>> Welcome back, everyone. We we are here live in our Palo Alto studios with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host of today's special digital event, hybrid, cloud and IT analytics for digital business. This is our one-on-one segment with Umair Khan, principal product marketing manager at CA Technologies. Where we get to do a drill-down. He's got a special product, UIM. We're going to talk about unified management. Umair, great to see you. Nice shirt, looking good, same as mine. I got the cuff links. >> I know, we think alike and have the same shirt. >> Got the cloud cufflinks. >> You got to get me one of those. (laughs) >> Good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Hey, I want to just drill down. We had the two keynote presenters, Peter Burris, we'll keep on the research perspective and then kind of, where you guys tie in with your VP of Product Management, Sudip Datta, and interesting connection. Peter laid out the future of digital business, matches perfectly with the story of CA, so interesting. More importantly, it's got to be easy, though. How are you guys doing? I want to drill down to your product, UIM. Unified management, what is that? Unified infrastructure management. What's making it so easy? So, like you said, it's unified infrastructure management. It's a single product to monitor your cloud, your on-prem, your traditional and your entire stack, be it compute layer, storage layer, application services layer. It's a single product to monitor it all, so a) you get a single view to resolve problems, and at the back end, people tend to underestimate the time it takes to configure different tools, right? Imagine a different tool for cloud, different tool for public cloud too that you use, I'm not going to name vendors. Traditional environment you have, or maybe one silo group is using hybrid infrastructure, right? So configuring those, managing those, it's tough. And having a single console to deploy monitoring configuration in the same time monitor that infrastructure makes it easy. >> You and I were talking yesterday, before we came here and were doing a dry run, about cars. >> Yeah. >> And we were talking about the Tesla is so cool compared to an older car, but it's got everything in there. It's got analytics, it's got data, but it's a car. The whole purpose is to drive. It has nothing to do with IT, yet it's got a ton of IT analytics in it. How is business related to that? Because you could almost say that the single pane of glass is analytics. It's almost like Tesla for the business. The business is the car. How do you view that, because you have an interesting perspective. I want to get your take on that. >> Absolutely. So I've seen a lot of people giving examples as well, but I think cars of today is a great example of how monitoring should be, right? Cars, yes, it's still about the look and feel and the brand, but when you're sitting in the car now you expect a unified view. You want blind spot detector, you want collision detector, everything there. Even your fuel gauge, it shouldn't tell you how much is left, it should tell you how much mileage is left, right? Everything is becoming more intelligent. And you know Peter talked about the importance of expedience in the digital business, so IT team needs that visibility, that end-to-end unified view, just like in a modern car, to avoid any blind spots and resolve issues faster, and at the same time, it has to be more proactive and predictive in nature. So that collision detection, all the car companies these days have a commercial on safety features, collision detection, and same with IT. They need to have that ability to use intelligent monitoring tools to be able to resolve issues before the customer experience suffers. And one of our customers says, if someone opened a service desk ticket, that means everyone knows about the issue. I need to be resolving that issue before the service desk ticket is issued, right? >> You don't see Tesla opening up issues, "Hey, you're on the freeway, slow down." But this is important. I mean, Tesla was disruptive because they didn't just build a car and say "bolt on analytics." They took holistic, proactive view of the car experience with technology and analytics in mind to bring that tech to the table. That's similar to the message that we heard from Peter and Sudip about analytics. It's not just a thing you bolt on anymore. You got to think about the outcome of what you're trying to do. >> Exactly. >> That really is the key. And how does that unified infrastructure management do that? >> So it's all about unifying all different, today's digital businesses are adopting a lot of technologies. Every developer has their own stacks. As an IT ops person, you don't want to be someone who says, "you cannot adopt this cloud" or, "you do not adopt this technology." You should be flexible enough to whatever stack they have. You should be able to monitor that infrastructure for them, get yourself a unified view to resolve issues faster. But at the same time, provide your dev teams the flexibility of choosing the stack they like. >> A lot of IT ops guys are impacted and energized, quite frankly, by the future that's upon us with all these opportunities, but the realities of having uptime is a for opsis key and also enabling new (mutters) like IOT. The question for you is, who is most impacted in the enterprise organization or in IT operations, by your modern analytics products and visions? >> So I think there are two groups, right? One is the traditional VP of IT infrastructure, IT operations, so he has a lot of concerns about his infrastructure is becoming more and more dynamic, more complex, clouds are being adopted, businesses talking about expedience, right? So he needs a modern approach to get that end-to-end picture and make sure there are no blame games happening between different groups, and resolve issues really proactively. And at the same time, his tool and his analytics approach need to support modern infrastructures, right? If businesses wants to adopt cloud-based technologies, he needs to be, or she needs to be, able to provide that monitoring, needs to cover that approach as well. >> Is there one that pops out that you see growing faster in terms of the persona within IT? Because we hear Sudip talk about network, which we all want the network to go faster. I mean, you can't go to to Levi's Stadium or any kind of place and people complain about wifi. My kids are like, "Dad, the network's too slow." But in IT, network's critical. But only up to the app, so it's a bigger picture than that. Is there one persona that's rising up that you see that really hones in on this message of this holistic view of looking at modern analytics? >> I think rules are changing overall in IT, right? The system admin is becoming cloud admin, or the dev ops guy, so I think it's getting more and more collaborative. Roles will be redefined, reengineered a bit to meet the needs of modern technologies, modern companies, and so on. And we're also seeing the rise of a site reliability engineer, right? Because he's more concerned about reliability versus individual component. To him an app might be bad because of the network, because of the application itself, or the infrastructure that runs it. >> Okay, what does the UIM stand for and how does that impact in the overall stack? >> So UIM is our unified, as I mentioned before, unified infrastructure management product that's the most comprehensive solution on the market. If you look at technology support from your public-private cloud-based infrastructures like Amazon, Azure, or your hyperconverge. You can also call them private cloud, like mechanics, and being variable stack, or your traditional IT as well, from your (mutters) environments or from your Cisco environments, Cisco UCS, or anything. So it really gives that comprehensive solution set, and at the same time it provides an open architecture if you wanted to monitor some technology that we don't provide support for, it allows you to monitor that. And again, because of that, people are able to resolve issues faster, they're able to improve mean time to repair, and at the same time, I'll reemphasize the configuration part, right? Imagine you have multiple tools for each silos, then you need to configure that. In a dev ops world, you have to release applications faster, but you cannot deploy an application without configuring the monitoring for it, right? But if the infrastructure monitoring guys are taking three or four days to configure monitoring, then the entire concept of dev ops falls apart. So that's where UIM helps too. It really helps ops deploy configurations a lot faster through out-of-the-box templates in a unified approach across hybrid stacks. >> And developers want infrastructure as code, that's clear as day, and now they want great analytics. Okay, so I got to ask you the use case. I got to drill down on use cases, specifically, for the folks watching, whether they're maybe a CA customer in the past or one now, or not yet a customer. Where are you winning? Where is CA actually winning right now? How would talk about the specific use cases where it's a perfect fit and where you've got beachhead and where you can go. >> No, I think the places we typically win really well is as companies become more hybrid, if they're starting up in cloud-based infrastructures, they all of a sudden realize that the monitoring approach for traditional infrastructure is really not for cloud. The more technology that (mutters), you started with cloud and you want to adopt containers, and you start adding these monitoring tools. All of a sudden you realize this approach cannot work. I'm creating more silos, I don't the internal visibility and these infrastructures are more dynamic, going up and down all the time. I need a modern tool, modern approach. So typically, when you have hybrid infrastructures, we typically win there. And I think of a large insurance company as well, where initially we started working with them, and initially they had a lot of different tools that they worked on-- >> I think we actually have a slide for this. Can you pull that up on the thing here, the slide. Before you get to the insurance company, I want to get the graphic up. There it is. So we had the global 500 company, go ahead, continue. >> So basically worked with a global 500 insurance company. They had the same kind of issue, right? A lot of different technologies being adopted, cloud being adopted by a lot of the application team, and they wanted to really scale the business, digitize the business, but they didn't want the monitoring to get in the way. Right, so they implemented UIM, and they significantly improved mean time to repair and the time they spent in monitoring tools, right? That's the biggest thing. IT while monitoring may sound cool, but it's, the IT wants to work in modern innovative stuff. They want to stare at a screen, spending time and creating scripts and monitoring. So it really gave them the ability to get you the single tool to monitor increasingly complex and hybrid infrastructure. >> So you guys also ran a survey, also validated by Tech Validate, which is a third party firm which surveys top IT folks, on the three important ITOA, IT analytics solutions, correlation of data across apps, infrastructure, and network, 78%. Full stack visibility with in-context log monitoring and analysis, 65%. Ability to scale in high volume environments. So interesting how those are the top three. Kind of speaks to the conversation Peter Burris and I had. Lot of data (laughs), okay, multiple stack issues, so you're talking about a holistic view. What's the importance of these top three trends? >> I think a lot of companies miss out when they only monitor a silo, right? Even when I talk about our unified product, it's unified infrastructure. Even within infrastructure, there's so many components. You have to unify them, and that's the UIM work. But as Sudip mentioned, we have one of the biggest portfolio in the market. We're not only good at unified infrastructure, but also the network that connects that infrastructure to the application, and the application itself, right? The mobile application, the user experience of it, and the code-level visibility that you need. So as the survey mentioned, one of the biggest issues that companies have is they want to aggregate this data from app, network, and infrastructure. And at CA we are uniquely positioned because we have products in all three areas. I think typically no vendor covers all three areas and we're tying these together with more contextual analytics, which includes log which we released a while back, and I love to give the example of logs as well, right? People even monitor logs in a silo. But the value of using log together with performance is performance tells you a system is slow, okay, but logs tell you why. So it's using context together with your performance across app, infra, and network, really helps you solve these problems. >> Well, the Internet of Things and the car example we use also takes advantage of potential log data because data exhaust could be sitting around, but with realtime it could be very relevant. Okay, so let's move on to some of the kudos you're getting. Customers recognize CA as a leader in ITOA, IT analytics, operational analytics. 82% of organizations agree with the following, little thumb-up there. "CA has the breadth and depth of monitoring expertise to deliver the cross-correlation of IT operation analytics data from app to infrastructure to network. I buy the vision. I'm going to challenge you on this. What's the most important thing you got that this survey says? Because that's a huge number. Some might challenge that number. So I'm going to challenge that. Why is that number so important, and describe how it's reached. >> So I think it's some of our customers that have bought the belief of this, right, because we have in the portfolio an application performance like I mentioned, infrastructure performance with UIM, our net ops product portfolio, we are the only vendor in the market with that holistic set of products and experience in all three areas. So that really positions us uniquely. If you pick up any vendor out there, they either started on the app side, just started going on the infrastructure side, or they're a pure network player, starting to go infra and trying to get into app. But we are the vendor that has all three, and now we are bringing all of these three areas together through our operation intelligence platform that Sudip mentioned. >> Okay, so go to the next slide here. This one here is kind of chopped down, so move to the next one, you can come to that, look at that, later. This is the one I want to talk about, because retail is huge. We cover retail as a retail analyst firm, but retail does have a lot of edge components to it. It's heavily data-driven, evolving realtime from wearables to whatever. I mean, it's just going crazy. So it's turbulent from a change standpoint, but it's heavily IT operations driven. Why is this important? It says "Global 500 retail company was spending too much time in issue resolution. They lacked end-to-end visibility across cloud, traditional, and applications. After implementing CA UIM, they improved their mean time to repair by 35-50%. I'll translate that. Basically, it's broken, they got to repair it. Things aren't working. Retail can't be down. Why did you guys provide this kind of performance? Give a specific example of how this all plays out. >> So actually this tech firm named the customer, but in a typical scenario in retail, everyone is getting these mobile apps, right? So you need to monitor performance of the mobile app, the application running on it, we have tools for that, and the infrastructure behind it. So typically these mobile apps are on the cloud, right? IT ops have a traditional infrastructure, but this is Amazon-based or Azure-based. They come to us, we are adopting these mobile applications, but at the same time, we don't want to set up a separate IT ops team for these mobile applications as well. So retail organizations are proactively implementing an analytics-based approach for their unified end-to-end view. So even though the mobile app might be siloed, but it's multi-channel in retail, right? So they might order from their application but they might pick up in the store, and the store might be running on a physical Windows machine, versus some cloud-based boss. >> So you're saying they get to the cloud real fast, then realize, "oh, damn, I got to fix this. "I need analytics." So either way the customer use case is they can work with you on the front end to design that reimagined infrastructure, or bring you in at the right time. >> And our monitoring tool helps that, gives that end-to-end view, right, from the user's genie all the way from logging in, to all the way to the transaction being updated on the inventory software, being updated on the store, all the back-end SOP system. So we monitor all these technologies, give them end-to-end views. And we give them proactive (mutters). That's what analytics is, right? If their experience is slow, again, a user shouldn't be telling them on social media, "I can't order this," right? That IT team should be proactively testing, proactively-- >> Agility, speed and agility. >> Right, and without a unified view, it's not possible. >> All right, I'm at a bottom line here for you, and get your personal perspective. Take your CA hat off and your personal industry tech hat on. What should IT guys, what should they think of when working with CA? Why is CA good for them, and why should they look at you, and why should they continue to use you if they're an existing customer? >> So I think CA, like I said before, they're experienced in this space, right? And the investment we are making in analytics and cloud, we have a large customer base, so pretty much every customer, every enterprise, every industry you name, we have a customer there. And we have a huge portfolio already. So we have the basis from application to network to infrastructure, and are building this analytics layer that our customers have been asking us, that you're one of the rare vendors that have the most depth of information already available, right? So if aggregating that into an operational intelligence platform really helps puts us in a unique position by giving them the broadest set of data through a single platform. Right, and our experience for 30 years in monitoring, like Peter mentioned as well, and the investment we are bringing in cloud, UIM is a example. We were recently applauded by industry analysts as well that it's one of the best tools for single pane of glass for hybrid cloud environments. That shows how heavily we are investing in new, modern infrastructures like Amazon and Azure and even Utanics, right? >> Well, certainly you've got a lot of props. We just shared some of those stats and from independent firms like Tech Validate. But more, I think, impressive is that Peter Burroughs is on the cutting edge of digital business. You guys are aligned really with some of the cutting-edge research, where we see the market going, so congratulations. This digital event's been great. I want to ask you one final question. We see you guys out a lot at all the events we go to with TheCUBE, we go to all the cloud events. So you guys are going to be going to all the cloud events this year. So is that how customers can get ahold of you in the field? Which events will you be at? Where should they look for CA out in the field? >> So I think we're pretty much everywhere, on all the key events that you mentioned. Amazon Reinvent and C-World is coming as well. Customers should come to us and see how CA is helping people better manage the modern software factory, what we call it, every customer is in a digital economy, is trying to build software to deliver unique experiences, and at CA we talked about our IT operations, from dev to test to ops, we provide all the solutions. So C-World, Amazon Reinvent, you know, come find us there, or online at ca.com as well. >> All right, Umair, thanks for coming here and sharing your thoughts as part of our one-on-one drill downs from the digital event here at Silicon Angle Media's Cube Studios in Palo Alto, where we discuss the cloud and IT analytics for digital business, sponsored by CA Technologies. I'm John Furrier. I've been the host and moderator for today. I want to thank Peter Burris, head of research at wikibon.com for the opening keynote and Sudip Datta, who's the vice president of product management for CA for the second keynote. And all the conversation will be online, and thanks for watching, everyone. And check out CA. We'll see you at all the different cloud events with TheCUBE, thanks for watching.