>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, It's the Cube! Covering VM World 2019 Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners >> Hello everyone and welcome to the Cube's coverage here in San Francisco, California of the VMWorld 2019. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Dave Vellante Dave, 10 years covering VMWorld since 2010, it's been quite a ride, lot of changes. >> Dave: Sure has. >> John: We're going to do a Power Panel our format we normally do it remote guests in our Palo Alto and Boston studios in person because we're here. Why not do it? Of course, Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor friend of the Cube, Cube host sometimes and Sarbjeet Johal, cloud architect cloud expert, friends on Twitter. We're always jammin' on Twitter. So we'll have to take it to the video. Guys, thanks for joining us on the Power Panel. >> Good to see you, Gents. >> Good seein' ya. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah, I, I hope we don't come to blows, Sarbjeet. I mean we've had some passionate conversations over the past couple months. >> Yeah, Santoro, yes, yes. >> John: The activity has been at an all time high. I mean, snark aside, there's real things to talk about. >> Yes. >> I mean we are talking about VMware a software company, staying with their roots. We know what happened in 2016 The Amazon relationship cleared the air so to speak, pun intended. Vcloud air kind of goes it's way stock prices go up and to the right Yeah, fluctuations happening but still financially doing well. >> Keith: Yeah. >> Customers have clarity. They're an operate. They run, they target operators not developers. We're living in a DevOps world we talk about this all the time dev and ops this is the cloud world that they want Michael Dell was on the Cube Dell Technologies owns VMware they put Pivotal on VMware moves are being made. Keith, how do you make sense of it? What's your take? You've been on the inside. >> Well, you know, VMware has a tough time. Pat came in, 2013, we remember it. He said we are going to double down on virtualization. He is literally paying the cost for that hockey stick movement VMware has had this reputation of being an operator based company Infrastructure based, you go into accounts, you're stuck in this IT Infrastructure cells movement. VMware has done awesome over the past year. Few years, I had to eat a little crow and say that the move to eject Pivotal was the right thing for the Stock but for the reputation, VMware is stuck so Pat, what, tallied up 5 billion dollars in sales, in purchases last week to get out of this motion of being stuck in the IT Infrastructure realm Will it pay off? I think it's going to be a good conversation because they're going to need those Pivotal guys to push this PKS vision of theirs. This PKS and Kubernetes vision that they have >> Well they got to figure it out but certainly it's a software world and one of the things that's interesting we were talking before we started is, they are stuck in that operator world but it's part of DevOps, Dev and Ops. This is the world that they operate in Google's cloud shows how to do it. You got SRE's run things and developers this program infrastructure is code. This is the promise of this new generation. Sarbjeet, we talk about it all the time on Twitter developers coding away not dealing with the infrastructure, that's the goal >> Yeah, traditionally, developers never sort of mucked around with infrastructure. Gradually we are moving into where developers have to take care of infrastructure themselves the teams are like two person teams we hear that all the time. They are responsible for running the show from beginning to the end. Operations are under them, it's Dev and Ops are put together, right? But I'll speak from my own personal experience with working at VMware in the past that from all the companies which are operations focused, that's HP, IBM, and Oracle to a certain extent. So portfolio and all that. And BMC, and CA, those are pure companies in the operations space, right? I think VMware is one of those which values software a lot. So it's a purely, inside the VMware it's purely software driven. But to the outside, what they produce what they have produced in the past that's all operations, right? So I think they can move that switch because of the culture and then with Pivotal acquisition I think it will make it much easier because there's some following of the Pivotal stack, if you will the only caveat I think on that side is it is kind of a little bit of interlocking-ish, right? That is one of the fears I have. >> Who's not, even RedHat these days is, locking you in. >> Yeah, you know, I pulled some interesting stat metadata from a blog post from Paul Fazzone announcing the Pivotal acquisition. He mentioned Kubernetes 22 times. He mentioned Pivotal Cloud Foundry once. So VMware is all in on this open-shift type movement I think VMware is looking at the Red shift I mean Red OpenShift acquisition by IBM and thinking, "Man, I wish we didn't have this "Sense of relationship with Pivotal "So we could have went out and bought RedHat." >> Well that's a good point about Kubernetes, I think you're right on that. And remember, we've been covering Open Stack up until about a year ago, and they changed the name it's now something else, but I remember when Open Shift wasn't doing well. >> Keith: I do too! >> And what really was a tipping point for them was they had all the elements, but it was Kubernetes that really put them in a position to take advantage of what they were trying to do and I think you're right, I think VMware sees that, now that IBM owns RedHat and Open Shift, it's clear. But I think the vSphere deal with Project Pacific points out that they want to use Kubernetes as a distraction layer for developers, and have a developer interface to vSphere. So they get the operators with vSphere, they put Kubernetes in there and they say, "Hey developers, use us." Now I think that's a hedge also against Pivotal 'cause if that horse doesn't come across the track to the finish line, you know... >> It's definitely a hedge on Containers just a finer point of what you were saying there was a slight difference in the cash outlay for RedHat, 34 billion versus the cash outlay for Pivotal was 800 million. So they picked up an 800 million dollar asset or a 4 billion dollar asset for 2.7 billion. >> Hold on, explain that because 2.7 billion was the number we reported you're saying that VMware put out only 800 million in cash, which, what's that mean? >> That's correct. So they put out 800 million in cash to the existing shareholders of Pivotal, which is a minority of the shareholders. Michael Dell owns 70% of it, VMware owns 15% of it. So they take the public shareholders get the 800 million >> John: They get taken out, yep. >> Michael Dell gets more VMware stock, so now he owns more of VMware. VMware already owns 15% of Pivotal, so for 800 million, they get Pivotal. >> So, the VMware independent shareholders get... they get diluted. >> Right. >> Did they lose out in the deal is the question and I think the thing that most people are missing in this conversation is that Pivotal has a army of developers. Regardless of whether developers focus on PCF or Kubernetes is irrelevant. VMware has a army, a services army now that they can point towards the industry and say, "We have the chops to have "The conversation around why you should "Come to us for developing." >> So I want to come back to that but just, a good question is, Do the VMware shareholders get screwed? Near term, the stock drops, right? Which is what happens, right? Pivotal was up 77% on the day that the Dow dropped 800 points. Here's where I think it makes sense, and there are some external risks. Pivotal plus Carbon Black, the combination they shelled out 2.7 billion in cash. They're going to add a billion dollars to VMware's subscription business next year. VMware trades at 5x revenue multiple, so the shareholders will, in theory, get back 5 billion. In year two, it's going to be 3 billion that they're going to add to the subscription revenue so in theory, that's 15 billion of value added. I think that goes into the thinking, so, now, are people going to flock to VMware? Are Kubernetes developers going to flock to VMware? I mean to your point, that to me, that's the value of Pivotal is they can get VMware into the developer community. 'Cause where is VMware with developers? Nobody, no developers in this audience. >> That's true. >> What are your guys' thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think that we have to dissect the workload of applications at the enterprise level, right? There are a variety of applications, right, from SAPs Oracles of the world those are two heavyweights in the application space. And then there's a long trail of ISVs, right. And then there's homegrown applications I think where Pivotal plays a big role is the homegrown applications. When you're shipping a lot as an ISV or within your enterprise, you're writing software you're shipping applications to the user base. It could be internal for partners, for customers, right, I think that's where Pivotal plays Pivotal is pivotal, if you will. >> I think that's a good bet too, one of the things we've been pulling the CESoEs data for when we got reinforced we started pulling CESoEs in our network, and it's interesting. They're under the gun to produce security solutions and manage the vendors and do all that stuff they're all telling us, the majority of them are telling us that they're building their own stacks internally to handle the crisis and the challenge of security, which I think's a leading indicator versus the kind of slow, slower CIO which LOVES multi-anything. Multi-vendor, control, a deal with contracts CESoEs, they don't have the DOGMA because they can't have the DOGMA. They got to deliver and they're saying, "We're going to build a stack "On one cloud. "Have a backup cloud, "I want all my developer resources "On this cloud, not fork my team "And I'm going to build a stack "And then I'm going to ship APIs "And say to my suppliers, in the RFP process, "If you support these APIs, "You could do business with us." >> Keith: So, if you don't -- >> That's kind of a cutting edge. If you don't, you can't, you can't. And that's the new normal. We're seeing it with the Jedi deal with Oracle not getting, playing 'cause they're not certified at the level that Amazon is, and you're going to start to see these new requirements emerging this is a huge point. I think that's where Pivotal could really shine not being the, quote, developer channel for VMware. I think it's more of really writing apps >> And John, I think people aren't even going to question that model. Capital One is probably the poster child for that model they actually went out and acquired a start-up, a security, a container security start up, integrated them into their operations and they still failed. Security in the cloud is hard. I think we'll get into a multi-cloud discussion this is one of the reasons why I'm not a big fan of multi-cloud from an architecture perspective, but from a practical challenge, security is one of the number one challenges. >> That's a great point on Capital One in fact, that's a great example. In fact, I love to argue this point. On Twitter, I was heavily arguing this point which is, yeah, they had a breach. But that was a very low-level it's like the equivalent of a S3 bucket not being configured, right? I mean it was so trivial of a problem but still, it takes one whole-- (hearty laughing) One, one entry point for malware to get in. One entry point to get into any network where it's IOT This is the huge challenge. So the question there is, automation. Do you do the, so, again, these are the, that's a solvable problem with Capital One. What we don't know is, what has Capital One done that we don't know that they've solved? So, again, I look at that breech as pretty, obviously, major, but it was a freakin' misconfigured firewall. >> So, come back to your comments on multi-cloud. I'm inferring from what you said, and I'd love to get your opinion, Sarbjeet. That multi-cloud is not an architectural strategy. I've said this. It's kind of a symptom of multiple vendors playing but so, can multi-cloud become, because certainly VMware IBM RedHat, Google with Anthos, maybe a little bit less Microsoft but those three-- >> Dell Technologies. >> Cisco, Cisco and certainly Dell all talking about multi-cloud is the clear strategy that's where CIOs are going, you're not buying it. Will it ever become a clear strategy from an architectural standpoint? >> Multi-cloud is the NSX and I don't mean NSX in VMware NSX it's the Acura NSX of enterprise IT. The idea of owning the NSX is great it brings me into the showroom, but I am going to buy, I'm going to go over to the Honda side or I'm going to go buy the MDX or something more reasonable. Multi-cloud, the idea, sure it's possible. It's possible for me to own a NSX sports car. But it's more practical for me to be able to shop around I can go to Google via cloud simple I mean I can go via cloud simple to Azure, GCP or I can go BMC, I have options to where I land, but to say that I am going to operate across all three? That's the NSX. >> If you had a NSX sports car, by the way, to use the analogy in my mind is great one, the roads aren't open yet. So, yeah, okay great. (hearty laughing) >> Or you go to Germany and you're in California. So, the transport, and again in the applications you could build tech for good applications all you want, and they're talking about tech for good here but if it's insecure, those apps are going to create more entry points. Again, for cyber threats, for malware, so again, the security equation, and you're right is super important, and they don't have it. >> Dave: What's your thought on all (mumble)? >> Sarbjeet: I think on multi-cloud you are, when you are going to use multi-cloud you going to expand the threat surface if you will 'cause you're putting stuff at different places. But I don't think it, like as you said Dave, the multi-cloud is not more of an architectural choice, it's more like a risk mitigation strategy from the vendor point of view. Like, Amazon, who they don't compete with or who they won't compete with in the future we don't know, right? So... >> You mean within the industry. >> Yeah, within the industry right-- >> Autos or healthcare or... >> Sarbjeet: Yeah, they will, they are talking about that, right? So if you put all, all sort of all your bets on that or Azure, let's say even Azure, right? They are not in that kind of category, but still if you go with one vendor, and that's mission critical and something happens like government breaks them up or they go under, sideways, whatever, right? And then your business is stuck with them and another thing is that the whole US business, if you think about it at a global scale, like where US stands and all that stuff and even global companies are using these hourglass providers based in US, these companies are becoming like they're becoming too big to fail, right? If you put everything on one company, right, and then something happens will we bail them out? Right, will the government bail them out? Like stuff like that. Like banks became too big to fail, I think. I think from that point of view, bigger companies will shift to multi-cloud for, to hedge, right, >> Risk Mitigation >> Risk mitigation. >> Yeah, that's, okay, that's fair. >> I mean, I believe in multi-cloud in one definition only. I think, for now, the nirvana of having different workload management across utility bases, that's fantasy. >> Keith: Yeah, that's fantasy. >> I think you could probably engineer it, but there might not be a workload for that or maybe data analytics I could see moving around as a use case, certainly, but I think-- >> D-R! >> The reality is, is that all companies will probably have multiple clouds, clearly like, if you're going to run Office 365, and it's going to be on Azure, you're an Azure customer, okay. You have Azure cloud. If you're building your security stack on Amazon, and got a development team, you're on Amazon. You got two clouds. You add Google in there, big tables, great for certain things you know, Big Query, you got Google. You might even have Alibaba if you're operating in China So, again, you going to have multiple clouds the question is, the workloads define cloud selection. So, I've been on this thing, if you got a workload, an app, that app should choose its best infrastructure possible that maximizes what the outcome is. >> And John, I think what people fail to realize, that users, when you give them a set of tools, they're going to do what users do, which is, be productive. Just like users went out and took credit cards swiped it and got Amazon. If you, if in your environment you have Amazon you have GCP, you have Azure, you have Salesforce, O-365, and a user has access to all five platforms, whether or not you built a multi-cloud application a user's going to find a way to get their work done with all five, and you're going to have multi-cloud fallout because users will build data sets and workloads across that, even if IT isn't the one that designed it. >> All right, guys, final question of the Power Panel Dave, I want to include this for you too, and I'll weigh in as well. Take a minute to share what you're thinking right now is on the industry. What's taking up your attention? What's dominating your Twittershpere right now? What's the bee in your bonnet? What's the hot-button issue that you're kicking the tires on, learning about, or promoting? Sarbjeet, we'll start with you. What's on top of the mind for you these days? >> I think with talk about multi-cloud all the time, that's in discussions all the time and then Blockchain is another like slow-moving train, if you will, I think it's arriving now, and we will see some solutions coming down the pike from different, like a platformization of the Blockchain, if you will, that's happening, I think those are two actually things I keep my eyes on and how developers going to move, which side to take and then how the AWSs dominance is challenged by Microsoft and Google there's one thing I usually talk about on Twittersphere, is that there's a data gravity and there's a scales gravity, right? So people who are getting trained on Amazon, they will tend to stay with them 'cause that's, at the end of the day, it's people using technology, right? So, moving from one to another is a challenge. Whoever throws in a lot of education at the developers and operators, they will win. >> Keith, what are you gettin' excited about? >> So, CTO advisor has this theory about the data framework, or data infrastructure. Multi-cloud is the conversation about workloads going here, there, irrelevant, it's all about the data. How do I have a consistent data policy? A data protection policy, data management policy across SAS, O-365, Sales Force Workday, my IAF providers, my PATH providers, and OMPRIM, how do I move that data and make sure another data management backup company won Best of VMWorld this year. This is like the third or fourth year and a reason it's not because of backup. It's because CIOs, CDOs are concerned about this data challenge, and as much as we want to talk about multi-cloud, I think well, the industry will discover the problem isn't in Kubernetes the solution isn't in Kubernetes it's going to be one of these cool start-ups or one of these legacy vendors such as NetAp, Dell, EMC that solves that data management layer. >> All right, great stuff. My hot button is cloud 2.0 as everyone knows, I think there's new requirements that are coming out, and what got my attention is this enterprise action of VMware, the CIA deal at Amazon, the Jedi deal show that there are new requirements that our customers are driving that the vendors don't have, and that's a function that cloud providers are going to provide, and I think that's that's the canary in the coal mine. >> I've got to chime in. I've got to chime in. Sorry, Lenard, but it's the combination what excites me is the combination of data plus machine intelligence and cloud scale. A new scenario of disruption moving beyond a remote set of cloud services to a ubiquitous set of digital services powered by data that are going to disrupt every industry. That's what I get excited about. >> Guys, great Power Panel. We'll pick this up online. We'll actually get the Power Panels working out of our Palo Alto studio. If you haven't seen the Power Panels, check them out. Search Power Panels the Cube on Google, you'll see the videos. We talk about an issue, we get experts it's an editorial product. You'll see more of that online. More coverage here at VMWorld 2019 after this short break. (lively techno music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, at theCUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, we're here with a special conversation with Fortinet's John Maddison, senior vice president of products and solutions with Fortinet. Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Good to be here again. >> So you guys have some hard new today hitting, it's called the FortiNAC, Forti, like Fortinet, Forti, N-A-C, network access control. >> Right. >> Significant announcement for your guys, take a minute to explain the announcement. >> Yeah, so about two months ago we acquired a company called Bradford Networks. They compete, provide products in the network access control arena. Other companies in that space, so people like ForeScout or Cisco or HP. We think it's a very important space because it's going to be the foundations for IOT security. You probably heard a lot of buzz around IOT security. And there's different levels of IOT security. There's that for the enterprise, there's that for cloud, et cetera and so, for us, this is an important announcement because it gives us that added visibility now to IOT devices via the fabric. >> And the product, is it an appliance? Is it software? What's the product making? >> It's both. You can do a virtual machine version. It's also an appliance. It comes in different levels. The key for it though is the scalability because with IOT devices, we're not talking 100 devices anymore, we're talking millions of devices so what it's able to do is look across many different protocols and devices and provide that visibility of just about any device attaching to your network. >> Who's the target audience for FortiNAC? Is it the data center? Is it the cloud? Is it the remote? Where's the product actually sit? >> Well it's more by industry, so certain industries will have lots more of these types of devices attaching. So think of manufacturing for example. The medical industry as well. And so those are the real, education's another one, so it's more by vertical and it's really focused on campuses, large campuses or remote offices or even manufacturing plants where, again, these devices are attaching to your network. >> And they'll sit at the edge, monitoring what's coming in and out? Is that the purpose? >> Well that's the neat thing about it, it doesn't have to sit at the edge and see all the traffic. What it does is interrogate existing devices at the edge. It could be a switch, it could be a router, it could be an access point, and from that information it can make an assessment of what the device is attaching and then apply a policy. >> So this is part of a bigger holistic picture? We've have conversations with Fortinet in the past, a few conversations certainly around security, with cloud it's the top conversation, on premise it's the top conversation. You guys also have some complimentary products involved like the security fabric and the connectors. Does this fit into that? Take a minute to explain the relevance of how FortiNAC works with the security fabric and the connectors? >> Yeah, last time I was here I explained our fabric and so the fabric is basically something, is a set of Fortinet products, solutions in a way, that are very tightly integrated into the network or into the customer's ecosystem, and then once you've built that you then provide automation systems across for protection, detection and response. And the whole idea is to make sure you're covering what we call the digital attack surface. The digital attack surface now includes, obviously IOT devices, so gaining this visibility from FortiNAC, making sure the information is available to our fabric is crucial for us to make sure we can protect the digital attack surface. >> And for customer's the fabric is a holistic view, the NAC is a product that sits in the campuses or within the network that kind of communicates in the fabric? Is that right? >> Right. So the NAC can see all the IOT devices attaching and then it integrates back into the fabric. The fabric can then apply a policy, so the fabric can see everything now From IOT to the campus, to the WAN, to the data center, to the cloud and if, for example, those IOT devices are communicating with something in the cloud the fabric can see end to end and apply, for example, a segmentation policy, end to end, all the way through the infrastructure. >> You know what I love about having conversations with Fortinet is that you guys spark two types of conversations, use cases and then product technology conversation. This obviously is an IOT kind of product. It makes a lot of sense, you got a little SD-WAN in there. This is the top conversation around enterprises and people looking at cloud an/or looking at re-platforming around cloud operations, it's the cloud architect, it's the network architect. >> Yeah. >> These guys are really being asked to redo things, so how does the IOT fit into this? What is the product? What is the FortiNAC do for IOT from a use case standpoint and then product and technology? >> That's a good conversation because recently, maybe the last 18 months, instead of talking about a point solution, instead of talking about a specific use case, customers want to put all those use cases together and then produce a longer term, more holistic architecture. So now they have a cyber security architect, security architects as well as networking architects. And they want to look at their infrastructure, because that's the things that's changing the most right now. Sure, the threat landscape's out there and the cyber criminals are changing and stuff, et cetera but it's really that infrastructure that's changing the most because they've moving to flexible WAN systems or cloud and so they want it integrated, end to end, over a long time period. So what they want to be able to do is to automate, that's the key word, is automation. It's to make sure all these devices attaching are part of the security automation architecture and then they comply that security policy automatically to that device. >> You know one of the things that's a big trend in the industry is having network guys and people who are managing infrastructure, move from a command line interface, DLI, to automation. >> Mm. >> You mentioned that. How does the FortiNAC extend the security fabric? Because you guys essentially have that holistic view with the fabric. So now you have this IOT capability. How is that device extending the security fabric and what's the benefits to the buyer? >> Yeah, so the fabric has visibility obviously at the next generation firewall, we also have deployment of access points and switches. But obviously there are other companies with vast deployments of switches, I can name a few, and access points and so if they weren't our switches we couldn't necessarily see those devices attaching. And so what FortiNAC does, it comes in and provides us that now complete visibility. It doesn't matter if it's our infrastructure switches and APs, it can be somebody else's. FortiNAC can interrogate and talk to those devices and not only gain that visibility but if we decide there's a certain security posture we want to apply to some IOT device, we don't know what it is, we want it segmented, restrict it's access. Then the fabric can then tell the FortiNAC device to provide control and segmentation back to it. >> So they're working together? >> Working together and it gives us now complete visibility of the IOT devices. >> Let's talk about some the trends around segmentation. We heard, certainly recently at VMworld about micro segmentation's been one of the key things. A lot of top architects, both network and cloud and software are looking at micro segmentation or segmentation in general around the network. Why is it important and what are some of the use cases that you guys are seeing around segmentation? >> It's extremely important but it's a very complex problem in that even though our customer's have bought a lot of different security products from different vendors and different infrastructure, one of the things they don't always realize is they bought a lot of different orchestration systems, a lot of command and control systems and those are key in the future because those systems determine what the infrastructure looks like. You NAC system is kind of an orchestration system, allowing different devices to come on/off the network. SD-WAN has it's own orchestration system. You talked about micro segmentation, things like VMware and NSX and Cisco ACI, all the clouds have their own orchestration systems as well. AWS, Azure, and so what's interesting is none of them really talk to each other. They're more focused on looking after their part of the infrastructure. Now to do segmentation end to end you really need to have end to end orchestration across all those systems. If I want to orchestrate, as I said, that IOT communication with a select application in the cloud, I need to orchestrate all the way through those orchestration systems. >> You need an orchestration or the orchestration system that you have in the cloud. (laughing) >> You need a mother of all orchestrators in some way but I don't think that's ever going to happen and so what's going to happen, really, is your security architecture and segmentation will be specific to a platform or fabric as we're building and then your fabric has to connect into the orchestration systems to tell it what's going on within that section of the orchestration. Again, if it's a NAC system, I can just explain, I know these IOT devices are attaching, let me apply a policy to those. If I know the WAN links are a certain type then I apply that policy. >> And this is the benefit of a holistic fabric because that's kind of where it ties together, right? >> It is, so you build a holistic security fabric and then you let the different infrastructure orchestrators, like VMware, or an SD-WAN vendor or a NAC vendor, do their job, really focus on the infrastructure. >> And you guys help those guys out, big time, with the orchestration side of it? >> Well we can connect into the orchestration systems and we just use it to make sure the security component is doing well. They're more focused on making sure the infrastructure delivers the applications to the end user. >> They do their job, you do your job. >> Exactly. >> Take a minute to explain for the folks out there, explain segmentation and what it is and why is it important for networks? >> A very simple example of segmentation, a couple of years ago there was a bank that got hacked in one of the countries, I think it was the Philippines or something like that, and what they found out was that in that particular country they didn't have the same security infrastructure in place so they got in through that particular branch and came all the way back into the core network and so a very simple segmentation policy they put in place was that, I'm going to segment by countries. So I'm not going to let this country's network access the core data center, if I give it a certain trust level. Segmentation can mean physical countries. It can mean I'm going to segment my intellectual property off. I could be segmenting by functions. Don't let those sales people anywhere near the intellectual property. You can also segment by identity. So segmentation means many different things, you have to apply, I think different levels of segmentation depending on your applications. >> And this is proven, too? We've heard this in many conversations in theCUBE. We had one guy from the US government saying, "We have these critical infrastructure pieces in the United States, why would we let anyone outside the United States access it?" >> Yeah. >> That's a great example. >> I mean if you go to critical infrastructure, you're even more dangerous. I mean most of the infrastructure's been air gapped. It's been totally air gapped, you can't get at it but that's changing as more of those devices become IOT and you have to let some access that. >> And this is where IOT is a challenge that we're seeing. This is one of the problems? >> It's IOT. You know that category is often referred to these days as OT, operational technology. >> Talk about end points, we're hearing endpoints being discussed, like hey, you connect the endpoints, your endpoint strategy, network strategy. Kind of elusive for some, describe why networking the endpoints is an important feature or is it? When people think of the endpoint of the network what are they really talking about? >> Well I think it's become more important. It's interesting if you go back 10 years or so even 15 years, you have a lot of endpoint vendors. Semantics, MacAfees, Trend Micros, Microsoft, I think, is now the largest endpoint security vendor. Then you have a different set of networking vendors, ourselves and some other names out there I can't remember. But, they're totally separated and so to look at your network, give you visibility to policy and segment, you need to be able to see the endpoints and the network together. The security fabric makes sure that you can at least see the endpoint. You may not provide the full stack of security, you may leave that to your endpoint vendor still but your network should be able to see your endpoint and vice versa, and you should be able to see what's communicating between the two. >> I'd like to talk about SD-WAN, but before we go there, just to kind of close out IOT, talk about Fortinet's differentiation and advantages when you talk about convergence between IOT and access technology. >> So the base technology's NAC, network access control, which is in place there but our advantage really is now scale, we can see huge amounts of IOT devices which are attaching and then take action not only at the access level but all the way into the cloud. >> SD-WAN has become a really hot topic. It's a huge market. >> Yeah. >> It's in the billions in terms of spend, it connects devices, campuses and devices but cloud's had a big renaissance within the SD-WAN market. Talk about what's going on with SD-WAN and how the security fabric and the FortiNAC fit into that because it's not your grandfather's SD-WAN market anymore as the expression goes. >> No. Well it's in that class of everything's being software defined, fair enough. But I think this marketplace, if you go even three years ago, was dominated because all the, you've got two marketplaces. You've got what I call the retail, which is distribute enterprise, thousands and thousands inside which already went to a UTM infrastructure. And then you had the branch office, which was more connected, in fact, it just had a simple router in there, it was connected back to the data center which then would go into the internet. And so what's happened is these branch offices they need more and more access to the cloud, more cloud applications are running. You need to provider QOS against those applications and then also these large corporations have decided they don't want to pay, it's a lot of money to get certain, high quality EPLS circuits, when they can get faster circuits through DSL and other mechanisms and so they wanted more flexibility around the wide area network. >> So commodity network access which is, you know, cloud non and EPLS, were high priced, secure. You get now more cloud access, this is translating to more traffic or is it? Is that the driver in all this? >> Well that's what happens and then you get more traffic going through there, it's the same with the next gen firewall right now and people saying, "There's a refresh going, we don't know why." the reason for it is, when you're in your office you're more than likely communicating with the cloud versus your local databases and so the same for the branch office, there's more traffic going through there, it's more encrypted, they want flexibility, they want HA modes, if that goes down now, you've got a big productivity problem with your employees there. And so this whole market sprung from nowhere only three or four years ago and is already in, as you say, in the billions of dollars. There's a lot of acquisition's already happened, consolidation. In our mind it's very important but what's just a important as all those elements is security. If I open up my branch office now to an internet connection, I need best of breed securities on that device and so we've been building SD-WAN, what I call core functionality, for some time, inside our fabric. It's quite a natural integration now of security into that. In fact some recent tests we did with SS Labs, we got highly recommended, for not only the SD-WAN features but that core security. Today SD-WAN vendors will say, well I'll just go and get some security solution from somewhere and bolt it on or attach it on, provide it through the cloud and that's fine but longterm, again, if you come back to that coordination, that orchestration, across two different systems, it's going to become hard. >> And the other complicating factor in this, aside from the infrastructure component, is that a lot of the SAS applications that people are buying, whether it's shadow IT or just off the shelf, or there's Dropbox or any of these services that are SAS based, cloud based, that's creating less of a perimeter. >> Yeah, when it all comes back, technology called CASB is providing that interface into that world through APIs and it all comes back to making sure that all your mechanisms of protection, detection, control are available to all your systems. If I've got some SD-WAN device somewhere and I need to check where this is going, I can use my application database or if I need to check if I'm going to this cloud, I use my CASB API. And so it comes back to a platform approach, a fabric approach. >> John, what's the SD-WAN approach for Fortinet? How do you guys do it? Why should people care? What's the differentiation? Why Fortinet for SD-WAN? What's the approach? >> Integrated in one word. That is, you don't need two boxes, you don't need two VMs, you don't need a box plus a cloud, it's all integrated on the system, best of breed SD-WAN functionality, best of breed tested by third party security which allows you then to have a much more cost effective solution. I think our TCO in the test as a 10th, or a 100th of some of the leading vendors outside there because you're bringing two vendors together and it's gets very costly. >> Alright, I'm going to put you on spot, I'm going to put my cynical hat on. So you're saying integrate security with SD-WAN? I'm going to say, hey, why not just keep it separate? Why integrate? >> Because the two functions need to work together. Where's the firewall going to go? Is it going to go in the cloud or is it going to go here? Who decides on the policy? If something happens, segmentation, who's deciding on segmentation policy? Usually two different companies, they don't really talk apart from maybe, there's an API leak in the security capabilities but to our mind, again, it comes back to that end to end segmentation and that's what a lot of the, I would say, the larger infrastructure vendors are trying to do. I want infrastructure all the way to devices being added, through my campus, through my SD-WAN, data center and cloud and if you've got multiple vendors, again, all over the place, there's no way you're going to be able to coordinate that. >> Alright, so I'll put my IT practitioner hat on. Okay, so I get that, so probably less security manual risk for human error, but I really want to automate. My goal is to automate some of these IT functions, get better security end to end, does this fit that requirement? >> Yeah, so from an automation perspective, we're building in some tools of our own but what we're finding more and more is that from an IT, as you said, they've gone out and built some dev ops capability. Ansible's a good example there. So what we're doing is making sure that, in fact, a lot of our partners and our SEs have already built these scripts and put them on GitHub, well now Microsoft Hub or whatever you want to call it. So we're taking those in and we're QAing them, making sure they're a high quality and then making them available to our customers and our partners through there. So this dev ops world, especially with cloud moving so fast, has become very important and to us it's a very important area we want to make available to our partners and customers. >> One of the things that's talked about a lot is SSL inspection, is that important? What do you guys do there? >> I think it's extremely important in that, a lot of enterprises have switched it off. The reason they switched it off is because when you switch it on it almost kills your performance. There was a recent, again an SS Labs test that was doing next gen firewall testing for SSL and some vendors' performance decreased by 90% and basically it was useless, you had to turn it off. A lot of enterprises want to switch it on. To switch it on, you need a system that has the performance capabilities. I think we decreased around 15%. The law of physics say you've got to decrease in some way but 15%'s a lot better than 90%. And you've got to switch that on because otherwise it's just a giant hole in your firewall. >> John, talk about the cloud because cloud now has multiple tracks to it. Used to be straight public cloud. Obviously on premise is this hot hybrid cloud, multi cloud is the center of the controversies, it's been validated. We see Amazon Web Services announcing something with VMware validation that you're going to start to see an on premises and cloud and some cloud native, born in the cloud companies will be out there. How do you guys extend the security fabric for those two cloud use cases? How does the Fortinet products scale to the cloud? >> Yeah, two good points. Again, a few years ago, I'd ask customers about cloud and say, "Yeah we're going to takes some steps in AWS." Now it's I've got four clouds, what's the next cloud I'm going to put inside there? I've got global clouds around the world. It's kind of interesting that there is this mad rush and it's still going on into public cloud but then I still see some people trying to do hybrid cloud and put some stuff inside their data centers. Some customers don't want that data leaving, regardless. Some people can't move mainframe applications out there so there's always going to be a hybrid world for some time but the key is multi cloud security in that, more than likely, your AWS security systems are not going to work inside a Google cloud, are not going to work inside your Azure cloud, are not going to work inside some of the data center pieces. And so hybrid cloud and multi cloud security Are really important, so for us the ability to support all those clouds, and it's not just saying, well I can put my firewall VM inside AWS. There's a whole set of deep integrations you need to do, to make sure you're inside their automation systems, you can see visibility, there's a lot of practices around compliance, et cetera, so it's actually a big task for each of us to make sure that we're compliant across the set of functions for each of those clouds. >> My final question is going to be around customer impact. If we zoom out, look at the marketplace and I'm a CIO or CXO, I'm a big time, busy enterprise architect or CIO, I'm so busy, I've got all this stuff going on, why Fortinet? Explain to me why are you important in my world? What should I be thinking about? What are some of the opportunities and challenges that I might face? What should I look at? I want to go to the cloud as much as possible because there's some benefits there. I want on premises to be as seamless as possible to the public cloud. I want rock solid security. I want to have the ability to use SAS apps. >> Right. >> Have programmable networks and have a great development team building top line revenue for my business. How can you help me? >> Is that all? (laughing) I think CIOs and CXOs are happier dealing with less vendors. The trouble is with some very large vendors, they just slow down the development side. I think what we bring to the table and by the way we're not the third largest cyber security company out there, what we try and bring is a broad approach, a broad product set so you can have different things from us as well at integrate into your current set but we try to keep very agile and fast with our developments because otherwise you'll fall behind the infrastructure, you'll fall behind the cyber threats. You know, GDPR, for example, over the last year, you've got to keep up with that. What we bring to the table is now a reasonably large company, we're five and a half thousand employees. A very large R and D budget, we try and move very fast. A large product set, all integrated through our fabric but again, we try and stay as agile and as fast moving as possible. Where we can't do it organically, we try and do it organically so our system integrate very well, where we can't do it, then we'll go and make smaller acquisitions, Bradford Networks was an example of that for IOT but I think we're building now a much better relationship with the CIO and CXO level and becoming one of their strategic partners going forward. >> Talk about the community that you guys have built because I've noticed, and I've seen you guys, certainly over the past couple years, that RSA I think a year and half, two years ago, you're working with a lot of industry partners. It's not just Fortinet by themselves, you work within the industry itself. >> Yeah, because people are building their ecosystem and they've made some decisions and hey want you to integrate inside those so we have about 50 partners now where they use our API to provide integration so they built our API and although we've mentioned FortiNAC today, we have APIs, for example, for ForeScout and other NAC vendors so if they've chosen that specific vendor, then we're fine, we'll integrate that inside our fabric. Will it have the level of integration that we have? Probably not, but at least you can see, have visibility, for example. I think the technology we've been building in the last year or so is something called fabric connectors which is a much, much deeper integration into the platforms so we have connectors for VMware NSX, for Cisco ACI, for AWS, and this provides a two way communication and that two way communication is important for one word, and that's automation. So once you can see things, once you direct policy backwards then you can start stitching together these objects and provide that end to end automation. >> Final question for you, a lot of the leading enterprises and businesses out there that are using technology to build digital business, whether it's from developers all the way down under the hood into the network, are all betting on multi cloud. Clearly that's obvious to us and that's pretty much being picked up by mainstream now. So early adopters that are leading the charge are multi cloud. If I'm betting on multi cloud, why Fortinet? Why should I be working with you guys? >> Because we're committed to supporting all those clouds. And as I said, it's no easy task to support, I think we support six clouds now, to go through all the different items and integrations across that, we're committed to that. We've got probably the most expansive integration across the most security products inside the industry and we'll continue to do that going forward. >> John, thanks for spending the time. John Maddison, senior vice president products and solutions at Fortinet here inside the special CUBE Conversation with the big news today, the FortiNAC new product integrating with the security fabric, IOT, SD-WAN, cloud solutions for multi cloud and IT. As automation comes down the road really fast, we're here in theCUBE bringing it to you. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Kevin Shatzkamer, who's the Vice President of Service Provider Strategy and Solutions with Dell EMC. Kevin thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so first time on the program, give us a little bit about your background, you know, what brought you to the Dell family of technical companies. >> Sure, absolutely. I've been in the service provider industry, supporting and working with service providers, about 20 years, working in areas first at the launch of 2G mobile data services, 3G, 4G. Now, we're at the advent of 5G. And during the entire time what we've continued to witness is this continued move away from proprietary more towards open technologies, obviously moving away from proprietary hardware appliances more towards X86-based appliances. The networking stacks moving more and more open in the last 18 months. During my journey here at Dell EMC, it was an opportunity to really come in and recognize Dell EMC and Dell Technologies family of companies as the foundational technologies for how we watch the telco industry really transform itself and start to embrace IT transformation into their own operations. >> Yeah, that's a great background. Keith and I had a great discussion with Tom Burns talking about networking. We've been watching the open networking feeds, but we haven't gotten into all the G's as much. Explain to our audience, we've got Interrupt down the street, we've done coverage of Mobile World Congress, but 5G, some of the standards are there, but some of the things are going to sort out. These type of transitions do take years to go, but why so important and how does Dell play into the story? >> I think if we go back towards kind of the 2012 timeframe, I think there were two acronyms that really came to the forefront. It was SDN and it was NFV. And at the time it was really discussed in the lens of how we saw the second half of 4G materializing and recognizing that for the second half of 4G with the early days of IoT, the economics of how you operate the network needed to change drastically. We saw some of that start to happen when we look at NFV in the industry, I think there's a little bit of trough of disillusionment out there, and I think we see some use cases that have been successful. We've seen some challenges in terms of operationalizing NFV at scale. I think SDN to date has really been confined to sitting within the data center or interconnecting servers and building overlay technologies for the data centers. But what I expect to see now as we go into 5G is not the need for incremental improvement but the need for an absolute step function in terms of performance, in terms of reliability, in terms of reduction in latency, all at a drastically different cost economics. So now when we start to think about the second wave of NFV and we think about SDN leaving the data center, I think that's where we're going to see 5G really play a lead. From taking some of the technologies we've been talking about in siloed pockets and really see them move to scaled operations. >> So, you mentioned a lot of the telco space and in this environment, I've got familiarity with how EMC used to work with the service providers. Dell, of course you know, plays up and down and all over the place. What's the relationship with the telcos and the service providers from the Dell family? >> I think when Dell Technology speaks about the four transformations, we talk about workforce transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation and security transformation. I think all of those are opportunities for the telcos and service providers in two ways. One, is recognizing that their own network operations are transforming and that embracing the concepts of the IT transformation inside of their own operations, obviously with the telco grade reliability, is an area that we work very closely with the telecos and SPs around. The second part is recognizing that the digital transformation and the shift towards digital for most of small medium business will be recognized through service providers, through cloud technologies. So the second way we work very closely with these service providers is helping them build the services that allow them to capture digital transformation as it moves off-prem into the cloud. >> Can you provide some clarity or vision into the service provider space, when it comes to the need for innovation to make that step transformation to 5G? With an enterprise we can see VMware NSX and we're blown away by it and that's way beyond what a lot of customers need, but there's still a lot of work to go through to your point. What are some of those innovations that have to happen? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think if you're at Mobile World Congress and just about any tradeshow event, and even Michael Dell's keynote this morning at Dell Technologies World, the conversation of the edge came up. I think that there's still a lot of debate around what the edge is, and I know that the conversation came up around distribution of compute. But I think that the conversation is really around decentralization. If we've looked over the last five years as cloud services like AWS and Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, various others, have really been built. They've been built around a model that said that to achieve efficiency and scale you have to build massively scaled centralized data centers. Now it turns out that low latency, highly interactive services that are very data driven just don't work well when the distance between the applications and the users consuming those applications is really large. Latency is too high, jitter's too high, it's a little bit too unpredictable. I think that the number one iteration, the number one innovation that we will see in the network's is the innovation at the edge. Now, the edge can be on-prem, it can sit on-prem at stadiums and venues. It can sit at the cell site, it can sit in the mobile backbone network, it can sit at central office locations. I think what we'll continue to see is recognition of, not necessarily, if you build it, they will come model, but recognition that there is a class of services and applications that the edge just makes sense to rally around. And we'll see the edge become the new cloud. >> We talk about NFV, the edge, shed some light, what would a CPE device look like at the edge? Is that NFV running on the customer's virtualized infrastructure, is that truly some x86 box that the service provider puts in place that's provided by Dell? Paint a clearer picture, I hope, for the edge. >> So the answer is yes. >> Keith: I was afraid you'd say that, It's a CPE that sits on the branch and at the enterprise prem right. Dell EMC and Mobile World Congress and most recently announced our Virtual Edge Platform family of products with the first platform being the Virtual Edge Platform 4600. The industry's first Skylake-D platform, specifically targeting the access and branch edge. But in addition to that, I think that what we're going to see is in the central office locations the boundaries between what is a compute device and what is a network device really start to blur. That modular servers, that include x86 and merchant silicon and FPGA to terminate certain circuit switch workloads, like cloud LAN and smart NICs to be able to process data on the NIC itself are really going to start to come to the forefront. Maybe we see GPU start to be included in that as well for more machine learning and artificial intelligence use cases. But I think that going forward the end goal of the programmability that we talked about, both at the application layer as well as at the infrastructure layer, means that the boundaries between what's a server, and what's a network device, really start to blur. >> Last question I have for you. When I talk to service providers, it feels like that they're being pulled from both sides. On the one side, there's public cloud, lots of them are figuring out how to do direct connect, work to integrate into those services for VMware's partnering with them on that. On the other side, there's all this edge stuff that you've been talking about. You know, massive footprint and there's so many pieces that they need to think about. What do you hear from your customers? What's their biggest challenges and opportunities that they're facing? >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think that when customers are being torn and service providers are being torn in the way that they are, they somewhat retreat to an or mindset, right. Is it this or this, do I live in the public cloud or do I live at my edge? Do I live in an open source environment or do I embrace technologies coming from industry vendors? I think more and more what we're seeing is a transition to an end environment and recognition that certain applications and workloads are well suited to reside in particular locations. Michael said in his keynote this morning that the cloud is not a place, it's a business model. I think that what we actually see is even extending that thought a little further, is that the cloud is just a whole bunch of different places. We're going to move services and applications and workloads to the locations that are best able to meet the subscriber experience and deliver on what the applications expect. >> Kevin, really appreciate your help giving us an instant insight into one of the more dynamic pieces of the IT industry. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's Flychip Production of theCUBE. We're here at CloudNativeCon and KubeCon here in Austin, Texas. Happy to welcome back to the program, a many-time alum Tom Joyce, who is now the CEO of Pensa. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you too. >> Alright, so Tom, we've had you on, so many different ecosystems, so many different waves of technology. Talk about Pensa, how it fits into this whole cloud native space that we're looking at this channel. >> Great, yeah, and like you said, you and I we've known each other a long time, we've seen a lot of revolutions in technology, and we're in the middle a number of them right now, and at this event you've got the Cloud-native folks and you've got the folks that are tackling connectainers and Kubernetes orchestration. You know, it's interesting, this crowd here is so young, and so creative. The last few days, I was at the Gartner Data Center Infrastructure show, and-- >> Stu: Not so young there? >> Not so young, but the same problems, right? Two different communities trying to solve the same problems. Which are how do we deal with insane complexity? How do we deal with an environment that's now not just three public clouds and some hybrid clouds, but a growing list of specialty clouds. How do we manage all of that? And what Pensa is trying to do, is be a part of solving that problem, using intelligent automation technology. Especially in managing the underlay complexity, the infrastructure layer. It's kind of funny we've gone through a period of time when the whole discussion has been, hey, containers are going to be at Pensa, and infrastructure doesn't matter, and infrastructure is going away. I think there's some truth to how that is evolving, but it still matters especially when you get down to having to deliver services to customers. >> Tom first of all, Dan Cone got on stage from the CNCF, and he said, "It is exciting times for boring infrastructure." >> Tom: Yeah. >> Maybe too exciting. I love that line, because every wave comes out, it was like, Tom you remember, virtualization, I'm not going to have to worry about things like that. >> It's been the biggest revolution, and it is the biggest wave of infrastructure ever. >> We spent a decade fixing that. Containers came out, oh, once again we're extracted away and it's going to take that. So, what do you see as that role, between the infrastructure layer and that cloud native? What are the big challenges? What are your customers seeing, and how Pensa have an effect? >> Well, I think what we're seeing, in my opinion, is we're going from operations running everything to DevOps, to now their starting to talk about NoOps. How do we get to a point where-- >> Ah, we might have argued over the terminology. We need Ops, obviously. >> Here's what I think, I think it's going to be less Ops and more architecture. I think the challenge becomes around, how do you do the design, how do you architect these systems so that they'll work and not fail. It's a lot like one metaphor I heard somebody use and I'm going to steal is we went from drafting on a sketch pad, using CAD technology, to using 3D CAD technology, to automated CAD technology, to now servers providing it. Right? And what happened? Everybody got smarter about architecture being the important part, not the actual physical plugging together. I think the role of the architect, in a cloud native environment, in a Kubernetes environment, in a VM environment, is frankly more important than ever. Somebody needs to know how the tools work, to make sure the the service levels actually deliver. I have sat in a lot of these meetings where people say, "Look, just put your old app in a container "and you can run it anywhere, it'll be fine." Somebody needs to think about the architecture. We want to provide intelligent technology that helps them do that. Like AutoCAD and like some of these things that came along in that ecosystem. >> One of the things I've been poking at, you know, most of this year and coming into this show especially, is people say, "Ah, it's too complicated." The response really is, "Well apologizes, it's never going to get simple." What we need is, I need proper tooling, things like automation to be able to help because humans alone will not be able to fix that. I really need to have the combination of the tooling, proper architecture, as you said. What are you seeing, how's that playing out in the customer environment? >> I think what we're seeing is folks figuring out that number one it's cross domain and cross cloud. So whatever you design needs to work in multiple different environments that are going to end up having different capabilities. Nobody really has deep expertise and everything about networking, everything about containers, everything about compute and storage, but all those things still matter. What folks are asking for is a layer of technology that kind of arbitrates between the underlying infrastructure and the upper level applications, they're actually trying to deliver. And that's where this automation layer, that's submerging comes in. Part of that orchestration, and part of it's what we do. What we're focusing on is design, validate complex designs, build them and deploy them, using tools that help people do that a lot faster and get it right every time. So mistakes don't transpire. >> Yeah, Tom, I want you to help explain to our audience this whole SDN wave, kind of it played out, and sure Vmware NSX and Cisco ACI, they're doing okay, but for a lot of the industry, SDN equals still does nothing. Yet networking critically important, heavily involved in both the container and all this cloud native discussion. How are we fixing networking, how is it being set up for this type of environment versus what we we're trying to do with SDN? >> I think this is a good point, I think you've got SDN and the enterprise. You also have network functions virtualization and the service providers and often overlook that in the enterprise you're going through cloud native and DevOps transitions. And surge providers are going through a revolution of their own. Going from being telcos, becoming digital service providers. The problems are similar that technologies are different. My observation is this, is the hype cycle's real. We've gone through five years of talking about SDN, talking about open stack, talking about network functions virtualization. All of a sudden now, what I've seen in this job is that there's real money getting spent and the technology's being used. NSX's being used in a whole variety of ways that people didn't anticipate. We're seeing in everyone of these service providers, whether they're a classic telcos, they're wired, or they're wireless, or they're cloud. They're investing in technologies to revolutionize how that core of that network works, and how the edged network works. I think the first signs of that are really NSX and SDN. SDN has now gone mainstream because customers have seen that there's a real used case for it. That's kind of your first broadly applicable network function. And I think through the next couple of years, it will be one after another. Those problems are going to get knocked down. Frankly in our business, we started focusing on a lot of these enterprise problems with NSX and VSAN and software defined data center technologies around VMware. We're working on containers, but frankly the biggest area of growth for us is probably going to be these large service providers. It's like a trillion dollar business and it's going to be revolutionized over five years. We're getting involved in a lot of these network functions virtualization conversations. I wouldn't say it does nothing, it does a lot, but getting there, it's been a really hard technology to figure out. >> It took a little bit while to mature. The other thing you've got some strong background on, the management monitoring in this type of environment. What's new? How does that change in the networking space, when we have all microservices and all of these various pieces there? What are you seeing there? >> The short answer is I have a little bit of a controversial view on that. It's not unique but I think-- >> John Ferrer would say, we love controversy here on theCUBE. >> I think monitoring goes away. Monitoring the way it's been done for the last 30 years goes away. I think when we had mainframes, we had client servers, we had internet, and now we have this set of technologies we're working with in virtualization. Every time that transition has happened, there's been a whole bunch of monitoring companies. I think classic monitoring is eventually going to go away. Ultimately, there is a lot of complexity, and the machine needs to manage it, right? The machines going to need to manage it. The eyeballs watching the problem and remediating it to a greater and greater extent, are going to be automation technologies. Versus throwing out more and more alerts in front of a human that says, "I'm just going to turn them off "because I don't know what this means." I think automation technologies are going to replace classic monitoring. Again, you go around this event here, the folks that are doing cloud native, they don't want to have a bunch of monitoring alerts. They're not going to tolerate that. They just want to deliver an application service. They don't want to deal with operations, they don't want to deal with monitoring, they don't want to deal with problems, they want the problems to take care of themselves. That's hard, but I think that's coming. >> Tom, the end users whether it be enterprise, service providers, there's a lot of technology out there, there's a lot of things happening out there. When do they know to call Pensa? Give us some of the big value problems that they should knowing that say, "Oh hey", "Yes that makes sense to me, I need to give you guys a call" >> You can boil it down very simply, we deal with two kinds of people, and they're really the architects. Think about that CAD analogy. We're dealing with people that are doing complex designs in two areas. One is typically software defined data center. So people that are bringing all of these technologies together and need to deliver a working system, maybe a really complex proof of concept or big systems where they're using VMwear, as an example. We help them get that job done, do it fast. That's what the automation systems we provide do. The other is, in large scale service providers. Folks that are dealing with onboarding VNF's, building complex networks and have been grappling with that, with open stack in some of these early technologies for a number of years. We have a revolutionary way to onboard those VNF's, validate designs, deliver designs and do it in a way that integrates with all the open source technologies people are using. To be honest with you, I don't which of those is going to be more important to us, but their two big areas, and our technology applies to both. >> Tom, you've been CEO at a couple of companies now. I want to get your view point, just being the CEO for a startup in today's landscape, what's it like? What advice do you give your peers? When you guys are grabbing a drink at the bar, what are some of the biggest challenges and biggest things that excite you? >> We are to tired to grab a drink at the bar. I'll tell you that I love this. It is a great mental challenge, because again I've been like you, I've been doing this for over 30 years. It forces you to learn and learn and learn and question what you know. And that's what I really like, the opportunity to engage with the leading edge of technology. Frankly all the folks here are young and creative and it's forced me to become better at what I do. There are a lot more unknowns than working for a big company. With a big company, a lot of what you have to do is laid out before you. In this job, I have to constantly force myself to question what I know, to listen to the customer, to learn new things, and it can be tiring, but it's a good kind of tiring. >> Alright, last question I have for you. What are you most proud, what you've done since you've joined Pensa? And give us a little bit of outlook for 2018, for those that are watching, what should we be looking for, kind of miles stone deliverables or other items. >> I think what I'm most proud of, this sounds like a silly statement, but I'm proud of what the team has accomplished. I didn't do anything, right? I don't write the code. We have a bunch of engineers that are actually delivering the product. I think we've been really fortunate to keep all those people and get them focused on some big problems. I'm proud of delivering Pensa Lab to market, and I'm proud of the customers we've signed up, since we launched that just at the beginning of October. I'm proud of what we're doing with Nokia on large scale networking in the NFP area. And frankly I'm proud of the ability of this team to constantly engage and learn and try new things and take risks and screw up and try again. It's that whole experience, it's good to work with good people that you like. >> Alright and 2018? >> 2018 I think is going to be surprising for the people in terms of the kind of the reemergence of open stack. I think open stack is coming back. >> Don't let them hear that Tom, the wolves will come out. Why? >> Well because I think it's reaching at a point where the economics of certain kinds of cloud models, and frankly the economics of the Mware are forcing people to reconsider. But it especially around digital service providers. These large companies have been grappling with "How do we revolutionize our poor networks" for five years dealing with open stack. And they kind of got a lot of the stuff to work now. I think that is another sort of controversial statement. When I got into this job, I was like "Yeah open stack is dead". I was involved with Helion at Hewlett-Packard, and I was like "That's never coming back". Well guess what, it's coming back. I think the other thing is, we're going to see a lot more money being spent on revolutionizing the core networks, and these telcos and digital service providers. That's what I think the big things going to be. >> Absolutely, we've been at the open stack show for any years. The networking component especially for the telco and service providers, absolutely a strong area of focus. Your average enterprise, might not be looking for open stack. >> There might be pockets. >> Internationally there's some pockets, but absolutely. Tom Joyce, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Looking forward to seeing you the next time. And well be back with lots more coverage here from theCUBE at KubeCon. In Austin Texas, you're watching theCUBE.