 Live from New York, it's The Cube. Covering Riverbed Disrupt, brought to you by Riverbed. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Riverbed Disrupt, everybody. This is The Cube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Subu Iyer is here, he's the CMO of Riverbed. Subu, great to see you. Great to see you, Dave. Thanks for coming on The Cube. Thanks for having us at this great venue. Absolutely, how did you guys like the show so far? Good, it's intimate, a lot of good practitioner talk. Love the innovation that you guys are putting forth. We just talked to your CEO about the whole the private equity mojo that you guys have going and it seems like it's all good, how do you feel? Really good, I mean, as I said in the morning, I started here in January, right, in the company and when I came on board it was very clear from Jerry that he wanted to really take the company in a different direction, with really the advent of SDVAN. And we made the acquisition, which was the smartest thing we made because it accelerated our roadmap and it got us a company which really had no legacy to think about, so this company, Oceto, was born in the cloud. So the design that they built in the product was thinking like any company would if it was starting today. So we benefited a lot from their design and what they brought to our SDVAN solution, which is a huge advantage versus the competition. And when we announced the product in April and we've been in early trials with customers, significant momentum, right? Just the one use case of direct cloud connectivity from the branch to the cloud. The fact that it's so simple from the GUI perspective, so intuitive, it's a beautifully designed product and so I think that's going to make a huge difference. Our closest competitors are either small companies who are talking about really small solutions, small use cases about leveraging multiple networks and so on and so forth. They don't have a huge vision and a huge enterprise scale kind of product that we bring to the table now with 2.0 that we announced today. So yeah, it's been exciting. Great ride. So I got to ask you, Stu knows I don't have the marketing gene, but as you and you're new to the company, as you come on to this, what was a one product company and pretty well known within at least our circles and now you expand to this whole new territory. You're talking about cloud, your examples this morning, we're all about digital disruption. What do you want the brand to be? What's the key message that you want people to take away? I think the key message that I'd like to, and they're not so disconnected, right? So when I joined the company, one of the things I said is the great thing about Roebert is really it's a known brand and kind of from a marketer's perspective, the challenge is that it's so well known and the identities are on van optimization. So, but when you look at SD van, right, I think those markets will all converge, right? SD van without van op doesn't make sense because every customer that will go for a software defined wide area network will decide and choose that some of those offices or some of those links will need to be optimized because of the critical traffic that needs to go on that. So some of these markets are obviously kind of converging our visibility solution which is with SteelCentral also is a key component of SD van. So there's natural synergies that are forming in terms of this category of software to find wide area networking. To your specific question around what's the identity, the current brand identity is the application performance company. And if you look at digital transformation and the reason why I talk about digital transformation it's really fueled by the plumbing that the technology provides from a cloud, from a mobile, from a big data and the ability to really harness that kind of data. But at the end of it, what you and I see as customers and the businesses are trying to engage us is applications. We see that engagement through applications. So that end user experience, that application performance, that network on which that application travels to the user, all of that is really relevant with the trend and the digitization. Not a direct answer but they're in a nice kind of. But we're honing in on it, it's very helpful. So essentially you guys are the sort of underneath that user experience, you make it all happen. We work with developers, we have a team in India of developers and they're always so focused on performance. Because they understand that the end user, if it doesn't perform, they're out of there. So is that right? I mean you guys are basically that substrate that enables that end user experience. And that's kind of the motivation behind the eternity acquisition also, following on the heels of Ocido, which got us into SDVAN. We really think as digital becomes more prominent, end user experience is going to be critical. Because at the end of the day it's all about what the user experiences on the device of their choice. And eternity gives us the capability that we were missing. It was a key kind of gap in our visibility and APM story, which is we had the ability to really monitor application performance, network performance, infrastructure performance, but not really the end user experience from a device performance. Tie all that together and that's truly end to end visibility which nobody else has in the market. Well when you think about infrastructure for this digital world, you draw the picture of cloud and you're on-prem and you're going to put data and apps on top of that, but everybody talks about hybrid and everybody talks about the same, same. You enable that to occur, right? The connection points between all these different clouds. It's the beautiful thing, you know, I don't know how many people picked up, I hope they did, which is what Angela was demoing in his eight minute demo on Mainstate and then in the longer session in the breakout is we brought that WAN optimization capability and integrated it into SteelConnect, our SD WAN product with this release and it's seamless, which is you have a branch office say in his example Dallas, you set it up through a new office, you have it on the network now through the software to find WAN product or SteelConnect and you say, you know, all traffic from the Dallas office needs to be WAN optimized, right, in terms and all you do is that click that button and that automatically actually brings up a cloud steelhead, virtual footprint in the cloud whether it's AWS today or Azure tomorrow and that's really powerful because I truly believe that customers can now pick and choose depending on which traffic needs to be optimized very simply and that's another differentiator a lot of the competitors, it's not just the power of the portfolio brought together but also doing it in such an intuitive and a simplistic manner, the GUI is powerful but how we bring those capabilities out to the customer is really important too. Well we had Hertz on earlier and the gentleman was describing, you know, his HR cloud, his sales cloud, his infrastructure cloud, these different clouds and we always talk about flattening that network and you're the connection points in between and that's a tailwind for you and I guess it's a marketing opportunity, like I said, for me it's a challenge but for a marketing pro you got to love that tailwind. Yeah, I mean, you take that, what you just described so whether it's cloud to cloud traffic or cloud to data center traffic or cloud to ranch traffic, right, remote office stuff, you know, we are there, right, we can actually know what's going on, we have the application awareness and that's the beauty of this company which is day one they started as a networking company but they always had the wherewithal to think application down. So the IP was always application aware. So you can set policies at the application level not at the packet level necessarily so that if it's sales force traffic, you know, it needs to go through this kind of priority, it needs to behave like this versus say email traffic or some other traffic. So you take that, what you just said Dave and then say if you truly believe that the future is really embedded sensors and you know, IoT kind of devices and as Mark and recent says which is if software is eating the world, it's now software is programming the world because chips are going to be essentially free then all these devices are going to send data somewhere where it gets harnessed, processed and to drive inside. Guess what, all of that is a connection and all of that is a network so you can connect the dots into the future and see how real but really has a really good place to be in where the industry is going. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your relationship with Riverbed and your customers because I think in a way an optimization was very much, it was a networking and a financial transaction and you talk about the digital transformation in the mobile clatter. I mean, you're talking about applications, you're talking about core business things, you know, drivers and innovation for your companies. So you know, that relationship with customers, who's the buyer, what's the message you want for them? Yeah, so traditional buyer has been maybe the infrastructure buyer or the network buyer, right, for this company for the longest time. Oh, the last couple of years with the acquisitions of Mizzou Networks, OpNet, as we got into more of an application performance monitoring, we are talking to the ITOps buyer, the application owner in certain cases who are really interested in making sure that the application is delivered and it continues to perform on an ongoing basis. So if you look at our personas or the people we talk to right now, it could be a line of business, VP of apps, it could be a ITOps manager, VP of infrastructure or a VP of networks. Increasingly also, we are getting pulled into conversations where the CIO wants to know, you know, how are we fitting into cloud? Because they all have, it's almost like all CIOs went to school and they thought them cloud first, right? So every customer that we are talking to has a cloud first strategy. It was called that, you know, management by magazine. That's what I got, yeah, so. Right, so, but they want to know our cloud story and what you heard us talk about here was essentially telling that story saying, you know, hey, we know, we understand that, you know, you want to leverage the cloud, you want to be innovative, you want to be agile, but we believe that there are impediments which we are uniquely positioned to actually solve. So we are seeing a lot more conversations with CIOs and an interesting thing which you, I'm sure you guys are also seeing as you talk to a lot of vendors and customers, is the role of the CDO, the chief digital officer. A lot of companies are hiring to really unify and really have a, you know, sense of what the digital strategy looks like. So we're kind of trying to change and seeing a change happening from what was a classic network buyer to IT buyer who had an affinity to the riverbed to more of the application and, you know, CIO, CDO kind of conversation. Well, and we joke about the CIOs, but CIOs are very risk-averse, right? And now cloud is not viewed as a risk anymore. You could have over-rotated to the cloud, some companies did, you know? And, you know, the timing is difficult, but the timing right now feels quite good for riverbed. Having said that, what are the challenges that you see as you guys expand your TAM and go after the new product portfolio and expanded product portfolio? What do you see as the big challenges? I think, you know, I think that challenges, I'll take off from the last answer that I provided really, it's easier for a company, whether it's your sales people or your partners, when you have a focus set of people to talk to within an organization, whether it's a network buyer, they know you, they love you, or infrastructure buyer. I just articulated a profile map, which is like at least four or five different possible buyers or at least influencers. So getting the partner community, getting your sales people to really internalize the vocabulary, simplify the story, and really talk in the language and the care abouts of the VP of apps, versus the infrastructure buyer, is I think is important from a marketing perspective, you know, our challenge is really to simplify that story, provide that unique storylines, depending on who they are talking to. So I think that's something that we are working on. Another thing that we're also doing is really up-leveling our story and building more solutions content rather than product content. So if I can have the sales people talk to a Office 365 admin about, hey, what are you doing with Office 365? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? What are the challenges? We understand this is your challenges, here's how Riverbird can help. So really application down and solution down, like the cloud, instead of saying, hey, here's the Riverbird five products, if I can tell you that if you have a cloud for strategy, I'm sure you're looking at these kinds of challenges, here's how we can help. If you're deploying Office 365, here's how we can kind of help you, so on and so forth. I guess one of the concerns in networking has been for so long, there's many of the network admins, they're certified on the product, and they feel their job is tied to kind of that gear that they've got. And that is, the line Dave uses there, they're defending the past instead of charging forward to the future. How do you break through some of that? And you talked about some of the application pieces, obviously help, but how do we get beyond that as an industry? So I mean, I think the, what we see is it's behavioral change, as you said, right, from a human's perspective, it's always the most difficult to do. But what we're also seeing is, they are under intense pressure, especially with the cloud, right? So when somebody in a remote office or otherwise needs instant cloud connectivity, and the network admin comes and says, oh, that's going to take me three weeks, that's an unacceptable answer. So they are being forced to look at different ways and alternate solutions. And that's basically the opening for us, not just, see the existing group at customer base is always going to look at us and it's going to take leadership from us and our solutions. But what SD-Van gives us and the tailwind and the door it opens is really with net new opportunities and net new customers. And these are the customers where you have probably, you know, network admins who are, you know, more likely to continue to do things the way they have been trained to. But these market pressures and pressures on them are actually helping us in, at least in the only conversations that we're having for sure. So we live super in this API economy. You are making some moves as a company to surface APIs for your ecosystem and customers. And you mentioned this morning that when you take the train, which is rare for most West Coast folks, that it's a vast majority of developers. So how important are developers in your overall strategy, your marketing, as maybe one of the personas, they don't buy infrastructure necessarily, but they certainly influence it increasingly? What do you see as the developer angle? You know, I think there are two aspects to it. I mean, when we talk to our partners, for example, service providers, right, they increasingly going to a different business model. They want to consume our products as services as much as possible and really programmable services. So we are looking at really providing a class of APIs that they can use for sure. So I'm going to come to your exact question on the developer side, but just talking about really, even in the service provider space, the need of that market is really having an ability and an API that is available to talk to the functionality so that they can program to it and have these services orchestrated together in a NFV or a virtual model. As far as developers in the enterprise are concerned, applications, as I mentioned in the morning, developers want the ability to really write to software. So if they are looking at application performance management kind of capabilities like SteelCentral, they not only want SteelCentral to support the new languages, right? It was Java and .NET in the old days. It's PHP, Ruby, Python, Goal, who knows what after tomorrow. They want the vendors to keep up with the new languages and the new frameworks that's kind of table stakes. But then more importantly, they also want to be able to write to the functionality so that as a developer, if I'm a developer, I'm building an application. I would want performance monitoring to be kind of called as an API so that I can test it and see how my application is behaving during tests. When I deploy it, I get a real-time picture of the performance of the application. So you'll see as increasingly provide really rich set of northbound and southbound API access to our products. Absolutely a key area for us to go after. Probably starting with our core networking products and our APM products. Right. You also talk about microservices in your keynote. Talk about the importance of microservices and what that means to Riverbed. I mean, I think, again, microservices are important in two ways, which is for us, we need to start packaging our software in smaller footprint because if our software is going to run into smaller form factor IoT devices, they only have so much real estate that they can run in. So that's an internal engineering exercise for us. From an external perspective, customers are building a new generation, next generation systems of engagement or modern applications using microservices based architecture. And that's great. I mean, it gives them the agility, it gives them the flexibility that they desire. What does a monolithic application has become a distributed application? But they're also challenges because I make this analogy of, imagine a tightrope walker and it was a single rope between the two ends. It's never easy, but it's probably easier to walk when that is. And now imagine the same rope made of multiple knots. That's how an application constructed with microservices look like. And imagine each of those knots is a separate microservice and some of those knots are coming in real time. How would that problem look like for a tightrope walker? That's exactly how the emerging architecture of applications is. So we believe there's a significant opportunity with this because this introduces possible application latency, visibility challenges, performance challenges, all of which we can uniquely kind of resolve and solve. And you can resolve that problem with some of the new products that you've announced today, providing visibility. And then what happens when a customer gets that visibility? Then they have their own protocols to address it. Are you working on things in the secret lab to sort of automate that remediation? What should we expect as observers there? So, you know, our strategy there is really, what we want to do is we want to capture as many data points or telemetry points as possible and really leverage a big data engine at the back end to analyze off this and drive insight more on a real time basis even before probably an incident or an issue could happen. So you'll see us push the envelope pretty dramatically on that side. If we can look at an application running on a network, capture all these data points, analyze that in the cloud or in the data center and really feed insights back in real time. That would be a perfect solution for a customer. Yeah, well you're in the best post position to do that. Kind of like Uber, they knows all the car traffic, they can analyze that data, maybe a smaller example here, but still, it's advantageous. We'll leave on, close on your thoughts on Disrupt, where you want to take this event. Give us some insight there. So I think this has been a great event. I think we put this together with the idea that we wanted to come out big with a new launch of our really enterprise readiness of our SDVAN product. But as we were thinking about this and talking to customers, we saw an opportunity to talk about a broader context and the trends that are happening in the industry. We've chosen New York on purpose, some of our bleeding edge customers are in New York. So that's the music, the party is starting. So we actually would love to continue this topical area into our user conference, which we are planning to do next year, sometime maybe in the second quarter or later in the year. But we'd like to constantly start building out conversations around areas that customers care about, that customers are driving, and really think about Riverbed as a thought leader, not just about a product vendor, but really a vendor that knows what's going on in the market. The customer challenges, the customer strategic directions, and connecting Riverbed into those kinds of directions. Right, yeah. Well, Super, thanks very much for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us here, and hopefully we'll see you next time. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks a lot. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is a Cuba live from Riverbed Disrupt in New York City. Right back.