 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are in theCUBE Studios. We're here with Ranga Rao, Senior Director of Product Management at Cisco Networking Group, and David Link, the CEO of ScienceLogic. Talk about their partnership. Guys, great to see you. Thanks for coming in. Glad to be here. So you guys had a great event, by the way. Symposium in DC. Congratulations. Thanks, a lot of momentum. Yeah, it was fun to watch CUBE, it was like our eight videos up on YouTube. But you guys are a classic partnership here with Cisco. Talk about the relationship. You guys are meeting in the channel, got a lot of joint customers, a lot of innovation. Talk about the relationship between ScienceLogic and Cisco. Cisco and ScienceLogic have been working together because our customers demand us to work together, right? So for more than 10 years, ScienceLogic has been a strong partner for Cisco, working across various different business units. When we started working on ACI, which is application-centric infrastructure, which is the product that my group works on, we thought ScienceLogic was a perfect partner to work with. And in fact, some of our joint customers, including Cisco IT, which is a customer of ScienceLogic too, came to the table and said they needed an integration with ScienceLogic. So customers are a huge part of the genesis of the partnership, and that's what keep us going together. And the fact that we have such strong synergies from a technology perspective makes it really easy for us to collaborate. And the fact that we have both open platforms with strong APIs makes it really easy for us to collaborate. And this is the real API. We're going to get into the talk tracks around, you know, these APIs and these abstraction software layers, ACI, has kind of gone the next level. We covered that at Cisco Live. Dave, we talked before about your value proposition. You're on the front lines. Cisco obviously has this new programmability model where their goal is to leverage the value of the network, abstract away the complexities and allow people to get more value out of it. How is that working and how do you guys tie into Cisco? It's really an ecosystem of technologies and partnerships that deliver outcomes for customers. Cisco is advancing technology so fast. We've seen an innovation sprint from Cisco that's actually causing us to sprint with them on behalf of their customers. But ultimately, we've had to introduce deep integrated monitoring across all the fabrics that they support for software to find. And that includes visibility into the ACI fabrics. But it also goes through into the virtual machines, the storage layers, the operating systems, the application layer. So when you pull all of that together, that's a day two challenge for the enterprise to make sure they're delivering outcomes to the customer that are above expectations. Recently we supported support for multi-site and multi-pod. ACI fabric, we're working on ACI anywhere in the cloud. Where really Cisco's extending the data center hyper-converged solutions to deliver value propositions no matter where the applications live. So that's a huge step forward. And then it causes operational initiatives to say, how are we going to solve that problem for our customers no matter where the application lives? So that's really where we're focused, helping solve problems on that day two side of make all these technologies come together to deliver a great outcome for the end user. And so they're enabling you with the ACI to if a hyper-converge is to go out and do your thing. Yes, so we instrument all those different really abstracted components because what we have with container management, with software to find its abstraction on top of core route switch and server and hyper visor technologies that bring it together in an intuitive way. Ultimately what we've seen from the enterprise and service providers is they really want infrastructure delivered as a service. And that's really where Cisco's headed, helping make that a reality with these products. We just help bring them together with the instrumentation analytics to operate them as one system. You know, Ranga, this is a great example of what we're seeing in this modern era with the data center, the on-premises, modernization, growth of the cloud, the advent of real hybrid cloud and private cloud as well as public cloud. You guys are in a good position so I want to kind of dig into some talk tracks. One, you mentioned day two operation. So I've heard that term kicked around before. Because this kind of speaks to this modernization in IT operations, enabling an environment for network compute storage to work seamlessly. This is the real deal. What is day two operations? Can you like define what that is? Yeah, so our customers essentially go through the journey of building a network for some purpose, to deliver an application or a service to their end users. So we think of the process of them building the network is day zero, configuring the network for the particular service is day one and everything that they deal with which is a lot of complexity which is where they spend 80% of their time, 90% of their budget is day two operations which is a very complex domain. So this is the area that we have been focusing within our business unit to make our customers' lives easier with products that essentially solve some of these problems and collaborating with partners like ScienceLogic to make the operations of our customers much easier. An important part of day two operations is making sure that we provide the right kind of abstractions for our customers. Initially customers used to configure switches on a switch-by-switch basis using command line interfaces with obscure commands. What we have done within the data center as of like 2014 is brought in the application-centric abstraction. So customers can configure the network in the language of the application which is the intent. That's why we're doing it. You know, I'm old enough to remember those days of standing those networks up day one, day zero and day one. But I think day two has become really the new environment because day two operation was simply, make sure the lights are on, provision the switches, top of racks, all that stuff that went on. And then you managed it, you had your storage administrator, all these things were kind of static. Perimeter-based security, all that now is kind of thrown away. So I think day two is almost like the reality of the situation because you now have microservices, you've got apps and DevOps demanding to have the agility and programmability of the network. So I got to ask is if that's true and you got cloud over the top happening, this means that the software has to be really rock solid because it's not getting less complex, it's getting more complex. So what is science logic fit into day two? We've been focused on all these different technologies you bring together. So from an intent-based perspective, Cisco's been really focused on intent-based solutions but that lines up to a business service. The business service is made up of a lot of different technologies that can come from many different locations to deliver you an application to you where you're super satisfied with an outcome. It's delivering productivity to you, all the great things that you're hoping to experience when you interact with an application. But behind the scenes, there's a whole myriad of technologies that we instrument from a fault configuration, performance analytics and really an analysis perspective to see all these multivariate data streams coming together in a hub where we can analyze them and understand the relationships, the context of how all of those data feeds come together to enable a service. So if we know that service view, again, no matter where the service is coming from and Cisco's now supporting ACI anywhere, so that service could be sitting in a lot of different places today and we're seeing more and more hybrid applications and I think that's around for a long time to stay for good reasons, security, compliance and other reasons. You got to bring all that together and understand real time, the real time operational viewpoint of how is it now? And more so that proactive insight to know if you have an anomaly across any one of these performance variants, how that may impact the service. So is it going to be impacting the service and really help operations stay proactive? I think that's where the DevOps focuses right now. If you look at evolution of DevOps, Gene Kim was on theCUBE said 3% of enterprises have adopted DevOps. Certainly there's the early adopters. We all know who they are. They're DevOps cloud native from day one, but really the adoption of DevOps is not yet there on mainstream, it's getting there. But you're speaking to day two operations as kind of like operations, you mentioned developers. The apps that need to be built require all this infrastructure programmability. This is where I think ACI is coming to go. So you need instrumentation, so you need ITOps and you got to have programmability of the network, but everyone's talking about automation. So to me, it sounds like there's an automation story in here. If you got an instrument everything, you got to have move beyond command line and configuring, how does that fit in? How does the automation fit in? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, within the ACI fabric, we have a controller based approach. So there's a single place of managing the entire infrastructure. Today we have customers who use 200 plus physical switches being managed by a single point. That's a huge amount of automation for provisioning the network. From the perspective of managing the network, the controller continuously looks at what's going on and essentially we have a product called network assurance engine which is a second pair of eyes which will tell you proactively if there are problems in the network. But a broader automation is needed where you can actually look at information from various different silos because network as important as we as Cisco think is one part of the whole puzzle. Information comes from many different places. So there's a platform that's needed that people can funnel in pieces of information from various different places and analyze that pieces of information, figure out trends, find the things that are of interest to them and operate in a data-driven fashion. Dave, I want to get your thoughts on this next talk track around the impact of the cloud because if this happens, automation is pretty much agreed upon in the industry that we've got to automate things that are repetitive, mundane tasks and certainly the network's a lot of command line stuff that can be automated away. Value will shift to other places. But with the impact of cloud, operation, the operational side of the data center is looking more and more cloud-like. So in a way, whether the debate of moving to the private cloud versus on-premises goes away and it becomes more of a cloud operation story on-premises, multi-cloud, on-public cloud is kind of a new system. This is the operational shift. This is where all the action is. Talk about your perspective on this because this is kind of like, it's not a simple saying lift and shift and move everything to the cloud. It's I want cloud-like economics. I want cloud-like elasticity. I want all that benefit on-premises. That's day two in my opinion, do you agree? I do and I think that's sometimes lost on the industry that we have a lot of clouds that we have to serve and for good purpose, they're going to live in different places. But back to the earlier comment, you've got to then pull information into a data hub. I'll just call it an architecture of data where you've got it from multiple sources, whether it's clouds or private hyper-converged, the wireless to the end user. All these different layers often that are being abstracted, we've got to really understand how that relates to a user experience. So when we think about what are the end results we're trying to achieve, we're trying to be proactive. So among the things that we're working on from a vision perspective, instead of thinking about waiting for a system across any one of these tiers to have a fault where it tells you, I've got a problem, here's a trap, here's a log, I've experienced this problem. We really want to do a lot more on the front end, the performance analytics, the anomaly detection to get across multivariates. All these variants mean this kind of performance health and a performance score. Cisco's been investing heavily here, we have as well, jointly for some of our customers, what I'd like to see in the future, our vision, is that you rely less on fault management and more on the proactive analytics side so that you understand anomalous behavior and how that could impact your experience as an end user and fix it through automation before there is a problem. So that's a very different thought. I'd love to say our industry should, in the future, worry less about event correlation and more about predictive behavior. So that's where we're spending a lot of our time. It's like, don't look so worried about the faults, look for the goodness too. I mean, where's the efficiencies? But you have to have all these data streams and you have to understand how they contextually relate to one another to make those important decisions and recommendations. Well, you know, I've always said this on theCUBE, you can, you know, in this world of digital, you can instrument everything, so as soon as it's going to be a matter of time for seeing what everything's happening, but knowing what to look at is kind of like what you're getting at here. Okay, Raghav, talk about your perspective, because again, one of the things that Dave Vellante and I do, many of you talk about it all the time on theCUBE is we debate this cloud conversation because my opinion is it's one big distributed architecture. It's like an operating system. If it's all the cloud, they're all edges, nodes and arcs on a distributed map. So the data center certainly isn't going away. But if everything's a network connection, whether it's the edge or data center, this is you're in the business of networking, right? What's your take on all this? Because, you know, if it's a cloud operations, it's a shift from the old IT to the new IT. What's your perspective on this? So the moniker that we have been using this year is that there's nothing centered about the data center. Like you said, there are workloads that reside in many different environments, including the cloud. So customers are demanding consistent operations and consistent management capabilities across this many different environments, right? So you're right, the data center itself is turning out more to be like a cloud. And we have even seen large cloud providers like offer solutions that sit within a customer's data center, right? So that's one area in which the world's evolving. And another area is in terms of all the tools that are coming together to solve some of the operational problems to be more predictive and more proactive. Yeah, you know, I like toot our own horn sometimes. Stu Miniman at Wikibon coined the term private cloud years ago, and everyone was throwing hate at him, you know, on the internet. What's this private cloud nonsense? That's what's happening. This is a private cloud, it's a hybrid cloud, multiple clouds, you have public cloud. And again, you're going to have multi-purpose, pick the right cloud for the workload kind of environment going on. Kind of like the way the tools business would, but it's still a platform. So guys, thanks for coming in and sharing your insights. I really appreciate that. Before we go, take a minute to get the plug in for what you guys are working on, give the company update, what's going on, the hiring, revenues up, what's happening. Give us a state of the science logic, what's going on. So we had a great first quarter, the best first quarter in the history of the company. The health of the business is good. I think the underlying theme is the transform of infrastructure is causing a lot of people to rethink the monitoring tooling as to how do we need to manage in this new operating environment? You mentioned DevOps. I think the real key there is the developer really wants to have the application be infrastructure aware. And he needs good information coming from not 50 places, but from a trusted place where he can make sure the application knows about how all the infrastructure that's supporting it, no matter where it is, is behaving. And that's really the wind behind the sails driving our business. We grew quarter over quarter sequentially with our subscription over 100% in Q1. So we're really thrilled with where the business is headed, excited about the momentum. And this is a really important partnership for us because everybody uses Cisco. All of our enterprise customers, service provider, government customers, Cisco is embedded in virtually every customer that we work with. So we have to have the best support, kind of that thought leadership of support for our customers, for them to entrust management of those core applications through our platform. Right, give the quick plug for the data center networking group. What's happening there? What's the hot items? Give the plug, quick. So very quickly, I think the journey that we have been on is ACI anywhere to take ACI and its management and operations paradigm to many different environments. We introduced support for AWS earlier in this year. We are working on support for Azure and soon will have support for Google public clouds. In all these environments, we want our customers to have consistent experience. And the way we get that is through solutions, working with partners where we offer consistent solutions across all these environments for our customers and working with science logic as a very important partner to solve problems for our joint customers. And you guys have always had a great channel, great ecosystem, not new for you to partner. Yeah, we have like open APIs, open platform, 65 plus partners that we work with. So all customer focus. Well, let me put you on the spot, one last question while I got you here because you're a guru in networking and you know, you've been around the block, you've seen the different waves. What's the biggest wake up call that customers are having with respect to the old way of doing networking and the new way? Because clearly everyone has come to the realization that the perimeter based security model and static networking has to be more dynamic. What's the big wake up call that you think customers are seeing now with this new modern era? I think customers are realizing more and more how important technology is as part of their business. Sometimes it even drives the business and helps customers make decisions on what's the right path to take for their business. So with this applications become really important and the nerve center, which is the network that supports the application becomes really important. So customers are demanding us to build the best network possible to support this modern world that's continuously evolving. So. Dave, do you think a stab at that customer wake up call? What's your perspective on this? What's the big off from your experience over the years? You can't use tools that were built 20 years ago to continue operating global networks. So we see a lot of the industry, it's about a $10 billion total adjustable market changing over because the market fit of the old tools that people have relied upon for many years aren't solving modern problems. Well guys, thanks for the insight, appreciate it and good to see the partnership doing well. Thanks for coming into the CUBE studio. We have Rango Rouse, senior director of product management at Cisco Networking Group and David Link, CEO of ScienceLogic here for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.