 Live from New York, it's The Cube, covering Riverbed Disrupt, brought to you by Riverbed. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Riverbed Disrupt, everybody. This is The Cube. Stu and I are pleased to introduce Angelo Comosetto, who is the technical director of Cloud for Riverbed. Angelo, welcome to The Cube. Thank you for coming in. Thanks for having me. And good demo this morning. Thank you. So Riverbed threw an acquisition of Oceto, which gets Riverbed into this whole cool SD-WAN marketplace. So things are changing pretty rapidly. What's happening in the world of Cloud? Yeah, I mean, we're doing lots of stuff. So we have Steel Connect that Riverbed acquired through the Oceto acquisition, which brings kind of their SD-WAN vision. They wanted to accelerate what they had planned to do. So we helped them do that. And after the acquisition, got everything all integrated, it worked out really well. And then I shifted over to work on the Cloud piece, because we've got really smart people building the boxes and doing all the VPN automation and the things that make Steel Connect cool. And the Cloud piece is the most important piece, just because vendors are wanting to put stuff in the Cloud, their customers are trying to get there, and everybody's taking different approaches. And the approach is usually different from their core competency, which we're trying to make it so that they don't have to make that distinction anymore. And the impetus is simplicity, right, and scale and agility. I mean, turn those sort of buzzwords into what it means to actually develop a product and get it to market. And I think that, especially around the Cloud, that's the benefit. As an infrastructure, as a surface, the idea is that I can leave this table and I can have 100 computers right now. And I can use them for an hour and kill them all when I don't want them anymore. And that kind of agility means that if you want to run your products effectively, you have to build them for that type of platform. You can't just build something, throw it over the fence and try to use the old way of doing things in a brand new platform. One of the advantages that those platforms give you, so that's kind of what we're working on, is making it so that really, if you do it one step beyond that, you can hide that whole layer from everybody anyways. They shouldn't actually need to become Cloud experts to connect their offices to the Cloud. Okay, and, Angela, can you help unpack for us, you know, we've seen certain products that say, okay, I have an appliance. And then I say, okay, let me make that a software bundle and I can run it as a virtual machine, which means I can bring my own hardware. And then maybe, you know, virtual machines, I can run those in the Cloud and I can run those there. How much is it just porting code and how much is it redesigned for Cloud? Yeah, I mean, I think if you're an older vendor and all of your stuff was built from the ground up to run on a hardware appliance, then it's much more difficult to just port it over someplace. Yeah, so, Stu, I mean, we talk a lot about sort of the transformation of the Cloud. We heard this morning that Amazon kind of got it started, it was interesting. I mean, I don't know, people debate about when the Cloud really started. Some say, well, Mark Benioff would say he started it in 1999. And of course, Larry Ellison would say he started it, but that's kind of what Oracle does, right? They act like they invented a couple years later, but he started the whole conversation. But so, I mean, from your standpoint, Stu, you've seen sort of Riverbed evolve from a company that was started before the Cloud was even invented and now it's sort of extending into, you know, this real Cloud world. What role does that sort of infrastructure play from a networking standpoint in the Cloud? Well, yeah, Dave, we talked about in the intro here, it's where my data is, where my applications live, where my people are, you know, it's just changing all the time. So mobile digital transformation, that requires huge challenges from the networking standpoint because it's not just I go to the network. Exactly. And I think that the premise of the Cloud is that for a few cents an hour, you can make a whole bunch of stuff somebody else's problem. That's the whole reason to do that versus your own data center. If by doing that approach, you then add a whole bunch of other problems that you're not prepared for, you kind of lose the benefit of why you're using the Cloud in the first place. So the demo, Angela, that you showed this morning, you know, basically showing off your SD-WAN product. Yeah. You really emphasize the simplicity and the admin user experience. Can you compare that with sort of where we are historically and how it works in your world? Yeah, and I think that SD-WAN is a way to move traffic across links. And the idea there, the promise is that you don't have to build the links by hand. Every network admin probably knows how to build a VPN tunnel. That doesn't mean they want to build them all day long or they want to build 4,000 new ones every time they have a change in their network. So it's not so much about what the technology does, it's more about what it requires you not to do. The automation or the orchestration, if you will, is kind of the idea where you can succeed with Steel Connect, where you can't succeed with other vendors that are trying to do the same thing and they're just not as advanced. So some people say, we talked about this, we heard it this morning in the keynotes about some people like the pain of command line interface and so forth, but some folks would say, well, I just like to have that control, I like to have the knobs to turn, I'm afraid of automation because it might do things like people talk about that way with autonomous vehicles now. How much of that is sort of real versus illusory in your view? Yeah, I mean, so have you ever ridden in a Tesla? So I mean, I was the same way, I'm not letting a car drive for me and I had a friend that took us for a ride in one and I wouldn't trust it driving around rural subdivisions maybe all the time, but driving and stopping go traffic where you don't have to pay quite as much attention, it's still a car, I understand that there's wheels, I understand there's a steering wheel, I understand how it works and then it's a building a relationship of do I trust it to do that stuff for me and that's what I think where you can differentiate. So to answer your question, it's the same. I think that we do what people are used to do, we just don't require them to do it and then we add a whole bunch of secret magic on top to make it more compelling. So, Angel, in the demo that you did this morning during the keynote, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the application library because I think back way in optimization was the network team cares about it and the CFO cares about it, but it's just like shrinking a pipe as opposed to what the business cares about is I need my application, I need performance, I don't want people calling me up, what applications, what's the span, if you could talk about some use cases that fit, so I mean you look at, the cloud kind of has two big uses, there's things you run in the cloud, like your web server and stuff just to keep that nice and elastic, but if you have a work order application and all of your offices enter their work orders through this application and it's private, you don't want it publicly hosted, then you need to connect people to that and a lot of times they say great, we've now moved the work orders application to the cloud and the poor result for the guy in Oklahoma office is that the app which he didn't like anyways is now also slow because he's going to the headquarters where the app was and is now going from the headquarters to the cloud so it actually did get farther away, so for him the cloud is like a beanstalk he's having to climb, it's way up there and it's a lot of work, but if you could bring the cloud down to where as a result of moving to the cloud it's now faster than the workforce you can accelerate their impression of it by bringing it closer and then applying Riverbed WAN optimization across it so that's kind of why the WAN op piece suddenly becomes super relevant and getting to the cloud is one thing but then getting there quickly and efficiently gives you more value so the network admin ostensibly anyway should love what you're doing other than those maybe hanging on to their precious command line boxes that they're hugging protecting the past from the future but senior execs must really love it because you're essentially saying look we've got this non differentiated activity that we're now going to eliminate and we're going to automate what are people doing with that extra time where are they applying it so we had this happen where we did a presentation in Greece and somebody stood up and said you will put me out of a job and I said no now you're free to focus on things which actually matter so instead of worrying about the plumbing you can worry about which routes the plumbing should act like what you're sending through those pipes you can work on making the voiceover IP a better experience you can work on adding branches maybe you had a plan to add 50 branches and you had a five year plan we just read comic books in the network room all day long and don't tell everybody that you've found a better way of doing things that also works too this thing called digital transformation that everybody's talking about which requires some new creativity and new thinking and we're early days this market's still getting started and even from our side a lot of the work we're doing now is around integrating it so that even within riverbed we don't have a bunch of separate products there's a lot of stuff going on with steel central for visibility we're trying to fuse all that and as a result of that there's the cloud piece there's the new boxes we have coming as we bring it all into a real solution then the value is going to keep getting more as customers are getting everything that we can do really in a single pane of glass and I don't like that term because everybody says they have that it's something that's actually possible with steel connect well and to your point you're not doing managers of managers of managers anymore the network admins I used to ask has anyone ever pushed a button that updates 500 boxes and they go yeah inevitably the two or three that don't come back are the ones that are geographically the farthest away from you and you're on the phone trying to talk someone who's not technical through resetting it or you're getting on a plane and so really having a product that was designed from the ground up to only be managed that way is one of the biggest benefits of that solution all right we got to leave it there thanks for popping in really good to meet you good to have a good time keep it right everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break this is the cube we're live from New York City we'll be right back my name is Dave Vellante