(gentle music) >> Announcer: "theCube's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) (logo whooshing) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to "theCube's" coverage of day one, MWC23 live from Barcelona, Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've got some great conversations so far This is the biggest, most packed show I've been to in years. About 80,000 people here so far. >> Yeah, down from its peak of 108, but still pretty good. You know, a lot of folks from China come to this show, but with the COVID situation in China, that's impacted the attendance, but still quite amazing. >> Amazing for sure. We're going to be talking about trends and mobility, and all sorts of great things. We have a couple of guests joining us for the first time on "theCUBE." Please welcome Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala or Sri, chief product officer at Ivanti. And Dave Shepherd, VP Ivanti. Guys, welcome to "theCUBE." Great to have you here. >> Thank you. >> So, day one of the conference, Sri, we'll go to you first. Talk about some of the trends that you're seeing in mobility. Obviously, the conference renamed from Mobile World Congress to MWC mobility being part of it, but what are some of the big trends? >> It's interesting, right? I mean, I was catching up with Dave. The first thing is from the keynotes, it took 45 minutes to talk about security. I mean, it's quite interesting when you look at the shore floor. We're talking about Edge, we're talking about 5G, the whole evolution. And there's also the concept of are we going into the Cloud? Are we coming back from the Cloud, back to the Edge? They're really two different things. Edge is all decentralized while you recompute. And one thing I observed here is they're talking about near real-time reality. When you look at automobiles, when you look at medical, when you look at robotics, you can't have things processed in the Cloud. It'll be too late. Because you got to make millisecond-based stations. That's a big trend for me. When I look at staff... Okay, the compute it takes to process in the Cloud versus what needs to happen on-prem, on device, is going to revolutionize the way we think about mobility. >> Revolutionize. David, what are some of the things that you're saying? Do you concur? >> Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, just reading some of the press recently, they're predicting 22 billion IoT devices by 2024. Everything Sri just talked about there. It's growing exponentially. You know, problems we have today are a snapshot. We're probably in the slowest place we are today. Everything's just going to get faster and faster and faster. So it's a, yeah, 100% concur with that. >> You know, Sri, on your point, so Jose Maria Alvarez, the CEO of Telefonica, said there are three pillars of the future of telco, low latency, programmable networks, and Cloud and Edge. So, as to your point, Cloud and low latency haven't gone hand in hand. But the Cloud guys are saying, "All right, we're going to bring the Cloud to the Edge." That's sort of an interesting dynamic. We're going to bypass them. We heard somebody, another speaker say, "You know, Cloud can't do it alone." You know? (chuckles) And so, it's like these worlds need each other in a way, don't they? >> Definitely right. So that's a fantastic way to look at it. The Cloud guys can say, "We're going to come closer to where the computer is." And if you really take a look at it with data localization, where are we going to put the Cloud in, right? I mean, so the data sovereignty becomes a very interesting thing. The localization becomes a very interesting thing. And when it comes to security, it gets completely different. I mean, we talked about moving everything to a centralized compute, really have massive processing, and give you the addition back wherever you are. Whereas when you're localized, I have to process everything within the local environment. So there's already a conflict right there. How are we going to address that? >> Yeah. So another statement, I think, it was the CEO of Ericsson, he was kind of talking about how the OTT guys have heard, "We can't let that happen again. And we're going to find new ways to charge for the network." Basically, he's talking about monetizing the API access. But I'm interested in what you're hearing from customers, right? 'Cause our mindset is, what value you're going to give to customers that they're going to pay for, versus, "I got this data I'm going to charge developers for." But what are you hearing from customers? >> It's amazing, Dave, the way you're looking at it, right? So if we take a look at what we were used to perpetual, and we said we're going to move to a subscription, right? I mean, everybody talks about subscription economy. Telcos on the other hand, had subscription economy for a long time, right? They were always based on usage, right? It's a usage economy. But today, we are basically realizing on compute. We haven't even started charging for compute. If you go to AWS, go to Azure, go to GCP, they still don't quite charge you for actual compute, right? It's kind of, they're still leaning on it. So think about API-based, we're going to break the bank. What people don't realize is, we do millions of API calls for any high transaction environment. A consumer can't afford that. What people don't realize is... I don't know how you're going to monetize. Even if you charge a cent a call, that is still going to be hundreds and thousands of dollars a day. And that's where, if you look at what you call low-code no-code motion? You see a plethora of companies being built on that. They're saying, "Hey, you don't have to write code. I'll give you authentication as a service. What that means is, Every single time you call my API to authenticate a user, I'm going to charge you." So just imagine how many times we authenticate on a single day. You're talking a few dozen times. And if I have to pay every single time I authenticate... >> Real friction in the marketplace, David. >> Yeah, and I tell you what. It's a big topic, right? And it's a topic that we haven't had to deal with at the Edge before, and we hear it probably daily really, complexity. The complexity's growing all the time. That means that we need to start to get insight, visibility. You know? I think a part of... Something that came out of the EU actually this week, stated, you know, there's a cyber attack every 11 seconds. That's fast, right? 2016, that was 40 seconds. So actually that speed I talked about earlier, everything Sri says that's coming down to the Edge, we want to embrace the Edge and that is the way we're going to move. But customers are mindful of the complexity that's involved in that. And that, you know, lens thought to how are we going to deal with those complexities. >> I was just going to ask you, how are you planning to deal with those complexities? You mentioned one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. That's down considerably from just a few years ago. Ransomware is a household word. It's no longer, "Are we going to get attacked?" It's when, it's to what extent, it's how much. So how is Ivanti helping customers deal with some of the complexities, and the changes in the security landscape? >> Yeah. Shall I start on that one first? Yeah, look, we want to give all our customers and perspective customers full visibility of their environment. You know, devices that are attached to the environment. Where are they? What are they doing? How often are we going to look for those devices? Not only when we find those devices. What applications are they running? Are those applications secure? How are we going to manage those applications moving forward? And overall, wrapping it round, what kind of service are we going to do? What processes are we going to put in place? To Sri's point, the low-code no-code angle. How do we build processes that protect our organization? But probably a point where I'll pass to Sri in a moment is how do we add a level of automation to that? How do we add a level of intelligence that doesn't always require a human to be fixing or remediating a problem? >> To Sri, you mentioned... You're right, the keynote, it took 45 minutes before it even mentioned security. And I suppose it's because they've historically, had this hardened stack. Everything's controlled and it's a safe environment. And now that's changing. So what would you add? >> You know, great point, right? If you look at telcos, they're used to a perimeter-based network. >> Yep. >> I mean, that's what we are. Boxed, we knew our perimeter. Today, our perimeter is extended to our home, everywhere work, right? >> Yeah- >> We don't have a definition of a perimeter. Your browser is the new perimeter. And a good example, segueing to that, what we have seen is horizontal-based security. What we haven't seen is verticalization, especially in mobile. We haven't seen vertical mobile security solutions, right? Yes, you hear a little bit about automobile, you hear a little bit about healthcare, but what we haven't seen is, what about food sector? What about the frontline in food? What about supply chain? What security are we really doing? And I'll give you a simple example. You brought up ransomware. Last night, Dole was attacked with ransomware. We have seen the beef producer colonial pipeline. Now, if we have seen agritech being hit, what does it mean? We are starting to hit humanity. If you can't really put food on the table, you're starting to really disrupt the supply chain, right? In a massive way. So you got to start thinking about that. Why is Dole related to mobility? Think about that. They don't carry service and computers. What they carry is mobile devices. that's where the supply chain works. And then that's where you have to start thinking about it. And the evolution of ransomware, rather than a single-trick pony, you see them using multiple vulnerabilities. And Pegasus was the best example. Spyware across all politicians, right? And CEOs. It is six or seven vulnerabilities put together that actually was constructed to do an attack. >> Yeah. How does AI kind of change this? Where does it fit in? The attackers are going to have AI, but we could use AI to defend. But attackers are always ahead, right? (chuckles) So what's your... Do you have a point of view on that? 'Cause everybody's crazy about ChatGPT, right? The banks have all banned it. Certain universities in the United States have banned it. Another one's forcing his students to learn how to use ChatGPT to prompt it. It's all over the place. You have a point of view on this? >> So definitely, Dave, it's a great point. First, we all have to have our own generative AI. I mean, I look at it as your digital assistant, right? So when you had calculators, you can't function without a calculator today. It's not harmful. It's not going to take you away from doing multiplication, right? So we'll still teach arithmetic in school. You'll still use your calculator. So to me, AI will become an integral part. That's one beautiful thing I've seen on the short floor. Every little thing there is a AI-based solution I've seen, right? So ChatGPT is well played from multiple perspective. I would rather up level it and say, generated AI is the way to go. So there are three things. There is human intense triaging, where humans keep doing easy work, minimal work. You can use ML and AI to do that. There is human designing that you need to do. That's when you need to use AI. >> But, I would say this, in the Enterprise, that the quality of the AI has to be better than what we've seen so far out of ChatGPT, even though I love ChatGPT, it's amazing. But what we've seen from being... It's got to be... Is it true that... Don't you think it has to be cleaner, more accurate? It can't make up stuff. If I'm going to be automating my network with AI. >> I'll answer that question. It comes down to three fundamentals. The reason ChatGPT is giving addresses, it's not trained on the latest data. So for any AI and ML method, you got to look at three things. It's your data, it's your domain expertise, who is training it, and your data model. In ChatGPT, it's older data, it's biased to the people that trained it, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> And then, the data model is it's going to spit out what it's trained on. That's a precursor of any GPT, right? It's pre-trained transformation. >> So if we narrow that, right? Train it better for the specific use case, that AI has huge potential. >> You flip that to what the Enterprise customers talk about to us is, insight is invaluable. >> Right. >> But then too much insight too quickly all the time means we go remediation crazy. So we haven't got enough humans to be fixing all the problems. Sri's point with the ChatGPT data, some of that data we are looking at there could be old. So we're trying to triage something that may still be an issue, but it might have been superseded by something else as well. So that's my overriding when I'm talking to customers and we talk ChatGPT, it's in the news all the time. It's very topical. >> It's fun. >> It is. I even said to my 13-year-old son yesterday, your homework's out a date. 'Cause I knew he was doing some summary stuff on ChatGPT. So a little wind up that's out of date just to make that emphasis around the model. And that's where we, with our Neurons platform Ivanti, that's what we want to give the customers all the time, which is the real-time snapshot. So they can make a priority or a decision based on what that information is telling them. >> And we've kind of learned, I think, over the last couple of years, that access to real-time data, real-time AI, is no longer nice to have. It's a massive competitive advantage for organizations, but it's going to enable the on-demand, everything that we expect in our consumer lives, in our business lives. This is going to be table stakes for organizations, I think, in every industry going forward. >> Yeah. >> But assumes 5G, right? Is going to actually happen and somebody's going to- >> Going to absolutely. >> Somebody's going to make some money off it at some point. When are they going to make money off of 5G, do you think? (all laughing) >> No. And then you asked a very good question, Dave. I want to answer that question. Will bad guys use AI? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Offensive AI is a very big thing. We have to pay attention to it. It's got to create an asymmetric war. If you look at the president of the United States, he said, "If somebody's going to attack us on cyber, we are going to retaliate." For the first time, US is willing to launch a cyber war. What that really means is, we're going to use AI for offensive reasons as well. And we as citizens have to pay attention to that. And that's where I'm worried about, right? AI bias, whether it's data, or domain expertise, or algorithmic bias, is going to be a big thing. And offensive AI is something everybody have to pay attention to. >> To your point, Sri, earlier about critical infrastructure getting hacked, I had this conversation with Dr. Robert Gates several years ago, and I said, "Yeah, but don't we have the best offensive, you know, technology in cyber?" And he said, "Yeah, but we got the most to lose too." >> Yeah, 100%. >> We're the wealthiest nation of the United States. The wealthiest is. So you got to be careful. But to your point, the president of the United States saying, "We'll retaliate," right? Not necessarily start the war, but who started it? >> But that's the thing, right? Attribution is the hardest part. And then you talked about a very interesting thing, rich nations, right? There's emerging nations. There are nations left behind. One thing I've seen on the show floor today is, digital inequality. Digital poverty is a big thing. While we have this amazing technology, 90% of the world doesn't have access to this. >> Right. >> What we have done is we have created an inequality across, and especially in mobility and cyber, if this technology doesn't reach to the last mile, which is emerging nations, I think we are creating a crater back again and putting societies a few miles back. >> And at much greater risk. >> 100%, right? >> Yeah. >> Because those are the guys. In cyber, all you need is a laptop and a brain to attack. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> If I don't have it, that's where the civil war is going to start again. >> Yeah. What are some of the things in our last minute or so, guys, David, we'll start with you and then Sri go to you, that you're looking forward to at this MWC? The theme is velocity. We're talking about so much transformation and evolution in the telecom industry. What are you excited to hear and learn in the next couple of days? >> Just getting a complete picture. One is actually being out after the last couple of years, so you learn a lot. But just walking around and seeing, from my perspective, some vendor names that I haven't seen before, but seeing what they're doing and bringing to the market. But I think goes back to the point made earlier around APIs and integration. Everybody's talking about how can we kind of do this together in a way. So integrations, those smart things is what I'm kind of looking for as well, and how we plug into that as well. >> Excellent, and Sri? >> So for us, there is a lot to offer, right? So while I'm enjoying what I'm seeing here, I'm seeing at an opportunity. We have an amazing portfolio of what we can do. We are into mobile device management. We are the last (indistinct) company. When people find problems, somebody has to go remediators. We are the world's largest patch management company. And what I'm finding is, yes, all these people are embedding software, pumping it like nobody's business. As you find one ability, somebody has to go fix them, and we want to be the (indistinct) company. We had the last smile. And I find an amazing opportunity, not only we can do device management, but do mobile threat defense and give them a risk prioritization on what needs to be remediated, and manage all that in our ITSM. So I look at this as an amazing, amazing opportunity. >> Right. >> Which is exponential than what I've seen before. >> So last question then. Speaking of opportunities, Sri, for you, what are some of the things that customers can go to? Obviously, you guys talk to customers all the time. In terms of learning what Ivanti is going to enable them to do, to take advantage of these opportunities. Any webinars, any events coming up that we want people to know about? >> Absolutely, ivanti.com is the best place to go because we keep everything there. Of course, "theCUBE" interview. >> Of course. >> You should definitely watch that. (all laughing) No. So we have quite a few industry events we do. And especially there's a lot of learning. And we just raised the ransomware report that actually talks about ransomware from a global index perspective. So one thing what we have done is, rather than just looking at vulnerabilities, we showed them the weaknesses that led to the vulnerabilities, and how attackers are using them. And we even talked about DHS, how behind they are in disseminating the information and how it's actually being used by nation states. >> Wow. >> And we did cover mobility as a part of that as well. So there's a quite a bit we did in our report and it actually came out very well. >> I have to check that out. Ransomware is such a fascinating topic. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, sharing what's going on at Ivanti, the changes that you're seeing in mobile, and the opportunities that are there for your customers. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you >> Thank you. >> Yes. Thanks, guys. >> Thanks, guys. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live from MWC23 in Barcelona. As you know, "theCUBE" is the leader in live tech coverage. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (gentle upbeat music)

hybrid work is the new reality according to the most recent survey data from enterprise technology research cios expect that 65 of their employees will work either as fully remote or in a hybrid model splitting time between remote and in office remote of course can be anywhere it could be home it could be at the beach overseas literally anywhere there's internet so it's no surprise that these same technology executives cite security as their number one priority well ahead of other critical technology initiatives including collaboration software cloud computing and analytics which round out the top four in the etr survey now as we've reported securing endpoints was important prior to the pandemic but the explosion in the past two plus years of remote work and corollary device usage has made the problem even more acute and let's face it managing sprawling i.t assets has always been a pain patch management for example has been a nagging concern for practitioners and with ransomware attacks on the rise it's critical that security teams harden it assets throughout their life cycle staying current and constantly staying on top of vulnerabilities within the threat surface welcome to this special program on the cube enable and secure the everywhere workplace brought to you by ivanti in this program we highlight key partnerships between avanti and its ecosystem to address critical problems faced by technology and security teams in our first segment we explore a collaboration between avanti and sentinel one where the two companies are teaming to simplify patch management my name is dave vellante and i'll be your host today and with me are nayaki nayar who's the president and chief product officer at avanti and nick warner president and security of the security group at sentinel one welcome naki and nick and hackie good to have you back in the cube great to see you guys thank you thank you dave uh really good to be back on cube uh i'm a veteran of cube so thank you for having us and um look forward to a great discussion today yeah you better thanks okay hey good nick nick good to have you on as well what do we need to know about this partnership please so uh if you look at uh we are super excited about this partnership nick thank you for joining us on this session today um when you look at ivanti ivanti has been a leader in two big segments uh we are a leader in unified endpoint management with the acquisition of mobileye now we have a holistic end-to-end management of all devices be it windows linux mac ios you name it right so we have that seamless single pane of glass to manage all devices but in addition to that we are also a leader in risk-based patch management um dave that's what we are very excited about this partnership with the with central one where now we can combine the strength we have in the risk-based patch management with central one's xdr platform and truly help address what i call the need of the hour with our customers for them to be able to detect uh vulnerabilities and being able to remediate them proactively remediate them right so that's what we are super excited about this partnership and nick would love to hand it over to you to talk about uh the partnership and the journey ahead of us thanks and you know from center one's perspective we see autonomous vulnerability assessment and remediation as really necessary given the evolution uh in the sophistication the volume and the ferocity of threats out there and what's really key is being able to remediate risks and machine speed and also identify vulnerability exposure in real time and you know if you look traditionally at uh vulnerability scanning and patch management they've really always been two separate things and when things are separate they take time between the two coordination communication what we're looking to do with our singularity xdr platform is holistically deliver one unified solution that can identify threats identify vulnerabilities and automatically and autonomously leverage patch management to much better protect our customers so maybe maybe that's why patch management is such a challenge for many organizations because as you described nick it's sort of a siloed from security and those worlds are coming together but maybe you guys could address the specific problems that you're trying to solve with this collaboration yeah so if you look at uh just in a holistic level uh dave today cyber crime is at catastrophic heights right and this is not just a cio or a cso issue this is a board issue every organization every enterprise is addressing this at the board level and when you double click on it one of the challenges that we have heard from our customers over and over again is the complexity and the manual processes that are in place for remediation or patching all their operating systems their applications their third party apps and that is where it's very very time consuming very complex very cumbersome and the question is how do we help them automate it right how do we help them remove those manual processes and autonomously intermediate right so which is where this partnership between ivanti and central one helps organizations to bring this autonomous nature to bring those proactive predictive capabilities to detect an issue prioritize that issue based on risk-based prioritization is what we call it and autonomously remediate that issue right so that's where uh this partnership really really uh helps our customers address the the top concerns they have in cyber crime or cyber security got it so prioritization automation nick maybe you could address what are the keys i mean you got to map vulnerabilities to software updates how do you make sure that your the patches there's not a big lag between your patch and and the known vulnerabilities and you've got this diverse set of you know i.t portfolio assets how do you manage all that it's a great question and i and i think really the number one uh issue around this topic is that security teams and it teams are facing a really daunting task of identifying all the time every day all the vulnerabilities in their ecosystem and the biggest problem with this is how do they get context and priority and i think what people have come to realize through the years of dealing with with patch management uh and vulnerability scanning is that patching without the context of what the possible impact or priority of that risk is really comes down to busy work and i think what's so important in a totally interconnected world with attacks happening at machine speed is being able to take that precious asset that we call time and make sure you properly prioritize that how we're doing it from sentinel one singularity xdr perspective is by leveraging autonomous threat information and being able to layer that against vulnerability information to properly view through that lens the highest priority threats and vulnerabilities that you need to patch and then using our single agent technology be able to autonomously remediate and patch those vulnerabilities whether or not it's on a mac a pc server a cloud workload and the beauty of our solution is it gives you proper clarity so you can see the impact of vulnerabilities each and every day in your environment and know that you're doing the right thing in the right order got it okay so the context gives you the risks profile allows you to prioritize and then of course you can you know remediate what else should we know about this this joint solution uh in terms of you know what it is how i engage any other detail on how it addresses the the problem specifically yeah so it's all about race against the time um uh dave when it's how we help our customers uh detect the vulnerability prioritize it and remediate it the attackers are able to weaponize those vulnerabilities and and have an attack right so it's really it's how we help our customers be a lot more proactive and predictive address those vulnerabilities versus um before the attackers really get access to it right so that's where our joint solution in fact i always say whatever edr with this edr or mdr or xdr the r portion of that r is very one he comes in our neurons for patch management or what we call neurons but risk based patch management combined with um central ones xdr is where we truly uh bring the combined solutions to to to life right so the r is where ivanti really plays a big part in uh in the joint solution yeah absolutely the response i mean people i think all agree you're going to get infiltrated that's how you respond to it you know the thing about this topic is when you make a business case a lot of times you'll go to the cfo and say hey if we don't do this we're going to be in big trouble and so it's this fear factor and i get that it's super important but but are there other measurements of success that that you you can share in other words how are customers going to determine the value of this joint solution so it's a mean time to repair let me go nick and then i'm sure you have your uh metrics and how you're measuring the success it's about how we can detect an issue and repair that issue it's reducing that mean time to repair as much as possible and making it as real-time as possible for our customers right that's where the true outcome through success and the metric that customers can track measure and continuously improve on nick you want to add to that for sure yeah you know you make some great great points niaki and what what i would add is um what sentinel one singularity platform is known for is automated and autonomous detection prevention and response and remediation across threats and if you look traditionally at patch management or vulnerability assessment they're typically deployed and run in point-of-time solutions what i mean by that is that they're scans and re-scans the way that advanced edr solutions and xdr solutions such as single one singularity platform work is we're constantly recording everything that's happening on all of your systems in real time and so what we do is literally eliminate the window of opportunity between a patch being uh needed a vulnerability being discovered and you knowing that you have that need for that vulnerability to be patched in your environment you don't have to wait for that 12 or 24-hour window to scan for vulnerabilities you will immediately know it in your network you'll also know the security implications of that vulnerability so you know when and how to prioritize and then furthermore you can take autonomous hatching measures against that so at the end of the day the name of the game in security is time and it's about reducing that window of opportunity for the adversaries for the threat actors and this is a epic leap forward in in doing that for our customers and that capability nick is a function of your powerful agent or is it architecture where's that come from that's a great question it's it's a combination of a couple of things the first is our agent technology which performs constant monitoring on every system every behavior every process running on all your systems live and in real time so this is not a batch process that that kicks up once a day this is always running in the background so the moment a new application is installed the moment a new application version is deployed we know about it we record it instantaneously so if you think about that and layer against getting best in class vulnerability information from a partner like avanti and then also being able to deploy patch management against that you can start to see how you're applying that in real time in your environment and the last thing i i'd like to add is because we're watching everything and then layering it against thread intel and context using our proprietary machine learning technology that that idea of being able to prioritize and escalate is critical because if you talk to security providers there's a couple different uh challenges that they're facing and i would say the top two are alert fatigue and then also human human power limitations and so no security team has enough people on their team and no security teams have an absence of alerts and so the fact that we can prioritize alerts surface the ones that are the most important give context to that and also save them precious hours of their personnel's time by being able to do this autonomously and automatically we're really killing two birds with one stone that's great there's the business case right there you just laid out some other things that we can measure right it all comes back to the data doesn't it we got to go but i'll give you the last word yeah i mean we are super excited about this partnership uh like nick said uh we believe in how we can help our customers discover all the assets we have they have um manage those assets but a big chunk of it is how we help them secure it right secure uh their devices the applications the data that's on those devices the end points and being able to provide an experience a service experience at the end of the day so that end users don't have to worry about securing you don't have to think about security it should be embedded it should be autonomous and it should be contactually personalized right so uh that's the journey we are on and uh thank you nick for this great partnership and look forward to a great journey ahead of us thank you yeah thanks to both of you nick appreciate it okay keep it right there after this quick break we're gonna be back to look at how ivanti is working with other partners to simplify and harden the anywhere workplace you're watching the cube your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage [Music] you

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well happy New Year, one and all welcome to 2021 in Cube Conversation continuing our ongoing series. I hope your New Year is off to a great start. I know that the end of 2020 was a very good one for Ivanti. And Jim Schaper, the CEO is going to join us to talk about that as is Nayaki Nayyar, or rather the EVP and the Chief Product Officer. So Nayaki and Jim, good to have you here with you on theCUBE and Happy New Year to you. >> Thank you, John. Happy New Year to you. 2020, I think for a lot of us couldn't get out of here quick enough. Although we had some great things happen to our company at the very end of the year. So anxious to talk to you about it and we appreciate the opportunity. >> You bet. So we're talking about two major acquisitions that you made that both closed near the end of the year back in December, not too long ago. One with Pulse Secure, the other with MobileIron. Two companies that provide you with additional expertise in terms of mobile security and the enterprise security space. And so Jim, if you would, let's first talk about just for the big picture, the acquisitions that were made and what those moves will do for you going forward. >> Okay, great, John. We closed both acquisitions interestingly enough, on December 2nd. We've been fortunate to have them part of our company now for about the last 30 days. One of the things that we made a decision on a number of months ago was that we had a real opportunity in the markets that we serve to really build our business more quickly through a series of acquisitions that strategically made sense for us, our investors and more importantly our customers. And that really is why we chose MobileIron and Pulse, for different reasons but nonetheless all very consistent with our longterm strategy of securing the end points on every network, in every location around the world. And so consequently, when you think about it and we've all witnessed here over the last 30 days or so, all of the security breaches, all of the things that go along with that, and our real focus is ensuring that every company and every individual on their network, outside their firewall, inside their firewall, on any device is secure. And so with these two particular acquisitions, in addition to the assets that we already had as a part of Ivanti, really puts us in a competitively advantaged position to deliver to the edge, and Nayaki will talk about this. The ability to secure those devices and ensure that they're secure from phishing expeditions or breaches or all of those kinds of things. So these two particular acquisitions really puts us on the map and puts us in a leadership position in the security market. So we're thrilled to have both of them. >> Before I go off to Nayaki, I want to follow with the point that you've made Jim talking about security breaches. We're all well aware. You know, the news from what we've been hearing out from the federal level about the state actors and the kind of these infiltrations of major US systems if not international systems. Some Interpol data, I read 207 some odd percent increase in breaches just in the post COVID time or in the COVID time, the past year. That gets your attention, does it not? And what does that say to you about the aggressive nature of these kinds of activities? >> Well, that they're getting more sophisticated every day and they're getting more aggressive. I think one of the most frightening conversations I had was a briefing with our chief security officer about how many attempted breaches of our network and our systems that he sees every single day. And we're able to identify what foreign actors are really trying to penetrate our systems or what are they trying to do. But the one thing I will leave you with is they're becoming much more sophisticated, whether you're inside the firewall or whether you're on your iPhone as an extension of the network, there the level of sophistication is startling. And unfortunately in many cases, as evidenced by the recent breaches, you don't even know you've had a breach for could be months, weeks, days. And so what damage is done. And so as we look forward, and as Nayaki kind of walks you through our product strategy, what you're going to hear a lot of is how do we self protect? How do we self-learn the devices at the edge, on the end of the networks, such that they can recognize foreign actors or any breach capability that somebody is trying to employ? And so, yeah, it's frightening how sophisticated and how frequent they have become. >> I think the one thing that really struck me as I read about the breaches was not so much the damage that has been done, but the damage that could be done prospectively and about which we have no idea. You don't know, it's like somebody lurking in your closet and they're going to stay there for a couple of months and wait for the time that maybe your guard is even more down. So I was, that's what shocks me. And they Nayaki, let's talk about your strategy then. You picked up obviously a couple of companies, one in the, kind of the enterprise IT space. Now the one in the VPN space, add into your already extensive portfolio. So I imagine from your office, wearing the hat of the chief product officer, you're just to look in your chops right now. You've got a lot more resources at your disposal. >> Yeah, we are very very busy John, but to Jim's point, one of the trends we are seeing in the market as we enter into the post COVID era, where everyone is working from anywhere, be it from home, be it from office, while on the move, every organization, every enterprise is struggling with this. What we call this explosive growth of devices. Devices being mobile devices, client-based devices, IoT devices, the data that is being generated from these devices, and to your point, the cybersecurity threats. It is predicted that there has been 30000% increase in the cybersecurity threats that are being targeted primarily at the remote workers. So you can imagine whether it's phishing attacks, malware attacks, I mean just an explosive growth of devices, data, cybersecurity attacks at the remote workers. So organizations need automation to be able to address this growth and this complexity which is where Ivanti's focus in discovering all the devices and managing those devices. So as we bring the MobileIron portfolio and Ivanti's portfolio together, now we can help our customers manage every type of devices be it Windows devices, Mac devices, Linux, iOS, Android devices, and secure those devices. The zero trust access that users need, the remote users need, all the way from cloud access to the endpoint is what the strength of both MobileIron and Pulse brings to our entire portfolio holistically. So we are truly excited for our customers. Now they can leverage our entire end to end stack to discover, manage secure and service all those devices that they now have to service for their employees. >> Explain to me, or just walk me through zero trust in terms of how you define that. I've read about trust nothing, verify everything, those kinds of explanations. But if you would, from your perspective, what does zero trust encompass, not only on your side, but on your client's side? Because you want to give them tools to do things for themselves to self heal and self serve and those kinds of things. >> So, zero trust is you don't trust anything. You validate and certify everything. So the access users have on your network, the access they have on the mobile devices, the applications they are accessing, the data that they are accessing. So being able to validate every access that they have when they come into your network is what the whole zero trust access really means. So, the combination of Ivanti's portfolio and also Pulse that zero trust access all the way from as users are accessing that network data, cloud data, endpoint data, is where our entire zero trust access truly differentiates. And as we bring that with our UEM portfolio with the MobileIron, there is no other vendor in the market that has that holistic offering, internal offering. >> I'm sorry, go ahead, please. >> It's interesting, John, you talk about timing is everything, right? And when we began discussions with MobileIron, it was right before COVID hit. And we had a great level of expertise inside the pre-acquisition of Ivanti to be able to secure the end points at the desktop level. But we struggled a bit with having all of the capabilities that we needed to manage mobile devices and tablets and basically anything that is attached to the network. That's what they really brought to us. And having done a number of acquisitions historically in my career, this was probably the easiest integration that we had simply because we did what they didn't do and they did what we didn't do. And then they brought some additional technologies. But what's really changed in the environment because of this work from home or work from anywhere as as we like to articulate it, is you've got multiple environments that you've got to manage. It isn't just, what's on the end of the VPN, the network, it's what's on the end points of the cloud. What kind of cloud are you running? You're running a public cloud, you're running a private cloud. Is it a hybrid environment? And so the ability to and the need to be able to do that is pretty significant. And so that's one of the real advantages that both the Pulse as well as the MobileIron acquisitions really brought to the combined offering from a product standpoint. >> Yeah, I'd like to follow up on that then, just because the cloud environment provides so many benefits, obviously, but it also provides this huge layer of complexity that comes on top of all this because you just talked about it. You can have public, you can have hybrid cloud, you can have on-prem, whatever, right? You have all these options. And yet you, Ivanti, are having to provide security on multiple levels and multiple platforms or multiple environments. And how much more complex or challenging is your mission now because of consumer demand and the capabilities the technology is providing your clients. >> Well, it's certainly more complex and Nayaki is better equipped to probably talk in detail about this. But if you just take a step back and think about it, you think about internet of things, right? I used to have a thermostat. And that thermostat control was controlled by the thermostat on the wall. Now everything is on WiFi. If I've got a problem, I had a a problem with a streaming music capability which infected other parts of my home network. And so everything is, that's just one example of how complicated and how wired everything is really become. Except when it comes to the mobile devices, which are still always remote. You've always got it with you. I don't what it was like for you, John, but you know, historically I've used my phone on email, texts and phone calls. Now it's actually a business tool. But it's a remote business tool that you still have to secure, you still have to manage and you still have to find an identify on the end of the network. That's where we really come into play. Nayaki, anything you want to add to that? >> Yeah, so, to Jim's point, John, and to your question also, as customers have what we call the multi-cloud offering. There are public clouds, private clouds, on-prem data centers, devices on the edge, and as you extend into the IOT world, being able to provide that seamless access, this is a zero trust access all the way from the cloud applications to the applications that are running on-prem, in your data centers and also the applications that are running on your devices and the IoT applications, is what that entire end to end zero trust access, is where our competitive strength resides with Pulse coming into our portfolio. Before Ivanti didn't have this. We were primarily a patch management vendor in the security space, but now we truly extend beyond that patch to this end to end access all the way from cloud to edge is what we call. And then when we combine that with our UEM portfolio in our endpoint management with MobileIron and also service management, that convergence of positive three pillars is where we truly differentiate and compete and win in the market. >> Nayaki, how does internet of things factor into this? Cause I look at sensor technology, I'm just thinking about all the billions of what you have now, right? With whether it's farming or agricultural inputs, business inputs, meteorological, or whatever. I'm sure, you're considering this as well as part of a major play of yours in terms of providing IoT security. How more proliferated is that now and how much of that is kind of in your concern zone you might say? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, just taking these trends we have in managing the end points, we will extend that into the IoT world also. John, when we say IoT world, in an industry where the devices are like healthcare devices. So, stay tuned, in January release we'll be releasing how we will be discovering managing and securing for the healthcare devices like Siemens devices, Bayer devices, Canon devices. So, you're spot on how we can leverage the strength we have in managing end points. Also IoT devices, that same capabilities that we can bring to each of the industry verticals. Now we're not trying to solve the entire vertical market but certain industry verticals where we have a strong footprint. Healthcare is a strong footprint for us. Telcos is a strong footprint for us. So that's where you will see us extending into those IoT devices too. >> Okay, so, in going forward, Jim, if you would just, let's talk about your 2021 in terms of how you further integrate these offerings that you've acquired right now. All of a sudden you've got 30 days of, you know, which is snap of a finger. But what do you see how 2021 is going to lay out, especially with distributed workforces, right? We know that's here. That's a new normal. And with a whole new set of demands on networks and certainly the need for security. >> That's exactly correct, John. I mean, everything is changed and it's never going back to the way it was. You know, everybody has their own definition of the new normal. I guess my definition is at some point in time when things do return to some form of normality, a portion of our workforce will always work from home. To what degree remains to be seen. I don't think we're different from virtually any other industry or any other company. It does put increased demands ,complexity and requirements around how you run your internal IT business. But as Nayaki talked about kind of our virtual service desk offering where you're not going to have a service desk anymore. It's got to be virtual. Well, you have to be able to still provide those services outside of your normal network. And so that's going to be a continued big push for us. I'm incredibly pleased with the way in which the employee bases of the acquired companies have really folded in and become one with our company. And I think as we all recognize cultural differences between organizations can be quite significant and an impediment to really moving forward. Fortunately for us, we have found that both of these organizations fit really nicely from an employee, from a values perspective, from a goals and objectives perspective. And so we did most of the heavy lifting on all the integration shortly after we closed the transactions on the 2nd of December. And so we've moved beyond what I would call the normal kind of concerns and asked around what's going to happen in this and that. We're now kind of heads down in what's the long-term integration going to look like from a product standpoint. We're already looking at additional acquisitions that will continue to take us deeper and wider into our three product pillars, as Nayaki described. And that'll be an ongoing kind of steady dose of acquisitions as we continue to supplement our organic growth within organic growth. >> But you've got to answer my question. I was going to ask you, you founded the company four years ago. There were two big acquisitions back in 2017. We waited four years Jim, until you dip back into that pole again. So the plan, maybe not to wait four years before moving on. >> No trust me, you won't be waiting another four years. Now you've got to bear in mind, John. I wasn't here four years ago. >> That's right, okay. Fair enough. That's okay. I want to thank you both for the time today. Congratulations on sealing those deals back in December and we certainly wish you all the best going forward. And of course, a very happy and a very safe new year for you and yours. >> Same to you, John. Thanks so much for the time. And so it was a pleasure to spend time with you today. >> Thank you, John. Happy New Year again. Thank you. Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and today I'm talking with Ivanti again, Nayaki Nayyar, their Chief Product Officer EVP is back with us, as is another Cube alumni, Sumedh Thakar, the President and Chief Product Officer of Qualys. Nayaki, sweet, great to have you guys both back on the program. >> Great to be back here, Lisa. I think it's becoming a habit for me to be here, talking to you almost... >> I like it. >> every week. >> Good to be here, thank you for inviting me. >> So, let's go right into some exciting news here, so Ivanti has had a lot of momentum in the last week or so, Nayaki with launch announcements, talk to us about what you're announcing today in terms of an expansion with the Ivanti-Qualys partnership. >> So Lisa, as you remember, this week we had a great week this week with the launch of our Ivanti neurons platform, that really helps our customers address end-to-end management of their endpoints and security of those endpoints. How we can help them, would be called self fuel, self secure and self service the endpoints. And one of the key strengths Ivanti has, in our portfolio, is our ability to manage all the patches. Today, with our Ivanti patch management solution, we patch approximately 1.2 billion patches on an annual basis. So that's a pretty big volume, and we are extremely excited as a part of this launch announcement, to also share the partnership we have with Qualys and how we are extending and helping Qualys with their overall vision for VMDR. >> So Sumedh, let's go right into that, talk to us about the VMDR, vulnerability management has been around for a while, what is VMDR and Qualys perspective? And what are you looking to do with your partnership with Ivanti? >> I should know about vulnerability management being around for a while, I've been 18 years at Qualys, so we've been doing for a long time, and, what's happened is with the hybrid infrastructure exploding and a lot more devices being added and focus shifting from just servers to endpoint, I think that is just a need to be able to do vulnerability management, in addition, also have the ability to do assessment of your devices in terms of inventory, etcetera, so, discovering your devices, being able to do vulnerability assessment, configuration assessment, but also be able to prioritize those vulnerabilities on which one do you really need to patch because you just have way too many vulnerabilities. And then at the end, all of this vulnerability management is not useful if we can't do something about it, and that's where, you need the ability to patch and fix those issues, and this is where VMDR really brings that workflow in a single platform end-to-end, So instead of just throwing a big report of CVEs, we provide the ability to go from detection of the device, to the patching, and this is where Ivanti partnership has been something that has really helped our customers because they bring in that patching piece, and this is one of the most complicated things you do, and because taking a vulnerability and mapping it to a particular patch is very complex to do and that's where the Ivanti partnership is helping us. >> And so, this is an expansion Sumedh, you guys have been doing this for Windows and Linux, and now this is adding Mac support and others. Tell me a little bit more about the additional capabilities that you're enabling. >> What's interesting is that, when we started working on this, this was before the pandemic hit, and COVID has certainly added a very interesting twist to the patching challenge, and the ability for the system admins to suddenly patch 100,000 to 200,000 devices, which are not in your office with a high speed internet anymore, they are sitting in little apartments all over the world with low bandwidth, WiFi connections, etcetera, how do you patch those endpoints? And so when, while the focus of the beginning was a lot more on Windows and Linux, which are more on the server side, with the pandemic hitting, there is a big need now for people also to be able to do their Macs and other endpoints that are now remote and at people's homes, and so obviously, with the success of the patch management capabilities on Windows that we got with Ivanti, they are a natural partner for us to also expand that into being able to do it for the Macs as well, and so, now we're working together to get this done for the Macs. >> So Nayaki, in terms of the announcements from Ivanti that they've been coming out the last week or so, we talked with Jeff Abbott last week about the partnerships and the GTM, talk to me about from a strategic perspective, how does the expansion of the Qualys partnership dial up Ivanti's vision? >> Lisa, when you take a look at what's really happening across every enterprise, every large company, especially during COVID, and post COVID, is what we call this explosive growth of remote workers, as everyone is trying to manage what the transformation to remote working means, the explosive growth of devices that now have to be managed by every IT organization, not to mention how to secure those devices, which is where this partnership with Qualys becomes extremely strategic for us. Now we can extend that overall vision that we have with our Ivanti neurons to discover every device we have, the customers' have, sense any security vulnerabilities, anomalies that are on those devices, prioritize those based on risk-based priority of it and going through priority as we embed more and more AI Amal into it, and get into what we call this auto remediation, remediating all those vulnerabilities, which nicely fits into Qualys's, or our VMDR vision and strategy. So, this truly helps our customers, go beyond just managing the endpoints to now what we call sub securing those endpoints, being able to automatically detect all security vulnerabilities and issues and get closer and closer to the self remediation of those vulnerabilities, and that's why this partnership makes, a great strategic benefit for all of our customers and large enterprise. >> So Sumedh, talk to us about the VMDR lifecycle, give us a picture of where your customers are and that how does this really going to help them deal with the new normal of even more devices going to be remote for a long period of time? >> what's happening now is that, this is being extended to home devices, customers in the past were only looking at enterprise devices that were owned by the organization, and we continuously now see, we can't get a new laptop to the user, or they're using their home device, home desktop, because it's bigger screen, more powerful, whatever it is, so people are starting to do that, and you can't really stop them from doing that if you want to get work done, and so, essentially VMDR is four things, which is, continuous asset inventory discovery, Second is, detection of all security issues, including vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Third is the prioritization based on the knowledge of the device, and what's running on the device just because you have a severity, five vulnerability or highly exploitable vulnerability does not mean that you need to prioritize that as the first one to patch, and then you need to be able to patch it, and so that's the four elements that make up the VMDR lifecycle, and as customers have no good way to detect what devices are there, what is connecting to the VPN, because now they don't actually, physically see the devices, the traditional network devices that were... office firewalls that are sitting in the office, that were detecting devices are now not useful because everybody's outside the firewall. And so that entire life cycle, is something that customers want to do, because at the end, you want to reduce your risk quickly. And having a single platform that does all of that, is the key benefit that we get from there. >> Talk to me a little about the go-to market, in terms of how are your customers, joint customers buying the solution? >> I think what we've really worked on is typically what happens today is the customers'... different vendors are providing individual pieces, you have to go buy a different inventory solution, a different vulnerability solution, a different prioritization, a different patch solution, so, working with Ivanti, we've really worked on creating a single platform, and this took us a quite a bit of time to really make that engineering integration work, to be able to have Ivanti patch management directly embedded into the Qualys' agent. So that way, customers don't have to deploy another agent, and they don't have to buy different solutions for different consoles, so, from a go-to market perspective, we keep it very simple for our customers, they essentially have a one price for the entire asset and then if they choose to do the patch management, this is something that we sell as a capability that is directly available through Qualys and Ivanti has done a huge amount of work to integrate seamlessly in the back end to help the customer so that they don't have to, buy from one, buy from another and try to integrate it themselves. >> And Lisa if you look at it, it's really a way for customers to handle heterogeneous landscape, patching of heterogeneous landscape that they have, in their environment all the way from the data centers to those endpoints, the Windows devices, Mac devices, Linux devices, and in future, we'll also be supporting multiple other devices and platforms through Qualys VMDR, absolutely. >> Let's talk about the target audience and really understanding, from a security perspective, it's top of mind for the C-suite all the way up to the board, now with COVID and the increase in ransomware, and some of the things, the device spread, that's probably only going to spread even more, Nayaki, starting with you, how are you seeing the customer conversations change? Are you now not just talking to ITs elevated up the stack? Is this a CEO, board level concern that you're helping them to remediate? >> Absolutely, Lisa, this conversation about cyber security challenges, especially as organizations are trying to figure out what this transformation to remote working means, this is really not just limited to an IT organization or a CIO level conversation, this is a C-suite conversation at the CEO level, and in most cases, I'm also seeing this becoming a board conversation and I'm on a couple of boards myself, and this is truly a board conversation where discussing how we help enterprises transform to remote working and cyber security challenges as more and more workers are working from home, securing those devices is top of mind, for pretty much CEOs and the boards, and helping them through the transition is a number one priority. So, this is between the partnership with Qualys and Ivanti, for us to offer this joint solution, and really make it available where they can address the security concerns that they have, in their environment. >> And Sumedh, in terms of target market, we talked with Nayaki and Jeff last week about, from a vertical perspective, they've got a lot of strengths in healthcare and retail, for example, are you looking at any leading edge markets right now, verticals that really are at most risk? Or are you attacking us from a GTM perspective, or in a horizontal way? >> It's not even our choice anymore, because what's happened with remote working in no matter what industry you are in, everybody's workers are working from home essentially, and using laptops and the number of attacks have significantly multiplied because now that this endpoint is outside of your traditional defenses that you have in an office environment, these endpoints are a lot more vulnerable, and they are in a home network, I have devices in my home network for my kids that are running all kinds of fortnight and things like that, that now actually could have access to my work laptop, so that is becoming a big concern and the other realization that you cannot really use enterprise solutions as you have in the past, for patching and securing your endpoint that's not inside the enterprise, because if a single SMB goes vulnerability patches 350 Megs for one device, if you have that patch 1000 devices trying to download that over VPN, it's just not going to work, and it kills the VPN, so that is this big push towards moving into a cloud based method of deploying these patches, So you going to actually get these patches deployed without hitting your VPN environments, and this is really the big thing, and the other day I read something that that asked like, what is accelerating the digital transformation to the cloud for your enterprise? And, there was a CEO and the Sea So and then COVID, so unfortunately, the pandemic has been bad in many ways, but in other ways, it has really helped organizations move more quickly, to get approvals from the board and the management because the other option is just not a choice anymore, which is trying to use on-prem solution so that resistance to cloud based solutions is significantly decreasing because, today, we're all sitting in different locations and meeting every day on video, etcetera and that's really powered by that cloud-based platforms that we have today. >> I call it the COVID catalysts, there are a lot of interesting things that are positive, that are being catalyzed as a result of this massive change. One more question Sumedh for you, in terms of, this enabling VMDR to become a category, a target market for endpoint security, how does this help? >> I think, the more we can provide the customer ability to reduce the number of different steps that they have to go through and the different tools that they have to purchase and multiple agents and multiple consoles that they have to put together, then it just becomes a category in itself because you kind of have that ability to do detection, prioritization and response in a single solution, which is something that nobody else offers today because everybody is focused on just one aspect of it, and so, today the response from our customers has been absolutely tremendous, they are extremely happy to have this ability to very quickly figure out what's wrong, one of the things we didn't talk a lot about, but I would say in patch management process, the biggest challenge and where most time is spent is mapping a CVE to a specific patch that needs to be deployed on a specific machine, because of 64-bit architecture, 32-bit architecture, so, the Ivanti catalog helps us tremendously to help bring the knowledge that we have on the CVEs to that catalog, and then give our customers a way to be able to get those patches deployed in a very, very quick way, and so that essentially is just created this new category, when you have this end-to-end ability on a single platform. So whether it comes from Qualys or somebody else, I think the need is there to say, when I'm looking at patch management, I want the discovery of vulnerability and patching all of that to be done together. >> And that speed is absolutely critical. So in terms of the general availability, Sumedh, is this available now, when do customers get access? >> So with the partnership with Ivanti, VMDR in general has been available now for our customers for a couple of months, but now with the enhanced partnership, it was available for Windows or is currently available for Windows and now we are working with Ivanti for the next few months to get the Mac version out, so, we would think about in the next couple of quarters, we will have that available through Qualys VMDR, the ability to patch the Macs as well. >> Excellent. Nayaki let's go ahead and take this home with you, in terms of give me kind of an overall, round this out, the expansion of the partnership, the importance of helping customers in these disparate environments, and the momentum that this gives Ivanti for the rest of the year and going into 2021? >> This really rounds our entire Ivanti's vision and strategy, reservoir, our ability to discover every asset customers have on their endpoints and point assets as devices, being able to manage those devices holistically and to secure those devices, and also do service management of those devices and I had mentioned this, we are the only vendor in the market, that can do all of this end-to-end all the way from discovery, to security, to service managing the devices which... and the partnership with Qualys really helps as round it off across the board is full lifecycle of endpoint management, device management, and also enables us to extend to the natural adjacencies of IoT with Ivanti neurons, vision and strategy and truly get into a world of what we call self healing and self securing, the autonomous edge that we really strive to in the longer term. >> Congratulations both of you on this expansion of the partnership, we thank you for taking the time to explain to us the value in it, the challenges that this going to solve for your customers, Nayaki it's always great to have you on the program, thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, thank you Lisa and Sumedh, absolutely a great pleasure talking to all of you. >> Thank you for inviting me and good seeing both of you and I look forward to seeing you guys again. Have a good day >> Yeah, Sumedh. Great to meet you as well. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

(calm music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and today, I'm talking to Ivanti again and Intel, some breaking news. So please welcome two guests, the EVP and Chief Product Officer of Ivanti, Nayaki Nayyar. She's back, and we've also got the VP and GM of Business Client Salute Platforms for Intel, Stephanie Hallford. Nayaki and Stephanie, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be back here with you Lisa, and Stephanie glad to have you here with us, thank you. >> Thank you, we're excited >> Yeah, you guys are going to break some news for us, so let's go ahead and start. Nayaki, hot off the presses is Ivanti's announcement of its new hyper-automation platform, Ivanti Neurons, helping organizations now in this new next normal of so much remote work. Now, just on the heels of that, you're announcing a new strategic partnership with Intel. Tell me about that. >> So Lisa, like we announced, our Ivanti Neurons platform that is helping our customers and all the IT organizations around the world to deal with this explosive growth of remote workers, the devices that would work is used, the data that it's getting from those devices, and also the security challenges, and Neurons really help address what we call discover all the devices, manage those devices, self-heal those devices, self-secure the devices, and with this partnership with Intel, we are extremely excited about the potential our customers and the benefits that customers can get. Intel is offering what they call Device as a Service, which includes both the hardware and software, and with this partnership, we are announcing the integration between Intel's vPro platform and Ivanti's Neurons platform, which is what we are so excited about. Our joint customers, joint enterprises that are using both the products can now benefit from this out of the box integration to take advantage of this Device as a Service combined offer. >> So Stephanie, talk to us from Intel's perspective. This is an integration of Intel's Endpoint Management Assistant with Ivanti Neurons. How does this drive up the value for the EMA solution for your customers who are already using it? >> Right, well, so vPro is just to step everyone back, vPro is the number one enterprise platform trusted now for over 14 years. We are in a vast majority of enterprises around the world, and that's because vPro is essentially our best performing CPUs, our highest level of security, our highest level manageability, which is our EMA or "Emma" manageability solution, which Ivanti is integrating, and also stability, so that is the promise to IT managers for a stable, the Intel Stable Image platform, and what that allows is IT managers to know that we will keep as much stability and fast forward and push through any fixes as quickly as possible on those vPro devices because we understand that IT networks usually QUAL, you know, not all at one time, but it's sequential. So vPro is our number one enterprise built for business, validated, enabled, and we're super excited today because we're taking that remote manageability solution that comes with vPro, and we are marrying it with Ivanti's top class in point management solution, and Ivanti is a world leader in managing and protecting endpoints, and today more than ever, because IT's remote and Intel. For instance, our IT over one weekend had to figure out how to support a hundred thousand remote workers, so the ability for Ivanti to now have our remote manageability in band, out of band, on-prem, in the cloud, it really rounds out. Ivanti's already fantastic world-class solution, so it's a fantastic start to what I foresee is going to be a great partnership. >> And probably a big target install base. Now, can you talk to me a little bit about COVID as a catalyst for this partnership? So many companies, the stuff they talked about a great example of Intel pivoting over a weekend for a hundred thousand people. We're hearing so many different numbers of an explosion of devices, but also experts and even C-suite from tech companies projecting maybe 30 to 40% of the workforce only will go back, so talk to me about COVID as really driving the necessity for organizations to benefit from this type of technology. >> Yeah, so Lisa, like Stephanie said, right, as Intel had to take hundred thousand employees remote over a weekend, that is true for pretty much every company, every organization, every enterprise independent of industry vertical that they had to take all their workforce and move them to be primarily remote workers, and the stats of BFC is what used to be, I would say, three to four percent before COVID of remote working. Post-COVID or during COVID, as we say, it's going to be around 30, 40, 50%, and this is a conversation and a challenge. Every IT organization, every C-level exec, and, in most cases, I'm also seeing this become a board conversation that they're trying to figure out not just how to support remote workers for a short time, but for a longer time as this becomes the new normal or the next normal, whatever you call that, Lisa, and really helping employees through this transition and providing what we call a seamless experience as we employees are working from home or on the move or location agnostic, being able to provide a experience, a service experience that understands what employee's preferences are, what their needs are, and providing that consumer with experiences, what this joint offering between Intel and Ivanti really brings together for our joint customers. >> So you talked about this being elevated to the board level conversation, you know, and this is something that we're hearing a lot of that suddenly there's so much more visibility and focus on certain parts of businesses, and survival is, so many businesses are at risk. Stephanie, I'd like to get your perspective on how this joint solution with Intel and Ivanti, do you see this as an opportunity to give your customers not just a competitive advantage, but for maybe some of those businesses who might be in jeopardy like a survival strategy? >> Absolutely, I mean, the, you know, while we both Ivanti and Intel have our own IT challenges and we support our workers directly, we are broadly experienced in supporting many many companies that frankly, perhaps, weren't planning for these types of instances, remote manageability overnight, security and cyber threats getting more and more sophisticated, but, you know, tech companies like Ivanti, like Intel, we have been thinking about this and experiencing and planning for these things and bringing them out in our products for some time, and so I think it is a great opportunity when we come together and we bring that, you know, IP expertise and IT expertise, both IP technical and that IT insight, and we bring it to customers who are of all industries, whether it be healthcare or financial or medium businesses who are increasingly being managed by service providers who can utilize this type of device as a service and endpoint manageability. Most companies and certainly all IT managers will tell you they're overwhelmed. They are traditionally squeezed on budget, and they have the massive requirement to take their companies entirely cloud and cloud oriented or maybe a hybrid of cloud and on-prem, and they really would prefer to leave network security and network management to experts, and that's where we can come in with our platform, with our intelligence, we work hard to continue to build that product roadmap to stay ahead of cyber threats. Our vPro platform, for instance, has what we call Intel Hardware Shield to set up technologies that actually protects against cyber attack, even under the OS, so if the OS is down or there's a cyber attack around the OS, we actually can lock down the BIOS and the Firmware and alert the OS and have that communication, which allows the system to protect those areas that need to be protected or lock down or encrypt those areas, so this is the type of thing we bring to the party, and than Ivanti has that absolute in Point Management credibility that there's just, I think, ease, So if IT managers are worried about moving to the cloud and getting workers remote and, you know, managing cyber threats, they really would prefer to leave this management and security of their network to experts like Ivanti, and so we're thrilled to kind of combine that expertise and give IT managers a little bit of peace of mind. >> I think it's even more than giving IT managers a peace of mind, but so talk to me, Nayaki, about how these technologies work together. So for example, when we talked about the Neurons and the hyper-automation platform that you just announced, you were talking about the discovery, the self-healing, self-securing of all these devices within an organization that they may not even know they have EDGE devices on-prem cloud. Talk to me about how these two technologies work together. Is it discovering all these devices first, self-security, self-healing? How does then EMA come into play? >> So let me give an analogy in our consumer world, Lisa. We all are used to or getting used to cars where they automatically heal themselves. I have a car sitting in my garage that I haven't taken to a workshop for last four years since I bought it, so it's almost a similar experience that combined offering things to our customers where all these endpoints, like Stephanie said, we are, I would say, one of the leading providers in the endpoint management where we support today. Ivanti supports over 40 million endpoints for our customers, and combining that with a strong vPro platform from Intel, that combined offering, which is what we call Device as a Service, so that the IT departments or the enterprises don't have to really worry about how we are discovering all of those devices, managing those devices. Self-healing, like if there's any performance issues, configuration drift issues, if there are any security vulnerabilities, anomalies on those devices, it automatically heals them. I mean, that is the beauty of it where IT doesn't have to worry about trying to do it reactively. These neurons detect and self-heal those devices automatically in the background, and almost augmenting IT with what I call these automation bots that are constantly running in the background on these devices and self-healing and self-securing those devices. So that's a benefit every organization, every company, every enterprise, every IT department gets from this joint offering, and if I were on their side, on the other side, I can really sleep at night knowing those devices are now not just being managed, but are secure because now we are able to auto-heal or auto-secure those devices in the background continuously. >> Let's talk about speed cause that's one of the things, speed and scale, we talk about with every different technology, but right now there's so much uncertainty across the globe, so for joint customers, Stephanie talked about the, you know, the large install base of customers on the vPro platform, how quickly would they be able to leverage this joint solution to really get those endpoints under management and start dialing down some of the risks like device sprawl and security threats? >> So the joint offering is available today and being released the integration between both the platforms with this announcement, so companies that have both of our platforms and solutions can start implementing it and really getting the benefit out of it. They don't have to wait for another three months or six months. Right after this release, they should be able to integrate the two platforms, discover everything that they have across their entire network, manage those, secure those devices and use these neurons to automatically heal and service those endpoints. >> So this is something that could get up and running pretty quickly? >> It's an AutoBox connection and integration that we worked very closely, Stephanie's team and my team had been working for months now, and, yeah, this is an exciting announcement not just from the product perspective, but also the benefit it gives our customers, the speed, the accuracy, and the service experience that they can provide to their end user, employees, customers, and consumers, I think, that's super beneficial for everyone. >> Absolutely, and then that 360 degree view. Stephanie, we'll wrap it up with you. Talk to us about how this new strategic partnership is a facilitator or an accelerant of Intel's device as a service vision. >> Well, you know, first off, I wanted to commend Nayaki's team because our engineers were so impressed. They, you know, felt like they were working with the PhD advanced version of so many other engineering partners they'd ever come across, so I think we have a very strong engineering culture between our two companies and the speed at which we were able to integrate our solutions, and at the same time start thinking about what we may be able to do in the future, should we put our heads together and start doing a joint product roadmap on opportunities in the future, network connectivity, wifi connectivity, all sorts of ideas, so huge congratulations to the engineering teams because the speed at which we were able to integrate and get a product offering out was impressive, but, you know, secondarily, on to your question on device as a service, this is going to be by far where the future moves. We know that companies will tend to continue to look for ways to have sustainability in their environments, and so when you have Device as a Service, you're able to do things like into end supporting that device from its start into a network to when you end of life a device and how you end of life that device has severe, some sustainability and costs, you know, complexities, and if we're able to manage that device from end to end and provide servicing to alert IT managers and self-heal before problems happen, that helps obviously not only with business models and, you know, protecting data, but it also helps in keeping systems running and being alert to when systems begin to degrade or if there are issues or if it's time to refresh because the hardware is not new enough to take advantage of the new software capabilities, then you're able to end of life that device in a sustainable way, in a safe way, and, even to some degree, provide some opportunity for remediation of data and, you know, remote erase and continue to provide that security all the way into the end, so when we look at device as a service, it's more than just one aspect. It's really taking a device and being responsible for the security, the manageability, the self-healing from beginning to end, and I know that all IT managers need that, appreciate that, and frankly don't have the time or skillsets to be able to provide that in their own house. So I think there's the beginnings today, and I think we have a huge upside to what we can do in the future. I look at Intel's strengths in enterprise and how long we have been, you know, operating in enterprises around the world. Ivanti's, you know, in the vast majority of Fortune 100s, and when you've got kind of engineering powerhouses that are coming together and brainstorming it's, I think, it's a great partnership for relief for customer pain points in the future, which unfortunately there's going to be more probably. >> And this is just the beginning. >> I think that's one thing we can guarantee. It's what, sorry? >> Yeah, and it's just the beginning. This partnership is just the beginning. You will see lot more happening between both the companies as we define the roadmap into the future, so we are super excited about all the work, the joint teams, and, Stephanie, I want to take this opportunity to thank you, your leadership, and your entire organization for helping us with this partnership. >> We're excited by it, we are, we know it's just the beginning of great things to come. >> Well, just the beginning means we have to have more conversations. The cultural fit really sounds like it's really there, and there's tight alignment with Ivanti and Intel. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me. Nayaki, great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you, thank you, Lisa. Thank you for hosting us, and, Stephanie, it's always a pleasure talking to you, thank you. >> Likewise, looking forward to the launch and all the customer reactions. >> Absolutely. >> Yes, all right, thanks Nayaki, thanks Stephanie. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. 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>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by two guests from Ivanti, today. Please welcome its President, Jeff Abbot and its Chief Product Officer, Nayaki Nayyar. Jeff and Nayaki, it's so great to talk to you today. >> Pleasure to speak to you, Lisa. >> Pleasure to be here, Lisa, look forward to this. >> Me too. So Jeff, let's start with you, transformation, you got some big news that you're going to be sharing and breaking through theCUBE Conversation today which we're going to dig into but there's been a lot of transformation at the top at Ivanti, you're new, tell me about that and what's the shake up that's been going on there to really drive this company forward? >> Yeah. We have got a lot of transformation going on, Lisa. And it's been an exciting ride for the first six months of my tenure at Ivanti. I came in January as president along with our new CEO, who has been Chairman, Jim Schaper. And when Jim and I started talking about Ivanti last fall, the challenges were pretty clear. It's a company that's had outstanding employees, fantastic customers, and a real heritage of innovation. But they had leveled off a little bit. And the idea behind the new executive team was to bring in a team of veterans to take it to the next level, really to grow to a billion dollars and beyond, both organically and through acquisitions. So you're right, we brought in a fantastic team of veterans people that Jim and I have both worked with: Angie Gunter, new Chief Marketing Officer, Mary Trick, new Chief Customer Officer, we recently hired Nayaki Nayyar, who's with us today, our Chief Product Officer, John Flavin, the Head of our Industry Business Unit, and a host of others that have all come in with a single mission to take Ivanti to the next level. >> So Nayaki, let's dig into Ivanti's vision, lot of change, lot of momentum, I imagine with that change, but what's your vision? >> So let's take a step back, Lisa and you look at, what I call Ivanti's position of strength. And when you look at the entire portfolio Ivanti has, one of the key strengths Ivanti has is its ability to discover, secure, manage and service the endpoints. And if you look at the entire marketplace, there is no vendor in the market today, most of them UEM vendors don't have service management, service management don't have UEM, our ability, Ivanti's ability to do this end to end management of endpoints all the way from discovery to security to service management is what our key strength is. That's our competitive advantage, bringing these three pillars together under one umbrella and having a holistic story. Especially in this day and age of COVID and post COVID, where everyone is trying to manage those endpoints, secure those endpoints, and have almost a seamless experience as remote becomes the next normal going forward for every enterprise, Lisa. >> Yeah, the next normal. Well, there's data scatter, there's device scatter and it's now almost like so many people working from home overnight a few months ago that now will have almost a relationship with our devices because they're our lifeline. So for an organization to be able to understand where all those devices are, people are now working from home, but as you shared, Nayaki, with me the other day, there's some gartner data that demonstrates that 3.6% of the workforce before COVID was working from home. It might be 10X that post COVID So the amount of device scatter and data scatter and need to secure, that challenge is even going up. So how does Ivanti help? How do you solve that challenge? >> So Lisa, if you put yourself in any large enterprise and organization that is dealing with this post COVID or addressing the needs of a remote worker, the remote workers are going through, I would say, explosive growth where they used to be single digits 3% 4% before COVID, and now, during COVID, and after COVID, it's probably going to be I would say, 30, 40% of remote workers that every enterprise has to now provide that service, that seamless service experience as they're working from home, they could be on the move. So providing that seamless experience is, I would say, number one priority and a key challenge for every enterprise. So what we are going to be releasing and launching and announcing to the market given our position of strength in managing endpoints is how we help that seamless experience and what I call the ambient experience for an end user independent of where they are working from, they could be working from home, they could be on the move, or office. >> Which is critical these days. But before we dig into the announcement, Jeff, I wanted to ask you, some of the stats that I've been seeing in terms of the C suite and the amount of decisions that the C suite has had to make in the last four months has been more than over the last five or so years. Talk to us a little bit about how Ivanti got together this new C suite to make the decision to announce what you're going to talk about today so quickly. >> Now, that's a great point. And it's one that we had to, quite frankly, Lisa. The market is demanding a hyper-automation, it's demanding more agnostic deployment, it needs more flexibility in terms of the ability to be self driven and sense and service without a whole lot of intervention. So we knew that when we came in as a new leadership team, the first thing we had to do was get the go-to-market strategy in order, which we did. We balanced our direct sales strategy with our partner strategy. We made some changes in the marketing organization to a more contemporary content-focused demand generation style, and we reset the company's focus on customer outcomes. And in so doing, we changed the mentality to success as measured by are we meeting our customers intended business goals? And that led us very quickly to say, "Listen, the unified IT message we've been using for the last few years has been great, and our customers have responded well to it, and we've acquired a lot of new customers with that message, but the game has changed." And as Nayaki was leading up to, the expectation has changed. And the entire IT space is relatively mature but the expectations and the pressure on that space has grown tremendously, as you pointed out, in the last few years. Just think of the number of devices we all now have to manage as a company, and it's growing. And as Nayaki pointed out as she discusses our launch, it's growing almost exponentially. So we knew that we had to have a new product strategy, we had to take the unified IT message and start to think differently about how the IT leaders in the field and our various customers around the world, how their game has changed and lean in to what they need in terms of automation, AI, bot technology, and so on. And that's what we're announcing with this latest release. >> All right, Nayaki, take it away. What are you announcing? >> Yeah, so what we're super-excited about, Lisa, is to Jeff's point, to handle this explosive growth, growth of devices, growth of data that is being generated from those devices, and also this explosive growth of remote workers. Meaning the only way to handle this growth is through what we call automation and we are taking that next, advanced automation, that leap frog strategy of what we call hyper-automation, embedding that into our entire stack, into our UEM endpoint management stack, into our security stack and also service management to help customers, what we call, self-heal, discover all the devices continuously, optimize the performance, optimize any configuration drifts, and proactively predictively remediate any issues, any issues that you see on those devices, and get into a world of what we call self-healing autonomous edge. Where it's continuously detecting every issue and being able to predictively and cognitively self-heal that edge. And this is what we are launching, is what we branded as Ivanti Neurons, is the brand that we are launching for these automation, this hyper-automation bots, that every company can deploy these hyper-automation bots into their network that will constantly discover every device you have across your entire network, discover any performance issues, configuration drift issues, security issues, vulnerabilities, anomalies, and really get into what we call self-healing, self-securing and providing a service experience that we are used to in our day to day life or in our consumer world. So that's what we are announcing, super-excited about the overall launch. The fact that every enterprise, every company, and it's not tied to any single vertical, Lisa, any vertical organization can leverage these neurons and get that closer to self-healing of those devices that they have to now manage every organization that has to now manage. >> I know Ivanti has a lot of strengths and several verticals, one of them being healthcare. And I can imagine right now, the last five months, the hyper status that every hospital and clinic is in, I'm curious, though, about the name. Jeff, talk to me about in this new, the next normal that we're living in, Neurons, what does that mean and what does it mean to your customers? >> Yeah, great question. And I know this will resonate with you, Lisa, as an accomplished biologist. With the idea is with what we're providing and what we're launching with Neurons, there's a sense of hyper-scale, hyper-automation, like the synapses in your brain, handles so much information at once. So we wanted to personalize the launch of these solutions. When you see the announcement next week, you'll see a series of products across the spectrum Ivanti solutions; the ITSM, endpoint management, security and so on. And we address in each of those areas, the self-sensing, self-healing, self-servicing, each of those business processes. But like your synapses or your neurons in your brain, there'll be a lot of super-fast automation, super-fast sensing of challenges and addressing those challenges. And that's why we went with Neurons. It was actually a pretty fun contest in the company and we really believe Neurons will connect with our target market. >> I love it. And the biologist part of me is gone, "That makes sense." So Nayaki, over to you. And in terms of that connectivity perspective, there's so many disparate data sources out there, it's only growing. And Jeff, you mentioned this, how can one of your existing 25,000 customers, use, deploy, this on top of their existing infrastructure to start connecting data sources that they may not even know they can connect or that they may not know does it make even sense to connect them? >> Yeah, so the beauty of the entire Neuron network is it uses MQTT protocol, Lisa, which is the protocol that immediately detects every device, be it endpoint desktops, laptops, mobile devices, or even, I was suggesting IoT devices, that it automatically detects. And senses if there is anything happening on those devices, predicts if there is any issue that may happen, like I said, performance issues, configuration drift issues, security issues and pulls that data in real time. The beauty of this is the speed at which it pulls its data, I've seen customers who can deploy this across their entire network around the world and within seconds, it's able to pull the data into a centri console, and give ourselves a full 360 view of every device you have, every user that's using those devices all the applications that are running on those devices and the services that are being delivered to those devices. So just the power of being able to pull that much data in seconds and provide that 360 view of what we call, a Neuron Workspace, for any IT organization to have that full 360 view, and detect and predict that there's any issue and almost like get into a self-healing remediated before it interrupts your productivity or interrupts your... Any service disruption. I think you were trying to say something, go ahead. >> I was just going to add to that, Nayaki. And you asked this or made this point, Lisa, Nayaki and I are speaking to the healthcare industry almost every day. We are very in tune with the challenges they're experiencing, obviously, with what's happening right now around the world. And as Nayaki is describing, the Neurons we intend to be a very seamless improvement to their existing IT processes and so on. In fact, when I described this to some of the hospitals I've been speaking to, and certainly the IT staff and leaders within, they are fascinated and very excited about what we're describing. Because if you think about it, IT challenges down at the device level in the healthcare industry can be life critical. And they need to solve those IT challenges very fast. They need to know when their new endpoints are online, they need to know when they need servicing, and then they know when their software needs patching. We're not talking about just being at home and being frustrated if you're having an IT challenge, we're talking about life and death. So Neurons is absolutely what the healthcare industry is asking for in terms of self-healing, self-sensing, self-securing and so on, they need those attributes in their business model, now definitely more than ever. >> Absolutely, they do. So Nayaki, talking to customers in healthcare, whatnot, I can see this being a great tool for the IT analyst but also maybe even helping the IT analysts and business users have better relationships that overall help drive a business forward. >> Yeah, so you put yourself in an end user or line of business, they expect, and especially in this day and age of post COVID, Lisa, they expect a consumer grade experience to be delivered to them. They expect their service provider to know exactly where they're working from, what devices they have, how all those devices are not just secure, but understands the preferences I need as an individual and provides that service experience to me. So I mean that, I would say, a close tie in between what the business wants, the end users in those lines of business want and how IT or any service organization can provide that service to employees, customers, and consumers is what really Neurons, I would really... Helps us get closer and closer to consumer grade experience that we all are used to in our day to day life. And to Jeff's point, in addition to healthcare, which is a strong industry vertical for us, some other industries, retail is another big industry that we are very strong in, Lisa, and also supply chain rugged devices in a warehouse. So it really gives us a huge expansion opportunity beyond just managing the IT devices or endpoints to also managing the IoT devices by industry vertical, in those segments, where we already have a very, very strong foothold, because of the technology that we have that powers this whole thing in the backend. >> And we're seeing some of the numbers of 40+ Billion, connected devices in the next few years. So Jeff, let's end this with you. I know there's more coming, but you probably have a great partnership suite that you're working with to enable this, talk to us a little bit about the partners, and then what's next? >> Yeah, no, great point, Lisa. I come from a heritage of companies that have leveraged our partners. And we continue to grow our partner network. We believe strongly in the strength of the extended ecosystem, solution partners, delivery partners, global systems integrators, they all have a role in Neurons. And we're excited to continue to provide the platform for mutual growth between us and those partners. And what's really important is, these are companies that our customers really love as well. So we're going to continue to, in some cases, tie our solutions together, in some cases, extend our services organization through partners, and in some cases, we'll actually service our customers through our channel partner network. We actually went through a little bit of a rationalization to really zero in on our most strategic partners, we've done that, we've finished that in the first six months of coming on board. And now we are hitting the gas pedal and going full speed to market with a great group of partners and again, you'll see that ecosystem more and more as part of our strategy. >> Excellent. So Neurons announced, what's next? >> Well, there's quite a bit behind Neurons. So it will take us probably into at least 2021 getting all the solutions launched, and getting them ingrained with our customers out there. Well, we fully intend to continue to innovate. And if there's one thing I leave you with, Lisa, it's that that's our big announcement more than anything. I mean, Ivanti's had a history of innovation, it's a company that practically invented patching, and keeping all of the devices up to speed on the latest virus protection software and so on, there's a lot of legacy companies within our footprint that are now completely tied together and under the Neuron strategy under Nayaki's leadership we intended to put innovation out in the marketplace, quarter after quarter after quarter, but Neurons for now will keep us quite busy. So we're very excited. >> Well, congratulations on that. Ivanti, innovation, hyper-automation. Jeff, Nayaki, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for joining me on theCUBE today. Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you for having us. >> For my guests, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Conversation. (upbeat music)

(clicking sound) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto at the Four Seasons Hotel at the Chertoff Event is called Security in the Boardroom. Its a annual event they do they do a couple every year and we're excited to be here because the security conversation doesn't really go to the boardroom that often in most of the shows that we go to. So we're excited to be here. Steve Daly is our next guest. He's the President and CEO of Ivanti. Steve, welcome. >> Well, thank you, glad to be here. >> Absolutely. So they said you're the ransomware guy when we were preparing to come in here. >> Right on, right on. >> What special relationship does Ivanti have with ransomware? >> We do a lot of it. >> You do a lot of it? (laughing) >> No we actually, we have a number of solutions to help customers so that they don't fall prey >> Right. >> to these phishing attacks, the stuff that kind of allows somebody to come in and hijack your systems and be able to ransom you >> Right. >> for this stuff. >> So why do you see from where you're sitting the growth in the ransomware in terms of, used to always be hacking and phishing and people doing stupid things. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Clicking on things you're not supposed to. But now suddenly its gotten much more aggressive, now it's got this kind of ransomware piece to it. Why do you see that evolving? >> Well, I see a couple things happening in the industry. One is, I like to think of it is... You think about medieval times, right? You have these castles, and the castles had these walls, their moats, they're very well protected. That's what our data centers have become like. We've got really good security, we've got really good ability to keep the assets that are behind the firewall in the data center very secure. So as the bad guys keep trying to attack and they keep falling against the wall and getting crushed, they start to look at different ways to get past the walls. What they realize is that, you and me, as we're out in the wild. We're like the guys go outside of the wall, we're out there and we're getting infected, we're getting attacked, we're getting... They realize that's the easiest way for us, for them, to get back in behind the wall because if they can infect us, >> Right. >> Then we'll take them back behind the wall through our credentials and our security and get them in to where they really want to be which is where personal identifiable information is, or the high value assets are. And so, I think they've recognized that it is harder and harder to attack directly into the data centers and so let's go at the endpoints. Let's go attack the weak point and get on those and let them take us back into the data center. And so they look at us and they say, "Okay, well how are we going to get Steve to let us use his credentials?" And the best way for them to do that is to phish us. And to bring in technology that we accidentally click on. >> Right, right. >> And once they get there, then they've got access to us. >> And so, this is just an evolution of that idea that says, "Okay, well I can get back in the data center, why don't I just charge this guy just to let me let him get back to the data that he wants access to." And so I think it's just an evolution, sophistication if you will. >> Right. >> Steve: And the bad actors and their ability to extort... extort value out of companies. >> The other trend we hear about is kind of a rise in the state sponsored. It's not just the kid living in his mom's basement anymore who's hacking around, maybe even for fun, right? Just because he could and to brag to other hackers. But really, it's state sponsored, so the motivations behind, the powers behind, the investment behind, the resources behind, >> Steve: They become different. >> is very very different. >> Yeah, and in that case when you think about ransomware, this really is about somebody trying to make some money. State sponsored isn't, they're not trying to make money, right? It's not they're trying to cut their budget deficit by ransomwaring a bunch of Americans type of thing. What they're after is they really are trying to get behind the moat, behind the walls of the castle. And they know the best way for that to do is to infect me, so that I take that virus, so I take that sickness back into the data center because when I come to the door, they're going to drop the drawbridge, they're going to let me in because they know me. >> Right. >> And so, the idea of phishing, the idea of getting me to click on something that I shouldn't click on is... Those techniques are really powerful. >> Right. >> Because, one, you can either ransom somebody to get their data back, or you can use that as a vehicle to slip back in to the... >> Right. >> Steve: Behind the wall. >> But it's so interesting, the more you read up on this topic, there's so many just big gaping holes, where people are just not applying patches, and they're not doing a lot of really simple things. And then on the the other hand, you have people in processing culture. And like you said, people are the weakest link. My favorite story somebody said one time, they came to the company picnic website which was hanging off the corporate website. I don't know if they said they were the plastic fork vendor or something, but that was the way... >> (laughing) They got in.. >> They infiltrated the company... right. >> The spork. Spork vendor. >> They got in the company, right, with the spork. So as you're talking to clients, how often do you see that they are just taking care of the basics before you can really even start to get in to some of the more advanced techniques? >> I think that's a big challenge for companies. I think it comes back to, particularly when we start to talk about end user computing, the way that the industry has evolved is very fragmented in IT. The way that IT decides to support us, and our devices >> Right. >> You think about it, in an IT organization they'll be a Desktop Operations group, they'll be a Mobile group if we're using our mobile phones instead of our desktops. There's a Security group, there's a Service Delivery, there's a Service Support group, they're all separate siloed organizations that are responsible for ultimately keeping us up and running, and secure. But, when they're siloed like that, it's really hard for IT to be able to say, "Okay, well let's do the basic hygiene. Let's make sure that the Desktop Operations group is patching these things in a normal way. Let's make sure the Asset Team is bringing in assets and they're tracking through the lifecycle, making sure that the software on there is up to date, those types of things. Making sure that the Security team has visibility across all of it." It's so siloed... >> Right. >> There's no way that IT can... It's really hard for IT to really bring that together. And I think that's a fundamental problem with the way that we're organized, and I think that has to change. I think that the people, process, side of thing is we have to start to bring and unify IT, particularly when you're talking about end user compute environments. Because the way it's fragmented is one, it's really expensive, its costly, right? You've got all these different teams that have to talk and, you have to stitch technology together, and IT's responsible for that. And two, it becomes really, really risky just because, what you brought up. This team is concerned, has their own remit, it's not necessarily 100% security and so patching falls to the bottom of the list. And, yet, for the security guy, most patches, most exploits are done on exploits that have had a patch available for at least nine months. So it's not that it's a brand new thing, zero day that just pops in, it's that the teams haven't patched the systems. >> Right. >> In nine months, it's crazy. So I think if we can break down, we can unify IT, we can break down those silos, then I think we've got a much better chance of doing the basic hygiene and getting all the technologies together in a way that allows IT to really address this problem and really focus, it's really a cultural change. IT's going to have to change. And the only way for a CIO to be able to affect this change is there has to be some organizational consolidation. >> Right. As you've seen kind of the growth of cloud, right? Public clouds and private clouds, where some of that security responsibility can be shifted off to Microsoft Azure team, or to the AWS team. Now it's interesting, on one hand, they've got massive resources that they can deploy that no individual company, or very few individual companies have, on the other hand, you still have to hit the knobs even the most recent AWS breach is somebody just didn't turn the knob on to close it down, so, are you seeing, because I imagine from a smaller mid-sized company, the security challenge is across all these fronts that are escalating at a rapid rate, really tough to have the resources to fight. >> That's right. >> So, are they adopting more, not necessarily the always cloud, but the kind of larger solutions that they can leverage so that they don't have all that responsibility on their own heads. >> I think that's some of the impetus to move to cloud. I think the challenge is still, when you're talking about end user computing, all we're talking about is moving the castle and the moat to somebody else's castle and moat, right? You still as a company, you still got all these users of IT that have their own devices that are wandering around out in the forest >> Got their own pipe... >> Right and maybe they can get you back in, and maybe that moat might be a little better than the one I could build myself. I'm still held responsible for... A ransomware attack doesn't matter if I'm using Azure. >> Right. >> Right? If I'm using a Windows laptop, and somebody tells me I can win a million dollars and I click on that, bang, right? That's a problem for me as a healthcare provider for instance, right? >> (laughs) >> It doesn't matter what kind of castle I got built by Microsoft or Amazon or Google or whoever. I'm still responsible for that >> Right. >> Piece of it, and that's not going to change. >> Steve, so much to talk about, and we didn't even get into IoT and the increasing attacks, surface area of our cars, and washing machines, and watches. >> That's right. >> Alright, we'll leave it there. Thanks for stopping by enjoy the rest of the show. >> Yes, good to meet you. >> Looking forward to our next conversation we'll jump into the IoT. >> Steve: Alright. >> Alright, he's Steve Daly, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Chertoff Security in the Boardroom event in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (clicking sound)