 This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE, and Wikibon's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We're excited to be live in Las Vegas for Amazon web service and AWS re-invent conference. Hashtag is re-invent. Go to crowdchat.net slash re-invent for all the action tomorrow. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm Joe, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is, goes by Pi. And he's the Vice President of Global Alliance at Riverbed, been with the business for many, many years. Welcome to theCUBE again, CUBE alumni. Thank you so much. Welcome to theCUBE here. Obviously, we're excited because, you know, from a content perspective, it's a content-rich environment here. DevOps, the cloud, a lot of transformation conversations going on. So talk about your view of this conference. Share it to folks out there. Why is this conference so important? And then talk about what you guys do. Great. So this conference has been, it's very good for us. It's very exciting to be here. And the reason is, you know, a lot of our customers, so we've been an enterprise company. We've been around for 10 years as a company. And a lot of our customers continue to evolve their business, their enterprises, looking at clouds. So when we start looking at, how do we participate and make them more efficient within their business, this conference becomes the pinnacle of how they are getting the information, how they're evolving their business, saying, how can I take advantage of public cloud computing? And Amazon is a poster child for that. And so, the reinvent conference, this is our second event in a row. We were here last year and we're just talking about it. This almost seems like double the number of attendees than we did last year. And so it is very, very good. It is very appropriate for the audience that we're trying to reach out to. And very happy to be here and talk about it as well. So we had a crowd chat earlier this morning, kind of activate the crowd on our social chat application. Had almost a half a million views already. The big conversation is the cloud wars, but really the big substantive conversation is the intersection of IT innovation around hybrid cloud. Enterprise are moving to the hybrid cloud. Myr from Gartner was on theCUBE with us last week at IBM IOD, and it's very, very clear. Hybrid cloud is what enterprises want. They want a little bit of public, they want hybrid cloud. So Amazon has a nice path there. But it's not, the road's kind of bumpy. So how do you guys, how do you talk to customers? What's the main talking points that you guys share with your customers? How do you pave a nice smooth road? It's a great question. So you're absolutely right. So I think over the last 20, 30 years, customers have built data centers over the last 10 years. There's been a big trend of consolidation and virtualization, right? And that's all happening inside the data center. With the evolution of cloud, I think a lot of what traditional models are being re-looked at, which is how do I spend my money and get maximum investment out of it? How do I get maximum value out of my investment? And I think what Amazon web services has done, what Amazon has done in terms of delivering its technology as easy to, as all the enablers around making easy to, very easy and accessible, so that when customers want to take advantage of moving to an OPEX-based model, taking advantage of a lot of the functions and features that Amazon has built, building a hybrid cloud is something that customers want to look at and go, how can I maintain my mission critical application that are core to my business, but still build a hybrid cloud to take advantage of public cloud opportunities? So, can I run test dev in the cloud and have all my dev ops, right? All the applications run in the cloud and make it very easy for them to make that transition. And I think Amazon has done a very good job in providing a lot of functionality, a lot of tools to make the transition very easy for enterprises to build that hybrid cloud. So, Pi, Riverbed's ascendancy sort of predated the whole cloud phenomenon. Talk about how the cloud has changed your business, how it's changed your TAM, the new opportunities are created, so maybe some of the ones that it cannibalized and how you've had to respond to that. So, just to give you a background, as you said, we've been around a long time targeting enterprises, so we're a public company based out of San Francisco. Our revenue is about 800 million last year and we're going at a billion dollar run rate. And a fundamental value to customers is how do we get customers to drive maximum value out of their applications? So, the traditional technology what used to be called van optimization which is how do I enable customers to centralize the infrastructure while still getting the users to get the kind of performance they want? So, this model has been all around building a private cloud, helping customers build their private cloud. But when the transition goes to the public cloud and the applications are now not in the data center, they're now running in the Amazon EC2. If you want to move your data into the S3 or Glacier infrastructure, you're now moving the data over long distances and so where we come into play is how do we help our customers make the transition to the cloud? So, our products are called steelhead technology, right? So, steelhead is our product for van optimization where the market leader in the space with over 50% market share. So, what we did was we transitioned the technology and enabled a cloud version of it to be available in the Amazon cloud. So, our customers want to build that hybrid cloud, want to move their applications into the cloud. We make sure that the applications that are now being accessed get the same performance as with the applications running inside the data center so that that transition is now seamless, right? If you now have your data sitting in the data center and go, look, I want to take advantage of Glacier for all my long-term archiving. So, we have a product called Whitewater that allows you to encrypt your data, deduplicate the data so that you're saving maybe 1 30th to 1 40th of the actual data into the Glacier cloud at one center gig. So, when you start looking at the return on investment of how much money am I investing into my data center to save those backup data and how much money could I be saving by applying deduplication for that traffic, applying my encryption key so that I have ownership of that data but still saving it on a platform that costing me maybe 1 50th to 1 60th of the water would traditionally cost if I put it in my data center. So, what Riverbed does is really enables customers to make that transition through products like Steelhead, like products like Whitewater, and products like Stingray, which is our product to build applications and scale it by thousands of applications inside the cloud very, very seamlessly. So, the enablement of the hybrid cloud for our customers, like enterprises, we become the enabler for making that transition hybrid cloud a reality. Yeah, you really are enabling the hybrid cloud and I presume everything you described could be automated, right? I mean, that's the whole idea behind this. And so, talk about how it's affected your marketplace as it expanded the marketplace but cloud economics are different? So, has it somewhat cannibalized some opportunities or is it incremental overall? I think we see it as incremental and the reason is customers continue to take advantage of their mission critical data in the data center even today, right? As they make the transition, they're looking at test dev, they're looking at key applications that they believe can run in the cloud and take advantage of the cloud bursting capabilities, get advantage of the scale that Amazon gives them, take advantage of taking some of their backup data and putting it into the cloud, which is costing them a lot of money. So, if you look at tape, it may cost you a dollar, two dollars a gig, which, you know, five years ago was a good deal. When Amazon comes and offers Glacier at one cent a gig, that becomes disruptive model and go, now I can now drive more value and we help customers make that transition very seamlessly, right? So, it's expanded our market significantly over and beyond what we would have done in the traditional model. So, you're saying Glacier is more economically feasible than tape? Yes, it is, right? So, because if you look at tape, tape is mechanical data, right? Glacier is digital data with 119-skip durability, right? So, when you look at how long can I keep the data? More importantly, can I recover the data? Tape is mechanical. So, when you go to recover the data, there may be an instance where it is unrecoverable. So, when you start looking at that, you know, digitization of data as customers want to keep data forever, right? Glacier becomes a great platform to make that happen. I've always said to customers, when you go to Glacier or you go to tape, you hope you never have to get it back, but have you had experiences with people having to bring data back into there? You know, when you have disasters, right? Like, look at Hurricane Sandy, if you look at all the things happening around the world, you know, saving data forever nowadays is almost a reality, right? Because of compliance reasons, because of whatever reason, you need to keep your data long-term archives and so the longer you keep it, the more time you're going to take to recover the data because, you know, you need to keep the metadata. But Glacier is a deep archive, right? I mean, ultimately it's there, you know it's there, you can kind of sleep at night. You really don't want to bring it back if you don't have to, right? Yes, but when you do want it back, you know it's there, even if it takes hours, it's not, am I going to ever get it back? Now, Andy Jassy has said that Glacier is Amazon's fastest growing service in the history of AWS in terms of customers. I think redshift in terms of revenue. Are you seeing that? What impact does that have on your business? So it's been having a great impact because before, for example, we've been partnering with Amazon for the last three years, right, we've been a great partner of theirs and they've done great with us as well. Before Glacier, we had, you know, we have a whitewater product that made the transition easy into S3, right? And so when we made that transition, we continue to sell it, customers are still a little hesitant. So we had customers that said, yes, I'm looking into it, I'm exploring it, I'll test drive it, I'll do a proof of concept. When Glacier's announced, some of those same customers called us back and said, now I'm interested because the economics have completely changed in terms of what the pricing was and the compelling return investment would have been versus what Glacier offers and what it could be now, right? So that's definitely made us relook at the market and it becomes our gateway product has made it very easy for customers to say, I want to take advantage of Glacier, how do I do that? That's when the partnership really kicks into gear. I talk about the, given your perspective, one at Riverbed, your relationship with Amazon, your partnership, and also your history in the industry, you're a tech athlete, you got a lot of experience, you've seen a couple of movies before. Why is Software Defined Data Center so hyped up right now? Why are people so clamoring on to the hype of Software Defined Data Center? I mean, I can see there's a destination, but I mean, it's pretty much hype at this point, but why is it important? I think IT is complex, right? People try to make it as simple as possible and so giving customers the tools to simplify certain part of the operations and automating it, when you have hardware, right? You still have to manually do things that typically would have been more preferable through software. So the concept of a Software Defined Data Center is the ability for enterprises to approach that model and say, if I have software, allows me to automate certain part of my operations which until now I could not have done before, right? So a lot of the tools that typically would have been relegated as individual tools, if they were all talking to each other to build a Software Defined Data Center, then the ability for IT and enterprises to automate certain operations, which is why if you think of a DevOps, right? Automating operations, taking what would have traditionally been a cost center profit center, making it automated, makes it much more compelling for enterprises to consider. Yeah, I mean one thing I like about Andy Jassy and Amazon and others like Paul Moritz at Pivotal and HP as well at IBM, they get the mainframe mindset and if you look at the tsunami of DevOps, right? You have an explosion of apps, you have these integrated stacks that can handle a lot of actually automation, configuration management, a lot of the stuff that you're used to dealing with. Okay, so you have a tsunami of apps. So the issue is orchestration. So software is changing on the development side, a lot of top of the stack developers, but then underneath the covers, under the hood, the engine. So what's your perspective? Okay, assume that, okay we agree that developers are going to continue to grow, new frameworks, Python, whatever you want to call, data science, but the engine of innovation in the data center, the next Ferrari, what is that going to look like? What's your vision and how does the software tie in? Because that engine is what everyone's tweaking right now. Yes. So what's your view of that? So I'll give a direct example of how we see the market, right? So we have a product called Stingrays, a virtual ADC product, right? So customers have been using it to automate operations and build scripts that automate their infrastructure. So when your application is running in the Amazon cloud and you want to scale it out from 100 users to 1,000 users to maybe even a million users, right? You cannot sit back and go okay, I'm going to have somebody now scale that to that level. So the concept of DevOps is how do we give IT and enterprises the ability to have the right tool set to build these kind of operations? So we have the scripting capabilities so that customers can take their operations and script it in such a way that enables them to grow from that 100 users to a million users in without any IT being involved to get that scale within minutes, right? So if you think of the realities of that scale and how do you make that happen without some concept of a software-defined capability, without the concept of DevOps, to be able to predict and automate those kind of operations is going to be very difficult to do. So we've been doing that with a Stingray product which is the virtual ADC product that has built in scripting capabilities to enable customers to now scale to 1,000 users to 100,000 users. Okay, so back in the old days, I was like, we'll say the old days, local director, policy-based configuration management, you go, you get a terminal, you attach to the device, you configure some ports, stack and rack some gear, you guys just sell a lot of gear, Cisco, Riverbed, a bunch of others. Now, though all those guys are growing up, they got to modernize, okay, I'm going to go hybrid cloud, I need a path to the cloud. What's going on with virtualization and now essentially instances, EC2, S3, you're mentioning it, it's a completely different mindset in the world. What do those customers face when they want to go to the cloud and deal with all the easy stuff back in the old days? Okay, I got to bring VLAN over here, I got static infrastructure, now I got virtualization, I got cloud, I got EC2 instances up and down, I got S3, I got stuff over provision, go into Glacier, apps put in workload pressure, I mean, so give us a view of what does an enterprise need to do to get to that hybrid cloud? So enterprises have to think of IT in a different way, right, so like I said, you're absolutely right. There's a lot of tool sets that have been used to for the last 10, 20 years, right? So if you just look at management of technology, right? Customers have hundreds of tools, there's point tools, there's enterprise tools, there's management tools, there's knock tools, right? So when you start moving to a cloud-based hybrid cloud architecture, it's a different model because you now have to look at tools that also manage inside the cloud and manage technology inside your private data center, right? So how do you find tools that manage both of them and give you that view of what's happening inside, right? If you start looking at this intermediate of technology, you've got software to find data center, right? There's also a concept of software to find network, right? So when you start looking at virtualization, there's virtualization of the servers, there's virtualization of the applications, virtualization of the network, and then you've got the software to find data center that builds all of that on top that allows you to take components that were typically hardware-based, that were point-based, you know, redefining, that now you could sit back and go, I'm going to build a software toolkit so that when I use something like cloud formation where I'm launching an application, the impact of what that means should now be ripple-affected all across my network, my virtual machines, my servers, and my applications so that I can now, within one click or five clicks or whatever, allow you to now automate that operation very, very easy. So that's what a software-defined data center is the vision of how do I automate certain operations of my IT that typically is relegated to hardware components, hardware reconfiguration, hardware re-architecting. So what do you guys think, what do you personally think about this whole cloud adoption trend? I mean, RiverBed's been at the heart of mission-critical applications now for a number of years. You're seeing this sort of tension between public and private and a lot of the traditional companies. You guys really don't care as long as somebody's moving the data somewhere. You're doing well. But you saw VMware's rise and you saw them go from test dev and into mission-critical applications what some people used to call the software mainframe. Do you think that the public cloud, generally in Amazon specifically, will be able to support any workload, any application, anywhere in the world. And that is going to be the dominant trend over the next, say, 15, 20 years. Or do you see this hybrid model, really this equilibrium being established and predominant? So I think you have to look at the entire market and say which segment of customers can now move to a fully public cloud model, right? So there's definitely security concerns. There's data compliancy concerns you need to think about. So if you go globally, certain countries don't allow data to leave their borders, right? So you have to take that into consideration. So I think if you took a market segmentation and go, there's certain segment of the market that is very comfortable putting the data fully in the public cloud and not have too much concerns about the security aspects of it, right? If you look at very large enterprises, there's definitely certain segments of you in those enterprise where they would like to keep the data inside the data center for the very reasons of security and confidentiality, things like that. But then there's definitely certain workloads that lend themselves very, very well to the public cloud model. So I think that's where the hybrid cloud model comes in. There are certain segments of the market that would not look at public cloud because of the confidentiality. So are those reasons, are they perceived? Are they real? Are they... I think a lot of them are still, the questions are still out there, right? I think, like I said, if you look at the large enterprises, they're stepping in cautiously. But as you can see over the last couple of years, over the last years and then, big enterprises are making that big step. They're stepping into launching applications in the Amazon Cloud. So both camps are right. Both camps are right, right? Like sales guys say, it depends. It depends. Yeah, we could do that. We could pave that road. Consultants do that too. Absolutely. So Amazon's got a bumpy road to the cloud, hybrid cloud, although it's a nice road. It works, the public cloud smooth and kick and butt of South Sea. We're big users of the Amazon Cloud. Hi, I got to ask you the final questions. We have our next segment coming up. Please. For the folks out there, put a bumper sticker on the car, okay? Here for this show. What's the bumper sticker of this reinvent this year? How would you describe this event? It's relevance to the world. If you'd have put it on a bumper sticker on a car, what would it say? Oh boy, that's putting me in a spot. So if you think of a bumper stick, I would say Amazon Web Service, the poster child for public cloud computing. All right. How was that? Great bumper stick. A little long, it's going to carry half the bumper stick. Some cars don't even have bumpers anymore, but great tagline, Amazon's kicking butt. They're here, it's real. Sighting developers are here. Amazon's winning the developer war. We're going to have all the coverage. Can they get to the enterprise? What do they have under the hood? Can they scale? Can they do the SLA? What does this game look like? I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back here live. Live independent coverage with SiliconANGLE, Wookie Bomb and theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.