(upbeat ambient music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got NETSCOUT guests here with me today. Eileen Haggerty joins us, the AVP of product and solutions marketing and Jason Chaffee as well, senior product manager. We're going to be talking about gaps in edge visibility. Guys, great to have you on theCube. >> Yeah, thanks Lisa, I really appreciate it. I appreciate the time to be able to talk with everyone. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. All right, Eileen, we're going to start with you. Oh, what a last two years we have had, COVID, digital transformation massively accelerated, it also both changed networking dynamics over the last couple of years. How has that changed? >> Yeah, and that's the absolute truth. I think we've really seen it in the huge swings where people are performing their jobs right now. You know, I think when people went home two years ago to do their jobs, no one ever expected we where we would be two years later, right? There's really been a variety of different stages from totally working at home to now where you see an awful lot of hybrid work. People splitting their time between the offices and home. That's really where we're at right now. And in fact, some of the studies that we've been reading up on and seeing, majority of workers actually really prefer a hybrid work model, I can understand that. (chuckles) As well the managers believe they are going to have some of their employees that work from a remote location on a regular basis going forward too. So that becomes one of the biggest issues that we have to support them from an IT perspective and a corporate of going forward. One aspect was interesting, two thirds of high revenue growth companies are really embracing hybrid work. This is going to require a couple of things though. Business continuity has depended on this model now, remote workers have been a part of it and we need applications in the network to support that as well as it used to when they were all based in one set of buildings, right? So one of the things that we find IT executives lamenting, some think that they have a lot of confidence in being able to troubleshoot problems when employees are having them remotely, others are actually not quite so confident. So we're going to have to look at this as an industry and help them assure IT infrastructure and services are performing flawlessly so that the hybrid workforce can be successful. >> Yeah, that hybrid environment, it's kind of like must embrace at this point. But Jason, there brings some network complexity to this. The digital transformation was absolutely essential, right, the last couple of years for businesses to first survive and then to thrive, but network complexity has increased. Jason, walk us through what the communications path looks like in today's hybrid environment. >> Yeah, Lisa, it really has. It's just become more complex, you know, in today's hybrid environment and the whole digital transformation, there's really three areas of visibility or three location types if you will that they really need to have to focus on. And one is sort of that data center, cloud services edge and then there's the network edge. And now the ever expanding and growing client edge and really what's common about all of these different edges is this is where the traffic gets altered and crosses across those two domains or those multiple domains really. And so what happens there is those are areas where problems can occur and these are possibly, if not probably blind spots for IT. So when you think about these different edges, like the service edge, just as your private data center or the cloud where applications that are actually hosted or the network edge are going through colocations and WANs and through the internet and your typical kind of network throughout the whole organization. And then lastly is the client edge. And the client edge is again, just continues to grow. And this, people now working from home as Eileen was just talking about and remote offices or their home one day and a remote office the next day and whatever that might be and heck, they might be working in coffee shops or in the corporate headquarters. So it's just really added complexity. And as we get further away from the data center, we start to lose all of that infrastructure that we own and can control. And so it makes it difficult to really manage and understand that. In fact, I think that's probably one of the biggest consequences or challenges of this whole digital transformation. You know, it's made it real easy for those of us to work from home and all these new systems, and it's real simple to work from literally anywhere, but it's just made it that much more complex and challenging for the IT organization to really be able to manage and kind of provide that ubiquitous end user experience regardless of where the users are. You know, kind of last point, I was just thinking about this is, when you think about an organization that maybe has 30,000 employees and if 80,000 of those sudden, or 80% of those suddenly got sent home and had to work during COVID and the whole pandemic, and maybe they're hybrid now, well, that's 24 to 25,000 employees that are really key to your revenue and customer satisfaction. So IT organizations just simply can't afford not to invest in all of this and really try and to understand these complexities and make sure that everything's working the way it should for productivity for the company. >> That's a great point, Jason, as consumers, we are so demanding. That's I think one of the things in COVID that went away was patients and maybe it's slowly coming back but the customer satisfaction, the brand reputation, those are all things that are dependent on solid networking. And of course IT challenges, IT is challenged to to really smooth out those challenges. But Eileen, as employees and end users, we've faced a lot of challenges. I know I have in the last couple of years. Walk us through some of those main pain points that the employees and the end users have been through in the last two years. >> You couldn't be more on spot there. So we really haven't. The irony is all of us on this call have been amongst the ones who have probably suffered from some of these issues as well. You know, one of the things that we found during this period is all of us were coming in over VPN or on video desktop interfaces like Citrix and others. And we were connecting to data center applications and software as service apps for everything. You know, it could be customer order processing, customer records, emails, and in any time or place that we were accessing, we could have slow responsiveness, we could have log issues, we had timeouts. I think one of the interesting ones was communications apps that became huge overnight, Teams, Zoom, WebEx, and those have had issues for us too. They had connection issues, poor quality voice, terrible video. So it became a very frustrating period of time in many cases for employees, they're there to deliver customer care, protect the corporate revenue. But networks and application disruptions counter that. So leading to productivity loss, that's a big issue and a concern. And certainly one of the bigger worries is customer dissatisfaction. But I'd say, you know what's fascinating here too is IT staffs were equally frustrated but for different reasons during this period. They were combating network and application issues for these employees. And usually, they were used to everybody being in one location or to a few buildings and they had total control if you will. Now they're managing 100s and sometimes 1000s of locations known as homes and those staff members we've heard them say things like, they felt like they were losing sight of the remote workforce or simply losing control. And hybrid work models, as they become the norm for many of these organizations, groups of IT professionals still have to ensure the quality of service performance for those employees wherever they do their jobs, home, remote offices or headquarters, and for any application wherever it happens to be hosted. So this is a big challenge. >> Big challenge for IT. You talked about that customer satisfaction. Reminded me of one time I was on the phone with a contact center and I heard a dog barking in the background and I first I thought was that my dog and I thought, no, that customer contact center person is also stuck working from home. Talk about losing control of your environment. But Jason, next question is actually for both of you and Jason, I'll start with you, how does IT assure performance? I mean, it's hard to manage, talk to us about that. >> Well, yeah, Lisa, really kind of as Eileen just said, we used to all sort of be in the same common area in the headquarters. And so people, you know, the IT organization was looking at things like the data center or server farms or internet links just going into and out of the headquarters or off to the data center itself. And so, but that's just not really the case anymore. And as people continue again, as I said before, work from literally anywhere, it's just made the ecosystem that much more challenging and much more complex and bigger frankly to try to manage. And so I think what you really need to do is you see something where it's challenging because the old adage is you just can't manage what you can't see. And so that's become that challenge. And I think what you need is visibility at every edge including up to the client edge that we've been talking about so that you can do things like track and trend volumes and bandwidth and capacity and application utilization and all the different things that make up that end user experience. You need that visibility from all of those locations to really understand and see what's going on from there. >> Eileen, what's your take? >> Well, Jason makes a bunch of valid points. I think what triggers in my mind as he was speaking was that there are other enterprises that have very specific remote locations which present themselves a very different kind of importance for value of the performance assurance. There's banks. They have financial transactions that are going on there, which are instantaneous in nature or need to be for a variety of different reasons, right? Factory plants they've been now wirelessly or WiFi driven production lines. And as a result, any disruption in that production line could have it turned off for 20 minutes an hour. And that has a deep impact to the business as well. Retail stores and distribution centers. This one rings probably for everybody, 'cause during this period of time, we were all online and we were ordering things, right? And so any issues with disruptions, slow downs from those types of remote locations for touchless pickup for the ability to go to a store or get something picked up that day, this was critical. And we all know those services broke down for one reason or another and it created a bit of a problem if you didn't have the right snack for the four year old today. >> Right, definitely the four year old losing control or losing patients, the poor parent. Jason, you talked about visibility and you said something really poignant, you can't manage what you can't see, what is needed for IT to have that visibility as this environment just scattered, what's needed to effectively manage it? >> Yeah. Lisa, you know I think as you just said, and as I said earlier, I think the real key is visibility at every edge and all of the different edges that we've talked about including the home user and it's really been impractical and expensive to instrument at every one of those, especially at all the home locations which are now everybody's home work office. And you just really can't get a view into it. And of course there's some solutions out there that sort of gives you a view of what's going on, what's that end user experience. And, but it doesn't really tell you why. And I think that's one of the key components of that. So as I think about this large new hybrid ecosystem, I think there's really three main things that you need in order to do that. And the first of all, again, is that complete visibility at every edge. And to me that means a combination of both passive and active synthetic based monitoring. So you're passive monitoring where you're actually looking at the real user traffic, and detecting trends and being able to understand what's going on there. But then you also do need, there's a time and a place for that synthetic active testing where we're getting an understanding and a baseline where we're testing continuously and automatically to understand what that end user experience is and understand what performance should look like. But as I mentioned, I think that's just not necessarily enough to do just do synthetics from those synthetic locations. I think it's really key to be able to get deep down into the wire day or the packets of that to really understand why something is happening. You know, for instance, today there might be an issue and you can say, well, I see it's a DNS issue. Hey, DNS guy, go off and try to fix this and figure out what's going on. Well, again, I think you need that visibility, you need a solution that can pull the packets back and give you that combination of both of those things. The next thing I think. >> So. >> Oh, sorry, go ahead. >> Go ahead. >> Well, the next thing I was going to say that I think that's really critical and key is tools that can manage the complexity as you go across all of these. I mean, there's just so many tools out there that are, SaaS and Ucast, your WebEx, Zoom teams, all of those. And it's just frankly, almost impossible to be an expert on all of those different solutions that you might have. And of course they have their own management platform forms that make it, so you can kind of see what's going on but being able to understand and see how to fix WebEx for instance, doesn't really help you when one of your users happens to be having a problem with teams. And so I think again, you need a solution that can go across all of those different applications to be able to see what's going on. And then thirdly, I think is the key, one of the key components is service and application collaboration. And what I mean by this is you need a tool that can give you the ability to have proof and evidence that you can share with your service providers, your application providers because they're very complex, right? They all have dozens of servers in different parts of the world, in different parts of the country. And frankly, they're going to probably blame you first, they're going to say, no, this is something on your end. And it really adds to the time of troubleshooting and get resolution. But if you can actually have that data to say, hey, I can see exactly what's going on. And it's this server at this data center and it's causing high retransmissions or latency. That just makes again more of a collaborative effort but allows you to sort of put all of those things together and stop the finger pointing and blame game and be able to solve those solutions much more quickly. So again, I think it's really a combination of active and passive together all in one console or one solution that really gives you that visibility across all of the different environments that we might have today. >> All those different environments, and there still are so many. Eileen, how have you seen this? How has NETSCOUT seen this actually in practice and how have the tool that you and talked about, how is it actually helping to give the visibility, to reduce the complexity and to ensure that ultimately the end users and the employees are productive so that the customers can be happy? >> Yeah, and you know, it's interesting as he was talking, I was thinking one of the accounts that I've talked to, an organization that's based in software development and they literally have offices all over the world. The hybrid workforce model is their choice going forward. And most of those worldwide employees are part of the sales and support organization for local prospects and customers. So one of the biggest things that's critical to them is communications. And that has to be top of their concerns for quality. The other business related applications are equally important because as you're talking to them, you're pulling those services up and they are in fact using solutions for looking at those edges, the WAN links are key for visibility. They're able to look at the inbound and outbound traffic at those locations. And then what they're able to do is to do two things, one, like Jason was talking about, collaborate, work with those local WAN providers. They're all different over the world. So you really need to build a relationship with them, you have to have some evidence and they're able to do that now. It helps them cost effectively and proactively plan bandwidth changes, and that's really important too. They're also using the synthetic testing that Jason referred to. These locations have the buildings able to test for different applications that are going to be important to the business that's at that location. They do it over ethernet, so for the people with hardwired desks, they can see what the traffic experience is. And then for those that are in open spaces or conference rooms on using WiFi, they're measuring there as well. They want to make sure that no matter where you sit in the office and how you connect, the quality is the same and that's important. Bottom line, they're being able to reduce dramatically the time it's taken to troubleshoot and resolve issues as they emerge. It's great. >> That is great. And of course, as we all have that patience limitation, that speed is key there. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about not just the gaps in edge visibility but the ways that they can be remedied and fixed so that ultimately customer satisfaction, employee productivity, all things are harmonious. We appreciate your insights. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> Thank you. >> For Eileen Haggerty and Jason Chaffee I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a CUBE Conversation. 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