(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE presentation here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, this special segment's experiencing the future of networking with the extend the SD-WAN to Wireless LAN segment conversation with Bruce Miller, Vice President of Product Marketing at Riverbed Xirrus, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for coming in. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, we had a whole segment on experiencing the future of networking with SD-WAN in action, but this is a dedicated segment really addressing the hottest area in the planet right now, relative to networking, that's wireless. >> Mmmhmm. >> Known as Wireless LAN, local area networking, or WiFi, is pervasive, it's everywhere, most everyone knows about WiFi if they have a device, they've had connections, large stadiums, large events, a lot of use cases, for it. But there's also the use case of Internet of Things. This certainly is a topic of conversation for the future -- >> Absolutely. >> of networking. >> Yeah, and you know, WiFi is pervasive like you said, >> It's the connection to the Internet for most people. In fact, a lot of people equate that, WiFi equals the Internet for a lot of teenagers for example, so, and as you mention the IoT, and where we are moving forward, it's all about growth and scale, I mean, we only had maybe one or two WiFi devices five or six years ago, now we're walking around with three, sometimes four, we have college students showing up with 15 sometimes, in their dorms. So it's very pervasive, and then the IoT as you mentioned, billions and billions of devices coming online. So, what we've seen is very much a scale and the need to scale these WiFi networks. >> Yeah, and folks watching that are in the business of IT, we're all consumers too. We've all been to stadiums or places where there's plenty of WiFi, but you just can't get the page to load. That's a backhaul issue, or, in some cases, there's not enough WiFi frequency around. So it's been a dense challenge, it's been scale challenges, and then on the IoT side for large enterprises, they have requirements that have to meet the network configurations. >> Right. >> So, there's complexity and scale on many fronts. This is the top priority of companies -- >> Yeah. >> How are you, how do you see that evolving, because, WiFi wasn't really kind of built for that -- >> Yeah. >> in the old days. How has it evolved today? >> This is actually a topic that Xirrus kind of solved very early on, so if you go back 10, 12 years, when we first put the company together, it was foreshadowing or foreseeing that this was going to happen. There was a lot of money going into the WiFi devices, if you actually think about it, the WiFi devices we're carrying around, but not the infrastructure. So, we've set out to solve that problem, and really the market kind of eventually came to us, in the sense of, "Hey, how do I get 10,000 people online at a convention center?", for example, or 20,000 people, 80,000 people in a stadium? Those are the extreme examples, but in general, it's just pervasive everywhere. You know, you need WiFi indoors, outdoors, in the elevator shafts, in the bathrooms, we're called to cover any kind of scenario, from that perspective. And so, Xirrus, that was a challenge that we took on, and today, I believe we solve it very very well, because we can scale into these scenarios. It keeps on going, up and to the right. I mean, there's more traffic, there's more devices on the network every single day. Millions of devices in fact, are provisioned to connect to WiFi every single day that are new, and that keeps on, like I said, going up, and up and up. >> So, scale and density has been your forte at Xirrus, now part of Riverbed through the acquisition. Translate that to the end user, customer for you, which is the person in IT, or someone in operational technologies that has to deploy network fast. >> Right. >> And they're going to use wireless and WiFi for that. >> Mmmhmm. >> What's in it for them? >> Yeah, and that's very key part of it is deploying and getting this out there very simply and it's scale. And provisioning the WiFi network, deploying something that is now basically a utility, you know, think about it, water, gas, water, electric, all these things are utilities, WiFi is basically the same thing. In fact, I was just visiting a higher ed customer of ours, who made that statement, if the power goes out, the students are asking for WiFi, they expect it to still work, right? It's more important in fact, almost to them, if they don't have that. >> God forbid they lose the Internet, but they're happy to live without power. >> Yeah, yeah. Or water, or whatever. So, we see it that way, WiFi is a utility. You need to make it utility grade, you need to make it enterprise grade so it can scale and support those things. So, you hit on a couple of those key things, how do you do it at scale, and then how do you provision and make that very ubiquitous and be able to roll that out in a broad fashion. That's key to what we do. >> I know you got a demo we're going to get to that shortly, so, stay tuned, stay with us for the demo, we'll walk through a use case, let's talk about the integration with Riverbed. Why is it now important? Because I think we all can imagine and see how WiFi is relevant. No doubt about it. Scale is a huge thing happening as more devices come online, people, and machines. But when it has to connect into the network, that's a big conversation point with IT practitioners and people in these large companies, they want more WiFi, they want it secure, they want it at scale, they want it with all the policies, where's that integration with Riverbed, can you explain how that works? >> Right, and that's key to where the acquisition came from. So we kind of talked about scale and then complexity and how you deploy these things. The integration with Riverbed is really focused on the second one, where, there's the SD-WAN, story that we've been talking about, and the vision for running common policies across the WAN, the LAN, the WLAN, into the datacenter, all managed through the cloud. And Xirrus fulfills that WLAN piece of that equation where it can deployed at the wireless edge, connecting all those devices in an enterprise, or in whatever deployment you're talking about. And now the policies that are actually deployed are common with what is being put into the SD-WAN portion of it, so in the Riverbed side of things that's the SteelConnect solution. So, we're integrating in as part of the SteelConnect solution to support the software defined LAN, so to speak, at the edge of the network, with switches and WiFi access points that will support that. So, the synergies are very much there in terms of, providing that vision across the entire network. >> So full integration into SteelConnect, from a managing and provisioning standpoint, demo perspective -- >> Right. Yeah, configuration and the policies, especially the application layer policies where you can say, "Hey, I have a new CRM application that I'm rolling out", or database application. Then that policy to prioritize that, and ensure a good user experience could be rolled out across the entire network. >> Give some quick use cases of customer industries that you guys are successful in. >> Sure. So, probably the one we're best known for is what we call large public venues or LPVs, this could be for example, Louisville Pro Football Club, which is a great name for us, Microsoft is another customer, so these are places where you have literally 10,000, 20,000 people connecting at once, or 80,000 people in the stadium for example, a portion of those are connected to WiFi. That is a very very difficult scenario to actually solve. We did some things that are very unique in the industry to support those kind of situations. Another big one for us is education. That is actually the biggest WiFi market in general, if you look at how many people are buying it, or what kind of organizations are buying WiFi. And we have some very large customers there, Brigham Young University for example in Idaho. Columbus State University, these are scenarios where they've rolled ubiquitous WiFi across campus, stadiums, basketball arenas, all the way to the dorms, to the offices, to the auditoriums, to the libraries, indoor, outdoor, I mean, very broad use cases. And that's what you see in higher ed. >> WiFi really kind of redefines, it doesn't reimagine, but it redefines what a campus is. I mean college -- >> Yeah. >> You know what a campus is, hospitals, large venues like public -- >> Right. >> Flash mob contained campus. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Problem there is different. >> Yeah. >> Too many people trying to get into the -- >> All at the same time. >> Spectrum. >> Yeah, we call that flash traffic, like when you see like at halftime maybe of a game, or some event happens -- >> Touchdown all the videos -- >> Yeah everybody wants to do it at the same time, and those are very challenging to support. Those kind of scenarios, and that's something that we have really defined a solution that can handle very well. >> Well, congratulations, thank you for building that, because I love to get my WiFi at Stanford Stadium, and all the other places that need to have that. And when I go to Liverpool to watch a soccer game, I'll think about you guys. Okay, let's get into the demo, let's take a real life in action of extending SD-WAN into wireless LANs with WiFi. >> Right. >> Show us what you got here. Sure. So, the first thing I want to talk about is provisioning the network. So, we have a solution called CommandCenter that makes that very fast, and easy. This is actually a view of a dashboard that shows multiple tenants in a cloud management system. Okay? So, imagine each of these as a separate customer, or, if I'm a large organization, this could be separate sites or locations. So, I'm going to just do an example here and say, let's create a new customer. And, say theCUBE is that customer. >> John: Alright, we like that. >> Bruce: I will say that we're enabling you with WiFi, so I'll create theCUBE. And what this is actually doing is just with literally a few mouse clicks I've actually created a new cloud instance that is theCUBE, and then what I can come down here and do, is edit that location, and let's just say that let's see here, Joe is going to be the administrator of that, so he's going to have access to manage that network. And then I have identified a couple access points here, I'm just going to drag and drop those in there. And these are now provisioned to theCUBE. And then, the last thing I'm going to do is, let's take a profile, so let's say, I have a configuration template or whatever, maybe I'll just call you, you have a business profile, and I'm going to deploy that, to your location as well. Hit deploy, and basically just that quickly what I've done is actually spun up a new customer, so you can imagine if you're a service provider in fact, then that means you're quicker to revenue. I'm actually able to turn on a customer and start charging 'em for WiFi, right? >> John: Let's stay on this example with theCUBE, because I think this is really important to the dense cloud problem. So we go to Moscone Center all the time. >> Bruce: Sure. >> And they have WiFi, they have large crowds come in, and we're still doing a live broadcast, there. >> Right, sure. >> So, I'd love to have my own WiFi provisioned. Is that what that happened there? Could they potentially say, dedicate this access point, or this subnet of the network to theCUBE? >> It could, it'd be a variation on this, but absolutely. One of the things that we do very well is taking a WiFi device, or a AP, and segment it out for use cases like that. >> John: AP being access point. >> Access point, exactly. So, in a convention environment like that, those are actually quite challenging, cause you have so many people on the network and what you need to do is carve out a resource that might be dedicated to that. So, if you can't get WiFi, >> Like a video -- >> We can do that. >> We do video production, so we want to actually prioritize the video traffic. >> Absolutely, and we'll show that a little bit later in the demo -- >> or the recreational... >> Yeah, you separate it out and make sure that you're -- >> Okay, continue. So that onramping there -- >> Bruce: Yeah, so basically this was just showing you how quickly you can create theCUBE. This is the environment that I basically set up. It's got a couple APs, it's ready to go. I can now start, I can plug in those access points, and that site is up and running. So that's the provisioning aspect. The second aspect of WiFi that we're going to talk about is access to the network itself. This is actually a challenge with a lot of environments, that's, you know, how do I get all these people onto the network, at the same time, and do that very easily without IT getting a phone call saying, "Hey, help me. I dunno what the password is," >> John: So onboarding users and stuff like that? >> Bruce: Yeah, onboarding. So, what we have for a solution there is called EasyPass. That solution allows you to create the portals that you see when you log into the network. >> John: Like going through the toll booths. >> Bruce: Yeah, and it basically provides a very easy way of doing that. So let's just say this is theCUBE guest, and I'll create a new portal, and this is a guest network, right? So I know when I came in here today, I connected to the WiFi network, I had to figure out how to do that, and what was the password? So let's just say we're creating a WiFi network here, this just shows how easy and quick that interface is. I can customize a page, let's select an image, we'll select a background image here, and then actually use Facebook and Google can be optionally used to log in. So just that quickly, I've created a portal that says, "This is what you're going to see when you log in." Now, obviously, if it's theCUBE you'd put your own logos and data there, but the idea here is that a user can come in here and either register with his email, or use Facebook or Google, for example, you get on the network. >> John: Is that OAuthing in, through the pre-existing credentials? >> Bruce: This is using, in this case, yeah with Facebook you're using the credential that they have to get onto their system, and you're basically using that for WiFi as well. So that the username and password is now providing access. >> John: So it's seamless to the user what their choice is. >> Bruce: Yeah, and some people use Facebook, others will just connect with their email. >> John: Some people want to register, but most people just want to connect with Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever they have. >> Bruce: Yeah, and so this basically shows how quick and easy it is to set up a guest page, that gets somebody on the network, very simple to use, and so IT administers love this because it simplifies their job significantly. The other thing I wanted to show real quick is just the Microsoft Azure and Google integration. We actually have integration directly with these two ecosystems, where, if you're already are in an Office 365 shop, or a Google Apps shop, as a lot of schools are, they can just use those credentials, the student, the user logs in with their laptop, with their username password and it gets them access to WiFi at the same time. >> So if it's connected -- >> Kill two birds with one stone. >> So if it's active directory you got your Microsoft, if it's Google and what they use, you can do that. >> Bruce: Yeah, so it's all in the cloud. So now, this is again, moving everything to the cloud as opposed to using some local resource to do authentication, and maintaining those resources. >> John: That seems to be the theme with Riverbed. Simplify. >> Bruce: Right, absolutely. And that's, those are the two big things here. We're scaling the WiFi network to support these broad use cases, and then we're simplifying it with the tools to enable that to roll out very smoothly. >> Well that's, all the research points to that manual task that don't add value, will be automated away, and those tasks will be shifted to more value activities. Okay, so take us to monitoring. Now what happens when I'm doing my SnapChats, or Instagram, or my Facebook Lives, you go, Woah! >> Bruce: Right. >> John: Or, I'm interested in knowing if someone is downloading the latest movie on BitTorrent. >> Bruce: Yeah, that's very key. So, if I go back to our solution here, the dashboard actually shows what's going on in the network, right? So, this is actually a very flexible interface, you can move things around, create widgets, do different things, and in fact, we have a map function where you would lay all this stuff out on a map, and then I can actually show what the coverage is, for example, that WiFi had a floorplan. This happens to be my house. >> John: That's an RF map right there? >> Bruce: This is actually RF coverage within this location of these access points. >> John: That's very cool. >> Bruce: Then I can jump in here and troubleshoot from there. But to your point in terms of what's going on -- >> John: So it shows overlaying clouds and channels and all that, kind of deep configuration stuff? >> Bruce: All the information If you need to go there. >> John: And you just don't need to get involved in that. >> Bruce: Most of this stuff is automated. There's the auto button for a lot of this when you hook up the WiFi the first time. You don't want to have to tweak all those things, so we have the auto button that 90% of the users would use, or more, and then if you need to tune it we can go from there. But yeah, to your point on in terms of application policies and controls, here's an example of what we do here. For example, I can see what types of traffic is on this network here. So, let's look at, for example, YouTube, and we see that there's actually a couple users here that are using a lot of YouTube traffic, I can click on any of these applications and see what the amount of traffic is associated with that. But what's more interesting then, is doing something about it. So, what we have is a policy engine that recognizes 1600 different applications, and allows me to create policies on them. So, I can create rules, and say, okay, let's look at YouTube specifically. Which is a streaming media application, and you can see we have hundreds in here, in fact 1600 in total, and I can block YouTube if I so desire from the network, or maybe I allow it in there, but I limit that traffic per user, to say, 500K or something like that, so they maybe can't watch a 4K video or something like that. So, enterprises -- >> Make it crawl for 'em. >> Bruce: Yeah, you can do it, but you can't overload the network. So, enterprises, hospitals. Schools love this, because they can get that granular control of the network. Maybe this happens to be instead of an enterprise that's using a database, maybe they're an Oracle shop, and so they want to raise the quality of service on that, and put that high priority. So you can do that just the same. >> John: And so whatever the priority is, they can give bandwidth to it. So, if it's live gaming, if I want to have that game be -- >> Yeah. >> John: That's what I want. >> Bruce: Exactly. >> John: Or minimize it. >> Bruce: So this really, what this map ends up doing is mapping the wireless to the business needs of the organization that's deploying it, so -- >> John: So, the optimization of the network, you can look at, much more clearly with the visualization, and make decisions. On the network map there with the RF, is that for placement of access points, or is that more for understanding propagation, or -- >> Bruce: It's, yeah, we have a separate design tool that allows you to design those heat maps, and then when you actually have a live network what you were looking at was actually the coverage estimation based on what's actually deployed. >> John: So that's kind of -- >> So if an AP goes down it turns red and then you'll see a hole in your coverage, and you know that you have a problem that you have to go and solve. >> Okay great, so it's a little... because you handle it. Okay, analytics. What other analytics do you have in the demo that you can share? >> Bruce: Right. So analytics is an interesting one. We have a lot data that we pull into the network from the WiFi. If you think about it, we know, who is on the network, we know what they're doing, what applications they're going to, we know where they are, because we actually calculate the location of those users, and that information is all pulled into this central location here. So if I pull in a couple of these analytics charts, you actually see now, what is going on in that location over time. Here we have users and how long they're actually in the network. >> John: Can you see the URL path that they're using? >> Bruce: That's in the application portion, right? This is just kind of showing bulk, like, how many users are showing on the network, and how long are they there. And how many are there, and how many are repeat or new. So a retail customer might be interested in that, it's like I'm getting 40% existing customers coming back, but maybe there's 60% on a given day. And then that could change over time depending on location. So, the bottom line is, WiFi is turning for us into a big data challenge or solutional, where I can take all that data on who, what, where, why, that they're doing, and turn that into business intelligence that the retailer, that's a big one, can use for making more intelligent decisions about how they run their business. >> Okay, so, bottom line for the folks watching, with respect to wireless, what's the future state that they need to be thinking about in terms of planning for WiFi and to experience the future of networking, by extending SD-WAN to the wireless LAN. >> Right, so there's a lot of things to consider when you look at WiFi, what you're doing today is probably not going to be the same as what you do next year, and certainly not five years from now. This is actually a big challenge for a lot of our customers to kind of get that future view of what's going to happen, because they're making a purchase decision today, that's going to last them for a while. So, what we look at is solving the problems that those users might run into, which could be scale, you might be using, and seeing double or triple the number of users and traffic in the next few years. So you have to solve that. You have to solve the security problems, which we didn't talk about too much today, but EasyPass is one of the solutions for that. I want to ensure those users can get on, but make sure that they're secure, my corporate data is going to be protected. And then finally, the simplicity of doing that. So, I know my WiFi is going to change, I know the network requirements are going to change, how I can a simply go into an interface through this cloud management solution we provide, and make those changes that are needed, and adapt to that dynamic that we're talking about. Then all of that folds into the broader picture of the SD-WAN story that we talked about with Riverbed where now I can do some of those things across the LAN and the WAN holistically, through a common control point. >> And the common control point is key, because users don't view things as LAN and WAN, they just want their stuff, wherever they are. >> Yeah, they don't care, right. So, you know they might be connected to the WiFi, so that's pretty visible, but in the end, the WiFi could work fine, but if that WAN connection is down, or compromised, or anywhere in between the datacenter, all these things have to be working. >> And the tools to make the integration easier, whether it's Microsoft 365, and Google on Premise, or Google login, or Facebook. >> Right, right. All those ecosystems, I mean, this is a big part of what we're trying to do, is tap into those systems that everybody is using anyway, and make it all seamless. Everyone knows how to login to their Google or, Facebook account, so now let's make that part of the WiFi experience. >> And security is all solid. >> Yeah, security is solid if you use it. And that's the big thing about WiFi, is there's a lot of open guest networks still, out there, and little by little, you're seeing those become secure, but what tends to happen is that security and simplicity, are kind of, er, complexity, and security are kind of at odds with each other. The more secure you make a network, the more complex. >> And here you're making it easier. >> That's why EasyPass, I mean in the name, that's what we do to make that as simple as possible, because security is very important. >> Bruce Miller, extending the SD-WAN to the Wireless LAN, in our segment experiencing the future of networking, thanks so much for sharing, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(techno music) >> Hello and welcome to the special Cube presentation here in the Palo Alto studios of TheCube. I'm here with the Extend SD-Wan to the Wireless LAN segment here at Riverbed. I'm John Furrier. Our next guest is Bruce Miller, Vice President of Product Marketing at Riverbed Xirrus. Welcome to the segment: Extend the SD-Wann to the Wireless Lan Wi-Fi. [Production Man] No Wi-Fi. (sharp clap) >> Production Man: (mumbles) let's try it again. Let's get that good solid intro. >> Okay, good call. (laughing) >> Production Man: Reset please. >> Been a long day. >> Production Man: Yeah, that's okay. >> That's how long? >> Production Man: Well let's see. >> It's a tongue-twister on extend the wireless LAN. (laughing) Doesn't just roll off the tongue. (laughing) I got flustered, hold on. I got to make my font bigger. >> Production Man: You only get one mulligan. >> John: I buy mulligans when I play, or use lifesavers. (techno music) >> Hello and welcome to the special Cube presentation here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, co-host of TheCube. This special segment: Experiencing the Future of Networking With the Extend the SD-WAN to Wireless LAN segment conversation with Bruce Miller, Vice President of Product Marketing at Riverbed Xirrus. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for coming in. >> Great. Thanks for having me. >> So we had a whole segment on experiencing the future of networking with SD-WAN in action, but this is a dedicated segment really addressing the hottest area in the planet right now, relative to networking, that's wireless. Known as wireless LAN, local area networking or Wi-Fi. It's pervasive. It's everywhere. Most everyone knows about Wi-Fi if they have a device. They've had connections at large stadiums, large events, lot of use cases for it. But there's also the use case of internet of things. So this certainly is a topic of conversation for the future -- >> Absolutely. >> John: Of networking. >> Yeah and Wi-Fi is pervasive like you said. It's the connection to the internet for most people. In fact, a lot of people equate that; Wi-Fi equals the internet for a lot of teenagers for example. And as you mentioned, the IoT and where we are moving forward, you know it's all about growth and scale. And we only had maybe one or two Wi-Fi devices five or six years ago and now we're walking around with three, sometimes four. We have college students showing up with 15 sometimes, to their dorm. So it's very pervasive and the IoT, as you mentioned, billions and billions of devices coming online. So what we've seen is very much a scale and the need to scale these Wi-Fi networks. >> Yeah and then folks watching that are in the business of IT, you know we're all consumers too. So we've all been to stadiums or places where there's plenty of Wi-Fi, but you just can't get -- >> Bruce: Right. >> The (mumbles) to load. That's a backhaul issue, or in some cases there's not enough Wi-Fi frequency around. So there's been a dense challenge, there's been scale challenges. And then on the IoT side, for large enterprises, they have requirements that have to meet the network-- >> Right. >> Configuration. So there's complexity and scale on many fronts. This is the top priority companies. >> Yeah. >> How do you see that evolving? Because Wi-Fi wasn't really kind of built for that in the old days? >> Yeah. >> How has it evolved today? >> And it is actually a topic that Xirrus kind of saw very early on. And so if you go back 10, 12 years when we first put the company together, it was foreshadowing or foreseeing that this was going to happen. There was a lot of money going into the Wi-Fi devices, if you actually think about it, the Wi-Fi devices we're carrying around, but not the infrastructure itself. So we set out to solve that problem. And really the market then eventually kind of came to us in the sense of; hey, how do I get 10,000 people online at a convention center for example, or 20,000 people, 80,000 people in a stadium. Those are the extreme examples. But in general, it's just pervasive everywhere. You know you need Wi-Fi indoors, outdoors, in the elevator shafts, in the bathrooms. I mean we're called to cover any kind of scenario from that perspective. And so Xirrus, you know that was a challenge that we took on. And today I believe we solved it very, very well, because we can scale into these scenarios. And it keeps on going up into the right. I mean there's more traffic. There's more devices on the network every single day. Millions of devices in fact are provisioned to connect to Wi-Fi every single day that are new. And that keeps on, like I said, going up, and up. >> So scale and density has been your forte at Xirrus, now part of Riverbed though the acquisition. >> Bruce: Right. >> Translate that to the end-user or customer for you, which is the person either in IT or someone in operational technologies that has to deploy network fast. >> Bruce: Right. >> And they're going to use wireless Wi-Fi for that. What's in it for them? >> Yeah, and that's a very key part of it is deploying and getting this out there very simply and at scale. And you know provisioning the Wi-Fi network, deploying something that is now basically utility. You think about it, gas, water, electric, all these things are utilities. Wi-Fi's basically the same thing. In fact, I was just visiting a higher-ed customer of ours who made that statement. If the power goes out, the students are asking for Wi-Fi. They expect it to still work, right? It's more important, in fact, almost to them if they don't have that. So -- >> God forbid they lose the internet, but they're happy to live without power. >> Yeah, yeah, or water or whatever. So we see it that way. Wi-Fi is a utility. You need to make it utility-grade. You need to make it enterprise-grade, so we can scale and support those things. So you hit on a couple of those key things. How do you do it at scale? And then how do you provision and make that very ubiquitous and be able to role that out in a broad fashion? And that's key to what we do. >> I know you got a demo, we're going to get to that shortly. So stay tuned. Stay with us for the demo. We'll walk through a use case. Let's talk about the integration with Riverbed. Why is now important? Because I think we all can imagine and see how Wi-Fi is relevant. No doubt about it. Scale is a huge thing happening as more devices come online; people and machines. But when it has to connect into the network, that's a big conversation point with IT practitioners and people in these large companies. They want more Wi-Fi. They want it secure. They want it at scale. They want it with all the policies. Where's that integration with Riverbed? Can you explain how that works? >> Right. And that's key to where the acquisition came from. So we kind of talked about scale and then complexity, and how you deploy these things. The integration with Riverbed is really focused on the second one where there's the SD-WAN story that we've been talking about and the vision for running common policies across the WAN, the LAN, the WLAN into the data center, all managed though the cloud. And Xirrus fulfills that WLAN piece of that equation where it can be deployed at the wireless edge, connecting all those devices in an enterprise, or in whatever deployment you're talking about. And now the policies that are actually deployed are common with what is being put into the SD-WAN portion of it. So in the Riverbed side of things, that's a SteelConnect solution. So we're integrating in, as part of the SteelConnect solution, to support the software to find LAN, so to speak, at the edge of the network with switches and Wi-Fi access points that will support that. And so the synergies are very much there in terms of providing that vision across the entire network. >> So full integration of the SteelConnect from a management and provisioning standpoint -- demo perspective. >> Right. Yeah, configuration and the policies. Especially the application layer policies where you can say, hey I have a new CRN application I'm rolling out, or database application. And then that policy to prioritize that and insure a good user experience could be rolled out across the entire network. >> Give some quick use cases of customer industries that you guys are successful in. >> Sure. Probably the one we're best known for is what we call large public venues or LPVs. So this could be, for example, Liverpool Football Club which is a great name for us. Microsoft is another customer. So these are places where you have literally 10,000 and 20,000 people connecting at once, or 80,000 people in the stadium for example, a portion of those are connected to Wi-Fi. That is a very, very difficult scenario to actually solve. So we did some things that are very unique in the industry to support those kind of situations. Another big one for us is education. That is actually the biggest Wi-Fi market in general if you look at how many people are buying it or what kind of organizations are buying Wi-Fi. And we have some very large customers there; Brigham Young University for example and Idaho, Columbus State University. These are scenarios where they've rolled out ubiquitous Wi-Fi across campus, you know, stadiums, basketball arenas, all the way to the dorms, to the offices, to the auditoriums, to the libraries, indoor, outdoor, I mean it's very broad-use cases. And that's what you see in higher ed. >> I mean the Wi-Fi really kind of redefines, doesn't reimagine, but it redefines what a campus is. I mean in college -- >> Bruce: Yeah. >> You know what a campus is; hospitals, large venues like public flash mob contained campus. >> Yeah. >> The problem there's different. >> Yeah. >> There's 28 people trying to get into the -- >> All at the same time. >> Spectrum. >> Yeah, we call that flash traffic when you see, like at halftime maybe of a game, or some event happens. >> John: Touchdown, and all the videos. >> Yeah and everybody wants do do it at the same time. And those are very challenging to support those kind of scenarios. And that's something that we have really defined a solution that can handle very well. >> Well congratulations. Thank you for building that, because I love to get my Wi-Fi at Stanford Stadium and all the other places that need to have that. >> Bruce: Sure. >> And when I go to Liverpool to watch a soccer game-- >> Bruce: Yeah. I'll be kind of thinking about you guys. >> Bruce: Next time you're there. >> Okay, let's get into the demo. Let's take the real life, in action of extending SD-WAN to wireless LANs with Wi-Fi. >> Right. >> Show us what you got here. >> Bruce: Sure. So the first thing I want to talk about is provisioning the network. We have solution called CommandCenter that makes that very fast and easy. And this is actually a view of a dashboard that shows multiple tenants in a cloud management system. Okay, so imagine each of these as a separate customer. Or if I'm a large organization, this could be separate sites or locations. So I'm going to just do an example here and say let's create a new customer, and say TheCube is that customer. >> John: All right, I like that. >> Bruce: I will say that we're enabling you with Wi-Fi. So I'll create TheCube. And what this is actually doing is just with literally a few mouse clicks I've actually created a new cloud instance that is TheCube. And then what I can come down here and do is edit that location. And let's just say that, well let's see here, Joe is going to be the administrator of that. So he's going to have access to manage that network. And then I have identified a couple access points here. I'm just going to drag and drop those in there. And these are now provisioned to TheCube. And then the last thing I'm going to do is, let's take a profile. So let's say, I have a configuration template, or whatever, maybe I'll just call you. You have a business profile and I'm going to deploy that to your location as well. Hit deploy. And basically, just that quickly what I've done is actually spun up a new customer. So you can imagine if you're a service provider in fact, then that means you're quicker to revenue. I'm actually able to turn on a customer and start charging him for Wi-Fi. >> John: Let's stay on this example with TheCube. Because I think this is really important to the dense qua problem. So we go to Moscone Center all the time. >> Bruce: Sure. >> And they have Wi-Fi. They have large crowds come in. And we're used to doing a live broadcast there. >> Right, sure. >> So I'd love to have my own Wi-Fi provisioned. Is that what happened there? Could they potentially say, you know, dedicate this access point or this subnet of the network to TheCube? >> They could, I mean it would be a variation on this, but absolutely. I mean one of the things that we do very well is taking a Wi-Fi device or an AP and segment it out for use cases like that. >> John: AP being access point. >> Access point, exactly. So in a convention environment like that, those are actually quite challenging 'cause you have so many people on the network. And what you need to do is carve out a resource that might be dedicated to that. So if you can't get good Wi-Fi-- >> John: Like good video, like we do video production-- >> We can do that. >> and so we want to-- >> Yeah. >> Actually prioritize the video traffic. >> Bruce: Absolutely. And we'll show that a little bit later in the demo. >> The recreational. >> Bruce: Yeah, you separate it out, right. And make sure that-- >> So continue, so that on-ramping there-- >> Bruce: Yeah, so basically this was just showing you how quickly you can create TheCube. This is the environment that I basically set up. It's got a couple APs. It's ready to go. I can now start. I can plug in those access points, and that side is up and running. So that's the provisioning aspect. The second aspect of Wi-Fi that we don't talk about is access to the network itself. This is actually a challenge with a lot of environments that's how do I get all of these people onto the network at the same time and do that very easily without IT getting a phone call saying, hey help me I dunno what the password is or -- >> John: Are we onboarding users and stuff like that? >> Bruce: Yeah, onboarding. Well we have a solution there, it's called EasyPass. And that solution allows you to create the portals that you see when you log into -- >> John: Like (mumbles) tollbooths? >> Bruce: Yeah, and it basically provides a very easy way of doing that. So let's just say this is TheCube guest, and I'll create a new portal. And this is a guest network right, so I know when I came in here today, I connected to the Wi-Fi network and I had to figure out how to do that, and what was the password. So let's just say we're creating a Wi-Fi network here. This just shows how easy and quick that interface is. I can customize the page. Let's select an image. We'll select a background image here. And then actually use Facebook and Google can be optionally used to log in. So just that quickly I've created a portal that says, this is what you're going to see when you log in. Now obviously if it's TheCube you put your own logos and data there. But the idea here is that a user can come in here and either register with his email or use Facebook or Google for example to get on the network. >> John: Is that (mumbles) thing in through the preexisting credentials? >> Bruce: This is used, in this case, yeah with Facebook you're using the credential that they have to get onto their system. And You're basically using that for Wi-Fi as well, so that the user name and password is now providing access. >> John: So it's seamless to the user what their choice is. >> Bruce: Yeah. And some people use Facebook, others will just connect with their email. >> John: Some people want to register, but most people just want to connect with either Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever they have. >> Bruce: Yeah, yeah. And so this basically just shows how quick and easy it is to set up a guest page that gets somebody on the network. Very simple to use. And so IT administers love this because it simplifies their job significantly. The other thing I wanted to show here real quick is just the Microsoft Azure to Google integration. We actually have integration directly with these two ecosystems where if you already are in a Office 365 shop or a Google App shop as a lot of schools are, they can just use those credentials. The user logs in with their laptop, with their username, password, and it gets them access to Wi-Fi at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone. >> John: So if it's active directory, you got your Microsoft. If it's Google and what they use you can do that. >> Bruce: Right, yeah. So it's all in the cloud. So now this is again, moving everything into the cloud as opposed to using some local resource to do authentication and maintaining those resources. >> John: That seems to be the theme with Riverbed; simplify. >> Bruce: Right, absolutely. And this is the two big things here. We're scaling the Wi-Fi network to support these broad use cases. And then we're simplifying it with the tools to enable that to roll out very smoothly. >> Well all the research points to, that manual task that don't add value will be automated away. And those tasks will be shifted to more value activities. >> Right. >> Okay, so take us through monitoring. Now what happens when, you know I'm doing my Snapchats or Instagram, or my Facebook Lives, and you go, whoa, whoa, whoa. >> Bruce: Right. >> John: Or I'm interested in knowing if someone's downloading the latest movie on BitTorrent. >> Bruce: Yeah, yeah and that's very key. So if I go back to our solution here. The dashboard actually shows what's going on in the network. So this is actually a very flexible interface. You can move things around, create widgets, do different things. And in fact we have a map function where you would lay all the stuff out on a map and then I can actually show what the coverage is, for example that Wi-Fi and a floorplan. This happens to be my house. >> John: That's an RF metric? >> Bruce: That is actually RF coverage within this location of these access points. >> John: That is very cool. >> Bruce: Then I can jump in here and troubleshoot from there. But to your point in terms of what's going on -- >> John: So it shows overlaying clouds and channels and all those deep, deep configuration stuff. >> Bruce: All the information if you need to go there. >> John: And you just don't need to get involved in that. >> Bruce: Most of this stuff is automated. There's the auto button for a lot of this when you hook up the Wi-Fi the first time. You don't want to have to tweek all of those things. So we have the auto button that 90% of the users would use or more. And then if you needed to tune it we can go from there. But yeah, to your point in terms of application policies and controls. Here's an example of what we do here. For example, I can see what types of traffic is on this network here. So let's look at for example, YouTube. And we see that there's actually a couple users here that are using a lot of YouTube traffic. I can click on any of these applications and see what the amount of traffic is associated with that. But what's more interesting then is doing something about it. So what we have is a policy engine that recognizes 1,600 different applications and allows me to create policies on them. I can create rules and say, okay let's look at YouTube specifically, which is a streaming media application. And you can see we have hundreds in here, in fact 1,600 total. And I can block YouTube if I so desire from the network. Or maybe I allow it in there, but I limit that traffic per user to say 500 K or something like that so they maybe can't watch a 4 K video or something like that. So Enterprise is-- >> John: Make it crawl for them. >> Bruce: Yeah, you can do it, but you can't overload the network. So Enterprise is hospitals. You know schools love this because they can get that granular control of the network. And maybe this happens to be instead of Enterprise that's using a database, maybe they're an Oracle shop, and so they want to raise the quality of service on that and put that high priority. So you could do that just the same. >> John: And so whatever the priority is, they can get bandwidth through it. So if it's live gaming, and you want to have that game be, that's what I want. >> Bruce: Exactly. >> John: Or minimize it. >> Bruce: So this really, what this map ends up doing is mapping the wireless to the business needs of the organization that's deploying it. >> John: So the optimization of the network, you can look at much more clearly with the visualization, and make decisions. On the network map there with the RF. Is that for placement of access points? Or is that more for understanding propagation or -- >> Bruce: It's, yeah we have a separate design tool that allows you to design those heat maps. And then when you actually have a live network what you were looking at was actually the coverage estimation based on what's actually deployed. >> John: So it's kind of -- >> Bruce: So if an AP goes down, it turns red and then you'll see a hole in your coverage and you'll know that you have a problem that you have to go and solve. >> Okay, great. So it's (mumbles) gives you a hand. >> Yeah. >> Okay, analytics. What other analytics do you have in the demo that you could share? >> Bruce: Right, so analytics is an interesting one. We have a lot of data that we pull into the network from the Wi-Fi. So if you think about it, we know who is on the network. We know what they're doing. What applications they're going to. We know where they are, 'cause we actually calculate the location of those users. And that information is all pulled into this central location here. So if I pull in a couple of these analytics charts you actually see now what is going on in that location over time. So here we have users and how long they're actually in the network. >> John: Can you see the URL path they're using? >> Bruce: That's in the application portion. This is just kind of showing bulk, like how many users are showing in the network and how long are they there. And then how many are there, and how many are actually repeat or new. So a retail customer may be interested that, if it's like I'm getting 40% existing customers coming back, but maybe there's 60% on a given day. And then that can change over time depending on location. So the bottom line is Wi-Fi is turning, for us, into a big data challenge or solution to where I can take all that data on who, what, where, why that they're doing and then turn that into business intelligence that the retailer, that's a big one, can use for making more intelligent decisions about how they run their business. >> Okay, so bottom line for the folks watching, with respect to wireless; what's the future state that they need to be thinking about in terms of planning for Wi-Fi and to experience the future of networking by extending SD-WAN to the wireless LAN? >> Right, so there's a lot of things to consider when you look at Wi-Fi. What you're doing today is probably not going to be the same as what you do next year, and certainly not five years from now. So this is actually a big challenge for a lot of our customers to kind of get that future view of what's going to happen, because they're making a purchase decision today that's going to last them for awhile. So what we look at is solving the problems that those users might run into, which can be scale, you might be using and seeing double or triple the number of users in traffic in the next few years, so you have to solve that. You have to solve the security problems, which we didn't talk about too much today, but EasyPass is one of the solutions for that. I want to ensure those users can get on, but make sure that they're secure, my corporate data is going to be protected. And then finally the simplicity of doing that. So I know Wi-Fi is going to change. I know the network requirements are going to change. How can I simply go into an interface, though this cloud management solution we provide and make those changes that are needed and adapt to that dynamic that we're talking about. And then all of that then folds into the broader picture of the SD-WAN story that we talk about with Riverbed, where now I can do some of those things across the LAN and WAN holistically through a common control point. >> And the common control point is key because the users don't view things as LAN and WAN. They just want their stuff. >> Bruce: Yeah, right. >> Wherever they are. >> Yeah, they don't care. So they might be connected into the Wi-Fi, so that's pretty visible, but in the end the Wi-Fi could work fine, but if that WAN connection is down or compromised, or anywhere in between the data center, all these things have to be working. >> And the tools to make the integration easier, whether it's Microsoft 365, and Google, On-Premise or GoogleLogin or Facebook. >> Right, right, all those ecosystems. I mean this is the big part of what we're trying to do is tap into those systems that everybody is using anyway and make it all seamless. >> John: And easy. >> So everyone knows how to log into their Google or Facebook account, so now let's just make that part of the Wi-Fi experience. >> And security's all solid? >> Yeah, security is solid if you use it. And that's the big thing about Wi-Fi is there's a lot of open guest network still out there. And little by little you're seeing those become secure, but what tends to happen is that complexity and security are kind of at odds with each other. The more secure you make a network, the more complex. >> John: And here you're making it easier. >> That's why EasyPass and the name, that's what we do to make that as simple as possible because security is very important. >> Bruce Miller: Extending the SD-WAN to the Wireless LAN in our segment experiencing the future of networking. Thanks so much for sharing. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

hello everyone welcome to the cube conversations here in our studio in Palo Alto California I'm John Faria co-host of the cube co-founder Sylvania media special guest today inside the cube in Palo Alto Steve Lucas the new CEO of Marketo formerly of sa P industry veteran a lot of experience in the enterprise space now the chief executive officer at Marquette Oh welcome to this cube conversation great to see you yeah great to see you again so Marketo has been on our radar spent on everyone's radar it's been one of the hottest marketing companies that have come out of this generation of SAS what I call SATs cloud offerings and certainly as burn burn in the field in terms of reputation in terms of quality high customer scale a lot of other companies have been bought out you see Oracle doing a lot of stuff you got Salesforce the SAS business is booming oh yeah and you have a rocket ship that you're now the CEO now for two months first question what's it like here now compare a CPA yeah Marketo what's it what's happening well it's I mean s if he's a fantastic company and loved it it's the the the kind of metaphor I've used is it you know with sa P it's it's a bigger it's a bigger vehicle you're driving a bus and you can carry a lot of people with you takes a little bit longer to make a u-turn Marketo is a Formula One car I mean this thing is just in and out of traffic and it's it's unbelievably nimble so it's it's been a big kind of shift culturally but absolutely love it for the folks that are watching you might not know but Steve was in the HANA analytics president of that division with ASAP which was a real interesting transformation because Hana and and and s ap was a traditional big enterprise software company yeah but had to move very quickly Hana was basically built before Hadoop was even conceived and it was built before the big cloud explosion but kind of well built for the cloud so you have to kind of move quickly oh yeah from scratch into the cloud oh yeah with sa Pease resources yeah so compare construct contrast butBut your expense from sa p what is Marquette O's prospects I mean what's going on there I mean I'll see you got a formula speedboat but the big aircraft carriers are thrown pretty big wake they are how are you gonna maneuver yeah yeah well it's it's a fascinating environment right now because you know going from us if he I'd say that my experience they're kind of highly tuned me or prepared me for what I'm doing in Marketo si P had to move nimbly at the time really nimbly you're entering a market where you've got oracle microsoft at a database level they're the incumbents they own massive share how does si penetrate that but we were successful at the time at sa p and i loved that experience coming into Marketo really i mean it's a couple things one is you got to out-innovate the competition this is not rest on your laurels and wait for the release a year and a half from now that doesn't happen so this is about moving quickly but the second thing it's about I believe is it's all about putting the customer at the center of your strategy they have to drive everything I've talked to more marketers more CMOS in the last two months than I have in my last 20 years putting them the center is all about that Marketo their heritage was marketing solutions built by marketers for market what are the people saying you made with a lot of those CMOS more in the past since the past two months what are they saying what's on their agenda what do they care about what's important to them brand revenue and impact they want to know how do I Drive my brand how do I drive revenue and how do I show that impact to my CEO the board whomever it may be but the thing that scares marketers right now the most is what is digital transformation changing relative you know the big trend in macro trend globally how is it changing buyer expectation how is it changing the customer brand relationship that's top of mind Peter Paris who heads up by research for wiki bond and he used to do the b2b practice at Forrester around digital and stay Volante now we're talking yesterday that digital now is everything right so if you look at digital it's not just oh marketing need some tools to send emails out or oh I need to get a website up call IT up and provision or landing page this is now a fabric of pure infrastructure yet the infrastructure was built in the web days and you can go back to your business object days and go back again even back in the 90s that infrastructure now is so hard and as instrumentation there's no agility so that I feel that and we here in our in our teams and our customers that I want agility but I also want to control what the infrastructure might look like but then I don't want to touch it again I wanted to work for me do you see that same dynamic and how does that play out because I mean it's kind of the nuance point but the end of the day shadow marketing is going on shadow IT oh it's happening and it's on this unequivocally I mean so the the it literally the what's crushing the marketer right now is every time we get a new touch point a a watch so we go from just a watch that tells me the time to an Apple watch right every time there's a new touch point there's a new point solution for it and it's crushing the marketer so if it's social there's point solutions if it's mobile there's point solutions if it's a watch there's point solutions I blew my mind I literally saw it start up this is we can do you know monitoring and engagement of people on a watch it's just it's overwhelming the marketer and so their landscape of applications is looking like 30 40 different apps and their big win single sign-on that's the big win for the marketer internally it's just crushing them so what they're looking for your point is the Mahr tech or marketing technology graph and map is so big each one of their own underlying stack database software is that kind of what you're getting at absolutely absolutely you pick a marketing cloud it really doesn't matter you could say Oracle's marketing cloud sales force marketing cloud Adobe's marketing cloud it's just convoluted the the graph or chart of what's out there so point solutions just put together cobble together that's exactly right and so we're the benefit are that this is the the problem with that is what well the problem with that is that you first of all you lose any context relative to who you are there's no way that I can across 30 or 40 systems keep a consistent definition of job for you it's just impossible to do and our notion is we're looking at and what we're driving is a single engagement platform where the definition of you who you are no matter what touch point how we listen to you how we learn from you and how we engage with you it's all the same it's all integrated so let's get back to this point because I think an engagement platform and then the applications are interesting so I mentioned the CMOS earlier there's more development going on in marketing with like programmers developing apps because creig's of course okay so they're using the cloud and the marketing cloud is not like a one-off it has to be part of the core infrastructure so one of the things that wiki bonds gonna be releasing a new research coming up but I saw David floor yesterday who's a head of the research project that they're gonna show market share numbers of Amazon Google all the top cloud guys yeah interesting dynamic past is squeezing now platform-as-a-service is being squeezed down and SAS is increasing and then I as infrastructure stores is kind of shortening which means this automation in there so that the middle layer is gone but yet there's more sass how does that relate to the marketing cloud because the marketing cloud would be considered middleware or is it just the SAS app and does that speak to an explosion of SAS applications well I mean you're gonna see an explosion of SAS applications regardless I mean we reached that point of critical mass a while ago that's there's no going back at this point but if you look at kind of I think you're absolutely right there's compression at the IaaS layer in the past layer etc because these these these larger kind of SAS applications they are really ruling today and if you look at how that applies to marketing we actually think about three technology tiers within marketing there's the listen learn and engage tier the listen it's here is how do I listen on these digital channels the myriad that are out there and then the learned here is core to our platform the engagement platform it's all about an automation engine an AI engine and an analytics engine it's learning and then engaged here is how do I go back to those self same channels I was listening to and engage you the way that you want to be touched and so that's really the stack that comprises the Marketo engagement platform what's interesting the dynamic for us is we're actually seeing our own native applications that we're building on our engagement platform and then we have over 600 partners that are building applications are not building applications on our engagements they're writing software on top of the market absolutely so they're extending it so if social listening which I know is a big thing for Silicon anger that's like the I mean you guys are masters at it that if that's your thing then we have a not only do we have social listening capability but there's an app for that there's dozens so we could potentially plug into that oh absolutely so that's your vision so the vision let's go back to the so more apps a platform that enables more satisfaction yeah and and you mentioned people building on it that's an integration challenge and that's something that people they want to do more of they want to integrate other things with platforms which could be a challenge but it brings up the point data where does the data sit because now the data is the crown jewel yes and also a very important aspect to get real-time information so if you have information on me you won't have access to that data fast that's right and so there's an architectural challenge there there is your thoughts and reaction to the role of data well I first of all marketers still want to own their data and I think we need to be you know the reality is is that if you look a lot at a lot of these marketing clouds that are out there they're the vendor perspective is going to be will if I own your data I own you and our perspective is well you know that your data can sit within our platform but we can actually drive that data into you know on-premise warehouse etc etc so we're our goal is not to own your data ergo we own you that's not our goal I think the big thing like in the content you're saying is you want to use their data to give them value absolutely and so for us it's a matter of you know we can we can do to protect their data - exactly and so for me it's all about you know it's securing the data its but it's also the data is so complex now for the marketer so you've got social data highly unstructured you know you're listening for key words they still have to interpret that information you've got highly structured data demographic for example so it's how do you bring all that together you can bring that together in the Marketo engagement platform and then you can turn that into something meaningful it's always funny always to love to interview the new CEOs because we got the fresh perspective but I can't ask the tough questions cuz you lived in there for two months you get it say I won't even that two months I really can't answer that so I'll get the more generic on that what to try to get this at some of the hidden questions that I like to expose for the audience and really the main one is what attracted Univ Marketo I mean you left a pretty senior very senior position NSA p-president and Marketo is like the ship that's out there it's a motorboat but some are saying that the ways might be big enough and so you know be like okay but their public company so everything's out in the open what attracted you to market what God did say you know what I want to ride this speedboat well the trigger point for me was you know especially it s if he get exposed to kind of the big macro trends big macro trend everybody knows it is digital transformation as if he's talking that Microsoft Accenture picked the big company they're talking digital transfers and it is real the reality is you either are a digital native company were born digital uber or you're going digital ie you know you're a hospitality company trying to compete with air B&B and you gotta go digital so it's yeah I wrote an article I want on go digital or die right that's that's the that's the notion and when I looked at that I said so how does that lens apply to marketing well the reality is is that the marketer in the digital economy is only going to win if they can engage with not two or three people but Millions in an authentic and personalized manner at scale so that it's kind of juxtaposed how do you do that how do you engage with millions of people but at scale but deliver personalized an authentic experience and I looked at Marketo and I saw this platform and I just said oh my gosh there they are there's like this this convergence of those two things that are going to happen and I just think that the whole kind of marketing automation space which is known as really I I want to transform that into the engagement space we're talking about things like this engagement economy trend I absolutely believe we are fully in this notion of the engagement economy I think Marketo is right there so I gotta ask you a question is this is interesting you mentioned getting personalized information one of the things that's apparent we talked about on my Silicon Valley Friday show if you go to soundcloud.com /john for every year that people watching can get the copies of those but the thing was the recent election highlighted an issue around trust right v news younger natives digital natives younger kids they actually don't know what fake news is and what real news is a lot of people are moving off cable TV into digital which opens up the snapchats of the world different channels omni-channel like things and so this brings up this notion of communities because what people are turning to in this time of no trusting the mainstream media right news or Trump or what they were saying it's causing a lot of theater but it highlights an issue which is what's real what's not its content content is also has a relationship with users content is marketing content is trust is now a huge deal how do marketers now deal with the fact that content marketing coming from a company it could be fake news but there's a real or not and how do they get the context jewel connections is it the communities and we see that election people kind of going back to their tribe and saying oh anti Trump or Trump or whatever so tribal communities are a big part of data it is what's your thoughts on this trust factor and data and the content yeah yeah well so I think I mean a couple things first of all you know the I I think you or I as a consumer you know where anybody really we don't respond well to stare I'll moderately creepy advertisements that show up that you you know you know okay you're tracking my cookie you know in my browser and that that is just that's a non-starter I think that that in and of itself is is not interesting now we respond well to there's I said that that kind of personalized and I use that word authentic content so if there's content it's not just hey I know that you visited you know three websites about cars so I'm just going to pump you with ads full of cars but if we deliver thoughtful content it could be a comparison of vehicles that you've been looking at and take a look so there's more thoughtful content that you can deliver that that I think can come through a Mar tech platform like what we have our engagement platform no I will tell you that that trust to me it's it's not just the the authentic nature it's also a consistent engagement you can't show up show me an ad one time and I'm just gonna buy from you it doesn't work that way anymore so it's about having a relationship digital at scale but you know it's it's delivering that human touch I wrote a blog on this one where I said how do you deliver the human touch its Kate for blog addresses it it's on Marquitos website actually yeah right on our website so we talked about that as well and as companies are moving away from you or I managing the social engagement to the AI engines the machines engaging with us I think that we run the risk the marketer runs the risk of reinforcing the stare aisle you know kind of engagement and that's not what we want we want warm human touch that breeds trust sowhat's marcado's technology I mean people look at Marketo and people in marketing general yeah they're just hiring agencies to do all this work this isn't real maar tech marketing technology going on I like some of the technology for the folks watching because yeah I think it's pretty interesting most people don't understand that's a lot of machine learning a lot of technology involved in databases from security to trust also enabling real-time yeah share some insight into what's going on there so so this so there's a notion of engagement platform which we believe is is just fundamentally different than your run-of-the-mill marketing cloud so the engagement platform for Marketo is all about that listen learn and engage kind of methodology that we think about and the listening notion as I said literally as we can listen to anything your custom data social channels smoke signals if we had to we can read and consume almost anything and if we can't do it one of our partners can with like a DMP for example they learn the core of our engagement engine and this is pretty neat so we have three engines in our engagement engine we have the automation engine which is all about I hear you say something on Facebook I can engage with you then there's the analytics engine so I can help you understand what are people talking about on Facebook what are you talking on a LinkedIn and then there's the AI engine now this is where I think the the merger of the marketer and the machine is going to start coming together in a big big way so our AI engine allows you to not just say well if people say Silicon angle on Twitter then send them this but you can actually have it adapt and customize learn and reason learn and reason so X writes out and do some it's right it's predictive Oh not only just predictive actually have it I think it's borderline kind of clairvoyant but understand well I'm not just gonna immediately react to something that you put on Twitter I'm gonna go and I'm gonna check the rest of your digital persona there's a digital assistant basically not a sales rep it's more of an assistant it is it is and and so the future of marketing is simple I can build a marketing or an engagement campaign and I can click a button that says make it adaptive and then that's when the machine in the marketer come together and so on top of that engine we have our marketing applications our native apps like marketing automation we have an account based marketing which is a pretty big deal especially in the enterprise account based marketing is all about going from the single buyer to the consensus buying that you know behavior that's see in the enterprise and then we have other technologies like mobile marketing so we can track when you open an app if you close it if you click on it so it's not just one thing we have a range of marketing apps that sit on the platform right so I want to get the final question I get your thoughts on just the future of the business obviously a year you're there two months you got to get to know the team you've got to get to know the players any changes on the horizon that he let's shop so you got a big launch coming up with it well Ryan codename Orion which is there a new engagement platform that you guys pre-announce and get the announcement coming up there got a book you going on but if for Marketo what's the guiding Northstar for you what do you what do you say to customers and kind of the vision and and what changes you look that might be coming down the pike yeah so I think so the vision really there's two elements to that one is that our core focus like at its core is we're going to help the CMO build the lasting relationship derive revenue for the company and the way that we're going to do that is deliver the engagement platform which we are now rolling out I mean we've been working on a ryan for a long time way before I showed up and Orion takes the ability for a marketer to go from millions of interesting touch points per year social mobile did you know digital touch points to quadrillions of touch points we are ready for that digital transformation what we call the engagement economy era I'm writing a book on there the whole notion of engagement economy we're entering this new era where if you're not able to engage with people and and also things because things will be out there too at scale you won't win you just won't we want to get your thoughts on one final point I know we're kind of running up on time in this segment but if you look at the cloud go back to 2008 2007 timeframe when it really emerged and Amazon is already you know had a couple years under their belts with what they were doing you saw the DevOps movement developed merging development and operators be the real catalyst those early adopters you know those you know Navy SEALs the Green Berets you know eating nails and spit and glass out so so that was Facebook that was the big web scalars Yahoo essentially invented Hadoop which became big data you saw all these companies that were new natives build their own stuff not buy off-the-shelf equipment and they became the the canary in the coal mines for everybody else now everyone wants to be like AWS and even Microsoft's changes to be more like AWS and competing directly with them Google is changing so there was early guys on Facebook what they're doing drones and virtual reality you know what these stuff they're doing with open open compute those are now leaders so they're the predictors of the future in my opinion so I look at it so the question I want to ask you is how does Marketo rank up because companies that don't have huge early adopters of the scale side of it platforms that can't scale probably won't have any Headroom so do you have an example where your business has guys pushing the tech scaling it up that are gonna be that canary in the coal mine you guys have that mix of business can you give some examples yeah first of all we have fantastic customers that are using us today kind of scale Oh at scale absolutely whether it's a GE for example GE is literally attributing billions in revenue to the the Marketo engine and the campaigns and efforts that they're driving through that but ge is a perfect example Microsoft another great when there's lots of great examples of customers of ours that are doing what I would I would call hyper scale in engagement within marketing data and they're with marketing data etc so they're using your tools at large large scale yeah and I'd say it's the scale that that today you get these hyper scale example points but tomorrow everybody's gonna have to do it it's just what's neat for us you see the same thing I was mentioned that those hyper scales are gonna be the you know the pioneers that are gonna let the settlers come in and and behind them do you see that more typically and the neat part for us is is because as a marketing automation technology or an engagement platform we're fully integrated with Facebook Linkedin etc so they actually pull us forward we get that I think we get that we've got the telescope to see the canary in the coalmine a little bit further down the road assuming it's a well-lit coal mine but we get to see that a little bit further down the road so I it's an advantage for us strategically I got to ask you the question because in the database world the systems of record the services of engagement and then systems of AI IBM calls it cognitive yes how do you guys play in that new era is that just all marketing for them well I mean everybody has their cognitive exist yeah and you have something it's so they're every two degrees so everyone has tech and we certainly have what what I characterize as adaptive and intuitive that's my version of AI you know I think saying artificially intelligent it's kind of like I've met a bunch of teenagers that I consider to be artificially intelligent but the reality is is that everybody to a degree has this brochure layer tech that they run around waving it really comes down to what's practical what's usable and for us that's we're focused on is what is adaptive and intuitive technology that's going to merge the marketer in the machine final question final final question is what's the top three priorities for you if we look back on your performance next year this time what are the top three things you want to accomplish as the new CEO of Marketo well number one champion engagement economy that whole we're there and I think people just need to understand what it is to is help the market or win I mean the reality is if you boil it down you ask the question what does the marketer what they want to win they just want to win help their company win and so we want to help the marketer win and then three is really engage our marketing nation we've got a community of an online community talking about communities over a hundred thousand marketers that are working inside of that community it's just absolutely huge and so I want to engage the community if we can do that and be just customer centric and oriented our technology the AI all of those things part of our engagement platform it's gonna help us win to stick congratulations on being the co-chief executive Marketo great to see you Steve Lucas here inside the cube and Paul all those new Studios here in Pella 4,500 square feet you see a lot more content live programming as well as featured interviews with top CEOs of Silicon Valley and top technology companies I'm John Fourier thanks for watching

(mumbling) >> Voiceover: Covering Sapphire now. Headline sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> We are here live at SAP Sapphire. This is SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal to noise and want to do a shoutout to our sponsors SAP HANA Cloud and Console Inc. at console cloud, connecting the clouds together. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Reggie Jackson, winner, athlete, tech athlete now, entrepreneur, overall great guy, and a cube alumni. Four years ago, we interviewed him here at SAP Sapphire. Welcome back, Reggie, to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. John, thank you very much. It's good to be here with old friends. We were havin' a little conversation about baseball there, but good to see you guys. Yeah, and obviously, the baseball, we were just talkin' about the whole fisticuffs and the glee of the grand slam walk-off. >> Reggie: Good stuff, good stuff. >> It's a good pivot point in some of the things that you're workin' on in here, the conversations in the tech world, which is social media and that notion of celebrating in a world of Instagram and Snapchat and social media. Certainly, ya flip the bat, the views go up. But then, baseball has these (laughing) unwritten rules, right. So does corporations. And so we're now a new era. Is baseball safe now with these unwritten rules and should they maintain those, certain things that have kept the game in balance? But yet with social media, the players are their own brand. And you certainly were a brand, even back in your day, which is a pioneer. What's your thoughts on that? >> You know John, Peter, I don't like the idea of someone going out of their way to promote their brand. Some of the great brands to me in history, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, the great Jim Brown, Joe Montana, Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan would be a prominent example where technology and TV enhanced who he was. And he had someone behind him to enhance his brand, Nike, Phil Knight, who was a real pioneer. I'm not so in favor, I'm not in favor at all of someone manufacturing themselves as a brand. And I hear players talk about their brand and about trying to create something. If you're great, if you deserve it, I don't think Stephen Curry works on his brand. I think he works on bein' a great player. I think he works on bein' a great teammate. I think he does his best to maximize his skill set. And he's nothing but a gentleman along the way. He'll celebrate with joy once in awhile, with the Curry moves, which we've come to recognize. But for guys that talk about the manufacturing of their brand, there's something about it that's manufactured. It's not real, it's false. And I don't like it. I think it's okay, the Snapchats and the Google+ and all of the stuff, Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff, all of the things that go along with trying to create some hubbub, etc. I'm okay with that. >> So you're saying if it's not deserved. People are overplaying their hand before earning it. >> A lot of it, John, a lot of it. Joe Montana didn't work on his brand, he was great. Jim Brown didn't work on his brand, he was great. I don't want to use Jimmy Brown. I want to use Montana because even young people today will know Joe Montana. Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, they're not about their brand. They're about being classy, being great, being part of a team, being a leader, presenting themselves as something that's respected in the NFL, across the United States. Go ahead, Pete. >> So even though it's cheaper to get your name out there, you still believe in let your performance speak for itself. >> You got to be real about it. Ya got to be who you are. If you're not a great player, get out of the way. Get out of the space. So manufacturing your brand. I played with the Yankees. I was in the era of Cosell and Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner. We won championships with the team. I was part of something that helped me become recognized. And so in our era, the Sandy Koufax's became brands because they were associated with greatness around them. They stood out and so they earned that tremendous brand. >> We were just watching Graig Nettles gettin' taken out by George Brett in that big game and also the pine tar, we kind of gettin' some good laughs at it. You look at the balance of personalities. Certainly, Brett and Nettles and your team and you had a great personality, winning championships. Worked together as a team. And so I want to ask you that question about the balance, about the in baseball, certainly, the unwritten rules are a legacy and that has worked. And now in a era of personalities, in some cases, people self-promoting themselves, people are questioning that. Your thoughts on that because that applies to business too 'cause tech athletes or business athletes have a team, there are some unwritten rules. Thoughts on this baseball debate about unwritten rules. >> Pete and John, I'll try to correlate it between some tech giants that have a brand. I just left a guy with a brand, Bill McDermott, that runs SAP. Even Hasso, the boss. The face now of SAP is Bill McDermott. Dapper, slender, stylish, bright. It comes across well. So maintaining that brand, to me, relates to SAP, bills a great image for it. He's stylish, he's smooth, he's smart. He's about people. He presents himself with care. So that is a brand. I don't think it's manufactured. That's who he is in real life. If you take a look, and I'll go back to Steph Curry because that name resonates and everyone recognize it. That style of cool, that style of control, that style of team and care. And he presents to us all that he cares about us, the fan, his team, his family. And so those are things and I think you can go from the tech world. Bill Gates had a brand. Brilliant, somewhat reclusive, concerned about the world, concerned about the country, concerned about his company. And so that resonated it Microsoft because that's who he really was. Some of the people today don't really recognize that Jobs was thrown out of Apple. He was pushed out. All of his brilliance, which was marketing. And the gentleman there that really was the mind for the company, Steve Wozniak, happens to be here at SAP Sapphire. Today, I think he speaks. But those brands were real, not manufactured. And so, in today's world, I think you can manufacture a brand. And then all of a sudden, it'll crumble. It'll go away in the future. But the great brands of whether it's Jackie Robinson or whether it's Jack Welch or whether it's George Steinbrenner and the Yankee brand, those brands were real. They were not manufactured. Those guys were eccentric. They were brilliant. Go ahead. >> And also, they work hard. And I want to point out a comment you made yesterday here at the event. You were asked a question up on stage about that moment when you hit the home runs. I think we talked about it last time. I don't necessarily want to talk about the home runs. But you made a comment I'd like you to expand on and share with the audience. 'Cause you said, "I worked hard," but that day during warm-ups, you had batting practice. You made a comment that you were in the zone. So working hard and being great as it leads up to that. But also, in the moment, 'cause that's a theme these days, in the moment, being ready and prepared. Share your thoughts on what you meant by you had a great batting practice and you just felt it. >> I'm going to take it to what you say is in the moment. I remember when I was talkin' about it yesterday, which you reference to, when I had such a fantastic batting practice. I walked by a coupla sports writers in that era. Really well-known guys, Dave Anderson, New York Times. I can't think of his name right now, but it'll come to me, of the Daily News. It was like hey man. >> John: You were rockin' it out there. >> I kind of hope I didn't leave it out here. (laughing) That was in the moment and at the same time, >> I mean, you were crushing it. >> Yes, when the game started, I got back in that moment. I got back in what was live, what was now, what was going on. Certainly, I think our world now with the instant gratification of sending out a message or tweeting to someone or whatever certainly in the moment is about what our youth is and who we are today as a country, as a universe. >> But you didn't make that up. You worked hard, but you pulled it together in the moment. >> A comment with that is I went and did something with ESPN earlier this year in San Francisco, in Oakland with Stephen Curry. They said, "Reggie, we want ya to come up "and watch his practice, his pre-game." And it was very similar to your batting practice, where people come out and watch, etc. And so I was looking forward to it and I like to go to the games about an hour and a half or two hours early so I can see warm-up and see some of the guys and say hello. And I got a chance to watch Steph Curry. I know his dad. And happened to be the first time I went this year, the dad, Carolina, the Panthers were in town. Not the Panthers. Come on, help me, help me, help me. >> Peter: The Wizards? >> No, no, no, the Carolina. >> Peter: Carolina Panthers. >> The Carolina Hornets. >> John: Hornets. >> Were there and I know his dad, Dell Curry. And we talked a little bit. But then, Steph came out and I watched him. And I watched the dribbling exhibition. I watched the going between the legs and behind the back and the fancy passing, etc. And I watched the shots, the high-arcing threes, the normal trajectory threes, the high shots off the backboard and things like that that he did. The left-handed shots, the right-handed shots. And the guy asked me what I thought of the show. And I said, "Well, it's a cool show, "but I'm going to see all that tonight." And me watching him, the behind the backs, the between the legs, the passes, the high-arching shots from three, the high-arching touches off the glass. He does all that. >> John: He brought it into the game. >> Yeah, I said so, (laughing) >> Peter: That is his game. >> It's not a show, but that's his game. >> So Reggie, you did an interesting promotion, Reggie's Garage, where you bought a virtual reality camera and you created a really nice show of your garage demonstrating your love >> Reggie: 360. >> Peter: of cars, 360. Talk a little bit about that. And then if ya get a second, imagine what baseball's going to be like as that technology becomes available and how some of the conversation that we're having about authenticity, the fan coming into the game. >> An experience. >> Is going to change baseball. Start with the garage and how that went and then how ya think that's going to translate into baseball, if you've had any thoughts on that. >> In the technology that was used, certainly I enjoyed it. While I was doing it, I noticed where the cameras were in different spots. There was one on the floor of my car. There was one in the backseat. And then there was someone following us as closely as they could. But you could see everything. You'd see the shift and you could see my feet. It was like you were with me. When we did the 360 inside the garage as well, you could listen to me and then you could use your finger and spin around. And they had these special headset and special glasses that you could look around, just with your headset on, and see all around the room. Behind you, in front of you. And so it's an experience that I think is going to become part of who we are as a nation, who we are as a people watching television, that you're going to really feel like you're in the room. I think it's going to be exciting. And I think it's going to be fun. And when you're talking about products, when you're talking about my website, if you will, with the focus on automotive parts, where a guy can go in and shop and get any part he wants for a vehicle, you really can build a complete car from my website. You can buy a frame. You can buy body parts. You can buy a horn, an engine, brakes, tires, grills, turn signals, the whole nine yards. And it gives you an experience through 360 video of really walking into the store, walking into the building, walking into the stadium and looking around to see the hot dog stand, see the dugout, see the pitcher and the hitter, to see the parts in the garage, to see the cars and take a look and view at everything that's there. >> How are players going to react to havin' the fans virtually right there with them? >> I don't think it bothers you. I don't think ya notice. I don't think they'll show anything that will affect the player that he's going to be concerned about. I think you'd have to be sensitive if they start microphoning, start micing up and then the looseness of the language would impact. So I don't think they'll go that far. But I do think the more that you can see, the more attractive the game becomes, the more interested that you can get people. When I broadcast baseball for ABC back in the 80's, I always tried to broadcast for the lady of the house, while she worked, while she cooked the meal, she didn't have time to think about a backup slider or the fastball that painted the outside corner, the changeup, etc., the sinker. I tried to broadcast for her interpretation so I could attract another fan to the game. So I think that the technology and the viewing that you'll see from behind home plate, from under the player's feet while he's running down the bases and the slides and things of that nature, Pete, I think are going to be exciting for the fan and it'll attract more fans, attract a new type of television it's going to produce, etc. So it's exciting. >> Reggie, thanks for comin' on The Cube again. Appreciate your time. I ask ya final two questions that I want to get your thoughts on. One is obviously the cars. Reggie's Garage is goin' great. And you shared with us last time on The Cube, it's on YouTube, about you when you grew up and decide football and baseball. But when you were growin' up, what was your favorite car? What was that car that you wanted that was out of reach? That car that was your hot rod? And then the second question is, we'll get to the second question. Answer that one first. What was you dream car at the time? How did ya get >> Reggie: The dream car >> John: hooked on this? >> at the time. I had a '55 Chevrolet that I bought from a buddy by the name of Ronny Fog. I don't even know if he's still around anymore. Out of Pennsylvania. I had $300 and my dad gave me $200. I'd saved up mine from workin' for my dad. But my dream car was I went to school with a guy named Wayne Gethman and another guy named Irwin Croyes. I don't know Wayne Gethman anymore. But from the age of 16, I reengaged with Irwin Croyes, who happens to be a business investing type guy in the city of Philadelphia, right where we're still from. He's a car collector. And he drove a '62 Corvette and so did Wayne Gethman. And I always wanted one. And I now happen to have four. (laughing) >> He who get the most toys wins. Final question, 'cause you're such a legend and you're awesome and you're doin' so much work. And you're very active, engaged, appreciate that. Advice to young athletes coming up, whether they're also in business or a tech athlete or a business athlete. But the sports athletes today got travel ball, you got all this stuff goin' on. The idols like Stephen Curry are lookin' great. Great role models now emerging. What advice do you give them? >> John's got a freshman in high school. I got a junior in high school. What would ya say to 'em? >> You know, I'll tell ya. When you're young, the people you want to listen to are Mom and Dad. No one, and I'll say this to any child from the age of eight or nine years old, five, six years old to 17, 18, 19, 20, all the way up, now my daughter's 25. All the way up to the end of your parents' days. No one cares for you more than your mother or your father. Any parent, whether it's a job or whether their success in life, number one in that man or woman, mom or dad, number one in their life is their children. And so for kids, I say if there's any person you're going to listen to for advice in any path you want to walk down, it's the one that your parents talk to you about or how they show you. That is what I would leave as being most important. For kids, anything, idea that you have that you believe you can do, whether it's the athlete like Stephen Curry that has created shots and done things on the basketball court that he envisioned, that he thought about. Or whether it's the next Steve Jobs who happens to be Mark Zuckerman, who I don't know Mark is 30 years old yet. >> John: He just turned 30. >> It's an idea. He's born around the same time. He's born this week. His birthday is in this week. My birthday's tomorrow. >> John: Happy birthday. >> But thank you. Anything that you can think of in today's world of technology. With places like Silicon Valley where they take dreams and create foundations for them. I had a dream about a website that would sell automotive parts and you could go to my site and buy anything for your car. We've got about 75,000 items now. We'll get to 180,000 in a few months. We'll get to a half a million as soon as my technology is ready for it. But we have things to pay attention to and look into and issues to make sure that we iron out that aren't there for our consumer, for ease of navigation, ease of consumption and purchasing. Any idea that you have, take time to dream. It's much more so than taking time to dream when I was a young kid. Because my father would say, "Stop daydreamin' "and wastin' time." >> John: Get to work. >> Reggie: In today's world, for our children, I say take time to create a vision or to create something new. And go to someone that's in the tech world and they'll figure out a way of helping you manifest it into something that's a reality. >> Listen to your parents, kids. And folks out there, dream, build the foundation, go for it. Reggie Jackson, congratulations for being a Cube alumni again, multi-return. >> Peter: Thank you very much. >> John: Appreciate it. Congratulate on all your continued success. You're a legend. Great to have you on. And thanks so much for comin' on The Cube. >> Peter: And happy 70th birthday. >> John, Pete, always a pleasure. >> John: Happy birthday. >> Thank you very much. >> Have some cake for Reggie. It's The Cube, live here in Orlando. Bringin' all the action here on The Cube. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris with Reggie Jackson. We'll be right back. (electronic music)