[Music] hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube conversation where we go in depth of thought leaders from around the industry to bring you the best ideas and insights about how to improve your business with technology one of the many things that CIOs and business leaders have to think about is how are they going to execute digital transformations what will be the priorities we all know the relationship between digital transformation and the use of data differently but different technologies assert themselves a different way and very important different relationships especially with cloud vendors assert themselves in different ways and that's one of the many challenges that CIOs have to deal with today serve the business better attend to those relationships and drive the company forward to achieve its ultimate outcomes and objectives so to have that conversation today we've got a great guest Thor Wallace is the senior vice president and CIO at Netscape door welcome to the cube thank you so tell us a little bit about what the CIO at netskope does sure so let me start by telling you a little bit about net sky so net Scout is a network monitoring and a service assurance company as the CIO I'm obviously responsible for providing the tools and the environment for running the company I'm also heavily involved in for example understanding and the applications and the business direction that we're taking we're also working on improving our customer relationships and experiences for example we have a customer portal that were sort of re-evaluating and sort of improving and we're also obviously trying to drive user productivity worldwide we have very briefly about 33 locations worldwide we're corner here and outside of Boston and have large offices both in Texas and California so you're a traditional supplier of technology services it's trying to make a transition to this new world and as part of that and that's got itself is going through digital transformation so that it can better support its customers digital transformations I got that right exactly so let me tell you a little bit about sort of what we're trying to achieve what some of the Y's are and sort of show where we are at this moment yeah so we're you know we as a company are being challenged by the same sort of environment that everyone else else is being a challenge with which is to be able to move as quickly as we can and provide as much of an impact of our customers as possible so so how I've read that sort of mandate in that remit is to really focus on improving our customer experience as I said you know working with a new sort of new platform and we re platforming and refactoring our application our customer service application but also really focusing on how best to improve user productivity so those are the areas that we've been focusing on direct driving IT productivity is important to me so that's a fairly substantial argument for moving operations to the cloud and we're also part of that is transforming sort of a hardware based environment to a much more of a virtualized and software based environment so that includes cloud that includes virtualization which we've obviously have taken a lot of ground on and for example what we've already done is virtualized all of our operations in the data center over the years we've also moved a lot of workloads to cloud were you know cloud agnostic but you know we have a fairly large environment it was salesforce.com we use office 365 which are obviously major applications on the cloud so we have a workload that's quite mixed for today we can we maintain on Prem data centers we have enough large engineering footprint as well so we will kind of live in all of the worlds so we live obviously on Purim we have cloud and one of the things that I think we've learned over the years is that in order to continue the journey of cloud we need to really worry about a couple things one is we want to make sure that we are we keep our operations in in an excellent place so and I can talk more about that in a few minutes and as I said we we want to continue to maintain our ability to execute and really what I call velocity to be able to add value and so cloud actually presents some of those opportunities for us but it also obviously makes things quite complicated in that we have multiple environments we have to make sure that people still get the services and the applications they need to do their job and provide those you know in a in a very productive way in a cost-effective way so that we can maintain that as an IT organization so you've got salesforce.com you've got office 365 you've got some other objectives movies some other applications up into the cloud each of those applications though has been historically associated with a general purpose network that you get to control so that you can give different quality of service to different classes workload or applications how is that changing and what pressures is that putting on your network as you move to more cloud based operations well I think that's a huge challenge for us and I think frankly for for most people I think you have to rethink how your network is designed fundamentally from the ground up and if you think about networks in the past you know in mainly an on-prem world you basically had a backhaul a lot of traffic in our in our case 33 locations worldwide a lot of back hauling of of services and and transactions back to wherever that application exists so for example historically we've had office excuse me in the Microsoft mail system or exchange on Prem we have you know other services that are on print for example Oracle and our ERP system etc and the challenge was to move all that traffic back to basically our core data center and as you move to the cloud you have an opportunity to actually real to rethink that so we've been in the process of doing over the last say year has been to redesign our network from the ground up and moving away from sort of the central monolithic network to more of a cloud slash edge base network so with that we've also moved from hardware basically a fairly heavy investment at hardware in each of the offices for example and we're now or we've actually in the process very far along in the process of converting all that hardware into a software-defined network that allows us to do some things that we have never been able to do operationally for example we can make deployments sort of from one central location worldwide both for security and patching etc and so what we've also done is we've moved as I said we have a lot of our workloads already in the cloud and we continue to put more on the cloud one of the things that's become important is we've got to maintain and create actually a low latency environment so for example ultimately putting our you know unified communication systems and technologies and the cloud to me where is me without having a low latency environment and a low latency network so that we can actually provide dial tone well worldwide and without worrying about performance so what we've what we've already done is we've transitioned from the centralized network into an edge based Network we've actually happened now a partner that we now are putting in services into a local presence idea have worldwide into firm into three locations for equinox and with that comes the software based network and allows us to move traffic directly to the edge and therefore once we're at the edge we can go very quickly a sort of backbone speeds into whatever cloud service we need whether it's as your AWS or Salesforce or any other provider office 365 we can get that sort of speed and low latency that is created a new environment for us at which is now virtual software base gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility moving what I consider fairly heavy and significant workloads that remain on Prem it gives us the option of moving that to the cloud so and with that one of the key things that comes with that is holding making sure that we can hold our accountable are our vendors very accountable for performance so for example if we experience an issue with office 365 performance whether it's in Pune or Westford or wherever it is we want to be able to make sure that we have the information and the data that says to Microsoft in this case hey you know we're actually the performance isn't great from wherever wherever those users are wherever that office is so we want to provide them information and to basically prove that our network or our insert internal capabilities and network are performing very well but may be that there's an issue with something and performance that on their size so without this sort of fact-based information it's really hard to have those discussions with vendors so one of the things I think is important for everyone to consider when you move more to a cloud is you've got to have the ability to troubleshoot and and make sure that you can actually maintain a very complicated environment so one of the things we have done is we and we continue to do is use our own products actually to give greater visibility that we've ever had before in this new sort of multi this multi sort of cloud multi Prem environment so so which is a very powerful thing for us and a team that is using this technology is sort of seeing visibility things that they've never really been able to see before so that's been quite exciting but I think that's sort of frankly table stakes moving forward into you know deeper more cloud or sort of sort of workload independent model that we're seeking well so one of the government building this because I have conversations like this all the time and I don't think people realize the degree to which some of these changes are really going to change the way that they actually get worked on when there's a problem you have control of the network and the application and the endpoints if there is an issue you can turn to someone who works for you and say here's the deal fix this so I'll find somebody else that can fix it so you have an employment-based almost model of coercion you can get people to do what you want to do but when you move into the cloud you find yourself having to use a contracting approach to actually get crucial things done and problems crop up either way it doesn't matter if you own it all or somebody else owns at all you're going to encounter problems and so you have to accelerate and diminish the amount of back-and-forth haggling that goes on and as you said the best way to do that is to have fact-based evidence-based visibility into what's actually happening so that you can pinpoint and avoid the back-and-forth about whose issue it really is exactly I mean there's so much you know is at the end of the day IT is still responsible for user productivity so whether somebody's having you know an application issue in terms of availability or frankly if it's not performing up to what it should be you're still accountable as an organization and regardless of where the workloads are it could be as you point out you know back in the day you could always go to your data center and do a lot of investigation and really do a lot of troubleshooting within the four walls today you just don't have that visit you don't have that luxury call it and so it's a whole new world and you know we all are relying increasingly on vendors which reads a contracting star which is you know presents an issue and you know sort of having these conversations with a vendor or contractor regardless of your relationship with them you're still again you're on the hook or for doing this so you've got to have some facts you've got to have some story you have to show in terms of hey you know we're good on this side you know the issue really is on you and we've actually had situations whether it was performance issues or service interruptions or bugs from different vendors where they've impacted our you know the net Scout organization and without you know deep understanding of what's going on you really don't have anywhere to go you you really have to have this sort of greater visibility and this is one of the things that you know is a is a is a lesson learned from at least from the journey that we're taking and so I think that's part of the story of the cloud and sort of migration and virtualization story is you really have to have this newfound visibility so I think that's been you know really important for us so I'm gonna I'm gonna see if I can't generalize that a little bit because I think it's great point as you go into a network redesign to support go to operations excellent operations in a cloud you have to also go into a sourcing and information redesign so that you can be assured that you're getting the information you need to sustain the degree of control or approximate the control that you had before otherwise you've got great technology but no way to deal with problems when they arise right exactly and you know as I said we've seen this movie and Minoo without having what we have I think we would have struggle as an organization actually to resolve the issue and that's not good for the company because you know IT part of the minute the mandate and their the remit for us is to make sure that people are as productive as it can be and so not having the ability to provide that environment is actually a huge problem for I think a lot of people and one of the ways we are working with it is to you know have that sort of visibility it also means upgrading the team skills which we've done a lot of work on so you take folks that were in IT that you know may have had a certain set of skills sort of in the on-prem environment call it those skills are quite different in in that in the sort of cloud or the mix exposure environment so I think upskilling you know having more information better information is really as part of the story that we're learning and that part of it at the end of the day it's not about upgrading the network it's about upgrading the network capability exactly yeah and you can't do that if especially the new world if you don't upgrade your ability to get information about how the whole thing is working together exactly all right Thor Wallis senior vice president and CIO at net Scout thanks very much for being on the queue thank you and once again I want to thank you participating in today's conversation until next time