 From Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, brought to you by ScienceLogic. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C. First of all, I want to welcome back to the program Raj Putnam, who's the Vice President of Global Solutions at ScienceLogic. Thanks for coming back, and welcome to the program. First time, Rob Gruner is listed as a Solutions Architect from Telstra, but Rob, I actually had a chance to talk to some of your cohorts there, and they said, Rob, Rob's a wizard. He's an engineer that does everything. So, you know, Solutions Architect, of course, we know. They're out there, they do a lot of different things, and at least your peers say you're somebody that does quite a lot of different things. I did. Jack of all trades, master of none, unfortunately, but we'll see how we go. It's all right. You know, it is in vogue now to be, you know, a generalist. It's, you know, we've gone from specialties to, well, oh no, it's platforms, and everything's going to be everything. So, I have plenty of background with Telstra, but maybe talk a little bit about, you know, your role in the organization, and what kind of things you're involved in since, you know, some of those trades that you are Jack of all. Probably, I suppose I've come into Telstra as an acquisition. So, you know, working for a small company, you tend to do everything. And for some reason, I've been allowed to continue to do that. So, and I've developed an expertise around science logic, and that means I've been involved across a lot of areas of the business, as we've been adopting science logic more widely. And yeah, it's been quite an interesting process. So, it means I can take that expertise and then see how it's applied across the organization. So, it's been quite interesting. Awesome. One of the things that's been interesting to me is talking to the service providers, talking to the enterprise customers, is to, you know, how many tools they had, how many they replaced with science logic, but also what things it's integrating with and working with. It was a big focus on the keynote this morning, is, you know, integrations with ITSM and, you know, all these various pieces. So, maybe give us a little bit of kind of the scope, you know, how long Telstra has been using science logic, how broad is the deployment, and, you know, what does it do, and what does it tie into? At the moment, it's more enterprise focused. So, and that's the area of Telstra I come from. So, it's really around delivering services to our customers. Quite recently, we've been then looking in deploying science logic across our carriage space and managing services there. That's quite a large deployment. You know, we're quite happy with that in terms of what it's going to be doing for the business. And the integrations there are endless. So, Telstra, like a lot of large organizations, has a lot of different systems to talk to, a lot of different service tests, depending on the operational areas. So, service now is one of those, but there's a whole lot of other stuff. And so, that's a very challenging process. And science logic's been pretty good at, you know, spreading itself around those. Yeah, give us a little insight as to, you know, how fast things are changing. Here, Kafka and Streams and, you know, constantly moving. I've been looking at the, you know, Kubernetes and container stuff that's happening, which is fast moving, so. Oh, definitely. So, yeah, and Telstra's trying as hard as it can to move as quickly as the market can allow it. So, definitely, it's virtualizing, it's automating. AIOps is a big component of what we're doing, and yeah, it's extremely important for the business. Okay, so AIOps is something you're doing. I have to admit, we're not as mature as we'd like to be. I'm not sure if you saw the keynote this morning, but they put out a maturity model. So, I would love for you to, you know, where are you when you look at, they kind of had the three criterias there, is there's kind of the machine learning, there's the automation, and I'm trying to remember the third piece that was there. But, you know, where are you today? You know, how'd you get there, and you know, what's a little bit of the roadmap going forward? I think it might be probably our ambitions to be in the upper end of the spectrum and into remediation, but that's an ambition, and I think we've got a while to go with that, so more than that, I can't really comment on it, so yeah. It's interesting, so they have the keynote tomorrow, they're going to have Gene Kim speaking on the DevOps, and you know, I'm a big fan of the Phoenix project, and they talked about, you know, the jack of all trades that does it all, he could sometimes be the bottleneck in the system. Absolutely, yeah. Because you can't be, oh, I need something fixed, well, we'll go to Rob, Rob will fix it, that's great, that fire-foting mode, I know I've done that in my career, and it's one of those things, oh geez, you're never going to move out of this job because you're irreplaceable. It's like, that's a dangerous place to be. It is, yeah. So, you know, we should talk a little bit about, you know, you said, you know, science logic, you know, they position themselves as this is going to help you move at, you know, machine speed, and keep up with that, give us a little bit of the reality of what you're seeing, how, what does that impact your job, your organization? Oh, look, I think science logic has done a wonderful job within the organization. It's the legacy infrastructure within any organization, particularly at Celsius scale, that's really holding you back, so. And there's a lot of will, I think, at a people level within Celsius, we can move as quickly as we can, but we have such a large number of legacy systems to deal with. You know, we're looking at one deployment of science logic where we're looking at 18 systems to kill, so that's a big task, so. The wonderful technical depth that we've all inherited. Yeah, correct. So, you know, Raj, you know, this is something we hear from all customers. It'd be lovely if I had the mythical, you know, unicorn that, you know, starts from the ground up, and you know, it can start afresh, but we always have to have that mix, and give us a little bit about what you're seeing, you know, about the Telstra, and a little bit broader. You know, I think what Telstra has done really well with taking advantage of our technology was they didn't come in with this attitude of I'm going to rip out everything that we have, and just have a magic easy button. Software doesn't work that way. I think we've all learned the lessons of tough deployments that when you try to auto-fix everything. So they came in with a really gradual phased approach of get a couple pieces done where they had gaps. We started to fill those gaps. What ended up happening during that last few years is we've seen this shift greater change, and so they've taken advantage of the platform's functionality as a whole as they go through their digitization efforts. And so as they digitize, they're taking this step-by-step approach to, you know, what you were saying earlier with what Rob does, he doesn't answer the question of being the one-man band. What they did was they built it all process-wise using software to drive the automation. So once it's done one time, you're not stuck on the person anymore. And so I think when we look at our most successful customers like Telstra, it's because they've had this gradual phased approach where they're using software rather than single-person bottlenecks and rather than having these Tiger teams to try to solve problems and moving towards a better process to take advantage of the world we're in today. So Rob, how do you measure success? You know, what are some of the business outcomes or, you know, KPIs that you understand how you're moving from kind of where you were to where you want to be? That's a difficult one to answer because, particularly with science logic, we was using so many different contexts. So for a certain part of the business, we might say, you know, are we monitoring the full stack? Are we giving customers real value and visibility through the whole dynamic of their business? And then in another context we're using science logic, where we're just saying, we just need to deploy at scale, we need to onboard as quickly as possible, we need to keep the cost down to a minimum, we need to keep events as low as possible. Okay, so it's more about the efficiency argument. So it really depends on where we're trying to use it and how we're deploying it. So, yeah. How do you have visibility across how everybody's doing and getting trained on the latest things and keeping up to date and sharing best practices? How do you manage that internally and how do you network with your peers on some of that? Well, we've tried to really, with Intel, we have a concept of center of excellence. So it's really about being recognized as the business experts in a particular area and allowing the business to understand that's where the expertise sits. And certainly we've done a very good job with that. And then allowing and communicating that out to the business as well. So it's a very tough ask though. It's a big business. We have 30,000 people. So often one person doesn't know about another person, another floor in the building. So, to try and spread it across the business, we have 50 offices worldwide. So it's a process, yeah. I mean, Roger, just one of the things I hear is, science logic, it's not a widget and it can fit in a lot of different environments and a lot of different uses. I heard a strong emphasis into training. Had your CEO on wearing his wizards hat for the e-learning knowledge that was gonna happen. So, talk a little bit about how science logic is looking to address this especially for some large customers like Telstra. I think there's a general skills gap as a whole beyond our technology, beyond what's taking place in the world today. And I've been at the business for quite a while and we've long focused on training the operator on how to utilize the technology to solve their specific problems. And while those aspects are really powerful, some of the things we've done recently to go a step further is, when we hear similar questions, we started to record all of those so our customers can watch videos of how to solve problems. Instead of just going on to some forum and let me type some question and hope somebody responds to it in the future, you have read it for that. So we've got to look at a better mechanism and video-based training, handling the customers, we can build out these use cases, drives the platform value. And what Telstra does that's really unique is they use the platform less so from a perspective of can I manage XYZ technology but what can I build on top of it? How can I break the platform to some extent and Rob is a mad scientist for us here. I mean, you can jump into this more but they've broken the platform to solve those business needs by addressing them individually. And what we've done is we've taken his best practices and we roll them back out to the rest of our customers. So with Rob, it's Telstra and a couple of our other really great customers, we're driving a better community and sense of community. So less question and answer forum, less traditional support, more video, more community, more shareability. And that's where you're going to get additional quality coming out from the products that are being delivered. Makes sense to you, Robert. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Rob, I mean, I'd love any commentary on that. You know, the network effect of software, especially you would talk about SaaS or as a service type things, you know, that's what Salesforce originally came out. It was like, oh wait, one customer asked for something and wait, everybody can take advantage of that or something similar. So are you seeing that kind of dynamics today with science logic and with others? Well, particularly within the Telstra business, yeah, absolutely. So by building a capability in one area, you can share it across. And we found that we've been able to then sell the system internally to our internal stakeholders. So they appreciate the value of it and we can build on that. And then our customers, whilst we don't necessarily lead you with the product, they can see what's going on and they basically then take it on as a service as well. So it's a very, very interesting process. All right, so Rob, one thing we haven't talked about yet, let's talk about data. You know, what's the role of data in your environment? It's something that's key to the platform from science logic. How are you leveraging it? How is that changing in your environment and what are the opportunities there? That's an interesting question. So as a telco, we collect a lot of data and obviously we have federal agencies who make that a requirement as well. So we have an existing data like initiative and that's very full at the moment. And science logic is where we're looking at how we can add to that the valuable information that it provides. But like everyone else, there's a lot of data to collect and it's an interesting process to try and make sense out of it and then react accordingly. I mean, as a business, we're responding to millions and millions of events a day. So it's a difficult thing. Yeah, one of the things when we look at things like anything that requires training like machine learning or the like, there's the balance between I wanna learn from everybody but you're in a competitive marketplace. I don't want my competitors necessarily to get things. So the software products usually, well, I can isolate and it doesn't have specific information but how do you look at that dynamic of making sure that you gain from what the industry's doing but that you can still stay competitive and ahead of your competition? I don't know if it necessarily can answer that. I suppose my head's tied into really what I can do with the platform and how I can then bring new technologies into the company. So that's really, I suppose, where my space is and really that's what I'm focused on. So what we do with the data probably is not necessarily a bigger concern. Fair enough. How about there was quite a lot of announcements this week. So number of integrations as well as updates to the product. Anything specifically that you've been waiting for or that has caught your eye? The service now integration I think is far more advanced than has been in the past and we have aspects of the business you use to sync server quite heavily. So the fact that that's now matured and as much more robust and which sort of offering that'll have a lot of impact on the business. So yeah, definitely. I mean, the machine learning is another great thing. And it's just a question of then how that develops over time. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah, Roger, I'd love to, you know, when I've been digging into some is the feedback you've been getting from customers and what's been leading to, you know, some of the enhancements. So I would love your take on what you're seeing. You know, I think one of the things that Telstra pushed us towards a few years back was we're going to build, we already have a data lake. We don't need you to function as our data lake. So it's multiple different data lakes. And this concept of how do I move later from one data lake to a different data lake, lakes within lakes, ponds, whatever the terminology is today. The data ocean is what we call it. Perfect, perfect. And when getting to that data ocean from our lake, we have to go get streaming data. So now we're going to get streams again. So really geographic here. But, you know, Rob really pushed us to make sure we could go right to Kafka buses and push data out. So what do you do with the data? And so Telstra has been a, you know, an early adopter of a lot of our technology. And by being an early adopter, they've pushed us in a number of directions. So I think when you see a lot of the functionality that we've released this week and we've announced, it's been because of our customer base, because of our partners like Telstra, that need to drive the business further and forward. And especially in an industry like the Telco world where everything is mobile, everything's moving so fast and aggressively, they're really like a good sounding board for where we need to go and how do we get there. And that drive and that partnership is what I think I'm most excited about working with Telstra is, they demand from us to be excellent. And that gets great product coming out and we see the results this week with all of our customers excitedly looking at extreme treatment capability that Rob was pushing us for well in advance of anyone else. Yeah, Rob, I want to give you the final word. You know, I can't help but notice you actually have co-branded shirts. You've got Telstra on your arm with the science logic there. So obviously more than just a vendor relationship there, maybe close this out with, you know, how important science logic is to your business and your job. It's a critical part of the business. I mean, particularly where we're looking at the commodity aspects of our managed services, you know, we can't survive unless we can provide quality and valuable information to our customers and really science logic has been the key platform for that. So in some respects, we're resting an aspect of the business entirely in science logic's hands and we're hoping they'll deliver. Well, Rob and Raj, thank you so much for joining and sharing all the progress that you've made and where things are going. Thanks so much. Thanks, Stu. All right, and I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE at ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Thanks for watching.