 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Well, we are in Moscone Center North here in San Francisco, the city by the bay, gorgeous day outside, day two of our coverage here on theCUBE, of VMworld 2019. I'm John Walls with John Troyer. John, good to see you today. Great to be here with you. Good for day two. We have a couple of authors with us today, both from VMware, Rosa Lear, who is the director of marketing at VeloCloud and the business unit there. Rosa, thank you for being with us. Thank you. I appreciate that. And Dave Twynum, who's the director of systems engineering in that business unit at VMware. And this is the book that they have collaborated on, I think with 12 others. I think there were 14 who came together on this project. It's called SD-WAN one-on-one. The what, the why, and the how. This is going to answer all those riddles, all those puzzles that you have about, how does software define wide area network work? Where are the pitfalls? Where are the challenges? What are we going to do to solve our problems? So folks, what was the genesis of this? I mean, it's a hefty thing for sure. And really well illustrated. So we'll get into that a little bit. But what was the genesis of this? Rosa, if you would first, what drove you to put this together? Sure, there are a lot of books out there on the market that are focused on SD-WAN because it's such a hot topic. But what we saw was a big deficit on how does it actually work, getting down into that second, third layer of what people are looking for. So it's not so superficial. They really want to know how does it work? How do I integrate it into my network? What are the steps that I go through? So it's not a user manual, but it definitely gives you that deep perspective of what SD-WAN can provide and how to implement it into your network. And so then the target audience would be? Network engineers, we've also got stuff in here for the business owner. So CTOs, we actually have two characters that help outline a lot of the comments or a lot of the meat of the book. One is Alvina, she's the CTO. So she really describes what her business needs are. And then there's Rodney, who is her network engineer who actually implements this, the architect. So it's told from their perspective and really introducing each of the chapters and the concepts and the takeaways. So Dave, as you've been doing this and you're talking to customers out there, what's the state of the art here with, where are we in the evolution of SD-WAN? It's kind of a noisy space from my perspective. Also, from a VMware perspective, this brings VMware out of the data center into the network and network edge and the wide area network. So can you just talk a little bit about what are the problems people are seeing and that they're solving with SD-WAN and why are network engineers interested in taking this as their bedtime reading? Yeah, absolutely. So clearly what we're seeing in the marketplace is that there is a lot of noise out there. There are a lot of vendors that are in the SD-WAN space. I think it's important to note though that we are number one. It's always a good place to be. And so while VMware is a newer kind of entrant into the wide area market in particular, we already have a leadership position via the Velocloud acquisition. And obviously they continue to enhance this portfolio from there. So the reality is that SD-WAN, it's kind of funny we have the why at the beginning of the book. More and more customers are actually aren't asking the why, right? They know why they need it, which is it is the natural evolution of their wide area infrastructure. They know that software is the future. That's why we're here at VMworld because we're all about software and understanding how they can evolve to meet those business challenges in the software framework versus the traditional Rip and Replace hardware-based model of the past. And you're on one side of the equation, obviously. You're supplying this information, supplying the services, developing the solutions, whatever. How much listening do you do to the other side to put together something like this? Because I would assume you have to have a real sense of what the problems are and what the questions are. What is the why? What is the how that's going on on the customer side of this? I mean, tell me about that process, if you will. Sure, so one of the unique parts of this book is that with these other authors that we brought in to put this book together and we did this within five days, which was a great project. But we really took the people out of the field. So these are the engineers that help create this book or the ones that are shoulder to shoulder with the customer. Helping them, the implementation, talking to them about how they actually implement this. So they talk to the customers. This is brought out from the field. It's not some guy sitting in an ivory tower talking about what you should do. This is actually what you should do because this is the best practice. This is what we hear from customers. This is what works best for all of the people that we've implemented SD-WAN with. And you did this in five days? Five days. We hired a company. How many of you? 14. There was 15 of us. 15. In five days, you locked up for 24 hours around the clock. You went to Miami, I remember that, but I didn't realize it was in that compressed of a timeframe. Oh yeah, it was great. I mean, we all learned, I think, a lot because we come from different geographies. We came from different deployment models and so forth. And yeah, we just all got together. I love the idea of the book sprint. And so you captured a moment in time of the technology, of the marketplace, but you said this isn't a dummy's book. Is it an intro? This isn't a, nor is it a how-to manual, right? It's not a product manual. So I'm thinking it should be somewhat conceptual and have a lifespan of more than just the latest release of anything, right? Is that part of the goal here? Is this going to have a lifespan? Absolutely. Okay. I mean, what do you envision? Again, it's interesting you're both engineering and you said the CTO, the CXO level can get some understanding of why some things are going on. Is that? Sure. You think about it from a CXO perspective, right? What are the business challenges that that individual sees, right? They don't necessarily care about the bits and bytes of networking underneath. They know that they need a network, but they also know that it's a really expensive part of their budget. So they need to understand how does it actually support the business? And ultimately, right, how can they do more with it? And ideally what we always hear is do more with less. And so how do we get to that point? And understanding then, so that's one need that comes from the business side. Well, how do we compliment that from the technical side of things, right? How do we solve those problems? But the reality is we're not solving technical problems just to solve technical problems. We're solving them to actually meet the needs of the business. And so kind of seeing both sides and how they come together is critical to it. And I think that's something that we tried hard to put into the book. Yeah, when you have a collaboration like this, and you said you brought 15 people together, I'm sure there has to be some disagreement at some point, right, or some discussion. So what were some of those points that came up where somebody thought that perhaps maybe a little more attention here, maybe a little less attention there, maybe this is something we should bring? No, let's not touch that base. I mean, how about those discussions, that back and forth, and how to just settle that with so many people in the room? So one of the things that we first outlined when we started this process was that this is a safe space that nobody is really wrong because we're also bringing in different perspectives here. So we definitely all decided that we're going to treat each other respectfully. There was a lot of arguments here and there about certain things, but we all are professionals, so we all figured out what the right thing was to do. But so let's talk about the order, let's talk about how you dealt with it, the what's and the why's. You said, why almost didn't make the cut, but did make the dress rehearsal and the publishing. How do you put together something like this that is not a user manual? That's the first thing I thought of. I thought, okay, you're going to show me what SD-WAN's all about, how am I going to deploy it, VMWare's services or solutions rather on my network. But that's not what this is all about, right? So how did you parse that? How did you decide this is the direction we're going to go and not just make it a how-to for people or a dummies? So we already have a dummies book, so you should check that out. There's also a PDF on our website, fellowcloud.com. So we needed another layer, another book that would go deeper on that. We needed something that, I mean, we can always write a user manual. Anybody can sit in a room and put that together. But we wanted something that was different, that was actually going to, I guess comfort customers who were looking at the solution, give them the right idea that this is what they need and also what they were going to get into. That's a big question is you don't understand what the implementation's going to be like until you're in it. So this gives you that view. So you can use that as a pre-customer read or you can use it post sales and really help define what you need to do when you're implementing. Nice, nice. So we're here at VMworld 2019. This is my millionth VMworld. Very interesting, a lot of talk at the top level, apps and Kubernetes and that sort of stuff at the bottom level. So networking and a lot of other things that maybe the traditional admin, vSphere admin, already kind of a silo buster from old roles is already here, but sometimes when the networking folks talk with the server folks, or the words mean different things or they're slightly different tribes, say. You know, when app performance, right? In an SD-WAN context, it may mean something completely different than performance in a data center server context. So you're here at the show, you've got the network edge zone down in the show floor. So you've got some booth there, you've got activities, you've got obviously a lot of breakout sessions. How have the networkers mixed with the admins? How has it been? And y'all are from VeloCloud, which has been with VMware for... Almost two years in December. Two years, right? So I mean, talk a little both about that integration, both at corporately and here at the show. You want to go first? Sure, so the, I mean, the book is, I mean, the event has been fantastic for us. We are getting a lot of traction. We actually did a book signing for this book yesterday with six of the authors. 96 books are gone and I feel like the conversations are really migrating to the networking space, the wide area networking space rather than just data center. You're right, there's a lot of overlap in the technology in the lingo and jargon. But I think that if we know what we're talking about in terms of wide area networking, I think those conversations can easily be budged or gapped. And just, I would add, so I've been at VMware about five years now. So I was on the NSX team prior to moving over to the Velo team. And so five years ago, like there was virtually no presence of networking. We were the only networking people here for the most part. And that's really changed substantially. And this year in particular is the first year where there are a lot of networking folks that are roaming the halls here, right? Whether it's understanding NSX out of the house or whether it's SD-WAN, that it's a significantly greater presence than there's ever been previously. So the other piece is realizing we're a networking company now and a security company, right? Those components are integral as a part of the solution. And so the makeup has actually begun to change a little bit. And there's more commingling than there's ever been before in this space. Do you touch on security in the book? Absolutely, it's an entire chapter on it. So CISO might be interested as well. Absolutely. So the book I've seen is for purchase here on site. Yes. Go ahead, in case somebody's watching and they're here, tell them where they can get it. Go to the VMware Bookstore, it's in Moscone West. And then we also will be making it available on Amazon starting next week. All right, so here's again a look at the book, SD-WAN, one-on-one, the what, the why, and the how. Rosa Day, thanks for being with us. Congratulations on maybe, I assume, first book? For me, yes. Third for me. Oh, all right. A practiced hand. First print, though. Not fair. All right, thank you both. Appreciate the time. Thank you very much. Back with more continued coverage here on theCUBE of VMworld 2019.