(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to everyone, to "theCUBE's" coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon Web Services Partner Marketplace Seller Conference, combining their partner network with Marketplace forming a new organization called AWS Partner Organization. This is "theCUBE" coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got great "Cube" alumni here from Zscaler, a very successful cloud company doing great work. Stelio D'Alo, senior director of cloud business development and Raveesh Chugh, VP of Public Cloud Partnerships at Zscaler. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks having us, John. >> So we've been doing a lot of coverage of Zscaler, what a great success story. I mean, the numbers are great. The business performance, it's in the top two, three, one, two, three in all metrics on public companies, SaaS. So you guys, check. Good job. >> Yes, thank you. >> So you guys have done a good job. Now you're here, selling through the Marketplace. You guys are a world class performing company in cloud SaaS, so you're in the front lines doing well. Now, Marketplace is a procurement front end opportunity for people to buy. Hey, self-service, buy and put things together. Sounds novel, what a great concept. Great cloud life. >> Yes. >> You guys are participating and now sellers are coming together. The merger of the public, the partner network with Marketplace. It feels like this is a second act for AWS to go to the next level. They got their training wheels done with partners. Now they're going to the next level. What do you guys think about this? >> Well, I think you're right, John. I think it is very much something that is in keeping with the way AWS does business. Very Amazonian, they're working back from the customer. What we're seeing is, our customers and in general, the market is gravitating towards purchase mechanisms and route to market that just are lower friction. So in the same way that companies are going through their digital transformations now, really modernizing the way they host applications and they reach the internet. They're also modernizing on the purchasing side, which is super exciting, because we're all motivated to help customers with that agility. >> You know, it's fun to watch and again I'm being really candid and props to you guys as a company. Now, everyone else is kind of following that. Okay, lift and shift, check, doing some things. Now they go, whoa, I can really build on this. People are building their own apps for their companies. Going to build their own stuff. They're going to use piece parts. They're going to put it together in a really scalable way. That's the new normal. Okay, so now they go okay, I'm going to just buy through the market, I get purchasing power. So you guys have been a real leader with AWS. Can you share what you guys are doing in the Marketplace? I think you guys are a nice example of how to execute the Marketplace. Take us through. What are you guys offering there? What's the contract look like? Is it multi-pronged? What's the approach? What do customers get if they go to the marketplace for Zscaler? >> Yeah, so it's been a very exciting story and been a very pleasing one for us with AWS marketplace. We see a huge growth potentially. There are more than 350,000 customers that are actively buying through Marketplace today. We expect that number to grow to around a million customers by the next, I would say, five to ten years and we want to be part of this wave. We see AWS Marketplace to be a channel where not only our resalers or our channel partners can come and transact, but also our GSIs like Accenture want to transact through this channel. We are doing a lot, in terms of bringing new customers through Marketplace, who want to not only close their deals, but close it in the next few hours. That's the beauty of Marketplace, the agility, the flexibility in terms of pricing that it provides to ISVs like us. If a customer wants to delay their payments by a couple of quarters, Marketplace supports that. If a customer wants to do monthly payments, Marketplace supports that. We are seeing lot of customers, big customers, that have signed EDPs, enterprise discount plans with AWS. These are multi-year cloud commits coming to us and saying we can retire our EDPs with AWS if we transact your solution through AWS Marketplace. So what we have done, as of today, we have all of our production services enabled through AWS Marketplace. What that means for customers, they can now retire their EDPs by buying Zscaler products through AWS Marketplace and in return get the full benefit of maximizing their EDP commits with AWS. >> So you guys are fully committed, no toe on the water, as we heard. You guys are all in. >> Absolutely, that's exactly the way to put it. We're all in, all of our solutions are available in the marketplace. As you mentioned, we're a SaaS provider. So we're one of the vendors in the Marketplace that have SaaS solutions. So unlike a lot of customers and even the market in general, associate the Marketplace for historical reasons, the way it started with a lot of monthly subscriptions and just dipping your toe in it from a consumer perspective. Whereas we're doing multimillion dollar, multi-year SaaS contracts. So the most complicated kinds of transactions you'd normally associate with enterprise software, we're doing in very low friction ways. >> On the Zscaler side going in low friction. >> Yep, yeah, that's right. >> How about the customer experience? >> So it is primarily the the customer that experiences. >> Driving it? >> Yeah, they're driving it and it's because rather than traditional methods of going through paperwork, purchase orders- >> What are some of the things that customers are saying about this, bcause I see two benefits, I'll say that. The friction, it's a channel, okay, for Zscaler. Let's be clear, but now you have a customer who's got a lot of Amazon. They're a trusted partner too. So why wouldn't they want to have one point of contact to use their purchasing power and you guys are okay with that. >> We're absolutely okay with it. The reason being, we're still doing the transaction and we can do the transaction with our... We're a channel first company, so that's another important distinction of how people tend to think of the Marketplace. We go through channel. A lot of our transactions are with traditional channel partners and you'd be surprised the kinds of, even the Telcos, carrier providers, are starting to embrace Marketplace. So from a customer perspective, it's less paperwork, less legal work. >> Yeah, I'd love to get your reaction to something, because I think this highlights to me what we've been reporting on with "theCUBE" with super cloud and other trends that are different in a good way. Taking it to the next level and that is that if you look at Zscaler, SaaS, SaaS is self-service, the scale, there's efficiencies. Marketplace first started out as a self-service catalog, a website, you know, click and choose, but now it's a different. He calls it a supply chain, like the CICD pipeline of buying software. He mentions that, there's also services. He put the Channel partners can come in. The GSIs, global system integrators can come in. So it's more than just a catalog now. It's kind of self-service procurement more than it is just a catalog of buy stuff. >> Yes, so yeah, I feel CEOs, CSOs of today should understand what Marketplace brings to the bear in terms of different kinds of services or Zscaler solutions that they can acquire through Marketplace and other ISV solutions, for that matter. I feel like we are at a point, after the pandemic, where there'll be a lot of digital exploration and companies can do more in terms of not just Marketplace, but also including the channel partners as part of deals. So you talked about channel conflict. AWS addressed this by bringing a program called CPPO in the picture, Channel Partner Private Offers. What that does is, we are not only bringing all our channel partners into deals. For renewals as well, they're the partner of record and they get paid alongside with the customer. So AWS does all the heavy lifting, in terms of disbursements of payments to us, to the channel partner, so it's a win-win situation for all. >> I mean, private offers and co-sale has been very popular. >> It has been, and that is our bread and butter in the Marketplace. Again, we do primarily three year contracts and so private offers work super well. A nice thing for us as a vendor is it provides a great amount of flexibility. Private Offer gives you a lot of optionality, in terms of how the constructs of the deal and whether or not you're working with a partner, how the partner is utilizing as well to resell to the end user. So, we've always talked about AWS giving IT agility. This gives purchasing and finance business agility. >> Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot. I just noticed this happening a lot more, where you see dedicated sessions, not just on DevOps and all the goodies of the cloud, financial strategy. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a lot more conversation around how to operationalize the business transactions in the cloud. >> Absolutely. >> This is the new, I mean it's not new, it's been thrown around, but not at a tech conference. You don't see that. So I got to ask you guys, what's the message to the CISOs and executives watching the business people about Zscaler in the Marketplace? What should they be looking at? What is the pitch for Zscaler for the Marketplace buyer? >> So I would say that we are a cloud-delivered network security service. We have been in this game for more than a decade. We have years of early head start with lots of features and functionality versus our competitors. If customers were to move into AWS Cloud, they can get rid of their next-gen firewalls and just have all the traffic routed through our Zscaler internet access and use Zscaler private access for accessing their private applications. We feel we have done everything in our capacity, in terms of enabling customers through Marketplace and will continue to participate in more features and functionality that Marketplace has to offer. We would like these customers to take advantage of their EDPs as well as their retirement and spend for the multi-commit through AWS Marketplace. Learn about what we have to offer and how we can really expedite the motion for them, if they want to procure our solutions through Marketplace >> You know, we're seeing an ability for them to get more creative, more progressive in terms of the purchasing. We're also doing, we're really excited about the ability to serve multiple markets. So we've had an immense amount of success in commercial. We also are seeing increasing amount of public sector, US federal government agencies that want to procure this way as well for the same reasons. So there's a lot of innovation going on. >> So you have the FedRAMP going on, you got all those certifications. >> Exactly right. So we are the first cloud-native solution to provide IL5 ATO, as well as FedRAMP pie and we make that all available, GSA schedule pricing through the AWS Marketplace, again through FSIs and other resellers. >> Public private partnerships have been a big factor, having that span of capability. I got to ask you about, this is a cool conversation, because now you're like, okay, I'm selling through the Marketplace. Companies themselves are changing how they operate. They don't just buy software that we used to use. So general purpose, bundled stuff. Oh yeah, I'm buying this product, because this has got a great solution and I have to get forced to use this firewall, because I bought this over here. That's not how companies are architecting and developing their businesses. It's no longer buying IT. They're building their company digitally. They have to be the application. So they're not sitting around, saying hey, can I get a solution? They're building and architecting their solution. This is kind of like the new enterprise that no one's talking about. They kind of, got to do their own work. >> Yes. >> There's no general purpose solution that maps every company. So they got to pick the best piece parts and integrate them. >> Yes and I feel- >> Do you guys agree with that? >> Yeah, I agree with that and customers don't want to go for point solutions anymore. They want to go with a platform approach. They want go with a vendor that can not only cut down their vendors from multi-dozens to maybe a dozen or less and that's where, you know, we kind of have pivoted to the platform-centric approach, where we not only help customers with Cloud Network Security, but we also help customers with Cloud Native Application Protection Platform that we just recently launched. It's going by the name of the different elements, including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity Event Management and so we are continuously doing more and more on the configuration and vulnerability side space. So if a customer has an AWS S3 bucket that is opened it can be detected and can be remediated. So all of those proactive steps we are taking, in terms of enhancing our portfolio, but we have come a long way as a company, as a platform that we have evolved in the Marketplace. >> What's the hottest product? >> The hottest product? >> In Marketplace right now. >> Well, the fastest growing products include our digital experience products and we have new Cloud Protection. So we've got Posture and Workload Protection as well and those are the fastest growing. For AWS customers a strong affinity also for ZPA, which provides you zero trust access to your workloads on AWS. So those are all the most popular in Marketplace. >> Yeah. >> So I would like to add that we recently launched and this has been a few years, a couple of years. We launched a product called Zscaler Digital X, the ZDX. >> Mm-hmm. >> What that product does is, let's say you're making a Zoom call and your WiFi network is laggy or it's a Zoom server that's laggy. It kind of detects where is the problem and it further tells the IT department you need to fix either the server on which Zoom is running, or fix your home network. So that is the beauty of the product. So I think we are seeing massive growth with some of our new editions in the portfolio, which is a long time coming. >> Yeah and certainly a lot of growth opportunities for you guys, as you come in. Where do you see Zscaler's big growth coming from product-wise? What's the big push? Actually, this is great upside for you here. >> Yeah. >> On the go to market side. Where's the big growth for Zscaler right now? So I think we are focused as a company on zero trust architecture. We want to securely connect users to apps, apps to apps, workloads to workloads and machines to machines. We want to give customers an experience where they have direct access to the apps that's hidden from the outside world and they can securely connect to the apps in a very succinct fashion. The user experience is second to none. A lot of customers use us on the Microsoft Office 365 side, where they see a lag in connecting to Microsoft Office 365 directly. They use the IE service to securely connect. >> Yeah, latency kills. >> Microsoft Office 365. >> Latency kills, as we always say, you know and security, you got to look at the pattern, you want to see that data. >> Yeah, and emerging use cases, there is an immense amount of white space and upside for us as well in emerging use cases, like OT, 5G, IOT. >> Yeah. >> Federal government, DOD. >> Oh god, tactical edge government. >> Security at the edge, absolutely, yeah. >> Where's the big edge? What's the edge challenge right now, if you have to put your finger on the edge, because right now that's the hot area, we're watching that. It's going to be highly contested. It's not yet clear, I mean certainly hybrid is the operating model, cloud, distributing, computing, but edge has got unique things that you can't really point to on premises that's the same. It's highly dynamic, you need high bandwidth, low latency, compute at the edge. The data has to be processed right there. What's the big thing at the edge right now? >> Well, so that's probably an emerging answer. I mean, we're working with our customers, they're inventing and they're kind of finding the use cases for those edge, but one of the good things about Zscaler is that we are able to, we've got low latency at the edge. We're able to work as a computer at the edge. We work on Outpost, Snowball, Snowcone, the Snow devices. So we can be wherever our customers need us. Mobile devices, there are a lot of applications where we've got to be either on embedded devices, on tractors, providing security for those IOT devices. So we're pretty comfortable with where we are being the- >> So that's why you guys are financially doing so well, performance wise. I got to ask you though, because I think that brings up the great point. If this is why I like the Marketplace, if I'm a customer, the edge is highly dynamic. It's changing all the time. I don't want to wait to buy something. If I got my solution architects on a product, I need to know I'm going to have zero trust built in and I need to push the button on Zscaler. I don't want to wait. So how does the procurement side impact? What have you guys seen? Share your thoughts on how Marketplace is working from the procurement standpoint, because it seems to me to be fast. Is that right, or is it still slow on their side? On the buyer side, because this to me would be a benefit to developers, if we say, hey, the procurement can just go really fast. I don't want to go through a bunch of PO approvals or slow meetings. >> It can be, that manifests itself in several ways, John. It can be, for instance, somebody wants to do a POC and traditionally you could take any amount of time to get budget approval, take it through. What if you had a pre-approved cloud budget and that was spent primarily through AWS Marketplace, because it's consolidated data on your AWS invoice. The ability to purchase a POC on the Marketplace could be done literally within minutes of the decision being made to go forward with it. So that's kind of a front end, you know, early stage use case. We've got examples we didn't talk about on our recent earnings call of how we have helped customers bring in their procurement with large million dollar, multimillion dollar deals. Even when a resaler's been involved, one of our resaler partners. Being able to accelerate deals, because there's so much less legal work and traditional bureaucratic effort. >> Agility. >> That agility purchasing process has allowed our customers to pull into the quarter, or the end of month, or end of quarter for them, deals that would've otherwise not been able to be done. >> So this is a great example of where you can set policy and kind of create some guard rails around innovation and integration deals, knowing if it's something that the edge is happening, say okay, here's some budget. We approved it, or Amazon gives credits and partnership going on. Then I'd say, hey, well green light this, not to exceed a million dollars, or whatever number in their range and then let people have the freedom to execute. >> You're absolutely right, so from the purchasing side, it does give them that agility. It eliminates a lot of the processes that would push out a purchase in actual execution past when the business decision is made and quite frankly, to be honest, AWS has been very accommodative. They're a great partner. They've invested a lot in Marketplace, Marketplace programs, to help customers do the right thing and do it more quickly as well as vendors like us to help our customers make the decisions they need to. >> Rising tide, a rising tide floats all boats and you guys are a great example of an independent company. Highly successful on your own. >> Yep. >> Certainly the numbers are clear. Wall Street loves Zscaler and economics are great. >> Our customer CSAT numbers are off the scale as well. >> Customers are great and now you've got the Marketplace. This is again, a new normal. A new kind of ecosystem is developing where it's not like the old monolithic ecosystems. The value creation and extraction is happening differently now. It's kind of interesting. >> Yes and I feel we have a long way to go, but what I can tell you is that Zscaler is in this for the long run. We are seeing some of the competitors erupt in the space as well, but they have a long way to go. What we have built requires years worth of R&D and features and thousands of customer's use cases which kind of lead to something what Zscaler has come up with today. What we have is very unique and is going to continuously be an innovation in the market in the years to come. In terms of being more cloud-savvy or more cloud-focused or more cloud-native than what the market has seen so far in the form of next-gen firewalls. >> I know you guys have got a lot of AI work. We've had many conversations with Howie over there. Great stuff and really appreciate you guys participating in our super cloud event we had and we'll see more of that where we're talking about the next generation clouds, really enabling that new disruptive, open-spanning capabilities across multiple environments to run cloud-native modern applications at scale and secure. Appreciate your time to come on "theCUBE". >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, I totally appreciate it. Zscaler, leading company here on "theCUBE" talking about their relationship with Marketplace as they continue to grow and succeed as technology goes to the next level in the cloud. Of course "theCUBE's" covering it here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (peaceful electronic music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to everyone, to "theCUBE's" coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon Web Services Partner Marketplace Seller Conference, combining their partner network with Marketplace forming a new organization called AWS Partner Organization. This is "theCUBE" coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got great "Cube" alumni here from Zscaler, a very successful cloud company doing great work. Stelio D'Alo, senior director of cloud business development and Raveesh Chugh, VP of Public Cloud Partnerships at Zscaler. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks having us, John. >> So we've been doing a lot of coverage of Zscaler, what a great success story. I mean, the numbers are great. The business performance, it's in the top two, three, one, two, three in all metrics on public companies, SaaS. So you guys, check. Good job. >> Yes, thank you. >> So you guys have done a good job. Now you're here, selling through the Marketplace. You guys are a world class performing company in cloud SaaS, so you're in the front lines doing well. Now, Marketplace is a procurement front end opportunity for people to buy. Hey, self-service, buy and put things together. Sounds novel, what a great concept. Great cloud life. >> Yes. >> You guys are participating and now sellers are coming together. The merger of the public, the partner network with Marketplace. It feels like this is a second act for AWS to go to the next level. They got their training wheels done with partners. Now they're going to the next level. What do you guys think about this? >> Well, I think you're right, John. I think it is very much something that is in keeping with the way AWS does business. Very Amazonian, they're working back from the customer. What we're seeing is, our customers and in general, the market is gravitating towards purchase mechanisms and route to market that just are lower friction. So in the same way that companies are going through their digital transformations now, really modernizing the way they host applications and they reach the internet. They're also modernizing on the purchasing side, which is super exciting, because we're all motivated to help customers with that agility. >> You know, it's fun to watch and again I'm being really candid and props to you guys as a company. Now, everyone else is kind of following that. Okay, lift and shift, check, doing some things. Now they go, whoa, I can really build on this. People are building their own apps for their companies. Going to build their own stuff. They're going to use piece parts. They're going to put it together in a really scalable way. That's the new normal. Okay, so now they go okay, I'm going to just buy through the market, I get purchasing power. So you guys have been a real leader with AWS. Can you share what you guys are doing in the Marketplace? I think you guys are a nice example of how to execute the Marketplace. Take us through. What are you guys offering there? What's the contract look like? Is it multi-pronged? What's the approach? What do customers get if they go to the marketplace for Zscaler? >> Yeah, so it's been a very exciting story and been a very pleasing one for us with AWS marketplace. We see a huge growth potentially. There are more than 350,000 customers that are actively buying through Marketplace today. We expect that number to grow to around a million customers by the next, I would say, five to ten years and we want to be part of this wave. We see AWS Marketplace to be a channel where not only our resalers or our channel partners can come and transact, but also our GSIs like Accenture want to transact through this channel. We are doing a lot, in terms of bringing new customers through Marketplace, who want to not only close their deals, but close it in the next few hours. That's the beauty of Marketplace, the agility, the flexibility in terms of pricing that it provides to ISVs like us. If a customer wants to delay their payments by a couple of quarters, Marketplace supports that. If a customer wants to do monthly payments, Marketplace supports that. We are seeing lot of customers, big customers, that have signed EDPs, enterprise discount plans with AWS. These are multi-year cloud commits coming to us and saying we can retire our EDPs with AWS if we transact your solution through AWS Marketplace. So what we have done, as of today, we have all of our production services enabled through AWS Marketplace. What that means for customers, they can now retire their EDPs by buying Zscaler products through AWS Marketplace and in return get the full benefit of maximizing their EDP commits with AWS. >> So you guys are fully committed, no toe on the water, as we heard. You guys are all in. >> Absolutely, that's exactly the way to put it. We're all in, all of our solutions are available in the marketplace. As you mentioned, we're a SaaS provider. So we're one of the vendors in the Marketplace that have SaaS solutions. So unlike a lot of customers and even the market in general, associate the Marketplace for historical reasons, the way it started with a lot of monthly subscriptions and just dipping your toe in it from a consumer perspective. Whereas we're doing multimillion dollar, multi-year SaaS contracts. So the most complicated kinds of transactions you'd normally associate with enterprise software, we're doing in very low friction ways. >> On the Zscaler side going in low friction. >> Yep, yeah, that's right. >> How about the customer experience? >> So it is primarily the the customer that experiences. >> Driving it? >> Yeah, they're driving it and it's because rather than traditional methods of going through paperwork, purchase orders- >> What are some of the things that customers are saying about this, bcause I see two benefits, I'll say that. The friction, it's a channel, okay, for Zscaler. Let's be clear, but now you have a customer who's got a lot of Amazon. They're a trusted partner too. So why wouldn't they want to have one point of contact to use their purchasing power and you guys are okay with that. >> We're absolutely okay with it. The reason being, we're still doing the transaction and we can do the transaction with our... We're a channel first company, so that's another important distinction of how people tend to think of the Marketplace. We go through channel. A lot of our transactions are with traditional channel partners and you'd be surprised the kinds of, even the Telcos, carrier providers, are starting to embrace Marketplace. So from a customer perspective, it's less paperwork, less legal work. >> Yeah, I'd love to get your reaction to something, because I think this highlights to me what we've been reporting on with "theCUBE" with super cloud and other trends that are different in a good way. Taking it to the next level and that is that if you look at Zscaler, SaaS, SaaS is self-service, the scale, there's efficiencies. Marketplace first started out as a self-service catalog, a website, you know, click and choose, but now it's a different. He calls it a supply chain, like the CICD pipeline of buying software. He mentions that, there's also services. He put the Channel partners can come in. The GSIs, global system integrators can come in. So it's more than just a catalog now. It's kind of self-service procurement more than it is just a catalog of buy stuff. >> Yes, so yeah, I feel CEOs, CSOs of today should understand what Marketplace brings to the bear in terms of different kinds of services or Zscaler solutions that they can acquire through Marketplace and other ISV solutions, for that matter. I feel like we are at a point, after the pandemic, where there'll be a lot of digital exploration and companies can do more in terms of not just Marketplace, but also including the channel partners as part of deals. So you talked about channel conflict. AWS addressed this by bringing a program called CPPO in the picture, Channel Partner Private Offers. What that does is, we are not only bringing all our channel partners into deals. For renewals as well, they're the partner of record and they get paid alongside with the customer. So AWS does all the heavy lifting, in terms of disbursements of payments to us, to the channel partner, so it's a win-win situation for all. >> I mean, private offers and co-sale has been very popular. >> It has been, and that is our bread and butter in the Marketplace. Again, we do primarily three year contracts and so private offers work super well. A nice thing for us as a vendor is it provides a great amount of flexibility. Private Offer gives you a lot of optionality, in terms of how the constructs of the deal and whether or not you're working with a partner, how the partner is utilizing as well to resell to the end user. So, we've always talked about AWS giving IT agility. This gives purchasing and finance business agility. >> Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot. I just noticed this happening a lot more, where you see dedicated sessions, not just on DevOps and all the goodies of the cloud, financial strategy. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a lot more conversation around how to operationalize the business transactions in the cloud. >> Absolutely. >> This is the new, I mean it's not new, it's been thrown around, but not at a tech conference. You don't see that. So I got to ask you guys, what's the message to the CISOs and executives watching the business people about Zscaler in the Marketplace? What should they be looking at? What is the pitch for Zscaler for the Marketplace buyer? >> So I would say that we are a cloud-delivered network security service. We have been in this game for more than a decade. We have years of early head start with lots of features and functionality versus our competitors. If customers were to move into AWS Cloud, they can get rid of their next-gen firewalls and just have all the traffic routed through our Zscaler internet access and use Zscaler private access for accessing their private applications. We feel we have done everything in our capacity, in terms of enabling customers through Marketplace and will continue to participate in more features and functionality that Marketplace has to offer. We would like these customers to take advantage of their EDPs as well as their retirement and spend for the multi-commit through AWS Marketplace. Learn about what we have to offer and how we can really expedite the motion for them, if they want to procure our solutions through Marketplace >> You know, we're seeing an ability for them to get more creative, more progressive in terms of the purchasing. We're also doing, we're really excited about the ability to serve multiple markets. So we've had an immense amount of success in commercial. We also are seeing increasing amount of public sector, US federal government agencies that want to procure this way as well for the same reasons. So there's a lot of innovation going on. >> So you have the FedRAMP going on, you got all those certifications. >> Exactly right. So we are the first cloud-native solution to provide IL5 ATO, as well as FedRAMP pie and we make that all available, GSA schedule pricing through the AWS Marketplace, again through FSIs and other resellers. >> Public private partnerships have been a big factor, having that span of capability. I got to ask you about, this is a cool conversation, because now you're like, okay, I'm selling through the Marketplace. Companies themselves are changing how they operate. They don't just buy software that we used to use. So general purpose, bundled stuff. Oh yeah, I'm buying this product, because this has got a great solution and I have to get forced to use this firewall, because I bought this over here. That's not how companies are architecting and developing their businesses. It's no longer buying IT. They're building their company digitally. They have to be the application. So they're not sitting around, saying hey, can I get a solution? They're building and architecting their solution. This is kind of like the new enterprise that no one's talking about. They kind of, got to do their own work. >> Yes. >> There's no general purpose solution that maps every company. So they got to pick the best piece parts and integrate them. >> Yes and I feel- >> Do you guys agree with that? >> Yeah, I agree with that and customers don't want to go for point solutions anymore. They want to go with a platform approach. They want go with a vendor that can not only cut down their vendors from multi-dozens to maybe a dozen or less and that's where, you know, we kind of have pivoted to the platform-centric approach, where we not only help customers with Cloud Network Security, but we also help customers with Cloud Native Application Protection Platform that we just recently launched. It's going by the name of the different elements, including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity Event Management and so we are continuously doing more and more on the configuration and vulnerability side space. So if a customer has an AWS S3 bucket that is opened it can be detected and can be remediated. So all of those proactive steps we are taking, in terms of enhancing our portfolio, but we have come a long way as a company, as a platform that we have evolved in the Marketplace. >> What's the hottest product? >> The hottest product? >> In Marketplace right now. >> Well, the fastest growing products include our digital experience products and we have new Cloud Protection. So we've got Posture and Workload Protection as well and those are the fastest growing. For AWS customers a strong affinity also for ZPA, which provides you zero trust access to your workloads on AWS. So those are all the most popular in Marketplace. >> Yeah. >> So I would like to add that we recently launched and this has been a few years, a couple of years. We launched a product called Zscaler Digital X, the ZDX. >> Mm-hmm. >> What that product does is, let's say you're making a Zoom call and your WiFi network is laggy or it's a Zoom server that's laggy. It kind of detects where is the problem and it further tells the IT department you need to fix either the server on which Zoom is running, or fix your home network. So that is the beauty of the product. So I think we are seeing massive growth with some of our new editions in the portfolio, which is a long time coming. >> Yeah and certainly a lot of growth opportunities for you guys, as you come in. Where do you see Zscaler's big growth coming from product-wise? What's the big push? Actually, this is great upside for you here. >> Yeah. >> On the go to market side. Where's the big growth for Zscaler right now? So I think we are focused as a company on zero trust architecture. We want to securely connect users to apps, apps to apps, workloads to workloads and machines to machines. We want to give customers an experience where they have direct access to the apps that's hidden from the outside world and they can securely connect to the apps in a very succinct fashion. The user experience is second to none. A lot of customers use us on the Microsoft Office 365 side, where they see a lag in connecting to Microsoft Office 365 directly. They use the IE service to securely connect. >> Yeah, latency kills. >> Microsoft Office 365. >> Latency kills, as we always say, you know and security, you got to look at the pattern, you want to see that data. >> Yeah, and emerging use cases, there is an immense amount of white space and upside for us as well in emerging use cases, like OT, 5G, IOT. >> Yeah. >> Federal government, DOD. >> Oh god, tactical edge government. >> Security at the edge, absolutely, yeah. >> Where's the big edge? What's the edge challenge right now, if you have to put your finger on the edge, because right now that's the hot area, we're watching that. It's going to be highly contested. It's not yet clear, I mean certainly hybrid is the operating model, cloud, distributing, computing, but edge has got unique things that you can't really point to on premises that's the same. It's highly dynamic, you need high bandwidth, low latency, compute at the edge. The data has to be processed right there. What's the big thing at the edge right now? >> Well, so that's probably an emerging answer. I mean, we're working with our customers, they're inventing and they're kind of finding the use cases for those edge, but one of the good things about Zscaler is that we are able to, we've got low latency at the edge. We're able to work as a computer at the edge. We work on Outpost, Snowball, Snowcone, the Snow devices. So we can be wherever our customers need us. Mobile devices, there are a lot of applications where we've got to be either on embedded devices, on tractors, providing security for those IOT devices. So we're pretty comfortable with where we are being the- >> So that's why you guys are financially doing so well, performance wise. I got to ask you though, because I think that brings up the great point. If this is why I like the Marketplace, if I'm a customer, the edge is highly dynamic. It's changing all the time. I don't want to wait to buy something. If I got my solution architects on a product, I need to know I'm going to have zero trust built in and I need to push the button on Zscaler. I don't want to wait. So how does the procurement side impact? What have you guys seen? Share your thoughts on how Marketplace is working from the procurement standpoint, because it seems to me to be fast. Is that right, or is it still slow on their side? On the buyer side, because this to me would be a benefit to developers, if we say, hey, the procurement can just go really fast. I don't want to go through a bunch of PO approvals or slow meetings. >> It can be, that manifests itself in several ways, John. It can be, for instance, somebody wants to do a POC and traditionally you could take any amount of time to get budget approval, take it through. What if you had a pre-approved cloud budget and that was spent primarily through AWS Marketplace, because it's consolidated data on your AWS invoice. The ability to purchase a POC on the Marketplace could be done literally within minutes of the decision being made to go forward with it. So that's kind of a front end, you know, early stage use case. We've got examples we didn't talk about on our recent earnings call of how we have helped customers bring in their procurement with large million dollar, multimillion dollar deals. Even when a resaler's been involved, one of our resaler partners. Being able to accelerate deals, because there's so much less legal work and traditional bureaucratic effort. >> Agility. >> That agility purchasing process has allowed our customers to pull into the quarter, or the end of month, or end of quarter for them, deals that would've otherwise not been able to be done. >> So this is a great example of where you can set policy and kind of create some guard rails around innovation and integration deals, knowing if it's something that the edge is happening, say okay, here's some budget. We approved it, or Amazon gives credits and partnership going on. Then I'd say, hey, well green light this, not to exceed a million dollars, or whatever number in their range and then let people have the freedom to execute. >> You're absolutely right, so from the purchasing side, it does give them that agility. It eliminates a lot of the processes that would push out a purchase in actual execution past when the business decision is made and quite frankly, to be honest, AWS has been very accommodative. They're a great partner. They've invested a lot in Marketplace, Marketplace programs, to help customers do the right thing and do it more quickly as well as vendors like us to help our customers make the decisions they need to. >> Rising tide, a rising tide floats all boats and you guys are a great example of an independent company. Highly successful on your own. >> Yep. >> Certainly the numbers are clear. Wall Street loves Zscaler and economics are great. >> Our customer CSAT numbers are off the scale as well. >> Customers are great and now you've got the Marketplace. This is again, a new normal. A new kind of ecosystem is developing where it's not like the old monolithic ecosystems. The value creation and extraction is happening differently now. It's kind of interesting. >> Yes and I feel we have a long way to go, but what I can tell you is that Zscaler is in this for the long run. We are seeing some of the competitors erupt in the space as well, but they have a long way to go. What we have built requires years worth of R&D and features and thousands of customer's use cases which kind of lead to something what Zscaler has come up with today. What we have is very unique and is going to continuously be an innovation in the market in the years to come. In terms of being more cloud-savvy or more cloud-focused or more cloud-native than what the market has seen so far in the form of next-gen firewalls. >> I know you guys have got a lot of AI work. We've had many conversations with Howie over there. Great stuff and really appreciate you guys participating in our super cloud event we had and we'll see more of that where we're talking about the next generation clouds, really enabling that new disruptive, open-spanning capabilities across multiple environments to run cloud-native modern applications at scale and secure. Appreciate your time to come on "theCUBE". >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, I totally appreciate it. Zscaler, leading company here on "theCUBE" talking about their relationship with Marketplace as they continue to grow and succeed as technology goes to the next level in the cloud. Of course "theCUBE's" covering it here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (peaceful electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, your host of "The Cube." We're here for a live performance in studio bringing all the thought leaders around this concept of Supercloud, which is a consortium of the smartest people in the industry, the the Cloudaratti some say, or just people in the field building out next generation Cloud technologies for businesses, for the industry, you know, software meets infrastructure at scale and platforms. All great stuff. We have an expert here, Cube alumni and friend of ours, Howie Xu, VP of machine learning and AI at Zscaler, hugely successful company, platform, whatever you want to call it. They're definitely super clouding in their own. Howie, great to see you. Thanks for spending time with us to unpack and grock the direction of the industry that we see. We call it Supercloud. >> Hey, John, great to be back. I'm expecting a nice very educational and interesting conversation here again. >> Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I love talking with you about is you're deep on the technology side, as well as you got the historian view like we do. We've seen the movies before, we've seen the patterns, and now we're seeing structural change that has happened, that's cloud. Thank you very much, AWS. And as your GCP and others. Now we're seeing structural change happening in real time and we want to talk about it as it's happening. This is the purpose of this event. And that is that Cloud is one. Okay, great Cloud operations, on premises and Edge are emerging. Software is open source. It's the perfect storm for innovation and new things are emerging. You're seeing companies like Snowflake, and Databricks, and Zscaler all building great products. But now it's not one thing anymore. It's a lot of things going on. So what is your take on Supercloud? How do you see this evolving? What is some of the structural change that's happening in your mind? >> Yeah, so when you first reached out a few weeks ago about this event, I was like, "Hey, what is Supercloud." I know you tweeted a little bit here and there, but I never really, you know, double clicked, right. So I actually listened to some of your episodes you know, the previous conversations. You know, I would say the way you define Supercloud is it's not just the multi-cloud. The multi-Cloud is probably one aspect of it, right. You know, it's actually more beyond that, right. You know, a little bit, you know, towards past, a little bit more towards the flexibility, and then, you know, including, and also you want to include the on-prem, the edge, not just the Big 3 cloud, right. So there is a lot of the, let's say hybrid, more inclusive, right. So, the way I look at it is it's now very different from my imagination of where the Cloud would be, should be 10, 12 years ago. Because, you know, at that time it was, you know, on-prem dominant and then we say, hey, let's go cloud. I never for a second thought, you know, we would've ditch the on-prem completely, right. You know, on-prem has its own value. It's own kind of characteristics we wanted to keep, right. But the way we went for the last 10 years is, hey, Cloud, Cloud everywhere. We embrace Cloud. You know, the way I look at architecture is always very much like a pendulum, right? We swung from decentralized in the mainframe days, you know back in the days, to more distributed, right, PC, kind of a architecture, you know, servers in your own data center. And then to the now, the Cloud, the Big 3 Cloud in particular, right. I think in the next 10, 15, 20 years, it will swing back to more decentralized, more distributed architecture again. Every time you have a swing, because there is some fundamental reason behind that, we all knew the reason behind the current swing to the Cloud. It's because hey, the on-prem data center was too complex, right. You know, too expensive, right. You know, it would've take at least the six months to get any business application going, right. So compared to Cloud, a swipe a credit card, frictionless, you know, pay as you go, it's so great. But I think we are going to see more and more reason for people to say, "Hey, I need a architecture the other way around because of the decentralized the use case," right. Web3 is one example. Even though Web3 is still, you know, emerging right, very, very early days. But that could be one reason, right? You mentioned the Zscaler is kind of a Supercloud of its own, right? We always embrace public Cloud, but a lot of the workloads is actually on our own, you know, within our own data center. We take advantage of the elasticity of the public Cloud, right. But we also get a value, get a performance of our private Cloud. So I want to say a company like Zscaler taking advantage of the Supercloud already, but there will be more and more use cases taking advantage. >> And the use cases are key. Let me just go back and share something we had on the panel earlier in the day, the Cloudaratti Panel. Back in 2008, a bunch of us were getting together and we kind of were riffing, oh yeah, the future's going to be web services and Clouds will talk to each other, workloads can work across this (indistinct) abstraction layer, APIs is going to be talking to each other. A little bit early but we tried to think about it in terms of the preferred architecture. Okay, way too early. Yeah. AWS was just getting going, really kind of pumping on all cylinders there, getting that trajectory up. But it was use case driven. The nirvana never happened. I mean, we were talking Supercloud back then with the Cloudaratti group and we were thinking, okay, hey this is cool. But it was just an evolutionary thing. So I want to get your reaction. Today, the use cases are different. It's not just developers deploying on public Cloud to get all those greatness and goodness of the Cloud, to your point about Zscaler and others, there's on premises use cases and edge use cases emerging. 5g is right there. That's going to explode. So, the use cases now are all Cloud based. Again, this is an input into what we're seeing around Supercloud. How do you see that? What's your reaction to that? And how do you see that evolving so that the methodologies and all the taxonomies are in place for the right solution? >> Right, I mean, you know, some of the use cases are already here, you know, have been here for the last few years. And again, I mentioned a Zscaler, right. The reason that a Zscaler needs the on-prem version of it is because it's impossible to route all the traffic to the Big 3 Cloud, because they're still far away. Sometimes you need the presence much closer to you in order for you to get the level of the performance latency you want, right. So that's why Zscaler has, you know, so many data center of our own instead of leveraging the public Cloud, you know, for most part. However, public Cloud is still super important for Zscaler. I can tell you a story, right. You know, two years ago, you know, at the beginning of the pandemics, everyone started working from home suddenly, right. You are talking about Fortune 500 companies with 200,000 employees, suddenly having 200,000 employees working from home. Their VPN architecture is not going to support that kind of the workload, right? Even Zscaler's own architecture or the presence is not enough. So overnight we just, having so many new workloads, to support this work from home, the zero trust network for our customers, literally overnight. So it wouldn't have happened without public Cloud. So we took advantage of the public Cloud. Yet at the same time, for many, many use cases that Zscaler is paying attention to in terms of the zero trust architecture, the latency, the latency guarantee aspect, the cost is so important. So we kind of take it advantage of both. >> Yeah, definitely. >> Today you may say, hey, you know, Zscaler is one of the, not a majority of the companies in terms of the Cloud adoption or public Cloud adoption, right. But I can say that, yeah, that's because it's more infrastructure, security infrastructure. It's a little bit different for some of the communication applications, right. Why not just support everything on the public Cloud? That's doable today. However, moving forward next to 5, 10, 15 years, we expect to see Web3 kind of the use cases to grow more and more. In those kind of decentralized use cases, I can totally see that we, you know, the on-prim presence is very important. >> Yeah. One of the things we're seeing with Supercloud that we're kind of seeing clarity on is that there's a lot of seamless execution around, less friction around areas that require a PhD or hard work. And you're seeing specialty Superclouds, apps, identity data security. You're also seeing vertical clouds, Goldman Sachs doing financial applications. I'm sure there'll be some insurance. People in these verse. Building on top of the CapEx on one Cloud really fast and moving to others. So that's clearly a trend. The interesting thing I want to get your thoughts on, Howie, on an architectural basis is in Cloud, public Cloud generally, SaaS depends on IAS. So there's an interplay between SaaS and the infrastructures of service and pass as well. But SaaS and IAS, they solve a lot of the problems. You mentioned latency. How do you see the interplay of these Superclouds that utilize the SaaS IS relationship to solve technical problems? So in architecturally, that's been a tight integration on these Clouds, but now as you get more complexity with Supercloud, how do you see SaaS applications changing? >> Yeah, I view the Supercloud is actually reduced the complexity. The reason I'm saying that is, think about it in the world where you have predominantly public Cloud kind of the architecture, right? 10 years ago, AWS has probably 20 services. Now they probably have, you know, more than 1,000 services. Same thing with Azure, same thing with GCP. I mean, who can make sense out of it, right. You know, if you just consume the eyes or the Big 3 Cloud service as is. You know, you need a PhD these days to make sense all of them. So the way I think about Supercloud or where, you know it is going, is it has to provide more simplicity, a better way for people to make sense out of it, right. Cause if I'm an architecture and I have to think, hey, this is a public Cloud, this is a multi-Cloud, and by the way, certain things need to be run on the on-prem. And how do I deal with the uniform nature of it? My mind would blow up. So I need a higher level abstraction. That higher level abstraction will hide the complexity of the where it is, which vendor. It will only tell me the service level, right. You know, we always say, you know, the Cloud is like electricity. I only wanted to know is that like 110 volt or 220, 240, whatever that is. I don't really want to know more than that, right. So I want to say a key requirement for the Supercloud is it's reduced the complexity, higher level abstraction. It has to be like that. >> And operational consistencies at the bottom. Howie, we have one minute left. I want to get your thoughts. I'd like you to share what you're working on that you're excited about. It doesn't have to be with Zscaler. As you see the Supercloud trend emerging, this is the next generation Cloud, Cloud 2.0, whatever we want to call it, it's happening. It's changing. It's getting better. What are you excited about? What do you see as really key inflection point variables in this big wave? >> Yeah. One of the things I really like, what I heard from you in the past about Supercloud is a Supercloud is not just a one Cloud or one vendor. It's almost like every company should have its own Supercloud, right. You're talking about JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs of the world, that they need to have their own Supercloud. Zscaler and their security vendors, they may have their own Cloud. So I think every Fortune 500, Fortune 2,000 companies will have its own Supercloud. So I'm excited about that. So why that's important? We also say that, you know, in the next 10, 20 years, AI machine learning is going to help us a lot, right. So without Supercloud, it's very hard to do AI machine learning. 'Cause if you don't have a place that you know where the data is, and then it's pretty hard. And in the context of Supercloud, I totally foresee that the AI model will follow the data. If the data is in the cloud, it will go there. If the data is on-prem, it will go there. And then the Supercloud will hide the complexity of it. So if you ask me, my passion is leveraging AI machine learning to change the world, but Supercloud will make that easier, right. If you think about why Google, Facebook of the world, are able to leverage AI better than 99% of the rest of the world, because they figure out the Supercloud for themselves, right. And I think now it's the time for the rest of the Fortune 500, of Fortune 2,000 company to figure out its own Supercloud strategy. What is my Supercloud? I need to have my own Supercloud. Each company needs to have its own Supercloud. That's how I see it. >> Howie, always great to have you on. Thanks so much for spending the time and weighing in on this really important topic. We're going to be opening this up. It's not over. We're going to continue to watch the change as it unfolds and get an open community perspective. Thank you so much for being a great expert in our network and community. We really appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having me. >> Okay. Okay, that's it. We'll be up with more coverage here, Supercloud event, after this short break. I'm John Furrier, host of "The Cube." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good evening, guys. Welcome back to Las Vegas, theCUBE is here live at AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We have two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on theCUBE talking with AWS, and its massive ecosystem of partners bringing you this hybrid tech event, probably the biggest of the year, and I'm pleased to welcome Stephen Kovac next, the Chief Compliance Officer at Zscaler. Stephen, how's it going? >> Well, it's going well, Lisa. Thank you for asking, enjoying Vegas, loving the conference, unbelievable. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Oh, it's so great, I've seen people. >> Conversations you can't replicate on video conferencing, you just can't. >> Can't, and you see people you haven't seen in two years, and it's like all of a sudden you're best buddies again. It's just wonderful, it's so great to back. >> It is, and AWS in typical fashion has done a great job of getting everybody in here safely. I'm not at all surprised, that's what I expected, but it's been great. And I hope that this can demonstrate to other companies, you can do this safely. >> You can, I think so. I mean, there's a lot of effort going into this, but as usual AWS does it right. So, you expect that. >> They do. Talk to me about the Zscaler-AWS partnership. What's going on? >> Well, it's a great partnership. So AWS and Zscaler have been partners since the beginning of Zscaler. We are the largest security cloud in the world. We're born and bred in the cloud security company. So literally we wrote one application that does global security, everything from firewall to proxy, secure web gateway, to DLP, to all this in one piece of software. So, in the past where people would buy appliances for all these devices and put them in their own data center, we wrote a software that allows us to put that in the cloud, run it on the cloud globally around the world. And our partnership with AWS is, we originally built that on AWS, and today still AWS is our prime partner, especially in the zero trust side of our business. So, great relationship, long-term and great I think for both of us, it's been a very, very... >> Fruitful partnership, synergistic? >> Synergistic, love that, so yes. >> You mentioned zero trust, and we have seen such massive changes to the security and the threat landscape the last 20, 22 months. Talk to me about the recent executive order calling for zero trust, how does Zscaler's partnership with AWS help you enable organizations, fed, SLED, DoD, to be able to actually bring in and apply zero trust? >> Yeah, great question. Five years ago I was tasked to bring Zscaler into the government side of the business. So I was employee one to do that. It was a great honor to do it. And the first thing we did is we partnered with AWS because we needed to get FedRAMP compliant. We knew we were going to go into DoD. So we needed to go to the Impact Level five. And eventually we'll be able to go up level six with AWS. And so it was our partnership started there. And as you've seen in five years with all the change that's happened, that obviously the breaches like SolarWinds, and the people up here talking about them all week with you I'm sure. The executive order came down from the Biden Administration, who I completely salute for being just tremendous leaders in the cybersecurity space. And the executive order, one of the big pieces of the executive order was every agency must produce a plan for zero trust. So our cloud platform that is on AWS is a zero trust platform. It is the first and only zero trust platform to get authorized by the federal government at the FedRAMP level, and now the IL five level. So, together we are literally capturing and taking over the, being the leader in the zero trust space for the federal government. And I'm going to get a sip of water, so forgive me, I've been here all week talking to a lot of people, so forgive me for that. >> That's one thing that we don't have to deal with when we're on Zoom, right, is you don't really have the risk of losing your voice. >> Stephen: There you go. >> But in terms of the executive order, something that you mentioned, SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, we only hear about some of the big ones. The fact that ransomware happens one attack every 10, 11 seconds, it's a matter of when we get hit, not if. >> As you know, the story coming up from me, coming up on stage with you today, I just got myself breached just this morning, just individually. So yes, it's going to get all of us. And especially, I think when you look at zero trust and ransomware and how they worked out how zero trust can prevent it, you look at the SLED market, you know, state, local governments, they don't have the dollars to go spend like DHS does, or say, some of the DoD does. So, our partnership with AWS allows us to produce a product that is very cost-effective on a per user basis, consumption model, which is what AWS has been famous for since day one, right, the consumption model, use it when you need it, don't use it when you don't. We built our software the same way. So, at some point in a year, in a school year, we'll ramp up with some schools up to a hundred thousand users in the district, and over the summer we'll ramp down to a thousand, and we just bill them for that. So it's a beautiful relationship that we partner in not just the executive order, but being a partner in SLED, fed in the sense that matches making our business together, match the government's business. And that makes us a true leader and makes us a cost-effective solution. And if you think about it just for a moment, yesterday, I told you I was testifying in front of the Senate. And one of the questions I got asked was, oh, how many security updates do you guys see a year? I said, a year, well, we do over 200,000 a day. 200,000 security updates from potential hackers every single day. And we're doing that over 200 billion transactions a day run on AWS. So it's tremendous partnership, and to be able to work like that, and at that kind of volume, and be able to go up and down with the, and you got AWS able to scope up and down, and us to be able to ride that wave with them. It's been great. >> One of the things that we always talk about when we talk AWS is they're customer focused or customer obsession that, hey, we start backwards, we work backwards from the customer. Same thing, synergistic from a cultural perspective? >> Absolutely, I mean, one of the things I always love about AWS and I've been a customer of AWS for many years, even prior to my Zscaler days, I love the way they approach things, right? If they're not trying to go out and sell it, they're trying to meet with the customer and find out what the customer needs, and then build a solution. We're the same way. I always tell, you know, when you think of our solutions, Zscaler, I always tell my sales teams, I say it takes four sales calls for people to really understand what we do. And AWS, in the beginning of AWS, it was kind of the same thing. In the old days, you know, we all just built data centers and we had all these racks, and all this expense and mesh is what you did. It was unusual back in the day, 10 years ago, and I've been to every single re:Invent. I mean, the first one there was like, you're actually going to put all your stuff in this unknown cloud thing, and it will be available when you need it? So yes, you know, the way that they did it is the same way we do it together today. And we do it together today. We partner on many deals today where we're both, our teams are in there together, selling together, whether it's the DoD, federal agencies, SLED agencies, and commercial, you know, selling it hand-in-hand because it's that same philosophy is we're going to build what a customer needs. We're not going to tell the customer what they need. We're going to hear what they need, and that's the same relationship. So I'm going to get another sip real quick. >> Go for it. One of the things that has been a theme that we've heard the last couple of days is every company needs to be a data company or private sector, public sector, and if they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer. How do you help customers get their handle around that? Because the security threats are only increasing. I mean, it's ransomware as a service. The fact that these criminals are getting much more brazen, you just had this happen to yourself, but enabling them to become data-driven organizations and use the data, extract the value from it securely, that's hard. >> It is, I mean, if you think back in the day, I mean, companies didn't have chief compliance officers that worked in the space that we do. Their chief compliance officer back in the day was the guy that was writing your HR issues and what OSHA issues, and of course, I still deal with some of that stuff, but my true job is really around the data, right? You know, how do we build our platforms, what decisions we make on our platforms, how we're going to certify them to support that, and I mean, chief data officers, chief security officers, I mean, you go into companies today, even car dealerships today. I mean, I'm picking one, you never thought of them having a security officer, but they do, they have to, they have to. And I mean, basic school districts, I mean, I don't about you, when I was a kid and went to school, they didn't have computers, but when my kid went to school, they did, but they didn't have a security officer. Now today, every single school district has security officers. I mean, I love how you said it, that data-driven, that data thought is there. It has to be, it's a real threat. And the sad thing is of these ransomware attacks, how many don't get reported. >> Oh, right, we're only hearing about a select few. >> The numbers are something like 88% don't get reported. It's that big. So that just tells you, we hear the big ones, right, Colonial Pipeline, things like that. We don't hear about West Texas or Middle Illinois school district that paid five grand because somebody had something on the school. That's how, as you said, this ransomware as a service security, we call it a security as a service, there's SaaS, which is software as a service, we're security software as a service, and AWS is the infrastructure as a service that we run on. And that's how it works well together. >> Do you guys go into accounts together from a go-to-market perspective? >> We, do, we can always do a better job. And my good friend here at AWS, who's probably listening, we can always do better. But yeah, so it is become something that, especially in the government space we do, in federal, DoD, because the certifications are really important, certifications are important everywhere, and we have many, we talked about all the certifications we have in federal, FedRAMP and IL five, and we have a plethora of those certifications in the commercial space. But they mean in a federal space, they're really the ticket. They call them the ENERGY STAR of approval, good housekeeping piece. So, you know, having that, teaming up with AWS who we partner together and because AWS has the same certs, we can sell at the same levels. And we do a really great job of co-selling in that space together. And I think when they look at us and they say, well, you're AWS, they've got their FedRAMP high, IL five, and you're Zscaler, you got your FedRAMP high, IL five. Yes, we can do business with these guys, and that's important. >> So you guys both open doors for each other. >> We do, we do in many cases, yeah. As a matter of fact, re:Invent five years ago, a buddy of mine here opened a big, big account for us, which is today our largest account in federal came from re:Invent, where came up to me and said, hey, my customer wants to, he's looking to do something, they're an agency that has global footprint, and they're like, we want to do something as a security as a service. They don't want to ship boxes all over the place. And we just met the customer for a coffee, and next thing you know, became our, still today, our probably largest customer in federal. >> Wow, well, this is the 10th re:Invent, you said you've been to all of them. >> Stephen: I have been to all of them. I can't lie, but I can't say I did all the virtual ones. I mean, I was logged in. (laughs) >> That's okay, we'll wink on that one. But, one of the things then, we've just got about a minute left here, is in new leadership, Andy Jassy being promoted to the CEO of Amazon, we've got Adam Selipsky, heard lot of announcements and news from Adam yesterday, but some of the things that we've been talking about on theCUBE is the first 15 years of innovation at AWS, that's going to accelerate. Do you see that also, like if you look forward to the next decade, do you see things moving much faster than they did the past decade? >> I don't think they can't. I mean, I shouldn't say they have to. And the change of the guard as you might call it here, is it's always good to have a change of the guard I think. You know, the question is when's Andy going to go to space? I mean, that's the next. (Lisa laughs) I think you have the guys who got AWS to the dance, and now the dance, who's going to become the belle of the ball. And this next generation of leadership coming in is fabulous. I think they've made great decisions, and I think they're going to do really well. And we're behind them, we support it. I got a chance to meet with most of them, love a chance to meet with Andy, I haven't met with him yet. So Andy, I'd love to meet you sometime soon. But I'm very impressed with what they've done. And yes, I think it's going to be, the last 10 years of growth is going to be a year next year. I think literally, you take 10 years be compressed to a year, and then next year it will be compressed to a day. So it's moving that fast. >> Yep, get your neck brace on, prepare for that whiplash. >> Yeah, right? That's what I said to Jeff when Jeff went to space, that's how fast we're about to travel, right? But it's really relative. >> It is, there is no limit. Well, Stephen, thank you for joining me, talking about Zscaler, AWS, what you guys are doing, how you're helping to revolutionize the public sector, fed, SLED, a lot of great stuff there. Security is an ever-evolving topic, and we appreciate all of your insights. >> Well, it was wonderful to be here. Great to see you again. And great to be back with all our friends at re:Invent. >> All of our friends, exactly. >> Stephen: Thank you so much for the time today. >> My pleasure. For Stephen Kovac, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (pleasant music)

>>Welcome to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. This year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two life studios, two remote studios, and over 100 guests. So stick around as we talk about the next 10 years of cloud innovation, I'm very excited to be joined by another Lisa from Zscaler. Lisa Lorenzen is here with me, the field CTO for the Americas. She's here to talk about ZScaler's mission to make doing business and navigating change a simpler, faster, and more productive experience. Lisa, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So let's talk about Zscaler in AWS. Talk to me about the partnership, what you guys are doing together. >>Yeah, definitely. Z scaler is a strategic security ISV partner with AWS. So we provide AWS customers with zero trust, secure remote access to AWS, and this can improve their security posture as well as their user experience with AWS. These scaler recently announced that we are the first and only cloud security service to achieve the FedRAMP PI authorization to operate. And that FedRAMP ZPA service is built on AWS gov cloud. ZScaler's also an AWS marketplace seller where our customers can purchase our zero trust exchange services as well as request or high value security assessments. We're excited about that as we're seeing a rapid increase in customer adoption as these scaler via the AWS marketplace, we vetted our software on AWS edge services that support emerging use cases, including 5g, IOT, and OT. So for example, Zscaler runs on wavelength, outposts, snowball and snowcones, and Zscaler has strategic partnerships with leading AWS service providers and system integration partners, including Verizon NTT, BT, Accenture, Deloitte, and many of the leading national and regional AWS consulting partners. >>Great summary there. So you mentioned something I want to get more understanding on this. It sounds like it's a differentiator for CSO scale. You said that you guys recently announced to the first and only cloud security service to achieve FedRAMP high. Uh, ATO built on AWS gov cloud. Talk to me about and what the significance of that is. >>I L five authorization to operate means that we are able to protect federal assets for the department of defense, as well as for the civilian agencies. It just extends the certification of our cloud by the government to ensure that we meet all of the requirements to protect that military side of the house, as well as the civilian side of the house. >>Got it super important there, let's talk about zero trust. It's a super hot topic. We've seen so many changes to the threat landscape during the pandemic. How are some of the ways that Z scaler and AWS are helping customers tackle this together? >>Well, I'd actually like to answer that by telling a little bit of a story. Um, Growmark is one of our Z scaler and AWS success stories when they had to send everyone home to work from home overnight, the quote that we had from is the users just went home and nothing changed. ZPA made work from anywhere, just work, and they were able to maintain complete business continuity. So even though their employers might have had poor internet service at home, or, you know, 80 challenging infrastructure, if you've got kids on your wifi bunch of kids in the neighborhood doing remote school, everyone's working from home, you don't have the reliability or the, maybe the bandwidth capacity that you would when you're sitting in an office. And Zscaler private access is a cloud delivered zero trust solution that leverages dynamic resilient, TLS encrypted tunnels to connect the user to an application rather than putting an end point on a network. >>And the reason that's important is it makes for a much more reliable and resilient service, even in environments that may not have the best connectivity I live out in the county. I really, some days think that there's a hamster on a wheel somewhere in my cable modem network, and I am a consumer of this, right. I connect to Z scaler over Zscaler private access, I'm protected by Zscaler internet access. And so I access our internal applications that are running in AWS as well this way. And it makes a huge difference. Growmark really started with an SAP migration to AWS, and this was long before the pandemic. So they started out looking for that better user experience and the zero trust capability. They were able to ensure that their SAP environment was dark to the internet, even though it was running in the cloud. And that put them in this position to leverage that zero trust service when the pandemic was upon us, >>That ability or that quote that you mentioned, it just worked was absolutely critical for all of us in every industry. And I'm sure a lot of folks who were trying to manage working from home, the spouses from home kids doing, you know, school online also felt like you with the hamster on the wheel, I'm sure their internet access, but being able to have that business continuity was table-stakes especially early on for most organizations. We saw a lot of digital transformation, a lot of acceleration of it in the last 20 months during the pandemic. Talk to me about how Z scaler helps customers from a digital transformation perspective and maybe what some of the things were that you saw in the last 20 months that have accelerated >>Absolutely. Um, another example, there would be Jefferson health, and really, as we saw during the pandemic, as you say, it accelerated a lot of the existing trends of mobility, but also migration to the cloud. And when you move applications to the cloud, honestly, it's a complex environment and maybe the controls and the risk landscape is not as well. Understood. So Z scaler also has another solution, which is our cloud security posture management. And this is really ensuring that your configuration on your environment, that those workloads run in is controlled, understood correctly, coordinated and configured. So as deference and health migrated to the cloud first model, they were able to leverage the scalers workload posture to measure and control that risk. Again, it's environment where the combination of AWS and Z scaler together gives them a flexible, resilient solution that they can be confident is correctly configured and thoroughly locked down. >>And that's critical for businesses in any organization, especially as quickly as how quickly things changed in the last 20 months or so I do wonder how your customer conversations have has changed as I introduced you as the field CTO of the America's proceeds killer. I'm sure you talk with a lot of customers. How has the security posture, um, zero trust? How has that risen up within the organizational chain? Is that something that the board is concerned about? >>My gosh, yes. And zero trust really has gone through the Gartner hype cycle. You've got the introduction, the peak of interest, the trough of despair, and then really rising back into what's actually feasible. Only zero trust has done that on a timeline of over a decade. When the term was first introduced, I was working with firewall VPN enact technology, and frankly, we didn't necessarily have the flexibility, the scalability, or the resilience to offer true zero trust. You can try to do that with network security controls, but when you're really protecting a user connecting to an application, you've got an abstraction layer mismatch. What we're seeing now is the reemergence of zero trust as a priority. And this was greatly accelerated honestly by the cybersecurity executive order that came out a few months ago from the Biden administration, which made zero trust a priority for the federal government and the public sector, but also raised visibility on zero trust for the private sector as well. >>When we're looking at zero trust as a way to perhaps ward off some of these high profile breaches and outages like the colonial pipeline, whole situation that was based on some legacy technology for remote access that was exploited and led to a breach that they had to take their entire infrastructure offline to mitigate. If we can look at more modern delivery mechanisms and more sophisticated controls for zero trust, that helps the board address a number of challenges ranging from obviously risk management, but also agility and cost reduction in an environment where more than ever belts are being tightened. New ways of delivering applications are being considered. But the ability to innovate is more important than ever. >>It is more important than ever the ability to innovate, but it really changing security landscape. I'm glad to hear that you're seeing, uh, this change as a result of the executive order that president Biden put down in the summer. That's good news. It sounds like there's some progress being made there, but we saw, you mentioned colonial pipeline. We saw a lot in the last 20, 22 months or so with ransomware becoming a household word, also becoming something that is a matter of when companies in any industry get hit and versus if it's no longer kind of that choice anymore. So talk to me about some of the threats and some of the stats that Z scaler has seen particularly in the last 20, 22 months. >>Oh gosh. Well, let's see. I'm just going to focus on the last 12 months, cause that's really where we've got some of the best data. We've seen a 500% increase in ransomware delivered over encrypted channels. And what that means is it's really critical to have scalable SSL inspection that can operate at wire speed without impeding the user experience or delay in critical projects, server communications, activities that need to happen without any introduced in any additional latency. So if you think about what that takes the Z scaler internet access solution is protecting users, outbound access in the same way that Zscaler private access protects access to private resources. So we're really seeing more and more organizations seeing that both of these services are necessary to deliver a comprehensive zero trust. You have to protect and control the outbound traffic to make sure that nothing good leaks out, nothing bad sneaks in. >>And at the same time, you have to protect and control the inbound traffic and inbound is, you know, a much broader definition with apps in the data center in the cloud these days. We're also seeing that 30% of malware is delivered through trusted applications like file shares or collaboration tools. So it's no longer enough to only inspect web traffic. Now you have to be able to really inspect all flavors of traffic when you're doing that outbound protection. So another good example where Z scaler and AWS work together here is in Amazon workspaces. And there's a huge trend towards desktop as a service, for example, and organizations are starting to recognize that they need to protect both the user experience and also the connectivity onward in Amazon workspaces, the same way that they would for a traditional end user device. So we see Z scaler running in the Amazon workspaces instances to protect that outbound traffic and control that inbound traffic as well. >>Another big area is the ransomware infections are not the problem. It's the result. So over half of the ransomware infections include data theft or leakage. And that is a double whammy because you get what's called double extortion where not only do you have to pay to unlock your machines, but you have to pay not to have that stolen data exposed to the rest of the world. So it's more important than ever to be able to break that kill chain as early as possible to ensure that the or the server traffic itself isn't exposed to the initial infection vector. If you do happen to get an infection vector that sneaks through, you need to be able to control the lateral movement so that it doesn't spread in your environment. And then if both of those controls fail, you also need the outbound protection such as CASBY and DLP to ensure that even if they get into the environment, they can't exfiltrate any of the data that they find as a result. We're seeing that the largest security risk today is lateral movement inside the corporate network. And that's one of the things that makes these ransomware double extortion situations, such a problem. >>Last question for you. And we've got about a minute left. I'm curious, you said over 50% of ransomware attacks are now double extortion. How do you guys help customers combat that? So >>We really deliver a solution that eliminates a lot of the attack surface and a lot of the risks. We have no inbound listener, unlike a traditional VPN. So the outbound only connections mean you don't have the external attack surface. You can write these granular policy controls to eliminate lateral movement. And because we integrate with customer's existing identity and access management, we can eliminate the credential exposure that can lead to a larger spread in a compromised environment. We also can eliminate the problem of unpatched gateways, which led to things like colonial pipeline or some of the other major breaches we've seen recently. And we can remove that single point of failure. So you can rely on dynamic optimized traffic distribution for all of these secure services. Basically, what we're trying to do is make it simpler and more secure at the same time, >>Simpler and more secure at the same time is what everyone needs regardless of industry. Lisa, thank you for joining me today, talking about Zscaler in AWS, zero trust the threat landscape that you're seeing, and also how's the scaler and AWS together can help customers mitigate those growing risks. We appreciate your insights and your thoughtfulness. >>Thank you >>For Lisa Lorenzen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent stick around more great content coming up next.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante by the dip has been been an effective strategy since the market bottomed in early march last year the approach has been especially successful in tech and even more so for those tech names that one were well positioned for the forced march to digital i sometimes call it i.e remote work online commerce data centric platforms and certain cyber security plays and two already had the cloud figured out the question on investors minds is where to go from here should you avoid some of the high flyers that are richly valued with eye-popping multiples or should you continue to buy the dip and if so which companies that capitalized on the trends from last year will see permanent shifts in spending patterns that make them a solid long-term play hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we shine the spotlight on three companies that may be candidates for a buy the dip strategy and it's our pleasure to welcome in ivana delevco who's the chief investment officer and founder of spear alpha a new research-centric etf focused on industrial technology ivana is a long-time equity analyst with a background in both long and short investing ivana welcome to the program thanks so much for coming on thanks for having me david yeah it's really our pleasure i i want to start with your etf and give the folks a bit more background about you first you know we gotta let people know i'm not an investment pro i'm not an advisor i don't make stock recommendations i don't sell investments so you got to do your own research i have a lot of data so happy to share it but you got to understand your own risks you of course yvonne on the other hand you do offer investment services and so people before investing got to carefully review all the available available investment docs understand what you're getting into before you invest now with that out of the way ivana i have some stats up here on this slide your spear you're a newly launched female lead firm that does deep research into the supply chain we're going to talk about that you try to uncover as i understand it under-appreciated industrial tech firms and some really pretty cool areas that we list here but tell us a little bit more about your background and your etf so thanks for having me david my background is in industrial research and industrial technology investments i've spent the past 15 years covering this space and what we've seen over the past five years is technology changes that are really driving fundamental shifts in industrial manufacturing processes so whether this is 5g connectivity innovation in the software stack increasing compute speeds all of these are major technological advancements that are impacting uh traditional manufacturers so what we try to do is assess speak to these firms and assess who is at the leading and who is at the lagging end of this digital transformation and we're trying to assess what vendors they're using what processes they're implementing and that is how we generate most of our investment ideas okay great and and we show on the bottom of of this sort of intro slide if you will uh so one of the processes that you use and one of the things that that is notable a lot of people compare you uh to kathy woods are investments when you came out uh i think you use a different process i mean maybe there are some similarities in terms of disruption but at the bottom of this slide it shows a mckinsey sort of graphic that that i think informs people as to how you really dig into the supply chain from a research standpoint is that right absolutely so for us it's all about understanding the supply chain going deep in the supply chain and gather data points from primary sources that we can then translate into investment opportunities so if you look at this mckinsey graph uh you will see that there is a lot of opportunity to for these companies to transform themselves both on the front end which means better revenue better products and on their operation side which means lower cost whether it's through better operations or through better processes on the the back end so what we do is we will speak to a traditional manufacturing company and ask them okay well what do you use for better product development and they will give us the name of the firms and give us an assessment of what's the differences between the competitors why they like one versus the other so then we're gonna take the data and we will put it into our financial model and we'll understand the broader market for it um the addressable market the market share that the company has and will project the growth so for these higher growth stocks that that you cover the main alpha generation uh potential here is to understand what the amount of growth these companies will generate over the next 10 to 20 years so it's really all about projecting growth in the next three years in the next five years and where will growth ultimately settle in in the next 10 to 20 years love it we're gonna have a fun conversation because today we're going to get into your thesis for cooper snowflake and z scalar we're going to bring in some of our own data some of our data from etr and and why you think these companies may be candidates for long-term growth and and be buy the dip stock so to do that i hacked up this little comparison slide we're showing here i do this for context our audience knows i'm not a cfa or a valuation expert but we like to do simple comparisons just to give people context and a sense of relative size growth and valuation and so this chart attempts to do that so what i did is i took the most recent quarterly revenue for cooper snowflake and z scalar multiplied it by four to get a run rate we included servicenow in the table just for baseline reference because bill mcdermott as we've reported aspires to make service now the next great enterprise software company alongside with salesforce and oracle and some of the others and and all these companies that we list here that through the three here they aspire to do so in their own domain so we're displaying the market cap from friday morning september 10th we calculated a revenue run rate multiple and we show the quarterly revenue growth and what this data does is gives you a sense of the three companies they're well on their way to a billion dollars in revenue it underscores the relationship between revenue growth and valuation snowflake being the poster child for that dynamic savannah i know you do much more detailed financial analysis but let's talk about these companies in order maybe start with koopa they just crushed their quarter i mean they blew away consensus on the top line what else about the company do you like and why is it on your by the dip list so just to back up david on valuation these companies investors either directly or indirectly value on a dcf basis and what happened at the beginning of the year as interest rates started increasing people started freaking out and once you plug in 100 basis points higher interest rate in your dcf model you get significant price downside so that really drove a lot of the pullback at the beginning of the year right now where we stand today interest rates haven't really moved all that significantly off the bot of the bottom they're still around the same levels maybe a little bit higher but those are not the types of moves that are going to drive significant downside in this stock so as things have stabilized here a lot of these opportunities look pretty attractive on that basis so koopa specifically came out of our um if you go back to that uh the chart of like where the opportunities lie in um in across the manufacturing uh um enterprise koopa is really focused on business pen management so they're really trying to help companies reduce their cost uh and they're a leader in the space uh they're unique uh unique in that they're cloud-based so the feedback we've been hearing from from our companies that use it jetblue uses it train technologies uses it the feedback we've been hearing is that they love the ease of implementation so it's very easy to implement and it drives real savings um savings for these companies so we see in our dcf model we see multiple years of this 30 40 percent growth and that's really driving our price target yeah and we can i can confirm that i mean i mean just anecdotally you know you know we serve a lot of the technology community and many of our clients are saying hey okay you know when you go to do invoicing or whatever you work with procurement it's koopa you know this is some ariba that's kind of the legacy which is sap we'll talk about that a little later but let's talk about snowflake um you know snowflake we've been tracking them very closely we know the management there we've watched them through their last two companies now here and have been following that company early on since since really 2015. tell us why you like snowflake um and and maybe why you think it can continue its rapid growth thanks david so first of all i need to compliment you on your research on the company on the technology side so where we come in is more from understanding where our companies can use soft snowflake and where snowflake can add value so what we've been hearing from our companies is the challenge that they're facing is that everybody's moving to the cloud but it's not as simple as just send your data to the cloud and call aws and they're gonna generate more revenue for your solve your cost problem so what we've been hearing is that companies need to find tools that are easy to use where they can use their own domain expertise and just plug and play so um ansys is one of the companies we covered the dust simulation they've found snowflake to be an extremely useful tool in sales lead generation and within sales crm systems have been around for a while and they're they've really been implemented but analyzing sales numbers is something that is new to this company some some of our companies don't even know what their sales are even when they look back after the quarter is closed so tools like this help um companies do easy analytics and therefore drive revenue and cost savings growth so we see really big runway for for this company and i think the most misunderstood part about it is that people view it as a warehousing data warehousing play while this is all about compute and the company does a good job separating the two and what our their customers like or like the companies that we cover like about it is that it can lower their compute costs um and make it much easier much more easily manageable for them great and we're going to talk about more about each of these companies but let's talk about z-scaler a bit i mean z-scaler is a company we've been very excited about and identified them kind of early on they've definitely benefited from the move to cloud generally and specifically the remote work uh situation with the cyber threats etc but tell us why you like z-scaler so interestingly z-scaler um we like the broader security space um the broader cyber security space and interestingly our companies are not yet spending to the level that is commensurate with the increase in attack rate so we think this is a trend that is really going to accelerate as we go forward um my own board 20 of the time on the last board meeting was spent on cyber security what we're doing and this is a pretty simple operation that that we're running here so you can imagine for a large enterprise with thousands of people all around the world um needing to be on a single simple system z-scaler really fits well here very easy to implement several of our industrial companies use it siemens uses it ge uses it and they've had great great experience with it excellent i just want to take a quick look at how some of these names have performed over the last year and and what if anything this data tells us this is a chart comparing the past 12 months performance of of those four companies uh that we just talked about and we added in you know servicenow z scalar as you can see has outperformed the other despite your commentary on discounted cash flow snowflake is underperformed really precisely for the reasons that you mentioned not to mention the fact that it was pretty highly valued and you can see relative to the nas but it's creeping back lately after very strong earnings even though the stock dropped after it beat earnings because the street wants the cfo to say to guide even higher than maybe as mike scarpelli feels is prudent and you can see cooper has also underperformed relatively speaking i mean it absolutely destroyed consensus this week the stock went up but it's been off with the the weaker market this week i know you like to take a longer term view but but anything you would add here yeah so interestingly both z-scaler and koopa were in the camp of as we went into earnings expectations were already pretty high because few of their competitors reported very strong results so this scalar yesterday their revenue growth was was pretty strong the stock is down today uh and the reason is because people were kind of caught up a little bit in the noise of this quarter growth is 57 last quarter it was 60 like is this a deceleration we don't see it as that at all and the company brought up one point that i thought was extremely interesting which is as their deal sizes are getting larger it takes a little longer time for them to see the revenue come through so it takes a little bit of time to for you to see it into from billings into into revenue same thing with cooper very strong earnings report but i think expectations were already pretty high going into it uh given the service now and um and anna plan as well reported strong results so i think it's all about positioning so we love these setups where you can buy the deep in on this opportunity where like people get caught up in um short-term noise and and it creates good entry points excellent i i want to bring in some data from our partner etr and see if you have any comments ivana so what we're showing here is a two-dimensional chart we like to show this uh very frequently it's based on a survey of between a thousand and fifteen hundred chief information officers and technology buyers every quarter this is from their most recent july survey the vertical axis shows net score which is a measure of spending momentum i mean this it measures the net percentage of customers in the survey that are spending more on a particular product or platform in other words it essentially subtracts the percentage of customers spending less from those spending more which yields a net score it's more granular than that but basically that's what it does the horizontal axis is market share or pervasiveness in the data set it's not revenue market share like you get from idc it's it's a mention market share and now that red dotted line at the 40 percent mark on the vertical represents an elevated level in other words anything above 40 percent we consider notable and we've plotted our three by the dip companies and included some of their competitors for context and you can see we added salesforce servicenow and oracle and that orange ellipse because they're some of the bigger names in the software business so let's take these in alphabetical order ivana starting with koopa in the blue you can see we plotted them next to sap's ariba and you can see cooper has stronger spending momentum but not as much presence in the market so to me my influence is oh that's an opportunity for them to steal share more modern technology you know more facile and of course oracle has products in this space but the oracle dot includes all oracle products not just the procurement stuff but uh maybe your thoughts on this absolutely i love this chart i think that's your spot on this would be the same way i would interpret the chart where um increased spending momentum is is a sign of the company providing products that people like and we we expect to see cooper's share grow market share grow over time as well so let's come back to the chart and i want to i want to really point out the green ellipse this is the data zone if you will uh and we're like a broken record on this program with snowflake has performed unbelievably well in net score and spending momentum every quarter the dtr has captured enough end sample in its survey holding near or above 80 percent its net score consistently is has been up there and we've plotted data bricks in that zone it's been expected right that data bricks is going to do an ipo this year late last month company raised 1.6 billion in a private round so i guess that was either a strategy to delay the ipo or raise a bunch more cash and give late investors a low risk bite at the apple you know pre-ipo as we saw with snowflake last year what we didn't plot here are some of snowflake's biggest competitors ivana who also happen to be their partners most notably the big cloud players all who have their own database offerings aws microsoft and google now you've said snowflake is much more than a database company i wonder if you could add some color here yeah that's a very good point david uh basically the the driver of the thesis in snowflake is all about acceleration and spending and what we are seeing is the customers that are signed up on their platform today they're not even spending they're probably spending less than five percent of what they can ultimately spend on this product and the reason is because they don't yet know what the ultimate applications are for this right so you're gonna start with putting the data in a format you can use and you need to come up with use cases or how are you actually going to use this data so back to the example that i gave with answers the first use case that they found was trying to optimize leads there could be like 100 other use cases and they're coming up with with those on a daily basis so i would expect um this score to keep keep uh keep up pretty high or or go even higher as we as people figure out how they can use this product you know the buy-the-dip thesis on snowflake was great last quarter because the stock pulled back after they announced earnings and when we reported we said you know mike the the company see well cleveland research came out remember they got the dip on that and we looked at the data and we said mike scarpelli said that you know we're going to probably as a percentage of overall customers decelerate the net net new logos but we're going deeper into the customer base and that's exactly what's happening with with snowflake but okay let's bring up the slide again last but not least the z scaler we love z scalar we named z scaler in 2019 as an emerging four-star security company along with crowdstrike and octa and we said these three should be on your radar and as you see we've plotted z scalar with octa who with its it's its recent move into to converging identity and governance uh it gets kind of interesting uh we plotted them with palo alto as well another cyber security player that we've covered extensively we love octa in addition to z-scaler we great respect for palo alto and you'll note all of them are over that 40 percent line these are disruptors they're benefiting well not so much palo alto they're more legacy but the the other two are benefiting from that shift to work from home cloud security modern tech stack uh the acquisition that octa-made of of of auth0 and again z scalar cloud security getting rid of a lot of hardware uh really has a huge tailwind at its back if on a zscaler you know they've benefited from the huge my cloud migration trend what are your thoughts on the company so i actually love all three companies that are there right and the point is people are just going to spend more money whether you are on the cloud of the cloud the data centers need more security as well so i think there is a strong case to be made for all three with this scaler the upside is that it's just very easy to use very easy to implement and if you're somebody that is just setting up infrastructure on the cloud there is no reason for you to call any other competitor right with palo alto the case there is that if you have an established um security platfor if you're on their security platform the databa on the data center side uh they they did introduce through several acquisitions a pretty attractive cloud offering as well so they've been gaining share as well in the space and and the company does look pretty attractive on valiation basis so for us cyber security is really all about rising tide lifts all boats here right so you can have a pure play like this scaler uh that benefits from the cloud but even somebody like palo alto is pretty well positioned um to benefit yeah we think so too over a year ago we reported on the valuation divergence between palo alto and fortinet fortinet was doing a better job moving to the cloud and obviously serves more of a mid-market space palo alto had some go-to-market execution challenges we said at the time they're going to get through those and when we talk to chief information security officers palo alto is like the gold standard they're the thought leader they want to work with them but at the same time they also want to participate in some of these you know modern cloud stacks so i we agree there's plenty of room for all three um just to add a bit more color and drill into the spending data a little bit more this slide here takes that net score and shows the progression since january 2019 and you can see a snowflake just incredible in terms of its ability to maintain that elevated net score as we talked about and the table on the insert it shows you the number of responses and all three of these companies have been getting more mentions over time but snowflake and z scale are now both well over 100 n in the survey each quarter and the other notable piece here and this is really important you can see all three are coming out of the isolation economy with the spending uptick nice upticks shown in the most recent survey so that's again another positive but i want to close ivana with kind of making the bull and bear case and have you address really the risks to the buy the dip scenario so look there are a lot of reasons to like these companies we talked about them cooper they've got earnings momentum you know management on the call side had very strong end market demand this the stock you know has underperformed the nasdaq you know this year snowflake and zscaler they also have momentum snowflake get this enormous tam uh although they were punished for not putting a hard number on it which is ridiculous in my opinion i mean the thing is it's huge um the investors were just kind of you know wanting a little binky baby blanket but they all have modern tech in the cloud and really importantly this shows in the etr surveys you know the momentum that they have so very high retention is the other point i wanted to make the very very low churn of these companies however cooper's management despite the blowout quarter they gave kind of underwhelming guidance they've cited headwinds uh they've with the the the lamisoft uh migration to their cloud platform snowflake is kind of like price to perfection so maybe that's an advantage because every every little negative news is going to going to cause the company to dip but it's you know it's pretty high value because salutman and scarpelli everybody expects them to surpass what happened at servicenow which was a rocket ship and it could be all argued that all three are richly priced and overvalued so but ivana you're looking out as you said a couple of years three years maybe even five years how do you think about the potential downside risks in in your by the dip scenario you buy every dip you looking for bigger dips or what's your framework there so what we try to do is really look every quarter the company reports is there something that's driving fundamental change to the story or is it a one-off situation where people are just misunderstanding what the company is reporting so in the case we kind of addressed some of the earnings that that were reported but with koopa we think the man that management is guiding conservatively as they should so we're not very concerned about their ability to execute on on the guidance and and to exceed the guidance with snowflake price to perfection that's never a good idea to avoid a stock uh because it just shows that there is the company is doing a great job executing right so um we are looking for reports like the cleveland report where they would be like negative on the stock and that would be an entry point uh for us so broadly we apply by the deep philosophy but not not if something fundamentally changes in the story and none of these three are showing any signs of fundamental change okay we're going to leave it right there thanks to my guest today ivana tremendous having you would love to have you back great to see you thank you david and def you definitely want to check out sprx and the spear etf now remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes they're all available as podcasts all you do is search breaking analysis podcasts you can always connect with me on twitter i'm at d vallante or email me at david.vellante at siliconangle.com love the comments on linkedin don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 20 >>20 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual. Is the Cube virtual not there in person this year because of CO of it? I'm John for your host of the Cube. Got David wants to meet him in all the Cube folks covering, of course, with VM Ware and VM World 2022. Great guest here to talk about the future of the workforce solutions and the impact of network security and partnerships. Tom Gala, senior vice president general manager of networking and security business unit at VM Ware and put it, Men OSHA. Who's the VP of business development and corporate development at Z Scaler. Two great companies all doing extremely well as customers are dealing with Cove it And the reality is this market and putting plans in place for coming out with a growth strategy. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today. >>Yeah, John, thanks for having us. >>Thanks for having us, >>Tom. I want to start with you. Actually, the partnership with the scaler is the discussion of this topic. But you guys do have some hard news around the future of workforce solutions. What's the hard news and has that relate to all this? >>Yeah, we sure do, John. So you know, networks were built in a very different time. Networks were built when work was a place that you came. Now, work is the thing that you do. Oftentimes you do from your living room or your den. As I am on DSO, it really calls into question some of the fundamental principles of how we build a deploy networks. In the old model, we would set up something like a branch office and we would back haul traffic using a dedicated circuit like an mpls circuit back, haul it to one of a handful of locations that we called the DMZ or Demilitarized and those locations where you would stitch together a security ensemble made out of dedicated hardware appliances, firewalls, Web proxies, I PS systems and the like And that model service? Well, Azan industry for many decades, three. I'd say 30 years. Um, all of a sudden, the whole notion of the workplace has changed and changed dramatically We're all living through that and experiencing it firsthand. And so the original model of back hauling traffic to some point in, you know, precipitating New Jersey so that you can run it through some magic black box because the model doesn't apply anymore. And so at the end, where we have a new vision for how we can take the security, the reliability, the performance that you get when you're on the corporate network and extended into people's homes. And this is in line with what industries air calling, sassy or secure access services edge. And so the news that we're announcing is we have a complete, sassy solution that involves zero trust access. It involves firewall I. D. S I. P s capability, Advanced security services and then importantly ah, very strong partnership with the scaler on. We can walk through how that works, but it's really driven by this new shape of the workplace. >>Put it, Talk about the partnership with VM where we've been following see scaler for a long time. What a great success story. Great technology team. Great business model growth in your marketplace. Congratulations on your success as you guys continue to grow the world has spun in this disruption kind of world we're in now. You guys are well poised for that. Talk about your partnership with VM Ware. >>Thanks, John. And thank you, Tom, for that quick overview. You know, just to play out this idea we started over it over a decade ago. The basic idea was you know, the users, uh, pretty much everywhere, and the applications are moving to the cloud. And so back to Tom's comment. You know, we had these networks where you were back hauling. Maybe I'll just give a very simple analogy the CIA off Nestle, you know, when he first deployed, uh, Z skater, you know, and and realized a tremendous amount of cost savings that a security. But then, more importantly, the employees off Nestle actually started blogging that the Internet had gotten faster. And when the CEO came to ah customer advisory board meeting, he made a very simple analogy. Imagine having to get out to the Internet through four major international airports worldwide. All right, so you couldn't drink directly traverse from point A to point B. But you have to transit through these four. It would be very inefficient it would really slow you down. And more often than not, you'll be complaining that was the old network architectural. And what we have chosen to do here from a security standpoint at sea Scaler, is make that security closer to the end user. Now we pride ourselves from a security standpoint, and we certainly need networking to also adapt to that. And that's where we have found our partnership with VM Ware, to be particularly strategic. We started partnering with VM were actually prior to them, acquiring Vettel Cloud, which is the software defined when, uh, networking provider, uh, just primarily because they were a cloud based networking player. And this idea off locally breaking out to the Internet Getting out to the end destination as quickly as possible is something that they did quite seamlessly. And so we started this journey, this partnership with them a few years ago and today at VM. Well, we're enhancing that, expanding the partnership not only from a product standpoint, but then, more importantly, we're leaning in from a sales go to market customer support standpoint. >>You know, that's a great point. What? I've been saying this in the queue for a while with the joke was, um the When is the new Land E? I mean, we used to have the old days, remember? Oh, campus connecting networks drive to the airport as you mentioned, the great analogy there, by the way, has to be better. People are working at home. You got technically a land un security, you know, working at home. People are realizing this. These core services have to change. It's not just connect to the Internet the old way. It's everywhere. It's networking everywhere. This is the reality of the kinds of Internet things that used to go on where it's kind of cool and secure. You know, you've got a perimeter. Everything was working. Great. Put it. You mentioned it. Why drive to the airport? Four airports with world. That's a great analogy, Tom. This points to the future. Ready concept, access anywhere. Services that are needed for the security and, more importantly, the user experience. I don't want to slow down to go faster. I wanna I wanna I wanna make it. I wanna make a good experience happen. What's your thought? >>Yeah, well, I mean, I think we're all living through this new world where we're working from home, and sometimes the user experience is less than perfect. In fact, on this broadcast you may see stuttering and break up of the video, and you know, that's that's a problem that I think needs to be solved. It's a problem that we're able to solve with virtualization. So the idea behind virtualization by putting a layer of software on top of a physical asset, you could make it easier to manage that asset. You could make that asset more efficient. We certainly did that with servers. It was really obvious. Now we're doing it to the network itself. So what this means is we have some customers. We have one customer that is in the health care industry, like during the height of the crisis, all of their doctors and researchers had to work from home, and yet they needed to use video communication tools like we're doing here. And they needed a consistently good and user experience. And so we were able to ship these customers more than 8000 boxes over the course of two weeks into people's homes. So think of a little tiny device about the size of a set top box shows up in your house and all of a sudden your zoom or your WebEx sessions just work, no more stuttering. And we're breaking up because we're able to manage the network and virtualized prioritized traffic and deliver consistently good and user experience. So managing the quality of services, a foundational capability, and we have a unique ways to do that with virtualization that I think never existed before the second step is I wanna make sure not only that it's a good user experience, but my security. All of those controls that used to live in black boxes that those replied, This is where our partnership with the scaler is so important. So the scaler has the same philosophy that we do of like, let's put this stuff in many points of presence around the world. I think you know you're in like, 100 or so points of presence, so we weren't 150. And so whatever an end user is, you just find that nearest point of presence, connect and make the shortest route possible to deliver good quality and user experience and also consistent world class security. It's zero. It's >>interesting. First of all. We'll sign up for the Cube Virtual. We need that video late challenges. But we're you know what? We shouldn't have to be video engineers to manage the packets on the round trip. This software, I mean, you know, Web Zoom, they build their entire application to manage these kinds of intellectual property challenges. So that >>brings the >>complexity of applications. So, you know, people are gonna have all these new complexities. And how do you integrate it all? >>Yeah, you know, obviously, Zoom and WebEx companies are, you know, this is court or what they do. The challenges they gotta control both ends of the wire, and and so so with with our network virtualization, we actually control the wire itself, right? We can make the wire behave in a way we can prioritize traffic so that your zoom goes ahead of Xbox Live or Netflix do things like traffic shaping, which are techniques that are actually well understood, but difficult to deploy in a physical world. In a virtual world, we could employ these techniques constantly adapting and changing to make sure that engineer experience is smooth and easy on. That's really pretty impactful. >>Put it. What's your reaction all of this because you know I'm a customer, you know? You know, I'm like, What's in it for me, guys? Integration with the scale of VM Ware. What's in it for me? Because I got now multi clouds in the horizon. I'm dealing with multiple clouds today. I got complexity and applications themselves, and I want to create the nirvana that you laid out, which is access anywhere. High speed eso I might not have the expertise in house. What do I do? What's in it for me? Take me through the value proposition. >>Absolutely. So you know, Tom touched on it. You know the idea of bringing security as close to the end user as possible. If you step back for a minute and you start to think about security usually security and user experience off a contradictory Usually if you add more security, you lose use of experience and vice versa. That's sort of what Ziese killers start to go solve. And so, you know, over a decade ago, you know, when we started to build the architectures, it was built with a few core principles in mind, right? The idea of being completely distributed today we're in over 200 points of presence worldwide. That gives us a pretty good footprint to be as close to the end user. We absolutely could not compromise own security. So this idea that if you have a finite appliance, maybe the appliance has a, you know, a limited amount of CPU or horsepower And so I will tweet the security s so that I could get more performance, not the case with how we ran about, you know, offering security. All security services run all the time. Right? So without any compromise to the end user, and then finally, you know, when it comes to the actual security itself architectures based on something called a proxy. And usually again, if you start to think about a proxy and security was, uh people don't think in a very favorable manner, they usually think it slows things down. It adds Leighton, see, it breaks applications. And again I go back to, you know, the foundational elements of the skater. When we started this journey, it was with this idea that we're gonna build this proxy from the ground up. Very high performance. Mike was second, like late and see something that you would not see in the market anywhere with this partnership. Now, right? Seamless integration between VM Wednesay skater You are now able to set up these tunnels instantly automatically, so go back to Tom's. Example. 8000 set top boxes like devices sent out to this healthcare institution. Right? You can automatically set up tunnels such that the traffic is pointing to Z scale. There's feel over capabilities, so any and all of that has been instrumented in in software. The end customers sets that up. You know can automate that templates all across those 8000 devices. You now have security at the same time with user experience. A passed away to go adapt to business needs agility, you know, being able to keep up and lower your costs because you're substantially reducing the Mpls footprint. So there's a whole bunch of disparate, uh, you know, advantages that an enterprise gets. But the biggest one off amongst them, in my mind, is just being able to address the business needs. I mean, how Maney CEO is today with Colvin are starting to realize my network is not adapting to this new normal right, and so that's sort of where this partnership between VM Ware and Z scaler comes in. It's very timely. >>Everyone's like they want more about their network, and that's like, you know, everyone's banging on the table. Great. Great point there. Thanks for taking that great explanation. I wanna just follow up with you if you if you don't mind, compare that what you just said in terms of the value of Z scaler with this partnership versus the old way, because you what you just laid out was, you know, dynamic provisioning, setting up connections, having software, automate things, compare what it was like before because, remember, I mean, people have been around the industry. No, the pain in the butt that it's been and human error Compare what the old way it was like And now with this experience, can just just >>really And I let Tom talk about, you know, things on the network side. You know, where you might have had a large behemoth like a Cisco box where you try to tweak some policy and the entire box would fall over or something along those lines from a security standpoint. Usually when you had a a box, you know, You know, folks would call it a youth name box that God about box with, You know, as much security as you could push into a finite amount of appliance unified threat management function. Usually what would end up happening the old way was, you know, you would, you would you would have some basic security capabilities. Maybe it was. It's a traditional DMC that Thoma alluded to. You know, there's a firewall, there's an I. P s. There's some Web proxy capabilities and and that that was the that was the journey that a customer had, you know, So they would replicate this box and all those various locations. Or in the case of Nestle, before the scaler, they had those Dems es in four locations around the world, right? And the moment security, security keeps changing, right, the threat landscape keeps adopting. I mean, today, within disease killer cloud, we provide over 125,000 updates everyday, right? That's how dynamic security is. And so because the threat keeps changing, usually one of the things that vendors will try and do is add more security to that existing appliance. Right? So you're trying to make sure that a customer bottom appliance on, they need to make sure that they recoup the full investment. Let's add a little more security to it. Let's add a little more security to it so that I can keep up with the latest threats. Well, the problem with that is, when you have a finite amount of horsepower within the appliance, the performance starts to drop. And so usually that was the trade off that enterprises were making. With the security now being in the cloud right, And this idea that you're in the way, you sort of have infinite compute. Uh, you are now decoupling security from those those branch devices that Tom just alluded to. I mean, that 8000 boxes, right? One of the key points of a sassy framework that Tom alluded to is a very lightweight branch. And that's the piece That's the North Star that I think both VM Ware and Czyz killer have had right that that that low end not not lowering but of a thin branch and let the heavy lifting whether it's on the US side from the networking standpoint, whether it's security, um, you know, as it related to Z skater. Let that heavy lifting be done in the cloud. >>Yeah, and of course, there's a lot of lot of moving parts, so it's It's might be lower in lightweight, but it's more functionality. That's what the cloud Because I get that point, by the way, that anyone in the D M Z knows that as you add more stuff in there, get more, you know, cooks in the kitchen. Nothing good comes from that. Um, Tom, I'm gonna get your thoughts for the your audience out there and your customers and your prospects. What does the Z scale of partnership mean for them? >>Well, like I said, it zone opportunity to think differently about how we build a deploy enterprise networks. This a dramatic change. Most of us have been familiar with the old model where you had a spoon. It was referring to those big heavy boxes, the VPN concentrators and at the same time, most of us have been employees of those companies on. We've had the, you know, sort of less than stellar experience of turning the VPN on, and all of a sudden interest in Internet go slow. That's that's not what we want Thio achieve, and so so having the ability to use a distributed architectures. It's being forced upon us. Everyone is distributed where they like. They like it or not, Right? And so having a distributed architecture where I can put security and quality of service network controls closer to the end user is really, really critical. And I think just as puny was saying they started with this idea of of pushing security closely on user. We started with fellow Cloud with the idea of virtual izing the network in lots of physical places. So retail locations. So you've got thousands of stores around the world. You need to deliver video and audio services into those stores with a very high quality. So we were designed to have a very light, uh, entry point, and a light interviewing can just be pure software. It could be a small box three advantage of a small boxes. It's so turnkey it's designed that totally unskilled operator can use this retail people. A store manager gets a little box in the mail. You plug it in, you know, snap to Internet cables into it, and it just works again, Put it referred to this. This is part of our value. Proposition is, you plug this thing in a zone and used all you know is the Internet just got faster. You don't have to configure proxy settings. What's my I p range? Like that stuff's? Yeah, exactly. Well, and this is so many of us are feeling it now when you have, you know, sub optimal network connections. So being able to deliver a quality and user experience, >>you know, Cove, it accelerated a lot of a lot of opportunities. Also exposes the scabs and and, you know, things that been laying around and some suboptimal projects. I mean, and everyone's gonna be doubling down on things that are working and probably, you know, putting on the back burner or killing projects that don't make sense. So, um, this is a great opportunity, and I think forces things right in you guys. Wheelhouse is so I appreciate taking the time for the last minute that we have left Tom and putting. If you don't mind, I'd love to get your thoughts real quick on what's next after cloud. Obviously, cloud brings up all these benefits you're talking about. Um, what do you guys see is what's next after cloud Tom will start with you. >>I think that the you know, the range of services that will deliver in this format is not at all limited to traditional DMC services. So thank ap. I gateways. Think about core infrastructure offerings like DNS. Pretty much everything that we used in the network can actually now be delivered as a service in software more efficiently, Um, then standing up boxes and and racking, stacking yourselves. And so our view is that that cove, it has killed the appliance once and for all. And that's broadly. That's not just at the at the edge. That's in the core of the data center, things like load balancers. They're all moving to software with scale out scale out infrastructure software running on X 86 on DE. So I think that change of that magnitude will still take a while to roll out. But it's happening, >>Cove. It killed appliance. That's the headline right there. Love that. Put it after cloud. What's next? >>Well, you know, I'll say this job very similar to what Tom just mentioned. I think we're in the early innings, you know, when we would talk to our customers about transforming the network and adapting to this new normal. You know, we had some early adopters, but there was still a fair number of people that was skeptical and that loved their appliances. Covert has changed a lot of that. And so we have seen, in general acceleration of the business. The market is moving in our direction, and we feel that with this partnership you have to market leaders coming together. Right? VM ware on the networking side on the cloud networking side on the data center z scaler as it relates to cloud security user base security. This idea that we are a zero trust exchange that allows users to connect your applications to the Internet in a safe manner and at scale. That's the beauty off. You know, this'll, uh, partnership that we have brought together. And we are hopeful that customers will embrace it with confidence. And I'm mindful that we're in the early innings. >>Great points, gentlemen. Awesome stuff, great insights. And I think the cloud native integration shows that people in the ecosystem is evolving to be cloud native toe have these kinds of integrations these value points physical virtualization. Tom. Great point. I mean, we're not in face to face, but we're here. Virtually the The Cube is gonna be virtual. It's suffered to find operations. The world has changed. I think everyone is now seeing it. Thanks for the insight. And congratulations, Tom. On the news putting. Thank congratulations on the partnership with VM. Where sounds like it's great for customers looking forward to digging in. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Okay. That's the cube coverage here. We're in Palo Alto, California. We're in the Bay Area, but this is the emerald virtual. We're not in person, but we're virtual. I'm showing for your host for coverage of the emerald 2020. Thanks for watching.

(funk music) (funk music) (funk music) (funk music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every enterprise is responding to the opportunities of cloud with significant changes in people, process, how they think about technology, how they're going to align technology overall with their business and with their business strategies. Now those changes are affecting virtually every aspect of business but especially every aspect of technology. Especially security. So what does it mean to envision a world in which significant new classes of services are being provided through cloud mechanisms and modes, but you retain and in fact, even enhance the quality of security that your enterprise can utilize. To have that conversation, we're joined today by a great guest, Amit Sinha is president and CTO at Zscaler. Amit, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So before we get into it, what's new at Zscaler? >> Well, at Zscaler our mission is to make the internet and cloud a secure place for businesses and as I engage with our global 2000 customers and prospects, they are going through some of the digital transformation challenges that you just alluded to. Specifically for security, what is happening is that they had a lot of applications that were sitting in a data center or in their headquarters and that center of gravity is now moving to the cloud. They probably adopt their Office 365, and Box, and Salesforce, and these applications have moved out. Now in addition, the users are everywhere. They're accessing those services, not just from offices but also from their mobile devices and home. So if your users have left the building, and your applications are no longer sitting in your data center, that begs that question: Where should the security stack be? You know, it cannot be your legacy security appliances that sat in your DMZ and your IT closets. So that's the challenge that we see out there, and Zscaler is helping these large global organizations transform their security and network for a more mobile and a cloud-first world. >> Distributed world? So let me make sure I got this right. So basically, cause I think I totally agree with you >> Right. >> Just to test it, that many regarded the cloud as a centralization strategy. >> Correct. >> What we really see happening, is we're seeing enterprises more distribute their data, more distribute their processing, but they have not updated how they think about security so the presumption is, "yeah we're going to put more processing data out closer to the action but we're going to backhaul a whole bunch back to our security model," and what I hear you saying is no, you need to push those security services out to where the data is, out to where the process, out to where the user is. Have I got that right? >> You have nailed it, right. Think of it this way, if I'm a large global 2000 organization, I might have thousands of branches. All of those branches, traditionally, have used a hub-and-spoke network model. I might have a branch here in Palo Alto but my headquarters is in New York. So now I have an MPLS circuit connecting this branch to New York. If my Exchange server and applications and SAP systems are all there, then that hub-and-spoke model made sense. I am in this office >> Right. >> I connect to those applications and all my security stack is also there. But fast forward to today, all of those applications are moving and they're not just in one cloud. You know, you might have adopted Salesforce.com for CRM, you might have adopted Workday, you might have adopted Office 365. So these are SaaS services. Now if I'm sitting here in Palo Alto, and if I have to access my email, it makes absolutely no sense for me to VPN back to New York only to exit to the internet right there. What users want is a fast, nimble user experience without security coming in the way. What organizations want is no compromise in their security stack. So what you really need is a security stack that follows the user wherever they are. >> And the data. >> And the data, so my data...you know Microsoft has a front-door service here in Redwood City and if if you are a user here and trying to access that, I should be able to go straight with my entire security stack right next to it. That's what Gartner is calling SASE these days. >> Well, let's get into that in a second. It almost sounds as though what you're suggesting is that the enterprise needs to look at security as a SaaS service itself. >> 100 percent. If your users are everywhere and if your applications are in the cloud, your security better be delivered as a consistent "as-a-service," right next to where the users are and hopefully co-located in the same data center as where the applications are present so the only way to have a pervasive security model is to have it delivered in the cloud, which is what Zscaler has been doing from day one. >> Now, a little spoiler alert for everybody, Zscaler's been talking about this for 10-plus years. >> Right. >> So where are we today in the market place starting to recognize and acknowledge this transformation in the basic security architecture and platform that we're going through? >> I'm very excited to see that the market is really adopting what Zscaler has been talking about for over a decade. In fact, recently, Gartner released a paper titled "SASE," it stands for Secure Access Service Edge and there are, I believe, four principal tenets of SASE. The first one, of course, is that compute and security services have to be right at the edge. And we talked about that. It makes sense. >> For where the service is being delivered. >> You can't backhaul traffic to your data center or you can't backhaul traffic to Google's central data center somewhere. You need to have compute capabilities with things like SSL Interception and all the security services running right at the edge, connecting users to applications in the shortest path, right? So that's sort of principle number one of SASE. The second principle that Gartner talks about, which again you know, has been fundamental to Zscaler's DNA, is to keep your devices and your branch offices light. Don't shove too much complexity from a security perspective on the user devices and your branches. Keep it simple. >> Or the people running those user devices >> Absolutely >> in the branches >> Yeah, so you know, keep your branch offices like a light router, that forwards traffic to the cloud, where the heavy-lifting is done. >> Right. >> The third principle they talk about is to deliver modern security, you need to have a proxy-based architecture and essentially what a proxy architecture allows you to do is to look at content, right? Gone are the days where you could just say, stop a website called "evil.com" and allow a website "good.com," right? It's not like that anymore. You have to look at content, you know. You might get malware from a Google Drive link. You can't block Google now, right? So looking at SSL-encrypted content is needed and firewalls just can't do it. You have to have a proxy architecture that can decrypt SSL connections, look at content, provide malware services, provide policy-based access control services, et cetera and that's kind of the third principle. And finally what Gartner talks about is SASE has to be cloud-native, it has to be, sort of, born and bred in the cloud, a true multitenant, cloud-first architecture. You can't take, sort of, legacy security appliances and shove it in third-party infrastructure like AWS and GCP and deliver a cloud service and the example I use often is, just because you had a great blu-ray player or a DVD player in your home theater, you can't take 100,000 of these and shove it into AWS and become a Netflix. You really need to build that service from the ground up. You know, in a multitenant fashion and that's what we have done for security as a service through the cloud. >> So we are now, the market seems to be kind of converging on some of the principles that Zscaler's been talking about for quite some time. >> Right. >> When we think about 2020, how do you anticipate enterprises are going to respond as a consequence of this convergence in acknowledging that the value proposition and the need are starting to come together? >> Absolutely, I think we see the momentum picking up in the market, we have lots of conversations with CIO's who are going through this digital transformation journey, you know transformation is hard. There's immune response in big organizations >> Sure. >> To change. Not much has changed from a security and network architecture perspective in the last two decades. But we're seeing more and more of that. In fact, over 400 of global 2000 organizations are 100 percent deployed on Zscaler. And so that momentum is picking up and we see a lot of traction with other prospects who are beginning to see the light, as we say it. >> Well as you start to imagine the relationship between security and data, between security and data, one of the things that I find interesting is many respects to cloud, especially as it becomes more distributed, is becoming better acknowledged almost as a network of services. >> Right. >> As opposed to AWS as a data center here and that makes it a cloud data center. >> Right. >> It really is this network of services, which can happen from a lot of different places, big cloud service providers, your own enterprise, partners providing services to you. How does the relationship between Zscaler and kind of an openness >> Hm-mm. >> Going to come together? Hm-mm. >> So that you can provide services from a foreign enterprise to the enterprise's partners, customers, and others that the enterprise needs to work with. >> That's a great question, Peter and I think one of the most important things I tell our customers and prospects is that if you look at a cloud-delivered security architecture, it better embrace some of the SASE principles. One of the first things we did when we built the Zscaler platform was to distribute it across 150 data centers. And why did we do that? We did that because when a user is going to destinations, they need to be able to access any destination. The destination could be on Azure, could be on AWS, could be Salesforce, so by definition, it has to be carrier-neutral, it has to be cloud-neutral. I can't build a service that is designed for all internet traffic in a GCP or AWS, right. So how did we do that? We went and looked at one of the world's best co-location facilities that provide maximum connectivity options in any given region. So in North America, we might be in an Equinix facility and we might use tier one ISPs like GTT and Zayo that provide excellent connectivity to our customers and the destinations they want to visit. When you go to China, there's no GCP there, right so we work with China Unicom and China Telecom. When we are in India, we might work with an Airtel or a Sify, when we are in Australia, we might be working with Telstra. So we work with, you know, world class tier one ISPs in best data centers that provide maximum connectivity options. We invested heavily in internet exchange connectivity. Why? Because once you come to Zscaler, you've solved the physics problem by building the data center close to you, the next thing is, you want quickly go to your application. You don't want security to be in the way >> Right. >> Of application access. So with internet exchange connectivity, we are peered in a settlement-free way or BGP with Microsoft, with Akamai, with Apple, with Yahoo, right. So we can quickly get you to the content while delivering the full security stack, right? So we had to really take no shortcuts, back to your point of the world is very diverse and you cannot operate in a walled garden of one provider anymore and if you really build a cloud platform that is embracing some of the SASE principles we talked about, you have to do it the hard way. By building this one data center at a time. >> Well, you don't want your servicers to fall down because you didn't put the partnerships in place >and hardend them Correct. >> As much as you've hardened some of the other traffic. So as we think about kind of, where this goes, what do you envision Zscaler's, kind of big customer story is going to be in 2020 and beyond? Obviously, the service is going to be everywhere, change the way you think about security, but how, for example, is the relationship between the definition of the edge and the definition of the secure service going to co-evolve? Are people going to think about the edge differently as they start to think more in terms of a secure edge or where the data resides and the secure data, what do you think? >> Let's start off with five years and go back, right? >> We're going forward. >> Work our way back. Well, five years from now, hopefully everyone is on a 5G phone, you know, with blazing-fast internet connections, on devices that you love, your applications are everywhere, so now think of it from an IT perspective. You know, my span of control is becoming thinner and thinner, right? my users are on devices that I barely control. My network is the internet that I really don't control. My applications have moved to the cloud or either hosted in third-party infrastructure or run as a SaaS application, which I really don't control. Now, in this world, how do I provide security? How do I provide user experience? Imagine if you are the CIO and your job is to make all of this work, where will you start, right? So those are some of the big problems that we are helping our customers with. So this-- >> Let me as you a question 'cause here's where I was going with the question. I would start with, if I can't control all these things, I'm going to apply my notion of security >> Hm-mm. >> And say I am going to control that which is within >> Right. >> my security boundaries, not at a perimeter level, not at a device level, but at a service level. >> Absolutely and that's really the crux of the Zscaler platform service. We build this Zero Trust architecture. Our goal is to allow users to quickly come to Zscaler and Zscaler becomes the policy engine that is securely connecting them to all the cloud services that they want to go to. Now in addition, we also allow the same users to connect to internal applications that might have required a traditional VPN. Now think of it this way, Peter. When you connect to Google today, do you VPN to Google's network? To access Gmail? No. Why should you have to VPN to access an internal application? I mean, you get a link on your mobile phone, you click on it and it didn't work because it required a separate form of network access. So with Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access, we are delivering a beautiful service that works across 150 data centers. Users connect to the service and the service becomes a policy engine that is securely connecting you to the destinations that you want. Now, in addition, you asked about what's going to happen in a couple of years. The same service can be extended for partners. I'm a business, I have hundreds of partners who want to connect to me. Why should I allow legacy VPN access or private circuits that expose me? I don't even know who's on the other end of the line, right? They come onto my network and you hear about the Target breaches because some HVAC contract that had unrestricted access, you hear about the Airbus breach because another contract that had access. So how do we build a true Zero Trust cloud platform that is securely allowing users, whether it's your employees, to connect to named applications that they should, or your partners that need access to certain applications, without putting them on the network. We're decoupling application access from network access. And there's one final important linchpin in this whole thing. Remember we talked about how powerless organizations >> Right. >> feel in this distributed model? Now imagine, your job is to also ensure that people are having a good user experience. How will you do that, right? What Zscaler is trying to do now is, we've been very successful in providing the secure and policy-based connectivity and our customers are asking us, hey, you're sitting in between all of this, you have visibility into what's happening on the user's device. Clearly you're sitting in the middle in the cloud and you see what's happening on the left-hand side, what's happening on the right-hand side. You know, you have the cloud effect, you can see there's a problem going on with Microsoft's network in the China region, right? Correlate all of that information and give me proactive intelligence around user experience and that's what we launched recently at Zenith Live. We call it Zscaler Digital Experience, >> Hmm. >> So overall the goal of the platform is to securely connect users and entities to named applications with Zero Trust principles. We never want security and user experience to be orthogonal requirements that has traditionally been the case. And we want to provide great user experience and visibility to our customers who've started adopting this platform. >> That's a great story. It's a great story. So, once again, I want to thank you very much for coming in and that's Amit Sinha, who is the president and CTO at Zscaler, focusing a lot on the R&D types of things that Zscaler's doing. Thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> It's my pleasure, Peter. Always enjoy talking to you. >> And thanks for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (funk music) (funk music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a Cube Conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to our program a first time guest, Larry Biagini, who is the Chief Technology Evangelist at Zscaler. Also had a long career at GE. Your last position there you were the Chief Technology Officer. Larry thanks so much for joining me, pleasure to me you. >> Thanks for having us. All right so you know before we get into some of your background at GE tell us a little bit... Zscaler, we've got some familiarity with the team. We've had some of the executives, many of the customers on our program. Tell us what part you do at Zscaler. >> So when I left GE after about 26 years, I was a Zscaler customer. Very early Zscaler customer at GE. And one of the things that intrigued me about GE and one of the things about Zscaler I learned with working with them is that they're vision for security and my vision for security and agility of organizations going forward were an easy match. That made a transition very simple, I was gone from GE for four weeks, that was my retirement before I got recruited into Zscaler and the reason it was a good match is I had big company experience. I had a very good network of people that are operating in large companies and Zscaler needed those connections. But we also had a product that was mature but we had a message that we had to get across to these folks. So it was a message that was real to me, a message that mattered to what Zscaler need to put out there, and that's why I'm the Chief Technology Evangelist. I spend my time with customers, with prospects. Just understanding what they're going through. Using my experience at GE and my experience with other customers to help them through that, and that's the role that I play. >> Yeah I know my time when I worked on the vendor side working with customers being in briefing centers working with them were some of the most gratifying for me. Cause it was you know helping them through what they were working on. Bring a C.E.O. in -- you no longer work for GE but give us a little bit of the background as to you know what gave you some of the skills and some of the scars to help customers that are now going through these journeys. >> The story really starts when I was asked to become the Chief Risk Officer for IT for GE. I was the CIO of the largest business at the time. But GE was going through a transformation or wanted to go through a transformation. They recognized that digital was an opportunity for them and could also be a threat, but at the same time security was not enabling the organization it was sort of disabling it. It was in the way. Now I had no security background at the time it was mostly in architecture and applications. I'd run the data centers but I was very familiar with security and what it was supposed to do and what it actually was doing. So one of the first things we looked at is why we were doing what we were doing. And the reality is ten years ago it made sense doing what we were doing which was protecting the network because everything was in the network. The users were in the network, the data was in the network, The applications were in the network and if you protect the network by definition or by default you're protecting everything else. But when we started seeing behaviors that's not the way people were acting. There was more and more traffic going directly to internet. Whether it be for personal use or for business use more and more business use. The mobile workforce and I just don't mean mobile devices the workforce itself was mobile, where we were out in the field. That's where you make money, it's when you're with customers, when you're selling. So this notion of protecting the network allows you to protect apps, users, and data actually is a fallacy. But we continue to do it because that was the problem we had to solve ten, fifteen years ago. The problem changed with the introduction of cloud, with the introduction of mobility. With end users getting much much smarter about how they can use technology without actually needing IT. You know we used to say that everybody's their own CIO at this point. They have their own devices they have their own networks, they have their own apps. Our job is still to secure them but not get in the way of them. >> Yeah we know back in the old days it was physical things that I could wrap my arms around and if I could lock a door, or you know build the moat as we talked about in the industry, that was great but the surface area just keeps increasing. Cloud pushed it that way. Edge is pushing it you know order of magnitudes even more. So it's interesting I think you know when we talked about cloud adoption, security was originally "Oh it's a reason why I might not go to the cloud," and then it was like "Wait, its a new opportunity for it." To be honest digital transformations I haven't heard as much discussion about thee challenges and opportunity's of security there so maybe you can help expand on that a bit. >> So I think what Zscaler does and the notion that I had that made it an easy fit was I always believed or not always believed after I took that role I believed that there had to be something between the user and whereever they wanted to go and we had to put as many services as we could in that. Now we originally thought we could build that ourselves. We couldn't. We didn't have the footprint, we didn't have the scale, even though were a large company at the time. But I always thought that tying a user and a application to a location was a big mistake. And so when I think about digital transformation what I'm really thinking about is safely attaining speed in order to do business in today's world. So you talked about devices. I'd argue that even five years ago most larger organizations could not tell the devices on their network yet we were trying to protect that. Right? They knew the ones they knew about but they didn't know the Raspberry Pi that was plugged in by an engineering guy. Or they didn't know that somebody just put a new machine on the factory floor and it happened to have an IP address. So we were actually kidding ourselves into what we were doing. So I think the cloud actually opened up the eyes of not only the business but opened up the eyes of the IT and security folks that the way -- you can't control the network anymore because you don't own the network -- I'd argue that you haven't for a long time -- and because of that things had to change. I also think that it became -- and I've seen this in my four years with Zscaler -- four years ago security was sort of black and white. Now that the dialogue has changed and more about risk what's really important to my company. The fact of matter is have to admit to my board that I can't protect everything. But I need to protect certain things but you have to tell me what those things are. I can mitigate that risk. I can't do everything to everybody and so I think that's the discussion people are having now. And when in five years ago people would say "Oh Amazon, Azure, GCP, I want to see their security practices, this, that, and the other thing." Now they can't stop things from moving there. They're less concerned about the security practices because they get an attestation of those and things like that. They're more concerned about how their organizations are migrating stuff. Are they migrating the right data? Do they have the right controls around it? So I think the mindset of the CISOs has changed a bit I think the roles of CIO, the CTO, and the CISO have changed. Where the CISO is more risk-averse, The CTO is actually learning how to tie things together rather than build them. And the CIO is focused on data and business opportunities. >> Yeah, Larry maybe you can bring us inside one of the customers or you know a sample of what you're hearing from customers because so many of the things you said really resonate absolutely five years ago was like Cloud, let me get your SLA and let me read trough all of it, and hey can you adjust this for me? Amazon says no. Okay wait I need to adjust to this, but the mantra I hear from my friends in security is security is everyone's responsibility and it is a practice and therefore it needs to be embedded in there not some product or thing that gets bolted on at the end. So how are they coming to that? Is it the CISO? Organizationally, where do these conversations start and fit? >> So every organization is different, so what I'll give you is a sort of combined view of a large organization. Probably two or three large organizations. The first step is adopting the internet as your corporate network. Once you come to that realization that the internet is your corporate network and will continue to be so, then the things that you do change dramatically. And the opportunities that you have change dramatically: from a cost perspective, from a service-delivery perspective, and from an end-user satisfaction perspective. >> So let me ask that for a second, because I have you know, some peers and friends that work at big companies and it feels like there's the corporate network and then I've got my device on the other thing that I use, the public network. Is this embracing the just, "it's there," or do I still have those two separate networks? >> I think where it's going and where the more progressive companies that I deal with are, is that rather than having a corporate network supporting everything, the corporate network will actually shrink. The...only supporting what it needs to support, and will become a destination just like an AWS, or an Azure or GCP. So if you have a corporate network today that's big and wide and flat, it has users, apps, data in it, and your data centers, my view and dealing with, again, some more of the progressive companies is that corporate network will shift to just a data-center network. And it will have no users on it but users will be able to get to it. So you turn yourself into an AWS. Some people call that Hybrid Computing. I call it Hybrid Networking. But the reality is most organizations, large organizations are going to have a hard time getting rid of their data centers in the near future. So they're going to have to be part of this game. And rather than try to extend the current model to wrap around AWS and Azure and the cloud providers, why not change your model what you do control to actually act like that. So my world has the internet as a corporate network, the corporate network as a subset of the internet, no users on the corporate network, all users untrusted on the internet. That's where I think this whole thing goes and that's where the customers that I talk to are headed. >> Okay one of the biggest challenges when you talk about this transformation is usually some of the organizational dynamics there. Maybe walk us through...you talked about we understand everyone's different you know we've seen the CISO greatly elevated to where their role fits into it but you know corporate structure and the average sysadmin and the like, what are they getting rid of, what are they learning, or is it new people coming in? >> The cultural -- I don't want to say "push back" -- but the cultural challenges are real. You know if you've been in this industry... ...I've been in this industry for forty years. You gain certain expertise and you like to get promoted on that expertise, get recognized for that expertise and it's comfortable to deal in that area. So just think if you're a network admin. You know Cisco equipment. You know it really well. You know your Cisco rep really well. And all of this stuff is second nature to you. Now you're asked to tie it, put up a connection between yourself and AWS, a VPC because you're going to move applications out there. And really, you're not a network guy anymore. You are a design guy to help move applications to the cloud. And it's an uncomfortable space to be in. So you can sort of, there's a couple options. You could say, this too shall pass. (And it won't.) That's I think, a losing proposition. I think you can move to a network provider and say, "Look, I'm still a network guy I can do networking." Or you're going to have to find a way to take the skills that you have and the mindset that you have and work in this new environment. Now that's not easy to do and one of the things that some of the large organizations I deal with are doing is they're bringing in people who grew up in this area and they're trying to seed the education of their own people. Because they're good people right? They know the culture, they know the business. They just don't have the skills that they need today so going to training's not going to help them. Doing it by example with people who've done it before is very important. >> All right how about outcomes? Is there anything you can share from your GE experiences or some of the customers you're working through as to kind that high level of what this means now you know is there a success finish line? Or is it a continuing journey? >> I think the success finish line is actually doing what you're supposed to do for the organization without actually anybody knowing it. Not being in the way. So from my perspective its end users or be they customers, suppliers, internal people, being able to do their job in a frictionless manner but you being able to do your job and the security side is protecting them and the network side, it's making sure they're getting the best user experience out there. And the CIO side is that they're using the best tools for the job. That's it for me. I'm tired, and I have been tired and I don't think it's right for the people that we provide technology or technology solutions to choose our technology as a last technology of choice. But they'd really like to use something else? We should give them that flexibility if it meets the risk appetite of the organization. So to me it's end user satisfaction is the most important thing because that allows you to do your job. Dissatisfied users will always find a way around whatever you put in their way. And that's not good for them, not good for the organization. So that's it for me. >> Great you've been now with Zscaler for four years, tell what's changed in the landscape. Security? You said to board-level discussion absolutely, something we hear, comment I've made is it went from kind of top of mind, bottom of budget, to, you know, no, this is something that actually you're not going to put it off for another quarter or year, you're going to take care of it now. >> So I actually think it's kind of counter-intuitive, what changed...is that I believe that five years ago, security was top of mind and there was a boatload of money thrown at it and that money got spent but nobody was able to prove that they were any more secure than the next guy. The metrics weren't there. I mean if you can't define what your network is, how can you stand in front of your board and say my network is... And so I think there's been a questioning of, are we spending enough on security but not only enough, are we spending it the right areas? Because what we've been doing sort of doesn't make me feel any better. You know, sure we meet our regulatory requirements but that's compliance, that's not security. So I think people are actually questioning, are we doing the right things for the business that we're in today versus the business that we were in in the past? And do we have the right conversation going with the board? Versus a red-yellow-green chart about here's how we think we're secure. And I think that's made a big difference. And I also think the discussion around where information resides and how important that information is and then ultimately how well you mitigate any risk to it, is the most relevant conversation that happens today. It's not, I'm not going to ignore ransomware and things like that but its not "Oh my God I'm getting attacked a million times a day." It's "Do I have something that's of value to somebody else and it will kill me as an organization or hurt me drastically if I lose it." And if I don't know where it is I'm probably going to lose it. Either deliberately or by mistake. So do I have those right controls in place? >> Yeah I'd love to get your commentary, there are certain companies out there that they have the message, you know, security's broken, we need a do-over, you know, the latest- -and-greatest software-defined cloud-based something or other isn't going to solve it, but you know, you've been in this space for decades, so you know where are we as a industry with security today, you feel that we're making progress? Sounds like it. >> I do feel that we're making progress. I think as an industry we recognize that the problem exists, and the problem that exists today is different from the problem that is existed seven, eight, ten, even fifteen years ago, that's number one. Number two is the competitive landscape of companies out that are huge today versus the companies that were huge ten years ago. It's a much different landscape. And these are all what I would call digital companies. They found a way to use information. You know things like Airbnb. It's an information business is all it is. And it's not a Marriott, it's not a Hilton, but it's a competitor to those guys. And I think that's a realization that business are having and that's filtering down into the IT organizations. You know ,we see a lot of companies -- which I don't necessarily agree with -- hiring Chief Digital Officers in addition to Chief Information Officers. And I see that as a bifurcation of the CIO as a back-room office guy and the CDO now is customer-facing. I think this whole thing has to be customer-facing and take advantage of the tools that are out there whether you provide them or whether you get them from somebody else, in a secure and safe enough manner that your business feels comfortable operating. So that's what's changed, I don't think it's...even the hardcore security guys, you know, we've had a lot of breaches in the past. Every one of those breaches, everyone had a firewall, everyone had a proxy. Everybody had all the tools that everybody else had and nobody could prevent those breaches. I think the fact of the matter is you want to prevent the harm of a breach occurring versus spending all your time making sure your breach doesn't occur. So I think that's a different mindset. >> Larry, I want to give you the final word. We've been going through this series of the digial cloud transformation, give us your final take away. >> So I don't like digital transformation as a word I think it's been overused. I think businesses are changing and adapting to what the opportunities and risks are today. With that, the whole organization has to face into that and say "This is where we can win, this is where we have to be good enough, and this is what's dragging us down." And they have to address all of them. I think in order to do that, one thing that an IT organization has to do is head-on, face its legacy debt. You can't play in this world with legacy debt. And if you don't start now, five years from now you're still going to be complaining about it. It's like that old, you know, Chinese proverb, when was the best time to plant a tree? One hundred years ago. When's the second best time? Today. If you don't address your legacy with your board head-on, your business will lose. That's number one. Number two is, don't go it alone. Get the talent who's done this before. This is not moving from, you know, from Cobalt, to C, to C++. This isn't an incremental change. Fundamentally the way that the cloud works in a way that your corporate network will work once its the internet, is fundamentally different than anything we've done before. Take advantage of people who've done it. Use that to seed your organization's growth. And then finally, there's no stopping this train. There's nothing that's going to happen cataclysmically that's going to stop this. On the other hand don't throw out the baby with the bath water, because most organizations as I said earlier are still going to have legacy applications in their data center. Just make them look as if they're modern applications, and it's a win for everybody. >> Larry Biagini, thank you so much for sharing all of your history and your customers' journeys. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right and thank you as always for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation, where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm today's host, Peter Burris. Every business is talking about cloud transformation as a consequence of their effort to do a better job with digital business transformation. But cloud transformation too often is associated with just thinking about moving applications and data to some as yet undefined location. Whatever approach enterprises take, they will absolutely have to touch upon a couple of crucial steps along the way. At the center of those steps will be how do we think about the network transformation that's going to be required to achieve and attain our cloud objectives? How do we do it? Well to have that conversation, we're here today with Jay Chaudhry who's a CEO of Zscaler. Jay, welcome to theCUBE, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So before we get into this very important conversation, give us an update on Zscaler. >> So Zscaler was designed as a cloud security platform for the world of cloud and mobility. When applications are in the cloud, users are everywhere, the traditional security that builds a castle and moat model no longer works. So I start with clean slate, 11 years ago to start this company. Today, some of the largest companies in the world are protected by Zscaler. We went public last year, on NASDAQ, the sales have done very well, our customers are very happy our employees are very happy, so we are having fun building this lasting company and making cloud and internet a safe place to do business. >> Now that's great. Now let's talk about that, 'cause you're talking to a lot of customers, about making the internet a safe place to do business. >> Yep. >> What are you encountering as you discuss their challenges? >> So with the mobility, with the desire to do digital transformation, CIOs and CTOs and CISOs, are trying to figure out, how do I get there? The biggest thing that's holding them back, is security. It's a new thing for them. If my data is sitting in the cloud somewhere, who is protecting it? How do my users access it while the bad guys don't? So security ends up being at the center of the whole discussion. In fact a few years ago, CISOs would talk to me and say, "Security is not getting enough attention, "it's being ignored." Now the same CISOs are complaining a little bit that I'm being asked to present to the board every quarter. >> Right >> So it's a good thing but the CISOs have a challenge of figuring out what solutions work for the cloud, what do not, because quite often, when the market changes, the incumbents, the legacy vendors, kind of whitewash the solutions overnight and everyone becomes a cloud security provider. >> We get a lot of marketing responses, I think one of the centerpieces of this whole thing is, digital business really places an emphasis on the value of data as an asset. >> Yep. >> And how it changes the way you engage your customers, how it changes the way they think about operations, how it impacts the way you govern the overall business. >> Yep. >> When data emerges as the asset, we move away from a focus especially in the security world, from securing devices to securing the new classes of data. >> Yep. >> Is that kind of solution direction that you're seeing companies taking, is how do I think about up leveling beyond perimeter to actually building security. >> Yeah. >> Embedded deep within my workings? >> To really understand how security came about. Earlier on it used to be, I protect my device with antivirus software, then we built networks and we expected users to be on the network and applications and data to be sitting in my data center on my network. So the easiest way to secure your enterprise was, to secure the network. >> Mm. By building a moat around your data center. That's why we call it network security, securing your network, it made sense for years but now, with applications sitting in Azure or AWS Office 365, Workday, the like. And the users being everywhere, at airport, coffee shops, at home and wherever. How do you protect the network? The users aren't even on your network and applications aren't even on your network. So the notion of network security is becoming irrelevant. At the end of the day, the sole purpose of IT is, that a user should be able to access an application, no matter where the application is and no matter where the user is. So all this network and security and all, are a byproduct of that. So when I start Zscaler, I said, what needs to be protected? Data. Where is data? Data is generally sitting with the application, behind the application. So rather than building this moat, rather than doing this network security, rather than trying to build an appliance and try to move it to the cloud, let's take a look at it totally different. Assume that we need a policy engine, a business policy engine that sits in, 100s of locations around the globe, a user connects to the policy engine, the policy engine looks and says, should this user have access to this application or not? Based on that, we connect a user to an application, internal or external, no matter where the user is coming from. So that's the approach that's needed and that's the approach Zscaler pioneered and that's why the biggest of the big companies from GE, to Siemens, to DHL, they all are becoming Zscaler customers. So we are helping them transform from this old world where network is a hub-and-spoke network, security is this castle and moat to the new world, where a user can go directly to the application over any network. And network is important, it's an important transport but it doesn't need to be secure. Security is about, securing the right user to a right application, irrespective of the location of the user or the application. >> So I want to build on this because, what a lot of companies are starting to recognize is that, they want to get their application and the services provided by the application and the data proximate to the commercial activity that generates, you know, that pays the rent so to speak. >> Yep, yep. >> And that means, an increase in distribution of function offer. >> Of course. >> So the notion of the cloud as a place where we're going to centralize things, is giving way to a notion of the cloud as a technique for further distributing. >> Yes. >> And that means ultimately that, the services that we're going to provide have to have security embedded in them, in policy so that the data, the security and all those services are moving to where they're required. >> Yes, so in my view, cloud was never meant to say, things must be centralized. Actually a data centers were highly centralized. >> Right. >> The cloud notion should be, it's a responsibility of the cloud provider to make sure that data and application can be pushed where there needs to be. So when Microsoft is offering Office 365, your emails aren't sitting at one place, it's Microsoft's job to make sure if your employees are in Singapore, some of these things move to Singapore so you can have faster access to it. So that's the application side or for the data side of it. A company like Zscaler, we sit between the user and the application as a check post. In fact, think of us as an international airport. >> mm >> When you go in and out, you need to make sure that, the person is authorized to do so and isn't carrying any guns and weapons that could cause damage to somebody out there. So a user going to Salesforce or user going to Office 365 or a user going to application Azure, they simply connect with us, the business defines a policy, says, this person is okay to go here and based on then, we are connecting those people securely. Now if you're in London, you want to go through Zscaler's check post in London, if you're in Tokyo, you want to go through a check post in Tokyo because you want the shortest path. The old approach where we built a hub-and-spoke network, you brought people back to the data center. >> Back to the hub. >> To a hub, to go out. It's very painful. Imagine flying from San Fran to Chicago, via Houston? It's very painful and that's what gets done in the old world of security appliances because you can build only so many moats and that's what Zscaler is making redundant or irrelevant. So with a 100 plus locations around the globe with multi-tenant technology, you fly to Paris tomorrow, as soon as you connect to the internet from your hotel or the airport, we automatically redirect your traffic through our Paris data center. Your policy and security magically shows up, gets enforced, you're getting localized content, you're getting amazing response time without having to do anything. >> You're getting the same services that you get anywhere else 'cause it's policy driven with a common infrastructure for ensuring that-- >> And-- >> The issue of distribution is not the determining consideration. >> So it is the heavy lifting we did. >> Right. >> To make sure your policy can automatically show up where it is. And to do that, you're to build some serious technology. The old technology was, policy needs to be pushed once in a while, let's do a batch push. That's what traditional security appliances like firewalls do, they're single tenant, we came with a concept policy on demand per user, it works beautifully and then logs. Any time you go through any check post, the logs are created just like when I go in a building, they have me sign that say Jay went to see Peter at this time, same colored logs are created and they must be secured. So, you may be going to our 50 data centers but your logs are created in 50 locations but in line in real time, without ever writing the disk locally, they get sent to one central logging cluster and they're available within seconds. That's really an example of a purpose-built security cloud as compared to what we are calling imitation clouds. >> Mm >> Where people take a stack of appliances, stick them as virtual machines in Google or AWS cloud and they become a cloud service. I was talking to a customer the other day, he said hey, here was a network security vendor making a pitch and he said, "I thought of it, "as if someone is trying to build a Netflix service "using a bunch of DVD appliances." >> Mm-hmm >> All right so, to do security right, one has to build it for the world of cloud, it's multi-tenant, it's distributed, have you seen it before? Think of Salesforce.com, think of Workday, these were young companies a few years ago like Siebel used to dominate CRM. >> Right. >> PeopleSoft used to dominate HR, what happened to them? Well the world moved to its cloud, the world move to SAS service and these companies tried to use that legacy technology, tried to move to the cloud, it just doesn't work and that's why all these investors and customers love Zscaler's platform. We like to call it born in the cloud for the cloud platform. >> One of the things you didn't mention is that, when you're not doing that huge amount of backhaul traffic, your costs are going to go down pretty dramatically. So if I kind of summarize what you've talked about, we're going to go through, we're in the midst of a cloud transformation. >> Mm-hmm >> We have to rethink applications in the context of improve security, bake it right in which is going to lead to a rethinking of network and finally a rethinking of security. >> That's correct. When your network changes from hub-and-spoke to direct to cloud, you can't have a direct path without security so it drives security transformation. So that's where a security platform like Zscaler comes in. So your traffic from any of your say, X 100 branches or from your mobile device or from your laptop, it simply goes through Zscaler to get the same policy, same protection. So Zscaler gets viewed as an enabler of cloud transformation because without us, you can't transform the network and then security has to be done right. >> Right, so you've had a lot of conversations with customers, give us some sense of what kinds of how it's changing the way they work, how it's changing their operations, how it's changing their cost profiles. >> You know three, four or five years ago, we had to do a fair amount of evangelism but when you're the pioneers, you expect to do that. Like three years ago, three CIOs will tell me, "I like cloud, I'm moving in that direction." Three will say, "I'm thinking about it." And remaining four will say, "Mm-hmm I don't think cloud will happen." Today, all of them want to embrace cloud because they've seen the benefits of it. It's making business more agile, more competitive. Now they're figuring out, how do we do security right, how do I do this transformation without, if I may say, messing it up? >> Mm-hmm >> And that's where, it all starts with thought leader, visionary customers. When I saw GE, Larry Biagini, a global CTO or global CISO driving cloud eight, nine years ago, seeing Siemens saying, I need to make my business more competitive and these are the type of leaders who actually help drive adoption because when they do this stuff, others followed. >> Yeah the recode system responds. >> Exactly, exactly >> Jay Chaudhry, talking about cloud transformation and the crucial role that security is going to play in that transformation. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Peter, thank you, I appreciate the opportunity. >> And once again we've been speaking with Jay Chaudhry who's the CEO of Zscaler. Thanks for joining us for another CUBE conversation, I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat jazz music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBEConversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBEConversation. I'm John Furrier in theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California. We're excited to have a great tech talk here with good friend Howie Xu, who's currently the Vice President of Machine Learning and AI at Zscaler. Formally an entrepreneur, which he sold his company Zscaler. Before that entrepreneur resident Greylock. Before that VMWare, a variety of other endeavors. Howie and I, we've known each other for a while. Great to have you come in and chat about-- >> Great to be here! >> The Zoom, Zscaler, these are the new breed modern era companies, SaaS business models. Really interesting and this is something that we were talking about on email and over text, is our topic. >> Yeah. >> Thanks for coming in. >> Great. >> So you've seen the waves at VMWare, you saw the rapid growth there. And now, you work for Zscaler which is experiencing rapid growth. You saw Zoom go public, and I just interviewed Michael Dell. We were commenting about that on text as well. He said these big markets that have big total addressable dollars associated with them are ripe for disruption. They used to have high barriers to entry in the old ways to look at it, but now with cloud and with SaaS, with data, there's different innovation speeds. This has become a big deal. Talk about your view on this. >> Well to me, when Zoom and then Zscaler founded, many years ago, no one believed that they would become this big, right? When Zoom founded, they were plenty of the conference, free even, software available out there. When Jay founded Zscaler people thought, "Well, there was enough security companies, security solutions." Clearly, they defied conventional wisdom and then they just fought on and they saw something that other people didn't see which is precisely what you were talking about. The SaaS is so different, right? The business model, the innovation speed, the data driven kind of the thing, it's so different. A lot of people say, "Hey what's the difference "between SaaS versus the convention? "Isn't that just moving that thing over to the cloud?" I actually used to think that way too, right? Isn't that just the virtual price, moving on to Amazon Cloud? After living and breathing in SaaS company and then also observing that in the VC industry as well. It's just totally different, day and night different. >> Well I wanted to get into this with you 'cause I think you bring some good perspective onto these insights and to the rocket success of say Zoom and Zscaler, but Zoom in particular, recent successful IPO. Among the recent class this past quarter. Zoom, Lyft, Uber. Zoom is standing out. They're getting profitable. This is video conferencing. You know in the old days if someone said, "Hey, I want to compete with video conferences." Well, the barriers are actually too high, but they took a very innovative approach. Cloud, data, simplicity, and the big 800 pound gorilla was the WebEx's of the world. Who was defined, divine for sharing slides, not so much pure video. (laughing) >> Yeah. >> They really innovated the focus, the speed of success. Unprecedented, in my opinion. I think this is a huge success of what the opportunities are for entrepreneurs. >> Yeah, I think on the surface, right? If you ask Eric he would tell you that, look the WebEx was designed for sharing slides, and then the Zoom was designed from ground up for video sharing, or the video conferencing, so it's very different and it requires different architecture. So that's very true. But I think there is a more fundamental to that. The more fundamental for that is, there are a few things. One is the product, the life cycle is very different. How do you approach the customer? The release cycle, the sort of the feedback loop, right? Much tighter feedback loop, much faster feedback loop between the customer and you. The release cost is much lower now as a SaaS product. So, innovation is just accelerated because it's SaaS, because it's a true SaaS. >> And this is a unique thing, you said before, SaaS isn't just lifting a on-premises workload and moving it to the cloud. It's a completely different mindset. Talk about this dynamic, because it affords new kinds of risk taking. You and I were talking about before we came on camera, share your insight on that. >> Well, you know, as kind of the traditional software you have a release cycle, you want it to have a release date, right? And then once the product is in customer hand, if you have a bug, if you have something, it's so costly to change it, right? But as a SaaS, the form factor, you can take a little bit more risk. You can even give that feature set to 10% of your audience. Not the entire set of the audience. You can do those kind of magic, so you can accelerate the innovation and as a shrink-wrapped software the traditional way. You have one shot, if that software is not good, then you are toast. >> So you can move quicker. You can push code, you don't have the on-premise dynamics. >> Yeah, the innovation and then risk taking are kind of correlated, right? Relatively more risk, the more you are willing to take risk, relatively you can take more innovation. So, that's the thing. >> Well, you and I were talking, and one of the key things that you have been talking about publicly, and amongst friends, is innovation speed. Everyone wants the innovation fever. "I got to win to innovate, digital transformation, rah rah." Easier said then done. Innovation speed is critical with cloud and SaaS, why? What's the formula there for innovation speed? >> Well, one thing we discussed, the release cycle. For a, not necessarily for Zoom and Zscaler, but you know for SaaS in general, its possible for you to have daily, weekly, monthly release. Traditional software, there is no way you can do that but that's just the release cycles of that. The other thing is, you can actually take a risk. You can say, "Hey I want you to try to raise 1% of the customer and then see how they are going to react to this." But in the traditional way you have product manager debating for six months, six years on whether or how to do things. Here, let's not debate, let's just see. >> Let's ship it. >> Right, ship it. >> And Reid Hoffman always says, "If he's not embarrassed by your first shipment then you're not doing it properly." Which begs the question, I want to get your thoughts on this because, again with VMware, you saw how early that worked and their transforming cloud is now here unlike when they started the company. What is the right way to do it? And what's the wrong way to do it? When you look at an entrepreneur or a friend, who's trying to get a business off the ground, SaaS business, when you look at what they're doing, and you look at their mechanisms and how they're organizing their team, their code. What jumps out at you as the wrong way, and what's the right way? >> Well, the, I think the coach is really it, right? You know, the kind of the coach of incremental success and the fast iteration is the culture for a SaaS company, right? For the traditional one, you cannot afford to do that, because once you make a small mistake, you are toast. So I think, you know, that the culture difference, you really want it to have faster iteration basically. >> And that also comes down to the team, the people, right? >> Yes. >> The people selection. >> Yes, if you are kind of used to the waterfall thing, it's pretty hard to adapt to this kind of the SaaS world. >> And what's your advice to entrepreneurs? Reset, because if you say speed is of the essence, resetting is probably something that's not hard to do, then. >> Well, I wouldn't say easy, but not easy-- >> I hate to use the word pivot, but you know, resetting means okay, stop, rebuild. >> I think one way to think about it is actually looking at it and how to build enterprise software, like the consumer sort of product way, right? If you think of Facebook or Google, the traditional Google, of course Google now has enterprise product, but the traditional sort of, the Google, Facebook, kind of the product, it's more for consumers to consume. I mean they are fast iterations. How often? What's the criteria to release a product? Enterprise product is getting towards there. You need that kind of the thing, so, if you don't know how to do it look at a Facebook, how Facebook, of course Facebook and YouTube pulled the other way around, they need to care more about the privacy, care about more stability. So I think you are seeing the the two sides of the world, the enterprise side and the consumer side. They are learning from each other. >> Well, I want to get to the enterprise talk track in a second, because I think you can give a lot of insight, so I want to stay on SaaS cloud native or cloud specifically, 'cause that's where SaaS really shines when you're really talking about cloud scale. Data, you're doing AI now, and you and I have both talked about data many times. >> Yes. >> You know I'm a data hardcore person. I love data. I think software and data, I wrote a blog post in 2007, that says data is the new developer kit. The word "developer kit" was used back then. You're now seeing where data is part of the developer's piece of their value creation. Highly addressable, available, usable, not stored in some silo unaddressable, high latency to get it. How important is the data for the SaaS piece? Because that's where to make these kind of changes you're talking about, you need the data, data's giving you insights, that's something that's near and dear to your heart. Explain your vision of the role of data. >> Yeah, I think, you touched up on it. If you want to make sense out of something, you need the data, right? And if it's not SaaS, I would go, maybe a more extreme way, but it's not clear to me the data's even useful to you 'cause you know the data may be for some large software company, they may have hundreds of thousands of customers out there, but the data is spread around. I mean how are you going to train a model with all the data spread around hundreds of thousands of locations? So the real, the correct, or the optimal way, is actually the SaaS model, you actually have the data with you and then you kind of leverage the data. So I would say this is actually another benefit of the SaaS, why SaaS is going to change the world or eat the world. It owns the data for real, right? The data may be not the private data, but it's actually could be a behavior data. How people are reacting to your features. From VMware days we wanted to know, is people even using this feature? How often people use this feature? You know people are always debating, "Hey what's the maximum policy we need to give this and that?" But in the SaaS world, no debate just look at it. We always say, "Don't listen to what customers are wanting you to do." But watch how they do things, so that you can sort of understand, what product you want to develop, right? Here you actually can really watch how customers using your product. Don't listen to them, if you listen to them you will give them a faster horse as we all knew. >> But what's important about the data discussion, because, a security person would say, "Hey if you put into one spot, I can hack it." But, it's not just people's names, it's other data. It's gesture data, it's usage data, so you're not talking about sign in data, it's data. >> It could be the behavior, it could be second order data. Do people use my product, that's my data. That's something I wanted to know, I'm not necessarily talking about peeking into people's email, no. It's actually the thing surrounding it. >> It's looking for the good things in the data. All right, let's talk about the customer alignment and customer expectations, you know customer user experience is driven by customer's expectations usually, right? As expectations change. And I think the Zoom thing jumped out at me, the Zoom IPO and their great success and were a customer as well, is that they really nailed the expectation of the user and cloud certainly helped them get that speed, but this is a key thing, if you could just deliver a great experience. >> Yeah. >> For those customers, you can actually win big part of the market. >> Yeah, if you Google, Eric. Eric doesn't speak to me as much, but if you Google Eric. >> We'll get him on theCUBE. >> What's sort of the jump? Hopefully I can help you to bring him here too. But what's going to be obvious if you Google search Eric he is sort of the notion of customer successes, my success. If customer is happy, I'm going to happy. So, my happiness hinges on the customer's happiness. So that's, kind of very important because only the SaaS model made that more natural. In traditional model, whether traditional on prime or we're not, you sort of celebrate when you have customer signing your PO and then you don't hear from the sales guy or three years, the sales guy may move on to another company, you don't know, right? But for the SaaS, it doesn't stop when sign the PO. You actually have to earn customers' happiness every single day. >> Adoption's critical. >> Yeah, customer success is important and then that's kind of the, so there is a huge alignment, very interesting alignment between customer's happiness, customer success, customer adoption of your product and you're sort of, the success, right? 'Cause you know, when I came to Zscaler, one of our first meeting is about, okay, we had a lot of customer interest us. They sign a PO. How to get them ramp up the actual first use, right? So, that kind of conversation doesn't happen in the traditional software company. You sign a PO. If the customer doesn't use your product for another 18 month which is actually quite normal, no one is going to jump up and say, "This is crazy!" Right? >> You know, we're going to do that on our Part Two, about the impact of the enterprise. But you made up a good point there, I want to just close out our last talk point is, the data driving the experience isn't like the old way of throw in, get the PO and celebrate. You got to, kind of, keep that going. The enterprise is changing and the enterprise has a tsunami of onboarding of new types of developers. In some cases they grow. We just had Cisco inside here on theCUBE this morning. They're turning network guys into programmers from CL command line prompt dudes to gals to coders. You're seeing developers now enter the enterprise to build the apps so there's now a digital transformation initiative for enterprises to be, I guess, SaaS-like. But it's hard. >> Yeah, I think that's, you know, this is part of the digital transformation. Every company, Fortune 500 or Fortune 2000 company need to do it, right? So, another interesting part is, when they do this on this journey of digitalization, you cannot possibly build all the infrastructure yourself. You will have to consume public cloud, you know sometimes private and hybrid cloud, and you are actually going to consume lots of the SaaS, right? Whether Zoom, the Zscaler, or the PagerDuty, I mean you are not going to be all those thing from scratch but you want it to have a very good, sort of the stack on top of it and how you going to take advantage of the SaaS, is a very interesting aspect. >> Well in Part Two of our chat, when we come back on our next discussion, I want to get into the enterprise. But to wrap up Part One here, innovation speed, leveraging data and the beautiful risk taking and benefits of SaaS. Large scale, fast, high value, target and developing an app or a venture. >> Yeah. >> What is your advice to entrepreneurs out there and/or someone who's doing a digital transformation? Where they want to leverage Saas, what's the playbook, what's the starting point, what's your advice? >> Well, there are a number of things. One, there are so many SaaS companies out there taking advantage of them, right? In the old days you have to hire email admins, you have to do this. Nowadays, all the SaaS, that's your kind of, you only need to worry about the business logic, you have some unique insight in the business and then just have, hire programmers to codify that and then the rest will magically happen because of the public cloud, because of the SaaS. So, be very mindful about the new environment you are in, that's number one. The second thing I want to say is, how do you look at AI technology? The older way is program something in a definitive way. I think there will be a limit for that. It has taken the software industry a long way to where we are. But, if you look at the next 20 years, I think a lot of the lift is going to be done by the AI Center. But it's not going to be easy to be done, you have to think about your data strategy, where are you going to have the massive, sustainable, unique, ideally even labeled data. If you don't have the labeled data, you have to have the strategy. How are you going to have some unique model with the data you have? So, the data strategy, right? So, essentially, how to take advantage of the cloud? How to take advantage of the data? And then on top of that you are going to do something that's solving an unmet um-- >> Customer problem. >> Customer problem. >> An acute landing spot in the market place. >> Unmet need. >> In a big market. >> In a big, well, in a big market. >> There it is. >> Even if there is already a mature solution I bet, since those mature solutions would not develop from that native cloud era, and the native AI era. You have plenty of opportunities. >> Howie, you and I are on the same page on this, I have been saying it truly believe we are living in an entrepreneurial era where, with your advice and what you just laid out, the better mousetrap can take down a big market. >> And, I'm hopeful that you will also disrupt the media business, you know we're-- >> Don't tell anyone! (laughing) We're still going to do that top secret of Silent Running. Howie, we're going to get Part Two. We're going to dig Deep into the enterprise, because the enterprise now has an opportunity in the first historic time in tech history, to use tools and technologies to completely reset and re-architect for this kind of capability. >> Absolutely. >> So, we'll hit that in Part Two. >> I'm super passionate about it too. >> Howie Xu, here inside theCUBE. Friend of theCUBE, legend in the industry. Great entrepreneur and technologist here, sharing CUBEConversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat jazz music)

(funky music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another Cube Conversation from our beautiful studios here in Palo Alto, California. This is going to be a Cube Conversation that focuses on marketing. It's one of the series that we have where we're talking to CMO's here in the valley and beyond 'about the challenges of marketing and the role that marketing is playing in driving increasing levels of value to customers. And, to have that conversation, we've got Micheline Nijmeh, who's a CMO of Zscaler here in the Cube with us today. Micheline, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So, Zscaler, tell us a little bit about Zscaler. Let's get started there. >> Zscaler is really transforming traditional network security. They are a security cloud platform that securely connects users to applications, no matter what location, on any device, over any network. And just to kind of put it in a little more context, if you think about how cloud and mobility are changing, how organizations are transforming digitally into the cloud, network security's changing, right? Apps are moving to the cloud, out of the data center, and there's no longer a perimeter to secure, filled with appliances to secure their data, their applications, and the mobile workforce, well they're accessing these apps not in your traditional method. They want secure, fast, reliable access. And, Zscaler is the platform that was born in the cloud, built for the cloud to help securely access those applications. >> Well, you'll get no argument from me about how important network security is. It's one of the fastest growing and become one of the largest areas of spending within an IT organization. >> Yeah. But, let's put that aside. >> Yes. >> And instead talk about marketing. You mentioned digital transformation. Let's start there, what does digital transformation mean to marketing? >> To me as a marketer, I think of how can you run your organization with the minimal amount of manual steps you can take? Why, it's because how do I connect better with my customer? It's going to make me more efficient, effective, you know, save money, right? It's going to cost savings there, but it's going to help me understand my customer better because I'm going to have the data. It's going to give me the data that I need, that single pane of glass, because all of these tools will allow me to have a better access to my customer, faster, more efficient, and understand them better. >> Well, I've been working in the marketing technologies space for quite some time at various other, in various places, but one of the observations I make is that a lot of the marketing automation tools are not growing as fast as you think their tool would suggest. By that I mean, if their tool is that great, by using their own tool, they'd be growing a lot faster than they are. That always suggested to me that the real value of these tools is in how they're utilized by people. So, it's still as highly dependent upon how the marketing organization uses these tools, and that's even more important than the selection of the tools. What, what do you think about that? >> Absolutely, if you think about a tool, it's not moving away from that human connection. It's enabling you to have a better human connection. And, if you don't have the right amount of tools, sorry, the right type of tools that allows you to engage with your customer better, then why have them? There's data that shows almost 30 percent of marketers have 11 to 20 tools, that's crazy. And, if you don't have them integrated, if you don't have them working and talking to each other, then they're going to be a hindrance more than help to a marketer. >> But, that also suggests, and you mentioned, we start our program by talking about digital and how digital can improve efficiencies, and effectiveness, but also how it can transform the role that marketing could play within a business. At Zscaler, what is the role of marketing and how do you envision that that role could change over time? >> Zscaler, when we, we are so customer-centric, right? Our customer is truly at the center and the heart of everything we do from our customer success team to our CEO to our CTO, all of our C-level execs, and everyone within those organizations think customer first, and marketing is another organization that has put them at the heart. And, when we think about a buying journey, that's how we start our any sort of planning, any sort of strategy. We look at how did we, how do we engage and drive interest before they buy, of course. How do we engage with them through this purchasing experience? And then, how does marketing impact them post-sale? And it takes sales, customer success team, marketing all working together as a true machine and that's what, how we've evolved marketing at Zscaler. >> So, is marketing a cog in the function, or, which of course it is in certain respects, but are you seeing that marketing is expanding it's role within Zscaler, becoming more of a steward of customer related data, becoming more of an advocate for customer experience, is that happening at Zscaler as well? >> Zscaler from the start, to be honest with you, has always valued marketing, so our CEO is a number one advocate and fan of marketing. You could not have anymore happiness as a marketer to have that, so he's been a huge advocate, so I can't say it's been more. I think what we're seeing more is optimizing it. How are we understanding the buyer a little bit better? How do we understand their challenges, their needs? And then, what are we doing to help solve that problem? So, that's kind of how we're evolving. It's, it's less about having more fans because it's been, we've been so lucky to have such huge advocates from sales, customer success, all the way to the exec team. It's been really wonderful. >> Well, I'll tell you a quick story. This is, the CEO at one the valley's juggernauts once told me a number of years ago when I asked him what was the value of marketing to this particular company. He said, oh marketing's what I put between my sales and engineers people to make sure they don't kill each other. >> Right. (laughing) >> Sounds like that's not the role of marketing in place at Zscaler. >> Nope. >> You mentioned being customer-centric, and having marketing sustaining the focus, helping Zscaler sustain and reapply that focus in the customer that we see a new challenge emerging in the industry, how do we use data to personalize what we offer to customers and sustain that engagement versus violating the privacy? What's some of the challenges that you've encountered as a CMO at Zscaler as you try to find that balance, especially given new regulations like GDPR? >> Right, GDPR, you know, when you first hear about it, when it first came out, it was a beast. And, as a marketer, you start thinking, am I doing the right thing, am I following, am I being compliant, but at the end of the day, marketers have had bad behaviors. We have not been, you know, looking at our database, and understanding how to engage, how to deliver that value to our customer all the time, consistently. You say it, but sometimes you realize in your best practices it doesn't always come true. So, with GDPR and other, you know, standards that are coming in, it is enabling us to make sure and look back, are we following what we need to do to be compliant, but are we delivering the value to the customer? And, for us it's been, to be honest with you, great. As a consumer, I love it. As a marketer, as challenging it has been, it has really helped us reset, make sure that we are engaging properly. We are delivering that story that, really, the persona cares about, and not just hitting them with, you know, communications over and over without really thinking through of what your needs are, what your challenges are, and then, how our solution helps. >> Now, I've always liked to say, and I want to see if you agree with this, that if marketing focuses on delivering value with every touch, they rarely get in the problems about abusing privacy, does that resonate? >> Completely agree, and that's why, when you put a strategy together of how you're engaging, who you're engaging with, but really understanding who you're communicating then that value comes through. Because you're not going to be sending them any sort of message that doesn't resonate. Because you've done your homework. You've looked at your database. It's compliant, you're understanding how you're engaging with them properly. So, it is huge in terms of delivering value. >> So data is essential to marketing. Customer data sounds like it's essential to Zscaler. >> Correct. >> I'm want to throw you off a little bit. >> See if you can help me out here. >> Connect Zscaler secure networking to making the CMO's job better. >> So, when you think of Zscaler, we are, we have so much data, right? Understanding kind of the usage, the patterns, and so, by delivering, by having the CXO's, the CIO's understanding what data's in front of them, we're giving them this visibility that they've never had before, so they know what apps are out there, how they're being used, where there's security risks. Marketing has similar data, right? Different tools, but we have this, we have that access to data understanding how the consumer, our customer, is engaging, where do they go on the web. I mean, it's a little scary, but we do understand how they're engaging with us, and then, we make better marketers. Just as we have better security networks in the cloud built because of the accessibility and the visibility, marketing is getting those similar tools as well. >> I got to believe that as a CMO who's worried about the customer experiences, especially in a world where there seems to be an ongoing onslaught against trust, that it's, that marketers also need to feel that they can trust their data, that marketing is becoming increasingly distributed and part of a community to get the work done, and that it's a essential feature of all of this, so that a marketer can say, I trust my data, and I know and I want my customers to be able to trust their digital interactions with us. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely, you have to trust your data, but you also have to have trust in how you use your data. If you're not being accountable on how the data is used, you're not being a good marketer. You don't want to take advantage of the data that you do have. You should be able to understand the data, and then, how do you turn that around to engage with your audience. >> And, it sounds like Zscaler, trusted, secure, networking, cloud-based service, is potentially a real tool a marketer can use, both internally as well as externally with customers. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, so, one last set of questions. There's been a lot of conversation about how diversity improves a business, to shareholders, to employees, and also to customers. So, you're often, tell us a little bit about what it means to be a woman in the CMO job in a technology company. >> Peter, you know, I've been a woman in the technology company my entire life and what is important to me is that I am looked at just as equal as everyone else, but really I feel responsible, and accountable, and almost a role-model to every woman out there. So, for me, I hold myself at a higher standard, but because I need to make sure I'm, I'm delivering and being my authentic self. I'm able to voice what my, you know, my feelings are at any time. I don't see myself as a woman amongst a C-level exec. I see myself as a CMO amongst a C-level exec. So, for me it's being accountable, being responsible as a role-model for these women who are growing. It's mentoring them, but also again, I don't, I don't differentiate as a woman versus a man. I think for me, I am responsible as a marketer, as a leader, and, how do I lead the entire marketing organization, men or women? How do I lead them no matter what? I am their leader, I am responsible for them, and I consider them as, as kind of my, my family that I'm trying to nurture and grow as well. >> Alright, let's go out three years. >> Yeah. >> Where is Zscaler in the industry and what role is I marketing playing to get Zscaler there? >> We are changing and disrupting how network security is being managed. We are the largest cloud security platform built for the cloud, born in the cloud. And, I, I don't see us, anyone else kind of coming to us in three years from now. >> Fantastic. >> Yep. >> Micheline Nijmeh, CMO of Zscaler, thanks very much for being on the Cube. >> Thank you for having me. >> And, once again, I'm Peter Burris, thank you very much for watching this important Cube Conversation. Until next time. (funky music)

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the cue, we're having acute conversation that are probably out. The studio's a little bit of a break in the conference schedule, which means we're gonna have a little bit more intimate conversations outside of the context of a show we're really excited to have. Our next guest is running $1,000,000,000 company evaluation that been added for almost 10 years. Cloud first from the beginning, way ahead of the curve. And I think the curves probably kind of catching up to him in terms of really thinking about security in a cloud based way. It's J. Charger. He's the founder and CEO of Ze Scaler. J Welcome. Thank you, Jeff. So we've had a few of your associates on, but we've never had you on. So a great to have you on the Cube >> appreciate the opportunity. >> Absolutely. So you guys from the get go really took a cloud native approach security when everyone is building appliances and shipping appliances and a beautiful fronts and flashing lights and everyone's neighborhood appliances. You took a very different tact explain kind of your thinking when you founded the company. >> So all the companies I had done. I looked for a fuss to move her advantage. So if you are first mover, then you got significant advantage. A lot of others. So look at 2008 we were goingto Internet for a whole range of service is lots of information sitting there from weather to news and all the other stuff right now on Cloud Applications. Point of view sales force was doing very well. Net Suite was doing well, and I have been using sales force in that suite and all of my start up since the year 2001. Okay, when each of them was under 10,000,000 in sales. So my notion was simple. Will more and more information sit on the Internet? Answer was yes. If sales force the nets weed is so good, why won't other applications move? The cloud answer was yes. So if that's the case, why should security appliances sit in the data? Security should sit in the cloud as well. So with that simple notion, I said, if I start a new company, no legacy boxes to what he bought, you start a clean slate, clean architecture designed for the cloud. What we like to call. Born in the cloud for a cloud. That's what I did. What >> great foresight. I mean trying in 2008 if tha the enterprise Adoption of cloud I mean sales was really was the first application to drive that. I mean, I just think poor 80 p gets no credit for being really the earliest cloud that they weren't really a solution right there. That's the service provider. But sales force really kind of cracked the enterprise, not four. Trust with SAS application wasn't even turn back back then. So So, taking a cloud approach to security. Very different strategy than an appliance. And, you know, credit to you for thinking about you know, you could no longer build the wall in the moat anymore. Creon and Internet world. Yeah. >> So my no show, no simple. The old world off security Waas What you just mentioned castle and moat. I am safe in my castle. But when people wanted to go out to call it greener pastures, right, you needed to build a drawbridge. And that's the kind of drawbridge these appliances bills. And then if you really want to be outside for business and all other reasons you're not coming in right? So notion of Castle and Motors, No good. So we said, Let's give it up. So let's get away from the notion that I must secure my network on which users and applications are sitting. I really need to make sure the right user has access to write application or service, which may be on the Internet, which may be on a public cloud, which may be a sass application like Salesforce. Or it may be the data center. So we really thought very differently, Right? Network security will become irrelevant. Internet will become your corporate network, and we connect the right user to write application, Right? Very logical. It took us a while to evangelize and convince a bunch of customers, right. But as G and Nestle and Seaman's off, the Wolf jumped on it because they love the technology. We got fair amount of momentum, and then lots of other enterprises came along >> right, right. It's so interesting that nobody ever really talked about the Internet, has an application delivery platform back in the day, right? It was just it was Bbn. And then we had a few pictures. Thank you Netscape, but really to think of the Internet as a way to deliver application and an enterprise applications with great foresight that you had there. >> Yes. So I think we built >> on the foresight off sales force in that suite and other information sources on the great. I >> came from security side off it. I built a number of companies that build and sold appliances, right. But it was obvious that in the new world, security will become a service. So think of cloud computing. People get surprised about cloud computing being big. It's natural. It's a utility service. If I'm in the business on manufacturing veg, it's a B and C. Gray computing is not my business. If just like I plug into the wall socket, get electricity right, I should be able to turn on some device and terminal and access abdication, sitting somewhere right and managed by someone right and all. So we re needed good connectivity over the Internet to do that. As that has matured over the past 10 years, as devices have become more capable and mobile, it's a natural way to go to cloud computing, and for us to do cloud security was a very natural >> threat. Right. So then you use right place right time, right. So then you picked up on a couple These other tremendous trends that that that ah cloud centric application really take advantage of first is mobile. Next is you know, B Bring your own global right B y o d. And then this this funky little thing called Shadow I T. Which Amazon enabled by having a data center of the swipe of a credit card. Your application, your technology. This works great with all those various kind of access methodologies. Still consistently right >> now. And that is because the traditional security vendors so called network security vendors but protecting the network they assumed that you sat in an office on the Net for great. Only if you're outside. You came back to the network through vpn, right? We assume that Forget the network. Ah, user sitting in the office or at home or coffee shop airport has to get to some destination over some network. That's not What about securing the net for Let's have a policy and security. It says Whether you are on a PC auto mobile phone, you're simply connecting through our security check post. Do what you want to go. So mobile and clothes for the natural. Two things mobile became the user cloud became the destination, and Internet became the connector off the two. And we became the policy check post in the middle. >> So what? So what do you do in terms of your security application? Are you looking at, you know, Mac addresses? Are you looking at multi factor authentication? Cause I would assume if you're not guarding the network per se, you're really must be all about the identity and the rules that go along with that identity. >> It's a good question, so user needs to get to certain applications, and service is so you put them into buckets. First is external service is external means that a company doesn't need to management, and that is either open Internet, which could be Google Search could be Facebook lengthen and type of stuff. Or it could be SAS applications that Salesforce offers on Microsoft Office E 65. So in that case, we want to make sure that been uses. Go to those sites. Nothing bad should comment. That means the malware stuff and nothing good chili con you confidential information. So we are inspecting traffic going in and out. So we are about inspecting the traffic, the packets, the packets to make sure this is not malicious. Okay, Now, for authentication, we use third party serves like Microsoft A D or Octagon. They tell us who the user is into what the group is. And based on that sitting in the traffic path were that I who enforce the policy so that is for external applications. Okay, the second part of the secular service, what we called the school a private access is to make sure that you can get to your internal applications. Either in your data center, all this sitting in a public cloud, such chance as your eight of us there were less. Whatever mouth we're more worried about is the right person getting to the right application and the other checks are different. There you are connecting the right parties, Okay. Unless worried about >> security, and then does it work with the existing, um, turn of the of, you know, the internal corporate systems. Who identified you? Integrate, I assume, with all those existing types of systems. >> Yes. So we look at the destination you did. Existing system could be sitting on in your data center or in the cloud. It doesn't really matter. We look at your data center as a destination. OK, we look at stuff sitting in Azure as a destiny. >> And then and then this new little twist. So obviously Salesforce's been very successfully referenced them a few times, and I just like to point to the new 60 story tower. If anyone ever questions whether people think Cloud of Secures, go look downtown at the new school. But there's a big new entrance in play on kind of the Enterprise corporate SAS side. And that's office 3 65 It's not that noone you are still relatively new. I'm just curious to get your perspective. You've been at this for 10 years? Almost, um, the impact of that application specifically to this evolution to really pure SAS base model, getting more and more of the enterprise software stack. >> So number one application in any enterprise is email >> before you gotta think that's gonna be your next started. We gotta fix today after another e >> mail calendar ring sharing files and what it used to sit in your data center and you had to buy deploy manage Sutter was with in a Microsoft exchange. So Microsoft said, Forget about you managing it. I've will manage your exchange, uh, with a new name, all 50 65 in the clout so you don't what he bought it and are You come to me and I'll take care off it. I think it's a brilliant move by Microsoft, and customers are ready to give up. The headaches are maintaining the boxes, the software and sordid and everything. Right now, when the biggest application moves the cloud, every CEO pays attention to it. So as Office God embraced the corporate network start to break. Now, why would that happen if you aren't in 50 cities and on the globe, your exchanges? Sitting in Chicago Data Center every employee from every city came to Chicago. Did know Microsoft Office. This is sun setting something. Why should every employee go to Chicago? That's the networks on and then try to go to cloud right? So they're back. Haul over traditional corporate network using Mpls technology very expensive, and then they go to them. Then they go to the Internet to go to office. If the 65 slow slow. No one likes it. Microsatellite. >> Get too damn slow >> speed. OnlyTest Fetal light. You can only go so far. It's >> not fast. If you're going around the world and you're waiting for something, I >> have to go to New York City to my data center so I could come to a local site in San Francisco. It is hard, right? Right, And that's what our traditional networks have done. That's what traditional security boxes down what Z's killer says. Don't worry about having two or three gateways to the Internet. You have as many gay tricks as your employees because every employee simply points to the Z's. Killers near this data center were the security stack. We take care of security inspection and policy, and you get to where you need to get to the fastest way. So Office 3 65 is a great catalyst for the skin. Asked customers of struggling with user experience and the traffic getting clogged on the traditional network. We go in and say, if you did local Internet breakout, you go direct, but you couldn't go direct without us because you need some security check personally. So we are the checkpost sitting 100 data centers around the globe and uses a happy customer. We are happy. >> So I was gonna be my next point. Begs the question, How many access points do you guys have just answered? You have hundreds. So you worked with local Coehlo. You got a short You got a short hop from your device into the sea scaler system and then you you're into your network. >> You know, we are deployed and 100 data center. These are generally cola is coming from leading vendors. Maybe it connects maybe level three tire cities of gold and the goal is to shorten the distance. I'll tell you two interesting anecdotes. I talked to a C i o last year. I said, How many employees do you have? He said 10,000 said, How many Internet gateways do you have? I tell you, it's safe. I he's a 10,000. I said What? He said. Every employee has a laptop and laptop goes with it. Employee goes and indirectly goes the Internet. It's a gate for you, Right? Then he said, Sorry, I'm Miss Booke. Every employee is a smartphone, and many have tablets to have 25,000 gate. So if you start thinking that way, trying to take all the traffic back to some security appliance is sitting in a data center or 10 branch offices, right? Makes no sense. So that's where we come in. And I had an interesting discussion with a very large consumer company out of Europe. I went to see them to one of her early customers. I >> met the >> head of security. I said, I'm here to understand how well these killers working. Since our security is so good, you must be loving it. He smiled, and he said, I love you security, but I love something more than your security. I said, Huh? What is that? He said. Imagine if the world had four airport hubs to connect through and you are a world traveler. You'll be missing, he said. I have 160,000 employees in hundreds, 30 countries. I have four Internet gateways with security appliance sitting there and everyone has to go to one of those four before they get out, right, so they were miserable. Now they are blogging on the Internet than entrant has become very fast, she said. As a C so I love it because security leaders are blamed for slowing you down in the name of security. Now I have made uses happy abroad in better security. So it's all wonderful. >> Hey, sounds like you're a virtual networking company that Trojan horsed in as a security company >> way. So let's put it this way. I >> mean, the value problem. Like I'm just I'm teasing you. But it's really interesting, you know, kind of twisted tale, >> so don't know you actually making a very good point. So So this is what happening Every c. I is talking about digital transformation through I t transmission Right now. If you start drilling down, what does that mean? Applications are moving in the cloud. So that's the application transformation going on because applications are no longer in your data center, which was the central gravity. If applications the move to the cloud, the network that designed to bring everything to the data center becomes irrelevant. It's no good. So no companies are transforming the data center bit. Sorry, they're transforming the network not to transform network so you could directly go to the application. The only thing that's holding you back is security, so we essentially built a new type of security, so we're bringing security transformation, which is needed. Do transform your network and transfer your application. Right? So that's why people customers who buy us is typically the head off application, head of security and head of networking. All three come together because transformation doesn't happen in isolation. Traditional security boxes are bought, typically by the security team only because they said, put a box here, you need to inspect the traffic. We go in and say the old world off ideas change. Let me help you transform to the New World. Why we call it cloned enabled enterprise, right? And that's what we come >> pretty interesting, too, when you think of the impact that not only are you leveraging us and security layer in this cloud and getting in the way of the phone traffic in the laptop traffic, but to as people migrate to Maura and Maur of these enterprise SAS APS, you're leveraging their security infrastructure, which is usually significantly bigger than any particular individual company can ever afford. >> That that's correct. So a point there so sales force an enterprise doesn't need to worry about protecting Salesforce, they need to make sure they can have a shortest path and the right user is getting so. We help as a policy jackboots in the middle, and also we make sure employees on downloading confidential customer information and sending out in Gmail to somebody else. But when applications moved to Azure or eight of us, you as an enterprise have to what he bought securing it if you expose them. If there is all to the Internet, then somebody can discover you. Somebody can do denial of service attack. So how do you handle that? So that's where we come in. We kind of say even 1,000,000,000 applications are in azure. I will give you the shortest bat with all the technology that you need to secure your internal >> happy. It's interesting because there's been recent breaches reported at Amazon, where the Emma's the eight of US customer didn't secure their own instance. Inside of eight of us, it wasn't an eight of US problems configuration problem >> or it could be the policy problem or possible. Somebody, for example, came into your data center over vpn, and once they're on you network, they can have what we call the lateral boom and they can go around to see what's out there. And they could get to applications. So we overcome all those security >> issues. Okay, so you've been at this for a while. 3 65 is a game changer and kind of accelerating as you look forward, Um, what excites you? What scares you? You know, where do you see kind of security world evolving? Obviously, you know, here in the news all the time that the attacks now or, you know, oftentimes nation states and you know it's it's the security challenges grown significantly higher than just the crazy hacker working out of his mom's basement. A CZ You see the evolution? You know what, What, what's kind of scary and what's exciting. >> I think the scary part is inertia. People kind of say this high done security than the castle and moat. That's still still because they feel like I can put my arms that only I can see the drawbridge. And I got to see the airplane right over the missing on that. So so one someone gets into your castle, you're in trouble, right? So in the new approach we advocate, don't worry about castles, and moats. The desk applications are out there somewhere. Your users are out there somewhere, right? And they just need to reach the right application. So we are focuses connecting the right people. Now, more and more devices coming in. We all here. But I owe tease out. The I. O. T. At the end of the day is a copier printer of video camera or some machine controls >> or a nuclear power plant. >> They all need to talk to something, something right if they got hijacked. You thinkyou nuclear power plant is sending information about its health to place a. But it's going to Ukraine, right? That's a problem. How do you make sure that the coyote controls in a plant are talking right parties? So we actually sit in the middle, are connecting the party. So that's another area for us. For potential, right? Looking at opportunity. >> So another big one like mobile and in 3 65 wasn't enough. Now you have I a t. >> It's a natural hanging out with you. So today, every day we see tens of thousands of cameras and copiers calling the Internet, and customers have no idea know why are they calling. Generally, there's no malicious motive. The vendor wanted to know if the toner is down or not. Are things are working fine, but they have no security control. R. C So does a demo from the Internet. He logs onto the camera, are the printer and copier and actually gets can show that information can be obtained. So those are some of the things we must control and protect. And you do it not by doing network security but a policy base access from a right device to alright, destiny. >> So, are you seeing an increase in the in the, you know, kind of machine machine? A tremendous amount of >> traffic machine to machine. So is io to traffic, and there's a machine to machine traffic. So when you have a bunch of applications said in our data center and you a bunch of applications sitting an azure eight of us, they need to talk. So lot of that traffic goes through Z Skinner. Okay, so we're long enforcing it, then you're an application that needs to go and get, say, some market pricing information from Internet. So the machine a sitting in your data center or in azure is calling someone out. There are some server to get that information. So we come in in between as a checkpost too. Have right connectivity. >> You're saying I proper. Same value difference. Very simple, but elegant. J I'm hanging out of the more you see now, the touch to nowhere to be at the right time. We're having fun. It's a great story, and and I really appreciate you taking a few minutes out of your day to stop. But I >> have a great team that makes it happen. >> That's a big piece of it. Well, and good leadership as well. Obviously >> great leaders in the company. >> All right, Thank you. J Child Reza, founder and CEO of Ze Scaler. Check it out. Thanks again for stopping by the Cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time.

>> Welcome back to the Cuban Peterborough's chief research officer of Silicon Angle and general manager of Wicked Bond. We're as part of our continuing coverage of the arse a show. We have a great guest Z scaler amid sin. Ha! Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So, um, it what exactly does Z scaler? D'oh >> Z's killer is in the business of providing the entire security stack as a service for large enterprises. We sit in between enterprise users and the Internet and various destinations they want to goto, and we want to make sure that they have a fast, nimble Internet experience without compromising any security. >> So if I can interpret what that means, that means that as Maur companies are trying to serve their employees that Air Mobile or customers who aren't part of their corporate network they're moving more. That communication in the Cloud Z scale is making it possible for them to get the same quality of security on that communication in the cloud is he would get on premise. >> Absolutely. If you look at some of the big business transformations that are happening, work lords for enterprises are moving to the cloud. For example, enterprises are adopting Office 3 65 instead, off traditional exchange based email and on your desktop applications. They might be adopting sales force for CR M Net suite for finance box for storage. So as these workloads are moving to the cloud and employees are becoming more and more mobile, you know they might be at a coffee shop. They might be on an iPad. Um, and they might be anywhere in the world. That begs the basic security question. Where should that enterprise DMC the security stack be sitting back in the day? Enterprises had a hub and spokes model, right? They might have 50 branch offices across the world. A few mobile workers, all of them, came back over private networks to a central hub, and that hub was where racks and racks of security appliances were deployed. Maybe they started off with a firewall. Later on, they added a proxy. You are l filtering some d e l P er down the road. People realized that you need to inspect us to sell. So they added some SSL offload devices. Someone said, Hey, we need to do some sand boxing for behavioral analysis. People started adding sandboxes. And so, over time the D. M. Z got cluttered and complicated and fast forward to Today. Users have become mobile. Workloads have moved to the cloud. So if I'm sitting in a San Francisco office on my laptop trying to do my regular work, my email is in the cloud. My my court applications are sitting in the cloud. Why should I have to vpn back to my headquarters in Cincinnati over a private network, you know, incurring all the Leighton see and the delays just so that I can get inspected by some legacy appliances that are sitting in that DMC, right? So we looked at that network transformation on We started this journey at Ze scale or eight years ago, and we said, Look, if users are going to be mobile and workloads are going to be in the cloud, the entire security stack should be as close as possible to where the users are. In that example, I described, I'm sitting here. I'm going to Salesforce. We're probably going to the same data center in San Francisco. Shouldn't my entire security stag be available right where I am, um, and my administrators should have full visibility, full control from a single pane of glass. I get a fast, nimble user experience. The enterprise doesn't have to compromise in any security, and that's sort of the vision that we have executing towards. >> But it's not just for some of the newer applications or some of the newer were close. We're also seeing businesses acknowledge that the least secure member of their community has an impact on overall security. So the whole concept of even the legacy has to become increasingly a part of this broad story. So if anybody accesses anything from anywhere through the cloud that those other workloads increasing, they're gonna have to come under the scrutiny of a cloud based security option. >> Absolutely. I mean, that's a brilliant point, Peter. >> I >> think of >> it this way. Despite all those security appliances that have been deployed over time, they're still security breach is happening. And why is that? That is because users are the weakest link, right? If I'm a mobile work user, I'm sitting in a branch office. It's just painful for me to go back to those headquarter facilities just for additional scanning so two things happen either I have a painful user experience. What? I bypassed security, right? Um, and more and more of the attacks that we see leverage the user as the weakest link. I send you a phishing email. It looks like it came from HR. It has a excel sheet attached to it to update some information. But, you know, inside is lurking a macro, right? You open it. It is from a squatter domain that looks very similar to the company you work for. You click on it and your machine is infected. And then that leads to further malware being downloaded, data being expatriated out. So the Z scaler solution is very, very simple. Conceptually, we want to sit between users and the destinations they goto all across the world. And we built this network of 100 data centers. Why? Because you cannot travel faster than the speed of light. So if you're in San Francisco, you better go through our San Francisco facility. All your policies will show up here. All the latest and greatest security protections will be available. We serve 5000 large enterprises. So if we discover a new security threat because of an employee from, let's say, a General Electric. Then someone from United Airlines automatically gets protection simply because the cloud is live all the time. You're not waiting for your security boxes to get, you know, the weekly patch updates for new malware indicators and so on. Right, So, um, you get your stack right where you are. It's always up to date. User experience is not compromised. Your security administrators get a global view off things. And one >> of the >> things that that I that we haven't talked about here it is the dramatic cost savings that this sort of network transformation brings for enterprises. To put that in perspective, let's say you're a Fortune 100 organization with 100,000 employees worldwide in that, huh? Been spoke model. You are forcing all those workloads to come toe a few choke points, right? That is coming over. Very expensive. NPLs circuits private circuits from service providers. You're double trombone in traffic, back and forth. You know, you and I are in a branch. We might be on. Ah, Skype session. Ah, Google Hangout session. All our traffic goes to H Q. Goes to the cloud comeback comes back to h. Q comes back to you, there's this is too much back and forth, and you're paying for those expensive circuits and getting a poor user experience. Wouldn't it be great if you and I could go straight to the Internet? And that can only be enabled if we can provide that pervasive security stack wherever you are? And for that, we built this network of 100 data centers worldwide. Always live, always up to date you. You get routed to the closest the scaler facility. All your policy show up. They're automatically and you get the latest and greatest protection. >> So it seems as though you end up with three basic benefits. One is you get the cost benefit of being able to, uh, have being able to leverage a broader network of talent, skills and resources You reduce. Your risk is not the least of which is that the cost and the challenges configuring a whole bunch of appliances has not gotten any easier over the last. No, it hasn't cheaters. And so not only do you have user error, but you also Administrator Erin, absolutely benign, but nonetheless it's there, and then finally and this is what I want to talk about. Increasingly, the clot is acknowledged as the way that companies are going to improve their portfolio through digital assets. Absolutely. Which means new opportunities, new competition, new ways of improving customer experience. But security has become the function of no within a lot of organizations. Absolutely. So How does how does AE scaler facilitate the introduction of new business capabilities that can attack these opportunities in a much more timely way by reducing doesn't reduce some of those some of those traditional security constraints. >> Absolutely right, and we call it the Department of No right. We've talked to most people in the industry. They view their I t folks there, security forces, the department of Know Why? Because there's this big push from users to adopt newer, nimble, faster cloud based ah solutions that that improved productivity. But often I t comes in the way. No, If you look at what Izzy's killer is doing, it's trying to transform the adoption of these Cloud service. Is that do improve business productivity? In fact, there is no debate now because there are many, many industries that ever doubt adopted a cloud first strategy. Well, that means is, as they think of the network and their security, they want to make sure that cloud is front and center. Words E scaler does is it enables that cloud for a strategy without any security compromise. I'll give you some specific examples. Eight out of 10 c I ose that we talk to our thinking about office 3 65 or they have already deployed it right. One of the first challenge is that happens when you try to adopt office. 3 65 is that your legacy network and security infrastructure starts to come crumble. Very simple things happen. You have your laptop. Suddenly, that laptop has many, many persistent SSL connections to the clothes. Because exchange is moved to the cloudy directory, service is are moving to the cloud. If you have a small branch office with 2000 users, each of them having 30 40 persistent connections to the cloud will your edge firewall chokes. Why? Because it cannot maintain so many active ports at the same time, we talked about the double trombone ing of traffic back and forth. If you try to not go direct to the Internet but force everyone to go through a couple of hubs. So you pay for all the excessive band with your traditional network infrastructure, and your security infrastructure might need a forklift upgrades. So a cloud transformation project quickly becomes a network in a security transformation project. And this is where you nosy scaler helps tremendously because we were born and bred in the cloud. Many of these traditional limitations that you have with appliance based security or networking, you know, in the traditional sense don't exist for the scaler, right? We can enable your branch officers to go directly to the cloud. In fact, we've started doing some very clever things. For example, we peer with Microsoft in about 20 sites worldwide. So what that means is, when you come to the scaler for security, there's a very high likelihood that Microsoft has a presence in the same data center. We might be one or two or three millisecond hops away because we're in the same equinox facility in New York or San Jose. And so not only are you getting your full security stack where you are, you're getting the superfast peered connections to the end Cloud service is that you want to goto. You don't have to work. Worry about you know your edge Firewalls not keeping up. You don't have to worry about a massive 30 40% increase in back hole costs because you were now shipping all this extra traffic to those couple of hubs. And more importantly, you know, you've adopted these transformative technologies on your users don't have to complain about how slow they are because you know, most of the millennials hitting the workforce. I used to a very fast, nimble experience on their mobile phones with consumer APS. And then they come into the enterprise and they quickly realize that, well, this is all cumbersome and old and legacy stuff >> in me s. So let's talk a little bit about Let's talk a bit about this notion of security being everywhere and increasingly is removed to a digital business or digital orientation. With digital assets being the basis for the value proposition, which is certainly happening on a broad scale right now, it means it's security going back to the idea of security being department. No security has to move from an orientation of limiting access to appropriately sharing. Security becomes the basis for defining the digital brand. So talk to us a little bit about how the how you look out, how you see the world, that you think security's gonna be playing in ultimately defining this notion of digital brand digital perimeters from a not a iittie standpoint. But from a business value standpoint, >> absolutely. I would love to talk about that. So Izzy's killer Our cloud today sees about 30,000,000,000 transactions a day from about 5000 enterprises. So we have a very, very good pulse on what is happening in large enterprises, from from a cloud at perspective or just what users are doing on the Internet. So here are some of the things that we see. Number one. We see that about 50 60% of the threats are coming inside SSL, so it's very important to inspect SSL. The second thing that we observe is without visibility. It is very different, very difficult for your security guys to come up with a Chris policy, right? If you cannot see what is happening inside an SSL connection, how are you going to have a date? A leakage policy, right? Maybe your policy is no P I information should leak out. No source code should leak out. How can you make sure that an engineer is not dropping something in this folder, which is sinking to Google Drive or drop box in an in an SSL tano, Right. How do you prioritize mission Critical business applications like office 3 65 over streaming media, Right. So for step two, crafting good policy is 100% real time visibility. And that's what happens when you adopt the Siskel a network. You can see what any user is doing anywhere in the world within seconds. And once you have that kind of visibility, you can start formulating policies, both security and otherwise that strike a good balance between business productivity that you want to achieve without compromising security. >> That's the policy's been 10 more net. You can also end that decisions. >> Yes, right. So, for example, you can you can have a more relaxed social media policy, right? You can say Well, you know, everyone is allowed access, but they can. Maybe streaming media is restricted to one hour a day. You know, after hours, or you can say, I want to adopt um, storage applications in the clothes here are some sanctioned APS These other raps were not going to allow right. You can do policies by users, by locations by departments, right? And once you have the visibility, you can. You can be very, very precise and say, Well, boxes, my sanction story, Jap other APS are not allowed right and hear other things that a particular group of users can do on box. Or they cannot do because we were seeing every transaction between the user on going to the destination and as a result, begin, you know, we can enable the enterprise administrator to come up with very, very specific policies that are tailored for that. >> You said something really interesting. I'm gonna ask you one more question, but I'm gonna make a common here. And that common is that the power of digital technology is that it can be configured and copied and changed, and it's very mutable. It's very plastic, but at the end of the day it has to be precise, and I've never heard anybody talk about the idea of precise and security, and I think it's a very, very powerful concept. But what are what's What's the scale are talking about in our say this year. >> Well, we're going to talk about a bunch of very interesting things. First, we'll talk about the scale of private access. This is a new offering on the scale of platform. We believe that VP ends have become irrelevant because of all the discussions we just had, um, Enterprises are treating their Internet as though it was the Internet, right? You know, sort of a zero trust model. They're moving the crown jewel applications to either private cloud offerings are, you know, sort of restricting that in a very micro segmented way. And the question is, how do you access those applications? Right? And the sea skill immortal is very straightforward. You have a pervasive cloud users authenticate to the cloud and based on policies, we can allow them to go to the Internet to sites that have been sanctioned and allowed. We make sure nothing good is leaking out. Nothing bad is coming in, and that same cloud model can be leveraged for private access to crown jewel applications that traditionally would have required a full blown vpn right. And the difference between a VPN and the skill of private access is VP ends basically give you full network access keys to the kingdom, right? Whether it's a contractor with, it's an employee just so that you could access, you know, Internet application. You allow full network access, and we're just gonna getting rid of that whole notion. That's one thing we're gonna stroke ISS lots of cloud white analytics, As I mentioned, you know, we process 30,000,000,000 transactions a day. To put that in perspective, Salesforce reports about four and 1 30,000,000,000 4 1/2 to 5,000,000,000 transactions. They're about three and 1/2 1,000,000,000 Google searches done daily, right? So it is truly a tin Internet scale. We're blocking over 100,000,000 threats every day for, ah, for all our enterprise user. So we have a very good pulse on you know what's what's an average enterprise user doing? And you're going to see some interesting cloud? Wait, Analytics. Just where we talk about a one of the top prevalent Claude APs, what are the top threats? You know, by vertical buy by geography, ese? And then, you know, we as a platform has emerged. We started off as a as a sort of a proxy in the cloud, and we've added sand boxing capabilities. Firewall capabilities, you know, in our overall vision, as I said, is to be that entire security stack that sits in your inbound and outbound gateway in that DMC as a pure service. So everything from firewall at layer three to a proxy at Layer seven, everything from inline navy scanning right to full sand. Boxing everything from DLP to cloud application control. Right? And all of that is possible because, you know, we have this very scalable architecture that allows you to to do sort of single scan multiple action right in that appliance model that I describe. What ends up happening is that you have many bumps in the wire. One of the examples we use is if you wanted to build a utility company, you don't start off with small portable generators and stack them in a warehouse, right? That's inefficient. It requires individual maintenance. It doesn't scale properly. Imagine if you build a turbine and ah, and then started your utility company. You can scale better. You can do things that traditional appliance vendors cannot think about. So we build this scalable, elastic security platform, and on that platform it's very easy for us to add. You know, here's a firewall. Here's a sandbox. And what does it mean for end users? You know, you don't need to deploy new boxes. You just go and say, I want to add sand boxing capabilities or I want to add private access or I want to add DLP. And it is as simple as enabling askew, which is what a cloud service offering should be. >> Right. So we're >> hardly know software. >> So we're talking about we're talking about lower cost, less likelihood of human error, which improves the quality, security, greater plasticity and ultimately, better experience, especially for your non employees. Absolutely. All right, so we are closing up this particular moment I want Thank you very much for coming down to our Pallotta studio is part of our coverage on Peter Boris. And we've been talking to the scanner amidst, huh? Thank you very much. And back to Dio Cube.