>>From around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you >>by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm john ferrier host of the Q. We've got a great guest here brian Bouchard, co founder president and ceo of Allah credit brian, great to see you um promoting it all the way from Puerto rico to Palo Alto. >>Great to >>see. First of all. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. >>Yeah great, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Um first of all, before we get into what you guys do and how this all ties in to think what do you guys do? It Alex Burnett, Why the name uh is good, you're at the top of the list and alphabetically, but tell us the secret behind the name and what you guys do. >>So first of all, a crochet is based on the root word alacrity, which means a prompt and will prompt a joyous prompt itude excuse me to achieve a common goal. So we ultimately our network of >>individuals with >>the traits of alacrity. So eloquent. So that's our name. >>Great. So what's your relation with IBM and how you guys been able to leverage the partnership program in the marketplace take us through the relationship >>so Well, first of all, L. A. Quartet is a platinum IBM business partner and was awarded recently the 2020 IBM north american Partner of the Year award. And we were selected among 1600 other business partners across North America. We've been actually a consulting an IT. consulting company for almost 20 years now and we were founded in 2002 in Palo Alto. And we have focused specifically on cybersecurity since 2013. What is >>Right, what are some of the things you guys are working on? Because obviously, you know, the business is hot right now, everyone's kind of looking at Covid saying we're gonna double down on the most critical projects and no time for leisurely activities when it comes to I T and cloud scale projects, you know, mission critical stuff is happening. What are you guys working on? >>So we're focused on cybersecurity. Our our security services really complement IBM suite of security solutions and cover the full spectrum from our research and penetration testing, which helps identify vulnerabilities before it reach occurs. And we also have managed security services which helps prevent detect and remediate attacks in real time. >>And then finally, we also have a security staffing division and a software resale division which kind of rounds out the full amount of offerings that we have to provide protection for our clients. >>What are some of the biggest challenges you guys have as a business and house IBM helping you address those? >>Well, as you know, john, we all know that the importance of cyber security in today's world, so it's increasing in both demand and importance and it's not expected to wait any time soon. Cyber attacks are on the rise and there's >>no >>Uh there's no expected end in sight to this and in fact just this week on 60 minutes, uh, the Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he noted that cyber attacks were the number one threat to the stability of the US. economy. >>Also this week, >>a public school in Buffalo new york was hacked with ransomware >>and the school, this uh, >>the school district is just contemplating you're paying the ransom to the hackers. So there's literally thousands of these attacks happening every day, whether it's in a local school district or state government or an enterprise, even if you don't hear about them, they're happening. And adding to the complexity that the cyber Attackers pose is the complexity of the actual cybersecurity tools themselves. There isn't a single solution provider or single technology that could ensure a company security. Our customers need to work with many different companies and disconnected tools and processes to build an individual strategy that can adequately protect their organizations. >>You know, I love this conversation whenever I talked to practitioners, uh, cybersecurity, you know, first of all, they're super smart, usually cyber punks, and they also have some kind of eclectic background, but more importantly, is that there's different approaches in terms of what you hear. Do you do you put more if you add more firefighters so to speak, to put out the fires and solve the problems? Or do you spend your time preventing the fires from happening in the first place? You know, and you know, the buildings are burning down, Don't make a fire fire uh don't make would make fire resistance, you know, more of a priority. So there's less fires, not firefighters. So it's that balance. You throw more firefighters at the problem or do you make the supply or the material, the business fireproof? What's your take on that? >>Well, it kind of works >>both ways. I mean, we've seen customers want to, they really want choice. They >>wanna, in some >>cases they want to be the firefighter and in some cases they want the firefighter to come in and solve their problems. So >>the common problem set that we're seeing with our our customers encounter is that they struggle one with too many disparate tools and then they also have too much data being collected by all these disparate tools and then they have a lack of talent in their environment to manage their environment. So what we've done at Lacqua net is we've taken our cybersecurity practice and we've really uh specifically tailored our offerings to address these court challenges. So first to address the too many disparate tools problem, uh We've been recommending that our clients look at security platforms like the IBM cloud pack for security. The IBM cloud fax for security is built on a security platform that allows interoperability across various security tools using open standards. So our customers have been responding extremely positively to this approach and look at it as a way to future proof their investments >>and begin taking advantage of >>interoperability with >>hand tools integration. >>Talk about what you see your business going with with this because you know there's not a shortage of of need um demand. Um How are you guys flexing with the market? Uh What's the strategy are you going to use technology enablement? You're gonna more human driven brian how do you see your business of unfolding >>Well? Actually really good. We're doing very well. I mean obviously we've made the top business partner for IBM in 2020. Um we have some significant growth and a lot of interest I think we really attacked the market in a good strategy which was to help defragment the market if you will. There's a lot of point solutions and a lot of point vendors that you know they they spent uh specialize in one piece of the whole problem and what we've decided to do is find them the highest party list. Every see so and see IO has a tick list. So >>they have that >>you know uh first thing we need we need a sim we need a E. D. >>Are we need a >>managed service? We need um what's the third solution that we're doing? So we need some new talent in house. So we actually have the added that as well. So we added a security staffing uh division to help that piece of it as well. So to give you an idea of the cybersecurity market size, It was valued at 150 billion in 2019. And that is expected to grow to 300 billion by 2027. >>And Akron is well positioned to consolidate the many fragmented aspects of the security marketplace and offer our customers more integrated and easier to manage solutions. And we will continue to help our customers select the best suite of solutions to address all types of cyber security, cyber security threats. >>You know, it's such a really important point you're making because, you know, the tools just piled up in the tool shed, I call it like that, It's like, it's like you don't even know what's in there anymore and then you've got to support them, then the world's changed, get cloud native, the service area is increasing and then the CSOs are also challenged. Do I have any clouds? Do I build on? Do I optimize my development teams for AWS or Azure? Now, that's kind of a factor. So you have all this tooling going on? They're building their own stuff, they're building their own core competency. And yet the sea so still needs to be like maintaining kind of like a relevance list. That's almost like a stock market for the, for the products you're providing, that it sounds like you're providing that kind of service. >>Uh, yeah, as well. Right? We distill all of the products that are out there, there's thousands of cybersecurity products out there in the marketplace and we kind of do all that distillation for the customer we find using, you know, using a combination of things we use uh Forrester and Gartner and all the market analysts to shortlist are, are solutions that we offer customers. But then we also use our experience. And so through since 2013, we've been deploying these solutions across organizations and corporations across America and we've gained a large body of experience and we can take that experience and knowledge to our customers and help them make some good decisions. So they don't have to make them go through the pitfalls that many companies do when selecting these types of solutions. >>Well, congratulations, got a great business and uh you know, that's just a basic, starts making things easier for the sea. So more so they can be safe and secure in their environment. It's funny, you know, cyber warfare, you know the private company have to fight their own battles, going to build their own armies. Certainly the government's not helping them and they're confused even know how to handle all this stuff. So they didn't they need your service. I'm just curious as this continues to unfold and you start to see much more of a holistic view. What's the IBM angle in here? Why are you such a big partner of theirs? Is it because their customers are working with you? They're bringing you into business? Is it because you have an affinity towards some of their products? What's the connection with IBM, >>all of the above? So >>I think it probably started with our affinity to IBM P radar products and we have a we have a lot of expertise in that in that solution. Um, so >>that's that's where it >>started. And then I think I B. M. S leadership in this space has been, Yeah, >>remarkable. Really. So like what's happening now with the IBM compaq for security, building a security platform to allow all these points solutions to work together. Uh that's the road map we want to put our customers on because we believe that's the that's the future for this, this uh, this marketplace >>and the vision of hybrid cloud having that underpinning be with red hat, it's a Lennox Colonel model of >>all things you can you can run it on. Sure. I've been plowed uh aws it's portable. Yeah. All this openness, as you probably know, uh, cybersecurity is really a laggard in the security and the information technology space as far as adopting open standards and IBM is I think leading that charge and you'll be able to have a force multiplier >>uh >>with open standards in the space. >>Open innovation with open source is incredible. I mean if you if if open source can embrace a common platform and build that kind of control, playing and openness to allow thriving companies to just build out, then you have an entire hybrid distributed >>architecture. Yeah, well, I think companies want to use the best in breed. So when we, when we show these solutions to customers, they want the best in breed, they always say, I don't, when it comes to security, they don't want second best. They want the best that's out there because they're securing their crown jewels. So that makes sense. Um, so the problem is having all these different disparate solutions that are all top in their category, none of them talk to each other so we need to address that problem because without that being solved this is just going to be a more, it's going to compound the complexity of the problems we solve day to day, >>awesome, congratulations brian, great story. Um you know entrepreneur built a great business over the years um I think the products amazing, I think that's exactly what the market needs and it just shows you what the ecosystems all about. This is the power of the ecosystem. You know 1000 flowers are blooming, you got a great product. IBM is helping as well. Good partnership network effect builds in and and still a lot more to do. Congratulations. >>Absolutely. Okay thank you very much >>brian thanks >>for coming on the q appreciate it. I'm Sean Fourier with IBM thinks 2021 virtual coverage. Thanks for watching. Mhm.

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