>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting you with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a CUBE Conversation, I'm coming to from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program, Angela Medina. She is the director of product marketing at ThousandEyes. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me Stu. >> All right, so Angelique, we get to dig into some research, a new report, it's set up to be annual, the 2020 Internet Performance Report. Of course, internet, like everything else in 2020, things are a little bit different. So help us understand a little bit the purpose of this report and what led to its inaugural incarnation. >> Yeah, absolutely. So it's really interesting. So about the March period, when suddenly there were shutdowns in the US and other regions, and a lot of the workforce was working from home, we started to get a lot of inbounds from our customers and other interested parties about how the internet was holding up. So there was systemic network degradation, are the operators able to handle all of this traffic and these pretty significant traffic shifts. So in responding to this, we decided to put out or make public our outage detection capabilities. So we put out an outage hub and this was back in May, and it basically shows ongoing and recent disruptions, so that's overlaid on a map and you can see where outages are taking place and which networks they're taking place in. So, that's been out for a few months, but we wanted to look at not just outages in real time, but historically as well. So, in looking at the last few months from January through the end of June, that's a really interesting time capsule because we can look at how networks perform and behave, not just under normal conditions, so maybe January and February, but also highly abnormal conditions. So it's a very interesting way to understand how the different types of network operators perform, given what we're enduring right now. >> Yeah, It's fascinating to me if you've watched the networking industry Angelique, normally these kinds of changes in networking are things that we measure in years if not a decade. I remember it felt like it was at least 10 years we talked about the mega trend of North-South to going East-West, how virtualization was changing everything. And of course in 2020, it's all of a sudden, all right, everybody work from home, everybody's home internet is going to be stressed. So help us understand a little bit how much of that is a blip that we saw over a very short period of time and what the resulting output is. >> Yeah, it was really interesting because beginning in... I mean, there are always a certain level of disruptions. Disruptions are just a part of operating a network. Occasionally you're going to have a little bit of downtime, stuff breaks, but in March we saw a pretty dramatic spike, particularly in North America and Asia pack. The level of disruptions, the duration of the disruptions and the scope of them. So more infrastructure impacted was pretty significant. So it was something like a 66% increase globally. And this did start to go down in subsequent months, so we're at a point where it's not quite back to January, February baseline, but it's pretty close. So we definitely saw an increase, but it seems to have stabilized as in a lot of areas, traffic has plateaued or normalized. >> And when you talk about the internet, of course, the internet is made up of lots of devices and lots of companies. What particularly is interesting there, if you look at some of the internet service providers out there, if you're look at companies that are doing remote contact centers, are you able to see a heat map or some of the areas that might have been under more stresses and strain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we're looking at it not only from a geographic standpoint, but we're also looking at different network types. So we're defining the internet fairly broadly, not to just be connectivity as a service providers like your broadband providers or your transit providers, but also cloud networks networks. Cloud networks these days are really an extension of the internet. So we're also looking at their performance and how they held up as well as the networks of really key services like CDN providers, content delivery network providers, as well as DNS. So the collection of these networks is really what is the foundation of what most people think of as the internet. >> Yeah, it's the thing that we've been saying for a number of years is if traditionally you were somebody that managed the network, it used to be something that you would touch. And now, of course, most network operators, you are responsible for a lot of things that you don't necessarily touch. I'll give the disclaimer of course, anybody watching, Cisco has made the announcement to acquire ThousandEyes of course, the gorilla in the networking world. We look forward to talking about that more once the deal is completely closed. So Angelique, how are the cloud providers doing? How are end customers reliance on all of these various services? How are things holding up? >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a really good point about the fact that a lot of enterprises have dramatically transformed or are in the process of transforming themselves where they're now so dependent on external services like cloud providers, like provider networks, more internet service providers, as opposed to managed services. So overall, there hasn't been any kind of systemic breakage across all of these providers, but really the devil is in the details. Oftentimes you might have issues where there might be of an increase in disruptions, or you can't quite pinpoint where the source of an issue is. So really being able to see into these external services and understand how they're performing and have that visibility so you can communicate is really important if you're going to be successful operating in this new IT reality. But in terms of how the different providers perform, how providers are vastly more reliable than internet service providers, probably for a number of reasons having to do with how they've built their networks. They're software defined, they're not as dependent on the underlying infrastructure. So they have much newer networks too, less technical debt, for sure. >> Anything specific when you look at the data over time, are we through the biggest shift in what's happening in more of the ripples now, or have things settled out a little bit, I guess, since some of the initial shocks? >> Yeah, so it varies by provider and region. If just think about the United States or North America. So in North America, we definitely have seen that the number of disruptions have come down over the last couple of months. And we're at a point we're really only about 20% off from what we were seeing in January and February, but cloud provider disruptions haven't quite returned to earlier levels. So they're still on the upswing. So it will be interesting to see where that goes, if that continues, or if that eventually starts to plateau and then decline. But they're going in different directions in North America, disruptions are up, but ISP disruptions are down. >> All right, maybe, could you explain a little bit, what does it mean by an outage? Actually, I pull up right now, the internet outage map which you have on your website and there's these scary, glowing red circles, but you and I are connecting from across the country, obviously using the internet to be able to do videos. So just because there's red glowing lights doesn't mean that we don't have internet access. >> Right, right. I mean, so just in terms of what an outage is, an outage, as we define it, is where there is a hundred percent packet loss within a provider's networks, so traffic is effectively terminating at an interface within the infrastructure of a provider. And so when that happens, we'll flag it. And this is based by the way, on billions of network probes that are sent over the internet using our platform each day. That's how we effectively derive these measurements. And when we see these disruptions, again, we'll flag them and to your point, yes, big, glowing outages on a map, but you know, you're right, not all of them were necessarily going to be disruptive to users for a number of reasons. One of the earlier points you brought up is that the internet is made up of thousands of independently operated networks. It's not like a utility, so you may go through a provider that's having an issue when you may not and that can change dynamically depending on where you're connecting to and what service you're trying to reach. It gets very complicated. >> Is that so? Yeah, so I'm curious one of the biggest challenges out there is that companies have to rapidly make changes. Whether it is adopting cloud services or getting ready remote call centers or the like, are there anything that they can take from the survey data or these maps as to how should I plan things? How should I make these changes? What can practitioners learn from this? >> So I think it's important to understand how do operators, what are their habits and practices, depending on where you're located and we've seen regional differences. So for example, in the US, with internet service providers, they tend to have disruptions that are taking place outside of traditional business hours. So less disruptive, more likely to be due to a maintenance window, change that they're making, versus other regions where many more of these disruptions are taking place at times that might impact a business. So understanding how different providers vary in terms of their practices, gives you an opportunity to have that conversation with providers to hold them accountable and to work collaboratively with them so that you understand when are they going to be making changes. If there are increases in traffic, maybe you have some resiliency measures in place because you know that the operators might be a little bit stressed responding to these increases in either traffic or changing traffic patterns. >> All right, are there any other key takeaways that people should take from this new report? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, one of the key things is that not every outage is created equal. Not all providers are created equal. I mean, they really do vary. Whether it's the fact that the cloud providers have significantly fewer disruptions within their network. Some countries that we've seen have not really been impacted in terms of traffic increases while others have. It really can depend. And so the only way for you to know how your provider is performing or how the key services that you rely on are performing is to have visibility because these days, very often, you don't directly own or manage it. So the only way to ensure that you're getting performance that you need, is to have insight. >> All right, in addition to the report that's coming out, you've got a weekly series I believe that sharing data along with one of our other CUBE Alarms Archana, tell us a little bit about what you're doing there and how that differs. >> Yeah, so we do a weekly podcast. It's just about 15 minutes. It's just to check in to look at what's happened the previous week. So we put this out every Monday and we're looking at whether there have been outages, any interesting news that's taken place, and we'll often go and deep dive on disruptions that have happened. So last week, you probably heard about the CloudFlare outage. It was a pretty big deal. I was getting lots of folks telling me, "Hey, the Internet's down." And it was really just CloudFlare and their DNS service that wasn't available. So we go under the hood and dissect what happened and how it unfolded, and we can show a lot of interesting visualizations around that. >> All right, one last thing, going back to the report, obviously you gather data, you look to be this yearly report, anything along gathering that data, surprises that you've found along this, or putting together the report, are there certain things that longitudinally you might look to do in future studies? >> Yeah, so I do think that maybe it wasn't as surprising to a lot of people, but it was surprising to us given that looking at the same amount of data or same amount of infrastructure that cloud providers were just so dramatically experienced fewer outages. ISP is like 10 times the number of outages as cloud providers. I think going forward, it would be interesting to incorporate more insight into LastMile connectivity, 'cause we're really focusing on backbone networks, really anything other than LastMiles. So, in subsequent reports, we'll fold in some additional insight into LastMile performance as well. >> Excellent. All right, Angelique, I'll let you have the final word, final takeaways you want people to have from this internet performance report. >> You know, I think what you should take away is that if you're able to see how providers are performing, you really can influence how they operate and have a more productive experience working with them. And because these days they're really foundational to most enterprises business, so it's really important to understand the differences between the cloud providers, as well as differences between internet service providers and how that works across different regions. >> All right, well, Angelique, thank you so much for sharing the results of this. Definitely look forward to digging into the data and hearing more from your weekly activities. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, thank you so much for joining, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back they're ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios today to have a conversation with a really exciting company they've actually been around for a while but they've raised a ton of money and they're doing some really important work in the world in which we live today which is a lot different than the world was when they started in 2010 so we're excited to welcome to the studio he's been here on before Mohit ladee is the CEO and co-founder of Thousand Eyes mode great to see you great to see you as well as pretty to be here yeah welcome back but for people that didn't see the last video or not that familiar with Thousand Eyes tell them a little bit kind of would a thousand eyes all about absolutely so in today's world the cloud is your new data center the Internet is your new network and SAS is your new application stack and thousand eyes is built to be the the only thing that can really help you see across all three of these like it's your own private environment I love that I love that kind of setup and framing because those are the big three things and as you said all those things have moved from inside your control to outside of your control so in 2010 is that was that division I mean when you guys started the company UCLA I guess a while ago now what was that the trend what did you see what yes what kind of started it so it's really interesting right so our background as a founding company with two founders we did our PhD at UCLA in computer science and focused on internet and we were fascinated by the internet because it was just this complex system that nobody understood but we knew even then that it would meaningfully change our lives not just as consumers but even as enterprise companies so we had this belief that it's going to be the backbone of the modern enterprise and nobody quite understood how it worked because everyone was focused on your own data center your own network and so our entire vision at that point was we want people to feel the power of seeing the internet like your network that's sort of where we started and then as we started to expand on that vision it was clear to us that the Internet is what brings companies together what brings the cloud closer to the enterprise what brings the SAS applications closer to the enterprise right so we expanded into into cloud and SAS as well so when you had that vision you know people had remote offices and they would set up they would you know set up tunnels and peer-to-peer and all kinds of stuff why did you think that it was gonna go to that next step in terms of the internet you know just kind of the public Internet being that core infrastructure yes we were at the at the very early stages of this journey to cloud right and at the same time you had companies like Salesforce you had office 365 they were starting to just make it so much easier for companies to deploy a CRM you don't have to stand up these massive servers anymore its cloud-based so it was clear to us that that was gonna be the new stack and we knew that you had to build a fundamentally different technology to be able to operate in that stack and it's not just about visibility it's about making use of collective information as well because you're going from a private environment with your own data center your own private network your own application stack to something that's sitting in the cloud which is a shared environment going over the Internet which is the same network that carries cat videos that your kids watch it's carrying production traffic now for your core applications and so you need a different technology stack and you need to really sort of benefit from this notion of collective intelligence of knowing what everybody sees together as one view so I'm here I think I think Salesforce was such an important company in terms of getting enterprises to trust a SAS application for really core function which just sales right I think that was a significant moment in moving the dial was there a killer app for you guys that was you know for your customers the one where they finally said wait you know we need a different level of his ability to something that we rely on that's coming to us through an outside service so it's interesting right when we started the company we had a lot of advisors that said hey your position should be you're gonna help enterprises enforce SLA with Salesforce and we actually took a different position because what we realized was Salesforce did all the right stuff on their data centers but the internet could mess things up or enterprise companies that were not ready to move to cloud didn't have the right architectures would have some bottlenecks in their own environment because they are backhauling traffic from their London office to New York and then exiting from New York they're going back to London so all this stuff right so we took the position of really presenting thousand eyes as a way to get transparency into this ecosystem and we we believe that if we take this position if we want to help both sides not just the enterprise companies we want to help sales force we want to have enterprise companies and just really present it as a means of finding a common truth of what is actually going on it works so much better right so there wasn't really sort of one killer application but we found that anything that was real-time so if you think about video based applications or any sort of real-time communications based so the web access of the world they were just very sensitive to network conditions and internet conditions same with things that are moving a lot of data back and forth so these applications like Salesforce office 365 WebEx they just are demanding applications on the infrastructure and even if they're done great if the infrastructure doesn't it doesn't give you a great experience right and and and you guys made a really interesting insight too it's an it's an all your literature it's it's a really a core piece of what you're about and you know when you owned it you could diagnose it and hopefully you could fix it or call somebody else to fix it but when you don't own it it's a very different game and as you guys talked about it's really about finding the evidence or everyone's not pointing fingers back in and forth a to validate where the actual problem is and then to also help those people fix the problem that you don't have direct control of so it's a very different you know kind of requirement to get things fixed when they have to get fixed yeah and the first aspect of that is visibility so as an example right you generally don't have a problem going from one part of your house to another part of your house because you own the whole place you know exactly what sits between the two rooms that you're trying to get to you don't you don't have run into surprises but when you're going from let's say Palo Alto to San Francisco and you have two options you can take the 101 or 280 you need to know what you expect to see before you get on one of those options right and so the Internet is very similar you have these environments that you have no idea what to expect and if you don't see that with the right level of granularity that you would in your own environments you would make decisions that you have you know you have no control over right the visibility is really important but it's giving that lens like making it feel like a google maps of the internet that gives you the power to look at these environments like it's your private network that's the hard part right and then so what you guys have done as I understand is you've deployed sensors basically all over the Internet all at an important pops yeah an important public clouds and important enterprises etc so that you now have a view of what's going on it I can have that view inside my enterprise by leveraging your infrastructure is that accurate correct and so this is where the notion of being able to set up this sort of data collection environment is really difficult and so we have created all of this over years so enterprise companies consumer companies they can leverage this infrastructure to get instant results so there's zero implementation what right but the key to that is also understanding the internet itself and so this is where a research background comes in play because we studied we did years of research on actually modeling the internet so we know what strategic locations to put these probes that to give good coverage we know how to fill the gaps and so it's not just a numbers game it's how you deploy them where you deploy them and knowing that connectivity we've created this massive infrastructure now that can give you eyes on the internet and we leverage all of their data together so if let's say hypothetically you know AT&T has an issue that same issue is impacting multiple customers through all our different measurements so it's like ways if you're using ways to get from point A to point B if Waze was just used by your family members and nobody else it would give you completely useless information values in that collective insight right and then now you also will start to be able to until every jamel and AI and you know having all that data and apply just more machine learning to it to even better get out in front of problems I imagine as much as as is to be able to identify it so that's a really interesting point right so the first thing we have to tackle is making a complex data set really accessible and so we have a lot of focus into essentially getting insights out of it using techniques that are smarter than the brute-force techniques to get insights out and then present it in manners that it's accessible and digestible and then as we look into the next stages we're going to bring more and more things like learning and so on to take it even further right it's funny the accessible and digestible piece I've just had a presentation the other day and there was a woman from a CSO at a big bank and she talked about you know the problem of false positives and in in early days I mean their biggest issues was just too much data coming in from too many sensors and and too many false positives to basically bury people so I didn't have time to actually service the things that are a priority so you know a nice presentation of a whole lot of data that's a big difference to make it actual it is absolutely true and now that the example I'll give you is oftentimes when you think about companies that operate with a strong network core like we do they are in the weeds right which is important but what is really important is tying that intelligence to business impact and so the entire product portfolio we've built it's all about business impact user experience and then going into connecting the dots or the network side so we've seen some really interesting events and as much as we know the internet every day I wake up and I see something that surprises me right we've had customers that have done migrations to cloud that have gone horribly wrong right so we the latest when I was troubleshooting with the customer was where we saw they migrated from there on from data center to Amazon and the user experience was 10x worse than what it was on their own data the app once they moved to Amazon okay and what had happened there was the whole migration to Amazon included the smart sort of CDN where they were fronting your traffic at local sites but the traffic was going all over the place so from if a user was in London instead of going to the London instance of Amazon they were going to Atlanta they were going to Los Angeles and so the whole migration created a worse user experience and you don't have that lens because you don't see that in a net portion of that right that's what we like we caught it instantly and we were able to showcase that hey this is actually a really bad migration and it's not that Amazon is bad it's just it's been implemented incorrectly right so ya fix these things and those are all configurations all Connecticut which is so very easy all the issues you hear about with with Amazon often go back to miss configuration miss settings suboptimal leaving something open so to have that visibility makes a huge impact and it's more challenging because you're trying to configure different components of this environment right so you have a cloud component you have the internet component your own network you have your own firewalls and you used to have this closed environment now it's hybrid it involves multiple parties multiple skill sets so a lot of things can really go wrong yeah I think I think you guys you guys crystallize very cleanly is kind of the inside out and outside in approach both you know a as as a service consumer yep right I'm using Salesforce I'm using maybe s3 I'm using these things that I need and I want to focus on that and I want to have a good experience I want my people to be able to get on their Salesforce account and book business but but don't forget the other way right because as people are experiencing my service that might be connecting through and aggregating many other services along the way you know I got to make sure my customer experience is big and you guys kind of separate those two things out and really make sure people are focusing on both of them correct and it's the same technology but you can use that for your production services which are revenue generating or you can use that for your employee productivity the the visibility that you provide is is across a common stack but on the production side for example because of the way the internet works right your job is not just to ensure a great performance in user experience your job is also to make sure that people are actually reaching your site and so we've seen several instances where because of the way internet works somebody else could announce that their google.com and they could suck a bunch of traffic from the Internet and this happens quite routinely in the notion of what is now known as DP hijacks or sometimes DNS hijacks and the the one that I remember very well is when there was the small ISP in Nigeria that announced the identity of the address block for Google and that was picked up by China Telecom which was picked up by a Russian telco and now you have Russia China and Nigeria in the path for traffic to Google which is actually not even going to Google's right those kinds of things are very possible because of the way the internet how fast those things kind of rise up and then get identified and then get shut off is this hours days weeks in this kind of example so it really depends because if you are let's say you were Google in this situation right you're not seeing a denial of service attack T or data centers in fact you're just not seeing traffic running it because somebody else is taking it away right it's like identity theft right like I somebody takes your identity you wouldn't get a mail in your inbox saying hey your identity has been taken back so I see you have to find it some other way and usually it's the signal by the time you realize that your identity has been stolen you have a nightmare ahead of you all right so you've got some specific news a great great conversation you know it's super insightful to talk people that are in the weeds of how all the stuff works but today you have a new a new announcement some new and new offering so tell us about what's going on so we have a couple of announcements today and coming back to this notion of the cloud being a new data center the internet your new network right two things were announcing today is one we're announcing our second version of the cloud then benchmark performance comparison and what this is about is really helping people understand the nuances the performance difference is the architecture differences between Amazon Google ad your IBM cloud and Alibaba cloud so as you make decisions you actually understand what is the right solution for me from a performance architecture standpoint so that's one it's a fascinating report we found some really interesting findings that surprised us as well and so we're releasing that we're also touching on the internet component by releasing a new product which we call as Internet insights and that is giving you the power to actually look at the internet more holistically like you own the entire internet so that is really something we're all excited about because it's the first time that somebody can actually see the Internet see all these connections see what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely owned the environment so are people using information like that to dynamically you know kind of reroute the way that they handle their traffic or is it more just kind of a general health you know kind of health overview you know how much of it do I have control over how much should I have control over and how much of I just need to know what's going on so yeah so in just me great question so the the best way I can answer that is what I heard CIO say in a CIO forum we were presenting it where they were a customer it's a large financial services customer and somebody asked the CIO what was the value of thousand I wasn't the way he explained it which was really fascinating was phase one of thousand eyes when we started using it was getting rid of technical debt because we would keep identifying issues which we could fix but we could fix the underlying root cause so it doesn't happen again and that just cleared the technical debt that we had made our environment much better and then we started to optimize the environments to just get better get more proactive so that's a good way to think about it when you think about our customers most of the times they're trying to just not have their hair on fire right that's the first step right once we can help them with that then they go on to tuning optimising and so on but knowing what is going on is really important for example if you're providing a.com service like cube the cube comm right it's its life and you're providing it from your data center here you have two up streams like AT&T and Verizon and Verizon is having issues you can turn off that connection and read all your customers back live having a full experience if you know that's the issues right right the remediation is actually quite quite a few times it's very straight forward if you know what you are trying to solve right so do you think on the internet insights this is going to be used just more for better remediation or do you think it's it's kind of a step forward and getting a little bit more proactive and a little bit more prescriptive and getting out ahead of the issues or or can you because these things are kind of ephemeral and come and go so I think it's all of the about right so one the things that the internet insights will help you is with planning because as you expand into new geo so if you're a company that's launching a service in a new market right that immediately gives you a landscape of who do you connect with where do you host right now you can actually visualize the entire network how do you reach your customer base the best right so that's the planning aspect and if you plan right you would actually reduce a lot of the trouble that you see so we had this customer of ours that was deploying Estevan software-defined man in there a she offices and they used thousand eyes to evaluate two different ISPs that they were looking at one of them had this massive time-of-day congestion so every time every day at nine o'clock the latency would get doubled because of congestion it's common in Asia the other did not have time of day congestion and with that view they could implement the entire Estevan on the ice pea that actually worked well for them so planning is important part of this and then the other aspect of this is the thing that folks often don't realize is internet is not static it's constantly changing so you know AT&T may connect to where I is in this way it connects it differently it connects to somebody else and so having that live map as you're troubleshooting customer experience issues so let's say you have customers from China that are having a ton of issues all of a sudden or you see a drop of traffic from China now you can relate that information of where these customers are coming from with our view of the health of the Chinese internet and which specific ISPs are having issues so that's the kind of information merger that simply doesn't happen today right promote is a fascinating discussion and we could go on and on and on but unfortunately do not have all day but I really like what you guys are doing the other thing I just want to close on which which I thought was really interesting is you know a lot of talked about digital transformation we always talk about digital transformation everybody wants a digital transfer eyes it but you really boiled it down into really three create three critical places that you guys play the digital experience in terms of what what the customers experience you know getting to cloud everybody wants to get to cloud so one can argue how much and what percentage but everybody's going to cloud and then as you said in this last example the modern when as you connect all these remote sites and you guys have a play in all of those places so whatever you thought about in 2010 that worked out pretty well thank you and we had a really strong vision but kudos to the team that we have in place that has stretched it and really made the most out of that so excited good job and thanks for for stopping by sharing the story thank you for hosting always fun to be here absolutely all right well he's mo and I'm Jeff you're watching the cube when our Palo Alto studio is having a cube conversation thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back here ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios today to have a cube conversation with a really exciting company they've actually been around for a while but they've raised a ton of money and they're doing some really important work in the world in which we live today which is a lot different than the world was when they started in 2010 so we're excited to welcome to the studio he's been around before Mohit lad he is the CEO and co-founder of thousand ice mode great to see you great to see you as well thrilled to be here yeah welcome back but for people that didn't see the last video or not that familiar with thousand ice tell them a little bit kind of would a thousand eyes all about absolutely so in today's world the cloud is your new data center the Internet is your new network and SAS is your new application stack and thousand eyes is built to be the the only thing that can really help you see across all three of these like it's your own private environment I love that I love that kind of setup and framing because those are the big three things and as you said all those things have moved from inside your control to outside of your control so in 2010 is that was that division I mean when you guys started the company UCLA I guess a while ago now what was that the trend what did you see what yes what kind of started it so it's really interesting right so our background is a founding company with two founders we did our PhD at UCLA in computer science and focused on Internet and we were fascinated by the internet because it was just this complex system that nobody understood but we knew even then that it would meaningfully change our lives not just as consumers but even as enterprise companies so we had this belief that it's gonna be the backbone of the modern enterprise and nobody quite understood how it worked because everyone was focused on your own data center your own network and so our entire vision at that point was we want people to feel the power of seeing the internet like your network that's sort of where we started and then as we started to expand on that vision it was clear to us that the internet is what brings companies together what brings the cloud closer to the enterprise what brings the SAS applications closer to the enterprise right so we expanded into into cloud and SAS as well so when you had that vision you know people had remote offices and they would set up they would you know set up tunnels and peer-to-peer and all kinds of stuff why did you think that it was going to go to that next step in terms of the Internet you know just kind of the public Internet being that core infrastructure yes so we were at the at the very early stages of this journey to cloud right and at the same time you had companies like Salesforce you had office 365 they were starting to just make it so much easier for companies to deploy a CRM you don't have to stand up these massive servers anymore its cloud-based so it was clear to us that that was gonna be the new stack and we knew that you had to build a fundamentally different technology to be able to operate in that stack and it's not just about visibility it's about making use of collective information as well because you're going from a private environment with your own data center your own private network your own application stack to something that's sitting in the cloud which is a shared environment going over the Internet which is the same network that carries cat videos that your kids watch it's carrying production traffic now for your core applications and so you need a different technology stack and you need to really sort of benefit from this notion of collective intelligence of knowing what everybody sees together as one view so I'm curious force was such an important company in terms of getting enterprises to trust a SAS application for really core function with just sales right I think that was a significant moment in moving the dial was there a killer app for you guys that was you know for your customers the one where they finally said wait you know we need a different level of visibility to something that we rely on that's coming to us through an outside service so it's interesting right when we started the company we had a lot of advisors that said hey your position should be you're gonna help enterprises enforce SLA with Salesforce and we actually took a different position because what we realized was Salesforce did all the right stuff on their data centers but the internet could mess things up or enterprise companies that were not ready to move the cloud didn't have the right architectures would have some bottlenecks in their own environment because they are backhauling traffic from their London office to New York and then exiting from New York they're going back to London so all this stuff right so we took the position of really presenting thousand eyes as a way to get transparency into this ecosystem and we we believe that if we take this position if we want to help both sides not just the enterprise companies we want to help sales force we want to have enterprise companies and just really present it as a means of finding a common truth of what is actually going on it works so much better right so there wasn't really sort of one killer application but we found that anything that was real-time so if you think about video based applications or any sort of real-time communications based so the web access of the world they were just very sensitive to network conditions and internet conditions same with things that are moving a lot of data back and forth so these applications like Salesforce office 365 WebEx they just are demanding applications on the infrastructure and even if they're run great if the infrastructure doesn't it doesn't give you a great experience right and and and you guys made a really interesting insight to its and it's an all your literature it's it's a really a core piece of what you're about and you know when you owned it you could diagnose it and hopefully you could fix it or call somebody else to fix it but when you don't own it it's a very different game and as you guys talked about it's really about finding the evidence or everyone's not pointing fingers back in and forth a to validate where the actual problem is and then to also help those people fix the problem that you don't have direct control of so it's a very different you know kind of requirement to get things fixed when they have to get fixed yeah and the first aspect of that is visibility so as an example right you generally don't have a problem going from one part of your house to another part of your house because you own the whole place you know exactly what sits between the two rooms that you're trying to get to you don't you don't have run into surprises but when you're going from let's say Palo Alto to San Francisco and you have two options you can take 101 or 280 you need to know what you expect to see before you get on one of those options right and so the Internet is very similar you have these environments that you have no idea what to expect and if you don't see that with the right level of granularity that you would in your own environments you would make decisions that you have you know you have no control over right the visibility is really important but it's giving that lens like making it feel like a google maps of the internet that gives you the power to look at these environments like it's your private network that's the hard part right and then so what you guys have done as I understand is you've deployed sensors basically all over the Internet all at an important pops yeah and a point in public clouds and important enterprises etc so that you now have a view of what's going on it I can have that view inside my enterprise by leveraging your infrastructures that accurate correct and so this is where the notion of being able to set up this sort of data collection environment is really difficult and so we have created all of this over years so enterprise companies consumer companies they can leverage this infrastructure to get instant results so there's zero implementation in what right but the key to that is also understanding the internet itself and so this is where a research background comes in play because we studied we did years of research on actually modeling the Internet so we know what strategic locations to put these probes that to give good coverage we know how to fill the gaps and so it's not just a numbers game it's how you deploy them where you deploy them and knowing that connectivity we've created this massive infrastructure now that can give you eyes on the internet and we leverage all of their data together so if let's say hypothetically you know AT&T has an issue that same issue is impacting multiple customers through all our different measurements so it's like ways if you're using ways to get from point A to point B if Waze was just used by your family members and nobody else it would give you completely useless information values in that collective insight right and then now you also will start to be able to leverage ml and AI and you know having all that data and apply just more machine learning to it to even better get in get out in front of problems I imagine as much as as is to be able to identify so that's a really interesting point right so the first thing we have to tackle is making a complex data set really accessible and so we have a lot of focus into essentially getting insights out of it using techniques that are smarter than the brute-force techniques you get insights out and then present it in manners that it's accessible and digestible and then as we look into the next stages we're going to bring more and more things like learning and so on to take it even further right it's funny the accessible and digestible piece I was just had a presentation the other day and there was a woman from a CSO at a big bank and she talked about you know the problem of false positives and in in early days I mean their biggest issues was just too much data coming in from too many sensors and and too many false positives to basically bury people so they didn't have time to actually service the things that are a priority so you know a nice presentation of a whole lot of data makes a big difference to make it action it is absolutely true and now that the example I'll give you is oftentimes when you think about companies that operate with a strong network core like we do they're in the weeds right which is important but what is really important is tying that intelligence to business impact and so the entire product portfolio we've built it's all about business impact user experience and then going into connecting the dots or the network side so we've seen some really interesting events and as much as we know the internet every day I wake up and I see something that surprises me right we've had customers that have done migrations to cloud that have gone horribly wrong right so we the latest when I was troubleshooting with the customer was where we saw they migrated from there on from data center to Amazon and the user experience was 10x worse than what it was on their own data of the app once they moved to Amazon okay and what had happened there was the whole migration to Amazon included the smart sort of CDN where they were fronting your traffic at local sites but the traffic was going all over the place so from if a user was in London instead of going to the London instance of Amazon they were going to Atlanta or they were going to Los Angeles and so the whole migration created a worse user experience and you don't have that lens because you don't see that in a net portion of that right that's why we like we caught it instantly and we were able to showcase that hey this is actually a really bad migration and it's not that Amazon is bad it's just it's been implemented incorrectly right so yeah fix these things and those are all configurations all Connecticut which is so very easy all the issues you hear about with with Amazon often go back to miss configuration miss settings suboptimal leaving something open so to have that visibility makes a huge impact and it's more challenging because you're trying to configure different components of this environment right so you have a cloud component you have the Internet component your own network you have your own firewalls and you used to have this closed environment now it's hybrid it involves multiple parties multiple skill sets so a lot of things can really go wrong I think I think you guys you guys crystallized very cleanly is kind of the inside out and outside in approach both you know a as as a service consumer yeah right I'm using Salesforce I'm using maybe s3 I'm using these things that I need and I want to focus on that and I want to have a good experience I want my people to be able to get on their Salesforce account and book business but but don't forget the other way right because as people are experiencing my service that might be connecting through and aggregating many other services along the way you know I got to make sure my customer experience is big and you guys kind of separate those two things out and really make sure people are focusing on both of them correct and it's the same technology but you can use that for your production services which are revenue generating or you can use that for your employee productivity the visibility that you provide is is across a common stack but on the production side for example because of the way the internet works right your job is not just to ensure a great performance in user experience your job is also to make sure that people are actually reaching your site and so we've seen several instances where because of the way internet works somebody else could announce that their google.com and they could suck a bunch of traffic from the internet and this happens quite routinely in the notion of what is now known as DP hijacks or sometimes DNS hijacks and the the one that I remember very well is when there was the small ISP in Nigeria that announced the identity of the address block for Google and that was picked up by China Telecom which was picked up by a Russian telco and now you have Russia China and Nigeria in the path for traffic to Google which is actually not even going to Google's right those kinds of things are very possible because of the way the internet how fast those things kind of rise up and then get identified and then get shut off is this hours days weeks in this kind of example so it really depends because if you are let's say you were Google in this situation right you're not seeing a denial of service attack to your data centers in fact you're just not seeing traffic running in because somebody else is taking it away right it's like identity theft right like I somebody takes your identity you wouldn't get a mail in your inbox saying hey your identity has been taken back so easy you have to find it some other way and usually it's the signal by the time you realize that your identity has been stolen you have a nightmare ahead of you alright so you got some specific news a great great conversation you know it's super insightful to talk to people that are in the weeds of how all the stuff works but today you have a new a new announcement some new and new offering so tell us about what's going on so we have a couple of announcements today and coming back to this notion of the cloud being a new data center the internet your new network right two things were announcing today is one we're announcing our second version of the cloud then benchmark performance comparison and what this is about is really helping people understand the nuances the performance difference is the architecture differences between Amazon Google as your IBM cloud and Alibaba cloud so as you make decisions you actually understand what is the right solution for me from a performance architecture standpoint so that's one it's a fascinating report we found some really interesting findings that surprised us as well and so we're releasing that we're also touching on the internet component by releasing a new product which we call as internet insights and that is giving you the power to actually look at the internet more holistically like you own the entire internet so that is really something we're all excited about because it's the first time that somebody can actually see the Internet see all these connections see what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely owned the environment so are people using information like that to dynamically you know kind of reroute the way that they handle their traffic or is it more just kind of a general health you know kind of health overview you know how much of it do I have control over how much should I have control over and how much of I just need to know what's going on so yeah so it just me great question so the the best way I can answer that is what I heard CIO say in a CIO forum we were presenting at where they were a customer it's a large financial services customer and somebody asked the CIO what was the value of thousand I wasn't the way he explained it which was really fascinating was phase one of thousand eyes when we started using it was getting rid of technical debt because we would keep identifying issues which we could fix but we could fix the underlying root cause so it doesn't happen again and that just cleared the technical debt that we had made our environment much better and then we started to optimize the environments to just get better get more proactive so that's a good way to think about it when you think about our customers most of the times they're trying to just not have their hair on fire right that's the first step right once we can help them with that then they go on to tuning optimizing and so on but knowing what is going on is really important for example if you're providing a.com sir is like cube the cube comm right it's its life and you're providing it from your data center here you have two up streams like AT&T and Verizon and Verizon is having issues you can turn off that connection and let all your customers back live having a full experience if you know that's the issues right right the remediation is actually quite quite a few times it's very straightforward if you know what you're trying to solve right so do you think on the internet insights this is going to be used just more for better remediation or do you think it's it's kind of a step forward and getting a little bit more proactive and a little bit more prescriptive and getting out ahead of the issues or or can you because these things are kind of ephemeral and come and go so I think it's all of the about right so one the things that the internet insights will help you is with planning because as you expand into new geo so if you're a company that's launching a service in a new market right that immediately gives you a landscape of who do you connect with where do you host right as now you can actually visualize the entire network how do you reach your customer base the best right so that's the planning aspect and if you plan right you would actually reduce a lot of the trouble that you see so we had this customer of ours that was deploying Estevan Software Defined one in there a she offices and they used thousand eyes to evaluate two different ISPs that they were looking at one of them had this massive time-of-day congestion so every time every day at nine o'clock the latency would get doubled because of congestion it's common in Asia the other did not have time of day congestion and with that view they could implement the entire Estevan on the ice pea that actually worked well for them so planning is important part of this and then the other aspect of this is the thing that folks often don't realize is Internet is not static it's constantly changing so you know AT&T might connect to Verizon this way it connects it differently it connects to somebody else and so having that live map as you're troubleshooting customer experience issues so let's say you have customers from China that are having a ton of issues all of a sudden or you see a drop of traffic from China now you can relate that information of where these customers are coming from with our view of the health of the Chinese Internet and which specific ISPs are having issues so that's the kind of information merger that simply doesn't happen today right promote is a fascinating discussion and we could go on and on and on but unfortunately do not have all day but I really like what you guys are doing the other thing I just want to close on which which I thought was really interesting is you know a lot of talk about digital transformation we always talk about digital transformation everybody wants the digital transfer eyes it but you really boiled it down into really three create three critical places that you guys play the digital experience in terms of what what the customers experience you know getting to cloud everybody wants to get to cloud someone can argue how much and what percentage but everybody's going to cloud and then as you said in this last example the MA when as you connect all these remote sites and you guys have a play in all of those places so whatever you thought about in 2010 that worked out pretty well thank you and we had a really strong vision but kudos to the team that we have in place that has stretched it and really made the most out of that so excited good job and thanks for for stopping by sharing the story thank you for hosting always a fun to be here absolutely all right well he's mo and I'm Jeff you're watching the cube when our power out the studio's having a cute conversation thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto offices for a CUBE Conversation today. We're going to talk about an interesting topic. You know as all these applications get more complex and they're all Internet based. I'm sure you know that feeling when you're at home and you lose your Internet power you pretty much can't do much of anything. So what can we do about that? Who are some of the companies that are working on this problem? We're real excited to have an innovator in this space from ThousandEyes. She's Archana Kesavan, Director of Product Marketing for ThousandEyes, welcome. >> Archana: Thank you Jeff, it's good to be here. >> Absolutely, so this is crazy. Give us kind of the run-down on ThousandEyes and what you do and then we'll jump into it. >> Sure, so ThousandEyes is a company that provides and enables enterprises. Gives them visibility into how the Internet is impacting end-user experience, right? When you think of it, of what users are, what this user experience is, it could be twofold. One is if you're an enterprise providing a digital service then they're your customers, right? So that customer experience we provide visibility into that. Then also if you're an enterprise moving towards using cloud applications or SaaS applications, employees using those applications, we provide visibility into that space as well. Really the thought and the idea behind ThousandEyes and the reason we are here is as enterprises are moving to the cloud and relying on this Internet-based delivery infrastructure, they're are starting to lose visibility into their critical customer-facing and employee-facing applications. What ThousandEyes does is it gives them back that control by giving them that visibility into that environment. >> Okay so then just to be clear because there's a ton of kind of monitoring applications, we use the Sumo Logic, we do Splunk. So there's a lot of things around operations where they're monitoring these apps, and they're super complex apps. But your guys main focus if I understand, is the network. The network piece and the transportation of that app across the wire. >> Right, let me unpack that and explain with an example, right. Let's think you're an enterprise that's moving towards Office 365 and you have a global workforce, right? Your users are connecting report and your VP of sales happens to connect from a Starbucks or a Philz because we're in Palo Alto. Can't download emails, can't get to emails. What's the first step this person or this employee's going to take is call corporate IT and say hey, I can't get to my emails. Now it's up the the corporate IT team to go and troubleshoot that scenario, right? Because if you can't get to your emails or you can't get to these collaboration apps today it's productivity down the hill. The IT team now starts troubleshooting it and where do they start? Is it the WiFi at the Philz that's a problem? Is it Microsoft that's a problem because which I can't get to my email. Or is it that access in between which is the Internet, right? How do you get from a Philz all the way to Office 365 is through that Internet transport. So where we come in is irrespective of the application or even the network, right, we've very agnostic to it. And we combine application performance all the way to the network performance. We take it one step further and we see how the Internet is impacting the services throughout. Because what we see is our customers be that in enterprises consuming SaaS, or enterprises delivering these SaaS services, the production teams and the corporate IT teams they feel the brunt of this every day. They have people calling and say hey, I can't get to this, I can't get to that application. They have their own customers complaining that something's wrong. Unfortunately in this world of the Internet and the cloud, while it's enabled convenience and flexibility they've traded in that for control and visibility. So if you again go back to this Office 365 example that I was just talking about, the enterprise does not own the WiFi in force. It does not own the Internet. Not one entity owns the Internet. It doesn't own Office 365. So monitoring tools that have existed and that have been in place to understand issues within the four walls of an enterprise flatline when it comes to Internet-based delivery and connectivity, which is where we come in. >> What about VPNs, because isn't kind of the purpose of a VPN on one hand is to be secure 'cause Lord knows who's sniffing on the Philz WiFi. But does that not put you into kind of a higher grade Internet line back to the server to get to my email? >> Archana: Is anybody using VPN these days? >> I hear the ads all the time on the radio. (laughing) I don't know, that's a good question. You guys are sitting on there, are people not using VPN? Does VPN solve their problem? Or is it something that's in the backside that regardless of whether you're using VPN or not these are kind of back hall issues that have to get worked out? >> So VPN, if you think about it, it's kind of an encapsulation over the underlying network. You still have to move packets through this network. So you might be connecting through a VPN, but it's the underlying, if you're going through the Internet than that can result in performance degradation, too. So irrespective of these techniques that enable, or so-called enable, performance and make performance better, you still need to know how the transport's behaving and how it's influencing performance just because you don't control it. >> And as I understand, the way you guys are doing this is you have a lot, a lot, a lot of monitoring points all over the place, hence ThousandEyes. Tell us a little bit about kind of how that works, what's the network? How has that been growing over time? >> We've been growing our infrastructure, monitoring infrastructure, over the last few years. The way ThousandEyes gathers its data which you know all the way from the application layer to the network, kind of then looking at Internet performance is our fleet of agents are distributed, are pre-deployed in about 185 cities around the world. We call them Cloud Agents. Now these agents are actively monitoring the services that might be of interest to an enterprise. You can also take a form of these agents and enterprises can deploy them within their own branch offices and their data centers. You can also use them in cloud providers. We actually have agents pre-deployed in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba too, which we recently announced. You can use these agents to monitor applications. You can use these agents to monitor your API endpoints which is another growing area that we see. So, fleet of our agents distributed. You can use that, a combination of agents that we own and pre-deployed along with agents that enterprises would like to put in their own infrastructure. >> Right, so you've got the ones already out there, you've got the ones in the clouds and then I can put some additional ones into my remote offices or places that are of interest to me. So if there's an issue because you said for tech support when the person can't get into email there's a whole host of potential things it could be, right? Office 365 could be down, there's all kinds of things. How does your application communicate to this poor person on the end of this service call that hey, it's a network issue between these two points? Or maybe it's a big exchange that's getting attacked like happened on the East Coast a couple of years ago. How did they work that into their triage so they know hey, we've been able to kind of identify that this is the issue not one of the other 47 things that's impacting that application? >> Right so we are a SaaS-based product. Our uniqueness and our secret sauce is how we look at all of these different layers that affect performance and we correlate them, visually correlate them in a time sequence. We present it to the corporate IT person or a production IT person who is actually triaging this issue. We help them very quickly pinpoint. It's very visual there. You can see how application performance ebbs and flows. You can look at what does a network pack look like? If I'm seeing an outage of the Internet service provider we're going to call that out. Obviously all of this is tied in with an alerting system which the platform enables as well. I think one of the most interesting changes that's happening in the industry is in the past when you found an issue, you could fix an issue because the chances are you owned that entire environment, right? It was a router that failed or a switch was dropping packets. You owned that switch, you owned that router. You could go and make changes to it. But in today's Internet-dependent and cloud-heavy environment, it's more about having the right evidence so you can escalate it to the right person. So knowing which neck to choke is absolutely critical in this distributed environment that enterprises are losing control over slowly. >> So the people start to make active changes in the way they route their traffic based on what they find? Is there either consistent good or consistent bad behavior in certain networks or certain public clouds that you can get a better latency performance by switching that? >> Sure, we've seen cases where usually enterprises have, let's take an example of an Internet service provider having an outage. Usually enterprises for redundancy they have two upstream providers, for instance, and they're probably load balancing traffic equally across these providers. Once ThousandEyes detects that one provider is completely down, could be a routing issue, could be a router failed within their environment. Once we alert them it's up to the enterprise to make that decision saying hey, we want to bypass this route, right? And we've seen that happen in a lot of cases. They do bypass routes if it's possible. It also depends on the severity of the issue, how long the issue lasts and things like that. But that definitely happens. >> You guys talk about a concept called Internet-aware Synthetic. What does that mean? >> Synthetics, it's interesting as a term. What it really means is trying to mimic something that's natural. Just the term synthetics in layman's language, right? Synthetic monitoring is really just that. While you're trying to understand application performance or how a website performs, synthetic monitoring replicates how a user would interact with that application. You replicate those steps and you periodically repeat them over time. Let's take an example. You're shopping online, you're going to Amazon.com. You're searching for whatever it is you're searching for. You get a list of results. You are interested in one item, you look at a review, you seem happy, you move it to your checkout, pay and move on, right? Those sequence of steps is what synthetic monitoring can actually craft. We keep executing those steps periodically so you can understand if there's any degradation of performance, has it slipped from baseline? So IT operations team can use that to understand if there's any change that's happening or if there is a particular area in the world where users are starting to see degradation and so on. The nice thing about synthetics is it's proactive. There's a lot of monitoring techniques out there that looks at real user interaction with the website. And to typically do that you need to insert a piece of code within the application itself that tracks that user's activity. That's great information. You want to see what your users are really doing and engaging with your website. That's very useful but it fundamentally doesn't tell you if performance is completely degraded or the checkout button's not working, for instance. That's where synthetic comes in. >> So is that the primary way that you maintain kind of this testing of the health of the network? Or are you using more of a passive, waiting for something to be slow and then running something like the synthetics to try to figure out where it is? >> The recommendation is to keep synthetics running constantly because you don't want something to slow down and then react. That's a very reactive approach. Really in today's digital economy you don't want an outage to last too long because customer loyalty is fleeting. You don't want even 10 seconds of wait time, right? The way I see it is every time I try to find a cab through Uber, if Uber makes me wait 30 seconds I'm moving on to Lyft. I don't have the patience to wait that long. You don't want outages to prolong so you definitely don't want to understand performance after they have degraded, right? So synthetics recommendation is to continuously monitor so you can find out what's happening and if there's any drift from required baselines. >> Okay and then are you running that concurrently across a number of geographies for the same customer? Because if this same shopper's sitting in Seattle versus if that same shopper is sitting in Mexico City or they're sitting in London are you running that concurrently to make sure that you're checking all the different potential hiccups? >> Our agents, because they are so pervasive across the globe you can pick an agent in one of those 185 cities and you can execute those same sequence of steps over time to actually run that. Now synthetics as a technology is not new. It really predates the cloud. The action of mimicking a user journey through a website, that really predates the cloud which is why it's fundamentally broken when it comes to these cloud and Internet-heavy environments. What we introduce, ThousandEyes Internet-aware Synthetics tries to take this age-old technique and tie that together with how the network and how the underlying Internet performs. So when you're looking at performance you're not looking at it in a silo. Because that's the other thing we hear all the time from our customers. Like the application team has blinders on. They're wanting to see if anything's gone wrong at the application. The network team has its own blinders on wanting to see if anything's gone wrong with the network, right? And usually what's happening is if they figure out it's not an application issue then they punt it over to the network team. The network team says ah, not my problem, you take care of it. So there's this constant finger-pointing that happens in today's environment. This pain has really gotten worse in the era of the cloud and Internet-based deliveries because guess what? Your application is first of all split into these microservices. The number of API calls that you are making has gone up, right? And all of these components don't sit in the same place. You're probably running into a hybrid infrastructure environment where some pieces of your code resides in your data center, the other may be in the cloud. Or you're making API calls which is resulting in a multi-cloud scenario. And what is it that's connecting all of these different environments is the actual network and the Internet. So understanding just hey, my app is down, is not good enough any more. You need to know my app is down, it's down because the Internet is causing problems for instance, right? So what ThousandEyes Internet-aware or network-aware Synthetics does is we look at performance right from the application stage, look at all those transactions see if they are run correctly or not. We tie them into how the underlying network is performing. And hey, if the Internet is causing issues we tie that into in a single correlated pin. So you're looking at one single platform and you're able to pinpoint quickly. You gather the evidence to escalate it to the right person. And at the same time you are bringing the application and the network teams together so it's more collaboration. It's not finger-pointing. Then that's what we really want to enable and what most of our customers actually do with ThousandEyes. >> Before I let you know I want to dig into the Alibaba announcement a little bit more. China is a special challenge on the Internet space. We've done some work over there and none of the Google services work and we use a lot of Google services. How did that come about? Is this a new growing area for you? I would presume there's all kinds of demand from the customers to try to get a little bit deeper penetration into that marketplace. >> China definitely is an interesting space. I mean because of the great firewall and all of the techniques China implements, performance is known to be relatively suboptimal in that region. Fortunately or unfortunately it's the fastest growing market, too. So enterprises want to invest in China. We're seeing a trend where they are moving their services to Ali Cloud. What does that mean for enterprises? You need to monitor that environment, too. Which means you want to understand how performances from Ali Cloud to Ali Cloud and so on. What we did recently is we increase our vantage points within Ali Cloud. Now you can look at user experience for users connecting from all around the world into Ali Cloud. You can look at API performance going from Ali Cloud to GCP or AWS, right? I think the key point to remember is that not just in China, but across the world not all cloud providers are created equal. We found some very interesting data for traffic between Beijing and Singapore, Ali Cloud performed relatively better, no surprises there. But AWS has relatively high performance. Same user from Beijing to AWS's data center in Singapore, they had a very circuitous route to get to Singapore. They were going from China to Tokyo to Singapore. During peak times, eight a.m. to eight p.m. Beijing time there was a lot of fluctuation showing some kind of congestion in the network, right? Ali Cloud we didn't see that. Understanding cloud provider performance is absolutely critical. What we do is our vantage points enable enterprises to do that. One of the initiatives that ThousandEyes we've been doing for a couple of years now is do a comparison of all these providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and Ali Cloud now. Last year we had our first report, it's called a Public Cloud Performance Benchmark report that compared AWS, GCP, and Azure. This year we're expanding it to Ali Cloud as well. So that's launching in November so it's going to be interesting to see. >> Jeff: A lot of people will want to see that one. >> Yes, it's going to be interesting to see who performed better and where. It's always good information. >> Jeff: I was going to ask you if you could share, but I didn't want you to give away any secrets. But I guess we'll have to wait 'til the report comes out. >> Yes, mid-November it's going to be there. >> All right Archana, we'll look forward to that. I'm sure it will be more variable than what most people expect. >> Archana: We'll see. Thanks for having me, Jeff. >> Thanks you very much. All right, she's Archana, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE Studios for another CUBE conversation where we go in depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology. I'm Peter Burris and today we're going to be talking about some of the challenges enterprises face as they try to do a better job of gaining visibility into their user-oriented, digital experience. Now what do we mean by that? We mean basically as a company moves to a digital business, digital engagement model, they increasingly are mediating their conversations with their customers through digital means. And if you don't have visibility into how that's going, you're going to end up with unhappy customers. Now to have that conversation, you've got Alex Henthorn-Iwane VP of product marketing from ThousandEyes. Alex, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Peter. >> Let's start by saying a little bit about ThousandEyes. What is ThousandEyes ? >> So ThousandEyes is a company that delivers visibility into digital experiences that are running over the internet as well as your own networks, of course. And the whole point of that is that when you move to the cloud enter these sort of cloud-based ecosystems that everybody's using to deliver digital, you are losing a lot of control. You no longer own the software and the infrastructure and the networks that you are connecting over, the users are connecting over. When you lose that control, you really, really need the visibility so that you can optimize and then you can also fix issues when they happen because they do happen. So that's really what we deliver. We deliver that visibility. >> So that's a big promise, but let's focus in on kind of the more proximate thing. You guys have just delivered a report that looks specifically at digital experience. What is the problem that the report's addressing? >> Right, so the problem that we are trying to address with this report, this digital experience performance benchmark report that we've released is one of trying to take away the subjectivity around performance management because when you're dealing with the internet, right, it's kind of a black box. What constitutes the minimum bar of good? Where should you be at minimally? And then, how are you doing competitively? How do you compare with the top folks in your peer group as an industry. That's the thing we wanted to address with this particular report. >> So if I think about, then, the challenges the company's facing, there are so many moving parts. You think you're getting a single service, but there are so many moving parts even within that service or even within that application that you want to be able to compartmentalize and break it down and start to isolate some of the issues will that be technology or service supply issue. So what are some of they key considerations that are contributing to say, better or worse digital experience? >> Well, the way we looked at this just to kind of get a little context and to answer your question is we thought well, let's look at top 20 websites, consumer websites across retail, media and entertainment and travel and hospitalities. So 60 in all. And then, let's measure them as how users will experience them and to the point of providers, pretty much all of them rely on a content delivery network, a CDN provider. There's a variety of them obviously in the market and so what doing is we're saying let's measure when we go from about 36 cities with a browser, you know, this is all automated obviously. >> Right, right. >> Using our monitor agency- >> You're simulating users. >> Simulating users. Let's go and measure what that experience is and let's tease out some of the performance factors and look at those things 'cause those are the kind of things that web operations teams and digital operations teams are really concerned with. That stuff is the foundation that you have to build from a performance point of view so that all the other subjective kind of things that you build into your website experience really have a time budget to work in. >> So those performance factors are kind of those foundational elements that have higher level impacts on a variety of other application characteristics. What are some of the key performance factors that you identified as being important? >> So we looked at a few different metrics that you can measure. One of the most foundational ones that people forget about a lot is DNS. That's the process when you type in Urls, something has to convert that into a numeric kind of address that internet can actually get to. >> Right. >> So that's the DNS look up, so that's one piece. A second piece is what's the network's speed or latency, right, of from a user where a user's sits to that server that's caching your content? You know, that CDN provider server. So we looked at that on a round trip basis. The reason we looked at that just by the way is that when you first interact with a website, before you get the first byte of content delivered, you have to take 11 one way trips across the wire, which means the internet. So that network time is important. So with DNS network. Then, what we did is look beyond that to the point the time it takes to deliver that first byte that's also called HTTP response time and the to get somewhat of an experiencial lens, we took one more measurement which is the page load time. Page load time is essentially the time it takes to load the content into the browser and it's starting to render. So that's something a little bit more experiential, but it's kind of like there's that stack of performance metrics. >> So set up the conversation or find who you're conversing with, set up the conversation and then, get that first bit of information back, but the page load is going to be significantly subjective because different pages are different sizes, but that's kind of what you set up these benchmarks to do. >> Right. >> Find the site, set up the session, and then get that first byte back. So what kinds of numbers are you suggesting that people start to benchmark themselves against? >> So one of the things that we found when we talked with customers is this sense of we don't know what minimum bar of good is. So what we decided to do is find what we're calling an internet performance bar and what we did is said, let's look at the averages, the median, you know, sort of numbers and we took 300 plus million unique measurements in this study and we looked at things like well, what correlates to delivering well in terms of the top end, you know, that page load, the HTTP response time. So we said all right, based on that, we decided that for those, for three of these metrics, we could define what thought is a minimum bar of good in the U.S. market, right, because go outside of the U.S. to other geographies, things could differ a lot and they do. And basically what we said is all right, for DNS we should be at 25 milliseconds response time >> Let me write these down. 25 milliseconds for DNS >> 25 milliseconds for DNS. 15 milliseconds, round trip latency, >> For the network. >> For form the user to the CDN edge server and then 350 milliseconds to deliver that first byte. That's HTTP response time. So 25, 15, and 350 milliseconds and what we find is that if you're delivering at that level in the U.S. market, you're in pretty good shape generally speaking when you compare to those top 60 websites and that would correlate pretty well to being able to deliver a good page load time. >> So if the page load time was equal or the amount of data being loaded on the page was equal, those would be the things that ultimately determine how fast or what the digital experience of the user was. >> Right, exactly. They build the foundation. A strong foundation. Now, on top of that, we also, of course, looked 20 websites for each of these sort of vertical industries >> Got it. >> And what we did is then charted out scatter plots and things like that so you can see, all right well, where are there any patterns there that are helpful for me as a retailer? E-commerce provider for example, to say well, you know, for example, we found that there were two major clusters for performance and retail in terms of HTTP response time. One cluster was 300 milliseconds or better and one cluster was sort of 4 to 500 milliseconds and when we share this with retailers, of course they say, "I know which one I wannna be in. I want to be in the faster level, right?" But just knowing that is helpful to say because let's say 350 milliseconds is minimum bar of good internet performance bar, but if you said hey, I'm looking at the cohort that I'm competing against and a bunch of them are doing better than that maybe even significantly better than that. That helps me, between those two things, make good investment decisions. >> But to go back to the notion of budget, what that basically means is that if I am at a disadvantage on these foundational metrics, my budget for the complexity and experience value that I can put into my digital assets is reduced. >> Right, because digital experience runs on a clock, right? Human, you know, visual sort of recognition is in the it's like 13, 14 milliseconds, but human response time to visual stimulus about 250 milliseconds roughly. >> Right. >> Right, So that's what happens in that sort of customer experience with all the content and, you know, digital assets. So what you're doing is building a strong time budget to deliver all the rest of it. >> Right, so now, let's talk a little bit about then what would people do with this information because the report articulates very nicely the nature of the problem, provides benchmarks that people can actually use. >> Right. >> Provides insight into how they can benchmark themselves against generalities, but also specific industries and as you said cohorts, but one of the things that you guys do is you guys use this basic tool for generating visibility to capture data that looks at other things as well, cloud, DNS look-ups, etc. and I've noticed that you actually can start mapping out topologies >> Right. >> regarding how traffic if moving in this end-to-end world. How does a customer use that information to get themselves inside the good cohort group or improve their performance relative to a competitor? >> So, there's a couple of things that you can do with that kind of data. One is to look at it and decide based on the benchmarks and your performance and the kind of topology insights we provide which is exactly how all this stuff connects over the internet. There's two things. One is you can say, look, if I'm not meeting at the bar in a market that I care about, I'm going to go to my provider and hold him accountable to do better because I know that this is achievable. All right, so that's one thing. I may make make some network architecture decisions. Well maybe there's a broadband provider that runs a little slower, maybe I'll get a private connection to them, so I, my user experience runs well. But the third thing is operationally, it's the internet. Things go wrong sometimes. Providers make mistakes. >> No. (laughs) >> And the thing is, the problem is in a cloud, there's so many factors, it's really hard without good visibility, without that topology view to know even who to call. So with the data we provide you operationally, you can now go and hold the provider, the right kind of provider, accountable to fix a problem or optimize a performance when things, you know, things go wrong. >> But because your visibility, it's not just the right provider. It's actually then saying and this is what I would like you to do. >> Right, exactly because you can share very rich information with them so they can take action. I mean, if you'd to put yourself in the shoes of the provider, they probably get blamed a lot of the times for things that really aren't their fault. So what do they do? They provide the service, they create a defensive mechanism of 12 layers of support and there's a lot of plausible deniability there, right? Because they don't want to be chasing things that aren't actually their problem. If you give them the kind of visibility that we provide with all this rich data, deep views into the internet, well one, you're going to lower the defenses 'cause they have got something to work with. Two, they're actually going to have enough information to do something about it and that's how you actually manage the internet in a sense. You manage it through your providers, but you have to have good information for them. >> So I think it was Sigh Sims, the old, the guy who sold clothing to men for many years said that an informed customer is, or a knowledgeable customer is the best customer. >> Right. >> And so, what you're really trying to do is to, with this report, establish what the problem is, establish this benchmark so people should be pointing to, give them the opportunity, give your customers the opportunity to compare themselves where comparisons are meaningful, but then, very importantly, use that knowledge of their operations to become a more informed purchaser of services or architect of their own assets. >> Have I got that right? >> Yeah, exactly because if you are able to partner effectively with all those providers and, I mean, in an e-commerce setting, I thing you're probably dealing with tens, dozens of different third party service providers. >> Sure. >> Just, you know, all the API content you're sucking in plus all the ISPs, CDNs, everything else. It's a lot, it's a big ecosystem. If you can partner effectively, you're just going to do a better job. You're going to get better service, you're going to get better outcomes, and ultimately deliver better experience which is great for the top and bottom line. >> Absolutely and so it's really a way of tying the business outcome of the improved service, the ability to increase or the value of the service by altering the way you use your time budget. >> Right. >> And then using that as a basis for establishing very high quality operations both inside your own shop, but also in the connections that you have these third party providers. >> Absolutely, yes. So the whole point of our research generally, we have multiple of these reports is provide that context so that when you use that kind of data that we provide for you, you have the bigger picture in mind. You know what's normal, what's not. And so that you know that you're making a really reasonable request to hold that provider accountable to a certain level of performance for example. >> All right. So what's next? >> So, you know, we have a, we have a few different reports that we have done in the past. We did public cloud network performance report, we did a global DNS report- >> Oh, by the way, I looked at that one and it was really interesting. >> There's some fascinating findings in all these things. You know, we've got some other research planned for this year. We're looking at things like maybe, looking to China for example. Performance in China. But also we'll be refreshing these reports we did last year. We're going to at least go on an annual refresh for them so we're trying to build out a body of research over time that compliments obviously all the product and solution things the we do. That, and we know that from talking to customers they really appreciate that they can look at something a little bit bigger lens. >> But it all starts with this premise of, look this is a really important problem, let's segment this into different classes or domains. So you have the benchmark, so you know what constitutes good versus bad. >> And then use the data from tools and what not visibility tools and what not to then improve your set of operational capabilities. >> Absolutely. >> Excellent. Alex Hawthorn-Iwane, Vice President of Product Marketing at ThousandEyes, thanks very much for being on theCUBE! >> Thanks very much for having me. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris, until next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's the Cube! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone and we're live here at Cisco Live, 2019 in Europe. It's the Cube's three days of wall-to-wall coverage, day two. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Vellante co-hosting with me as well as Stu Miniman who's been in and out on interviews. Our next guest is Alex Henthorn-Iwane, vice president of marketing for company Thousand Eyes. welcome back to the cube, welcome to the show. >> Thanks great to be here. >> So talk about what you guys do first, you guys do a very interesting business, a rapidly growing business. What is Thousand Eyes, what do you guys do, What's your product, who is your customer? >> OK, so the vision of thousand eyes was really to help organizations deal with all the connected experiences that they have to deliver. So we're giving visibility into those connected experiences but not just how there, you know if they're working or not but all the external dependencies that they rely on. So we developed a ton of expertise on how the internet works how the networks work, how routing works and all that. And we can give that insight so that all the things that IT now no longer controls and owns, but has to own the outcome for, we're giving that visibility. >> And when you guys sell a Saas Solutions, the software, what's the product? >> Yeah >> Who's the buyer? >> So we're Saas Platform and the way that we gather this data is we're primarily doing active monitoring at a few different layers; so we're monitoring the app layer things like HTTP and page loads and things like that you would think of that as synthetics classically but we've paired that with some patented ways of understanding how everything connects from a user out in the internet or from a branch office or from a data-center out to somewhere else typically across the internet all those networks the cloud networks going through things like Z-scaler all those complex pieces that again you don't control. We can trace all that and then map it down even to internet routing. One other kind of cool thing that we added to all that we do that on an agent basis so we have agents around the world that you can put them in your data-centers your VPC's and your branches. >> And the value proposition is what; visibility in the patterns; optimization; what's the outcome for the customer? >> The outcome is ultimately that we're going to help IT deliver the digital experiences for their employees for their customers that could be e-commerce, e-banking, it could be open banking or PSD2 here in Europe and UK. >> So full knowledge of what's going on >> Right >> But the name talks to that >> Yeah >> It talks to the problem you're solving >> Right, and it's really, the focus is and our specialty is all the external things, right. You've always had a lot of data, maybe too much data on the stuff that you did own, right, in IT. Okay, you could collect packets and flows and device status and all that sort of this and sort of, the challenge was always to know what does that mean, but whether or not that's perfect it exsited, but you simply can't get that from outside, you've got your four walls >> Yeah >> So you just have this big drop off in visibility once you get to the edge of your data-center etcetera >> Now, lets talk about the dynamics in IT; we were talking before we came on camera here about ya know, our lives in IT and going back and look at the history and how it's changed but there are new realities now >> Right >> Certainly Cisco here talking about intent based network ACI anywhere, Hyperflex anywhere, the ecosystem is growing the worlds changed. >> Right >> Security challenges, IOT, the whole things completely going high scale, more complexity. >> Right, Yeah. >> IT? What's the impact to IT? What's the structural change of IT from your prospective? >> Well, the way we see it what's happening with IT is the move from owning and controlling all the stuff, you know and managing that granting access to that. To a world where you really don't own a lot of the stuff anymore. You don't own the software, you don't own the networks. You don't own the infrastructure increasingly. Right? So how do you operate in that role? Changes. What the role of IT is in that role, really changes. And then out of that comes a big question. How does IT retain relevance? In that role? And a lot of that role is shifting away from being the proprietor, to being more of like a manager of an ecosystem. Right? And you need data to do that. So I think that's a really big step. >> So this is now, an actual job description kind of thing? >> Yeah. The roles and make up of the personnel in IT is changing. Because of the SAAS cloud, Hybrid cloud, Multi cloud? >> Right. It's more of like a product management role, than it is the classic operations role. You know? And we observed some really big changes in just operations. So, when you own all the stuff you can find a fix. Right? That's a classic statement of IT operations. But when all the stuff is outside, You can't fix it directly. So you go to what we call an evidence in escalation. You have to actually persuade someone else to fix it for you And if you can't persuade them, you don't have governance you don't have accountability and you don't have the outcome that you're supposed to deliver. >> So the infrastructure is to serve it's players; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, more SAAS All of this is taking data away from your control? >> Right >> And obviously network visibility? >> Sure >> So how are you guys dealing with that? What are some of the nuances of whether it's SAAS, or different infrastructures of service providers? >> And I would add to that SUN, Shift to the internet I would add to that just the increasing number of digital experiences that companies offer to customers. Right? >> Right. So the way that we deal with that is, that we believe that you need a highly correlated way of understanding things. Because at the top layer, if the outcome that IT is supposed to deliver is a digital experience. Right? The customers at the center now, not the infrastructure. Right? So I have to start with experience. So we need to look at, how is the app preforming? How is it delivering to that end user? And now you have to think about it from a persona basis. To who? Where? Right? So that's why we have all these agents floating around the world in different cities. Because if you're offering a let's say e-banking portal, and your surveying 100 cities as markets. You need to see from those cities, right? You also then need to be able to understand the why. When something is not working well, whose fault is it? Right? Is it us? >> Its the network guys! (laughing) >> What you don't to get is the everlasting war room circular firing squad kind of scenario. Where nobody actually knows, right? This is what happens, because the issue is that often times you suspect its not you. Maybe. Right? That search for innocents. >> Yeah. >> But again that's not enough because, the whole point is to deliver the experience. So, now who could it be? Say you're offering e-banking or e-commerce. Is it your CDM provider? Is it that your DMS manage provider is not responsive? Or somethings down? Are you under a D DOS attack? Or some of your ecosystem is. Is one of your back end providers, like your Braintree payments not working right. Right? There is so many pieces, is there an ISP in the middle there? That's being effected? >> There's so many moving parts now. >> If from each persona or location just to get to 1 URL. Could be traversing several ISP networks. Dozens of HOPS across the internet. How on earth are you supposed to isolate, and go an even find who to ask for help? That's a really sticky problem. >> So this will expose all those external credits? >> So we expose all those things. We expose all these multiple layers, and we have some patenting correlation, visual correlation. So you can say alright I see a drop in the responsiveness of a critical internal application or of .. I mean, we never have. Butt lets say like if SAAS like sails course, or something like that. And it may not be their fault by the way, its not them being a problem. But the users having a problem. So you see this drop and say well where's it happening? You can now say is it a network issue? Is it an app issue? Now if it is a network issue I can look at all the paths, from every where and say aha there's a commonality here. For example, we could surface through our collective intelligence that there's an ISP outage in the middle of the internet that's causing this. Or we could say, hey you know your ISP is having an issue. Or guess what? Sales force is maybe, you know things happen. People have problems in data centers sometimes. It's nothing you know, it's not.. >> So there's two things there's the post mortem view, and there's the reactive policy based intention. >> Right >> To say okay hey we've got an outage, go here do somethings take some action. >> Right. So some of those things you can automate. But the fact of the matter is that, automation requires learning. And machines need to be taught, and humans have to teach them. I mean that's one of the sort of sticky parts of automation. (laughing) Right, its not auto-magic its automation. >> So you guys are in the data business basically? >> Right, visibility, data. Right. >> Big data, its about data. You're servicing data. Insights, actionable insights, all this stuffs coming together. So the question is on AI. Cause AI plays a role here. IT OPS and machine learning you've got deterministic and non deterministic behavior. >> Sure. >> How do you solve the AI OPS problem here? Because this is a great opportunity for customers, to automate all this complexity and moving parts. To get faster time to data or insight. >> Okay so I would say that the prime place where you could do AI and ML is where you have a relatively closed system. Lets say an infrastructure that you do control. And you have a ton of data. You know like a high volumetric set of data-streams. That you can then train a machine to interpret. The problem with externalities is that One, you have sparse data. For example we have to use agents, cause you can't get all that traditional data from it. Right? So that means that that's why we built this in a visually correlated way. It's the only way to figure it out. But the other aspect to that is that, when your dealing with external providers you have an essential human part of this. There's no way as far as I know to automate an escalation process with your service providers. Which now we have so many, right? First of all, we have to figure out who. And then you have to have enough evidence, to get an escalation to happen to the right people. Empowered people. So they don't go through the three D's of provider response. Which is Deny, Deflect and Defer. (laughing) Right? You know you have to overcome plausible deniability, and that's very human interaction. So the way we deal with that. All this interactive correlated data we make it ridiculously easy, To share that. in an interactive way, with a deep link that you send to your provider and say "just look and see" and you can see that it's having issues. >> So get the evidence escalated, that's the goal as fast as possible? >> Right so then your time, like your mean time to repair now in the cloud is dependent on mean time to effective escalation. Right? >> Who are some of your customers? >> So, we have our kind of foundational customers. We have 20 of the top 25 SAAS companies in the world, as our customers. We have five of the top six US banks, four of the five top UK banks. 100 plus of global two thousand and growing fast. A lot of verticals, I would say enterprise I started with financials not surprisingly. But now we see heavy manufacturing, and telecom and oil and gas and all that. >> What's going on here at Cisco Live? What's your relationship with Cisco? >> So with Cisco we have a number of integration points, we have our enterprise agents. We have these could agents pre deployed, same software as what we call the enterprise agent. That's been certified as an VNF or as container deployments, on a variety of Cisco Adriatic platforms. So that's kind of our integration point. where we can add value and visibility from those you know, branch or data center or other places you know out to the cloud or outside in as well. >> And who's your buyer, typically? >> So I would say a couple of years ago we would be very network central. But now because of the change in IT, and our crossover into the largest enterprises we find that now it's the app owners. It's the folks who are rolling out sales force to forty thousand people and their adopting lighting. Right? You know or they're putting Office 365 out, and they're dealing with the complexities of a CDM based service or a centralized service like SharePoint. So we're seeing those kind of buyers emerge, along with the classic IT operations and network buyers. >> So it only gets better for you, as more API centric systems get out there. Because as its more moving parts, its basically an operating system. And you look at it wholistically, and you got to understand the IO if you will? >> Right. The microservices way of doing everything, means that when you click something or you interact with something as a user. There are probably 20 things happening at a back end, at least half of which are going off across the internet. And all of them have to work flawlessly. Right? For me to get that experience that I'm expecting. Whether I'm trying to buy something or, just get something done. >> What's your secret sauce in the application? >> So I'd say our secret sauce comes down to a couple really key things. One is the data that we generate. We have a unique data center from all these vantage points that we have now. That's what allows us to do this collective intelligence. No body else has that data. And an example we did a study, a couple studies last year. Major resource studies using our platform to look at public cloud performance from the internet within regions. Inter regions, and between clouds. And we found some really interesting phenomenon. And no body else had ever published that before. A lot of assumptions, a lot of inter-claims, we where actually able to show with data, exactly how this stuff performs. >> I'm sorry, you guys have published that? Where can we find that? >> Yeah, so we have that published, we also did another major report on DNS. >> Is that on your website? >> It's on our website, so definitely something to check out. >> Alright, Alex well thanks for coming on, give the quick plug, what's up for you guys? Hiring? What's new? Give the quick two cents. >> So here in Europe we're scaling up, hiring a lot and expanding across Europe. We have major offices in London and Dublin, so that's a big deal. And I think in this next year you'll see some bigger topped out ways that we can help folks understand. Not just how the internet is effecting them, but more of like the unknown of unknowns of internet behavior. So there's going to be some exciting things coming down the pipe. >> Well we need a thousand eyes on all the instrumentation as things become more instrumented having that data centric data. is it going to help feed machine learning? And again its just the beginning of more and more complexity being abstracted away by software on network Programmability. theCUBE bringing you The Data Here from Barcelona, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 stay with us for more day 2 coverage after the short break. I'm Jeff Furrier here with Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. ( upbeat music )

(energetic classical music) >> Welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman. Here with the CEO and co-founder of ThousandEyes Mohit Lad. Thanks so much for joining us here in our Palo Alto studio. >> Thanks too. I'm excited to be here. >> Alright, we always love when we get the founders on. So before we get into the company, take us back. What was the why, what were you seeing in the marketplace, and bring our audience a little bit about your background in the team and what you bring to the table. >> Sounds good. So, my background, personally, is I finished my PhD at TCLA and studied computer science, focused more on the Internet. And one of the reasons we focused-- my co-founder was my colleague as well-- and one of the reasons we focused on studying the Internet was we believed that it was going to dramatically transform our lives, and the quality of our life eventually will be highly dependent on the quality of the Internet. So that's essentially the reason we focused on researching on the Internet, on connectivity and performance. And then as we came out of grad school, and looked at the market, it was clear to us that the ship of the enterprise was dramatically changing because of the adoption of cloud, and SaaS, and infrastructure of service, and that the Internet was going to be a key component of what an enterprise looks like, and it was a black box. So our thesis behind starting the company was to really help companies understand how to manage Internet-centric WAN environments, which is what today's world looks like. >> Okay, for people that don't know ThousandEyes give us how long's the company been in business, the state of the product, how many customers you have, funding, and the like. Give us a snapshot. >> Yeah, so we started in 2010. We had an odd start in many ways because we didn't start with venture funding, so started with a small national SAANS foundation grant. And the result of that was we were very focused on customers from the early days. So for the first two years, very small, about three or four people, and then raised our first round funding in 2012 through Sequoia Capital. As of today, we're about 220 plus employees headquartered in San Francisco. And we split our engineering between San Francisco and London, so these are the two hubs. We also have offices in Austin and New York. And in terms of customers, close to 500 customers at this point of time, a heavy concentration in the mid to high end of the market, so we have more than 50 Fortune 500s, a large concentration of the top financials, and really what excites us is the fact that we're helping decode some really, really complex environments that are becoming more and more complex. >> Yeah, I loved that starting point. You find, in the networking world, there's a lot. It's government, it's scientific, need to understand this. Internet's been a distributor of architecture since the early days, but it's been going through a lot of transformations. Heck, even the TV show Silicon Valley's even talking about a "new Internet." And it's so funny for me to watch that because I'm like, oh wait, I'm talking to the people in here in Silicon Valley that are actually building that with blockchain and decentralization and the like, so its mirroring what's happening in the real world. >> Yeah, and the thing that people sometimes don't realize is the Internet was not built for enterprises. And I tell customers that when you're going to Office 365, when you're going to Amazon, you're relying on the same Internet that your kids are using to watch cat videos. And that's what's carrying your production traffic, and it's really difficult for enterprises to actually make sense of what's slowing things down, where the risk is, what's breaking, and that's where we really help companies understand and take control and thrive in these connected environments. >> It was funny, years ago we used to talk about "the consumerization of IT," and what people use at home will work its way into the enterprise, but you're right. What do businesses need that's different? ThousandEyes has, I believe you call it "Network Intelligence." How is that different than the public standard Internet that you like, and tell us a little bit about what your secret sauce is and what you're bringing to the customers. >> If you think about enterprises from 20 years ago, all the applications would be on the data centers, and it would be a pretty closed environment connected through MPLS connections and so on. So you could deploy the standard APM technologies on the data center to understand what's going on with the applications. And now if you fast forward to today, when you're using something like Office 365 or SalesForce or Workday, or so on, the applications don't sit on your premises anymore, and your network is not just your priority network, but a large portion, in fact, majority of your environment is actually the public Internet. So what is needed for you to thrive in this environment is the ability to actually understand what you depend on and be able to map out not just the user experience of applications that you don't control anymore, but the underlying factors that are impacting that application. And so what we're doing is essentially creating a huge, humongous data set on public performance of the Internet, of different components of the Internet. And we do this with some tremendous data collection but also a lot of smart heuristics that we've built on top, which makes sense of it. And then we marry this data with data we also collect from inside the enterprise. So what we're creating is this environment of a seamless network, and take off this notion of networks today are borderless, right? They really don't have any sort of borders around where the edges and so on. And what we're doing is making sure that customers can look at these hybrid environments as if it's their own private network. >> It's interesting, I think back, when we moved from the client/server era to now, the SaaS environments, like, oh, it'll just magically all work anywhere. I think back to Citrix, has a very heavy networking piece to be able to make those work anywhere. What needs to be fixed, what's kind of under the covers that most people don't understand that in a SaaS environment, solutions like yours are helping to make sure that I can have the promise of anywhere, any device, any cloud? >> Yeah, so a few different things. It's not just the applications are moving to cloud, SaaS. The users are also starting to be a lot more remote and mobile, and what that creates is an environment where a user may be unhappy with the performance of Office 365, and IT's responsible for solving that issue when the traffic is entirely bypassing the corporate environment. So it's going from a Starbucks coffee shop to Office 365 servers, and that's the environment that you're responsible for even though you don't physically control that. And as you think about that, the way we thought about the solution was not just essentially give people visibility into these complex environments, but also create an ecoystem where all these SaaS companies that you rely on as an enterprise are ThousandEyes customers. And we help them decode the Internet, and to large extent, deal with the Internet when they're delivering an application. But as an enterprise, if you're using one of these top SaaS applications, by using ThousandEyes you can not only understand the performance, but you can speak the same language with them when you are trying to troubleshoot and come into a consistent understanding of what the performance is. >> So, you're working with the SaaS providers, you're working with the enterprise, sounds like you're working with both. If I'm an enterprise CIO, and okay, yes, I'm pushing my people to work remote and everything like that, I can't worry about 10,000 employees and the network that they had. Help explain how that works. >> Right, so the requirements of a solution for today's world is beyond just giving visibility. Even if you rewind to the world from 20 years ago, you would find that when there's an issue, there's a lot of finger-pointing going on between the server team, the app team, the network team, and that finger-pointing has become worse in a multi-tenant environment, especially as you use third parties for your applications. So as an example from a few weeks ago, Amazon had a major outage in the East coast. And not only did it take down applications that were hosted on Amazon, but we had customers that were surprised that their applications were not working, and the reason they were not working was they were making, for example, API calls, where the API provider was hosted in Amazon. So they did not even realize the dependencies that they were bringing into their environment. So we had a situation where if we're using a messaging service, and I can't message the person sitting in front of me, because it's going through the Amazon environment. And so its really important in this ecoystem that we as a technology provider create something that helps you connect with each other, rather than just be a siloed solution and that's a huge part of our value chain is to make sure that we can provide you the technology that helps you see through different environments, but also establish good communications back and forth. >> Mohit, networking as an industry has tended to be one of the slower moving pieces of our market. The WAN has been going through such a transformation. You launched in 2010, from 2010 to now 2018, cloud is a much bigger piece, SDWAN wasn't part of our vocabulary. How are thing different now than when you launched the company and how has that impacted your product and your engagement with customers? >> That's a great question. One of the things that I see a lot is this shift in, at least some of the leading customers that we have, a shift towards the notion of network as a core competency. And what I mean by this is when you had environments which were static, so, you're familiar with Visio. People would use Visio to do their network topology maps. They would not change for five years, or maybe three years, depending on the customers. But if you do a Visio map of your extended environment today, it's invalid one second after it's done because the Internet is constantly changing. And so the notion of this network being a static thing is not valid anymore, and companies that need to thrive have to really treat the network as a core competency--and by network, it's not just a network, it's a skill set around networks. Coming back to the trends, the trends that you're seeing are essentially being driven by the fact that you do need to take control of the network, you do need to actually manage it, much more than you used to manage it in the past, and that will give you an edge when it comes to performance to cloud applications, better connectivities, sometimes in situations like SDVAN, it's around reducing cost through MPLS links. >> You've got kind of opposing forces when you look at that. Networking should be a core competency, but don't we have to have to have more intelligence in the network? Leverage all the analytics: machine learning and AI should manage that, 'cause it's changing so fast I can't wait for a person to do that. How do you balance that, how do your customers look at that, and how's that fit into your product? >> So absolutely right, I think networking should be a core competency but networking is not just about connecting devices and using wires to connect things. It's around really understanding what's happening, even understanding what the network actually looks like, because that's something you don't control. There's a lot of focus that we put on analytics, and one of the notions that we've developed over the many years is this notion of network intelligence. And the idea is pretty straightforward. When you're using an Amazon or an Azure, you're going through the same public environments that other customers are going through, and what we do is we essentially mine our entire data set, really understand what are the aspects of the network that are affecting multiple customers, and bridge that into a single cohesive view that is beneficial for you guys. So for example, if you have connectivity issues from the offices here at the CUBE to an Amazon, you would not only know whether it's just you, but you would have more perspective on, hey, this is a larger segment of the customer base of ThousandEyes is actually going through an issue, and here's where the specific issues are. So one of the benefits that the ThousandEyes ecosystem brings to customers is every customer that we add creates more value in the data set. >> How will some of the big waves coming like 5G, IoT, all of the Edge pieces, does that tie into the offering that you have? >> Ultimately, the common denominator for all of this is the Internet, right? Some of these technologies are more towards the last mile, but they have to go through the same core, the Internet, and it's really interesting because one of the user events we did in London a couple weeks ago, we had one of our customers, a large manufacturing company, and they were talking about how they were drilling in Texas, but the drilling was controlled through a site in Belgium, and all of this only worked because the connectivity was reliable. So they were using ThousandEyes to actually ensure that the connectivity between their giant 50 ton driller was maintained to their headquarters. So those are the kinds of applications that, we didn't build it for this specific application, but the fact is we find new ways that ThousandEyes is being used, essentially because there's more and more reliance on the Internet to make things work. >> Any other customer use cases that you want to highlight? Any customer case studies you can share? >> Yeah, so we primarily help with very broadly two sorts of use cases. So one aspect is if you are providing an online service that really depends on the Internet, has a global audience, or even a large regional audience, we help those customers really understand the user experience across the Internet and understand what parts of the Internet may be impacting the applications. So think about all the major SaaS companies that use ThousandEyes, all the major retail banks, they have an online asset that they care about, that's one use case. And then the other use case is enterprise companies. So this is everything from oil and gas, to tech enterprises, to financials. They depend more and more on the Internet when they are going into Cloud and SaaS, and for them it's really unnerving when they look at the environment they're getting into and have no visibility into this black box. So that's where we provide them intelligence into this extended environment and help them understand why a user may be having issues to Office 365 or WebEx, or all of the WYS or IP solutions that are also more and more Internet dependent. >> Mohit, how are your customers doing with the rapid pace of change here? You've talked about networking is a skillset. Finding the right skillset and training people up has always been a big challenge, but what are you seeing in the customers you're talking to? How are they doing these days? >> So the customer's very, depending on the maturity and the transition that they're going through, I still find in a lot of regions that the cloud is still new, SaaS is still new, and we're in many ways in a bubble in the value. Things happen pretty quickly here, but as you step outside you realize that some of the companies are ready to scorse and still making their first strides into SaaS and cloud, and one of the things we help these sets of customers with is essentially helping them plan towards that move. So if you have a large deployment, if you're making a large shift in your infrastructure, even, you think about, let's say a situation where I want to get rid of MPLS, I want to rely on direct Internet circuits, that's a big change, and we can help you measure the performance of MPLS performance of Internet and help you make that data-driven decision. Coming back to the notion of how our customer is doing, there are customers that have realized that network skillsets and engineering around that is core, so they invest a lot of efforts into building that core mindset. There are customers that are starting to build that, and there are customers that are looking at partners to bring that expertise in. So these customers will never build a core set of function around networking, but they look at partners, managed service providers that can bring that expertise into the environments. >> Last thing I want to ask you. You're talking about global networks, we haven't talked about security. Governance and compliance is usually some of the biggest challenges that we are having. The macroeconomic challenges of the Internet. We interviewed the president of ICANN a few years ago, and he gave a warning to our audience that said we might not have one Internet in this near future. We already are starting to see a fragmented Internet, and that could be a huge challenge. Security, governance, compliance, big topics here, but maybe bring us home on that as to what you're seeing and how that affects. >> So one of the things the Internet does, it connects people, right? And when it connects people it also makes it easy for the bad guys to reach the good guys, and so things that concern our audiences in terms of security. The way the Internet works, it's very easy for somebody to announce your address space, for example, and this has happened on several occasions, which creates a denial of service, a different denial of service where all the traffic would go to a party, which is announcing your address space, but not you. So there's all these issues where DNS mapping could be changed, the routing could be changed, and our DDoS attack that happens takes a lot of the upstream environment that you have out of the equation. And so as every day passes, there's more and more things that are being discovered in terms of how attacks can be generated, and how organizations can be brought down. So one example I'll give you which is very specific I've seen is in denial-of-service attacks, this is starting to become pretty routine in today's world. It started with the solutions being on-prem solutions that would detect the volume of traffic and try to filter traffic, and then it moved to using cloud-based solutions, because the volume of traffic would be so high, that you could not actually do this on your end. So you use these cloud-based solutions. You would turn them on when you would detect an attack, and then turn them off. And the financials in particular were always under attack, so now they've gone to a model where they're always turning these things on. A DDoS mediation service, which is based in the cloud. And what has happened, this is a really interesting phenomenon that we've seen, is, let's say, a particular bank, let's say Bank of America is under attack. The same provider that's protecting Bank of America is also protecting Wells Fargo and JP Morgan, and that infrastructure under stress could mean that Wells Fargo could actually have availability issues even though they are not under attack. So one of the things we see in the Internet is this notion of collateral damage, where you may not be the actual victim or target of an attack, but because of shared infrastructure, you're collateral damage. These are the scenarios which place more and more of an importance on gathering this intelligence on what's going on in the Internet. >> Mohit Lad, really appreciate you coming to help share with our audience everything that's happening in the WAN, network intelligence, multi-cloud, global environment world. Look forward to catching up with you more in the future. This has been a CUBE Conversation, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching the CUBE. (energetic classical music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And welcome to this CUBE conversation where we welcome an ESG senior analyst, Bob Laliberte Bob, good to see you. >> Great to see you too. Thanks for having me >> Love it, I love to have the analyst sessions. Set it up. What's your scope, what's your area of expertise? >> So my coverage area right now is networking in its entirety. So that spans everything from enterprise networking, wired, wireless, campus, data center, et cetera. All the way up through telco and, in cloud networking. >> So how do you look at the landscape? One of the big things I think about a lot is how does the shift to cloud migration? How does that affect the existing, network layers? I mean, you got Cisco as the big whale and it's just, it's amazing to me. They still have whatever percent market share they have 60, 65% of the market. Are things, what's happening in the competitive landscape. How is cloud affecting that? >> That's a great question. I think the interesting piece is so many times organizations think about the network as plumbing. But the reality is the it's really important plumbing because as you talk about cloud and things get more distributed, well, guess what connects those distributed locations? It's the network. And so organizations as they've moved to the cloud you've seen a big shift with things like SD-WAN and so forth. How do I get more efficient connectivity up to that cloud? How do I not only enable able better connectivity between my data centers in the cloud, but now all my remote workers in the cloud. And so there's been a lot of big shifts going on that have driven the importance of having not only network, but secure networks. So like I said, cloud is one thing, and you're moving your applications there. But with the pandemic you saw the remote work. Think about the network administrators who we're managing, hey, I've got to control network connections between my data centers, a couple clouds and maybe dozens maybe a hundred remote branches. And now I'm connecting to 10,000 micro branches that I need to ensure that they can connect up to these applications and so forth. Hell of a lot more complex environment today than it used to be for these network teams. When we look at the, what we're seeing, how the networking providers are responding it's by driving comprehensive end-to-end solutions. So unifying, wired, wireless, and WAN. Driving efficiencies there. You're seeing even ThousandEyes for Cisco and things like that. Because they know the Internet's becoming more integral part of the corporate network. So being able to drive those types of things being able to, I think look at how to drive those operational efficiencies through AI and ML. So one of the big shifts we've seen in networking is the transition to cloud-based network management. And obviously that couple of things that helps with, first of all, the operations teams who are working remotely can more easily access it. But once all that data is up in the cloud, it creates a platform to be able to invest in AI/ML, and be able to drive intelligent alerting and even automation. And that's really what's needed because as the environments get more distributed and complex, you need to have that those operational efficiencies that automation, that intelligence to help them. >> How has remote work and hybrid work affected sort of network, spending priorities. Obviously when the pandemic hit you had to accommodate end points. And I always have this theory okay, when people come back to the office and I know it's going to be a different world but, the HQ probably needs some love as well. So has that been a tailwind for the industry? >> Absolutely, that's what we're seeing now. I think when the pandemic first hit, everyone said I've got to ramp up my VPNs. I've got to scale out my concentrators. I've got to add more firewalls in my data center. And then after a while, when they realized this was here to stay, they said, okay we just created that hub-and-spoke network that we just got rid of with SD-WAN. So what are the better solutions we can implement? So now you're seeing them not only implement better networking solutions for the remote workers. But reimagining what the campus looks like. Because it's not going to be ever 100% full or maybe it will, but how, for how many times a year will it be 100% full? So you've got to go from 80% cubes and 20% conference and collaboration areas, to 80% collaboration areas and 20% cubes. So we're seeing a lot of transition taking place in the campus environment as organizations are deploying newer technologies like Wi-Fi 6E. That have greater bandwidth to allow for those collaboration apps to run in those collaboration areas. Instead of just having the single wired conference room for video. Everyone's got to be able to run their video, voice and video collaboration apps. >> So how do you look at the landscape now? Again, you can't talk about networking without talking about Cisco. I think they, up there, I saw you and Zeus as talking about out, Cisco's quarter and other networking topics. Their long term guidance is for 60% growth for a company that size that's really outstanding. I mean, Cisco's, really has always been an execution machine of course. And it's a new era now under Chuck. There are more than ankle biters. If you look at Arista's doing pretty well there's guys like Extreme, there's others that are out there but nobody seemed to be able to unseat Cisco. What's happening in the landscape? >> I mean, that's a great question. Cisco's just been around for so long and been so big for so long. And you have to also keep in mind that with Cisco it's not just about the technology, but the fact from a if you think about it from a cultural standpoint these are workers who have been trained on Cisco since, some of them since high school. The educational component that Cisco has done has groomed generations of network technologists. So when they come into the market, they're fully familiar and used to Cisco. Plus they make a really good product and they've got products that cover everything. They cover the whole gambit. So they're still able to maintain their share. They're able to grow. They're able to move. They've made a shift last year. They announced in last spring that they were going to focus more on end-to-end. So instead of just having, hey, here's a point product, here's a point product. Here's a point product. Let's think about it in its entirety. Let's deliver a complete end-to-end solution solve bigger problems for customers, which obviously makes it much harder to remove when you're just trying to remove a piece of that single problem. But the other competitors are also having good years. And I think also the rising tide floats all boats. And so because of this distributed nature, the importance of the network, everyone is doing that. Plus obviously this has to be said, the supply chain issues where people are ordering ahead as well. But organizations, you look at Arista, they've gone from just being a data center company to expanding all the way down to the campus edge, wireless, right there creating an end-to-end environment Extreme did the same thing. They went out and made a lot of acquisitions. They pulled them all together, integrated. They're all moving to this cloud based end-to-end network management. Arista has been on a tear, bringing in a lot of, not only innovative technology, but innovative technologists. So if you look at some of the organizations they bought. I keep calling it Route 128, it's 128 Technologies. So sorry folks I live in Massachusetts. It's always been Route 128. >> You Remember when don't we. 128 Technology's Mist was their big. Mist was their, Mist was kind of like their VMware. VMware to EMC was Mist was to Juniper. And so we call it the Mistification of Juniper where every organization, every company they bring in they're rolling under that and this the AI engine. So they're bringing in 128 Technologies into that. They've got their own, their own stuff under that, their wired switches. So they've got this unified wired and wireless and WAN assurance now that they have. They've been gaining a lot of traction with that. And again, for the things we were talking about because it's far more distributed and complex. You need to have, It's not like people are getting replaced. It's not like, hey, we're leveraging this automation so that we can get rid of network teams. It's because it's getting so much more complex just to have the same number of people manage that more complex environment. We need those intelligence solutions. >> So I want to ask you about network and multi-cloud. And so it's kind of tongue in cheek because we coined this term super cloud. And so what we meant by that, so here's the premise. And I wonder you could give us your perspective. Multi-cloud, I've said many times is I think largely a symptom of multi-vendor I run in this, I run in AWS or, Azure, I've done the work to understand their primitives and or Google, whatever it is. But it's not like an abstraction layer that's floating above all those but now you're starting to see that. In fact, it re:Invent in November. The ecosystem it seemed like was everybody was focused on developing what we call these super clouds. And again, it's tongue in cheek, this abstraction layer it hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs adds incremental value on top of that. So there's a company Prosimo, which Steve Herrod, is invested in and others Praveen Akkiraju, whom I'm sure you know from Viptela. Aviatrix is another company that's sort of, Steve Malaney has come on theCUBE and talked about what they're doing. Like yeah, that's super cloud. It seems like it's something new and different than just multi-cloud which is kind of connecting in to different clouds. It's that value on top. What do you think about that? And what does that mean for networking? >> That's a really good point because we are starting to see the inception of organizations going beyond having multiple cloud providers and looking at starting to deploy applications across multiple clouds. It's still really early. The vast majority of organizations are still, I use this application for this cloud and this application for that cloud. But that's the next frontier. That's what they're trying to solve is how do I create this basically cloud fabric and make it as simple as possible. And again, all the things we've been talking about how do I, instead of you having to learn Amazon, Google, Azure networking technology, learn mine, I'll take care of it, but I'll abstract all that complexity from you and make it so much simpler to be able to connect to these interconnect, and connect to them in a seamless fashion. And so that's what they're really trying to do is they're. And the hard part is it takes really sophisticated solutions to remove that high level of complexity and make it simple for an organization to do that. So yeah, absolutely. >> If I had more time I'd make it shorter as somebody who writes a lot. And I think you're right. I think it is future. It's not definitely not here today, but the other thing is it ties into digital transformation. We used this again, throw that buzzword around but, companies not just tech company, I mean everybody's becoming like a tech company, but organizations, financial services companies, healthcare they're building their own clouds on top of the hyperscalers who spend $100 billion a year on CapEx. And that seems to be a trend that I think is going to take legs over this next decade. Just like in the previous decade everybody was thinking, okay, we're going to SaaSify our business softwares (indistinct) the world. And now it's software and cloud services are the way in which I'm going to create customer experiences. >> Correct, yeah. It's why should I go out and make an investment in technology when the technology's already there? And I can rent it for when I need it scale it as I need it and, and do all of that. I agree with that. I think that's something that we're seeing. The interesting part though is that when we look at our data points, probably let than 40% of the applications and workloads are in the cloud today. So there's still a role that the corporate data center plays. We are seeing over time. They expect that to progress and transition but I think there's still always going to be maybe a quarter of the workloads and applications may never leave. Depending on how they're built, et cetera. So there's always going to be that distributed environment where you've got workloads in the private data centers, workloads in multiple public clouds. And also, the big thing too is don't forget about the edge. We're seeing a lot more edge activity take place as organizations recognize, as they deploy more IOT devices, and want to get realtime business insights they've got to deploy the compute there. >> Well, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about, but going back to what you just said, which is, I agree with you. So that suggests to me, Bob that we're just kind of, with cloud just entering the steep part of the S curve. Amazon's headed toward $100 billion, run rate business. Maybe they probably won't get there this year but they will next year. We're entering that steep growth phase, really could be. It's incredible. But I wanted to ask you about the edge. Because you're right is we got to move compute to the edge, ARM is going to dominate. I would think, the edge. They already are with our smartphones. How do you see the cloud guys participating in the edge? Whether it was Andy Jassy, or now Adam Selipsky or anybody at Amazon. They have the dogma of in the fullness of time all workloads are going to be in the cloud. So they either have to change their definition of cloud. Or they're wrong. So what's your thought on that? >> I think it really starts coming down to what's your definition of edge. And so, much like when the cloud technologies first came about and you had all the shadow IT. Everyone running off, and everyone thought oh this is all great, until you realized you had to operationalize it and you had to pull the brakes. Stop doing that. We're going to make sure IT operations. >> Call the CIO up. Exactly, finding out where stuff was by going through accounting and seeing credit card charges. For the edge what we've seen I think is maybe organizations really saying I've got to deploy my servers in my own site. Right at that edge in order to get the lowest possible latency. And so what I think we're starting to see is organizations looking at that and saying, okay well I'm in a metro and I've got 25 locations in a metro. And I've deployed technology to every single one of those sites. Do I need it there? Or can I put it in an Equinix facility that's less than five milliseconds from all 25 sites? So I think there's starting to be this pragmatic approach of looking at let's look at the edge, let's take a look at what type of latencies. What is our definition of real time. When do we actually need the data and so forth? What kind of connectivity do we have? And then from there figure out how we go about connecting it. And so for companies like AWS and Google and Azure a lot of them there's local zones and things like that. They're deploying them in those colos because they don't have data centers in every metro but they can leverage an Equinix. They can leverage someone else's hardware that's there to deploy their software stack within that location. So I think that's something that we're starting to see more and more of as the edge. And obviously the association with the telcos as well. They've got a great footprint. If you want to get close to the edge with their colos Their home offices and things like that and whatnot. Their ability to move the compute closer to the edge, the base stations of the antennas and things like that, are certainly significant. And that's why you're seeing the wavelengths and things like that, programs like that. >> So I was going to close, but there some really interesting topics you just brought up. Call it whatever you going to call it near edge, far edge or deep edge. And you mentioned real time. Yeah. So for those Equinix data centers, I don't need, true real time. But for Tesla, I need real time. I need real time inference at the edge probably using a bunch of ARM cores and I can't go back to any cloud. How do you look at that? Both, I would think big markets. Do you have a sense as to, is one bigger than the other? Are they both just enormous or we don't even know yet. >> I'm not sure that we know yet. I think certainly, it's riding the tail of the IOTs. So the more sensors, the more things that are deployed the more that, that data businesses realize they can leverage that data to make real time business insights to drive either better experiences. And if you're in retail. So location based services and real time offer management it doesn't do any good to offer a coupon for something that you've, that's 40 yards behind you. That that's past, like you said with the cars there's, I've seen some studies recently. They say, well, based on the latency, if the command is to stop and you're at one millisecond, it stops within four inches. If you are at 50 milliseconds, it stops 10 feet later. That's a big difference. And I don't know if those numbers are right but you get the idea about the impact, what the real time impact is of. >> Margin is not huge. >> Exactly, so that's where organizations, I think first and foremost need to take a pragmatic approach to determine what is real time for us. What's our definition of it. And then that can lead them to where do I need to place this compute technology? And then that goes to how do I then connect to it? So for the Teslas and so forth, obviously you're going to want 5G connections if possible. Ultra low latency and not just any 5G. The good stuff, the millimeter bandwidth stuff that that's the ultra low latency. >> So let's wrap. So, what's going on in your research world obviously the big, big acquisition tech target they seem to be investing in ESG. You guys are really growing and hiring. That's awesome. Any research that you're working on? >> Yeah, there's a couple of couple of projects we have going on right now. We're wrapping up a four part distributed cloud research series. So we did it on distributed cloud infrastructure. Applications, observability. And now this last one is on the edge. Coincidentally. So we're working on that. We've got some new network modernization research that we've published. And we're going to be looking, from a networking perspective looking at end-to-end network modernization which will be coming out soon. >> Awesome, Bob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really would love to have you back and chat about some of those things. Observability hot space. God, I wish we had more time. >> Absolutely, appreciate it, thanks. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It's transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model, which also should be high margin through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It's doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital in the cloud. We believe Cisco's dominant position in networking combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. However, there are clear challenges ahead for Cisco, not the least of which is the growing complexity of its portfolio, a large legacy business, and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it transitions into a new business model. Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki-bond cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, who's the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, long time Cisco watcher who together with me crafted the premise of today's session. Zeus, great to see you welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. >> Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today, set the agenda. The catalyst for this session, Zeus and I attended Cisco's financial analyst day. We received a day and a half of firehose presentations, drill downs, interactions, Q and A with Cisco execs and one key customer. So we're going to share our takeaways from these sessions and add our additional thoughts. Now, in particular, we're going to talk about Cisco's TAM, its transformation to a subscription-based model, and how we see that evolving. As always, we're going to bring in some ETR spending data for context and get Zeus' take on what that tells us. And we'll end with a summary of Cisco's cloud strategy and outlook for how it could win in the cloud. So let's talk about Cisco's sort of structure and TAM opportunities. First, Zeus, Cisco has four main lines of business where it's organized it's executives around sort of four product areas. And it's got a large service component as well. Network equipment, SP routing, data center, collaboration that security, and as I say services, that's not necessarily how it's going to market, but that's kind of the way it organizes its ELT, its executive leadership team. >> Yeah, the in fact, the ELT has been organized around those products, as you said. It used to report to the street three product segments, infrastructure platforms, which was by far the biggest, it was all their networking equipment, then applications, and then security. Now it's moved to five new segments, secure agile networks, hybrid work, end to end security, internet for the future and optimized app experiences. And I think what Cisco's trying to do is align their, the way they report along the lines of the way customers buy. 'Cause I think before, you know, they had a very simplistic model before. It was just infrastructure, apps, and security. The ELT is organized around product roadmap and the product innovation, but that's not necessarily the way customers purchase things and so, purchase things so I think they've tried to change things a little bit there. When you look at those segments though, you know, by, it's interesting. They're all big, right? So, by far the biggest distilled networking, which is almost a hundred billion dollar TAM as they reported and they have it growing a about a 9% CAGR as reported by other analyst firms. And when you think about how mature networking is Dave, the fact that that's still growing at high single digit CAGR is still pretty remarkable. So I think that's one of those things that, you know, watchers of Cisco historically have been calling for the network to be commoditized for decades. For as long as I've been watching Cisco, we've been, people have been waiting for the network to be commoditized. My thesis has always been, if you can drive enough innovation into things, you can stave off commoditization and that's what they've done. But that's really the anchor for them to sell all their other products, some of which are higher margin, some which are a little bit sore, but they're all good high margin businesses to your point. >> Awesome. We're going to dig into that. So, so they flattened the organization when Geckler left. You've got Todd Nightingale, Jonathan Davidson, Liz Centoni, and Jeetu Patel who we heard from and we'll make some comments on what we heard from them. One of the big takeaways at the financial analysts meeting was on the TAM, as you just mentioned. Liz Centoni who also is heavily involved in strategy and the CFO Scott Herren, showed this slide, which speaks to the company's TAM and the organizational structure that you were just talking about. So the big message was that Cisco has got a large and growing market, you know, no shortage of available market. Somewhere between eight and 900 billion, depending on which of the slides you pull out of the deck. And ironically Zeus, when you look at the current markets number here on the right hand side of this slide, 260 billion, it just about matches the company's market cap. Maybe an interesting coincidence, but at any rate, what was your takeaway from this data? >> Well, I think, you know, the big takeaway from the data is there's still a lot of room ahead for Cisco to grow, right? Again, this is a, it's a company that I think most people would put in the camp of legacy IT vendor, just because of how long they've been around. But they have done a very good job of staving off innovation. And part of that is just these markets that they play in continue to grow and they continue to have challenges that they can solve. I think one of the things Cisco has done though, since the arrival of Chuck Robbins, is they don't fight these trends anymore, Dave. I know prior to Chuck's arrival, they really fought the tide of software defined networking and you know, trends like that, and even cloud to some extent. And I remember one of the first meetings I had with Chuck, I asked him about that and he said that Cisco will never do that again. That under his watch, if customers are going through a market transition, Cisco wants to lead them through it, not try and hold them back. And I think for that reason, they're able to look at, all of those trends and try and take a leadership position in them, even though you might look at some of those and feel that some of them might be detrimental to Cisco's business in the short term. So something like software defined WANs, which you would throw into secure agile networks, certainly doesn't, may not carry the same kind of RPOs and margins with it that their traditional routers did, but ultimately customers are going to buy it and Cisco would like to be the ones to sell it to them. >> You know, you bring up a great point. This industry is littered, there's a graveyard of executives who fought the trend. Many people, some people remember Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation. "Unix is snake oil," is what he said. IBM mainframe guys said, "PCs are a toy." And of course the history, they were the wrong side of history. The other big takeaway was the shift to software in subscription. They really made a big point of this. Here's a chart Cisco showed a couple of times to make the point that it's one of the largest software companies in the world. You know, in the top 10. They also made the point that Chuck Robbins, when he joined in 2015, and since that time, it's nearly 4x'ed it's subscription software revenue, and roughly doubled its software sales. And it now has an RPO, remaining performance obligations, that exceeds 30 billion. And it's committing to grow its subscription business in the forward-looking statements by 15 to 17% CAGR through 25, which would imply about a doubling of these, the blue lines. Zeus, it's unclear if that forward-looking forecast is just software. I presume it includes some services, but as Herren pointed out, over time, these services will be bundled into the product revenue, same way SAS companies do it. But the point is Cisco is committed, like many of their peers, to moving to an ARR model. But please, share your thoughts on Cisco's move to software subscriptions and how you see the future of consumption-based pricing. >> Yeah, this has been a big shift for Cisco, obviously. It's one that's highly disruptive. It's one that I know gave their partners a lot of angst for a long time because when you sell things upfront, you get a big check for selling that, right? And when you sell things in a subscription model, you get a much smaller check for a number of months over the period of the contract. It also changes the way you deal with the customer. When you sell a one-time product, you basically wipe your hands. You come back in three or four years and say, "it's time to upgrade." When you sell a subscription, now, the one thing that I've tried to talk to Cisco and its partners about is customers don't renew things they don't use. And so it becomes incumbent on the partner, it becomes incumbent upon Cisco to make sure that things that the customer is subscribing to, that they do use. And so Cisco's had to create a customer success organization. They've had to help their partners create those customer success organizations. So it's really changed the model. And Cisco not only made the shift, they've done it faster than they actually had originally forecast. So during the financial analyst day, they actually touted their execution on software, noting that it hit it's 30% revenue as percent of total target well before it was supposed to, it's actually exceeded its targets. And now it's looking to increase that to, it actually raised its guidance in this area a little bit by a few percentage points, looking out over the next few years. And so it's moved to the subscription model, Dave, the thing that you brought up, which I do see as somewhat of a challenge is the shift to consumption-based pricing. So subscription is one thing in that I write you a check every month for the same amount. When I go to the consumption-based pricing, that's easy to do for cloud services, things like WebEx or Duo or, you know, CloudLock, some of the security products. That that shift should be relatively simple. If customers want to buy it that way. It's unclear as to how you do that when you're selling on-prem equipment with the software add-on to it because in that case, you have to put metering technology in to understand how much they're using. You have to have a minimum baseline to start with. They've done it in some respects. The old HCS product that they sold, the Telcos, actually was sold with a minimum commit and then they tacked on a utilization on top of that. So maybe they move into that kind of model. But I know it's something that they've, they get asked about a lot. I know they're still thinking about it, but it's something that I believe is coming and it's going to come pretty fast. >> I want to pick up on that because I think, you know, they made the point that we're one of the top 10 software companies in the world. It's very difficult for hardware companies to make the transition to software. You know, HP couldn't do it. >> Well, no one's done it. >> Well, IBM has kind of done it, but they really struggle. It's kind of this mishmash of tooling and software products that aren't really well-integrated. But, I would say this, everybody now, Cisco, Dell, HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, pretty much all the traditional hardware players are trying to move to an as a service model or at least for a portion of their business. HPE's all in, Dell transitioning. And for the most part, I would make the following observation. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. They're pretty much following a SAS like model, which in my view is outdated and kind of flawed from a customer standpoint. All these guys say, "Hey, we're doing this because "this is what the customers want." I think the cloud is really a true consumption based model. And if you look at modern SAS companies, a lot of the startups, they're moving to a consumption based model. You see that with Snowflake, you see that with Stripe. Now they will offer incentives. But most of the traditional enterprise players, they're saying, "Okay, pay us upfront, "commit to some base level. "If you go over it, you know, "we'll charge you for it. "If you go under it, you're still going to pay "for that base level." So it's not true consumption base. It's not really necessarily the customer's best interest. So that's, I think there's some learnings there that are going to have to play out. >> Yeah, the reason customers are shying away from that SAS type model, I think during the pandemic, the one thing we learned, Dave, is that the business will ebb and flow greatly from month to month sometimes. And I was talking with somebody that worked for one of the big hotel chains, and she was telling me that what their CRM providers, she wouldn't tell me who it was, except said it rhymed with Shmalesforce, that their utilization of it went from, you know, from a nice steady level to spiking really high when customers started calling in to cancel hotel rooms. And then it dropped down to almost nothing as we went through that period of stay at home. And now it's risen back up. And so for her, she wanted to move to a consumption-based model because what happens otherwise is you wind up buying for peak utilization, your software subscriptions go largely underutilized the majority of the year, and you wind up paying, you know, a lot more than you need to. If you go to more of a true consumption model, it's harder to model out from a financial perspective 'cause there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the business, but over a longer period of time, it's more cost-effective, right? And so the, again, what the pandemic taught us was we don't really know what we're going to need from a consumption standpoint, you know, nevermind a year from now, maybe even six months from now. And consumption just creates a lot more flexibility and agility. You can scale up, you can scale down. You can bring in users, you can take out users, you can add consultants, things like that. And it just, it's much more aligned with the way businesses are run today. >> Yeah, churn is a silent killer of a software company. And so there's retention is the key here. So again, I think there's lots of learning. Let's put Cisco into context with some of its peers. So this chart we developed compares five companies to Cisco. Core Dell, meaning Dell, without VMware. VMware, HPE, IBM, we've put an AWS, and then Cisco as, IBM, AWS and Cisco is the integrated plays. So the chart shows the latest quarterly revenue multiplied by four to get a run rate, a three-year growth outlook, gross margin percentage, market cap, and revenue multiple. And the key points here are that one, Cisco has got a pretty awesome business model. It's got 60% gross margin, strong operating margins, not shown here, but in the mid twenties, 25%. It's got a higher growth rate than most of its peers. And as such, a much better, multiple than say, for instance, Core Dell gets 33 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE is double that. IBM's below two X. Cisco's revenue multiple rivals VMware, which is a pure software company. Now in a large part that's because VMware stock took a hit recently, but still the point is obvious. Cisco's got a great business. Now for context, we've added AWS, which blows away any company on this chart. We've inferred a market cap of nearly 600 billion, which frankly is conservative at a 10 X revenue multiple given it's inferred margins and growth rate. Now Zeus, if AWS were a separate company, it could have a market cap that approached 800 billion in my view. But what does this data tell you? >> Well, it just tells me that Cisco continues to be a very well-run company that has staved off commoditization, despite the calling for it for years. And I think the big lesson, and I've talked to financial analysts about this over the years, is that if, I don't really believe anything in this world is a commodity, Dave. I think even when Cisco went to the server market, if you remember back then, they created a new way of handling memory management. They were getting well above average margins for service, albeit less than Cisco's network margins, but still above average for server margins. And so I think if you can continue to innovate, you will see the margin stay where they are. You will see customers continue to buy and refresh. And I think one of the challenges Cisco's had in the past, and this is where the subscription business will help, is getting customers to stay with the latest and greatest. Prior to this refresh of network equipment, some of the stuff that I've seen in the fields, 10, 15 years old, once you move to that sell me a box and then tack on the subscription revenue that you pay month by month, you do drive more consistent refresh. Think about the way you just handle your own mobile phone. If you had to go pay, you know, a thousand dollars every three years, you might not do it at that three-year cycle. If you pay 40 bucks a month, every time there's a new phone, you're going to take it, right? So I think Cisco is able to drive greater, better refresh, keep their customers current, keep the features in there. And we've seen that with a lot of the new products. The new Cat 9,000, some of the new service provider products, the new wifi products, they've all done very well. In fact, they've all outpaced their previous generation products as far as growth rate goes. And so I think that is a testament to the way they've run the business. But I do think when people bucket Cisco in with HP and Dell, and I understand why they do, their businesses were similar at one time, it's really not a true comparison anymore. I think Cisco has completely changed their business and they're not trying to commoditize markets, they're trying to drive innovation and keep the margins up, where I think HP and Dell tend to really compete on price versus innovation. >> Well, and we are going to get to this point about the tailwinds and headwinds and cloud, and how Cisco to do it. But, to your point about, you know, the cell phone analogy. To the extent that Cisco can make that seamless for customers could hide that underlying complexity, that's going to be critical for the cloud. Now, but before we get there, I want to talk about one of the reasons why Cisco such a high multiple, and has been able to preserve its margins, to your point, not being commoditized. And it's been able to grow both organically, but also has a strong history of M and A. It's this chart shows a dominant position in core networking. So this shows, so ETR data within the Fortune 500. It plots companies in the ETR taxonomy in two dimensions, net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending velocity, and market share on the horizontal axis, which is a measure of presence in the survey. It's not like IDC market share, it's mentioned market share if you will. The point is Cisco is far and away the most pervasive player in the market, it's generally held its dominant position. Although, it's been under pressure in the last few years in core networking, but it retains or maintains a very respectable net score and consistently performs well for such a large company. Zeus, anything you'd add with respect to Cisco's core networking business? >> Yeah, it's maintained a dominant network position historically. I think part of because it drives good products, but also because the competitive landscape, historically has been pretty weak, right? We saw companies like 3Com and Nortel who aren't around anymore. It'll be interesting to see moving forward now that companies like VMware are involved in networking. AWS is interested in networking. Arista is a much stronger company. You know, Juniper bought Mist and is in better position. Even Extreme Networks who most people thought was dead a few years ago has made a number of acquisitions and is now a billion dollar company. So while Cisco has done a great job of execution, they've done a great job on the innovation side, their competitive landscape, looking out over the next five years, I think is going to be more difficult than it has been over the previous five years. And largely, Dave, I think that's good for Cisco. I think whenever Cisco's pressed a little bit from competition, they tend to step on the innovation gas a little bit more. And I look back and even just the transition when VMware bought Nicira, that got Cisco's SDN business into gear, like nothing else could have, right? So competition for that company, they always seem to respond well to it. >> So, let's break down Cisco's net score a little bit. Explain why the company has been able to hold its spending momentum despite its large size. This will give you a little insight to the survey. So this chart shows the granular components of net score. The lime green is new adoptions to Cisco. The forest green is spending more than 6%. The gray is flat plus or minus 5%. The pink is spending drops by more than 5%. And the red is we're chucking the platform, we're getting off. And Cisco's overall net score here is 25%, which for a company of its size speaks to the relationships that it has with customers. It's of course got a fat middle in the gray area, like all sort of large established companies. But very low defections as well, it's got low new adoptions. But very respectable. So that is background, Zeus. Let's look at spending momentum over time across Cisco's portfolio. So this chart shows Cisco's net score by that methodology within the ETR taxonomy for Cisco over three survey periods. And what jumps out is Meraki on the left, very strong. Virtualization business, its core networking, analytics and security, all showing upward momentum. AppD is a little bit concerning, but that could be related to Cisco's sort of pivot to full stack observability. So maybe AppD is being bundled there. Although some practitioners have cited to us some concerns in that space. And then WebEx at the end of the chart, it's showing some relative strength, but not that high. Zeus, maybe you could comment on Meraki and any other takeaways across the portfolio. >> Yeah, Meraki has proven to be an excellent acquisition for Cisco. In fact, you might, I think it's arguable to say it's its best acquisition in history going all the way back to camp Kalpana and Grand Junction, the ones that brought up catalyst switches. So, in fact, I think Meraki's revenue might be larger than security now. So, that shows you the momentum it has. I think one of the lessons it brought to Cisco was that simpler is better, sometimes. I think when they first bought Meraki, the way Meraki's deployed, it's very easy to set up. There's a lot of engineering work though that goes into making a product simple to use. And I think a lot of Cisco engineers historically looked at Meraki as, that's a little bit of a toy. It's meant for small businesses, things like that, but it's not for enterprise. But, Rocky's done a nice job of expanding the portfolio, of leveraging the cloud for analytics and showing you a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily get from traditional networking equipment. And one of the things that I was really delighted to see was when they put Todd Nightingale in charge of all the networking business, because that showed to me that Chuck Robbins understood that the things Meraki were doing were right and they infuse a little bit of Meraki into the rest of the company. You know, that's certainly a good thing. The other areas that you showed on the chart, not really a surprise, Dave. When you think of the shift hybrid work and you think of the, some of the other transitions going on, I think you would expect to see the server business in decline, the storage business, you know, maybe in a little bit of decline, just because people aren't building out data centers. Where the other ones are related more to hybrid working, hybrid cloud, things like that. So it is what you would expect. The WebEx one was interesting too, because it did show somewhat of a dip and then a rise. And I think that's indicative of what we've seen in the collaboration space since the pandemic came about. Companies like Zoom and RingCentral really got a lot of the headlines. Again, when you, the comment I made on competition, Cisco got caught a little bit flat-footed, they've caught up in features and now they really stepped on the gas there. Chuck joked that he gave the WebEx team a bit of a blank check to go do what it had to do. And I don't think that was a joke. I think he actually did that because they've added more features into WebEx in the last year then I think they did the previous five years before that. >> Well, let's just drill into video conferencing real quick here, if we could. Here's that two dimensional view, again, showing net score against market share or pervasiveness of mentions, and you can see Microsoft Teams in the upper right. I mean, it's off the chart, literally. Zoom's well ahead of Cisco in terms of, you know, mentions presence. And that could be a spate of freemium, you know, but it's basically a three horse race in this game. And Cisco, I don't think is trying to take Zoom head on, rather it seems to be making WebEx a core part of its broader collaboration agenda. But Zeus, maybe you could comment. >> Well, it's all coming together, right? So, it's hard to decouple calling from video from meetings. All of the vendors, including Teams, are going after the hybrid work experience. And if you believe the future is hybrid and not just work from home, then Cisco does have a pretty interesting advantage because it's the only one that makes its own end points, where Teams and Zoom doesn't. And so that end to end experience it can deliver. The Microsoft Teams one's interesting because that product, frankly, when you talk to users, it doesn't have a great user score, like as far as user satisfaction goes, but the one thing Microsoft has done a very good job of is bundling it in to the Office365 licenses, making it very easy for IT to deploy. Zoom is a little bit in the middle where they've appealed to the users. They've done a better job of appealing to IT, but there is a, there is a battleground now going on where video's not just video. It includes calling, includes meetings, includes room systems now, and I think this hybrid work friend is going to change the way we think about these meeting tools. >> Now we'd be remiss if we didn't spend a moment talking about security as a key part of Cisco's business. And we have a graphic on this same kind of X, Y. And it's been, we've seen several quarters of growth. Although, the last quarter security growth was in the low single digits, but Cisco is a major player in security. And this X, Y graph shows, they've got both a large presence and a solid spending momentum. Not nearly as much momentum as Okta or Zscaler or a CrowdStrike and some of the smaller companies, but they're, these guys are on a rocket ship, but others that we featured in these episodes, but much more than respectable for Cisco. And security is critical to the strategy. It's a big part of the subscriber base. And the last thing, Zeus, I'll say about Cisco made the point in analyst day, that this market is crowded. You can see that in this chart. And their goal is to simplify this picture and make it easier for customers to secure their data and apps. But that's not easy, Zeus. What are your thoughts on Cisco's security opportunities? >> Yeah, I've been waiting for Cisco go to break up in security a little more than it has. I do think, I was talking with a CSO the other day, Dave, that said to me he's starting to understand that you don't have to have best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, there's a lot of buyers now will tell you that if you try and have best of breed everywhere, it actually creates a negative when it comes to threat protection because keeping all the policies and things up to date is very, very difficult. And so the industry is moving more to a platform model, right? Now, the challenge for Cisco is how do you get that, the customer to think of the network as part of the platform? Because while the platform model, I think, is starting to gain traction, FloridaNet, Palo Alto, even McAfee, companies like that also have their own version of a security platform. And if you look at the financial performance of companies like FloridaNet and Palo Alto over the past, you know, over the past couple of years, they've been through the roof, right? And so I think an interesting and unique challenge for Cisco is can they convince the security buyer that the network is as important a part of that platform as any other component? If they can do that, I think they can break away from the pack. If not, then they'll stay mixed in with those, you know, Palo, FloridaNet, Checkpoint, and, you know, and Cisco, in that mix. But I do think that may present their single biggest needle moving opportunity just because of how big the security TAM is, and the fact that there is no de facto leader in security today. If they could gain the same kind of position in security as they have a networking, who, I mean, that would move the needle like no other market would. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that they're coming at security, obviously from a position of networking strength. You've got, to your point, you've got best of breed, Okta in identity, you got CrowdStrike in endpoint, Zscaler in cloud security. They're all growing like crazy. And you got Cisco and you know, Palo Alto, CSOs tell us they want to work with Palo Alto because they're the thought leader and they're obviously a major player here. You mentioned FloridaNet, there's a zillion others. We could talk all day about security. But let's bring it back to cloud. We've talked about a number of the piece in Cisco's portfolio, and we haven't really spent any time on full stack observability, which is a big push for Cisco with AppD, Intersight and the ThousandEyes acquisition. And that plays into this equation. But my take, Zeus, is Cisco has a number of cloud knobs that it can turn, it sells core networking equipment to hyperscalers. It can be the abstraction layer to connect on-prem to the cloud and hybrid and across clouds. And it's in a good position with Telcos too, to go after the 5G. But let's use this chart to talk about Cisco's cloud prospects. It's an ETR cut of the cloud customer spending. So we cut it by cloud customers. And they're are, I don't know, 800 or so in the survey. And then looking at various companies performance within that cut. So these are companies that compete, or in the case of HashiCorp, partner with Cisco at some level. Let me just set this up and get your take. So the insert on the chart by the way shows the raw data that positions each dot, the net score and the shared n, i.e. the number of accounts in the survey that responded. The key points, first of all, Azure and AWS, dominant players in cloud. GCP is a distant third. We've reported on that a lot. Not only are these two companies big, they have spending momentum on their platforms. They're growing, they are on that flywheel. Second point, VMware and Cisco are very prominent. They have huge customer bases. And while they're often on a collision course, there's lots of room in cloud for multiple players. When we plotted some other Cisco properties like AppD and Meraki, which as we said, is strong. And then for context, we've placed Dell, HPE, Aruba, IBM and Oracle. And also VMware cloud and AWS, which is notable on its elevation. And as I say, we've added HashiCorp because they're critical partner of Cisco and it's a multi-cloud play. Okay, Zeus, there's the setup. What does Cisco have to do to make the cloud a tailwind? Let's talk about strategy, tailwinds, headwinds, competition, and bottom line it for us. >> Yeah, well, I do think, well, I talked about security being the biggest needle mover for Cisco, I think its biggest challenge is convincing Wall Street in particular, that the cloud is a tailwind. I think if you look at the companies with the really high multiples to their stock, Dave, they're all ones where they're viewed as, they go along with the cloud ride, Right? So the, if you can associate yourself with the cloud and then people believe that the cloud is going to, more cloud equals more business, that obviously creates a better multiple because the cloud has almost infinite potential ahead of it. Now with respect to Cisco, I do think cloud has presented somewhat of a double-edged sword for Cisco. I don't believe the current consumption model for cloud is really a tailwind for Cisco, not really a headwind, but it doesn't really change Cisco's business. But I do think the very definition of cloud is changing before our eyes, Dave. And it's shifting away from centralized clouds. If you think of the way customers bought cloud before, it might have used AWS, it might've used Azure, but it really, that's not really multi-cloud, it's just multiple clouds in which I put things in these centralized resources. It's shifting more to this concept of distributed cloud in which a single application can be built using resources from your private cloud, for AWS, from Azure, from Edge locations, all the cloud providers have built their portfolios to support this concept of distributed cloud and what becomes important there, is a highly agile dynamic network. And in that case with distributed cloud, that is a tailwind for Cisco because now the network is that resource that ties all those distributed cloud components together. Now the network itself has to change. It needs to become a lot more agile and microservices and container friendly itself so I can spin up resources and, you know, in an Edge location, as fast as I can on-prem and things like that. But I do think it creates another wave of innovation and networking, and in that case, I think it does act as a tailwind for Cisco, aside from just the work it's done with the web scalers, you know, those types of companies. So, but I do think that Cisco needs to rethink its delivery model on network services somewhat to take advantage of that. >> At the analyst meeting, Cisco made the point that it does sell to the hyperscalers. It talked about the top six hyperscalers. You know, you had mentioned to me, maybe IBM and Oracle were in there. I always talk about four hyperscalers and only four, but that's fine. Here's my question. Practitioners have told me, buyers have told me, the more money and more workloads I put in the cloud, the less I spend with Cisco. Now, even though that might be Cisco gear powering those clouds, do you see that as a potential threat in that they don't own that relationship anymore and value will confer to the cloud players? >> Yeah, that's, I've heard that too. And I don't, I believe that's true when it comes to general purpose compute. You're probably not buying as many UCS servers and things like that because you are putting them in the cloud. But I do think you do need a refresh the network. I think the network becomes a very important role, plays a very important role there. The variant, the really interesting trend will be, what is your WAM look like? Do you have thousands of workers scattered all over the place, or do you just have a few centralized locations? So I think also, you know, Cisco will wind up providing connectivity within the cloud. If you think of the transition we've seen in other industries, Dave, as far as cloud goes, you think of, you know, F5, a company like that. People thought that AWS would commoditize F5's business because AWS provides their own load balancers, right? But what AWS provides is a very basic, very basic functionality and then use F5's virtual edition or a cloud edition for a lot of the advanced capabilities. And I think you'll see the same thing with the cloud that customers will start buying versions of Cisco that go in the cloud to drive a lot of those advanced capabilities that only Cisco delivers. And so I think you wind up buying more Cisco over time, although the per unit price of what you buy might be a little bit lower. If that makes sense here. >> It does, I think it makes a lot of sense and that fits into the cloud model. You know, you bring up a good point, the conversation with the customer was Rakuten. And that individual was essentially sharing with us, somebody was asking, one of the analysts was asking, "Well, what about the cloud guys? "Aren't they going to really threaten the whole Telco "industry and disrupt it?" And his point was, "Look at, this stuff is not trivial." So to your point, you know, maybe they'll provide some basic functionality. Kind of like they do in a lot of different areas. Data protection is another good example. Security is another good example. Where there's plenty of room for partners, competitors, of on-prem players to add value. And I've always said, "Look, the opportunity "is the cloud players spend 100 billion dollars a year "on CapEx." It's a gift to companies like Cisco who can build an abstraction layer that connects on-prem, cloud for hybrid, across clouds, out to the edge, and really be that layer that is that layer that takes advantage of cloud native, but also delivers that experience, I don't want to use the word seamlessly, but that experience across those clouds as the cloud expands. And that's fundamentally Cisco's cloud strategy, isn't it? >> Oh yeah. And I think people have underestimated over the years, how hard it is to build good networking products. Anybody can go get some silicon and build a product to connect two things together. The question is, can you do it at scale? Can you do it securely? And lots of companies have tried to commoditize networking, you know, White Boxes was looked at as the existential threat to Cisco. Huawei was looked at as the big threat to Cisco. And all of those have kind of come and gone because building high quality network equipment that scales is tough. And it's tougher than most people realize. And your other point on the cloud providers as well, they will provide a basic level of functionality. You know, AWS network equipment doesn't work in Azure. And Azure stuff doesn't work in Google, and Google doesn't work in AWS. And so you do need a third party to come in and act as almost the cloud middleware that can connect all those things together with a consistent set of policies. And that's what Cisco does really well. They did that, you know back when they were founded with routing protocols and you can think this is just an extension of what they're doing just up at the cloud layer. >> Excellent. Okay, Zeus, we're going to leave it there. Thanks to my guest today, Zeus Kerravala. Great analysis as always. Would love to have you back. Check out ZKresearch.com to reach him. Thank you again. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Now, remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Braking Analysis" podcast, and you can connect on Twitter at DVallante or email me David.Vallante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for the comments on LinkedIn. Check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay. We're here with Thomas Scheibe, who's the vice president of Product Management, aka VP of all things Data Center Networking, STN, cloud, you name it in that category. Welcome Thomas, good to see you again. >> Hey, same here. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay. Let's get right into observability. When you think about observability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring, problem resolution across the network, how does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >> Yeah. (scoffs) Yeah. Visibility as always is very, very important and it's quite frankly, it's not just, it's not just the networking team, it's actually the application team too, right? And as you pointed out, the the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the, the data center is wherever the data is, and I think we said this a couple years back. And really what happens the, the applications are going to be deployed in different locations, right? Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on-prem and they're built differently, right? They're built as micro servers, so they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need, as an operator as well as actually a user, a better visibility, "where are my pieces?", and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is, that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge why the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's, that's really the problem statement. What, what we're trying to go after with observability. >> Okay. Let's, let's double click on that. So, so a lot of customers tell me that you got to stare at log files until your eyes bleed, then you've got to bring in guys with lab coats who have PhDs to figure all this stuff out. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> So you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time, you have to simplify things. So how, how are you doing that? >> Correct. So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that is called ThousandEyes. And so what this does is basically (chuckles) as the name which I think is a fantastic, fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere and you can have a good correlation on links between if I run a from a site to a site, from a site to a cloud, from the cloud to cloud. And you basic can measure what is the performance of these links? And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of the ThousandEyes agent, right? Instead of just having a, an inversion machine of clouds we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices, right? We announced this was the Catalyst 9000. And we're extending this now to our 8000 Catalyst product line for the for the SD-WAN products, as well as to the data center products, in Nexus line. And so what you see is, is you know, a half a thing, you have ThousandEyes. You get a million insights and you get a billion dollar off improvements for how your applications run. And this is really the, the power of tying together the footprint of what a network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >> I see. So, okay. So as the cloud evolves, it expands, it connects, you're actually enabling ThousandEyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location but out to the network across clouds, et cetera. >> Thomas: Correct. >> Wherever the network is you're going to have a ThousandEyes sensor and you can bring this together and you can quite frankly pick, if you want to say, Hey I have my application in public cloud provider A domain one, and I have another one in domain two I can do monitor that link. I can also monitor, I have a user that has a campus location or a branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the, let's say, corporation's data center or headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just the, have visibility in saying, Hey, if there's a performance I know where the issue is. And then I obviously can use all the other tools that we have to address those. >> All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us that, you know, it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of ROI. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and DevOps to this world of hybrid and specifically, how is Cisco enabling IT organizations to move to a cloud operating model as that cloud definition expands? >> Yeah, no, that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observability. So it really, really what we're seeing, and this is going on for, I want to say couple of years now it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team, more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider, right? This is really around the networking team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model, right? Where this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public cloud is operating it like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for a while. So one of the examples um that we have, we're moving some of the control software assets that customers today can deploy on-prem to an instance that they can deploy in a, in a cloud provider and just basically instantiate things there and then just run it that way. Right? And so the latest example for this is what we have, our Identity Service Engine that is now unlimited availability, available on AWS and will become available mid this year, both on AWS and Azure, as a service. You can just go to Marketplace, you can load it there and now increase. You can start running your policy control in the cloud managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus, wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our Customers Network Operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically deploying their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >> Dave: So >> What's the scope of I, I hope I'm saying it right, ISE, right? I.S.E, I think it's um, you call it ISE. What's the scope of that? Like for instance, to an effect my, or even, you know address, simplify my security approach? >> Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is, a lot of people talking about is, how do I get to a Zero Trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure, again, whether this was only campus access as well as the data center and ISE helps you there. You can use it as a pawn to define your policies and then inter-connect from there, right. In this particular case, we would, instead of ISE in a cloud as a software, alone, you now can connect and say, Hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center or my campus going to the respective controller, whether it's DNA Center for campus or whether it's the, the ACI policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage ,in one place, "what is my policy", and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure. >> Yeah. Zero Trust. It was..Pre pandemic it was kind of a buzzword, now it's become a mandate. I, I wonder if we could talk about- >> Thomas: - Yes >> Yeah, right. I mean, so- >> Thomas: -Pretty much. >> I wondered if we could talk about cloud native apps. You got all these developers that are working inside organizations, they're maintaining legacy apps they're connecting their data to systems in the cloud. They're sharing that data. These developers, they're rapidly advancing their skillsets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud native, making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >> Yeah. So you were going to the talk we saw was the visibility. We talked about the operating model how our network operates actually want to use tools going forward. Now the next step to this is, it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools? Or how they interact with this tools? As well as quite frankly, as how let's say, a DevOps team, or application team or a cloud team also wants to take advantage of the programmability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right. Which has really two angles. So it's the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure, right? And so what we have done is we're A, putting in place the on-ramps between clouds, and then on top of it, we're exposing for all these tools APIs that can be used and leveraged by standard cloud tools or cloud-native tools, right? And one example or two examples we always have. And again, we're on this journey for a while, is both Ansible script capabilities that access from RedHat as well as Hashi Terraform capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure automation. And what, what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the app team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically instantiation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools, right. Whether this is ISE, what I just mentioned, whether this is our DCN controllers in the data center whether these are the controllers in the, in the campus for all of those, we have cloud-native interfaces. So operator or a DevOps team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives on the cloud or with everything how they built the application. >> Yeah, this is key. You can't even have the conversation of of Op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on-prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's, that's very important. Last question, Thomas, are customers actually using this? You made the announcement today. Are there, are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >> We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the path and using the Cisco High-performance Infrastructure both on the compute side, as well as on the Nexus side. One of the costumers, and this is like an interesting case, is Rakuten. Rakuten is a large telco provider, a mobile 5G operator in Japan and expanding, and as in different countries. And so people, some think, "Oh cloud" "You must be talking about the public cloud provider" "the big three or four". But if you look at it, there's a lot of the telco service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with Rakuten and help them build high performance data center infrastructure based on HANA Gig and actually for a gig to drive their deployment to its 5G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is where the whole the whole world, which frankly is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility together with the High-performance infrastructure becoming a reality on delivering actually, services. >> Yeah, some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, they're enormous but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds telcos that are either proximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper-scalers may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So, so that's a great case study. Thomas.Hey, great having you on. Thanks much for spending some time with us. >> Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in tech event coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Vice President, Senior Vice President, GM, and also CTO of Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, And Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy, Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, John. >> So we're not in person >> It's great to be here. >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet Zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of accelerating automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called (Susie laughs) and automation plays a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as, well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on. But what happens is, there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking, it has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need? And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation, you can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale, and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds about you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was at Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had >> Susie: Yeah. >> The massive cloud surge and scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, because the businesses need to stay alive. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> I just want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world, because you were there in person. Now we're six months in, scale is huge. >> We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and, you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you've bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you (chuckles) >> Yeah What are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenge that's such a huge deal? >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before, he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board-level conversation. So all of a sudden, CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the Heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, "How's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity?" So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation and, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working, but now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what accelerating automation with DevNet means. >> (giggles)Well, you've been, you know, we've been working together on DevNet and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time and the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, just as much as it is about automation and technology. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner, Virtual, unfortunately, won't be in person, but will be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks John. >> Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart, you've been driving as Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud, multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >> Oh yes, absolutely. You know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers, that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer, which Susie mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of Developer Advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact Switch, and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role? >> Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our, historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed. And we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto Cisco Live. And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We are always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities, such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get onboard with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability now that we need it while we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out' how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that IT departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days. You would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >> That's great. Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session in the DevNet Zone. Learning's going on, sometimes linearly and non linearly. You got the certifications, which is great. That's key, great success there. People are interested, but what other learnings are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends? >> Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice they want to be able to choose what matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. And we have two new expert-led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called Automation Bootcamp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands-on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular self-driven hands-on learning through the DevNet Fundamentals course, which is available through DevNet. And then there's also people who are saying, "I just want to use the technology. "I like to experiment and then go, you know, "read the instructions, read the manual, "do the deeper learning." And so they're spending a lot of time in our DevNet sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands-on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD-WAN. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways. and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at DevNet Create. >> Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up this Accelerating Automation with DevNet package and virtual event here and also tee up DevNet Create because DevNet Create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing, everything with APIs, I only can imagine the enablement that's going to create. >> Mandy: Yeah >> Can you share the summary real quick on Accelerating Automation with DevNet and tee up DevNet Create. Mandy, we'll start with you. >> Yes, I'll go first and then Eric can close this out. So just like we've been talking about with you at every DevNet event over the past years, you know, DevNet's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio, and up and down the stack and Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transforms teams, And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about Accelerating Automation with DevNet, it's about the DevNet community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >> Eric, take us home here, Accelerating Automation with DevNet and DevNet Create, a lot of developer action going on in Cloud Native right now, your thoughts. >> Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for DevNet Day this year, for Cisco Live and we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with Create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the Start Now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer for instance, we've now got a track just for them where they can get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. So I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >> Awesome. Thanks so much. >> I would >> Go ahead, Mandy. >> Can I add one more thing? >> Add one more thing. >> Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about Create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions and you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and content and speakers and the regions stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for DevNet Create that's going to be fantastic this year. >> Yeah, that's it. I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during, with this virtual DevNet, virtual DevNet create virtual theCUBE virtual, I think we're learning new things. People are working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. And I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll ride the wave with you guys. >> So thank you so much (Susie laughs) for taking the time to come on theCUBE and talk about your awesome Accelerating Automation and DevNet Create Looking forward to it, thank you. >> Thank you so much, >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Happy to be here. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content and men, we stay virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at DevNet Create. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro) >> Controller: Okay John, Here we go, John. Here we go. John, we're coming to you in five, four, three, two. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Senior Vice President GM and also CTO at Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, and Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy. Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, John. So we're not in person. >> It's great to be here >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome. But DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of Accelerating Automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called. And automation plays (Susie laughs) a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as ,well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surge and scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever, the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that because the businesses need >> Absolutely. >> to stay alive. I just want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world, because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >> We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is, as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate, digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability is super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenges? It's a huge deal. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers and he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home. How many people are you know, connected and able to work and what's their productivity? So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what Accelerating Automation with DevNet means. >> (laughs) Well, you know, we've been working together on DevNet in the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital, it's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner virtual, unfortunately won't be in person, but will be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is, as senior director of DevNet Certifications is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >> Oh yes, absolutely. You know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer which Susie mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. And this is why we created the DevNet certification. Several years ago, our DevNet community, who's been some of those engineers who have been coming into that software and infrastructure side and meeting. They ask us to help create a more defined pathway to create resources, training, all the things they would need to take all those steps to go after those new jobs. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of Developer Advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact Switch, and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role >> Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our, historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands-on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed and we were able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in-person where you're bound by the parameters of you know, how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto Cisco Live. And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability, they're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> Yeah, I mean, it's awesome, and first of all, you guys done a great job. I'm always impressed when we were at physical events in the DevNet Zone, just the learning, the outreach. Again, very open, collaborative, inclusive, and also, you know, you had one-on-one classes and talks to full blown advanced, (sneezes)Had to sneeze there >> Yeah, and that's the point. >> (laughs)That was coming out, got to cut that out. I love prerecords. >> Absolutely. >> That's never happened to me to live by the way. I've never sneezed live on a thousand--. (Eric laughs) >> You're allergic to me. >> We'll pick up. >> It happens. >> So Eric, so I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular? Obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been a leader in that, but as you move up the stack, as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability now that we need it while we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick. And we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that IT departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, used some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >> That's huge and you know, you brought up this sharing concept. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is you've got more sharing going on. >> Controller: John, let's pause right here. Let's pause right here. I'm going to try and bring Eric and Mandy and everybody out. And then just start right from here to bring Eric and Mandy back in and close up. Stand by Eric just hold tight. >> All right, hold on >> Controller: just for one moment. Hold tight, we got Mandy back >> Controller: Standby. Standby. Standby. Standby, standby, standby. Hold hold hold.

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's "TheCUBE" presenting accelerating automation with DevNet brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage theCUBE virtual's coverage of DevNet Create Virtual, we're not face to face, theCUBE's been there with DevNet and DevNet Create, since the beginning DevNet Create was really a part of the DevNet community looking out at the external market outside of Cisco which essentially is the cloud native world which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here who's been on theCUBE many times, we've been talking to them, recently acquired by Cisco ThousandEyes we have Joe Vaccaro with us Vice President of Product. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Great and thanks for having me. >> You have the keys to the kingdom you're the Vice President of the Product which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside figure it all out make everything run on ThousandEyes, You guys have been running common language across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud-native. This is really a hard area, it's converging multiple theaters and technology, a super important I want to get into that with you but first ThousandEyes is recently acquired by Cisco big acquisition, super important. The new CEO of Cisco, very clear API everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at DevNet Create. The ecosystem of Cisco is going outside their own their walls, outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers, talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us as the COVID hits you get acquired by Cisco. Tell us what's happening. >> Yeah, surely been an exciting six months for a ThousandEyes and the entire team and our customers as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think that change alone really kind of amplified even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And SaaS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever not only to run your business but to enable your employees to be productive but you don't own them. And if you don't own them then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what ThousandEyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >> Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses. I've talked to many CXOs, CSOs, chief security is huge. Talk track we'll get to in a second. But it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint as people start to look at their priorities and on hey, we going to have a connected experience. We going to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs are passe, maybe it's SD-WAN maybe it's something else, they're on a backbone, they're connecting to the internet. A lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running for these networks. This is a huge issue, COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what is ThousandEyes thinking about this? >> If you think about the kind of legacy application delivery it went from largely users internet office connected over say a dedicated corporate network largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a fairly simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now as you mentioned distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application. Those three things together, ultimately are creating that level of complex service chain. It really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the IT organization is really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure but delivering the right experience. And yet then have a way to be able to see to gain that visibility that experience to measure it and understand and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it to be able to ensure that your employees as well as your customers are getting the right overall approach to being able to elaborate those assets. >> It's funny you know I was getting to some of these high scale environments a lot of these concepts are converging. We had terms like automation, self healing networks. You mentioned microservices earlier, you earlier mentioned the clouds of the new data center or when's the new land. Have you ever look at it, it's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on the automation piece of networking and internet outages for instance. Because there's so many outages going up and down it is like catching looking for a needle in a haystack, right? So we've had this conversation with you guys on theCUBE before. How does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? What's important to look at? Can you comment on and react to the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >> Yeah, it was really great and as you mentioned automation really in a place that a key when you think about the just a broad problem that IT is trying to drive you know from our lens we look at it in really three ways. First off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points you want to inspect them. But what we talked about RightSide Data alone doesn't solve that problem as you mentioned that needle in the haystack. Data just provides the raw metrics that are streaming across the screen you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. You need to enable that data to become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly to allow you to be able to see the unseen. To allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your IT workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine to be able to then make the fundamental changes back the network fabric whether that is dressing your modifying your BGP peering that we see happen within our customers using ThousandEyes data built around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months or to be able to then use that data to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers as well as our employees. >> Classic policy-based activities taken to a whole another level. I going to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay, because most IT people like Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane sandy but now with COVID everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent work from home which puts a lot of pressure on everything. So I got to ask you now that employees are working at home how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >> Yeah, that's a great question. As you we saw within our own customer base when COVID hit and we saw this rise of work from home IT teams were really scrambling and said, okay I have to light up this say VPN infrastructure or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network. And people were then using ThousandEyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CPP and infrastructure across back into the corporate network as well as in using our ThousandEyes end point agents that runs on a local user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. Because when a user calls up support and says I'm having trouble say accessing my application whether that's Salesforce or something else what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU memory utilization. It could be the WiFi and the signal quality within your WiFi network. It could be your access point. It could be your local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that can go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application and to be able to understand that full end to end path. >> IT teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well but you've got the Cloud. How has your technology help the IT teams? Can you give some examples there? >> Yeah great way is how people use ThousandEyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem again that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action. And where in the past you might be able as an IT administrator to walk over to their network team say hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing? Now that's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as an IT organization? We think a ThousandEyes and how our customers are using a ThousandEyes becomes a common operating language. It allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure through those different layers of the network. What's happening and where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore within ThousandEyes in terms of enabling that data sharing ecosystem leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say you know what here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the IT organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times as well as over the course of people using ThousandEyes. They take those share links that actually send them to their external providers. Because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own IT organization they're having worked collaboratively with the different ESPs that they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're leveraging or the SaaS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >> So I got to ask you the question what you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for IT teams, you see a lot of benefits with ThousandEyes. You pointed out a few of them. So I got to ask you the question. So if I'm an IT person in the trenches are you guys have an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah, give me a couple Advils and aspirins but also >> Yeah. you're an enabler too. The new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. Talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for IT teams. >> Yeah, that's a great analogy you're thinking like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum ThousandEyes is the trusted tool the source of truth for IT organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing as they are generating the different on call to be able to jump into a war room situation. ThousandEyes is that trusted source of truth that allow them to focus to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But ThousandEyes is also when you think about baselining your experience what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging ThousandEyes on a continuous basis it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience to understand how your network is changing cause as you mentioned networks are constantly evolving, right? The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore you can be begin to use that as you mentioned in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy you'd be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light as people using say ThousandEyes as part of say SD-WAN roll out. Where you're looking to say benchmark and again confidence as you look to scale out either benchmarking different ISP within that I feel like connectivity where as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >> That's great insights classic financial model ROI you got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out and the upside music experience connectivity, application performance which drives revenue, etc. So great point great insight Joe, thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. Who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things, but as the trend starts going on as everything is a service or SaaS as it's called certainly Cisco is going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service. Because at the end of the day everything will be a service but without automation you really can't have services, right? So, automation, automation, automation great drum to bang all day long but then also you've got the same business side saying as a service pushing that into the products. Means it's not trivial. Talk about how you look at automation and everything as service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >> Yeah, ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve and ultimately, what is the deal that they're trying to face? And in many ways right, they're being exploded with increase of data they need to be able to not only process and gather but then be able to then make use of. Then from that as we mentioned once you've processed that data and you still gather the insights from it you need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that IT experience becomes even more complex as more, more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. Ultimately you need with the level of automation you'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as a broad of a way as possible. And data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate and then ultimately how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >> Its like a feature (laughs). It's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning all the goodness in the software. That's really kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it? >> Hmm. >> Final question for you as we wrap up DevNet Create really again is going beyond Cisco's DevNet community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. These are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want you know, you guys got that. That was nice thanks so much. You take care of that I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services these new automation, these new capabilities what's your message? >> Ultimately I think when you look at ThousandEyes from a product perspective we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience and from a developer standpoint what I'd say is that, while you're developing in your silo you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. And your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon but the network its connected to and then ultimately the user and the sense of that user. If I leveraging a ThousandEyes and being able to then integrate ThousandEyes into how you think closely on that experience that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developers looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is while you need to focus on your role as a developer having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of how your users will access that application is critical. >> Awesome Joe, thank you so much again. Trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction. Congratulations to everyone at ThousandEyes. Thanks for coming on sharing. >> I appreciate it thanks for having me. >> Joe Vaccaro vice president of Product here with ThousandEyes is now part of Cisco. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE Virtual for DevNet Create Virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)