 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. We're back at Riverbed Disrupt here in New York City. Paul Monford is here as the Chief Sales Officer at Riverbed. Paul, thanks for coming to The Cube. Good to see you. Yeah, welcome. Good to be here. So, great event, very intimate, awesome venue. How does it feel? It's great. I mean, you know, huge energy, right? And it's a really good venue. I think, you know, venues can be too big these days and people get lost in it all. And I like this one. It's just the right size and we've got some really key players here this week. Yeah, so tell us, what's going on in the market? You joined Riverbed when it was still a public company and you've seen it go private and you're going through now a transformation not under the spotlight of the 90-day shot clock, which has got to feel good. And you're really expanding your portfolio. Tell us about that. So, you know, first and foremost, you know, when Jerry bought me into the business, the idea was, you know, we're likely to go private because that was on the cards at the time. So, you know, can you help us, you know, rebuild the gutter market strategy and how we need to get there? This is what our plans and ambitions are. I was attracted to it because it's, you know, I knew of Riverbed anyway from my previous company and you know, the great opportunity there was at Riverbed to take some of the assets it had and really sort of get some volume behind them because they had some great assets that if I'd had them in previous jobs, I would have loved to have had. So, that's what we've been doing. We've been building that and we went through all of that. We've been very successful. You know, our quarters have been great. I still have a nine, my boss still runs me to 90 days, by the way, as much as we're not under Wall Street any longer. We still run a 90-day cycle. But it gives you the latitude to make decisions that you might not make if you were a public company. Isn't that true? It allows the company to make investment decisions and acquisitions and bring them in and give them realistic time for them to flourish rather than put them under the hammer straight away, which is what happens in a public company. And believe me, I was, you know, a big public company. So, you know, running through that, they can't make long-term decisions. It's really difficult. So, we've been able to do that and that's, we're going to come out very nicely from that. So, as a WAN optimization company, highly focused, solving a very particular problem around latency. Now, as you expand your portfolio, how does that change your go-to-market, your, the sales talent that you're attracting, the partnerships? Talk about that a little bit. How long have we got? That's a big question. Look, I mean, the fact is, we built the company on the back of WAN optimization. WAN optimization is relevant, if not more now than it was way back then, because way back then, you know, lots of people had challenges of connectivity, right? Bandwidth today is cheap. But there's still, the physics of distance and the physics of distance is even more exaggerated by cloud and SaaS models because you don't know where your data is. I mean, so the point is, you still need to have WAN optimization. The question is, will customers want to absorb it in the way they've always done it? And, you know, we have customers that want specialized WAN optimization, which we've been the leader in for years, and people who want the new way of adopting it as a virtual service that they can put on their network. So, we're providing and giving customers choice on that. But the exciting thing that I like is, you know, what we're doing now, next generation application defined networking. That's the cool thing, right? Because what we've learned as a company is applications and how applications perform. And application performance is business performance. You know, it's somewhat different to the network. The network is kind of a, almost like a utility that supports that, but the application performance has to be fantastic. Especially as we walk into the world of digitization where every company is now selling their own revenue streams down to their customers through applications on their network. So, you know, we're perfectly positioned for that and hence disrupt this week, and you know, they're still connect launch and everything else which is there. So Paul, for decades we've talked about the enterprise buyer buys on risk. Especially, you know, networking is one of those things. They're slow to change. You know, can you talk about both from a company standpoint? You know, is there uncertainty that the customers have? You know, going private, what does that mean for kind of my relationship? And you know, what about, I mean, SD WAN is an area that's coming really fast. It sounds like a lot of people are, you know, embracing it and you know, looking to gain advantage through some of these new, you know, cloud deployments going digital and the like. You know, what's changing in the customer environment that you see? I think the real answer is, and first of all, the private public thing. We've never even seen a blip. In fact, we came straight out of going private, hitting every one of our quarters and growing the company, right? From actually being flat to negative. So, our companies flourish through being private. And I don't, I've not had a single customer that's even questioned, you know, private versus public, what does that really mean to us? I mean, it varies to our shareholders, of course, and our shareholders are very different these days, but it doesn't really impact the customer. As far as what's going on at the customer, I think customers, look, I don't, I think they're sick and tired of this industry, using them as a beta test for new technology. What they want is simplicity, you know, take all the complexity away, you know, I sat down with a very well-known CTO of a very known street brand beverage company. He said to me, Paul, we are unlikely to be hiring more people in IT. I currently cannot, through the complexity of the business and how it's growing and the compliance, there's no way I can do all this internally. I need to take SaaS and I need to take CloudMoles and we're going to go cloud first as much SaaS as we possibly can. And you can understand it in the business model of that particular company, that's the right move forward for them. Simplicity, ease of use, so the people that's held to the SLA, not his own team any longer. When a line of business leader in his company wants something for the business, he doesn't have to wait 18 months for the CIO to turn it on because of the limitation of resources. He can bring it straight into the company. And all the decision is, am I happy to raise my apex? So, you know, I think we have two lots of customers. We have customers that say, Paul, we've got lots of cash. We don't need to worry about that thing. And by the way, we've got a team that can build this. So therefore, give it me in the old model, please. Because we have cash. We'll sweat the asset over seven years. Make it easier for us to implement it, but we're happy like that. Then we have a new set of customers who are saying, don't want that anymore. It's cloud first. We want everything on the cloud. We want everything to come through a consumption model. So our plan is to provide both things to our customer base so they can do things. And they kind of like that. And in the latter model, when you have a senior executive say to you, Paul, I need simplicity. We're going cloud. How do you respond and why Riverbed versus the competition? Well, I think, you know, first of all, I don't think anybody, there's been one company that's held the network space for many years, right? And I know I worked for them for 16 years, right? So that's never really been challenged. And there's never really been an alternative. I think today there is. We're not the only company, but I would say that we're probably in a great position because we are not a starter. We're a billion dollar plus company. We have G2000 customer base and those G2000 customers trust us. They trust us in terms of supporting critical factions of their IT and they trust us to do the right thing in the relationship and deliver on what we say we're going to do. And I think that's a nice strength to have in the market because you know, you can go to the big Leviathans in the industry who are going to be very slow to move away from their legacy and you're going to go to the young startups, they're going to tell them they can do everything they want. You just say what you want, we can do it, but they don't have the backup. They don't have the pedigree. We sit in the middle of that being able to have pedigree and be able to implement quickly new technology. Well, it's interesting. We've observed a lot on theCUBE. I mean, other than Microsoft and Intel that have a binary compatibility lock in, Cisco's really the only company that's been able to achieve a vastly dominant market share. We've always wondered sort of how and why is that sustainable and is it starting to crack? It appears that way. It sounds like you believe that. Well, I mean, if you look at, you know, it's not, first of all, I have a lot of respect for that company, you know, because I was there. You got to respect what John Chambers and the team built there and Chuck's taken over and they're trying to pull it forward. But you know, the thing is, it doesn't matter how brilliant the people are, you know, the issue is what's your base and where you're trying to get to. And if you've got a massive base of traditional market with conventional routers sitting out in the network and you've got all the maintenance costs, you've got all the implementation costs and the operational costs, you need CCIEs to implement the network and administer the network. That's an old model. And you know, Cisco, I think, are struggling in that space in terms of their growth. They're doing very well with their Meraki technology, but that's a cloud-based model and sometimes in conflict with their core base. So it's going to be a very interesting time for them as they struggle between the surrogical and hide type of thing that's going on in the market. So your advantage is speed, innovation, agility. Well, you know, we don't have a router market, we don't have a switch market, we don't have a firewall market. You know, we can go in brand new, do what the customers want to do and by the way, upsell from our one optimization into the new platform. So people can adopt a simple orchestrated, very easy to do, straight on. You don't need a CCIE to do it. You can design it yourself, you can spin it up on Amazon, you can spin it up on Azure and away you go. You can disrupt. We can disrupt. Exactly. There you go. So Paul, I'm wondering if you can help. Here we should change seats. Unpack a little bit so that change and go to market because well, you know, Wayne Optimization was more than just a box. In many ways, you're moving from a primarily appliance model to software and even in cloud models. You know, how does that impact kind of your skill set for your team and your partners? I don't think it impacts the skill set because the technology is something we're very familiar with. I think what it changes is the business model, how your revenues get generated and how your margins get generated is different. And you know, if you're going from taking the full value of a project you do, the customer upfront, which is what is the traditional model versus spinning it over five years, that makes a dramatic impact to you. Oh, but then we're not a public company. What's the most exciting thing you hear from customers that really gets your juices flowing, that you take back to whatever, the engineering team or senior management here and say, you know, let's charge forward. This is our opportunity. Tailwind's behind us, let's go. I think it's, you know, it's kind of going back to the start of the boom of the industry, you know, before, you know, when the internet was booming is, you know, a new platform puts a lot of new opportunities in front of them. Never thought Riverbed had anything like this, you know, this is fantastic. And our visibility platform, I mean, we've been talking about sort of, you know, software defined networking, application defined networking. But our, you know, our visibility platform means that you can go, and this is what I had a customer last night talk to me about it. Paul, we want to understand right through the business process, right from the end user, all the way through up through our business process that you can monitor that, not just across it. So, you know, you can look across our network and all our applications and tell us what's working, what isn't working and suggest to us how we can get better performance out of it off a single portal, beautiful. No one else does that. The industry's full of siloed little tools in visibility, right? We've got a full portal solution for our customers. But now we've got end user experience which says, if I'm a power user on mobility, I'm on the cloud, I'm on SaaS, I can see into Amazon, I can see into Azure, I can see into the big cloud providers. I can tell you how things are working and how the user's productivity is working. And, you know, to me, that's like critical because if you have that, it means that no matter what service you as a customer introduce to your customer base, you can read back and know exactly how it's performing on the benchmark. So it's a whole new opportunity for you, a whole new pricing model, I presume, right? So that brings the level of complexity for your sales teams and your distribution channel. Yes. How are you managing that transition? Lots of training, I'm sure. Well, yeah, there's a lot of effort in that, you're right. So there's quite a lot of, but don't forget, you know, most of our partner base is used to this model already because they have other companies that are also doing the similar things. And people are getting used to that, I think. And then partnering with Azure and partnering with Amazon, you know, as part of what they do and all these different things. So it's just different as to where the money's going to come from and who gets recognized for what and where, and that's the kind of, that's the labyrinth that everybody's trying to work through. But in terms of our approach, I think that part is quite different. So instead of us saying, well, okay, that's our cloud service and we'll give you a commission on it, we're saying, host it, make it your cloud service if you want. Put your badge on it. White label it. Yeah. And that means they have much more higher profitability than, you know, just taking a sales commission. And I think a lot of partners are worried about some of the big players in the market who do have these cloud offers, where they are getting paid these commissions because those customers are going onto those suppliers, OEMs systems. And you know, at some point, you've got to ask the question, is somebody going to pull a plug on that and say, well, okay, I don't need these, why do I need these intermediaries? Right? What we're trying to do is build out that space. And get scale into the market through our partners and allow them to host themselves if they want to. And help them go from sort of a box seller mentality. Yeah, to a hosted service, right? Higher value added. That is disruptive. We are disruptive on theCUBE. Paul, thanks very much for coming on. I really appreciate it. That was great to see you. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. We're live from New York City. This is Disrupt. Right back. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm...