 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 the Palo Alto CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We here at Dave Newdy, who is the head of channels for Open Systems. Open Systems just recently launched their partner network in 2019. Dave, welcome to the CUBE Conversation. Thank you, John. Good to be here. So security obviously is the hottest area. We've been covering it like a blanket these days. It's only getting better and stronger in terms of number of players and options for customers, but that's also a double-edged sword. There's more options for customers. And security problems aren't going away. They're just getting more compounded. It's complicated global marketplace, global scale, regional clouds on premise, no surface area. We've had these conversations with you guys a lot, and it's super important, but opportunity to deliver solutions with channel partners has become a huge thing at Amazon Reinforce. We had a big conversation with what that even looks like. It's a new market opportunity for security players. You guys are forged in there. Tell us about your partner's channel. Just launched. Give us a quick overview. Yeah, I have a growing smile as you talk about the complexity of the space and how difficult it can be because we're the ones that eliminate that complexity, make it very simple. And for our partners that we've been engaging with, I joined the company just over a year ago, and we began laying the groundwork of transitioning from a direct sales model to a partner-only model, and you fast forward to where we are today, and we've already made that 180 degree turn and are working exclusively through partners throughout North America and executing around the world in that way. What's exciting for the partners is that they have a new supplier in the portfolio in the form of open systems that while it is a new name to them, is anything but new in experience and execution. It might arguably be one of the more seasoned suppliers in their entire portfolio they have today, and it is opening doors and breaking down barriers to entry in a number of security categories that for years they've been on the outside looking in, trying to figure out how can I participate in these areas and how can I really unify a conversation around value for my customers that I am the trusted advisor to, and those are the exciting networks of hundreds and thousands of trusted advisors out there that we're engaging with today. You know, the security space is interesting, it's changing a lot, it's not just the one supplier, multiple suppliers, you're now hundreds and thousands of suppliers of something to the security market. There's a lot of venture capital being funded for startups, you've got customer spending money, so there's a lot of spend and activity flowing, money flowing, huge value creation opportunity. Yet customers are also looking at the cloud technologies as a disruptive enabler of how to deal with new things, but also they're looking at their supplier relationships right now, they're evaluating who do I want to do business with, they don't want to get another tool, they don't want a new thing, they don't want to get more and more sprawl. You guys have been an open system and very successful with word of mouth customer growth. Your CEO and I talked about that in the last interview, it's like you guys have been getting a lot of wins, classic word of mouth, good product offering, so you have success on the product side. As you go into the channel and enable the people in front of the customers every day to bring a solution to the table, what's the value proposition to the partners because they're fighting to be relevant, they want to be in front of the customers, the customers want their partners as well. So the opportunity for the people in front of your customers through the channel is big. What's the value proposition? Establishing trust with the channel is critical. For years they've had solutions that roll into the portfolio that were written in a conference room a year and a half ago and they're only selling off of PowerPoint slides. And now you're coming in with open systems and you have over 20 years of experience, accumulated maturity and automation into a platform that they very rarely see that type of door opened up for them. So when they lean in and they really start asking questions about open systems, we really check off boxes in a fantastic way for our partners. You talk about vendor sprawl and complexity and it all boils back, you're exactly correct to the embracing of a cloud and that diversity of application origin, the diversity of the users trying to access those corporate resources wherever they happen to be hosted and how do I unify a strategy and it's resulted in what is not uncommon having to engage 30, 40, 50 different vendors and then trying to unify that environment, let alone the problem that you can't hire the people to go and do it anyway. There's a negative unemployment issue in IT security categories today. So there's a very, very fortune few that have the ability to bench the depth, the resource to do that and then even fewer number of people who can lead an enterprise down that path and then you turn the corner and we're usually, there's this tug of war between agility and security. Then if I'm really agile, it means I'm compromising security or if I'm super secure, I'm going to be as slow as a sloth and doing anything. And then you have open systems sitting in the middle who says that's not necessarily the case. You can have world-class deployment in an agile platform where all that complexity and service chaining and unification is handled for you and that really is mind boggling and I'll tell you it's a whole lot of fun to demonstrate it. You know, Dave, we talked to a lot of customers and user customers through our media business, CIOs and now CISOs and they're all kind of working together. They have partners, they have partners they've worked with for many, many years from the old days of buying servers in Racken, Stacken them to software to applications but now the touch points for services are those traditional suppliers, application developers, but security is being bolted in everywhere. So almost all services need security. That's essentially what the main message with cloud is. So that gives a service opportunity for you guys with partners to enable you guys in there. As a partner, if I'm a partner of open systems, what do I get? Because I want to make my, I want to keep my customer. I want to deliver security. What do I talk to my customer? What's the pitch that I can give as a partner to the customer to ensure that they're going to get what they need from open systems? What I tell our partners is that we should be the services conversation that you lead with. There are a lot of other options out there and even if you don't mention it by name if you approach the conversation in an open way with a customer with the mindfulness of the wide net of capabilities and value that you're able to execute on with open systems, it gives you your strongest footing. One of the big problems and you mentioned it is that so often for years, these technology conversations have been siloed and isolated and that always creates problems. I had talked to a partner who works their way downstream on an SD-WAN conversation and at the very end they say, this looks great. We just have to get it passed by our security team and the wind falls out of everybody's sails because that should have been part of the conversation all along or vice versa starting from a security conversation and now I've got to get the network team to sign off on it. The open systems really comes with a model that says all those viewpoints need to be in the room at the same time. That's how you execute and that's how you unify an environment so that you're not running into those bottlenecks later on. It's madness, it needs to be simpler. We were talking before we came on camera about what it means to be disruptive and valuable to partners and to customers and you mentioned convergence of capabilities and managed services. What do you mean by that? I mean I get convergence of services, we talk about it all the time from industrial IoT, we've been doing some segments on that to manage services, people get what that means. What do you mean by convergence of services and managers with respect to security and open systems? Absolutely, I mean convergence is, we all carry one in our pocket. So how many people carry a separate GPS device or a separate digital camera with a separate phone or a separate, you know, converging technologies just simplifies my environment and oftentimes there's a viewpoint of I'm compromising in certain areas that if I break everything out myself, I could probably do it better off myself. And in some cases that's absolutely true when you look at how open systems has taken a very diverse set of services and network and security categories and unified it into a single platform, if you will, we've taken a stack of boxes and we've turned it into one by building a managed services platform that's delivered as a service. But what we've layered on top of it is the ability to manage it for our customers. And I talk about modern managed services, it's very different, you know, before managed services was I'm just too incapable to do something myself, you know, so I need somebody else to do it. When I talk to a partner, I like pointing out that I don't try to find somebody too dumb to do the things we do and they have to rely upon us. Our best customers are very forward leaning because they realize that the automation that we've accumulated over 20 years that were 85 to 90% of our detected incidents are handled by AI automation and machine learning and the type of monitoring automation that we have at the edge. And the engine and the team of 115 level three plus engineers that are executing on our customers behalf is we're a force multiplier for our end customers to an ability that they will never achieve on their own. They'll never build it on their own. So, you know, those are the two, I think two of the biggest pillars in disruption are convergence and managed services and they are two enormous check boxes for open systems where it's hard to find someone more experienced in that than the team at open systems. And those are realities that the customers are dealing with but also the other reality on top of that to make it even more complicated and better for you guys and partners is you have more surface area to deal with. So the AI and the automation really play into the hands of on the delivery side. So if I'm a partner, I don't, I don't, I'm standing up open systems, it's working. So you can't just develop that in a conference room. I mean, it's, that's something that's accumulated over time. That's what comes with experience. And I usually really lean heavily into our maturity and our experience. We're in 183 countries with customers today. We have a 98% retention rate of 58, you know, NPS score when I show the monitoring portals of visibility tools, the maturity and what has been developed isn't just open systems, you know, stubbornly telling the world what they need and should be doing. It's actually a very aggressive two way conversation with our existing customers and their guidance telling us this is what we want, what we need to see, what we need to be able to pull and what we need your help in enforcing. I met with a customer in Pacific Northwest and he dropped a line on me that was terrific. He said, I'm looking for a partner that can tell us the questions that we should be asking that we haven't and the technologies we should be evaluating that we haven't looked at yet. And I told him I was going to steal that line and I'm using it here today because that is an absolutely brilliant description of exactly the type of customer experience that we expect to deliver from open systems to our customers. So if I'm a rep, I'm a person who's got a portfolio of customers and I want to bring open systems to the table, take me through that. I mean, am I asking the questions? What are some of those questions? I should be asking, what's my engagement posture look like to my customer? That's a great question. I've been to a number of events and sat through kind of advanced training seminars. And at the beginning of a seminar, you have somebody on stage saying, talk about security categories. If you talk about security, then you have a pathway to sell anything else on there. And then at the end of the event, all the SD-WAN guys are sitting on a stage saying, talk about SD-WAN. It's the glue that holds everything together. And if you can sell SD-WAN, it'll give you a pathway to everything else. And meanwhile, I'm in the back of the room smiling, just wondering, what if you didn't have to pick? What if you could just have a wide open conversation with your customer around application origins and remote users and how you're unifying security and application performance and routing intelligence for any application or origin to any type of user trying to access it. How are you addressing that? And that's really at the core of what open systems has developed for its clients is that, is that type of agility and flexibility where you're never trapped. And opening up considerations around new and emerging threats and capabilities that you should be looking at where if it's not the time for you today, we've still already designed it in for you. So when you're ready, it's there for you. Now the real question on the reps money is that's in those basic questions saying, how do I make money from this? And which is essentially, money making certainly is a great channel formula. It's indirect sales for you guys, but also you have to have a couple of table stakes. One, it's got to be a product that can be sold. The delivery has to be elegant enough where there's margin for the partner and benefit to customer. So the money making is certainly the big part of not only just trust as a supplier to the channel, but also as an engine of innovation and wealth creation. What's your pitch there? How do I make money? Well, as a managed services model, that's always the beauties you get to configure to the requirement of the individual customer. So no one's force fed capability they don't need or an oversubscription for what they might need in a year, so just in case they want to, we're able to right size and deliver the capability that's specifically configured to the individual customer level, but then also show them that they have a pathway to capability laid out for them and integrated and modern. Like we never go end of life, we never get shelved. This is something that is living, breathing. You're never buying boxes again in service chaining and handling the complexity. So we make that very simple. For our partners, in categories around security and SOC and managed services and SIM and CASB, and these are things that they hear about, but they don't know how to address them with their customers. And now Open Systems makes that very simple because we've fully integrated capabilities around those categories and many more into it. So one of the psychology I would just, reading from that as a wrap, if I was a wrap I'd be like, I don't have to overplay my hand. I can get engagement with my customer. I can get a feel for the service, grow into it because it's the managed service and go from there, it's not a big ask. It's instant alignment. Yeah, oftentimes what we do is a timing issue. Somebody just bought boxes in one category. So fine, we'll coexist with that. We sit in parallel and in framework with current investments and subscriptions that happen to be in place, but we give them a pathway that allows them to integrate it into fully unified. And I like to really point this out is that we don't go to a customer and say, what do you need, we'll build it for you. It's what do you need, we've already built it. We just want to know how we configure it for you to match up to what your requirements are and maybe suggest some areas that should be a part of that consideration as well based upon 20 plus years of doing this with customers that we already have under our belt. It gives them confidence that the operating model of, say Cloud and Manager has been around, it's proven. And now you have a model there. Final question for you, Dave is, okay, what's my fear might be, are you going to be around tomorrow? Because you know, people want to know, are you going to be there for the long haul? What's your answer to that? I mean, we're a 30 year old security company founded out of Zurich and started in 1990 and transitioned to as a service in 1999 and have grown on the backs, we're customer funded. So this is as battle tested and bullet proof as anything that they may have in their portfolio and it shows extremely well in front of a customer. I spend more time talking to partners saying be the first one in the door to talk about open systems with their customer. Don't let somebody else do it. Or certainly use the mindfulness of the net of capabilities of open systems and don't go in narrow view because if somebody comes in behind you with our conversation, I don't think you're going to like what happens. One more question just jumped in my head and he reminded me of, we were talking before we came on camera around how channels are great leverage, great win-win. But we're in a modern era of computing, delivery of services, Cloud has certainly shown that that whole nother wave coming behind it, security obviously the biggest challenge. You've been in the channel business for a while. What's your take on what's happening in the channels? Because it is changing, there's opportunities there. What's your take? Yeah, this is the second company I've had the opportunity to introduce into the channel and this one is a lot of fun, I'll say that. But the channel's traditionally thought of in more of a telecom space and for many of our partners that's where they've been literally for decades in some cases is selling technology but is selling connectivity rather in networks. But what has happened is that technology has found its way into the network layer and because of Cloud and SaaS app origins and remote users from coffee shops or theCUBE or a customer site accessing those applications it's created a massive set of diversity in requirements on the IT team at the enterprise and how do you accommodate for all of that? How do you keep up with it and maintain it? And now these things transitioning from these CapEx buying boxes and maintenance agreements and rotating those out and that model is constantly being assaulted in the same way that we've seen so many services that we have come to our house and nobody digs a well for water anymore. I've got a water company or it makes their own electric power plant in the backyard, I've got the electric company. Everything's as a service. Absolutely. Dave Newdy, head of channels at Open Systems thanks for sharing the insight on your partner network. Congratulations, thanks for coming in. Pleasure, thank you. I'm John Furrier here in CUBE Conversation in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.