 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello and welcome to the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Anybody that's read any Wikibon research or been a part of any conversation with anybody here at Silicon Angle knows we're big believers in the notion of digital business and digital business transformation. Simply put, the difference between a business and a digital business is the role that data plays in a digital business. Digital businesses use data to change their value propositions, better manage and get greater visibility and utilization of their assets and ultimately drive new types of customer experience. That places an enormous burden on the technologies, the digital technologies that have historically been associated with IT, but now are becoming more deeply embedded within the business. And that digital business transformation is catalyzing a whole derivative set of other transformations, including, for example, technology, data center, security, et cetera. It's a big topic and to start to parse it and make some sense of it, we're joined by two great guests today. Michael Siegel is the area vice president of strategic alliances at Netscout Systems and Eric Smith is a senior product line manager of Netscout Systems. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Pleasure to be here, Pete. Thank you. Michael, let's get going on, give us a quick update on Netscout Systems. Yeah, so maybe just a quick introduction of what Netscout actually does. So Netscout assures service performance and security for the largest enterprises and service providers in the world. And the way we accomplish it is through what we refer to as offering visibility without borders. Now this visibility without borders provides actionable intelligence that enables very quickly and efficiently to enterprises and service providers assure their service performance and security, understand discover problems, root cause and solution. So it overall reduces their mean time to repair and it's being used to assure that digital transformation and other transformation initiatives are executed effectively by the IT organization. All right, so let's jump into this notion of transformation. Now I know that you and I have spent a couple different, on a couple of different occasions, talked about the idea of digital business transformation. How does digital business, or does digital business transformation mean to Netscout and some of the other derivative transformations that are associated with it? Right, so as you described very, very concisely in your introduction, the business transformation is about enabling the business through digital services and data to differentiate itself from competition very, very effectively. Now one of the aspects of this digital transformation is that now more than ever before, the CIOs are taking a very active role in this transformation because obviously information technology is responsible for digital services and processing and analyzing data, right? So with that in mind, the CIOs now need to support the business aspects of agility, right? So if your business agility involves introducing new services very quickly and efficiently, the IT organization need to support that. And at the same time, they also need to assure that the employee productivity and end user experience is maintained at the highest levels possible. So this is exactly where Netscout comes in and we support the IT organization by providing this visibility without border to assure that employee productivity and end user experience is maintained and any issues are resolved very quickly and efficiently. Especially customer experience, that's increasingly the most important end users that any digital business has to deal with. I want to, at this point in time, Eric, I want to bring you into the conversation. When we talk about this notion of greater visibility, greater security over digital assets and the role that the CIO is playing, that also suggests that there's a new class of roles for architects, for people who have historically been associated more with running the networks, running the systems. How is their role changing and how is that part of the whole concept of data center transformation? Right, so the guys that have typically been in what you might consider network operations types of roles, their roles are evolving as well as the entire organization does. So as Michael mentioned beforehand, no longer is the digital business wholly and solely confined to an IT department that is working just with their employees. They're now part of the business. They're not just the cost center anymore. They're actually an asset to the business and they are supporting lines of business. So the folks that have traditionally had these roles of just maintain the network, maintain the applications are having to become experts in other aspects. So as certain applications disaggregate or potentially move out partially into the cloud, they kind of become cloud architects as well. And whether it's a public cloud or a private cloud, they have to understand those relationships and they have to understand what happens when you spread your network out beyond your traditional data center border. So let's build on that because that suggests that the ultimate solution for how we move forward has to accommodate greater visibility end to end across resources, not only do we have traditionally controlled and therefore could decide how much visibility we had if the tooling was right, but also resources that are outside of our direct purview. How is that work as we think about building this end to end visibility to improve our overall, the overall productivity and capability, as you said, the productivity and end user experience of the systems we're deploying? Yeah, so maybe we can start with the end in mind and what I mean by that is what you just described as end user productivity and user experience. So how do we measure it, right? So in order to measure it, what we need to look is the visibility at the service level. And what I mean by visibility at the service level is actually looking not just at one specific component that is associated with the service, such as application, it's one component. However, application is running on a network. You have service enablers, for example, to authenticate, to do accounting, to do DNS resolution. So you need to look at all of these components of a service and be able to effectively provide visibility across all of them. Now, the other aspect of this visibility, as you mentioned end to end, which is excellent observation as well, because you're looking at the data center, which is still very strategic assets. Your crown jewels are still going to be in the data center. Some of the data will remain there, but now you're expanding to the edge, maybe collows, maybe micro data centers in the collows. Then you move workloads, migrate them to public clouds, it can be IAS. You have more SaaS providers that provide you with different services. So this aspect of end to end really evolves into geographically dispersed, very complex and highly scalable architecture. Yeah, we like to say that the cloud is not an architecture, it's not a strategy for centralizing resources. Rather, it's a strategy for greater distributing resources, allowing data to be where it needs to be to perform the function or where it gets captured, allowing the service to be able to go to the data to be able to perform the work that needs to be conducted from a digital business standpoint. That suggests that even though a customer, let's call it the end user and the end user experience, may get a richer set of capabilities, but the way that by which that work is being performed gets increasingly complex. And part of it, it sounds like, that it's that complexity that has to be administered and monitored so that you can, so that you don't increase the time required to understand the nature of a problem or understand the nature of a fix. Have I got that right? You got it absolutely right. And I would add to this that the complexity that you described is being further magnified by the fact that you lose control to some extent as you mentioned before, right? Or it becomes, let's put it this way, it becomes a contracting challenge as opposed to command and control prompt challenge. Now the CIO can't tell, you know, Mike, go fix it. The CIO has to get in the phone with a public cloud provider and say, our service level says, and that's a different type of an interaction. Right, and usually the service provider would say the problem is not on my side, it's on your side. So the traditional finger pointing in war rooms now is being expanded across multiple service providers and you need to be able to very effectively and quickly identify, this is the root cause, this is why it's your fault, service provider, it's not our fault, please go and fix it. So let's dig into that if we can, Eric. This notion of having greater visibility so that you are in a better position to actually identify the characteristics of the problem and where the responsibilities lie, how is that working? So in the past or when digital transformation started, it's initial rise, it wasn't. And what was happening is as you both have alluded to a moment ago, I can no longer call Mike and Susie downstairs and say, you know, voicemail is not working, our, you know, things are just not working. Well, you could go sick them on it and they go fix it. What's happening now is that data is leaving your data center. It may be going through something like a colo, which is aggregating the data and then sending it on to your partner that is providing these services. So what you have to have is a way to regain that visibility into those last mile segments, if you will, so that as you work with your partners, whether it's the colo or the in software provider, that you can say, look, I can see things from here, I can see things to there. And here's where it goes south. And this is the problem, help me fix it. And so as you said a moment ago, you cannot let your mean time to resolution expand simply because you're engaging in these digital transformation activities. You need to remain at least as good as it did before and hopefully better. Well, you have to be better because your business is becoming more dependent on your digital business capabilities and increasingly it's becoming a business. So let me again dig a little bit more deeper technically into that. A lot of companies are attempting to essentially provide a summary view of that data that's moving around a network, moving across these different centers and locations, edge, colo, et cetera. What is the right way to do it? What constitutes real truth when we talk about how these systems are going to work? So NetScout believes and I think, you know, most people wouldn't argue with this that when you can actually see the packet data that goes across the network, you know what elements are talking to which ones and you can see that and you can build metrics and you can build views upon that. That is very high fidelity data and you absolutely know what's going on. We like to call it the single source of truth. So as things come from the deep part of the data center, whether it's a virtualized server farm all the way through the core of the network in your service and neighbors like Michael mentioned, all the way through the colos and out into an IAS or SaaS type of environment, if you're seeing what's actually being on the wire and who's talking to whom, you know what's going on and you can quickly triage and identify what the problem is so that you can solve it. Now, is that something that increasingly architects or administrators are exploiting as they use these new classes of tools to gain that visibility into how the different services are working together and also is that becoming a feature of how SLAs and contracts are being written so that we can short circuit the finger pointing with our service providers? Yeah, so there's kind of like you said, two parts of that. The first is I think a lot of the traditional IT operations folks as you mentioned earlier are learning new roles. So to some degrees it is new for them and I don't know that everybody has started to make use of those tools yet but that's part of what our story is to them is that we can provide those tools to you so that you can continue to isolate and solve these problems. And I'm sorry, what was the second part of your question? Well, the second part is how does that translate into contracting? Does that knowledge about where things actually work inform a contracting process to reduce the amount of finger pointing which by the way is a major transaction cost and a major barrier to getting things done quickly. Absolutely and so since you have this high fidelity data at every step of the way and you can see what's happening you can prove to your partners where the problem lies. If I find it on my side of it, okay, no harm, no foul, I'll go fix it and move on with my life but with that data, with that high fidelity data and being able to see all the transactions and all the applications and all the communications that happens in the end through the network between me and my partner I can show them that they are outside of their SLA and so to your point it should shorten the time between the finger pointing because I have good data that says this is the problem. You can't dispute that and so they're much more inclined to work with you in a hopefully in a very good way to fix the problem. So that brings us back to the CIO and I want to close with you on this, Michael. That's got to make a CIO happier who is today facing a lot of business change and is trying to provide a lot, you said agility, I'll use the word an increasing array of business and strategy options based on digital technology ensuring that they have greater certainty in the nature of the services, the provider of the services and the service levels of the services has got to be an essential feature of their decision-making toolkit as they provide business with different ranges of options, right? Absolutely correct. So in fact, the high fidelity data is so critical in order to accomplish this, right? So in order for the CIO to be able to demonstrate to the CEO and other key executives that his objectives are met, the KPIs for that are along the lines of your efficiency, your service delivery capabilities and being able to monitor everything in real time. So the high fidelity data, I just want to elaborate a little bit more on what it means because that's the difference between having this key performance indicators that are relevant for the CIO and relevant also for other key stakeholders and having something that is best guess and maybe, you know, maybe it's going to help. So high fidelity data, the way that NetScout defines it, has several components. First of all, because it's based on traffic or packet data or wire data, it means that we continuously monitor the data, continuously analyze it and it's the single source of truth because there's consistency in the terms of what data is being exchanged. So the more visibility you get into the data that's being exchanged between different workloads, the more intelligence you can glean from it. The other aspect is that it's really we mentioned the service level and if you think of packet data, it's all layers two through seven, right? So you have the data link layer, you have the network, you have the transport, you have the session, you have application, we can heuristically identify any application and provide you with error codes. And in context, say, you know, the load and latency and error codes give you the overall picture. So this altogether constitutes very high fidelity data. And at the end of the day, if the CIO wants to accelerate the digital transformation with confidence, this is the kind of high fidelity data that you need in order to assure that your key performance indicators as CIO are being maintained. This is the as is truth. Exactly. All right. Michael Siegel, Eric Smith, I want to thank you both for being on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much, Peter, for having us. And thanks for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. So we got to be pretty quick.