. It's very rarely it's going to tell you why. Similarly for tracing, it's going to point you to where the issue is. It's going to take you through that stack and probably pinpoint where you're being, you know, where it's happening or where something is running slow potentially. So that's great, but again, the root cause of why it's happening is going to be buried in log files, and I can expand on that a little bit more, but, you know, when you're a software developer, and you're writing your software, those log files are a wealth of information. It's just a set of breadcrumbs that are littered with facts about how the software is behaving and why it's doing what it's doing or why it went wrong, and it's that that really gets you to the root cause very fast, and that's, our contention is that these software systems are so complex nowadays, and that the root cause is lying in those logs. So how do you get there fast? You know, we would contend that you better automate that or you're just doomed for failure, and that's where we come in. >> Great. >> Getting to that request. >> Thank you, Rod. You know, it's interesting. You talk about the $20 billion market. There's an analogy with security, right? We spend 80, $100 billion a year on securing our infrastructure, and yet we lose, probably, closer to a trillion dollars a year in breaches, and there's a similar analogy here. 20 billion could be 5x in downtime impacts or more. Okay, let's go to Larry. Tell us a little bit more about Zebrium. I'm interested always to ask a founder why you started the company. Rod touched on that a little bit. You guys have invented this concept of RCAs. What does it mean? What problems does it solve? And how does it solve the problem? Let's get into it. >> Yeah, hey, thanks, Dave. So I think when you said, you know, who's automating the observer? That's a great way to think about it because what observability really means is it's a property of a system that means you can see into it. You can observe the internal state, and that makes it easier to troubleshoot, right? But the problem is if it's too complicated, you just push the bottleneck up to your eyeball. There's only so much a person can filter through manually, right? And I love the way you put that. So that's a great way to think about it is automating the observer. Now, of course, it means that, you know, you reduce your MTTR, you meet your service level objectives, all that stuff, you improve customer experience, that's all true, but it's important to step back and realize like we have cracked a real nut here. People have been trying to figure out how to automate this part of sort of the troubleshooting experience, this human part of finding the root cause indicators for a long time, and until Zebrium came along, I would argue no one's really done it right. So, you know, I think it's also important, you know, as we step back, we can probably look forward five to 10 years and say, "Everyone's going to look back and say, 'How did we do all this manually?'" You're going to see this sort of last mile of observability and troubleshooting is going to be automated everywhere because otherwise, you know, people are just, they're not going to be able to scale their business. So, you know, I think one more thing that's important to point out is, you know, I think Zebrium, you know, it's one thing to have the technology, but we've learned we need to deliver it right where people are today. You can't just expect people to dive into a new tool. So, you know, we're looking at, you know, if you look at Zebrium, you'll put us on your dashboard, and we don't care what kind of a dashboard it is. It could be, you know, Datadog, New Relic, Elastic, Dynatrace, Grafana, AppDynamics, ScienceLogic, we don't care. You know, they're all our friends. So we're more interested in getting to that root cause than trying to fight, you know, these incumbents and all that stuff, yeah. >> Yeah, so interesting. Again, another analogy I think about, you know, you talked about automation, where to look back, and say, "This is what- We're never going to do this again." It's like provisioning LANs. Nobody provisioned LANs anymore. It's all automated. >> That's correct. >> So, Larry, stay with you. The skeptic in me says, "This sounds amazing," but if, you know, it probably too good to be true. Tell us how it works. >> Yeah, so that's interesting. So Cisco came along and they were equally skeptical. So what they did was they took a couple of months, and they did a very detailed study, and they got together 192 incidents across four product lines where they knew that the root cause was in the logs, and they knew what that root cause was because they'd had their best engineers, you know, work on those cases and take detailed notes of the incidents that had taken place, and so they ran that data through the Zebrium software, and what they found was that in more than 95% of those incidents, Zebrium reflected the correct root cause indicators at the correct time. Like that blew us away. When we saw that kind of evidence, Dave, I have to tell you, everyone was just jumping up and down. It was like, you know, it was like the Apollo Command Center, you know, when they finally, (Dave laughs) you know, touchdown on the moon kind of thing. So, you know, it's really exciting at a point in time to be at the company, like just seeing everything finally being proven out according to this vision. I'm going to tell you one more story, which is actually one of my favorites, because we got a chance to work with Seagate Lyve Cloud. So they're, you know, a hyper modern, you know, SaaS business. They're an S3 competitor. Zoom has their files stored on Lyve Cloud to give, you know, to let you know who they are. So, essentially, what happened was they were in alpha, in their early access, and they had an outage, and it was pretty bad. I mean, it went on for longer than a day, actually, before they were completely restored, and it was, you know, fortunately, for them, it was early access. So no one was expecting, you know, uptime, you know, service level objectives and so on, but they were scared because they realized if something like this happens in production, you know, they're screwed. So what they did was they saw Zebrium, they did some research, they saw Zebrium. They went in a staging environment, recreated the exact (indistinct) that they'd had, and what they saw was, immediately, Zebrium pops up a root cause report that tells them exactly the root cause that they took over a day to find. These are the kind of stories that let us know we're onto something transformational. >> Yeah, that's great. I mean, you guys are jumping up and down. I'm sure, we're going to hear from Cisco later. I bet you, they were jumping up and down, too, 'cause they didn't have to do all that heavy lifting anymore. So Rod, Larry's just sort of implying that or, actually, you guys both talked about that your tool's agnostic. So how does one actually use the service? How do I deploy it? >> Yeah, so let me step back. So when we talk about logs, right? Like, you know, all these red crumbs being in logs and everything else. So, you know, they are a great wealth of, you know, information, but people hate dealing with them. I mean, they hate having to go in and figure out what log to look at. In fact, you know, we had one of our, or we've heard from several of our customers now prior to using Zebrium, but when they're, you know, have some issue, and they know there's something wrong, something on their dashboard has told them that something's wrong, maybe a metrics is, you know, taken a blip or something's happened that they know there's a problem, we've heard from them that it can take like a number of hours just to get to the right set of logs, like figuring out over these hundreds of services where the logs are to get to them, maybe searching in a log manager, just to get into the right context even can take hours. So, you know, that's obviously the problem we solve, but, you know, we don't want them just looking at logs. I mean, you know, we don't want to put 'em back in the thing they don't like doing 'cause people don't do what they don't like doing. So we put it up on the dashboard. So if something is going wrong with your metrics, and that's the indicator or maybe it's something with tracing that you're sort of digging through now that you know something's wrong, we will be right on that same dashboard. So we're deployed as a SaaS service. You send us your logs. You click on one of our integrations, and we integrate with all these tools that Larry's talked about, and when we detect anything that is a root cause report, it will show up on your dashboard in the same timeline as those blips in your metrics. So when you see something going wrong, and you know there's an issue, take a look at the portion of your dashboard that is us, and we're going to tell you why. We're going to get you to the why that went wrong. Not no other work could be- You can, you know, also click down and click through to us so that you land up in our portal if you want to do some more digging around if you need to or whatever, maybe to get some context, what have you, but it's fair that you ever need to do that. The answer should be right there on your dashboard, and that's how we expect people to use it. We don't want them digging in logs and going through things. We want it to be right in their workflow. >> Great, thank you, Larry. So Rod, we talked about Cisco. We're going to hear more from them in a moment and Seagate. I would think this is like a perfect solution for a SaaS provider, anybody doing AIOps, do you have some examples of those types of firms leaning into this? >> Yeah, a couple of great, well, I mean, we got many of them, but couple that I'll touch on. We have an actual AIOps company that was looking for, you know, sort of some complimentary technology and so on, and so they decided to just put us through our paces by having one of their own SREs sign up for our service in our SaaS environment and send the logs from their system to us, you know, and just see how we did. So it turned out we ended up talking back to this SRE like a week after he had installed the product, you know, signed up, and then, you know, started sending us logs, and, you know, he was hemming and hawing saying that he was busy like, you know, like every SRE is, and that he didn't have a chance to really do much with us yet, and, you know, we just, you know, having this conversation on the phone, and he comes to tell us that, "Yeah, I've been busy because we had this, you know, terrible outage like, you know, five days ago," and we said like, "Okay, did you actually look on the Zebrium dashboard?" (laughs) And he goes, "You know what? I didn't even think to do it yet. I mean, I'd just been so busy and frazzled." So we have an integration with that company. He hadn't put that integration in so it wasn't in his dashboard yet, but it was certainly on ours. So he went there and he looks on the day like, you know, on the time range of when he had this incident, and right at the very top of the page on our portal was the incident with the root cause, and he was flabbergasted. It literally would've saved him hours and hours and hours. They had this issue going on for over 24 hours, and we had the answer right there in five minutes, and it was crazy, and we get that kind of story. It's just like the Seagate one. If you use us and you have a problem, we're going to detect it, and you're going to hear from Cisco how successful we are at detecting things. I mean, it'll be there when you have a problem. In SaaS companies, you know, one of our customers is Archera. They do cost optimizations for cloud properties, you know, for AWS optimization, Google cloud, and so on, but they use our software, and they have a lot of interaction, obviously, with these cloud vendors and the APIs of those cloud vendors. So, you know, in order to figure out you're costing at AWS, they're using all those APIs. So it turned out, you know, they had some issue where their services were breaking and we had that root cause report right on the screen, again, within five minutes that was pointing to an API problem with Google, and they had changed one of their APIs, and Archera was not aware of it. So their stuff was breaking because of a change downstream that we had caught, and I'll just tell you one last one because it's somewhat related to one of these cloud vendors of, you know, big cloud vendor who had an outage couple of months ago, and it's interesting because, you know, lot of our customers will set up shared Slack channels with us where we're monitoring or seeing their incidents as well as they are. So we get a little Slack representation of the incident that we detected for them or the root cause that we've detected for them, and that's in a shared community channel. So we could see this happening when that AWS outage happened. We could see our customers getting impacted by that AWS outage and the root cause of what was going on there in AWS that was impacting our customers, that was showing up in our incidents. Now, we didn't obviously, you know, have the very root cause of what was going on in AWS per se, but we were getting to the root cause of why our customer's applications were failing, and that was because of issues going on at AWS. >> Very interesting. I mean, I think one of your biggest challenge is going to be getting people's attention because these SREs is so busy, their hair's on fire. (all laughs) You know, he's like, "Hey, chap, I'm going to show you, look at this." >> I tell you. You get their attention, they love it. I mean, this AIOps company, I didn't even tell you the punchline there, but, you know, they had this incident that occurred that we found and, quite literally, the next week, they ended up signing up as a paid customer, so. >> That's great, and Larry, give you the last word. I mean, you know, Rod was talking about, you know, changes in APIs, and, you know, there's still a lot of scripts out there. You guys, if I understand it correctly, run both as a service in the cloud and you can run on-prem, which is important because there's a lot of sensitive information in logs and people don't want to leave. >> That's right, absolutely. >> But, yeah, close it out here. >> Yeah, I mean, you can, that's right, you can run it on-prem, just like we run it in our cloud. You can run it in your cloud or on your own infrastructure. Now, that's all true. You know, I think the one hurdle now that we have left as a company is getting the word out and getting people to believe that this is actually possible and try it for themselves. You don't believe it? Do a POC, try it yourself. And, you know, people have become so jaded by the lack of, you know, real sort of innovation in the software industry for the last 10 years that it's hard to get people to... But guys, you got to give it a shot. I'm telling you. I'm telling you right now, it works, and you'll hear more about that from one of our customers in a minute. >> Alright guys, thanks so much. Great story, really appreciate you sharing. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate the time. >> Okay, in a moment, we're going to hear from Cisco who is the customer in this case example, and a company that is... Look, they have quite an impressive suite of observability tooling, and they've done a pretty compelling proof of concept with Zebrium using real data on some Cisco products that you've heard of like Webex. So stay tuned and learn about how you can really take advantage of this new technology called root cause as a service. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (bright outro music)