well hello everybody John Wallace here on thecube he's continuing our segments here on the AWS Global startup showcase we are at day three of Reinventing irking Zhang is joining us now he is the CEO co-founder of Jupiter one um first off before we get going talking about you know security and big world for you guys I know what's your take on the show what's been going on out here at re invent yeah yeah ring event has been one of my favorite shows there's a lot of people here there's a lot of topics of course it's not just cyber security a lot of cloud infrastructure and just technology in general so you get a lot you know if you go walk the floor you see a lot of vendors you look at us go into sessions you can learn a lot but you're the Hot Topic right everybody's focused on Cyber yeah big time and with good reason right because as we know the Bad actors are getting even smarter and even faster and even more Nimble so just paint the landscape for me here in general right now as you see uh security Cloud Security in particular and and kind of where we are in that battle well we are clearly not winning so I think that in itself is a bit of a uh interesting problem right so as a it's not just Cloud security if you think about cyber security in general as an industry it has it has not been around for that long right but if you just look at the history of it uh we haven't done that while so uh pick another industry say medicine which has been around forever and if you look at the history of Medicine well I would argue you has done tremendously well because people live longer right when you get sick you get access to health care and yeah exactly you have Solutions and and you can see the trend even though there are problems in healthcare of course right but the trend is is good it's going well but not in cyber security more breaches more attacks more attackers we don't know what the hell we're doing with that many solutions and you know that's been one of my struggles as a former CSO and security practitioner for many years you know why is it that we're not getting better all right so I'm going to ask you the question yeah okay why aren't we getting better you know how come we can't stay ahead of the curve on this thing that for some reason it's like whack-a-mole times a hundred every time we think we solve one problem we have a hundred more that show up over here exactly and we have to address that and and our attention keeps floating around yeah I think you said it right so because we're taking this guacamole approach and we're looking for the painkiller of the day and you know we're looking for uh the Band-Aids right so and then we ended up well I I think to be fair to be fair to your industry the industry moves so quickly technology in general moves so quickly and security has been playing catch-up over time we're still playing catch-up so when you're playing catch-up you you can almost only uh look at you know what's the painkiller of what's the band name of the day so I can stop the bleeding right but I do think that we're we're to a point or we have enough painkillers and Band-Aids and and we need to start looking at how can we do better fundamentally with the basics and do the basics well because a lot of times the basics that get you into trouble so fundamentally the foundation I if I hear you right what you're saying is um you know quick changing industry right things are moving rapidly but we're not blocking and tackling we're not doing the X's and O's and so forget changing and we we got to get back to the basis and do those things right exactly you can only seem so simple it seems so simple but it's so hard right so you can you can think about you know uh even in case of building a starter building a company and and in order at one point right so we're blocking uh blocking tackling and then when we grow to a certain size we have to scale we have to figure out how to scale the business this is the same problem that happens in security as an industry we've been blocking happening for so long you know we're the industry is so young but we're to a point that we got to figure out how to scale this scale this in a fundamentally different way and I'll give you some example right so so what when we say the basics now it's easy to to think that say users should have MFA enabled is one of the basics right or another Basics will be you have endpoint protection on your devices you know maybe it's Cloud strike or Sentinel one or carbon black or whatever but the question being how do you know it is working 100 of the time right how do you know that how do you know right you find out too exactly that's right and how do you know that you have 100 coverage on your endpoints those Solutions are not going to tell you because they don't know what they don't know right if it's not enabled if it's not you know what what's the negative that you are not seeing so that's one of the things that you know that's in the basic state that you're now covering so the fundamentals it really goes to these five questions that I think that nobody has a really good answer for until now so the five questions goes what do I have right is it important what's important out of all the things I have you have a lot right you could have millions of things what important now for those that are important does it have a problem and if it has a problem who can fix it because the reality is in most cases security teams are not the ones fixing the problems they're they're the ones identical they're very good at recognizing but not so good exactly identifying the owner who can fix it right right could be could be business owner could be Engineers so the the asset ownership identification right so so these four questions and and then over time you know whether it's over a week or a month or a quarter or a year am I getting better right and then you just keep asking these questions in different areas in different domains with a different lens right so maybe that's endpoints maybe that's Cloud maybe that's you know users maybe that's a product and applications right but it really boils down to these five questions that's the foundation for any good security program if you can do that well I think we cover a lot of bases and we're going to be in much better shape than we have been all right so where do you come in man Jupiter one in terms of what you're providing because obviously you've identified this kind of pyramid yes this hierarchy of addressing needs and I assume obviously knowing you as I do and knowing the company as I do you've got Solutions that's exactly right right and and we precisely answer those five questions right for uh any organization uh from a asset perspective right because all the the answers to all those these five questions are based in assets it starts with knowing what I have right right so the the overall challenge of cyber security being broke broken I I believe is fundamentally that people do not understand and cannot uh probably deal with the complexity that we have within our own environments so again like you know using uh medicine as an example right so in order to come up with the right medicine for either it's a vaccine for covid-19 or whether it is a treatment for cancer or whatever that case may be you have to start with the foundations of understanding both the pathogen and to the human body like DNA sequencing right without those you cannot effectively produce the right medicine in modern uh you know Medicine sure right so that is the same thing that's happening in cyber security you know we spend a lot of times you know putting band days in patches right and then we spend a lot of time doing attacker research from the outside but we don't fundamentally understand in a complete way what's the complexity within our own environment in terms of digital assets and that's that's almost like the DNA of your own work what is that kind of mind-blowing in a way that if again hearing you what you're talking about is saying that the first step is to identify what you have that's right so it seems just so basic that that I should know what I what's under my hood I should know what is valuable and what is not I should prioritize what I really need to protect and what maybe can go on the second shelf yeah it has been a tough problem since the beginning of I.T not just the beginning of cyber security right so in the history of I.T we have this thing called cmdb configuration management database it is supposed to capture the configurations of it assets now over time that has become a lot more complex and and there's a lot more than just it asset that we have to understand from a security and attack service perspective right so we have to understand I.T environments we have to understand Cloud environments and applications and users and access and data and as and all of those things then then we have to take a different approach of sort of a modern cmdb right so what is the way that we can understand all of those complexity within all of those assets but not just independently within those silos but rather in a connected way so we can not only understand the attack surface but only but also understand the attack path that connect the dots from one thing to another right because everything in the organization is actually connected if if there's any one thing that sits on an island right so if you say you have a a a a server or a device or a user that is on an island that is not connected to the rest of the organization then why have it right and it doesn't matter so it's the understanding of that connect connected tissue this entire map where this you know DNA sequencing equivalent of a digital organization is what Jupiter one provides right so that visibility of the fundamental you know very granular uh level of assets and resources to answer those five questions and how does that how do I get better at that then I mean I have you to help me but but internally within our organization um I mean I don't want to be rude but I mean do I have do I have the skill for that do I have um do I have the the internal horsepower for that or or is there some need to close that Gap and how do I do it you know I'll tell you two things right so so one you mentioned the worst skills right so let me start there so because this one is very interesting we also have a huge skills shortage in cyber security we will we've all heard that for years and and and and for a long time but if you dig deeper into it why is that why is that and you know we have a lot of you know talented people right so why do we still have a skills shortage now what's interesting is if you think about what we're asking security people to do is mind-boggling so if you if you get a security analyst to say hey I want to understand how to protect something or or how to deal with an incident and what you're asking the person to do is not only to understand the security concept and be a domain expert in security you're also asking the person to and understand at the same time AWS or other clouds or endpoints or code or applications so that you can properly do the analysis and the in the response it's it's impossible it's like you know if you have you have to have a person who's an expert in everything know everything about everything that's right it's impossible so so so that's that's one thing that we have to to resolve is how do we use technology like Jupiter one to provide an abstraction so that there's Automation in place to help the security teams be better at their jobs without having to be an expert in deep technology right just add the abstract level of understanding because you know we can we can model the data and and provide the analysis and visual visualization out of the box for them so they can focus on just the security practices so that's one and the second thing is we have to change the mindset like take vulnerability management as an example right so the mindset for vulnerability management has been how do I manage findings now we have to change it to the concept of more proactive and how to manage assets so let's think about uh you know say log4j right that that happened and uh you know when it happened everybody scrambles and said hey which which devices or which you know uh systems have log4j and you know it doesn't matter what's the impact we can fix it right going back to those questions that that I mentioned before right and then um and then they try to look for a solution at a time say well where's that silver bullet that can give me the answers now what what what we struggle with though is that you know I want to maybe ask the question where were you six months ago where were you six months ago where you could have done the due diligence and put something in place that help you understand all of these assets and connections so you can go to one place and just ask for that question when something like that you know hit the fan so so if we do not fundamentally change the mindset to say I have to look at things not from a reactive findings perspective but really starting from an asset-centric you know day one perspective to look at that and have this Foundation have this map build we can't get there right so it's like you know if I need direction I go to Google Maps right but the the reason that it works is because somebody has done the work of creating the map right right if you haven't if you don't have the map and you just at you know when the time you say I gotta go somewhere and you expect the map to magically happen to show you the direction it's not going to work right right I imagine there are a lot of people out there right now are listening to thinking oh boy you know and that's what Jupiter one's all about they're there to answer your oh boy thanks for the time of course I appreciate the insights as well it's nice to know that uh at least somebody is reminding us to keep the front door locked too that's just the back door the side doors keep that front door and that garage locked up too definitely um all right we'll continue our coverage here at AWS re invent 22 this is part of the AWS Global startup showcase and you're watching the cube the leader in high-tech coverage foreign

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE live in Miami on the floor of IFS Unleashed. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Had some great conversations. Have more great conversations coming your way. I have two guests joining me. Please welcome Martin Schirmer, the President of Enterprise Service Management, IFS Assyst. And Parminder Khosa, the Senior IT Manager at Parexel. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. >> Lovely to be here. >> It's good to be here. >> Martin, talk to me a little bit... tell the audience a little bit about Assyst so that that get that context before we start asking questions. >> Yeah. Absolutely. So IFS Assyst is a recent acquisition. It's an acquisition we made about a year ago. And fundamentally, it's a platform that takes care of IT service management, enterprise service management and IT operations management. So think of it, of managing sort of the ERP for IT and then broadening that out into the sort of enterprise where you're driving enterprise use cases for all lines of businesses like HR, finance, facilities, so on and so forth. >> Got it. And then Parminder, give the audience just a little bit of a flavor of Parexel, who you guys are, what you do. >> Sure. >> Maybe the impact that you make. >> Yeah, so Parexel is a clinical research organization. And what that means is that we manage drug trials for big pharmaceutical companies. So we're a big company. We're 25,000 people. We have offices in 150 locations all the way from Japan and the east through to the West Coast of the USA. >> Big company. >> Yeah, we are. We are a lot of people. >> And let's start chatting now Martin with some of the questions that you have so we get the understanding of how IFS and Parexel are working together. >> Yeah. Absolutely. I suppose... I mean the first thing is and thank you for traveling here all the way from the UK. (Lisa chuckles) Appreciate it and great energy and vibe. So just what the first question I had really was, you're customer of ours for the last 15 years plus. Maybe just give the audience a bit of context into your journey and how you've evolved from the sort of early years to where you're going into the future. >> Sure. So our history, I was part of a company that Parexel acquired that was already using Assyst. And as Parexel acquired us, they were in the process of also buying Assyst. So it became a kind of natural fit where I carried on with Assyst. And we started relatively small, sort of just the service desktop. And throughout the ongoing 15 years or so, we've just grown and expanded into kind of being a critical tool for Parexel right now. >> Okay, that's fantastic. I mean part of that journey, I know you started in sort of the more they call a ticketing space or IT service management space. Expand a little bit how you've expanded out of that and really moved into the enterprise. >> Sure. So yeah. So when we first rolled Assyst out, it was as I say, purely IT. And eventually we reached out to other business units to say asking questions like, Are you managing your workload through email? Are you managing your workload through Excel spreadsheets? In which case, if you are, we've got a solution for you that will make it a much better experience for your customers. They're all internal. It'll make it much easier for you because you will have official tracking going on through our system. I'll make it better for your management because we can drive metrics from all of the data that we're getting. So if you imagine finance we're getting, kind of 200 miles a day because of the size of our company. And they were just working through them one by one responding, and they becomes just a mess. So we developed forms for them to say, "Okay, Larry raise all your requests here. We will pick it up. We will manage it. We will communicate with you. And once the piece of work that you've asked for is done, we will let you know." And as we go through that process, we'll make it better for us because as I say we're getting those metrics. And we'll make it better for you because we can spot where our gaps are. If a request is taking three days, and of that three days, two days is waiting for someone on our end to respond to you or is waiting for us waiting for a customer to respond, we can iron those out and make it a much better experience for everyone. >> That's fantastic. It's really music to my ears because we always pushing the industry to say move away from just the IT side and really get into the enterprise. And it sounds like you've really gotten a lot of sort of productivity and efficiency gains out of that. >> Definitely, definitely. And it becomes kind of a happy circle. So the finance guys will work with the procurement guys. And they also look... Well, we're doing all of our work through Assyst now. So procurement's a little turnaround. So, well we're using this big spreadsheet to manage all of ours. Can we do the same? And they'll reach out to us and we'll say, "Of course we can. What is your process?" For example, they will say, okay, if someone asks for a new laptop, we need to get the approval from their line manager, from the supplier. We need to do our own internal work and then we will send it out. So imagine if you're doing that in a an email chain. It just becomes chaos. >> Yeah. >> So we will build all of that out for them. And then procurement will talk to HR and it just becomes a snowball. And before you know it, we are doing about 4,000 tickets per day in our Assyst system. And of those, 50% perhaps maybe more than 50% now will be non IT related. >> Oh, that's fantastic. Really music to my ears. And it really breaking down the boundaries or silos within an organization. It's really good. Let the teams work together. Right? >> Definitely. And that's one of the key things that we've learned is that we have to engage completely with our business partners. And our business partners are becoming more and more IT literate as well. So for example, we had a recent big HR solution provided to us. And as part of that, we know there are going to be questions, and queries and perhaps even issues to do with our HR system. So we have to work with us guys, the Assyst front end, the IT HR guys who look after the databases, all of the technology in the background. Then there'll be IT HR who are Workday experts. And then kind of not necessarily at the bottom of the chain will be the HR people themselves who are in their own way, experts in their area, experts in IT in a certain way. So all of those people have to work together. We become the front end, but we have to work with all of those parts of the business. >> That's really great. It's basically what you just said is taking business, IT processes and underpinning solutions. Effectively digital transformation, right? >> Exactly. Yeah. So HR is a great example. They used to have paper flying around with leave request, with sickness requests, with all of those kind of issues. And you said, well if you have an issue with your HR system, you can't raise a leave request, or you can't raise a sickness request, tell us. We will take care of it. We will fix it for you. We will give you the instructions. And we will get rid of all of that paper. >> That's brilliant. Just sort of turning the attention. And all of that, how do you drive the sort of, we'll talk about the autonomous enterprise. How do you drive automation in that process? >> Yeah. Of course, we have to map all of those processes out. Because we're not the experts in HR or procurement or whatever the business area may be. We have to really dig into their work methods, their working areas. What is necessary for them? What is a must have? What is a like to have? What is we don't really need? So we really drive into that processes. Once we've got those, we will automate them. We will build them out in Assyst with the process designer. It's very intuitive now. The latest version is really good to work with. We will do some pretty clever stuff in there. We'll say, okay the manager approval. If the manager is not there, then escalate it to the next person. Then we go to HR and say, okay HR have taken two days to do this. We're not particularly okay with that. So we will escalate it to the next person. And all of that process is completely automated, completely in Assyst. >> Brilliant. I mean obviously, we have a codeless workflow engine with a designer. And if you look at one of the trends from post covid is a war in talent in particular developers. The IDC says there's going to be around 4 million shortage of developers. What is your view on, how easy... Do I need developers? Is it easy, is it difficult to do these workflow extensions and automations? >> Definitely not, no. So the two key areas that you mentioned that with the customizer to develop the forms to make them available to our end users, drag and drop. Really easy to do. You can put some nice filters in there. You can put some nice variables in there. You can drive intelligent drive the forms from there as well. So if option A is correct, then don't show me option B, show me option C. And all of that is codeless, entirely codeless. I don't need to type any code. And when we move on to a process designer that hooks in nicely with the form customizer because we can say, "Okay, if option B on that form is selected, then runs this process." And all of that process is entirely codeless as well. Drag and drop. Creates some tasks. Create some decisions. >> Fantastic. >> Brilliant. >> Sounds really good. Switching gears a little bit. You spoke about experience, and that's also obviously very topical post, well, Covid becoming a remote workforce. Clearly, we need to be digitally connected to our business and organization because the hybrid workforce, as we all know, is here to stay. And that employee experience is fundamental because it is their sort of channel to the engagement of the organization. Of course, that has retention impacts and productivity impact. So just from your perspective, how was Covid, from your perspective, and how easy or difficult was it to get your employees engaged and productive and working? >> Yeah. And for us, it's a double edged sword Covid was. Because of the nature of our business. We do covid stuff. We do drug stuff. So we may have issues with some trials that are related to that. So we need to escalate those. We need to be aware of them and move them to the top of the chain as soon as possible. And then Assyst becomes a source of truth. Everybody knows that if I've got an issue with the current environment that we're living in, I can raise it in Assyst. And everybody knows that's where that information is. There's no need to have huge conference calls or huge email chains to try and follow those around. So with our Assyst platform, with our employees as well, everybody knew that this is where the source of truth was. We didn't have any dropouts. We didn't have any concerns with our system or performance. We knew it was there. We had to do some work like, as I say, around covid issues just to make sure they get pushed up to the top of the chain. But otherwise, we were fine. And great credit to our IT operations team as well who managed that pretty much seamlessly. >> That's brilliant. That's good news. >> Yeah. >> It really is. Just taking a little bit further and talking a little bit about what next. My team has been, I know, talking to your team about the whole area of asset management. Maybe talk to us a little bit about that journey. >> Sure, sure. So we're an ITOM customer as well. So all of our hardware data is stored within the ITOM platform. So we've pushed out the agents to all of our end user machines, so 25,000 agents. And we're in the process of integrating that into our Assyst platform to make that the single source of truth. And that part of that we're working on the software asset management side as well. So we've got a really good idea of where our software assets are. It comes to all license auditing, we know exactly how much we've got there. And the more complex side of it is of course server. So software management management as well. So we're in the process of getting all of that data as well. So once we've done all that, there is other all as the next step. The next step will be to perhaps do monitoring or pushing out software using the ITOM platform and getting rid of some of the disparate systems that we have right now. >> Well that's good news. And I think I saw a study. I think, every single person as an employee carries around 15 or 20 assets with him at any one time. Be it from a PC, phone, physical software licenses, so on and so forth. In that context, I can imagine the business case around it. >> Definitely. Yeah. And every, again, we map every user to their assets and (indistinct) their assets. And again Assyst as a source of truth for that. So if you want to look at my record, so, all right. Pam's got a laptop. He's got a mobile phone. We're thinking about giving him a tablet, but we'll find out. That he's in the process of getting a tablet as well. So I can have a look at my user record and know exactly what I've got with all of the asset tags and the various links that it has to the software pieces so it becomes a big tree of my assets. >> That's wonderful. Just the question I had was, we spoke about breaking down silos and the enterprise use cases and the effect that has. Do you envisage that Assyst can really get to being enterprisewide as, when I say enterprisewide, everybody in the organization effectively using this tool as their sort of source of experience, and level of automation of process? >> Definitely, definitely. As I say, we're getting... We're really pushing to get to that. As I say, 4,000 tickets a day with a user base of 25,000 kind of means that everybody will interact with the system perhaps every two weeks or so. So we're getting to that point and with the new functionality that's coming out with the Assyst product, with the team's integration, and the bot and everything that will bring to us because we are a big. We use teams. We use bots. We use that kind of technology. It will just fit in seamlessly. And trying to break down the silos, as I say finance, procurement, all of the big beasts within our company already are using the Assyst tool. And we want to bring in more and more of those processes as we mature. >> Brilliant. I think Omnichannel's critical. We want to connect from any device from anywhere. It's just the way we work. So I think that's critical. Teams is of course a a tool that most of us have become too familiar with. >> Yup. (chuckles) >> To be fair. (chuckles) It's better to be here in person finally, right? >> Yeah. >> So I think, that's all exciting news. And it's really fantastic. >> Great. >> So I suppose maybe in the time that we have left, what's next? >> What's next for us is that we're in the process of migrating our solution to the cloud, to the IFS cloud. That will open up a huge new user base for us. If we think all of our customers, all of our people who work on studies will have the ability to connect to Assyst and ask questions. That's a lot of it is just ask a question, or raise an issue or ask for something. So we're talking, it could be expanded by hundreds of thousands of new users that will meet more people on the backend to manage those requests as well. So yeah. It's just going to get bigger and bigger. And as you say, with the CMDB work that we're doing as well, that's another big ongoing stream for us. >> It's great because as you know, with Assyst we have a disruptive licensing model. >> Yeah. >> We have a t-shirt size pricing. All you can need based a number of employees. So there's no barriers to entry for you. >> There really is. And that really helps us because as I said initially, particularly when finance came on board and now they're expanding, there is no cost implication for it. The more that we use it, the better it is for. The more bang for buck that we get. >> Yep. That's our mantra. Enterprise users, right? For the price of a cup of coffee, for the price of a user. That's our mantra. >> I love it. You guys have done such a great job of articulating the synergies in the relationship that IFS Assyst has with Paraxel. You talked about the great outcomes that you're achieving. And it's all about Martin, I know, from IFS Assyst perspective, it's all about helping customers achieve those outcomes and those moments of service that are so critical to your customers on the other end staying with you, doing more business. Whether it's the end user customer, whether it's the actual employee. You talked a lot about the customer experience, the employee experience, and what you guys are doing together to enable that. And I always think that the employee experience and the customer experience are like this. They're inextricably linked. You can't, you shouldn't. Otherwise you're going to have problems. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's actually a study on that saying that, 70% of customers generally don't feel they get what they want from organizations. >> 70. Wow! >> And if you take that one step further to what you said, the interconnectivity between customer employee, employee shops on Amazon, right? It's on those websites. So you can't be rolling out and digitally connect to the employee with something that is clunky and has the wrong experience. Like I said, it really affects that level of engagement the employee has with the company which happens to be largely these days remote. >> It does. Last question Martin, is for you. Talk to us about what's next for IFS Assyst. Obviously, we're back in person. There's a lot of momentum about the company. I was talking with Darren, the growth and first half was great. He kind of gave us some teaser about second half, but what's next from your perspective? >> Yeah. So what's next for us is achieving our goal. We are here to disrupt the industry. It's an industry that's dominated by one player and a fair amount of legacy players. We've disrupted the business model as I've told you. We here to do more because it's a simple thing. And that's the word simple. We want to keep things simple. We're going to keep engineering and driving our product forward, right? We've made sure that our platform is up there with the best. Yeah. We've just been certified by pink. Pink is a verification of ITIL four they call it. So it's a body. And the top level is you can get 20 out of 20. We got 17 out of 20. There's only one other vendor that has more than us and it's only by little. And after it's a big white space, the next one is 14. So we on the right track. We are going to of course drive and capture the market. So watch this space. We here to grow. >> We will watch this space. Congratulations on being that disrupter. >> Thank you. >> Parminder great work with what you guys are doing. You did a great job of articulating, as I said, the customers tour here. We appreciate your insights, your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Pleasure. >> All right, my pleasure. >> Thank you. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live from Miami on the show floor of IFS Unleashed. We'll be back after a short break.

>>Okay. We're back at the area in Las Vegas, Falcon 22. You're watching the cube. My name is Dave Valante. Michael cent is here. He's the chief technology officer at CrowdStrike. Michael. Good to see you. Thanks. Thanks >>For >>Having me. Yeah. So this is your first time I think, on the cube. It is, and, and it's really a pleasure. I've been following you, watching you very closely. You're, you know, quite prominent and, and, you know, very articulate. I loved your keynote talking about what is XDR. I think you guys are gonna do really well in that space, cuz you've got clarity of vision and execution. Talk about some of the announcements that you made this week, particularly interested in, in insight. XDR what's that all about? >>Yeah. So I've been talking about XDR for a while and trying to help push the right narrative. There's a lot of marketing in the industry with XDR. So we've been talking a lot about what it, what it means that the benefit that it provides from a technology perspective, what you need in the architecture. So we firmly believe it's a philosophy and we build all of our technology to work together, but it's bringing in third parties. And that was really a lot of the, the announcements. My keynote was to show everybody the work that we've been doing to bring in data from Zscaler and Proofpoint. And we talked about bringing in data from a whole range of different vendors, firewall vendors, and we've been doing XDR use cases for a long time. So a big part of our strategy is to make security easy. And we've been doing a lot of XDR use cases with our Falcon insight module. So the announcement that I made was to relaunch Falcon insight as insight XDR and it means all of our close to 20,000 customers have access to the product. >>So that gets bundled right in it's like SAS automatically part of the portfolio >>Log off on Friday, come back on Monday and you're good to go. >>And then, and you, you just, you just called out Zscaler and Proofpoint you, I think you also mentioned Palo Alto network, Cisco for net as well. You're pulling in telemetry from, yeah, >>We've got a, we got a long map of, of people that we're integrating with. We talked about Cisco, we talked about for drop and for net, we announced that we're gonna be pulling in telemetry from, from Palo and a range of other vendors, Microsoft and others. And that's what XDR is about. It's about first party and third party integration and making all of the telemetry work together. >>I was talking to George about this yesterday is I think there's a lot of confusion. Sometimes when you have the dogma of cloud native, you know, snowflake, same thing, no, we're not doing OnPrem. This is hybrid. People think that that you're excluding on-prem data, but you're not, you can ingest on-prem data, right? >>We absolutely are not excluding on-prem. We will support and, and secure every workload, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud, whether it's connected to the internet or offline, a lot of the, the indicators of attack and the, and the detection techniques that we have are on the sensor itself. So you don't have to be connected anywhere for that capability to work. You get the benefit when you connect to the cloud of the additional visibility, the additional protection, but the core capabilities on the sensor that we have >>Given that you guys started 11 years ago, plus two days now, and you had that dogma cloud cloud, first cloud cloud, only Nate cloud native. Was there ever a point where you're like, you know, boy, we might be missing some of the market, you know? And, and you, you, you held true to your principles. Two part question. Did you ever question that and by focusing all your resources on cloud, what, what has that given you? >>It's there's been a Eliza focus on having a, a native cloud platform. It's easy to say cloud native. And if you look at a lot of the vendors in the industry today, if you are a, a customer and you ask them, Hey, can you gimme an on-premise product? I'm not gonna buy your product. They've got an on premise product. The problem is when you have two different versions, you end up having compromise. You have to manage two code bases, impact to your engineering team. Their features are different customers. Ultimately are the ones that miss out because if I have the on-prem version or if the cloud version, I may not get the same capability for us, it's been very clear. It's been a laser focus to be a cloud and cloud only from day one. >>You've renamed humo. I gotta stop using humo. I guess it's not called log scale, Falcon, complete log scale. You're bringing together security and observability. Although you're not doing the full spectrum of observability, you're just sort of focusing on, you know, part of it. Can you explain that? >>Yeah. So first of all, we did rebrand and bring the homeo brand closer to a crowd strike by renaming it Falcon log scale. And just to be clear, it's not just the rebranding of the name. We've been spending a lot of time. We made that acquisition in March of, of last year, and we've been doing a lot of work on the technology. We built out long, the Falcon long term retention. We built a whole bunch of capability into the product. So now was the right time to rebrand it as Falcon log scale. And at the same time, we also announced Falcon complete log scale. And it's part of the complete franchise. And that's where customers can get the value and the benefit of log scale, but they don't have to set it up. They don't have to manage it. They leave that to us. >>So you get pretty much involved in, in the, the M and a activity. You talked on stage yesterday about reify and, and what's going on there. You guys got, obviously gotta, still do that. You, but you made investments this week. You announced investments in salt security, the API specialist, and, and also Vanta compliance automation. What's the thinking behind that, you know, explain actually the fund that you guys are sprinkling around as a strategic investor and why those companies. Yeah. >>So there's two, two parts that, that I'm involved in on that part of my team. One is the M and a team. And one is the Falcon fund side of the business. Obviously two very different things. The, the M and a part of CrowdStrike, we're always looking to see for every technology space that we want to get into, you know, what is the best option build by a partner? Sometimes it's built sometimes it's a, it's a hybrid approach of build and partner. Other times we go down the path of M and a, and I was super excited about reify, great company, great technology. And as you said, we made announcements to we're investing as part of the fund into, into van and salt. We, we, we are very blessed. We're very fortunate to have achieved a lot of success in a short period of time. And we think we've got an opportunity to help fledgling companies to help them guide through the process of setting up the company, helping them with engineering principles and guidelines, helping them with the go to market perspective. So the fund is really about that. It's finding the next cybersecurity company working closely together, and it's been a huge success. You had banter and salt on earlier, and there's so much excitement about what they do. >>Yeah. I mean, it's clear, clear, compliment to what you guys are doing. I want to ask you about your lightweight agent. There, there are other firms that say they have a lightweight agent too. You know, what, what makes your lightweight agent so different? So special? >>Yeah. I've never seen a PowerPoint presentation. That's wrong. It's very easy to, to say your lightweight agent is, is, you know, super lightweight. And many times when you look at them, they're, they're not lightweight. They take a lot of effort to install. They need reboots. If you've got security, that's part of the operating system. If you've got security that requires to reboot, you can't go to a bank and say, Hey, you've got a hundred thousand machines. We're gonna install all of this technology, but you've gotta reboot it once, twice, three times. So what ends up happening is you see deployment cycles that go on for 12 months. I've spoken to organizations here this week that said we had budgeted to roll out your product in 18 months because of what we experienced in the past. And we did it in seven weeks. That's a lightweight agent with no reboot. And then you look at the updates. You look at the CPU resource utilization. So again, very easy to say lightweight. I haven't seen anything like what we've built at crowd strike. >>How do you keep an agent lightweight when you're both acquiring in companies and adding modules? I think you're, you're over 20 modules now. How, how is it that the, the agent can remain so lightweight? >>So we spent a lot of time building out the agent cloud architecture that we have, the, the concept of our agent is very different. It's not collecting data, storing it, trying to sell, send it up. We have a smart agent with smart filtering built in. So we're very careful in terms of the data that we collect, but think of the aperture on a camera. You know, if you wanna let more light in you, you widen the aperture. It's the same as our, our agent. If we wanna bring in more telemetry, we, we widen that aperture. So we're very efficient on the network. And we collect data. When machine process runs, we collect that telemetry. We use it in different ways, but we collect once and reuse it many times. So it's the same agent for NextGen AV for EDR, for our spotlight vulnerability management module. And when we're looking at M M and a, so coming back to your, your question, we will look at technology. And if we can't bring that technology and incorporate it into the agent that we already have, we won't acquire it. Worst thing in security is complexity. When you give an organization, 1, 2, 3, 5 plus agents, and then they have 3, 4, 5 plus management consoles. It's too hard when they're under attack. >>Well, it's like my, my business partner co-host John furrier says is that as an industry, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity. And it's, that's problematic. Can you talk about your, your threat graph? Like, what is that? Is it a, is it a graph database? Is it a purpose built? Is it a time series, database, a combination? What, what is >>That? Yeah, it is a graph database. When we, when, when the company was started, obviously the vision was to crowdsource telemetry from so many machines from millions of devices around the world. And the thesis at the time was as that capability scales out, there's nothing commercially available that will be able to ingest all of that data. And today we are processing over 7 trillion events every single week. We, we can't go and get something off the shelf. So we've had to build the, the technology from the ground up. That's the first part. Secondly, there is a temporal element to this. There's a time element. And we, we have an ontology built where we track the relationship between all the telemetry that we get. The reason why I believe we stand alone in EDI is because of that time element, the relationship that we have, and we just have so much context that makes it easy for the threat hunter speed and, and ease of use is critical in cyber. >>So you see in data in the database world, everything's kind of converging with all this function, you know, 11 years ago, these were pretty rudimentary. I shouldn't say rudimentary, but immature markets they've come a long way. If you had to start, if, if those capabilities that are there today with graph databases and time series databases were available in, in 2010, would you have used off the shelf technology, or would you have still developed your >>Own? We would've done the same thing that we've done today. >>And, and why can you explain what that, what that is it a performance thing? Is it just control? >>Yeah, look, it, it, it's everything that I talked about before, the, the benefit that you get from the approach that we've taken and the scalability that the requirements that we need, we still today, there's nothing that we can, we can go and get off the shelf that can scale and give us the performance that we need that can give us the ability to, to have that relationship data, the ontology of, of what we have in the platform and the way that we inter operate with all of the different modules that just wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have that capability. And what you'd find is we'd be pretty much the same as every other vendor where they have on-prem solutions, they have hybrid hosted solutions. And when you have those trade offs, you see it in the product. >>Yeah. So the, the point is you're very focused on the purpose of your, your proprietary technology. You're not trying to serve the all things to all people. You used the term yesterday in your keynote, which it, it caught my attention. You used the term ground truth, and it has very specific meaning. Can you explain what you meant by what is ground truth, you know, in the world? And what, what, what does it mean to CrowdStrike? Yeah, >>I was talking about ground truth as it relates to the acquisition of reify and the big thing for us, we wanted to bring additional capability to the platform, to give our customers external and internal visibility of all their assets and all their vulnerabilities. What's important with us, with our agent is today, we give you a single source of truth. When we put that agent onto a device, we tell you everything about the hardware. We tell you everything about who's logged in. We tell you everything about the applications that are running the relationships between the, of the device and the application. We're not a CMDB. We feed CMDB with information that is instant, that is live. And when we look at reify, it broadens again, I'll use the same word. It broadens the aperture. It gives us more visibility around what's going on. So we're, we're super excited about that because having information about all of your assets, all of your users, the applications they use, whether they're vulnerable, how you need to protect them, having it at your finger fingertips, it's a game changer >>Contract, can CrowdStrike be a generational company. And what do you have to do to ensure that that outcome occurs? We, >>We, I think we absolutely are. And, and we're we're path paving a path to, you know, really continuing to build out that platform. I said, in my keynote that I think we're at an early innings. I, if you buy, for example, as a customer, our insight module, cuz you wanna start with EDR, you've got 21 modules to go yesterday. Today we, we talked about discover 2.0, we talked about discover for IOT. I talked about the, the repository acquisition, a whole range of technology built on that single cloud agent architecture. And we've heard the success stories here this week from customers that have just gotten so much benefit. They've rolled out one agent and they've turned off eight or nine from other security vendors. So absolutely we can be a generational company with what we're doing. What >>Are the blockers to customers turning on those additional modules? Cause not, not all customers are using our modules. Is it that they've made an investment in an alternative technology and they're sort of hugging onto it or are there other technical blockers? Yes. >>It many times it's the investment, right? So if you've made a, an investment in the company, you've got a year to go, you might wanna sweat that asset. But typically what we find is the benefit that we have. It's a very simple conversation. If we can give people a cost and a technology benefit, they're gonna make the transition to move. There's so many technical benefits. We talked about the single agent, but the actual features of the modules themselves. But the big thing for us is we've done over 4,700 business value assessments where we sit down with an organization and we look at what they have. We look at what their spend is. We look at their FTEs, we look at the security outcomes that they get. And then we come out with a model that shows them technology and business value. And that's what really drives them to make the switch. >>So the business value in that VVA is not just a, a reduction in expected loss. That's part of it, better security you're gonna, you know, be, be, be lower your risk. But you're saying it's also the labor associated with that. Yeah, >>Absolutely. It's it's how do you operationalize the solution? How many people do you need? How long does it take you to respond? You know, how do you interact with third parties with your suppliers is taking in all of that data. We've spent a long time building out that model and it's, it's proving to be very successful customers. Love it. Is >>That, is that sort of novel ROI thinking in the security business or I'm trying to think of, I mean, I know for years it would watch art. Coviello stand up at RSA and tell us how, how this year's worse than last year. And so, but, but, but I never really heard, you know, a strong business case that would resonate with the, with the P and L manager, other than, you know, we gotta do this or we're gonna get hacked and you're gonna be screwed. Is that new thinking? Or am I, did I just miss it? >>I don't know if I wanna size new thinking. I think what happened, what changed was 10, 15 years ago at a conference you'd stand up and everybody would tell you ransomwares up and fishing is up. And at the end of it, people are trying to work out. Is that good? Or is that bad? It went up 20% based off what that doesn't work anymore. Everyone, you know, got tired of that. And a few of us have been doing it for a while. I I'm, I'm sort of two and a half decades into this. And if you, if you try to use that model of scaring people, they switch off, they want to understand the benefit. You know, the break in the car is so you can go and stop safely when you need it. And I look at security the same way we want to accelerate the company. We want to help companies do their job, but security is there to make sure they don't get into trouble. >>Yeah. It's like having two security guards by your side, right? I mean, they're gonna help you get through the crowd and move forward. So Michael, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Thanks for having me your time. You're you're very welcome. All right. Keep it right there. After this short break, Dave ante will be back with the cube live coverage from Falcon 22 at the area in Las Vegas.

Okay. We're back at AWS reinforced 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and this is the cube we're here in Boston, home of lobster and CDA. And we're here, the convention center where the cube got started in 2010, Shariq Qureshi is here the senior manager at Deloitte and two LL P and merit bear is back on the cube. Good to see >>You guys can't keep me away, >>Right? No. Well, we love having you on the cube shark set up your role at, at Deloitte and toosh what do you actually, what's your swim lane, if you will. >>Yeah, sure. You know, I spend, I wear a lot of hats. I spend a lot of time in the assurance, the controls advisory audit type of role. So I spend our time, a lot of time working with our clients to understand, you know, regulatory requirements, compliance requirements, and then controls that they need to have in place in order to address risks, technology risks, and ultimately business risks. >>So I like to put forth premise, you know, when I walk around a show like this and come up with some observations and then I like to share 'em and then people like me. Well, you know, maybe so help me course correct. My epiphany at this event is the cloud is becoming the first line of defense. The CISO at your customers is now the second line of defense. I think audit is maybe the th third line of defense. Do, do you buy that the sort of organizational layered approach? >>No, because in fact, what we're here to talk about today is audit manager, which is integrated, right? Like if you're doing so the whole notion of cloud is that we are taking those bottom layers of the stack, right? So the concrete floors up through layer for the hypervisor, the, the racks and stacks and HVAC and guards and gates up through the hypervisor, right? Our, our proprietary hardware nitro ecosystem, which has security inheritance is okay upon that. We are then virtualized. Right? And so what we're really talking about is the ways that audit looks different today, that you can reason about what you're doing. So you're doing infrastructure as code. You can do securities code, you can do compliances code, and that's the beauty of it. So like for better, or in your case for worse in your analogy, you know, these are integrated, these are woven together and they are an API call >>Seamless. >>It, it is like easy to describe, right? I mean, like you can command line knowledge about your resources. You can also reason about it. So like, this is something that's embedded, for example, an inspector you can do network reachability know whether you have an internet facing endpoint, which is a PCI, you know, requirement, but that'll be dashboarded in your security hub. So there's the cloud is all the stuff we take away that you don't have to deal with. And also all the stuff that we manage on top of it that then you can reason about and augment and, and take action on. >>Okay. So at the same time you can't automate the audit entirely. Right? So, but, but talk about the challenges of, of, of, of automating and auditing cloud environment. >>Yeah. I mean, when I look at cloud, you know, organizations move to take advantage of cloud characteristics and cloud capabilities, right? So elasticity, scalability is one of them. And, you know, for market conditions, business, business outcomes, you know, resources expand and contract. And one of the questions that we often get as an auditor is how do you maintain a control environment for resources that weren't there yesterday, but are there today, or that are, that are no longer there and that are there today. So how do you maintain controls and how do you maintain security consistently uniformly throughout an audit environment? It's not there. So that's a challenge auditors, you know, historically when you look at the on-prem environment, you have servers that are there, it's a physical, it's a physical box. You can touch it and see it. And if it goes down, then, you know, it's still there. You can hug >>It if you're some people >>It's still there. So, but you know, with, you know, with cloud things get torn down that you don't see. So how do you maintain controls? That's, you know, it, one challenges, it >>Sounds like you're describing a CMDB for audit. >>I mean, that's a, that's an outcome of having, you know, getting good controls of having a CMDB to keep track and have an inventory of your assets. >>But the problem with CMDB is they're out of date, like so, so quickly, is it different in the cloud world? >>Yeah, exactly. I mean, yes. And yes, they are outta date. Cuz like anything static will be manual and imprecise, like it's gonna be, did John go calculate, like go count how many servers we have. That's why I was joking about server huggers versus like virtualizing it. So you put out a call and you know, not just whether it exists, but whether it's been patched, whether it's, you know, like there are ways that we can reason about what we've done, permissioning pruning, you know, like, and these, by the way, correspond to audit and compliance requirements. And so yes, we are not like there, it's not a click of a, whatever, a snap of the fingers, right. It takes work to translate between auditors and us. And it also takes work to have customers understand how they can augment the way that they think about compliance. But a lot of this is just the good stuff that they already need to be doing, right? Knowing internet facing endpoints or whatever, you know, like pruning permissioning. And there's a lot of ways that, you know, access analyzer, for example, these are automated reasoning tools that come from our formal reasoning group, automated reason group that's in identity. Like they, computers can reason about things in ways that are more complex, as long as it can be resolved. It's like EEU utility in mathematics. You don't go out and try to count every prime number. We accept the infinitude of primes to be true. If you believe in math, then we can reason about it. >>Okay. So hearing that there's a changing landscape yeah. In compliance shift from a lot of manual work to one that's much more highly automated, maybe not completely integrated and seamless. Right. But, but working in that direction, right. Yeah. Is that right? And maybe you could describe that in a little bit more detail, how that, you know, journey has progressed. >>I mean, just the fact alone that you have, you know, a lot of services, a lot of companies that are out there that are trying to remove the manual component and to automate things, to make things more efficient. So then, you know, developers can develop and we can be more agile and to do the things that, you know, really what the core competencies are of the business to remove those manual, you know, components to take out the human element and there's a growing need for it. You know, like we always look at security as, you know, like a second class citizen, we don't take advantage of, you know, the, you know, the opportunities that we need to, to do to maintain controls. So, you know, there's an opportunity here for us to look at and, and automate compliance, to automate controls and, and to make things, you know, seamless >>As a fun side benefit, you will actually hopefully have improved your actual security and also retain your workforce because people don't wanna be doing manual processes. You know, they wanna be doing stuff that humans are designed for, which is creative thinking, innovation, you know, creating ways to make new pathways instead of just like re walking these roads that a computer can analyze, >>You mentioned audit manager, what is that? I mean, let's give a plug for the product or the service. What's that all about what problems does it solve? Let's get >>Into that. Yeah. I mean, audit manager is a first of its kind service. You're not gonna find this offered through any other hyperscaler it's specifically geared and tailored towards the second line, which is security and compliance and a third line function, which is internal audit. So what is it looking to do and what is it looking to address some of those challenges working in a cloud space working, and if you have a cloud footprint. So for example, you know, most organizations operate in a multi account strategy, right? You don't just have one account, but how do you maintain consistency of controls across all your accounts? Auto manager is a service that can give, you know, kind of that single pane of view that to see across your entire landscape, just like a cartographer has a map to see, you know, the entire view of what he's designing auto managers does the same thing only from a cloud perspective. So there's also other, you know, features and capabilities that auto managers trying to integrate, you know, that presents challenges for those in compliance those in the audit space. So, you know, most companies, organizations they have, you know, not just one framework like SOC two or GDPR, high trust, HIPAA PCI, you know, you can select an industry accepted framework and evaluate your cloud consumption against, you know, an industry accepted framework to see where you stand in terms of your control posture, your security hygiene, >>And that's exclusive to AWS. Is that what you're saying? You won't find that on any other hyper scale >>And you'll find similarities in other products, but you won't find something that's specifically geared towards the second line and third line. There's also other features and capabilities to collect evidence, which is, I don't see that in the marketplace. >>Well, the only reason I ask that is because, you know, you, everybody has multiple clouds and I would love, I would love a, you know, an audit manager that's, that's span that transcends, you know, one cloud, is that possible? Or is that something that is just not feasible because of the, the, the deltas between clouds? >>I mean, anything's possible with the APIs right now, the way that, you know, you have to ingrain in, right. There's, you know, a, a feature that was introduced recently for audit manager was the ability to pull in APIs from third party sources. So now you're not just looking, looking exclusively at one cloud provider, you're looking at your entire digital ecosystem of services, your tools, your SA solutions that you're consuming to get a full, comprehensive picture of your environment. >>So compliance, risk, audit security, they're like cousins that are all sort of hanging out on the same holiday, but, but they're different. Like what help us understand and squint through those different disciplines. >>Yeah. I mean, each of them have, you know, a different role and a hat to wear. So internal audit is more of your independent arm of management working or reporting directly towards, you know, to the audit committee or to the board to give an independent view on company control and posture security and compliance works with management to help design the, that there that are intended to prevent, detect, or even correct, you know, controls, breakdowns, you know, those action, those action verb items that you wanna prevent unauthorized access, or you wanna restrict changes from making its way into production unless it's approved and, and documented and tracked and so on and so forth. So each, you know, these roles they're very similar, but they're also different in terms of what their function is. >>How are customers dealing with regional differences? You mentioned GDPR, different regulations, data sovereignty, what are the global nuances and complexities that, that, that cloud brings. And how are you addressing those? >>Yeah. Merit, I don't know if you had any thoughts on that one. >>I mean, I think that a lot of what, and this will build off of your response to the sort of Venn diagrams of security and risk and compliance and audit. I think, you know, what we're seeing is that folks care about the same stuff. They care about privacy. They care about security. They care about incentivizing best practices. The form that that takes when it's a compliance framework is by definition a little bit static over time. Whereas security tends to be more quickly evolving with standards that are like industry standards. And so I think one of the things that, you know, all these compliance frameworks have in, in mind is to go after those best practices, the forms that they take may take different forms. You know what I mean? And so I, I see them as hopeful in the motivation sense that we are helping entities get the wherewithal, they need to grow up or mature or get even more security minded. I think there are times that they feel a little clunky, but you know, that's just Frank. Yeah. >>It, it, it can audit manager sort of help me solve that problem. Is that the intent? And I see what you're saying, merit, that there security is at a different pace than, than, you know, GDPR, a privacy, you know, person, >>Right. I mean, like security says, we want this outcome. We want to have, you know, data be protected. The compliance may say, it must be this particular encryption standard. You know what I mean? Like the form I see things taking over time will evolve and, and feels dynamic. Whereas I think that sometimes when we think about compliance and it's exactly why we need stuff like audit manager is to like help manage exactly what articulation of that are we getting in this place at this time for this regulated industry? And like almost every customer I have is regulated. If you're doing business, you're probably in PCI, right. >>And there's never just one silver bullet. So security is, is a number of things that you're gonna do, the number of tools that you're gonna have. And it's often the culture in, in what you develop in your people, your process and technology. So auto manager is one of the components of robust strategy on how to address security. >>But it's also one of those things where like, there are very few entities, maybe Deloitte is one that are like built to do compliance. They're built to do manufacturing, automotive hospitality. Yeah. You know, like they're doing some other industry as their industry. Right. And we wanna let them have less lag time as they make sure that they can do that core business. And the point is to enable them to move our, I mean like sure. I think that folks should move to the pod because of security, but you don't have to, you should move because it enables your business. And this is one of the ways in which it just like minimizes, you know, like whatever our tailwinds lagging or push it anyway, it pushes you. Right. I mean, like it minimizes the lag >>Definitely tailwind. So are you suggesting merit that you can inject that industry knowledge and specificity into things like audit manager and, and actually begin to automate that as, and of course Deloitte has, you know, industry expertise char, but, but, but how should we think about that? >>I mean, you're gonna, you're gonna look at your controls comprehensively a across the board. So if you operate in an industry, you're gonna look to see like, what's, what's important for you. What do you have to, you know, be mindful of? So if you have data residency concerns, you wanna make sure that you've tailored your controls based on the risks that you're addressing. So if there's a framework >>And remember that you can go in the console and choose what region you're, you know, like we never remove your data from your region that you have chosen, you know, like this is, there's an intentionality and an ability to do this with a click of a mouse or with an API call that's, you know, or with a cloud formation template. That's like, there is a deliberateness there. There's not just like best wishes. >>You know, >>ESG is in scope. I presume, you know, helping the CISO become more green, more diverse. Increasingly you're seeing ESG reports come out from major organizations. I presume that's part of the compliance, but maybe not, maybe it hasn't seeped in yet. Are you seeing >>For that? I think it's still a new service auto manager. It's still, you know, being developed, but, you know, continuous feedback to make sure that, you know, we're covering a, a broad range of services and, and, and those considerations are definitely in the scope. Yeah. >>I mean, are you hearing more of that from >>Clients? So, I mean, we have an internal commitment to sustainability, right. That has been very publicly announced and that I'm passionate about. We also have some other native tools that probably, you know, are worth mentioning here, like security hub that does, you know, CIS benchmarking and other things like that are traffic lighted in their dashboard. You know, like there are ways a lot of this is going to be the ways that we can take what might have been like an ugly ETL process and instead take the managed ness on top of it and, and consume that and allow your CISO to make high velocity decision, high velocity, high quality decisions. >>What's the relationship between your two firms? How do you work >>To I'm like we just met. >>Yeah. I sense that, so is it, is it, how do you integrate, I guess is >>A question. Yeah. I mean, I mean, from the audit perspective, our perspective, working with clients and understanding, you know, their requirements and then bringing the service audit manager from the technical aspect and how we can work together. So we have a few use cases, one we've working with the tech company who wanted to evaluate, you know, production workload that had content, you know, critical client information, client data. So they needed to create custom controls. We were working with them to create custom controls, which auto manager would evaluate their environment, which would, you know, there's a reporting aspect of it, which was used to, you know, to present to senior leadership. So we were working together with AWS and on helping craft what those custom controls were in implement at the customer. >>Yeah. I mean, among other things, delight can help augment workforce. It can help folks interpret their results when they get outputs and act upon them and understand industry standards for responsiveness there. I mean, mean like it's a way to augment your approach by, you know, bringing in someone who's done this before. >>Yeah. Cool, cool. Collaboration on a topic that's generally considered, sorry. Don't, don't hate me for saying this boring, but really important. And the fact that you're automating again makes it a lot more interesting guys. Excellent. Thanks for your sharp first time on the cube. Thank you. Absolutely on, appreciate it. Rapidly. Becoming a VIP. Thanks. Coming on. Hey, I'll take it. All right. Keep it right there. Thank you. This is Dave ante for the cube. You're watching our coverage of AWS reinforce 2022 from Boston. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Today's organizations are overwhelmed by the number of different assets connected to their networks, which now include not only IT devices and assets, but also a lot of unmanaged assets, like cloud, IoT, building management systems, industrial control systems, medical devices, and more. That's not just it, there's more. We're seeing massive volume of threats, and a surge of severe vulnerabilities that put these assets at risk. This is happening every day. And many, including me, think it's only going to get worse. The scale of the problem will accelerate. Security and IT teams are struggling to manage all these vulnerabilities at scale. With the time it takes to exploit a new vulnerability, combined with the lack of visibility into the asset attack surface area, companies are having a hard time addressing the vulnerabilities as quickly as they need. This is today's special CUBE program, where we're going to talk about these problems and how they're solved. Hello, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is a special program called Managing Risk Across Your Extended Attack Surface Area with Armis, new asset intelligence platform. To start things off, let's bring in the co-founder and CTO of Armis, Nadir Izrael. Nadir, great to have you on the program. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Great success with Armis. I want to just roll back and just zoom out and look at, what's the big picture? What are you guys focused on? What's the holy grail? What's the secret sauce? >> So Armis' mission, if you will, is to solve to your point literally one of the holy grails of security teams for the past decade or so, which is, what if you could actually have a complete, unified, authoritative asset inventory of everything, and stressing that word, everything. IT, OT, IoT, everything on kind of the physical space of things, data centers, virtualization, applications, cloud. What if you could have everything mapped out for you so that you can actually operate your organization on top of essentially a map? I like to equate this in a way to organizations and security teams everywhere seem to be running, basically running the battlefield, if you will, of their organization, without an actual map of what's going on, with charts and graphs. So we are here to provide that map in every aspect of the environment, and be able to build on top of that business processes, products, and features that would assist security teams in managing that battlefield. >> So this category, basically, is a cyber asset attack surface management kind of focus, but it really is defined by this extended asset attack surface area. What is that? Can you explain that? >> Yeah, it's a mouthful. I think the CAASM, for short, and Gartner do love their acronyms there, but CAASM, in short, is a way to describe a bit of what I mentioned before, or a slice out of it. It's the whole part around a unified view of the attack surface, where I think where we see things, and kind of where Armis extends to that is really with the extended attack surface. That basically means that idea of, what if you could have it all? What if you could have both a unified view of your environment, but also of every single thing that you have, with a strong emphasis on the completeness of that picture? If I take the map analogy slightly more to the extreme, a map of some of your environment isn't nearly as useful as a map of everything. If you had to, in your own kind of map application, you know, chart a path from New York to whichever your favorite surrounding city, but it only takes you so far, and then you sort of need to do the rest of it on your own, not nearly as effective, and in security terms, I think it really boils down into you can't secure what you can't see. And so from an Armis perspective, it's about seeing everything in order to protect everything. And not only do we discover every connected asset that you have, we provide a risk rating to every single one of them, we provide a criticality rating, and the ability to take action on top of these things. >> Having a map is huge. Everyone wants to know what's in their inventory, right, from a risk management standpoint, also from a vulnerability perspective. So I totally see that, and I can see that being the holy grail, but on the vulnerability side, you got to see everything, and you guys have new stuff around vulnerability management. What's this all about? What kind of gaps are you seeing that you're filling in the vulnerability side, because, okay, I can see everything. Now I got to watch out for threat vectors. >> Yeah, and I'd say a different way of asking this is, okay, vulnerability management has been around for a while. What the hell are you bringing into the mix that's so new and novel and great? So I would say that vulnerability scanners of different sorts have existed for over a decade. And I think that ultimately what Armis brings into the mix today is how do we fill in the gaps in a world where critical infrastructure is in danger of being attacked by nation states these days, where ransomware is an everyday occurrence, and where I think credible, up-to-the-minute, and contextualize vulnerability and risk information is essential. Scanners, or how we've been doing things for the last decade, just aren't enough. I think the three things that Armis excels at and completes the security staff today on the vulnerability management side are scale, reach, and context. Scale, meaning ultimately, and I think this is of no news to any enterprise, environments are huge. They are beyond huge. When most of the solutions that enterprises use today were built, they were built for thousands, or tens of thousands of assets. These days, we measure enterprises in the billions, billions of different assets, especially if you include how applications are structured, containers, cloud, all that, billions and billions of different assets, and I think that, ultimately, when the latest and greatest in catastrophic new vulnerabilities come out, and sadly, that's a monthly occurrence these days. You can't just now wait around for things to kind of scan through the environment, and figure out what's going on there. Real time images of vulnerabilities, real time understanding of what the risk is across that entire massive footprint is essential to be able to do things, and if you don't, then lots and lots of teams of people are tasked with doing this day in, day out, in order to accomplish the task. The second thing, I think, is the reach. Scanners can't go everywhere. They don't really deal well with environments that are a mixed IT/OT, for instance, like some of our clients deal with. They can't really deal with areas that aren't classic IT. And in general, these days over 70% of assets are in fact of the unmanaged variety, if you will. So combining different approaches from an Armis standpoint of both passive and active, we reach a tremendous scale, I think, within the environment, and ability to provide or reach that is complete. What if you could have vulnerability management, cover a hundred percent of your environment, and in a very effective manner, and in a very scalable manner? And the last thing really is context. And that's a big deal here. I think that most vulnerability management programs hinge on asset context, on the ability to understand, what are the assets I'm dealing with? And more importantly, what is the criticality of these assets, so I can better prioritize and manage the entire process along the way? So with these things in mind, that's what Armis has basically pulled out is a vulnerability management process. What if we could collect all the vulnerability information from your entire environment, and give you a map of that, on top of that map of assets? Connect every single vulnerability and finding to the relevant assets, and give you a real way to manage that automatically, and in a way that prevents teams of people from having to do a lot of grunt work in the process. >> Yeah, it's like building a search engine, almost. You got the behavioral, contextual. You got to understand what's going on in the environment, and then you got to have the context to what it means relative to the environment. And this is the criticality piece you mentioned, this is a huge differentiator in my mind. I want to unpack that. Understanding what's going on, and then what to pay attention to, it's a data problem. You got that kind of search and cataloging of the assets, and then you got the contextualization of it, but then what alarms do I pay attention to? What is the vulnerability? This is the context. This is a huge deal, because your businesses, your operation's going to have some important pieces, but also it changes on agility. So how do you guys do that? That's, I think, a key piece. >> Yeah, that's a really good question. So asset criticality is a key piece in being able to prioritize the operation. The reason is really simple, and I'll take an example we're all very, very familiar with, and it's been beaten to death, but it's still a good example, which is Log4j, or Log4Shell. When that came out, hundreds of people in large organizations started mapping the entire environment on which applications have what aspect of Log4j. Now, one of the key things there is that when you're doing that exercise for the first time, there are literally millions of systems in a typical enterprise that have Log4j in them, but asset criticality and the application and business context are key here, because some of these different assets that have Log4j are part of your critical business function and your critical business applications, and they deserve immediate attention. Some of them, or some Git server of some developer somewhere, don't warrant quite the same attention or criticality as others. Armis helps by providing the underlying asset map as a built-in aspect of the process. It maps the relationships and dependencies for you. It pulls together and clusters together. What applications does each asset serve? So I might be looking at a server and saying, okay, this server, it supports my ERP system. It supports my production applications to be able to serve my customers. It serves maybe my .com website. Understanding what applications each asset serves and every dependency along the way, meaning that endpoint, that server, but also the load balancers are supported, and the firewalls, and every aspect along the way, that's the bread and butter of the relationship mapping that Armis puts into place to be able to do that, and we also allow users to tweak, add information, connect us with their CMDB or anywhere else where they put this in, but once the information is in, that can serve vulnerability management. It can serve other security functions as well. But in the context of vulnerability management, it creates a much more streamlined process for being able to do the basics. Some critical applications, I want to know exactly what all the critical vulnerabilities that apply to them are. Some business applications, I just want to be able to put SLAs on, that this must be solved within a week, this must be solved within a month, and be able to actually automatically track all of these in a world that is very, very complex inside of an operation or an enterprise. >> We're going to hear from some of your customers later, but I want to just get your thoughts on, anecdotally, what do you hear from? You're the CTO, co-founder, you're actually going into the big accounts. When you roll this out, what are they saying to you? What are some of the comments? Oh my God, this is amazing. Thank you so much. >> Well, of course. Of course. >> Share some of the comments. >> Well, first of all, of course, that's what they're saying. They're saying we're great. Of course, always, but more specifically, I think this solves a huge gap for them. They are used to tools coming in and discovering vulnerabilities for them, but really close to nothing being able to streamline the truly complex and scalable process of being able to manage vulnerabilities within the environment. Not only that, the integration-led, designer-led deployment and the fact that we are a completely agent-less SaaS platform are extremely important for them. These are times where if something isn't easily deployable for an enterprise, its value is next to nothing. I think that enterprises have come to realize that if something isn't a one click deployment across the environment, it's almost not worth the effort these days, because environments are so complex that you can't fully realize the value any other way. So from an Armis standpoint, the fact that we can deploy with a few clicks, the fact that we immediately provide that value, the fact that we're agent-less, in the sense that we don't need to go around installing a footprint within the environment, and for clients who already have Armis, the fact that it's a flip of a switch, just turn it on, are extreme. I think that the fact, in particular, that Armis can be deployed. the vulnerability management can be deployed on top of the existing vulnerability scanner with a simple one-click integration is huge for them. And I think all of these together are what contribute to them saying how great this is. But yeah, that's it. >> The agent listing is huge. What's the alternative? What does it look like if they're going to go the other route, slow to deploy, have meetings, launch it in the environment? What's it look like? >> I think anything these days that touches an endpoint with an agent goes through a huge round of approvals before anything goes into an environment. Same goes, by the way, for additional scanners. No one wants to hear about additional scanners. They've already gone through the effort with some of the biggest tools out there to punch holes through firewalls, to install scanners in different ways. They don't want yet another scanner, or yet another agent. Armis rides on top of the existing infrastructure, the existing agents, the existing scanners. You don't need to do a thing. It just deploys on top of it, and that's really what makes this so easy and seamless. >> Talk about Armis research. Can you talk about, what's that about? What's going on there? What are you guys doing? How do you guys stay relevant for your customers? >> For sure. So one of the, I've made a lot of bold claims throughout, I think, the entire Q and A here, but one of the biggest magic components, if you will, to Armis that kind of help explain what all these magic components are, are really something that we call our collective asset knowledge base. And it's really the source of our power. Think of it as a giant collective intelligent that keeps learning from all of the different environments combined that Armis is deployed at. Essentially, if we see something in one environment, we can translate it immediately into all environments. So anyone who joins this or uses the product joins this collective intelligence in essence. What does that mean? It means that Armis learns about vulnerabilities from other environments. A new Log4j comes out, for instance. It's enough that, in some environments, Armis is able to see it from scanners, or from agents, or from SBOMs, or anything that basically provides information about Log4j, and Armis immediately infers or creates enrichment rules that act across the entire tenant base, or the entire client base of Armis. So very quick response to industry events, whenever something comes out, again, the results are immediate, very up to the minute, very up to the hour, but also I'd say that Armis does its own proactive asset research. We have a huge data set at our disposal, a lot of willing and able clients, and also a lot of partners within the industry that Armis leverages, but our own research is into interesting aspects within the environment. We do our own proactive research into things like TLStorm, which is kind of a bit of a bridging research and vulnerabilities between cyber physical aspect. So on the one hand, the cyber space and kind of virtual environments, but on the other hand, the actual physical space, vulnerabilities, and things like UPSs, or industrial equipment, or things like that. But I will say that also, Armis targets its research along different paths that we feel are underserved. We started a few years back research into firmwares, different types of real time operating systems. We came out with things like URGENT/11, which was research into, on the one hand, operating systems that run on two billion different devices worldwide, on the other hand, in the 40 years it existed, only 13 vulnerabilities were ever exposed or revealed about that operating system. Either it's the most secure operating system in the world, or it's just not gone through enough rigor and enough research in doing this. The type of active research we do is to complement a lot of the research going on in the industry, serve our clients better, but also provide kind of inroads, I think, for the industry to be better at what they do. >> Awesome, Nadir, thanks for sharing the insights. Great to see the research. You got to be at the cutting edge. You got to investigate, be ready for a moment's notice on all aspects of the operating environment, down to the hardware, down to the packet level, down to the any vulnerability, be ready for it. Great job. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> In a moment, Tim Everson's going to join us. He's the CSO of Kalahari Resorts and Conventions. He'll be joining me next. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Today's organizations are overwhelmed by the number of different assets connected to their networks, which now include not only IT devices and assets, but also a lot of unmanaged assets, like cloud, IoT, building management systems, industrial control systems, medical devices, and more. That's not just it, there's more. We're seeing massive volume of threats, and a surge of severe vulnerabilities that put these assets at risk. This is happening every day. And many, including me, think it's only going to get worse. The scale of the problem will accelerate. Security and IT teams are struggling to manage all these vulnerabilities at scale. With the time it takes to exploit a new vulnerability, combined with the lack of visibility into the asset attack surface area, companies are having a hard time addressing the vulnerabilities as quickly as they need. This is today's special CUBE program, where we're going to talk about these problems and how they're solved. Hello, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is a special program called Managing Risk Across Your Extended Attack Surface Area with Armis, new asset intelligence platform. To start things off, let's bring in the co-founder and CTO of Armis, Nadir Izrael. Nadir, great to have you on the program. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Great success with Armis. I want to just roll back and just zoom out and look at, what's the big picture? What are you guys focused on? What's the holy grail? What's the secret sauce? >> So Armis' mission, if you will, is to solve to your point literally one of the holy grails of security teams for the past decade or so, which is, what if you could actually have a complete, unified, authoritative asset inventory of everything, and stressing that word, everything. IT, OT, IoT, everything on kind of the physical space of things, data centers, virtualization, applications, cloud. What if you could have everything mapped out for you so that you can actually operate your organization on top of essentially a map? I like to equate this in a way to organizations and security teams everywhere seem to be running, basically running the battlefield, if you will, of their organization, without an actual map of what's going on, with charts and graphs. So we are here to provide that map in every aspect of the environment, and be able to build on top of that business processes, products, and features that would assist security teams in managing that battlefield. >> So this category, basically, is a cyber asset attack surface management kind of focus, but it really is defined by this extended asset attack surface area. What is that? Can you explain that? >> Yeah, it's a mouthful. I think the CAASM, for short, and Gartner do love their acronyms there, but CAASM, in short, is a way to describe a bit of what I mentioned before, or a slice out of it. It's the whole part around a unified view of the attack surface, where I think where we see things, and kind of where Armis extends to that is really with the extended attack surface. That basically means that idea of, what if you could have it all? What if you could have both a unified view of your environment, but also of every single thing that you have, with a strong emphasis on the completeness of that picture? If I take the map analogy slightly more to the extreme, a map of some of your environment isn't nearly as useful as a map of everything. If you had to, in your own kind of map application, you know, chart a path from New York to whichever your favorite surrounding city, but it only takes you so far, and then you sort of need to do the rest of it on your own, not nearly as effective, and in security terms, I think it really boils down into you can't secure what you can't see. And so from an Armis perspective, it's about seeing everything in order to protect everything. And not only do we discover every connected asset that you have, we provide a risk rating to every single one of them, we provide a criticality rating, and the ability to take action on top of these things. >> Having a map is huge. Everyone wants to know what's in their inventory, right, from a risk management standpoint, also from a vulnerability perspective. So I totally see that, and I can see that being the holy grail, but on the vulnerability side, you got to see everything, and you guys have new stuff around vulnerability management. What's this all about? What kind of gaps are you seeing that you're filling in the vulnerability side, because, okay, I can see everything. Now I got to watch out for threat vectors. >> Yeah, and I'd say a different way of asking this is, okay, vulnerability management has been around for a while. What the hell are you bringing into the mix that's so new and novel and great? So I would say that vulnerability scanners of different sorts have existed for over a decade. And I think that ultimately what Armis brings into the mix today is how do we fill in the gaps in a world where critical infrastructure is in danger of being attacked by nation states these days, where ransomware is an everyday occurrence, and where I think credible, up-to-the-minute, and contextualize vulnerability and risk information is essential. Scanners, or how we've been doing things for the last decade, just aren't enough. I think the three things that Armis excels at and completes the security staff today on the vulnerability management side are scale, reach, and context. Scale, meaning ultimately, and I think this is of no news to any enterprise, environments are huge. They are beyond huge. When most of the solutions that enterprises use today were built, they were built for thousands, or tens of thousands of assets. These days, we measure enterprises in the billions, billions of different assets, especially if you include how applications are structured, containers, cloud, all that, billions and billions of different assets, and I think that, ultimately, when the latest and greatest in catastrophic new vulnerabilities come out, and sadly, that's a monthly occurrence these days. You can't just now wait around for things to kind of scan through the environment, and figure out what's going on there. Real time images of vulnerabilities, real time understanding of what the risk is across that entire massive footprint is essential to be able to do things, and if you don't, then lots and lots of teams of people are tasked with doing this day in, day out, in order to accomplish the task. The second thing, I think, is the reach. Scanners can't go everywhere. They don't really deal well with environments that are a mixed IT/OT, for instance, like some of our clients deal with. They can't really deal with areas that aren't classic IT. And in general, these days over 70% of assets are in fact of the unmanaged variety, if you will. So combining different approaches from an Armis standpoint of both passive and active, we reach a tremendous scale, I think, within the environment, and ability to provide or reach that is complete. What if you could have vulnerability management, cover a hundred percent of your environment, and in a very effective manner, and in a very scalable manner? And the last thing really is context. And that's a big deal here. I think that most vulnerability management programs hinge on asset context, on the ability to understand, what are the assets I'm dealing with? And more importantly, what is the criticality of these assets, so I can better prioritize and manage the entire process along the way? So with these things in mind, that's what Armis has basically pulled out is a vulnerability management process. What if we could collect all the vulnerability information from your entire environment, and give you a map of that, on top of that map of assets? Connect every single vulnerability and finding to the relevant assets, and give you a real way to manage that automatically, and in a way that prevents teams of people from having to do a lot of grunt work in the process. >> Yeah, it's like building a search engine, almost. You got the behavioral, contextual. You got to understand what's going on in the environment, and then you got to have the context to what it means relative to the environment. And this is the criticality piece you mentioned, this is a huge differentiator in my mind. I want to unpack that. Understanding what's going on, and then what to pay attention to, it's a data problem. You got that kind of search and cataloging of the assets, and then you got the contextualization of it, but then what alarms do I pay attention to? What is the vulnerability? This is the context. This is a huge deal, because your businesses, your operation's going to have some important pieces, but also it changes on agility. So how do you guys do that? That's, I think, a key piece. >> Yeah, that's a really good question. So asset criticality is a key piece in being able to prioritize the operation. The reason is really simple, and I'll take an example we're all very, very familiar with, and it's been beaten to death, but it's still a good example, which is Log4j, or Log4Shell. When that came out, hundreds of people in large organizations started mapping the entire environment on which applications have what aspect of Log4j. Now, one of the key things there is that when you're doing that exercise for the first time, there are literally millions of systems in a typical enterprise that have Log4j in them, but asset criticality and the application and business context are key here, because some of these different assets that have Log4j are part of your critical business function and your critical business applications, and they deserve immediate attention. Some of them, or some Git server of some developer somewhere, don't warrant quite the same attention or criticality as others. Armis helps by providing the underlying asset map as a built-in aspect of the process. It maps the relationships and dependencies for you. It pulls together and clusters together. What applications does each asset serve? So I might be looking at a server and saying, okay, this server, it supports my ERP system. It supports my production applications to be able to serve my customers. It serves maybe my .com website. Understanding what applications each asset serves and every dependency along the way, meaning that endpoint, that server, but also the load balancers are supported, and the firewalls, and every aspect along the way, that's the bread and butter of the relationship mapping that Armis puts into place to be able to do that, and we also allow users to tweak, add information, connect us with their CMDB or anywhere else where they put this in, but once the information is in, that can serve vulnerability management. It can serve other security functions as well. But in the context of vulnerability management, it creates a much more streamlined process for being able to do the basics. Some critical applications, I want to know exactly what all the critical vulnerabilities that apply to them are. Some business applications, I just want to be able to put SLAs on, that this must be solved within a week, this must be solved within a month, and be able to actually automatically track all of these in a world that is very, very complex inside of an operation or an enterprise. >> We're going to hear from some of your customers later, but I want to just get your thoughts on, anecdotally, what do you hear from? You're the CTO, co-founder, you're actually going into the big accounts. When you roll this out, what are they saying to you? What are some of the comments? Oh my God, this is amazing. Thank you so much. >> Well, of course. Of course. >> Share some of the comments. >> Well, first of all, of course, that's what they're saying. They're saying we're great. Of course, always, but more specifically, I think this solves a huge gap for them. They are used to tools coming in and discovering vulnerabilities for them, but really close to nothing being able to streamline the truly complex and scalable process of being able to manage vulnerabilities within the environment. Not only that, the integration-led, designer-led deployment and the fact that we are a completely agent-less SaaS platform are extremely important for them. These are times where if something isn't easily deployable for an enterprise, its value is next to nothing. I think that enterprises have come to realize that if something isn't a one click deployment across the environment, it's almost not worth the effort these days, because environments are so complex that you can't fully realize the value any other way. So from an Armis standpoint, the fact that we can deploy with a few clicks, the fact that we immediately provide that value, the fact that we're agent-less, in the sense that we don't need to go around installing a footprint within the environment, and for clients who already have Armis, the fact that it's a flip of a switch, just turn it on, are extreme. I think that the fact, in particular, that Armis can be deployed. the vulnerability management can be deployed on top of the existing vulnerability scanner with a simple one-click integration is huge for them. And I think all of these together are what contribute to them saying how great this is. But yeah, that's it. >> The agent listing is huge. What's the alternative? What does it look like if they're going to go the other route, slow to deploy, have meetings, launch it in the environment? What's it look like? >> I think anything these days that touches an endpoint with an agent goes through a huge round of approvals before anything goes into an environment. Same goes, by the way, for additional scanners. No one wants to hear about additional scanners. They've already gone through the effort with some of the biggest tools out there to punch holes through firewalls, to install scanners in different ways. They don't want yet another scanner, or yet another agent. Armis rides on top of the existing infrastructure, the existing agents, the existing scanners. You don't need to do a thing. It just deploys on top of it, and that's really what makes this so easy and seamless. >> Talk about Armis research. Can you talk about, what's that about? What's going on there? What are you guys doing? How do you guys stay relevant for your customers? >> For sure. So one of the, I've made a lot of bold claims throughout, I think, the entire Q and A here, but one of the biggest magic components, if you will, to Armis that kind of help explain what all these magic components are, are really something that we call our collective asset knowledge base. And it's really the source of our power. Think of it as a giant collective intelligent that keeps learning from all of the different environments combined that Armis is deployed at. Essentially, if we see something in one environment, we can translate it immediately into all environments. So anyone who joins this or uses the product joins this collective intelligence in essence. What does that mean? It means that Armis learns about vulnerabilities from other environments. A new Log4j comes out, for instance. It's enough that, in some environments, Armis is able to see it from scanners, or from agents, or from SBOMs, or anything that basically provides information about Log4j, and Armis immediately infers or creates enrichment rules that act across the entire tenant base, or the entire client base of Armis. So very quick response to industry events, whenever something comes out, again, the results are immediate, very up to the minute, very up to the hour, but also I'd say that Armis does its own proactive asset research. We have a huge data set at our disposal, a lot of willing and able clients, and also a lot of partners within the industry that Armis leverages, but our own research is into interesting aspects within the environment. We do our own proactive research into things like TLStorm, which is kind of a bit of a bridging research and vulnerabilities between cyber physical aspect. So on the one hand, the cyber space and kind of virtual environments, but on the other hand, the actual physical space, vulnerabilities, and things like UPSs, or industrial equipment, or things like that. But I will say that also, Armis targets its research along different paths that we feel are underserved. We started a few years back research into firmwares, different types of real time operating systems. We came out with things like URGENT/11, which was research into, on the one hand, operating systems that run on two billion different devices worldwide, on the other hand, in the 40 years it existed, only 13 vulnerabilities were ever exposed or revealed about that operating system. Either it's the most secure operating system in the world, or it's just not gone through enough rigor and enough research in doing this. The type of active research we do is to complement a lot of the research going on in the industry, serve our clients better, but also provide kind of inroads, I think, for the industry to be better at what they do. >> Awesome, Nadir, thanks for sharing the insights. Great to see the research. You got to be at the cutting edge. You got to investigate, be ready for a moment's notice on all aspects of the operating environment, down to the hardware, down to the packet level, down to the any vulnerability, be ready for it. Great job. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> In a moment, Tim Everson's going to join us. He's the CSO of Kalahari Resorts and Conventions. He'll be joining me next. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to San Francisco, live coverage here with the cube 80, be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John furry host of the cube. We'll be at the 80 us summit in New York city. This summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube, alumni and friend of the cube. I dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. I'm gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see. See you, sir. Chris pump. Cool. How are you? >>Good. How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes over the past couple years and your company raising some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? >>First of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you never while after. Great to see you. Um, so I, as the company started around four years back, I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. The investors are people like nor west Menlo, true ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people all well known guys, Andy Beel chime Paul Mo Mayard web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley vs are involved >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISRA is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and service now to take it the next stage? Well >>Of having you on the cube, Dave and I, David ante as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know who done? You >>Get the comment, this fun to talk to you though, you >>Get the commentary, you you're your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on a 2 billion valuation back from the debt after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. What's your angle on this? What's your take? Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. Native NATO is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service it operations. We talk about observability. I call it AI ops, applying ops for good old it operations management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events incidents. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI service desk. What used to be help desk with ServiceNow BMC <inaudible> you see a new, a layer emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you'll see AI going off >>Is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feed of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI pass? One will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. It's a feature. >>It is very good point. Very, very good thing. So one is, it's the category for sure. Like it's a category, it's an area where RPA maybe change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be ed in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NATO and AI NATO. It'll become automation. NATO. Yeah. And that's your thinking? So >>It's most interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about. What's coming to my is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle and it was software abstraction. Now you have all kinds of workflows abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed. Are they integrated? I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't put the database became called polyglot databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you you're talking about. It should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see it. MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you got the expo hall, got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Ove, uh, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative all the companies out here that we know. And we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen. We know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the, to of the, in your mind, cuz you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember days of Amazon created the startups 15 years back, everybody built on Amazon now Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're going build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes the data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I, my old boss Blankman trying to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's the next level of <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud. Right's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldmans Sachs is doing. You're starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgerald out there who we like was kind of shitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get him. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. He's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist and, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build, I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake so I can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer. If I really need do size, I'll build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll. >>So basically the, the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. It is, That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or >>Cloud, and that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. >>Yeah. Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think they had Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift, um, but snowflakes, a big customer and the they're probably paying AWS, I think bills too. So >>John video it's like whole Netflix is, and Amazon prime Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-optation will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouses, a data layer. So I think depending on the applic use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then, right. Think from stats. >>Well, I think that it comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, You know, foreclose your value. That's right. With some sort of internal hack. But I think, I think the general question that I have is that I, I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening. Some point, when does the rising tide stop >>And >>The people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? >>I think it's growth. You call it cloud scale. You invented the word cloud scale. So I think, look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's, as long as there are more movement from on, uh, on-prem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations, it helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go >>Made. I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers or practitioners, not suppliers to the market, feel free to text me or DMing next. Question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products, cuz you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise, they're all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What, no, it >>Is. If I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then and Amazon started very small, right? We an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or one person today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO, a line of business it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check our, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want get your reaction because I, I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or are um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona. You mentioned a AIOps we've been seeing AOPs IOPS blue booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call and coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this to engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same things? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself? I, no, I have a lot of thoughts that first is I see the AOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone through it. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app dynamic, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards predict to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring of a very good point on the data side, I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service desk customers that give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can come the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make >>Them >>Better, make them better. Yeah. And I think there are a whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that data is very important. >>You've always been on, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is double, the >>Key cloud air kinda went private, so good stuff. But what are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still invest strength. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. >>So >>Right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers. Some of them you like it's zoom auto desk, MacAfee, uh, grantor. So all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service ops. Those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What what's their need? What category is it? >>I think the look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on, predict ours one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value. Prop. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service. >>Great stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the key. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of Aish summit 2022. And we're gonna be at a summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course, go to Aish startups.com and mention that it's ay for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break.

>>Well, hello everybody. I'm John Walls here with the cube, and we're very happy to continue our coverage here of a splunk.com 21. And today we're going to talk about cyber security. Uh, obviously everybody is well aware of a number of, uh, breaches that have happened around the globe, but you might say there's been a surge in trying to prevent those from happening down the road. And I'm going to let our guests explain that Ryan Covar, who is the security strategist at Splunk. Ryan. Good to see you with, uh, with us here on the cube. Glad you could join us today. >>Thank you very much. I've wished we could have been doing this in person, but such as the time of life we live. >>Yeah. We have learned to live on zoom that's for sure. And, uh, it's the next best thing to being there. So, uh, again, thanks for that. Um, well, let's talk about surge, if you will. Um, uh, I know obviously Splunk and data security go hand in hand that is a high priority with the, with the company, but now you have a new initiative that you're just now rolling out to take that to an even higher level. Tell us about that. >>Yeah, something I'm extremely excited to announce. Uh, it's the first time we're really talking about it is that.com 21, which is wonderful. And it's kind of the culmination of my seven years here at Splunk. Uh, before I came to Splunk, I did about 20 years of cyber security research and defense and nation state hunting and threat intelligence and policy and compliance, and just about everything, uh, public sector in the U S and the UK private sector, a couple of different places. So I've kind of been around the block. And one of the things I've found that I'm really passionate about is just being a network defender or a blue teamer. And a lot of my time here at Splunk has been around that. It's been speaking at conferences, doing research, um, coming up with ways to basically defend organizations, but the tools they have at hand and something that we say Alon is, uh, we, we work on the problems of today and tomorrow, not the distant future, right? >>The really practical things. And we had an, you know, there was a little bit of a thing called solar winds. You might've heard of it. Um, that happened earlier in December and we were able to stand up kind of on an ad hoc ragtag group of Splunkers around the world, uh, in a matter of hours. And we worked about 24 hours for panning over to Australia, into a Mia, and then back over to America and able to publish really helpful work to, for our customers to detect or defend or mitigate against what we knew at the time around solar winds, the attack. And then as time went on, we were continuing to write and create material, but we didn't have a group that was focused on it. We were all kind of chipping in after hours or, you know, deep deprecating, other bits of work. >>And I said, you know, we really need to focus on this. This is a big deal. And how can we actually surge up to meet these needs if you will, uh, the play on the punter. So we created an idea of a small team, a dedicated to current events and also doing security research around the problems that are facing around the world insecurity who use Splunk and maybe even those who don't. And that's where the idea of this team was formed. And we've been working all summer. We're releasing our first research project, excuse me, uh, at.com, which is around supply chain, compromise using jaw three Zeke and Splunk, uh, author by myself and primarily Marcus law era. And we have other research projects coming out every quarter, along with doing this work around, just helping people with any sort of immediate cybersecurity threat that we're able to assist with. >>So what are you hoping that security teams can get out of this work? Obviously you're investing a lot of resources and doing the research, I assume, diversifying, you know, the areas and to which you're, um, exploring, um, ultimately what would be the takeaway if I was on the other end, if I was on the client and what would you hope that I would be, uh, extracting from this work? >>Sure. We want to get you promoted. I mean, that's kind of the, the joke of it, but we, we talk a lot. I want to make everyone in the world who use a Splunk or cybersecurity, looked into their bosses and defend their company as fast and quickly as possible. So one of the big, mandates for my team is creating consumable, actionable work and research. So we, you know, we joke a lot that, you know, I have a pretty thick beard here. One might even call it a neck beard and a lot of people in our community, we create things for what I would call wizards, cybersecurity wizards, and we go to conferences and we talk from wizard to wizard, and we kind of sit on our ivory tower on stage and kind of proclaim out how to do things. And I've sat on the other side and sometimes those sound great, but they're not actually helping people with their job today. And so the takeaway for me, what I hope people are able to take away is we're here for you. We're here for the little guys, the network defenders, we're creating things that we're hoping you can immediately take home and implement and do and make better detections and really find the things that are immediate threats to your network and not necessarily having to, you know, create a whole new environment or apply magic. So >>Is there a difference then in terms of say enterprise threats, as opposed to, if I'm a small business or of a medium sized business, maybe I have four or 500 employees as opposed to four or 5,000 or 40,000. Um, what about, you know, finding that ground where you can address both of those levels of, of business and of concern, >>You know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago? I would've answered that question very differently and I fully acknowledge I have a bias in nation state threats. That's what I'm primarily trained in, however, in the last five years, uh, thanks or not. Thanks to ransomware. What we're seeing is the same threats that are affecting and impacting fortune 100 fortune 10 companies. The entire federal government of the United States are the exact same threats that are actually impacting and causing havoc on smaller organizations and businesses. So the reality is in today's threat landscape. I do believe actually the threat is the same to each, but it is not the same level of capabilities for a 100% or 500 person company to a company, the size of Splunk or a fortune 100 company. Um, and that's something that we are actually focusing on is how do we create things to help every size of that business, >>Giving me the tools, right, exactly. >>Which is giving you the power to fight that battle yourself as much as possible, because you may never be able to have the head count of a fortune 100 company, but thanks to the power of software and tools and things like the cloud, you might have some force multipliers that we're hoping to create for you in a much more package consumable method. >>Yeah. Let's go back to the research that you mentioned. Um, how did you pick the first topic? I mean, because this is your, your splash and, and I'm sure there was a lot of thought put into where do we want to dive in >>First? You know, I'd love to say there was a lot of thought put into it because it would make me sound smarter, but it was something we all just immediately knew was a gap. Um, you know, solar winds, which was a supply chain, compromise attack really revealed to many of us something that, um, you know, reporters had been talking about for years, but we never really saw come to fruition was a real actionable threat. And when we started looking at our library of offerings and what we could actually help customers with, I talked over 175 federal and private sector companies around the world in a month and a half after solar winds. And a lot of times the answer was, yeah, we can't really help you with this specific part of the problem. We can help you around all sorts of other places, but like, gosh, how do you actually detect this? >>And there's not a great answer. And that really bothered me. And to be perfectly honest, that was part of the reason that we founded the team. So it was a very obvious next step was, well, this is why we're creating the team. Then our first product should probably be around this problem. And then you say, okay, supply chain, that's really big. That's a huge chunk of work. So the first question is like, well, what can we actually affect change on without talking about things like quantum computing, right? Which are all things that are, you know, blockchain, quantum computing, these are all solutions that are actually possible to solve or mitigate supply chain compromise, but it's not happening today. And it sure as heck isn't even happening tomorrow. So how do we create something that's digestible today? And so what Marcus did, and one of his true skillsets is really refining the problem down, down, down, down. >>And where can we get to the point of, Hey, this is data that we think most organizations have a chance of collecting. These are methodologies that we think people can do and how can they actually implement them with success in their network. And then we test that and then we kind of keep doing a huge fan of the concept of OODA loop, orient, orient, observe, decide, and act. And we do that through our hypothesizing. We kind of keep looking at that and iterating over and over and over again, until we're able to come up with a solution that seems to be applicable for the personas that we're trying to help. And that's where we got out with this research of, Hey, collect network data, use a tool like Splunk and some of our built-in statistical analysis functions and come out the other side. And I'll be honest, we're not solving the problem. >>We're helping you with the problem. And I think that's a key differentiator of what we're saying is there is no silver bullet and frankly, anyone that tells you they can solve supply chain, uh, let me know, cause I want to join that hot new startup. Um, the reality is we can help you go from a field of haystacks to a single haystack and inside that single haystack, there's a needle, right? And there's actually a lot of value in that because before the PR problem was unapproachable, and now we've gotten it down to saying like, Hey, use your traditional tools, use your traditional analytic craft on a much smaller set of data where we've pretty much verified that there's something here, but look right here. And that's where we kind of focused. >>You talked about, you know, and we all know about the importance and really the emphasis that's put on data protection, right? Um, at the same time, can you use data to help you protect? I mean, is there information or insight that could be gleaned from, from data that whether it's behavior or whatever the case might be, that, that not only, uh, is something that you can operationalize and it's a good thing for your business, but you could also put it into practice in terms of your security practices to >>A hundred percent. The, the undervalued aspect of cybersecurity in my opinion, is elbow grease. Um, you can buy a lot of tools, uh, but the reality is to get value immediately. Usually the easiest place to start is just doing the hard detail oriented work. And so when you ask, is there data that can help you immediately data analytics? Actually, I go to, um, knowing what you have in your network, knowing what you have, that you're actually trying to protect asset and inventory, CMDB, things like this, which is not attractive. It's not something people want to talk about, but it's actually the basis of all good security. How do you possibly defend something if you don't know what you're defending and where it is. And something that we found in our research was in order to detect and find anomalous behavior of systems communicating outbound, um, it's too much. >>So what you have to do is limit the scope down to those critical assets that you're most concerned about and a perfect example of critical asset. And there's no, no shame or victim blaming here, put on solar winds. Uh, it's just that, that is an example of an appliance server that has massive impact on the organization as we saw in 2020. And how can you actually find that if you don't know where it is? So really that first step is taking the data that you already have and saying, let's find all the systems that we're trying to protect. And what's often known as a crown jewels approach, and then applying these advanced analytics on top of those crown jewel approaches to limit the data scope and really get it to just what you're trying to protect. And once you're positive that you have that fairly well defended, then you go out to the next tier and the next tier in next year. And that's a great approach, take things you're already doing today and applying them and getting better results tomorrow. >>No, before I let you go, um, I I'd like to just have you put a, uh, a bow on surge, if you will, on that package, why is this a big deal to you? It's been a long time in the making. I know you're very happy about the rollout of this week. Um, you know, what's the impact you want to have? Why is it important? >>We did a lot of literature review. I have a very analytical background. My time working at DARPA taught me a lot about doing research and development and on laying out the value of failure, um, and how much sometimes even failing as long as you talk about it and talk about your approach and methodology and share that is important. And the other part of this is I see a lot of work done by many other wonderful organizations, uh, but they're really solving for a problem further down the road or they're creating solutions that not everyone can implement. And so what I think is so important and what's different about our team is we're not only thinking differently, we're hiring differently. You know, we have people who have a threat intelligence background from the white house. We have another researcher who did 10 years at DARPA insecurity, research and development. >>Uh, we've recently hired a, a former journalist who she's made a career pivot into cybersecurity, and she's helping us really review the data and what people are facing and come up with a real connection to make sure we are tackling the right problems. And so to me, what I'm most excited about is we're not only trying to solve different problems. And I think what most of the world is looking at for cybersecurity research, we've staffed it to be different, think different and come up with things that are probably a little less, um, normal than everyone's seen before. And I'm excited about that. >>Well, and, and rightly so, uh, Ryan, thanks for the time, a pleasure to have you here on the cube and, uh, the information again, the initiative is Serge, check it out, uh, spunk very much active in the cyber security protection business. And so we have certainly appreciate that effort. Thank you, Ryan. >>Well, thank you very much, John. You bet Ryan, >>Covar joining us here on our cube coverage. We continue our coverage of.com for 21.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> ServiceNow is a company that investors love to love, but there's caution in the investor community right now is confusion about transitory inflation and higher interest rates looms. ServiceNow also suffers from a perfection syndrome of sorts. The company has seen that the slightest misstep can cause many freak outs from the investor community. So what it's done is it's architected a financial and communications model that allows it to beat expectations and raise its outlook on a consistent basis. Regardless, ServiceNow appears to be on track to vie for what its CEO Bill McDermott refers to as the next great enterprise software company. Wait, I thought Marc Benioff had his hands on that steering wheel. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll dig into one of the companies we began following almost 10 years ago and provide some thoughts on ServiceNow's March to 15 billion by 2026, which we think is a highly probable achievement. In 2020, despite the contraction in IT spending, SeviceNow outperformed both the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, but here's a view of 2021. And you can see while the stock has done well since it saw a softness in May and again in early June, and it bounced off that double bottom, it's performance is well below those other benchmarks. This is not a big surprise given the fact that this is a high growth stock and we all know that those names with high multiples get hurt in an inflationary environment, but still the gaps are notable. This is especially true given the performance of the company. It's not often that you see a company with four to $5 billion in revenue growing at a 30% clip, throwing off billions of dollars in free cash flow and increasing operating margins at 100 basis points a year and promising to do that over the next several years. In fact, I don't think we've ever seen that before. I remember years ago, when the trade press was criticizing SeviceNow for its lofty valuation, despite the fact that it was losing money, then CEO, Frank Slootman said to me, "Dave, we can be highly profitable tomorrow if we want it to be, but this is a marathon and we're planning to go big." So essentially Slootman was telling me that this company was going to be an ATM machine that prints money. And that seems to be how it's shaping up. I happened to be at SeviceNow headquarters in 2017, literally the first day on the job for John Donahoe, the CEO replaced Slootman, and I remember while I was there thinking Donahoe was certainly capable, but why the heck I said, would the board let Frank Slootman get away? You know what? It turned great for Slootman, he's at snowflake. Donahoe, I always felt was a consumer guy anyway, and not long for SeviceNow. And now you have this guy, new CEO, Bill McDermott at the helm. He's not a more qualified CEO for the company in my view. About two months ago, McDermott led a virtual investor day. We've had McDermott on theCUBE a couple of times back when he was CEO of SAP and this individual is very compelling. He's got JFK like looks and charisma, but more than that, he's passionate and convincing. And he obviously knows enterprise software. And with conviction, he laid the groundwork for how SeviceNow will get to $10 billion in revenue by 2024 on its way to 15 billion two years thereafter. And one of the big things McDermott's stressed was they're going to get there without any big M&A moves. And that's important because previously the door was left open for that possibility. And now the company is assuring investors that it can get there organically, even with slower growth. So this chart implies no big M&A, and you can see Slootman handed over the reigns at that year one tick on the horizontal axis. This was not a turnaround story. It was a rocket ship at the time. And look at the logos on this chart. This is a revenue view and SeviceNow is aiming to be the fastest to get to 10 billion in software industry history. SeviceNow is valuation just to sort of shift gears here for a minute blew by workdays years ago. Its sites are now set on SAP which is currently valued at 170 billion. And then there's Oracle and Salesforce. They're at around 250 billion and 225 billion in valuation respectively. And these lines back to revenue show the trajectory that these companies took to get to 10 billion. And you can see how SeviceNow plans to get there with those dotted lines. And this is why I call this a collision course with Salesforce, because I think Marc Benioff might say, "Hey, we are ready." Are the next great enterprise software company. We have no plans to give up that post, that mantle anytime soon. I want to share a clip from four years ago. something we've been saying for a long, long time. Roll the clip. >> As they say their goal now is to be four billion by 2020. It feels like, you know, when we first covered SeviceNow knowledge, we said, wow, this company reminds us a lot of the early days of Salesforce. They've got this platform you can develop on this platform, you know, call it paths or, you know, whatever you want to call it, but we at the time said, they're on a collision course with Salesforce. Now there's plenty of room for both of those companies in the marketplace. Salesforce obviously focused predominantly on Salesforce automation, SeviceNow really on workflow automation, but you can see those sort of two markets coming together. >> Now you may be thinking isn't Salesforce's revenue like 5X that of SeviceNow? And yes it is. But I would say a couple of things. One is that Salesforce has gotten to where it is with a lot of M&A, more than 60 acquisitions. At some high profile wants to like slack and Tableau as well as MuleSoft and Heroku back in the day and many others. So we'll see how far McDermott can get before he reverts to his inquisitive self that we saw at SAP. But the second thing I'll say is serviceNow positions itself as the platform of platforms. And the thing is it runs its own cloud. And when it does acquisitions, it replatforms the acquiree into the now platform so that it can drive integrations more seamlessly. That's fundamentally part of its value proposition, a big part of its value proposition. And that means it's somewhat limited on the acquisitions it can make, it has to be pretty selective. Otherwise it's got to do a heavy lift to get it the now platform. It's the power of the models, especially if customers can get to a single CMDB, that configuration database management system, which by the way, a lot of customers never get to that kind of skirt that, but remember SeviceNow is like the ERP for IT. So the more you can get to a single data model, the more effective you're going to be, especially in this data era where you got to put data at the core of your organization, something we've talked about a lot. And the third thing I'll mention the SeviceNow wants to use this platform to attack what it sees as a very large TAM as shown here. Now, a couple of things I want to point out. One is when SeviceNow IPO in 2012, a lot of the analysts said that they were way overvalued because they were in a market. It was help desk and writing tickets was a $2 billion business that was in decline and BMC remedy. Wasn't really that big of a base to attack. In 2013, the Wikibon team took a stab at sizing the TAM. I dug back into the old Wiki. We had well over 30 billion at the time and we expected the company to move deeper into IT and then beyond IT into lines of business and line of business management. Yeah, we felt we were being conservative. We thought the number could be as big as 100 billion, but we felt like putting that number out there, was too aggressive but, you know, it turns out from SeviceNow standpoint, it sees these new software opportunities coming together. And SeviceNow in a way they can double dip both in and beyond their current markets. What I mean by that is it can partner with, for instance, HCM vendors and then at the same time offer employee workflows. They can partner or even purchase RPA tools from specialists like UI path or automation anywhere. And it can go acquire a company which it did like Intel a bot and integrate what I would consider lighter-weight RPA into its platform. So it can manage workflows for best of breed and pick off functionality throughout the software stack. Now what's interesting in this chart is first, the size of the TAM that SeviceNow sees 175 billion, but also how it's now reorganizing its business around workflows, which you see in the left-hand side. This was done of course, to simplify the many, many, many things that you can buy from SeviceNow. But there's also speculation that SeviceNow is leveraging its orchestration and service catalog capabilities, which are meaningful from a revenue standpoint and using them to power these workflows because the way it was organized was both confusing and not as effective as it could be. Now, it's well known that SeviceNow has ITSM this comprises the biggest piece of its revenue pie, probably a couple billion. And it's adding to that with ITSM pro and ITSM enterprise going deeper, deeper into the ITSM space. And it's ITAM business is also doing well against the likes of Datadog and Elastic and Splunk and others and its acquisition of LightStep. It's going to push it further into this space, which is both crowded is morphing into observability as we've been reporting. What's unclear though is how well, for instance, HR and the CSM businesses are doing as sort of standalone businesses, you might remember they used to be standalone businesses with standalone GMs. They've sort of changed that up a little bit. So this is potentially not only a way to simplify, but also shuffle the deck chairs a bit and maybe prop up the non IT workflows, which then allows SeviceNow to show this chart, which essentially says to the street, see, we have this huge TAM and our TAM expansion strategy is working as the overall business is growing nicely yet the mix is shifting toward customer, employee and creator workflows. See how awesome our business is and see how smart we are. So this is possibly a way to hide some of the warts and accentuate the growth. Look, there's not a lot to criticize SeviceNow about, but they've been pretty good at featuring what some perceive as weaknesses. Like for instance, the way it marketed it's a multi-instance and turned that into an advantage as a better model. Even though the whole cloud world was going multitenant and within a ServiceNow you got to really plan new releases, which they drop every six months, although CJ decide. So he's SeviceNows head of products. He did say at the investor meeting, that event that they held last May, that they do certain releases now bi-monthly and even some bi-weekly. So, yeah, maybe a little bit of nitpicking here, but I always liked to question when such changes are made to the reporting structures to the street. And if workflows are the new black, so to speak, I wonder will SeviceNow start pricing by workflows versus what really has been a legacy of, you know, what's your ticket volume and how many agents need access to the model and we'll charge you accordingly? Now, I'm not a service pricing expert and they don't make it easy to figure out that pricing. So let's dig a little bit more on that and keep an eye on it. Now I want to turn to the customers survey data from ETR on ServiceNow. First, here's the latest update on IT spending from ETR, something that we've been tracking for quite some time. We've been consistently saying to expect this year a seven to 8% growth for 2021 IT spend off of last year's contraction. And the latest ETR survey data puts it right at 8%. So we really liked that number. You know, could even be higher push 10% this year. Now, let's look at the spending profile within the ETR dataset. Of the 1100 plus respondents to this quarter, there were 377 SeviceNow customers, and this chart shows the breakdown of net score or spending velocity among those respondents. Remember, net score is a measure of that spending momentum. What it does is it takes the lime green bar, which is adopting new, that says 11% of that 377 customers are adopting ServiceNow for the first time. It takes that lime green and it adds the forest green bar that's growth in spending of 6% or more this half relative to the first half. That's 43% of the customers that have been surveyed here. And then it subtracts out the reds, which is that pinkish is spending less, that's 3%, small number of spending less. And then the bright red is we're leaving the platform. That's a minuscule 1% of the respondents. And you can see the rest in that gray area is flat spending, which is ignored. And so what this does is it calculates out, you'd take the greens minus the reds. It calculates out to a net score 50% for SeviceNow, which is well above that magic 40% elevated mark that we'd like to see. It's rare for a company of this size, except for the hyperscalers. You see AWS and Microsoft and Google are up that high and oh, there's another great enterprise software company at the 45% net score level. Guess who that is, salesforce.com. But anyway, it's rare to see that large of a company have that much spending momentum in the ETR surveys. Now let's take a look at the time series data for ServiceNow. This chart shows the net score granularity over time. So you see the bars, that time series, the blue line is net score. And you can see that it was dragged down during last year's lockdown. As, even though SeviceNow did pretty well last year and it's now spiking back to pre-COVID levels, which is a very positive sign for the company. That red call-out that ETR makes it shows market share. That's an indicator of pervasiveness in the dataset. I'm not overlyconcern there that downturn. I don't think it's a meaningful indicator because ServiceNow revenue is skewed towards a big spender accounts and this is an account unit indicator, if you will not spending level metric. And okay, and here's another reason and why I'm not concerned about SeviceNow is a so-called market share number in the ETR dataset as ETR defines it. This is an X, Y Z view chart that we'd like to show here. We've got net score on the vertical axis and market share in the horizontal plane. This is focusing on enterprise software. So remember that 40% red line is the magic level, anything above that is really indicative of momentum. Oh look, there's Salesforce and ServiceNow on that little collision course that I talked about. Now, CEO McDermott, I would say as by the way, would his predecessors, look, we're a platform of platforms and we partner with other companies, we'll meet at the customer level and sure we'll integrate functions where we think it can add value to customers. But we also understand we have to work with the vendors that our customers are using. So it's all good, plenty of room for growth for all of us, which by the way is true. But I would say this, anyone who's ever been in the enterprise software industry knows that enterprise software execs and their salespeople believe that every dollar spent on software should go to them. And if it's a good market with momentum and growth, they believe they can either organically write software to deliver customer function and value, or they can acquire to fill gaps. So, well, what McDermott would say is true. The likes of Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, Infor, et cetera, they all want as big of a budget piece as possible in the enterprise software space. That's just the way it is. Now, we're going to close with some anecdotal comments from ETR insights, formerly called VENN, which is a round table discussion with CXOs. You can read the summaries when we post on Wikibon and SiliconANGLE but let me summarize. This first comment comes from an assistant VP in retail who says SeviceNow is a key part of their digital transformation. They moved off of BMC remedy two years ago for the global ticketing system. And this person is saying that while the platform is extremely powerful, you got to buy into specific modules to just get one feature that you want. You may not need a lot of the other features, so it starts to get expensive. The other thing this individual is saying is initially, it's a very services heavy project. And so I'll tell you, when you look at the SeviceNow ecosystem the big SIs, the big names, they have big appetites. They love to eat at the trough as I sometimes say, and they want big clients with big budgets. So if you're not one of those top 500 or 700 customers, the big name SIs, you know, they might not be for you. They're not going to pay attention to you. They're going after the big prizes. So what I would suggest is you call up someone like Jason Wojahn of third era, he's the CEO over there and he's got a lot of experience in this space or some more specialized SeviceNow consultancy like them because you're going to get better value for the money. And you're going to get short-term ROI faster with a long-term sustainable ROI as a measurable objective. And I think this last comment sums it up nice, let me to skip over the second one and go just jump to the third one. This basically says the platform is integrated. It's like a mesh. It's not a bunch of stovepipes and cul-de-sacs. Yes it's expensive, but people love it. And like the iPhone, it just works. And their feature pace is accelerating. So pretty strong testimonials, but I want to keep an eye on price transparency any possible backlash there and how the ecosystem evolves. It's something that we called out early on. It's an indicator and SeviceNow needs to continue to invest in that partner network is especially as it builds out its vertical industry practices and expands internationally. Okay, we'll leave it there for now. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes they're all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for breaking analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @DVellante or email me @david.vellantesiliconangle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of an AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to the AI ops virtual forum. Finally, some Artan extended to be talking with rich lane now, senior analyst, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester. Rich. It's great to have you today. >>Thank you for having me. I think it's going to be a really fun conversation to have today. >>It is. We're going to be setting the stage for, with Richard, for the it operations challenges and the need for AI ops. That's kind of our objective here in the next 15 minutes. So rich talk to us about some of the problems that enterprise it operations are facing now in this year, that is 2020 that are going to be continuing into the next year. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we've been on this path for a while, but certainly the last eight months has, uh, has accelerated, uh, this problem and, and brought a lot of things to light that, that people were, you know, they were going through the day to day firefighting as their goal way of life. Uh, it's just not sustainable anymore. You a highly distributed environment or in the need for digital services. And, you know, one of them has been building for a while really is in the digital age, you know, we're providing so many, uh, uh, the, the interactions with customers online. Um, we've, we've added these layers of complexity, um, to applications, to infrastructure, you know, or we're in the, in the cloud or a hybrid or multi-cloud, or do you know you name it using cloud native technologies? We're using legacy stuff. We still have mainframe out there. >>Uh, you know, the, just the, the vast amount of things we have to keep track of now and process and look at the data and signals from, it's just, it's a really untenable for, for humans to do that in silos now, uh, in, in, you know, when you add to that, you know, when companies are so heavily invested in gone on the digital transformation path, and it's accelerated so much in the last, uh, year or so that, you know, we're getting so much of our business in revenue derived from these services that they become core to the business. They're not afterthoughts anymore. It's not just about having a website presence. It's, it's about deriving core business value from the services you're providing to your, through your customers. And a lot of cases, customers you're never going to meet or see at that. So it's even more important to be vigilant. >>And on top of the quality of that service that you're giving them. And then when you think about just the staffing issues we have, there's just not enough bodies to go around it in operations anymore. Um, you know, we're not going to be able to hire, you know, like we did 10 years ago, even. Uh, so that's where we need the systems to be able to bring those operational efficiencies to bear. When we say operational efficiencies, we don't mean, you know, uh, lessening head count because we can't do that. That'd be foolish. What we mean is getting the head count. We have back to burping on and higher level things, you know, working on, uh, technology refreshes and project work that that brings better digital services to customers and get them out of doing these sort of, uh, low, uh, complexity, high volume tasks that they're spending at least 20%, if not more on our third day, each day. So I think that the more we can bring intelligence to bear and automation to take those things out of their hands, the better off we are going forward. >>And I'm sure those workers are wanting to be able to have the time to deliver more value, more strategic value to the organization, to their role. And as you're saying, you know, was the demand for digital services is spiking. It's not going to go down and as consumers, if w if we have another option and we're not satisfied, we're going to go somewhere else. So, so it's really about not just surviving this time right now, it's about how do I become a business that's going to thrive going forward and exceeding expectations that are now just growing and growing. So let's talk about AI ops as a facilitator of collaboration, across business folks, it folks developers, operations, how can it facilitate collaboration, which is even more important these days? >>Yeah. So one of the great things about it is now, you know, years ago, have I gone years, as they say, uh, we would buy a tool to fit each situation. And, you know, someone that worked in network and others who will somebody worked in infrastructure from a, you know, Linux standpoint, have their tool, somebody who's from storage would have their tool. And what we found was we would have an incident, a very high impact incident occur. Everybody would get on the phone, 24 people all be looking at their siloed tool, they're siloed pieces of data. And then we'd still have to try to like link point a to B to C together, you know, just to institutional knowledge. And, uh, there was just ended up being a lot of gaps there because we couldn't understand that a certain thing happening over here was related to an advantage over here. >>Um, now when we bring all that data into one umbrella, one data Lake, whatever we want to call it, a lot of smart analytics to that data, uh, and normalize that data in a way we can contextualize it from, you know, point a to point B all the way through the application infrastructure stack. Now, the conversation changes now, the conversation changes to here is the problem, how are we going to fix it? And we're getting there immediately versus three, four or five hours of, uh, you know, hunting and pecking and looking at things and trying to try to extrapolate what we're seeing across disparate systems. Um, and that's really valuable. And in what that does is now we can change the conversation for measuring things. And in server up time and data center, performance metrics as to how are we performing as a business? How are we overall in, in real time, how are businesses being impacted by service disruption? >>We know how much money losing per minute hour, or what have you, uh, and what that translate lights into brand damage and things along those lines, that people are very interested in that. And, you know, what is the effect of making decisions either brief from a product change side? You know, if we're, we're, we're always changing the mobile apps and we're always changing the website, but do we understand what value that brings us or what negative impact that has? We can measure that now and also sales, marketing, um, they run a campaign here's your, you know, coupon for 12% off today only, uh, what does that drive to us with user engagement? We can measure that now in real time, we don't have to wait for those answers anymore. And I think, you know, having all those data and understanding the cause and effect of things increases, it enhances these feedback loops of we're making decisions as a business, as a whole to make, bring better value to our customers. >>You know, how does that tie into ops and dev initiatives? How does everything that we do if I make a change to the underlying architectures that help move the needle forward, does that hinder things, uh, all these things factor into it. In fact, there into the customer experience, which is what we're trying to do at the end of the day, w w whether operations people like it or not, we are all in the customer experience business now. And we have to realize that and work closer than ever with our business and dev partners to make sure we're delivering the highest level of customer experience we can. >>Uh, customer experience is absolutely critical for a number of reasons. I always kind of think it's inextricably linked with employee experience, but let's talk about long-term value because as organizations and every industry has pivoted multiple times this year and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, for them to be able to get immediate value that let's, let's not just stop the bleeding, but let's allow them to get a competitive advantage and be really become resilient. What are some of the, uh, applications that AI ops can deliver with respect to long-term value for an organization? >>Yeah, and I think that it's, you know, you touched upon this a very important point that there is a set of short term goals you want to achieve, but they're really going to be looking towards 12, 18 months down the road. What is it going to have done for you? And I think this helps framing out for you what's most important because it'd be different for every enterprise. Um, and it also shows the ROI of doing this because there is some, you know, change is going to be involved with things you're gonna have to do. But when you look at the, the, the longer time horizon of what it brings to your business as a whole, uh it's to me, at least it all seems, it seems like a no brainer to not do it. Um, you know, thinking about the basic things, like, you know, faster remediation of, of, uh, client impacting incidents, or maybe, maybe even predictive of sort of detection of these incidents that will affect clients. >>So now you're getting, you know, at scale, you know, it's very hard to do when you have hundreds of thousands of optics of the management that relate to each other, but now you're having letting the machines and the intelligence layer find out where that problem is. You know, it's not the red thing, it's the yellow thing. Go look at that. Um, it's reducing the amount of finger pointing and what have you like resolved between teams now, everybody's looking at the same data, the same sort of, uh, symptoms and like, Oh yeah, okay. This is telling us, you know, here's the root cause you should investigate this huge, huge thing. Um, and, and it's something we never thought we'd get to where, uh, this, this is where we smart enough to tell us these things, but this, again, this is the power of having all the data under one umbrella >>And the smart analytics. >>Um, and I think really, you know, it's a boat. Uh, if you look at where infrastructure and operations people are today, and especially, you know, eight months, nine months, whatever it is into the pandemic, uh, a lot of them are getting really burnt out with doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Um, just trying to keep the lights on, you know, we need, we need to extract those things for those people, uh, just because it just makes no sense to do something over and over again, the same remediation step, just we should automate those things. So getting that sort of, uh, you know, drudgery off their hands, if you will, and, and get them into, into all their important things they should be doing, you know, they're really hard to solve problems. That's where the human shine, um, and that's where, you know, having a, you know, really high level engineers, that's what they should be doing, you know, and just being able to do things I >>Think in a much faster, >>In a more efficient manner, when you think about an incident occurring, right. In, in a level, one technician picks that up and he goes and triaged that maybe run some tests. He has a script, >>Uh, or she, uh, and, >>You know, uh, they open a ticket and they enrich the ticket. They call it some log files. They can look up for the servers on it. You're in an hour and a half into an incident before anyone's even looked at it. If we could automate all of that, >>Why wouldn't we, that makes it easier for everyone. Um, >>Yeah. And I really think that's where the future is, is, is, is bringing this intelligent automation to bear, to take, knock down all the little things that consume the really, the most amount of time. When you think about it, if you aggregate it over the course of a quarter or a year, a great deal of your time is spent just doing that minutiae again, why don't we automate that? And we should. So I really think that's, that's where you get to look long-term. I think also the sense of we're going to be able to measure everything in the sense of business KPIs versus just IT-centric KPIs. That's really where we going to get to in the digital age. And I think we waited too long to do that. I think our operations models were all voted. I think, uh, you know, a lot of, a lot of the KPIs we look at today are completely outmoded. They don't really change if you think about it. When we look at the monthly reports over the course of a year, uh, so let's do something different. And now having all this data and the smart analytics, we can do something different. Absolutely. I'm glad >>That you brought up kind of looking at the impact that AI ops can make on, on minutiae and burnout. That's a really huge problem that so many of us are facing in any industry. And we know that there's some amount of this that's going to continue for a while longer. So let's get our let's leverage intelligent automation to your point, because we can to be able to allow our people to not just be more efficient, but to be making a bigger impact. And there's that mental component there that I think is absolutely critical. I do want to ask you what are some of these? So for those folks going, all right, we've got to do this. It makes sense. We see some short-term things that we need. We need short-term value. We need long-term value as you've just walked us through. What are some of the obstacles that you'd say, Hey, be on the lookout for this to wipe it out of the way. >>Yeah. I, I think there's, you know, when you think about the obstacles, I think people don't think about what are big changes for their organization, right? You know, they're, they're going to change process. They're going to change the way teams interact. They're they're going to change a lot of things, but they're all for the better. So what we're traditionally really bad in infrastructure and operations is communication, marketing, a new initiative, right? We don't go out and get our peers agreement to it where the product owner is, you know, and say, okay, this is what it gets you. This is where it changes. People just hear I'm losing something, I'm losing control over something. You're going to get rid of the tools that I have, but I love I've spent years building out perfecting, um, and that's threatening to people and understandably so because people think if I start losing tools, I start losing head count. >>And then, whereas my department at that point, um, but that's not what this is all about. Uh, this, this isn't a replacement for people. This isn't a replacement for teams. This isn't augmentation. This is getting them back to doing the things they should be doing and less of the stuff they shouldn't be doing. And frankly, it's, it's about providing better services. So when in the end, it's counterintuitive to be against it because it's gonna make it operations look better. It's gonna make us show us that we are the thought leaders in delivering digital services that we can, um, constantly be perfecting the way we're doing it. And Oh, by the way, we can help the business be better. Also at the same time. Uh, I think some of the mistakes people really don't make, uh, really do make, uh, is not looking at their processes today, trying to figure out what they're gonna look like tomorrow when we bring in advanced automation and intelligence, uh, but also being prepared for what the future state is, you know, in talking to one company, they were like, yeah, we're so excited for this. >>Uh, we, we got rid of our old 15 year old laundering system and the same day we stepped a new system. Uh, one problem we had though, was we weren't ready for the amount of incidents that had generated on day one. And it wasn't because we did anything wrong or the system was wrong or what have you. It did the right thing actually, almost too. Well, what it did is it uncovered a lot of really small incidents through advanced correlations. We didn't know we had, so there were things lying out there that were always like, huh, that's weird. That system acts strange sometimes, but we can never pin it down. We found all of those things, which is good. It goes, but it kind of made us all kind of sit back and think, and then our readership are these guys doing their job. Right? >>And then we had to go through an evolution of, you know, just explaining we were 15 years behind from a visibility standpoint to our environment, but technologies that we deployed in applications had moved ahead and modernized. So this is like a cautionary tale of falling too far behind from a sort of a monitoring and intelligence and automation standpoint. Um, so I thought that was a really good story for something like, think about as Eagle would deploy these modern systems. But I think if he really, you know, the marketing to people, so they're not threatened, I think thinking about your process and then what's, what's your day one and then look like, and then what's your six and 12 months after that looks like, I think settling all that stuff upfront just sets you up for success. >>All right. Rich, take us home here. Let's summarize. How can clients build a business case for AI ops? What do you recommend? >>Yeah. You know, I actually get that question a lot. It's usually, uh, almost always the number one, uh, question in, in, um, you know, webinars like this and conversations that, that the audience puts in. So I wouldn't be surprised, but if that was true, uh, going forward from this one, um, yeah, people are like, you know, Hey, we're all in. We want to do this. We know this is the way forward, but the guy who writes the checks, the CIO, the VP of ops is like, you know, I I've signed lots of checks over the years for tools wise is different. Um, and when I guide people to do is to sit back and, and start doing some hard math, right. Uh, one of the things that resonates with the leadership is dollars and cents. It's not percentages. So saying, you know, it's, it brings us a 63% reduction and MTTR is not going to resonate. >>Uh, Oh, even though it's a really good number, you know, uh, I think what it is, you have to put it in terms of avoid, if we could avoid that 63%. Right. You know, um, what does that mean for our, our digital services as far as revenue, right. We know that every hour system down, I think, uh, you know, typically in the market, you see is about $500,000 an hour for enterprise. We'll add that up over the course of the year. What are you losing in revenue? Add to that brand damage loss of customers, you know, uh, Forrester puts out a really big, uh, casino, um, uh, customer experience index every year that measures that if you're delivering good Udall services, bad digital services, if you could raise that up, what does that return to you in revenue? And that's a key thing. And then you just look at the, the, uh, hours of lost productivity. >>I call it, I might call it something else, but I think it's a catchy name. Meaning if a core internal system is down say, and you know, you have a customer service desk of a thousand customer service people, and they can't do that look up or fix that problem for clients for an hour. How much money does that lose you? And you multiply it out. You know, average customer service desk person makes X amount an hour times this much time. This many times it happens. Then you start seeing the real, sort of a power of AI ops for this incident avoidance, or at least lowering the impact of these incidents. And people have put out in graphs and spreadsheets and all this, and then I'm doing some research around this actually to, to, to put out something that people can use to say, the project funds itself in six to 12 months, it's paid for itself. And then after that it's returning money to the business. Why would you not do that? And when you start framing the conversation, that way, the little light bulb turn on for the people that sign the checks. For sure. >>That's great advice for folks to be thinking about. I loved how you talked about the 63% reduction in something. I think that's great. What does it impact? How does it impact the revenue for the organization? If we're avoiding costs here, how do we drive up revenue? So having that laser focus on revenue is great advice for folks in any industry, looking to build a business case for AI ops. I think you set the stage for that rich beautifully, and you were right. This was a fun conversation. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And thanks for watching >>From around the globe with digital coverage. >>Welcome back to the Broadcom AI ops, virtual forum, Lisa Martin here talking with Eastman Nasir global product management at Verizon. We spent welcome back. >>Hi. Hello. Uh, what a pleasure. >>So 2020 the year of that needs no explanation, right? The year of massive challenges and wanting to get your take on the challenges that organizations are facing this year as the demand to deliver digital products and services has never been higher. >>Yeah. So I think this is something it's so close to all the far far, right? It's, uh, it's something that's impacted the whole world equally. And I think regardless of which industry you rent, you have been impacted by this in one form or the other, and the ICT industry, the information and communication technology industry, you know, Verizon being really massive player in that whole arena. It has just been sort of struck with this massive consummation we have talked about for a long time, we have talked about these remote surgery capabilities whereby you've got patients in Kenya who are being treated by an expert sitting in London or New York, and also this whole consciousness about, you know, our carbon footprint and being environmentally conscious. This pandemic has taught us all of that and brought us to the forefront of organization priorities, right? The demand. I think that's, that's a very natural consequence of everybody sitting at home. >>And the only thing that can keep things still going is this data communication, right? But I wouldn't just say that that is, what's kind of at the heart of all of this. Just imagine if we are to realize any of these targets of the world is what leadership is setting for themselves. Hey, we have to be carbon neutral by X year as a country, as a geography, et cetera, et cetera. You know, all of these things require you to have this remote working capabilities, this remote interaction, not just between humans, but machine to machine interactions. And this there's a unique value chain, which is now getting created that you've got people who are communicating with other people or communicating with other machines, but the communication is much more. I wouldn't even use the term real time because we've used real time for voice and video, et cetera. >>We're talking low latency, microsecond decision-making that can either cut somebody's, you know, um, our trees or that could actually go and remove the tumor, that kind of stuff. So that has become a reality. Everybody's asking for it, remote learning, being an extremely massive requirement where, you know, we've had to enable these, uh, these virtual classrooms ensuring the type of connectivity, ensuring the type of type of privacy, which is just so, so critical. You can't just have everybody in a go on the internet and access a data source. You have to be concerned about the integrity and security of that data as the foremost. So I think all of these things, yes, we have not been caught off guard. We were pretty forward-looking in our plans and our evolution, but yes, it's fast track the journey that we would probably believe we would have taken in three years. It has brought that down to two quarters where we've had to execute them. >>Right. Massive acceleration. All right. So you articulated the challenges really well. And a lot of the realities that many of our viewers are facing. Let's talk now about motivations, AI ops as a tool, as a catalyst for helping organizations overcome those challenges. >>So yeah. Now on that I said, you can imagine, you know, it requires microsecond decision-making which human being on this planet can do microsecond decision-making on complex network infrastructure, which is impacting end user applications, which have multitudes of effect. You know, in real life, I use the example of a remote surgeon. Just imagine that, you know, even because of you just use your signal on the quality of that communication for that microsecond, it could be the difference between killing somebody in saving somebody's life. And it's not predictable. We talk about autonomous vehicles. Uh, we talk about this transition to electric vehicles, smart motorways, et cetera, et cetera, in federal environment, how is all of that going to work? You have so many different components coming in. You don't just have a network and security anymore. You have software defined networking. That's coming, becoming a part of that. >>You have mobile edge computing that is rented for the technologies. 5g enables we're talking augmented reality. We're talking virtual reality. All of these things require that resources and why being carbon conscious. We told them we just want to build a billion data centers on this planet, right? We, we have to make sure that resources are given on demand and the best way of resources can be given on demand and could be most efficient is that the thing is being made at million microsecond and those resources are accordingly being distributed, right? If you're relying on people, sipping their coffees, having teas, talking to somebody else, you know, just being away on holiday. I don't think we're going to be able to handle that one that we have already stepped into. Verizon's 5g has already started businesses on that transformational journey where they're talking about end user experience personalization. >>You're going to have events where people are going to go, and it's going to be three-dimensional experiences that are purely customized for you. How, how does that all happen without this intelligence sitting there and a network with all of these multiple layers? So spectrum, it doesn't just need to be intuitive. Hey, this is my private IP traffic. This is public traffic. You know, it has to not be in two, or this is an application that I have to prioritize over another task to be intuitive to the criticality and the context of those transactions. Again, that's surgeons. So be it's much more important than postman setting and playing a video game. >>I'm glad that you think that that's excellent. Let's go into some specific use cases. What are some of the examples that you gave? Let's kind of dig deeper into some of the, what you think are the lowest hanging fruit for organizations kind of pan industry to go after. >>Excellent. Brian, and I think this, this like different ways to look at the lowest hanging fruit, like for somebody like revising who is a managed services provider, you know, very comprehensive medicines, but we obviously have food timing, much lower potentially for some of our customers who want to go on that journey. Right? So for them to just go and try and harness the power of the foods might be a bit higher hanging, but for somebody like us, the immediate ones would be to reduce the number of alarms that are being generated by these overlay services. You've got your basic network, then you've got your whole software defined networking on top of that, you have your hybrid clouds, you have your edge computing coming on top of that. You know? So all of that means if there's an outage on one device on the network, I want to make this very real for everybody, right? >>It's like device and network does not stop all of those multiple applications or monitoring tools from raising and raising thousands of alarm and everyone, one capacity. If people are attending to those thousands of alarms, it's like you having a police force and there's a burglary in one time and the alarm goes off and 50 bags. How, how are you kind of make the best use of your police force? You're going to go investigate 50 bags or do you want to investigate where the problem is? So it's as real as that, I think that's the first wins where people can save so much cost, which is coming from being wasted and resources running around, trying to figure stuff out immediately. I'm tied this with network and security network and security is something which has you did even the most, you know, I mean single screens in our engineering, well, we took it to have network experts, separate people, security experts, separate people to look for different things, but there are security events that can impact the performance of a network. >>And then just drop the case on the side of et cetera, which could be falsely attributed to the metric. And then if you've got multiple parties, which are then the chapter clear stakeholders, you can imagine the blame game that goes on finding fingers, taking names, not taking responsibility that don't has all this happened. This is the only way to bring it all together to say, okay, this is what takes priority. If there's an event that has happened, what is its correlation to the other downstream systems, devices, components, and these are applications. And then subsequently, you know, like isolating it to the right cost where you can most effectively resolve that problem. Thirdly, I would say on demand, virtualized resource, virtualized resources, the heart and soul, the spirit of status that you can have them on demand. So you can automate the allocation of these resources based on customer's consumption their peaks, their cramps, all of that comes in. >>You see, Hey, typically on a Wednesday, the traffic was up significantly for this particular application, you know, going to this particular data center, you could have this automated system, uh, which is just providing those resources, you know, on demand. And so it is to have a much better commercial engagement with customers and just a much better service assurance model. And then one more thing on top of that, which is very critical is that as I was saying, giving that intelligence to the networks to start having context of the criticality of a transaction, that doesn't make sense to them. You can't have that because for that, you need to have this, you know, monkey their data. You need to have multi-cam system, which are monitoring and controlling different aspects of your overall end user application value chain to be communicating with each other. And, you know, that's the only way to sort of achieve that goal. And that only happens with AI. It's not possible >>So it was when you clearly articulated some obvious, low hanging fruit and use cases that organizations can go after. Let's talk now about some of the considerations, you talked about the importance of a network and AI ops, the approach I assume, needs to be modular support needs to be heterogeneous. Talk to us about some of those key considerations that you would recommend. >>Absolutely. So again, basically starting with the network, because if there's, if the metrics sitting at the middle of all of this is not working, then things can communicate with each other, right? And the cloud doesn't work, nothing metal. That's the hardest part of this, but that's the frequency. When you talk about machine to machine communication or IOT, it's just the biggest transformation of the span of every company is going for IOT now to drive those costs, efficiencies, and had, something's got some experience, the integrity of the topic karma, right? The security, integrity of that. How do you maintain integrity of your data beyond just a secure network components? That is true, right? That's where you're getting to the whole arena blockchain technologies, where you have to use digital signatures or barcodes that machine then, and then an intelligence system is automatically able to validate and verify the integrity of the data and the commands that are being executed by those end-user told them what I need to tell them that. >>So it's IOT machines, right? That is paramount. And if anybody is not keeping that into their equation, that in its own self is any system that is therefore maintaining the integrity of your commands and your hold that sits on those, those machines. Right? Second, you have your network. You need to have any else platform, which is able to restless all the fast network information, et cetera. And coupled with that data integrity piece, because for the management, ultimately they need to have a coherent view of the analytics, et cetera, et cetera. They need to know where the problems are again, right? So let's say if there's a problem with the integrity of the commands that are being executed by the machine, that's a much bigger problem than not being able to communicate with that machine and the best thing, because you'd rather not talk to the machine or have to do anything if it's going to start doing wrong things. >>So I think that's where it is. It's very intuitive. It's not true. You have to have subsequently if you have some kind of faith and let me use that use case self autonomous vehicles. Again, I think we're going to see in the next five years, because he's smart with the rates, et cetera, it won't separate autonomous cars. It's much more efficient, it's much more space, et cetera, et cetera. So within that equation, you're going to have systems which will be specialists in looking at aspects and transactions related to those systems. For example, in autonomous moving vehicles, brakes are much more important than the Vipers, right? So this kind of intelligence, it will be multiple systems who have to sit, N nobody has to, one person has to go in one of these systems. I think these systems should be open source enough that they, if you were able to integrate them, right, if something's sitting in the cloud, you were able to integrate for that with obviously the regard of the security and integrity of your data that has to traverse from one system to the other extremely important. >>So I'm going to borrow that integrity theme for a second, as we go into our last question, and that is this kind of take a macro look at the overall business impact that AI ops can help customers make. I'm thinking of, you know, the integrity of teams aligning business in it, which we probably can't talk about enough. We're helping organizations really effectively measure KPIs that deliver that digital experience that all of us demanding consumers expect. What's the overall impact. What would you say in summary fashion? >>So I think the overall impact is a lot of costs. That's customized and businesses gives the time to the time of enterprises. Defense was inevitable. It's something that for the first time, it will come to life. And it's something that is going to, you know, start driving cost efficiencies and consciousness and awareness within their own business, which is obviously going to have, you know, it domino kind of an effect. So one example being that, you know, you have problem isolation. I talked about network security, this multi-layers architecture, which enables this new world of 5g, um, at the heart of all of it, it has to identify the problem to the source, right? Not be bogged down by 15 different things that are going wrong. What is causing those 15 things to go wrong, right? That speed to isolation in its own sense can make millions and millions of dollars to organizations after we organize it. Next one is obviously overall impacted customer experience. Uh, 5g was given out of your customers, expecting experiences from you, even if you're not expecting to deliver them in 2021, 2022, it would have customers asking for those experience or walking away, if you do not provide those experience. So it's almost like a business can do nothing every year. They don't have to reinvest if they just want to die on the line, businesses want remain relevant. >>Businesses want to adopt the latest and greatest in technology, which enables them to, you know, have that superiority and continue it. So from that perspective that continue it, he will read that they write intelligence systems that tank rationalizing information and making decisions supervised by people, of course were previously making some of those. >>That was a great summary because you're right, you know, with how demanding consumers are. We don't get what we want quickly. We churn, right? We go somewhere else and we could find somebody that can meet those expectations. So it has been thanks for doing a great job of clarifying the impact and the value that AI ops can bring to organizations that sounds really now is we're in this even higher demand for digital products and services, which is not going away. It's probably going to only increase it's table stakes for any organization. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving us your thoughts. >>Pleasure. Thank you. We'll be right back with our next segment. >>Digital applications and services are more critical to a positive customer and employee experience than ever before. But the underlying infrastructure that supports these apps and services has become increasingly complex and expanding use of multiple clouds, mobile and microservices, along with modern and legacy infrastructure can make it difficult to pinpoint the root cause when problems occur, it can be even more difficult to determine the business impact your problems that occur and resolve them efficiently. AI ops from Broadcom can help first by providing 360 degree visibility, whether you have hybrid cloud or a cloud native AI ops from Broadcom provides a clear line of sight, including apt to infrastructure and network visibility across hybrid environments. Second, the solution gives you actionable insights by correlating an aggregating data and applying AI and machine learning to identify root causes and even predict problems before users are impacted. Third AI ops from Broadcom provides intelligent automation that identifies potential solutions when problems occur applied to the best one and learns from the effectiveness to improve response in case the problem occurs. Again, finally, the solution enables organizations to achieve digit with jelly by providing feedback loops across development and operations to allow for continuous improvements and innovation through these four capabilities. AI ops from Broadcom can help you reduce service outages, boost, operational efficiency, and effectiveness and improve customer and employee experience. To learn more about AI ops from Broadcom, go to broadcom.com/ai ops from around the globe. >>It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum, Lisa Martin here with Srinivasan, Roger Rajagopal, the head of product and strategy at Broadcom. Raj, welcome here, Lisa. I'm excited for our conversation. So I wanted to dive right into a term that we hear all the time, operational excellence, right? We hear it everywhere in marketing, et cetera, but why is it so important to organizations as they head into 2021? And tell us how AI ops as a platform can help. >>Yeah. Well, thank you. First off. I wanna, uh, I want to welcome our viewers back and, uh, I'm very excited to, uh, to share, um, uh, more info on this topic. You know, uh, here's what we believe as we work with large organizations, we see all our organizations are poised to get out of the, uh, the pandemic and look for a brood for their own business and helping customers get through this tough time. So fiscal year 2021, we believe is going to be a combination of, uh, you know, resiliency and agility at the, at the same time. So operational excellence is critical because the business has become more digital, right? There are going to be three things that are going to be more sticky. Uh, you know, remote work is going to be more sticky, um, cost savings and efficiency is going to be an imperative for organizations and the continued acceleration of digital transformation of enterprises at scale is going to be in reality. So when you put all these three things together as a, as a team that is, uh, you know, that's working behind the scenes to help the businesses succeed, operational excellence is going to be, make or break for organizations, >>Right with that said, if we kind of strip it down to the key capabilities, what are those key capabilities that companies need to be looking for in an AI ops solution? >>Yeah, you know, so first and foremost, AI ops means many things to many, many folks. So let's take a moment to simply define it. The way we define AI ops is it's a system of intelligence, human augmented system that brings together full visibility across app infra and network elements that brings together disparate data sources and provides actionable intelligence and uniquely offers intelligent automation. Now, the, the analogy many folks draw is the self-driving car. I mean, we are in the world of Teslas, uh, but you know, uh, but self-driving data center is it's too far away, right? Autonomous systems are still far away. However, uh, you know, application of AI ML techniques to help deal with volume velocity, veracity of information, uh, is, is critical. So that's how we look at AI ops and some of the key capabilities that we, uh, that we, uh, that we work with our customers to help them on our own for eight years. >>Right? First one is eyes and ears. What we call full stack observability. If you do not know what is happening in your systems, uh, you know, that that serve up your business services. It's going to be pretty hard to do anything, uh, in terms of responsiveness, right? So from stack observability, the second piece is what we call actionable insights. So when you have disparate data sources, tools, sprawls data coming at you from, uh, you know, uh, from a database systems, it systems customer management systems, ticketing systems. How do you find the needle from the haystack? And how do you respond rapidly from a myriad of problems as CEO of red? The third area is what we call intelligent automation. Well, identifying the problem to act on is important, and then acting on automating that and creating, uh, a recommendation system where, uh, you know, you can be proactive about it is even more important. And finally, all of this focuses on efficiency. What about effectiveness? Effectiveness comes when you create a feedback loop, when what happens in production is related to your support systems and your developers so that they can respond rapidly. So we call that continuous feedback. So these are the four key capabilities that, uh, you know, uh, you should look for in an AI ops system. And that's what we offer as well. >>Russia, there's four key capabilities that businesses need to be looking for. I'm wondering how those help to align business. And it it's, again like operational excellence. It's something that we talk about a lot is the alignment of business. And it a lot more challenging, easier said than done, right. But I want you to explain how can AI ops help with that alignment and align it outputs to business outcomes? >>Yeah. So, you know, one of the things, uh, I'm going to say something that is, uh, that is, uh, that is simple, but, but, but this harder, but alignment is not on systems alignment is with people, right? So when people align, when organizations align, when cultures align, uh, dramatic things can happen. So in the context of AI ops VC, when, when SRE is aligned with the DevOps engineers and information architects and, uh, uh, you know, it operators, uh, you know, they enable organizations to reduce the gap between intent and outcome or output and outcome that said, uh, you know, these personas need mechanisms to help them better align, right. Help them better visualize, see the, you know, what we call single source of truth, right? So there are four key things that I want to call out. When we work with large enterprises, we find that customer journey alignment with the, you know, what we call it systems is critical. >>So how do you understand your business imperatives and your customer journey goals, whether it is car to a purchase or whether it is, uh, you know, bill shock scenarios and Swan alignment on customer journey to your it systems is one area that you can reduce the gap. The second area is how do you create a scenario where your teams can find problems before your customers do right outage scenarios and so on. So that's the second area of alignment. The third area of alignment is how can you measure business impact driven services? Right? There are several services that an organization offers versus an it system. Some services are more critical to the business than others, and these change in a dynamic environment. So how do you, how do you understand that? How do you measure that and how, how do you find the gaps there? So that's the third area of alignment that we, that we help and last but not least there are, there are things like NPS scores and others that, that help us understand alignment, but those are more long-term. But in the, in the context of, uh, you know, operating digitally, uh, you want to use customer experience and business, uh, you know, a single business outcome, uh, as a, as a key alignment factor, and then work with your systems of engagement and systems of interaction, along with your key personas to create that alignment. It's a people process technology challenge. >>So, whereas one of the things that you said there is that it's imperative for the business to find a problem before a customer does, and you talked about outages there, that's always a goal for businesses, right. To prevent those outages, how can AI ops help with that? Yeah, >>So, you know, outages, uh, talk, you know, go to resiliency of a system, right? And they also go to, uh, uh, agility of the same system, you know, if you're a customer and if you're whipping up your mobile app and it takes more than three milliseconds, uh, you know, you're probably losing that customer, right. So outages mean different things, you know, and there's an interesting website called down detector.com that actually tracks all the old pages of publicly available services, whether it's your bank or your, uh, you know, tele telecom service or a mobile service and so on and so forth. In fact, the key question around outages for, from, uh, from, uh, you know, executives are the question of, are you ready? Right? Are you ready to respond to the needs of your customers and your business? Are you ready to rapidly resolve an issue that is impacting customer experience and therefore satisfaction? >>Are you creating a digital trust system where customers can be, you know, um, uh, you know, customers can feel that their information is secure when they transact with you, all of these, getting into the notion of resiliency and outages. Now, you know, one of the things that, uh, that I, I often, uh, you know, work with customers around, you know, would that be find as the radius of impact is important when you deal with outages? What I mean by that is problems occur, right? How do you respond? How quickly do you take two seconds, two minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, 20 hours, right? To resolve the problem that radius of impact is important. That's where, you know, you have to bring a gain people, process technology together to solve that. And the key thing is you need a system of intelligence that can aid your teams, you know, look at the same set of parameters so that you can respond faster. That's the key here. >>We look at digital transformation at scale. Raj, how does AI ops help influence that? >>You know, um, I'm going to take a slightly long-winded way to answer this question. See when it comes to digital transformation at scale, the focus on business purpose and business outcome becomes extremely critical. And then the alignment of that to your digital supply chain, right, are the, are the, are the key factors that differentiate winners in the, in their digital transformation game? Really, what we have seen, uh, with, with winners is they operate very differently. Like for example, uh, you know, Nike matures, its digital business outcomes by shoes per second, right? Uh, Apple by I-phones per minute, Tesla by model threes per month, are you getting this, getting it right? I mean, you want to have a clear business outcome, which is a measure of your business, uh, in effect, I mean, ENC, right? Which, which, uh, um, my daughter use and I use very well. >>Right. Uh, you know, uh, they measure by revenue per hour, right? I mean, so these are key measures. And when you have a key business outcome measure like that, you can everything else, because you know what these measures, uh, you know, uh, for a bank, it may be deposits per month, right now, when you move money from checking account to savings account, or when you do direct deposits, those are, you know, banks need liquidity and so on and so forth. But, you know, the, the key thing is that single business outcome has a Starburst effect inside the it organization that touches a single money moment from checking a call to savings account can touch about 75 disparate systems internally. Right? So those think about it, right? I mean, all, all we're doing is moving money from checking account a savings account. Now that goats into a it production system, there are several applications. >>There is a database, there is, there are infrastructures, there are load balancers that are webs. You know, you know, the web server components, which then touches your, your middleware component, which is a queuing system, right. Which then touches your transactional system. Uh, and, uh, you know, which may be on your main frames, what we call mobile to mainframe scenario, right? And we are not done yet. Then you have a security and regulatory compliance system that you have to touch a fraud prevention system that you have to touch, right? A state department regulation that you may have to meet and on and on and on, right? This is the chat that it operations teams face. And when you have millions of customers transacting, right, suddenly this challenge cannot be managed by human beings alone. So therefore you need a system of intelligence that augments human intelligence and acts as your, you know, your, your eyes and ears in a way to, to point pinpoint where problems are. >>Right. So digital transformation at scale really requires a very well thought out AI ops system, a platform, an open extensible platform that, uh, you know, uh, that is heterogeneous in nature because there's tools, products in organizations. There is a lot of databases in systems. There are millions of, uh, uh, you know, customers and hundreds of partners and vendors, you know, making up that digital supply chain. So, you know, AI ops is at the center of an enabling an organization achieve digital op you know, transformation at scale last but not least. You need continuous feedback loop. Continuous feedback loop is the ability for a production system to inform your dev ops teams, your finance teams, your customer experience teams, your cost modeling teams about what is going on so that they can so that they can reduce the intent, come gap. >>All of this need to come together, what we call BizOps. >>That was a great example of how you talked about the Starburst effect. I actually never thought about it in that way, when you give the banking example, but what you should is the magnitude of systems. The fact that people alone really need help with that, and why intelligent automation and AI ops can be transformative and enable that scale. Raj, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for joining me today. And we'll be right back with our next segment. Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum. We've heard from our guests about the value of AI ops and why and how organizations are adopting AI ops platforms. But now let's see AI ops inaction and get a practical view of AI ops to deep Dante. The head of AI ops at Broadcom is now going to take you through a quick demo. >>Hello. So they've gotta head off AI ops and automation here. What I'm going to do today is talk through some of the key capabilities and differentiators of Broadcom's CII ops solution in this solution, which can be delivered on cloud or on-prem. We bring a variety of metric alarm log and applauded data from multiple sources, EPM, NetApps, and infrastructure monitoring tools to provide a single point of observability and control. Let me start where our users mostly stock key enterprises like FSI, telcos retailers, et cetera, do not manage infrastructure or applications without having a business context. At the end of the day, they offer business services governed by SLS service level objectives and SLI service level indicators are service analytics, which can scale to a few thousand services, lets our customers create and monitor the services as per their preference. They can create a hierarchy of services based on their business practice. >>For example, here, the sub services are created based on functional subsistence for certain enterprises. It could be based on location. Users can import these services from their favorite CMDB. What's important to note that not all services are born equal. If you are a modern bank, you may want to prioritize tickets coming from digital banking, for example, and this application lets you rank them as per the KPI of your choice. We can source the availability, not merely from the state of the infrastructure, whether they're running or not. But from the SLS that represent the state of the application, when it comes to triaging issues related to the service, it is important to have a complete view of the topology. The typology can show both east-west elements from mobile to mainframe or not South elements in a network flow. This is particularly relevant for a large enterprise who could be running the systems of engagement on the cloud and system of records on mainframe inside the firewall here, you can see that the issue is related to the mainframe kick server. >>You can expand to see the actual alarm, which is sourced from the mainframe operational intelligence. Similarly, clicking on network will give the hub and spoke view of the network devices, the Cisco switches and routers. I can click on the effected router and see all the details Broadcom's solution stores, the ontological model of the typology in the form of a journal graph where one can not only view the current state of the typology, but the past as well, talking of underlying data sources, the solution uses best of the pre data stores for structured and unstructured data. We have not only leveraged the power of open source, but have actively contributed back to the community. One of the key innovations is evident in our dashboarding framework because we have enhanced the open source Grafana technology to support these diverse data sources here. You can see a single dashboard representing applications to infrastructure, to mainframe again, sourcing a variety of data from these sources. >>When we talk to customers, one of the biggest challenges that they face today is related to alarms because of a proliferation of tools. They are currently drowning in an ocean of hundreds and thousands of alarms. This increases the Elmont support cost to tens of dollars per ticket, and also affects LTO efficiency leading to an average of five to six hours of meantime to resolution here is where we have the state of the art innovation utilizing the power of machine learning and ontology to arrive at the root cause we not only clusterize alarms based on text, but employ the technique of 41st. We look at the topology then at the time window duplicate text based on NLP. And lastly learn from continuous training of the model to deduce what we call situations. This is an example of a situation. As you can see, we provide a time-based evidence of how things unfolded and arrive at a root cause. >>Lastly, the solution provides a three 60 degree closed loop remediation either through a ticketing system or by direct invocation of automation actions instead of firing hard-coded automation runbooks for certain conditions, the tool leverage is machine learning to rank automation actions based on past heuristics. That's why we call it intelligent automation to summarize AI ops from Broadcom helps you achieve operational excellence through full stack observability, coupled with AIML that applies across modern hybrid cloud environments, as well as legacy ones uniquely. It ties these insights with intelligent automation to improve customer experience. Thank you for watching from around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to our final segment today. So we've discussed today. The value that AI ops will bring to organizations in 2021, we'll discuss that through three different perspectives. And so now we want to bring those perspectives together and see if we can get a consensus on where AI ops needs to go for folks to be successful with it in the future. So bringing back some folks Richland is back with us. Senior analysts, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester smartness here is also back in global product management at Verizon and Srinivasan, Reggie Gopaul head of product and strategy at Broadcom guys. Great to have you back. So let's jump in and rich, we're going to, we're going to start with you, but we are going to get all three of you, a chance to answer the questions. So we've talked about why organizations should adopt AI ops, but what happens if they choose not to what challenges would they face? Basically what's the cost of organizations doing nothing >>Good question, because I think in operations for a number of years, we've kind of stand stood, Pat, where we are, where we're afraid change things sometimes, or we just don't think about a tooling as often. The last thing to change because we're spending so much time doing project work and modernization and fighting fires on a daily basis. >>Problem is going to get worse. If we do nothing, >>You know, we're building new architectures like containers and microservices, which means more things to mind and keep running. Um, we're building highly distributed systems. We're moving more and more into this hybrid world, a multi-cloud world, uh, it's become over-complicate and I'll give a short anecdote. I think, eliminate this. Um, when I go to conferences and give speeches, it's all infrastructure operations people. And I say, you know, how many people have three X, five X, you know, uh, things to monitor them. They had, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and everyone's saying how many people have hired more staff in that time period, zero hands go up. That's the gap we have to fill. And we have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems. It's the only way we're going to be able to fill back out. >>What's your perspective, uh, if organizations choose not to adopt AI ops. Yeah. So I'll do that. Yeah. So I think it's, I would just relate it to a couple of things that probably everybody >>Tired off lately and everybody can relate to. And this would resonate that we have 5g, which is all set to transform the world. As we know it, I don't have a lot of communication with these smart cities, smart communities, IOT, which is going to make us pivotal to the success of businesses. And as you've seen with this call with, you know, transformation of the world, that there's a, there's a much bigger cost consciousness out there. People are trying to become much more, forward-looking much more sustainable. And I think at the heart of all of this, that the necessity that you have intelligent systems, which are bastardizing more than enough information that previously could've been overlooked because if you don't measure engagement, not going right. People not being on the same page of this using two examples or hundreds of things, you know, that play a part in things, but not coming together in the best possible way. So I think it has an absolute necessity to drive those cost efficiencies rather than, you know, left right and center laying off people who are like 10 Mattel to your business and have a great tribal knowledge of your business. So to speak, you can drive these efficiencies through automating a lot of those tasks that previously were being very manually intensive or resource intensive. And you could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which let's be very honest going into 20, 21 after what we've seen with 2020, it's going to be mandate treat. >>And so Raj, I saw you shaking your head there when he was mom was sharing his thoughts. What are your thoughts about that sounds like you agree. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, uh, to put things in perspective, right? I mean we're firmly in the digital economy, right? Digital economy, according to the Bureau of economic analysis is 9% of the U S GDP. Just, you know, think about it in, in, in, in, in the context of the GDP, right? It's only ranked lower, slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP and slightly about finance and insurance, which is about seven and a half percent GDP. So the digital economy is firmly in our lives, right. And as Huisman was talking about it, you know, software eats the world and digital, operational excellence is critical for customers, uh, to, uh, you know, to, uh, to drive profitability and growth, uh, in the digital economy. >>It's almost, you know, the key is digital at scale. So when, uh, when rich talks about some of the challenges and when Huseman highlights 5g as an example, those are the things that, that, that come to mind. So to me, what is the cost or perils of doing nothing? You know, uh, it's not an option. I think, you know, more often than not, uh, you know, C-level execs are asking head of it and they are key influencers, a single question, are you ready? Are you ready in the context of addressing spikes in networks because of the pandemic scenario, are you ready in the context of automating away toil? Are you ready to respond rapidly to the needs of the digital business? I think AI ops is critical. >>That's a great point. Roger, where does stick with you? So we got kind of consensus there, as you said, wrapping it up. This is basically a, not an option. This is a must to go forward for organizations to be successful. So let's talk about some quick wins, or as you talked about, you know, organizations and sea levels asking, are you ready? What are some quick wins that that organizations can achieve when they're adopting AI? >>You know, um, immediate value. I think I would start with a question. How often do your customers find problems in your digital experience before you do think about that? Right. You know, if you, if you, you know, there's an interesting web, uh, website, um, uh, you know, down detector.com, right? I think, uh, in, in Europe there is an equal amount of that as well. It ha you know, people post their digital services that are down, whether it's a bank that, uh, you know, customers are trying to move money from checking account, the savings account and the digital services are down and so on and so forth. So some and many times customers tend to find problems before it operations teams do. So a quick win is to be proactive and immediate value is visibility. If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it's going to be hard to be responsive. So I would start there >>Visibility this same question over to you from Verizon's perspective, quick wins. >>Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a need to ingest this multi-care spectrum data, which I don't think is humanly possible. You don't have people having expertise, you know, all the seven layers of the OSI model and then across network and security and at the application level. So I think you need systems which are now able to get that data. It shouldn't just be wasted reports that you're paying for on a monthly basis. It's about time that you started making the most of those in the form of identifying what are the efficiencies within your ecosystem. First of all, what are the things, you know, which could be better utilized subsequently you have the >>Opportunity to reduce the noise of a trouble tickets handling. It sounds pretty trivial, but >>An average you can imagine every trouble tickets has the cost in dollars, right? >>So, and there's so many tickets and there's art >>That get created on a network and across an end user application value, >>We're talking thousands, you know, across and end user >>Application value chain could be million in >>A year. So, and so many of those are not really, >>He, you know, a cause of concern because the problem is something. >>So I think that whole triage is an immediate cost saving and the bigger your network, the bigger >>There's a cost of things, whether you're a provider, whether you're, you know, the end customer at the end of the day, not having to deal with problems, which nobody can resolve, which are not meant to be dealt with. There's so many of those situations, right, where service has just been adopted, >>Which is just coordinate quality, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. So those are the, >>So there's some of the immediate cost saving them. They are really, really significant. >>Secondly, I would say Raj mentioned something about, you know, the user, >>Your application value chain, and an understanding of that, especially with this hybrid cloud environment, >>Et cetera, et cetera, right? The time it takes to identify a problem in an end user application value chain across the seven layers that I mentioned with the OSI reference model across network and security and the application environment. It's something that >>In its own self has massive cost to business, >>Right? That could be >>No sale transactions that could be obstructed because of this. There could be, and I'm going to use a really interesting example. >>We talk about IOT. The integrity of the IOT machine is exciting. >>Family is pivotal in this new world that we're stepping into. >>You could be running commands, >>Super efficient. He has, everything is being told to the machine really fast with sending yeah. >>Everything there. What if it's hacked? And if that's okay, >>Robotic arm starts to involve the things you don't want it to do. >>So there's so much of that. That becomes a part of this naturally. And I believe, yes, this is not just like from a cost >>standpoint, but anything going wrong with that code base, et cetera, et cetera. These are massive costs to the business in the form of the revenue. They have lost the perception in the market as a result, the fed, >>You know, all that stuff. So >>These are a couple of very immediate problems, but then you also have the whole player virtualized resources where you can automate the allocation, you know, the quantification of an orchestration of those virtualized resources, rather than a person having to, you know, see something and then say, Oh yeah, I need to increase capacity over here, because then it's going to have this particular application. You have systems doing this stuff and to, you know, Roger's point your customer should not be identifying your problems before you, because this digital is where it's all about perception. >>Absolutely. We definitely don't want the customers finding it before. So rich, let's wrap this particular question up with you from that senior analyst perspective, how can companies use make big impact quickly with AI ops? Yeah, >>Yeah, I think, you know, and it was been really summed up some really great use cases there. I think with the, uh, you know, one of the biggest struggles we've always had in operations is isn't, you know, the mean time to resolve. We're pretty good at resolving the things. We just have to find the thing we have to resolve. That's always been the problem and using these advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms now across all machine and application data, our tendency is humans is to look at the console and say, what's flashing red. That must be what we have to fix, but it could be something that's yellow, somewhere else, six services away. And we have made things so complicated. And I think this is what it was when I was saying that we can't get there anymore on our own. We need help to get there in all of this stuff that the outline. >>So, so well builds up to a higher level thing of what is the customer experience about what is the customer journey? And we've struggled for years in the digital world and measuring that a day-to-day thing. We know an online retail. If you're having a bad experience at one retailer, you just want your thing. You're going to go to another retailer, brand loyalty. Isn't one of like it, wasn't a brick and mortal world where you had a department store near you. So you were loyal to that because it was in your neighborhood, um, online that doesn't exist anymore. So we need to be able to understand the customer from that first moment, they touch a digital service all the way from their, their journey through that digital service, the lowest layer, whether it be a database or the network, what have you, and then back to them again, and we're not understanding, is that a good experience? >>We gave them. How does that compare to last week's experience? What should we be doing to improve that next week? Uh, and I think companies are starting and then the pandemic certainly, you know, push this timeline. If you listened to the, the, the CEO of Microsoft, he's like, you know, 10 years of digital transformation written down. And the first several months of this, um, in banks and in financial institutions, I talked to insurance companies, aren't slowing down. They're trying to speed up. In fact, what they've discovered is that they're, you know, obviously when we were on lockdown or what have you, they use of digital servers is spiked very high. What they've learned is they're never going to go back down. They're never going to return to pretend endemic levels. So now they're stuck with this new reality. Well, how do we service those customers and how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand? >>Uh, so, you know, they're looking for modernization opportunities. A lot of that that's things have been exposed. And I think Raj touched upon this very early in the conversation is visibility gaps. Now that we're on the outside, looking in at the data center, we know we architect things in a very way. Uh, we better ways of making these correlations across the Sparrow technologies to understand where the problems lies. We can give better services to our customers. And I think that's really what we're going to see a lot of the innovation and the people really clamoring for these new ways of doing things that starting, you know, now, I mean, I've seen it in customers, but I think really the push through the end of this year to next year when, you know, economy and things like that straightened out a little bit more, I think it really, people are gonna take a hard look of where they are and is, you know, AI ops the way forward for them. And I think they'll find it. The answer is yes, for sure. >>So we've, we've come to a consensus that, of what the parallels are of organizations, basically the cost of doing nothing. You guys have given some great advice on where some of those quick wins are. Let's talk about something Raj touched on earlier is organizations, are they really ready for truly automated AI? Raj, I want to start with you readiness factor. What are your thoughts? >>Uh, you know, uh, I think so, you know, we place our, her lives on automated systems all the time, right? In our, in our day-to-day lives, in the, in the digital world. I think, uh, you know, our, uh, at least the customers that I talk to our customers are, uh, are, uh, you know, uh, have a sophisticated systems. Like for example, advanced automation is a reality. If you look at social media, AI and ML and automation are used to automate away, uh, misinformation, right? If you look at financial institutions, AI and ML are used to automate away a fraud, right? So I want to ask our customers why can't we automate await oil in it, operation systems, right? And that's where our customers are. Then the, you know, uh, I'm a glass half full, uh, cleanup person, right? Uh, this pandemic has been harder on many of our customers, but I think what we have learned from our customers is they've Rose to the occasion. >>They've used digital as a key needs, right? At scale. That's what we see with, you know, when, when Huseman and his team talk about, uh, you know, network operational intelligence, right. That's what it means to us. So I think they are ready, the intersection of customer experience it and OT, operational technology is ripe for automation. Uh, and, uh, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna sort of give a shout out to three key personas in this mix. It's about people, right? One is the SRE persona, you know, site, reliability engineer. The other is the information security persona. And the third one is the it operator automation engineer persona. These folks in organizations are building a system of intelligence that can respond rapidly to the needs of their digital business. We at Broadcom, we are in the business of helping them construct a system of intelligence that will create a human augmented solution for them. Right. So when I see, when I interact with large enterprise customers, I think they, they, you know, they, they want to achieve what I would call advanced automation and AI ML solutions. And that's squarely, very I ops is, you know, is going as it, you know, when I talk to rich and what, everything that rich says, you know, that's where it's going and that's what we want to help our customers to. So, which about your perspective of organizations being ready for truly automated AI? >>I think, you know, the conversation has shifted a lot in the last, in, in pre pandemic. Uh, I'd say at the end of last year, we're, you know, two years ago, people I'd go to conferences and people come up and ask me like, this is all smoke and mirrors, right? These systems can't do this because it is such a leap forward for them, for where they are today. Right. We we've sort of, you know, in software and other systems, we iterate and we move forward slowly. So it's not a big shock. And this is for a lot of organizations that big, big leap forward where they're, they're running their operations teams today. Um, but now they've come around and say, you know what? We want to do this. We want all the automations. We want my staff not doing the low complexity, repetitive tasks over and over again. >>Um, you know, and we have a lot of those kinds of legacy systems. We're not going to rebuild. Um, but they need certain care and feeding. So why are we having operations? People do those tasks? Why aren't we automating those out? I think the other piece is, and I'll, I'll, I'll send this out to any of the operations teams that are thinking about going down this path is that you have to understand that the operations models that we're operating under in, in INO and have been for the last 25 years are super outdated and they're fundamentally broken for the digital age. We have to start thinking about different ways of doing things and how do we do that? Well, it's, it's people, organization, people are going to work together differently in an AI ops world, um, for the better. Um, but you know, there's going to be the, the age of the 40 person bridge call thing. >>Troubleshooting is going away. It's going to be three, four, five focused engineers that need to be there for that particular incident. Um, a lot of process mailer process we have in our level, one level, two engineering. What have you running of tickets, gathering of artifacts, uh, during an incident is going to be automated. That's a good thing. We should be doing those, those things by hand anymore. So I'd say that the, to people's like start thinking about what this means to your organization. Start thinking about the great things we can do by automating things away from people, having to do them over and over again. And what that means for them, getting them matched to what they want to be doing is high level engineering tasks. They want to be doing monitorization, working with new tools and technologies. Um, these are all good things that help the organization perform better as a whole great advice and great kind of some of the thoughts that you shared rich for what the audience needs to be on the lookout. For one, I want to go over to you, give me your thoughts on what the audience that should be on the lookout for, or put on your agendas in the next 12 months. >>So there's like a couple of ways to answer that question. One thing would be in the form of, you know, what are some of the things they have to be concerned about in terms of implementing this solution or harnessing its power. The other one could be, you know, what are the perhaps advantages they should look to see? So if I was to talk about the first one, let's say that, what are some of the things I have to watch out for like possible pitfalls that everybody has data, right? So yeah, there's one strategy we say, okay, you've got the data, let's see what we can do with them. But then there's the exact opposite side, which has to be considered when you're doing that analysis. What are the use cases that you're looking to drive? Right. But then use cases you have to understand, are you taking a reactive use case approach? >>Are you taking active use cases, right? Or, yeah, that's a very, very important concentration. Then you have to be very cognizant of where does this data that you have, where does it reside? What are the systems and where does it need to go to in order for this AI function to happen and subsequently if there needs to be any backward communication with all of that data in a process manner. So I think these are some of the very critical points because you can have an AI solution, which is sitting in a customer data center. It could be in a managed services provider data center, like, right, right. It could be in a cloud data center, like an AWS or something, or you could have hybrid views, et cetera, all of that stuff. So you have to be very mindful of where you're going to get the data from is going to go to what are the use cases you're trying to get out to do a bit of backward forward. >>Okay, we've got this data thing and I think it's a journey. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, you've built this fantastic thing. It's like Terminator two. I think it's a journey where we built starting with the network. My personal focus always comes down to the network and with 5g so much, so much more right with 5g, you're talking low latency communication. That's like the true power of 5g, right? It's low latency, it's ultra high bandwidth, but what's the point of that low latency. If then subsequently the actions that need to be taken to prevent any problems in application, IOT applications, remote surgeries, uh, self driving vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. What if that's where people are sitting and sipping their coffees and trying to take action that needs to be in low latency as well. Right? So these are, I think some of the fundamental things that you have to know your data, your use cases, that location, where it needs to be exchanged, what are the parameters around that for extending that data? >>And I think from that point at one word, it's all about realizing, you know, sense of business outcomes. Unless AI comes in as a digital labor that shows you, I have, I have reduced your this amount of time and that's a result of big problems or identified problems for anything. Or I have saved you this much resource in a month, in a year or whatever timeline that people want to see it. So I think those are some of the initial starting points, and then it all starts coming together. But the key is it's not one system that can do everything. You have to have a way where, you know, you can share data once you've caught all of that data into one system. Maybe you can send it to another system at make more, take more advantage, right? That system might be an AI and IOT system, which is just looking at all of your street and make it sure that Hey parents. So it's still off just to be more carbon neutral and all that great stuff, et cetera, et cetera, >>Stuff for the audience to can cigarette rush, take us time from here. What are some of the takeaways that you think the audience really needs to be laser focused on as we move forward into the next year? You know, one thing that, uh, I think a key takeaway is, um, uh, you know, as we embark on 2021, closing the gap between intent and outcome and outputs and outcome will become critical, is critical. Uh, you know, especially for, uh, you know, uh, digital transformation at scale for organizations context in the, you know, for customer experience becomes even more critical as who Swan Huseman was talking, uh, you know, being network network aware network availability is, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition anymore. Right? The what, what, what customers have to go towards is going from network availability to network agility with high security, uh, what we call app aware networks, right? How do you differentiate between a trade, a million dollar trade that's happening between, uh, you know, London and New York, uh, uh, versus a YouTube video training that an employee is going through? Worse is a YouTube video that millions of customers are, are >>Watching, right? Three different context, three different customer scenarios, right? That is going to be critical. And last but not least feedback loop, uh, you know, responsiveness is all about feedback loop. You cannot predict everything, but you can respond to things faster. I think these are sort of the three, three things that, uh, that, uh, you know, customers aren't going to have to have to really think about. And that's also where I believe AI ops, by the way, AI ops and I I'm. Yeah. You know, one of the points that was smart and shout out to what he was saying was heterogeneity is key, right? There is no homogeneous tool in the world that can solve problems. So you want an open extensible system of intelligence that, that can harness data from disparate data sources provide that visualization, the actionable insight and the human augmented recommendation systems that are so needed for, uh, you know, it operators to be successful. I think that's where it's going. >>Amazing. You guys just provided so much content context recommendations for the audience. I think we accomplished our goal on this. I'll call it power panel of not only getting to a consensus of what, where AI ops needs to go in the future, but great recommendations for what businesses in any industry need to be on the lookout for rich Huisman Raj, thank you for joining me today. We want to thank you for watching. This was such a rich session. You probably want to watch it again. Thanks for your time. Thanks so much for attending and participating in the AI OBS virtual forum. We really appreciate your time and we hope you really clearly understand the value that AI ops platforms can deliver to many types of organizations. I'm Lisa Martin, and I want to thank our speakers today for joining. We have rich lane from Forrester who's fund here from Verizon and Raj from Broadcom. Thanks everyone. Stay safe..

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with dev net in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube, but in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that. Creativity. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net senior vice president in general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe presenting accelerating automation with damnit brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX all that great stuff. Many Wade Lee, who's the director, senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first. We don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net creative, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years where virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you've had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are >>Coming online is, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. Uh, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for start a, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business stay alive. And to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>Now one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and, you know, have you guys got some acquisitions, you about thousand eyes? Um, um, you've got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game in security Cooper and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place and now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, um, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they have to build in and what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first, everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>Cause you know, you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. Well, you've >>Been falling, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people rumblings are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>We got dev net created right around the corner, virtual unfortunate won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. >>Thanks. Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard, uh, Susie is about people and one of the things that's close to your heart and you've been driving is, uh, as senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network, automation, developer, which Susie mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite data that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on a dev net site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dump space as well, and are helping people with that service or what it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. Okay. >>I ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned a observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we need it? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, um, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Eric and Mandy. If you guys can wrap up this accelerate automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, I'm only can imagine the enablement that's gonna create. Can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with dev net and tee up dev net create Mandy, we'll start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every Devin event over the past years, you know, damnit is bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that the people's skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the Duveneck community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping >>That customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. >>Can I add one, add one more thing? Yeah. I was just gonna say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>Yeah. That's what I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that. By saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. Happy to be here. >>Okay. I'm Jennifer with the cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment virtual tour face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching. >>Welcome back. And Jeffrey, >>The cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev data van, it's called accelerating automation with dev net and the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is, is not going away. They've been doing this since the middle of March or all the way to October. And so we're excited to have our next guest is Thomas Shively. He's the vice president of product marketing and data center networking for the intent based networking group at Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. Exactly, >>Exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls in their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16 hit and everybody had to go home. >>Wow, good point. Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network >>Much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more operative as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it, 2000 East to West, as we say on the data center. Right. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >>Right. You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning, can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends and the way I look at this trans as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while then. So in a sense, we, we, we prep was, or no, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little block, a little, little, uh, abrupt before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if he didn't, if he didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we sold our match. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. Yeah, >>I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of, of trends, right? The other great, uh, trend as public cloud, um, and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focused on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might have played some compliance reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your sinks. And so I sing in the end, what a, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed. But the logic context section, which we see in the last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is where a lot of my discussions I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of. >>Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. And I said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? >>Right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools, uh, and that's a whole range, right? And this is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speeds, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use NoMo tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further and saying, I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pleasing, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration with relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right? And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see a given. I, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about. The cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all of these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throat to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer. You, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just sit. I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they want to actually structure the operation. Right? One of the nice things around this or automation plus, uh, tool integration, cloning to, and integration is you actually opened this up, not a soul automation train, not just to the network operations personnel, right. You also open it up and can use this for the second ops person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, is literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional, you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I got to hand over the sec ups team, and they can directly call these these KPIs, right? Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>That's interesting, you know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously change software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those. None of those is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes to saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI decent, a controller or our multicell orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. Uh, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she formed Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is emotion where in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying, Neil, all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little plugin. I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetApps person or dev ops person or SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right. And it's simplest thing that like sent books and why moments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code Coda there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly. And that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation we're in and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning, that's the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily. Right, >>Right. That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right. Democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and can make the changes and then opening up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the, it says application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happening with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get projects started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lands, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right. This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right. And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to, uh, adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's not just automation. I say, we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private, private networks into which of private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing, what a business looks at, right. They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment. What's a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this. Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. It's really democratisation. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in, in, in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting is we, we started on the Cisco data center side. We started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on these, on these products, uh, they have all the capabilities they are, they can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them point. >>Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and in social media, right. What what's driving your digital transformation is that the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. I highly recommend everybody roll up his sleeves and you know, the best races you can have. >>And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, you know, like say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. I look forward to that as well. All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? >>I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, or along with our partner, DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's know, North of 70% >>Plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our, our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable as sort of the, of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my, you know, dog's name is the password, you know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all of the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively. And I make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if, when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, that there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I, I see that with an asterisk because, um, if, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant Tessa mill component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? Let's say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there in that, in that data set. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation, and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on the outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in, in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about what computers are gonna run on, or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so what, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right? There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to, you know, security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical do, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines, if the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if, if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code while we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company likes companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatize is the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick doc. I don't care, but they sort of laid out this pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy mean beyond GDPR and California consumer privacy act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and Mose. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He needs to be walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me, >>Really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is, is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or are you >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, try not try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming a, this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there? And what are you? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters. Isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass players go over there. Like what happened to the band? That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So things thanks for inviting me and I miss you, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says kidney, thanks so much for coming to the Q. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>After the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual. We're not face to face the cubes been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's, who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is beast vice president of product. Uh, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area it's converged in multiple theaters and technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you, but first thousand eyes is recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important, the new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, it's really been an exciting six months for the entire team and customers, >>You know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the Cova dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, the home of the conference book talk track we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandoned from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home. VPNs are passe. Maybe it's SD when maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed this at scale. What's your view on this? And what is thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a early, simple, uh, connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say, functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the it organization newly chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, to be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, as you get into some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data at the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. First off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right inside, you know, data, um, alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen. You have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, to allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as our employees, >>Classic policy based activity, taking it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it, people are like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CTPs infrastructure across, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you've got the cloud. How has your technology helped the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, a great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and where in the past you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need, enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, what, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. They're having to work collaboratively with a different ISP. If they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question, we think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it. Teams. Um, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them just got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a war situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment at time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to, uh, be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same se land-based rollout, where you're looking to say benchmark, and you can confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ESPs within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch, give you that competence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights. The classic financial model ROI got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation and who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things, but as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products, it means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the deal that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you've said, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need with the level of automation, you'll be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And, you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking for. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>And ultimately, I think, you know, when you're looking at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a fraud perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure that's running upon, but the network it's connected to, and then ultimately the user in the sense of that user and by leveraging that thousand eyes and being able to then integrate thousand into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developer's looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. We've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks Joe Vaccaro, vice president of product here, but thousand nine is now part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. You really have to automate you human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got a Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. >>Good to see Kuhn. >>Thank you for having me >>Joining him as Eric nip. He is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was cool. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think that the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them as the women, the flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah. W we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic that just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a serve as an elastic is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>And then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the, you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CIC pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as, and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. You know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. We like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security change from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no, I'm so, wow. The kudos that you, you found that book I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis in the primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices, that's digitally connected devices. >>Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about parameters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guys up or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data and the context, what data is being accessed. And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because of the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We at Dave runs it on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days at Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd and, and I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, con really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, because five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they've been able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to, you know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have a host Sarah that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing, you know, partners and customers employing programmability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that can provide, >>Um, bringing on board those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT in the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you, uh, clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an you're an a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, not itself was a, was a, a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean, obviously he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, we were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several years, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to me, programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that is automated, or if that decision requires some type of manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough, like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I don't want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for anybody that can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to it and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, who achieved it when incentive was secondary, they just wanted to have the bragging rights, like yeah, I beat Eric. Right? >>Right. Absolutely. No, it's a, it's it, you know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well, but I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media means, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So I, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are a bubble, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and do their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I, and I believe the status, this, and I'll probably get number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a, in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kind of gotten out of the fog of, of, of war for our fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that our customers, that people are happier working from home, people are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent and some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay in there in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to, to travel and, and check into a hotel and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part time as, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium, our, our local general manager has a virtual effort. TIF every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four, five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really, really grown and, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really about the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, uh, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of, of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. Uh, we're seeing really people dive into that and customers, um, co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology >>Can provide, but also how it impacts people. Has it been discussed and redefines process? >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it is, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and it's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the end, the, it lexicon as being that critical or that poor critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with them in another program, ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? And I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>All right. Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for, for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and, and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, mob bell must be happy because the old mother's day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power, that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners. And he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's businesses transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want to way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along the step in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. >>Right. That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that's the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. A new Cisco has pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional form. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. >>You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in this definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, in, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to bring it all together. It's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now, everything is cloud native. We have the ability to, to better, to better adjust, to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something ups to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. >>Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. Right. >>Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other side, >>Cloud multicloud >>Public cloud, you know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective in helping customers work through this, cause still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses, how are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. >>But you know, aside from, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of, uh, operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry, and the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. In that thing. You used to know what that was. Now you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. >>You really need to understand what's going on. And the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path there, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of that. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're on, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about in a dev net, really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some, you know, non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a, as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the doublet that gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they've built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology case that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes that the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here from around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with Devin brought to you by Cisco. >>When I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net, with Cisco, and we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos, where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into, you know, IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called street from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with Devon it in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube that in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. >>It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that creativity. So today you're going to hear from a number of experts. For example, TK key Anini is a distinguished engineer and a security pro. He's going to join us, his colleagues, Thomas Scheiber and Joe Vaccaro. They're going to help us understand how to apply automation to your data center networks, cloud, and security journeys. Cisco's Eric nip and Coon Jacobs will also be here with a look into Cisco's marketplace shifts. We'll also hear from dev net partners. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe. It's the cube presenting >>Decelerating automation with damnit >>Brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX, all that great stuff. Any Wade Lee, who's the director, a senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first, then we don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net, create all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme, accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X, a AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as well, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the covert hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business to stay alive and to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, uh, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and you know, you guys got some acquisitions youth about thousand eyes. Um, um, you got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game and security, Kubernetes, all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation of the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they had to build it. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home, how many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>I know you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. >>Well, you've been following, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got dev net created right around the corner of virtual unfortunate. Won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie is about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network automation, which Susie >>Mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your, what's your role? >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We committed very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite date that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the dev net site. And then my team also looks after community, such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dev net space as well, and are helping people with that servicer. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. >>So you mentioned, uh, observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we needed? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me all days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up, um, this accelerated automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, um, only can imagine the enablement that's gonna name, uh, create, can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with, at and T up dev net create Mandy we'll start. Yeah. >>Yes. I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, that's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the dev community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with creative this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. >>So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much, God, man, you can add, add one more thing. >>I'm just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is it it's happening in three regions and um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. Yeah. >>I was just gonna close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Yeah. >>The cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment say virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching Jeffrey here with the cube. Uh, we have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev net event. It's really accelerating with automation and programmability in the new normal, and we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So we're excited to have our next guest he's Thomas Sheba. He is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. >>Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light moment, which was, >>You know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you've got the kids home, you've got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >>Well, good point, Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls to zoom calls, but you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it was 2000, he still West, as we say on the data center. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. Right. >>You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. Can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends in the way I look at this trends as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your, your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we, we, we prep was, are normal, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little plot, a little, little, uh, Bret before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw her March. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. >>Yeah, I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend as public cloud, um, and cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might've played some clients reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your things. And so I think in the end, what, uh, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed, but the logic context section, which we see in the, um, last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions, I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focusing and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's a good point. And it said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which has in most of the infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just a foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? Right? >>And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. Uh, and that's a whole range, right? This is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use normal tools that they have in a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for it further and saying, I want to integrate this with like some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pieces saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration was relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see, uh, giving us, I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer or you, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just to say, sit, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they to actually structure the operation. Right. One of the nice things around this or automation plus a tool integration to an integration is you actually opened us up, not a sole automation train, not just to the network operations personnel. Right. You also open it up and can use this for the SecOps person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional process you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I gotta hand over the sec ups team and they can directly call, uh, these, these API is right, or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>Interesting. You know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And, and I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those, none of this is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it's just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes from saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI dcnm controller or our multi-site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she from Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is the emotion we're in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little clock. And I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at those, whether you're a net ops person or a dev ops person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly, then that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation where, and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily, right? >>That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and it can make the changes and then opening it up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the it's as application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of change the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I, to operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's just automation. I think we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing. What, what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment was a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this, Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>It's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting because we, we started on a Cisco data center. So we started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on, on these products, >>They have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them >>Good times for you, because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and social media, right? What what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. And I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeves, you know, the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah. And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So I say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. >>Okay. I look forward to that as well. >>All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>TK Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred. >>Uh, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side, a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what is that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, uh, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business? Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. Right? >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, or our survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the datasets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help, you know, simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical. What are you doing? You're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines is the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threat model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything has code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as, um, human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a communities, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>That's a good point. When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to the text-based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time, and I'm this old curmudgeon in the back of the room. Um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems it'd be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you putting on? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high-performance businesses. >>No, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all you can talk later is go over here. All your bass players go over there. I'm like, what happened to the band? >>That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says doing my part to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the cube. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>Come back to the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual will not face to face the cubes. Been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is BC vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multicloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area. It's converging multiple theaters in technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you. But first thousand nine was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talk programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers, you know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, home of the conference book talk track, we'll get to in a second, but exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe, maybe it's way. And maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running along for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was early simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. When you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level of level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you have to then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, I was getting to some of these high scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're gonna look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. You're first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right aside, you know, data alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the, of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen with our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as their employees, >>Classic policy based activities. And you take it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I gotta ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams are really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their safety VPN infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device and the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and we're in the past, you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need nibbling, that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization, but it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. >>They're having to work collaboratively with the different ISP that they're appearing with with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it, teams, um, and see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talked about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your balance, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same SC land-based rollout, where you're looking to seek benchmark and confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ISP within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights, the classic financial model ROI, you get baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you'd look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only processing gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>You know, ultimately I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network gets connected to, and then ultimately the user and the stance of that user, if I leveraging a thousand eyes and being able to then integrate that into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on today. >>I appreciate it. Thanks for having me >>Vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. >>You really have to automate your human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got >>Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Kuhn, >>Thank you for having me >>And joining him as Eric nappy is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute, because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was Coon. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them is when a flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic, the just overall the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers. Um, and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic, uh, is, is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>Yeah. And then, and then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the S you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CICB pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. Um, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, uh, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's, it's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. Uh, you know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book, and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book and, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no I'm so, wow. Cocoon is that you, you found that book on the I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So, uh, I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the I, you know, it's estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis. >>And primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guise of, or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data in the context, what data is being accessed. >>And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable, undercurrent, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave runs and on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, can really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, cause five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data, just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they'd be able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, uh, bringing on board, uh, those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>Right. >>Right. So Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT and the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an engineer and a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So of itself was a, was a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean obviously if you look back to the very early days of our vision, right, it was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, you were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to meet programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that decision is automated, or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody that can get there before me, maybe there's a little incentive tied to the incentive. Although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, uh, who achieved it when incentive was secondary. They just wanted to have the bragging rights, like, yeah, I beat Eric, right. >>You know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why, you know, you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media meme, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all, all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are. Uh, but, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I believe the stat is this, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I, you know, leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kinda gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that are customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent in some estimates, put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to >>Stay in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part-time right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally going to work from home, unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration, uh, that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events space where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and, and check into a hotel and, and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part-time as, as Eric also explain, but a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team, or, you know, even here in Belgium, our local general manager has a virtual effort, TIF every Friday, obviously skip the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four or five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but it has really, really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really >>About the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes the relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to us. We've seen really people dive into that and customers co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and redefines process >>That the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it's, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and there's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place in the end, the it lexicon as being that critical or that critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one, another program ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. Right. >>Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, my bell must be happy because the old mother's problem is finally solved. And when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the dub net certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just >>Like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what, what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. >>You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was a, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, >>Right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not >>Scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to, to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud multicloud, public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. >>And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, because still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like, what did he still look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. >>And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to, to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right. You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. >>It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit, cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the dev that specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with their vertical and working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes. If the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion, that's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. It happens happy to be here >>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco. What I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net with Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event, hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at dev net create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open for demos where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called straight from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite, um, advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>> If you want to innovate, you must automate at the edge. I'm Chris Wright, chief technology officer at Red Hat. And that's what I'm here to talk to you about today. So welcome to day two of AnsibleFest, 2020. Let me start with a question, do you remember 3G when you first experienced mobile data connections? The first time that internet on a mobile device was available to everyone? It took forever to load a page, but it was something entirely different. It was an exciting time. And then came 4G, and suddenly data connections actually became usable. Together with the arrival of smartphones, people were suddenly online all the time. The world around us changed immensely. Fast forward to today, things are changing yet again, 5G is entering the market. And it's in evolution that brings about fundamental change of how connections are made and what will be connected. Now it's not only the people anymore who are online all the time, devices are entering the stage, sensors, industrial robots, cars, maybe even the jacket you're wearing. And with this revolutionary change and telecommunications technology, another trend moves into the picture, the rise of edge computing. And that's what I'll be focusing on today. So what is edge computing exactly? Well, it's all about data. Specifically, moving compute closer to the producers and consumers of data. Let's think about how data was handled in the past. Previously, everything was collected, stored and processed in the core of the data center. Think of server racks, one after the other. This was the typical setup. And it worked as long as the environment was similarly traditional. However, with the new way devices are connected and how they work, we have more and more data created at the edge and processed there immediately. Gathering and processing data takes place close to the application users, and close to the systems generating data. The fact that data is processed where it is created means that the computing itself now moves out to the edge as well. Outside of the traditional data center barriers into the hands of application users. Sometimes, literally into the hands of people. Look at your smartphone next to you, is one good example. Data sources are more distributed. The data is generated by your mobile phone, by your thermostat, by your doorbell, and data distribution isn't just happening at home, it's happening in businesses too. It's at the assembly line, high on top of a cell tower, by a pump deep down in a well, and at the side of a train track, every few miles for thousands of miles. This leads to more distributed computing overall. Platforms are pushed outside the data center. Devices are spread across huge areas in inaccessible locations, and applications run on demand close to the data. Often even the ownership of the devices is with other parties. And data gathering and processing is only partially under our direct control. That is what we mean by edge computing. And why is this even interesting for us, for our customers? To say it with the words of a customer, edge computing will be a fundamental enabling technology within industrial automation. Transitioning how you handle IT from a traditional approach, towards a distributed computing model, like edge computing, isn't necessarily easy. Let's imagine how a typical data center works right now. We own the machines, create the containers, run the workloads and carefully decide what external services we connect to, and where the data flows. This is the management sphere we know and love. Think of your primary OpenShift cluster for example. With edge computing, we don't have this level of ownership, knowledge or control. The servo motors in our assembly line are black boxes controlled only via special APIs. The small devices next to our train tracks, running embedded operating system, which does not run our default system management software. And our doorbell is connected to a cloud, which we do not control at all. Yet we still need to be able to exercise control our business processes suddenly depend on what is happening at the edge. That doesn't mean we throw away our ways of running the data centers, in fact, the opposite is true. Our data centers are the backbone of our operations. In the data center, we still tie everything together and run our core workloads. But with edge computing, we have more to manage. To do so, we have to leave our comfort zones and reach into the unknown. To be successful, we need to get data, tools and processes under management and connect it back to our data center. Let's take train tracks as an example. We're in charge of a huge network. Thousands of miles of tracks zig-zagging across the country. We have small boxes next to the train tracks every few miles, which collect data of the passing trains. Takes care of signaling and so on. The train tracks are extremely rugged devices and they're doing their jobs in the coldest winter nights and the hottest summer days. One challenge in our operation is, if we lose connection to one box, we have to stop all traffic on this track segment, no signal, no traffic. So we reroute all of the traffic passengers, cargo, you name it, via other track segments. And while the track segments now suddenly have unexpected traffic congestion and so on, we have sent a maintenance team to figure out why we lost the signal, do root cause analysis, repair what needs to be fixed and make sure it all works again. Only then, can we reopen the segment. As you can imagine, just bringing a maintenance team out there takes time, finding the root issue and solving it, also takes time. And all the while, traffic is rerouted. This can amount to a lot of money lost. Now imagine these little devices get a new software update and are now able to report not only signals sent across the tracks, but also the signal quality. And with those additional data points, we can get to work. Subsequently, we can see trends. And the device itself can act on these trends. If the signal quality is getting worse over time, the device itself can generate an event, and from this event, we can trigger followup actions. We can get our team out there in time, investigating everything before the track goes down. Of course the question here is, how do you even update the device in the first place? And how do you connect such an event to your maintenance team? There are three things we need to be able to properly tie events and everything together to answer this challenge. First, we need to be able to connect through the last mile. We need to reach out from our comfort zones, down the tracks and talk to a device, running a special embedded OS on a chip architecture we don't have in our data center. And we have thousands of them. We need to manage at the edge in a way suited to its scale. Besides connecting, we need the skills to address our individual challenges of edge computing. While the train track example is a powerful image, your challenge might be different. Your boxes might be next to an assembly line or on a shipping container or a unit under an antenna. Finally, the edge is about the interaction of things. Without our data center or humans in the equation at all. As I mentioned previously, in the end, there is an event generated by the little box. We have to take the event and first increase the signal strength temporarily between this box and the other boxes on either side, to buy us some more time. Then we ask the corporate CMDB for the actual location of that box, put all this information into a ticket, assign the ticket to the maintenance team at high priority to make sure they get out there soon. As you can see, our success here critically depends on our ability to create an environment with the right management skills and technical capabilities that can react decentrally in a secure and trusted way. And how do we do these three things, with automation. Yeah, it might not come as much of a surprise, right? However, there is a catch. Automation as a single technology product, won't cut it. It's tempting to say that an automation product can solve all these problems. Hey, we're at a tech conference, right? But that's not enough. Edge computing is not simple. And the solution to the challenges is, is not simply a tool where we buy three buckets full, and spread it across our data center and devices. Automation must be more than a tool. It must be a process, constantly evolving, iterating on and on. We only have a chance if we embed automation as a fundamental component of an organization, and use it as a central means to reach out to the last mile. And the process must not focus on technology itself, but on people. The people who are in charge of the edge IT as well as the people in charge of the data center IT. Automation can't be a handy tool that is used occasionally, it should become the primary language for all people involved to communicate in. This leads to a cooperation and common ground to further evolve the automation. And at the same time, ensure that the people build and improve the necessary skills. But with the processes and the people aligned, we can shed light on the automation technology itself. We need a tool set that is capable of doing more than automating an island here and a pocket there. We need a platform powerful enough to write the capabilities we need and support the various technologies, devices, and services out at the edge. If we connect these three findings, we come to a conclusion. To automate the edge, we need a cultural change that embraces automation in a new and fundamental way. As a new language, integrating across teams and technology alike. Such a unified automation language, speaks natively with the world out there as well as with our data centers at any scale. And this very same language is spoken by domain experts, by application developers and by us as automation experts, to pave the way for the next iteration of our business. And this language has the building blocks to create new interfaces, tools and capabilities, to integrate with the world out there and translate the events and needs into new actions, being the driving motor of the IT at the edge and evolving it further. And yes, we have this language right here, right now. It is the Ansible language. If we come back to our train track, one more time, this Ansible that can reach out and talk to our thousands of little boxes sitting next to the train tracks. The Ansible language, the domain experts of the boxes can natively work together with the train operations experts and the business intelligence people. Together, they can combine their skills to write workflows in a language they can all understand and where the deep down domain knowledge is encapsulated away. And the Ansible platform offers the APIs and components to react to events in a secure and trusted way. If there's one thing I'd like you to take away from this, it is edge computing is complex enough. But luckily we do have the right language, the right tools, and here with you and awesome community at our fingertips, to build upon it and grow it even further. So let's not worry about the tooling, we have that covered. Instead, let's focus on making that tool great. We need to become able to execute automation anywhere we need. At the edge, in the cloud, in other data centers, in the end, just like serverless functions, the location where the code is actually running, should not matter to us anymore. Let's hear this from someone who is right at the core of the development of Ansible, over to Matt Jones, our automation platform architect.

(soft music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, brought to you by Cisco. >> And welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco DevNet event. It's really Accelerating with Automation and Programmability in the new normal. And we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So, we're excited to have our next guest. He's Thomas Scheibe, he is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco, Thomas, great to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and truly run it in normal as everybody can see on our background. >> Exactly, so, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep, and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the network, you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >> Well, (laughs) good point, hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. And then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise yes. What I do see actually is that as I said network becomes much more operas as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about agility and flexibility, these days we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, north to south and east to west, as we see in the data center. >> Right. >> And touches as for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >> Right, you know, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was (chuckles) some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office or are used to getting at school. >> Yeah, and I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. We clearly talking about some of these trends and the way I look at this trend as being distributed data centers and having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so, in a sense we prep was our normal we're prepping for. But as I said, resiliency just became so much more important. And, you know, one of the things I actually do a little preview for a blog I put out end of August around resiliency. If you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw it in March this is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. And I think this is the new normal for some time being. >> Yeah, I think so. So, let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend is public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. There's all types of variants on that theme, you had in that blog post about resiliency in data center cloud networking, data center cloud. You know, some people think, wait, it's kind of an either or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling both inner data center resiliency within multi data center resiliency within the same enterprise as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So, I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >> Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not counterintuitive because in the end, what I'm focusing on and the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. And that's really, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multicloud. In the end, what it is is really the ability to have the flexibility, to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reason. You might played some compliance reasons depending on which customer segment you're after. If you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your syncs. And so I think in the end what an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like a cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move syncs as needed. But the logic context section which we see in the last couple of months accelerating is really this whole theme around digital transformation, which goes hand in hand than was the requirement on the IT side really do. And IT operations transformation, right? How IT operates. And I think that's really exciting to see, and this was excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions I was customized. What does it actually mean with respect to the IT organization? And what are the operational changes there's a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly accelerated going through? >> Right, and automation is in the title of the event. So, automation is an increasingly important thing, you know, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data. Either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera. And a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those you know, kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. >> Yeah, that's a good point. And I said, TechLine, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from CloudReady, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud-native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? It's like the CloudReady is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that our customers have, network infrastructure or the Nexus 9000, they're all CloudReady, right? And what this really means, you have APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled. And that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability, right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools and that's the whole range, right? This is where the IT operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these APIs and use normal tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further saying, "I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools." Some go even further and saying, "This is like the cloud-native (indistinct), "Oh, I want to use, let's say, Red Hat Ansible, or I want to use (indistinct) Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I managed my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability plus the integration was relevant cloud-native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating in that motion. Which really then drives us how they run their IT operations. >> Right. >> And so that's a pretty exciting area to see. given as I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It's just not doing the operational change the process change is to actually get there. >> Right, and it's funny, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud-native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API, you know, pulling data from all these technical applications. So, hey, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within very small units of time. So, that you don't lose that customer. You complete that transaction. They check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these things that are now created with cloud-native applications that just couldn't really do before. >> Now, you're absolutely right. And this is like, just as I said, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers. How they want to actually structure the operation, right? One of the nice things around this whole automation plus cloud network tool integration is you actually opened us up not a sole automation training, not just to the network operations personnel, right? You also open it up and can use those for the SecOps person or for the DevOps person or for the CloudOps engineering team, right? Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process? Do you want to have a more traditional process, you have to request, a network operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hands it back over. Or do you say, "Hey, maybe some of these security things, "I can hand over the SecOps team and they can "directly call these APIs, right?" Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the DevOps or the application team actually says, "Hey, I going to write a whole infrastructure as code "kind of a script or template, and I just execute, right?" And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles in our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it literally unleashes a lot of flexibility. How they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the IT operations processes. >> That's interesting, you know, 'cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right? Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of DevOps versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, NetworkOps or, NetOps, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have kind of a fast changing dynamic kind of point of view versus a stick it in, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So, I wonder if you can, you can share how, kind of that DevOps attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is has impacted things at Cisco in the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >> Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? It's none of these is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. And yeah, we do have EU Network Operations Teams come to you saying, "Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute, "so, we might use this for Alpha Seven. "We want to use the same for networking." And so we made available all these integrations with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI and dc network controller or our multi site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. The other one as I mentioned that how she formed Tarco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. And so that is the motion we're in for over a year now. And another blog actually is out there we just posted saying, Yeah, all set what you can do. And then a parallel to this, right? Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training. And, you know, a little plucking I know probably part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. And the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetOps person or a DevOps person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. There's a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level, right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, you know, without stress try things out, snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous time people spend to learn. Quite frankly then, that's another side product of the suggestion when people say, "Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing." So, these tools are used very heavily. >> Right. That's awesome 'cause you know, we've had Susie Leon a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team, right? Really built this DevNet thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right? Democratization is the access tool, taking it out of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work. And it can make the changes in an opening up to a software defined world where now it's application centric point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of changed the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >> Yeah, I mean, again, I typically look at this more from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility, I want flexibility and I want resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner what they're looking for. And then that translates into an IT operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. And that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this, right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? You need to give sync services to the app developer and the platform team and the security team, right? To your point so the network can act at the same speed. But you also give tools to the network operations teams because they need to adjust then, they have the ability to react to some of these requirements, right? And it's not just automation, I said we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just for backup and recovery, and how do I extend into public clouds, right? And in the end that's a network connectivity problem, and we have solved as, we have meters available, we have integrations into AWS. We have integrations into Ajua to actually make this very easy from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So, from an app developer perspective, now it looks like it's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here, some of it might sit here. But it's really looking the same. And that's really in the end I said what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need you to have something separate for this deployment or separate for that deployment. What they want is I need you to deploy something. I need to do this resilience. And the resilient way and an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools available that we support, but they're all open. They're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right? That everybody's using. So, you're not getting into this, "Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right? It's really democratization, I actually liked your term. >> Yeah, it's a great term and it's really interesting, especially with the APIs and the way everything is so tied together. That everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. And it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers in respond to, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So, it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure to really support kind of this app first point of view, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be. And enable this hyper fast development, hyper fast change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. So, super important stuff. >> Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's kind of interesting because we started on the Cisco data center. It's where we started this probably six or seven years ago. When we named the application-centric, clearly a lot of these concepts evolved. But in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, this is what I want to do. And I need a service thinking on the networking side to expose services that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. And as I said, automation is a key foundation that we put in place. And our customers most of our customers at this point are on these products. They have all the capabilities there are. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them at this point. >> Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes in social media, right? What's driving your digital transformation is the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question. So, I don't think the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So, (indistinct) keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >> Yeah, I know, thanks for having me and again, yeah, if you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started? Cisco definitely is the place to go. It's, you know, fantastic, fantastic environment. And I highly recommend everybody, roll up the sleeves and you know, the best reasons you can have. >> Yeah, and we know once the physical events come back, we've been to DevNet Create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, really engaged community, sharing lots of information. It's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, like Susie and the team have really built a great thing and we're happy to continue to cover it and eventually we'll be back face to face. >> Okay, (chuckles) look forward to that as well. >> All right, thanks. He's Thomas and I'm Jeff you're watching continuing coverage of CiscoDevNet Accelerating With Automation and Programmability. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. We're digging in with Pensando. Talking about the technologies that they're using. And happy to welcome to the program, two of Pensando's technical leaders. We have Krishna Doddapaneni, he's the Vice President of Software. And we have here Pirabhu Raman, he's a Principal Engineer, both with Pensando. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right. >> Thank you for having us here >> Krishna, you run the Software Team. So let's start there and talk about really the mission and shortly obviously, bring us through a little bit of architecturally what Pensando was doing. >> To get started, Pensando we are building a platform, which can automate and manage the network storage and security services. So when we talk about software here, it's like the better software as you start from all the way from bootloader, to all the way it goes to microservices controller. So the fundamentally the company is building a domain specific processor called a DSP, that goes on the card called DSC. And that card goes into a server in a PCIe slot. Since we go into a server and we act as a NIC, we have to do drivers for Windows, all the OS' Windows, Linux, ESX and FreeBSD. And on the card itself, the chip itself, there are two fundamental pieces of the chip. One is the P4 pipelines, where we run all our applications, if you can think like in the firewalls, in the virtualization, all security applications. And then there's Arm SoC, which we have to bring up the platform and where we run the control plane and data and management plane so that's one piece of the software. The other big piece of software is called PSM. Which kind of, if you think about it in data center, you don't want to manage, one DSC at a time or one server at a time. We want to manage all thousands of servers, using a single management and control point. And that's where the test for the PSM comes from. >> Yeah, excellent. You talked about a pretty complex solution there. One of the big discussion points in the networking world and I think in general has been really the role of software. I think we all know, it got a little overblown. The discussion of software, does not mean that hardware goes away. I wrote a piece, many years ago, if you look at how hyperscalars do things, how they hyper optimize. They don't just buy the cheapest, most generic thing. they tend to configure things and they just roll it out in massive scale. So your team is well known for, really from a chip standpoint, I think about the three Cisco spin-ins. If you dug underneath the covers, yes there was software, but there was an Async there. So, when I look at what you're doing in Pensando, you've got software and there is a chip, at the end of the day. It looks, the first form factor of this looks like, a network card, the NIC that fits in there. So give us in there some of the some of the challenges of software and there's so much diversity in hardware these days. Everything getting ready for AI and GPUs. And you listed off a bunch of pieces when you were talking about the architecture. So give us that software/hardware dynamic, if you would. >> I mean, if you look at where the industry has been going towards, right, I mean, the Moore's law has been ending and Dennard scale is a big on Dennard scaling. So if you want to set all the network in certain security services on x86, you will be wasting a bunch of x86 cycles. The customer, why does he buy x86? He buys x86 to run his application. Not to run IO or do security for IO or policies for IO. So where we come in is basically, we do this domain specific processor, which will take away all the IO part of it, and the computer, just the compute of the application is left for x86. The rest is all offloaded to what we call Pensando. So NIC is kind of one part of what we do. NIC is how we connect to the server. But what we do inside the card is, firewalls, all the networking functions: SDNs, load balancing in all the storage functions, NVMe virtualization, and encryption of all the packets, data of data at rest and data of data in motion. All these services is what we do in this part. And you know, yes, it's an Async. But if you look at what we do inside, it's not a fixed Async. We did work on the previous spin-ins as you said, with Async, but there's a fundamental difference between that Async can this Async. In those Asyncs for example, there's a hard coded routing table or there's a hard coded ACL table. This Async is a completely programmable. It's more like it's a programmable software that we have domain specific language called P4. We use that P4 to program the Async. So the way I look at it, it's an Async, but it's mostly software driven completely. And from all the way from controllers, to what programs you run on the chip, is completely software driven. >> Excellent. Pirabhu of course, the big announcement here, HPE. You've now got the product. It's becoming generally available this month. We'd watch from the launch of Pensando, obviously, having HPE as not only an investor, but they're an OEM of the product. They've got a huge customer base. Maybe help explain, from the enterprise standpoint, if I'm buying ProLion, where now does, am I going to be thinking about Pensando? What specific use cases? How does this translate to the general and enterprise IP buyer? >> We cover of whole breadth of use cases, at the very basic level, if your use cases or if your company is not ready for all the different features, you could buy it as a basic NIC and start provisioning it, and you will get all the basic network functions. But at the same time in addition to the standard network functions, you will get always on telemetry. Like you will get rich set of metrics, you will get packet capture capabilities, which will help you very much in troubleshooting issues, when they happen, or you can leave them always on as well. So, you can do some of these tap kind of functionalities, which financial services do. And all these things you will get without any impact on the workload performance. Like the customers' application don't see any performance impact when any of these capabilities are turned on. So once this is as a standard network function, but beyond this when you are ready for enforcing policies at the edge or you're ready for enforcing stateful firewalls, distributed firewalling capabilities, connection tracking, some of the other things, like Krishna touched upon NVMe virtualization, there are all sorts of other features you can add on top of. >> Okay, so it sounds like what we're really democratizing some of those cloud services or cloud like services for the network, down to the end device, if I have this right. >> Exactly. >> Maybe if you could, networking, we know, our friends in network. We tend to get very acronym driven, to overlays and underlays and various layers of the stack there. When we talk about innovation, I'd love to hear from both of you, what are some of those kind of key innovations, if you were to highlight just one or two? Pirabhu, maybe you can go first and then Krishna would would love your follow up from that. >> Sure, there are many innovations, but just to highlight a few of them, right. Krishna touched upon P4, but even on the P4, P4 is very much focused on manipulating the packets, packets in and packets out, but we enhanced it so that we can address it in such a way that from memory in-packet out, packet in-memory out. Those kind of capabilities so that we can interface it with the host memory. So those innovations we are taking it to the standard and they are in the process of getting standardized as well. In addition to this, our software stack, we touched upon the always on telemetry capabilities. You could do flow based packet captures, NetFlow, you could get a lot of visibility and troubleshooting information. The management plane in itself, has some of the state of the art capabilities. Like it's distributed, highly available, and it makes it very easy for you to manage thousands of these servers. Krishna, do you want to add something more? >> Yes, the biggest thing of the platform is that when we did underlays and overlays, as you said there, everything was like fixed. So tomorrow, you wake up and come with a new protocol, or you may come up with a new way to do storage, right? Normally, in the hardware world, what happens is, Oh, you have to I have to sell you this new chip. That is not what we are doing. I mean, here, whatever we ship on this Async, you can continue to evolve and continue to innovate, irrespective of changing standards. If NVMe goes from one dot two to one dot three, or you come up with a new encapsulation of VXLAN, you do whatever encapsulations, whatever TLVs you would want to, you don't need to change the hardware. It's more about downloading new firmware, and upgrading the new firmware and you get the new feature. That is that's one of the key innovation. That's why most of the cloud providers like us, that we are not tied to hardware. It's more of software programmable processor that we can keep on adding features in the future. >> So one way to look at it, is like, you get the best of both worlds kind of a thing. You get power and performance of Async, but at the same time you get the flexibility of closer to that of a general purpose processor. >> Yeah, so Krishna, since you own the software piece of thing, help us understand architecturally, how you can deploy something today but be ready for whatever comes in the future. That's always been the challenge is, Gee, maybe if I wait another six months, there'll be another generation something, where I don't want to make sure that I miss some window of opportunity. >> Yeah, so it's a very good question. I mean, basically you can keep enhancing your features with the same performance and power and latency and throughput. But the other important thing is how you upgrade the software. I mean today whenever you have Async. When you have changed the Async, obviously, you have to pull the card out and you put the new card in. Here, when you're talking upgrading software, we can upgrade software while traffic is going through. With very minimal disruption, in the order of sub second. Right, so you can change your protocol, for example, tomorrow, we change from VXLAN to your own innovative protocol, you can upgrade that without disrupting any existing network or storage IO. I mean, that's where the power of the platform is very useful. And if you look at it today, where cloud providers are going right, and the cloud providers, you don't want to, because there are customers who are using that server, and they're deploying their application, they don't want to disturb that application, just because you decided to do some new innovative feature. The platform capability is that you could upgrade it, and you can change your mind sometime in the future. But whatever existing traffic is there, the traffic will continue to flow and not disrupt your app. >> All right, great. Well, you're talking about clouds one of the things we look at is multi cloud and multi vendor. Pirabhu, we've got the announcement with HPE now, ProLion and some of their other platforms. Tell us how much work will it be for you to support things like Dell servers or I think your team's quite familiar with the Cisco UCS platform. Two pieces on that number one: how easy or hard is it to do that integration? And from an architectural design? Does a customer need to be homogeneous from their environment or is whatever cloud or server platform they're on independent, and we should be able to work across those? >> Yeah, first off, I should start with thanking HPE. They have been a great partner and they have been quick to recognize the synergy and the potential of the synergy. And they have been very helpful towards this integration journey. And the way we see it, a lot of the work has already been done in terms of finding out the integration issues with HPE. And we will build upon this integration work that has been done so that we can quickly integrate with other manufacturers like Dell and Cisco. We definitely want to integrate with other server manufacturers as well, because that is in the interest of our customers, who want to consume Pensando in a heterogenous fashion, not just from one server manufacturer. >> Just want to add one thing to what Pirabhu's saying. Basically, the way we think about it is that, there's x86 and then the all the IO, the infrastructure services, right. So for us, as long as you get power from the server, and you can get packets and IO across the PCIe bus, we are kind of, we want to make it a uniform layer. So the Pensando, if you think about it, is a layer that can work across servers, and could work inside the public cloud and when we have, one of our customers using this in hybrid cloud. So we want to be the base where we can do all the storage network and security services, irrespective of the server and where the server is placed. Whether it's placed in the call log, it's placed in the enterprise data center, or it's placed in the public cloud. >> All right, so I guess Krishna, you said first x86. Down the road, is there opportunity to go beyond Intel processors? >> Yes. I mean, we already support AMD, which is another form of x86. But other architecture doesn't prevent us from any servers. As long as you follow the PCIe standard, we should, it's more of a testing matrix issue. It's not about support of any other OS, we should be able to support it. And initially, we also tested once on PowerPC. So any kind of CPU architecture, we should be able to support. >> Okay, so walk me up the application stack a little bit though. Things like virtualization, containerization. There's the question of does it work but does it optimize? Any of us live through those waves of, Oh, okay, well it kind of worked, but then there was a lot of time to make things like the origin networking work well in virtualization and then in containerization. So how about your solution? >> I mean you should look at, a good example is AWS, like what AWS does with Nitro. So on Nitro, you do EBS, you do security, and you do VPC. In all the services is effectively, we think about it, all of those can be encapsulated in one DSC card. And obviously, when it comes to this kind of implementation on one card, right, the first question you would ask what happens to the noisy neighbor? So we have the right QOS mechanisms to make sure all the services go through the same card, at the same time giving guarantees to the customer that (mumbles) especially in the multi-tenant environment, whatever you're doing on one VPC will not affect the other VPC. And the advantage of the platform that what we have is very highly scalable and highly performing. Scale will not be the issue. I mean, if you look at existing platforms, even if you look at the cloud, because when you're doing this product, obviously, we'll do benchmarking with the cloud and enterprises. With respect to scale, performance and latency, we did the measurements and we are order of magnitude compared to (sneezes) given the existing clouds and currently whatever enterprise customers have. >> Excellent, so Pirabhu, I'm curious, from the enterprise standpoint, are there certain applications, I think about like, from an analytic standpoint, Splunk is so heavily involved in data that might be a natural fit or other things where it might not be fully tested out with anything kind of that ISV world that we need to think about. >> So if we're talking in terms of partner ecosystems, our enterprise customers do use many of the other products as well. And we are trying to integrate with other products so that we can get the maximum value. So if you look at it, you could get rich metrics and visualization capabilities from our product, which can be very helpful for the partner products because they don't have to install an agent and they can get the same capability across bare metal virtual stack as well as containers. So we are integrating with various partners including some CMDB configuration management database products, as well as data analytics or network traffic analytics products. Krishna, do you want to add anything? >> Yeah, so I think it's just not the the analytics products. We're also integrating with VMware. Because right now VMware is a computer orchestrated and we want to be the network policy orchestrator. In the future, we want to integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift. So we want to add integration so that our platform capability can be easily consumable irrespective of what kind of workload you use or what kind of traffic analytics tool you use or what kind of data link that you use in your enterprise data center. >> Excellent, I think that's a good view forward as to where some of the work is going on the future integration. Krishna and Pirabhu, thank you so much for joining us. Great to catch up. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)