 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Next Level Network Experience Event brought to you by Infoblox. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Infoblox virtual event, digging into the Next Level Networking Experience. I'm here with John Furrier, who is the host of the event. John, we've been talking about Next Level Networking for a few years now. Everything's multi-cloud, cloud-native, SaaS adoption, really transforming the way that we have to think about networking. Tell us a little bit about this event. Well, Stu, as you know, yeah, we've been, again, go back years from when member VMware bought NSX, we're like, okay, that's going to change the game, software-defined networking. And we loved it. We were always riffing on programmability. We saw the DevOps trajectory hitting networking. We would say that's where the action is. And this event really kind of speaks to Infoblox as a company, which is really well-known for DNS. I mean, they had CricketLoose, Stuart Bailey, they're really kind of the pioneers in DNS and security. They've constantly been adding innovation to it. But DNS is one of those things where it's kind of like not thought about, but it runs everywhere, runs the web. It is critical infrastructure. And if you know DHCP, we all know what that is. We have a home router. And then you got IP address management. These have been traditionally different things for enterprises, and everyone has it. And they got to deal with it. And it's really ultimately the location and how things resolve and connect. So it really becomes a foundational opportunity to figure out where the access is, not only on remote access, but security. So we had a great bunch of guests looking at the Infoblox next level networking, because they bought, had an acquisition, a CUBE alumni snap route recently. And this caught our attention because they were doing cloud native. And one of the guests we had was Glenn Sullivan. He was the founder of Snap Route. He was the guy who did all the Siri work for Apple. So this guy knows large scale and knows cloud native. We had Kunaiya Suni, who runs corporate development and all of the products for Infoblox. He kind of went into the strategy of how they're taking the, I won't say boring DNS, but the critical infrastructure of DNS and how they're extending the functionality with an abstraction layer around DDI, which is DNS, DHCP and IP management. And then we had some great guests on there. We had Craig Sanderson from Infoblox, he's on there. You'll hear from him, he talks about the security. And then finally a customer who's running a big school district who with COVID-19 exposes all these challenges around what has been called the borderless enterprise. So really next level is that, how do you deal with all this stuff? And that's been a big issue. So we're going to unpack all that in this virtual event. We had four great interviews. And so it's going to be a great program. Yeah, John, as you said, it's some of those foundational pieces of how network is done. A lot of times runs under the radar, something you don't need to think about. But all of these changes, as we said, my data, my network is now highly distributed. Especially, I would expect that the impact of the global pandemic and work from home are really causing even more of these challenges and to think about distributed infrastructure even more. What are some of the themes we should be looking for here? How much of them kind of tie into what we've been talking about the last couple of years in some of these cloud native worlds? That's great questions too. I'll get into some of the themes of the program, but you brought up the COVID-19. Again, we've been talking about this in our reporting. You've been doing a ton of interviews and following all your stuff as well as all of our team. COVID-19 really exposes the aspect of critical infrastructure. And to me, it's the great IoT experiment happening in real time. It's forcing companies to say, hey, the future of work is about workplace. The location is now home. Workforce are the people, emotional. They want ease of use. They want a different experience. They're all not in the office. Workloads and workflows. All of them have the common word work in it. So I think COVID-19 exposes this, what I call IoT experiment because everyone is now borderless. It changes the game and really puts a pressure on security, network access, and ultimately the bad guys are out there. So you could have someone, a teacher at home or a worker at home, and they get some malware attack and they're not sophisticated with Zoom or whatever they're using for tools. All of that's changed and they're vulnerable. So this brings up a huge networking challenge from whether even VPNs are even relevant or not to everything. So to me, that is a huge point. You're going to hear that throughout the commentary that's kind of teased out, but the real thing is about innovation around the cloud. You're going to hear info blocks and their experts talk about what they're doing and how they see cloud scale and cloud native integrating into an older paradigm like DNS. And to me, that's the evolution of this DDI concept. It's an abstraction layer that creates innovation opportunities but also takes away a lot of the complexities around managing all the DNS things out there. And again, that's the access to the network. It's a place of truth. So it's really kind of low level, but it's really foundational. So to me, that's the main theme and customers want ease of use into it whether they're at home or not. And replacing the old ways to putting a box out there. That's the way it was in DNS. You know, DNS people would manage it all. Now they want to have it provisioned, managed, a managed service, cloud native, cloud operations, because it's only, it has to get that way. Yeah, it's interesting, John. You know, we watched the whole wave of software defined, impact networking. Think of a company like Infoblox. They've been around for decades. They are dominant in the spaces that they play in. Traditionally, it would have been an appliance that you thought of for their environments. You talked about, they now have the snap route acquisition as part of what they're doing. So I guess, what should we be looking for? What are really the main point that Infoblox wants to bring people together for this next level networking experience? Well, Glenn Sullivan was one of my favorite discussions. And he's been on the, he's a CUBE alumni, and he's so smart. He came again from Apple. He knows what large scale looks like. Snap route was really early. It was one of those technologies that just, you know, it has the core DNS built in, Kubernetes built in. They were doing some pretty aggressive, I would call it, for the lack of better, Kubernetes and bare metal. They were doing stuff, but it was really super cool with Kubernetes. You combine that with DNS and Infoblox actually has the core DNS. That's actually in every Kubernetes of, in the CNCF. So everything that comes out of the CNCF from a core DNS standpoint is Infoblox. So, you know, they're definitely relevant in the whole CNC of cloud native foundation, effort around cloud native. And as that scales to microservices, you're going to have to have this new abstraction layer that can also be compatible with automation. So that's, we didn't go into the weeds on that, but that was essentially the headroom for all the different conversations, the roles of cloud native and open source technologies, enabling borderless enterprises because you got to have the operation side and you got to have the programmability. So you start to get into the true dev ops that we used to riff on all the time, you know, move fast break stuff to don't break anything, right? So ops and dev have to come together. This is where the winners and the losers of networking will be determined. You got to provide the enablement for developers, but you got to provide the stability of an operational checklist. Yeah, John, brings me to the last question I wanted to ask you before we get to the guests. You know, that operational change, you know, we saw for so many years, it was, oh, all the networking people, they're going to have to learn to code. Oh, wait, dev ops is actually going to spread the information around, and maybe I won't need a particular networking team, but we understand when things go wrong, you've got to have somebody with the expertise that can be able to dig in. Who should be listening to this? What are some of those organizational implications for what you're talking about with Infoblox? That's a great point. I mean, the biggest challenge that I see in all this entire digital transformation as it starts to get down into the cloud native world is, most people are asking the wrong questions. They don't even know what they're talking about when it comes down to trying to compare an apple to an orange. They're really kind of disconnected on language. You know, you got server people and networking. We know that they have different languages and working together is key. When you think about something like DNS, that's a technical, that's an operator, that's an IT person, that's someone who's running critical infrastructure. But when you start to think about the security aspect of it, it's a CXO conversation. So what I'm seeing come out of this that's critical is when you start to get into this cloud native world, you have more stakeholders in the value proposition of all this. And with COVID-19, as I pointed out, you know, you got hacks and you got security. So when you talk about security, that's up and down the organization. That's the CXO down to the teams themselves. When you talk about automation horizontally scaling with DevOps, that's multiple teams. So you have an integration kind of stakeholders, you know, the DNS server, all the networking, all these people have to kind of come together. So the people who should watch this are the people who are concerned about scaling the modern enterprise, which is borderless, which is code word for, you know, multiple access points and multiple connection points or IoT. And how do you make that work? And that's the real challenge. So it's kind of like an IT person who wants to figure out where the puck will be so they can be there when it's there and skate to where the puck is, as we say. And the CXO or the senior people have to understand that DNS cannot be overlooked because, you know, whether it's a managed service, you saw Cloudflare had a huge outing to the DNS setting. DNS takes down everything, right? So it's the most fertile ground and the most targeted ground for attacks. And that is well understood. So getting the right questions in place, foundationally had a set up the modern enterprise and then that's going to be a construct for the cloud native architecture and ultimately the developer environment. So, you know, it's a topic that's kind of nerdy with DNS but it has implications across digital transformation. Yeah, John, I expect there are lots of conversations around security and automation, how they tie into all of the modernization themes, absolutely some pieces that shouldn't be left behind. All right, John Furrier, thank you so much for helping us kick off. Really interested, make sure to stick with us to listen to all the guest interviews here that John has done, the Infoblox, next level networking experience. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.