 Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering Riverbed Disrupt, brought to you by Riverbed. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back, welcome to Riverbed Disrupt. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Mike Sargent is here as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Steel Central Business Unit. Mike. Hi guys, great to be with you. Welcome. Thanks, great to be with you. Good job this morning. Thank you. Starting to sort of fine tune our understanding of the product portfolio and you're pretty focused. All about visibility. It is, it is all about visibility. So tell us about the business unit that you run and why it's relevant to customers. Absolutely, so Dave, it's a, you know, if you look at what's going on out there in the marketplace, you've got an amazing transformation happening, apps more important than ever. You got the move to the cloud, you've got all these different pieces. Hybrid architecture is coming up in terms of end-to-end services that folks really care about that are app-enabled. Really hard to see what's going on. It's getting, visibility is getting worse while apps are getting far more important. So what we provide is we're bringing together the data sets and the analytics that deliver insight. So you can act on that quickly. You can know if you have a problem. You can know who's impacted. You can, you know, quickly determine what the root cause is and you can go take action. Ideally, before end users even see the problem. What we were talking earlier too, the more sort of security that you layer on top, the harder it is to see things and inspect things. How do you address that challenge? Well, I mean, it's true with clouds, true with all the architect, all the different vectors that we're going down right now. So it really comes down to having a composite. There's no silver bullet, right? It's really a composite of data that needs to come together to inform how things are performing and get visibility into how they're performing. So it could be packets and flows. We'll help you do it. It could be code level metrics. And so what we're doing is we're pulling together those disparate data sets and that composite so we can apply the analytics on top of that and provide the insights for the particular use case and question. But you're not just laying a log file on me. I mean, you're packaging it in a way that's consumable. Absolutely right. Talk about that a little bit. Absolutely right. I mean, really a good point. It really goes back to the use cases, right? What is it I'm trying to solve for? You know, if I'm really trying to solve for end user experience, I really want to be seeing from the device level. I want to see what's going on. I want to see what's happening in the app. I want to see what's happening on the wire. We're going to package that together. But importantly, I don't want to give our customers just a bunch of metrics and a bunch of screens. Ultimately, you got to pull it together. We pulled it together in what we call Steel Central Portal, which is a single view. Single view that brings it all together, but then can be tuned to the different users out there, right? So if you're a line of business head, great. You want a set of metrics. All comes from the same common data set. We provide that to you. But then the DevOps team needs a different set, a different set of views. Network engineering team needs a different set of views. So think of portals really being a broker of insight. Coming up from the analytics, brokered out to the various constituents. We're trying to make it simple. Because it's all about speed. It's all about time to discovering the problem and fixing the problem. I wonder if we can unpack your unique advantage a little bit more. Are you sort of, you have all this data, in a way you're describing, I'm saying, well, they're a big data company. Well, that's what we are. You don't want to be a big data company these days, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I get you. Unless you're a practitioner of big data, which is what you are. So are you able to infer from all that data across the other companies that you serve and infer for a particular situation? Is that how it works? Yeah, I would say not yet. There's no question that, because not all of our data, most of our data is still on-prem. We have some in the cloud, but at this point our plans are ultimately, and that's hardly aided by the SaaS move. We do want to get to the point where we are mining that data to extract patterns and feed those insights back into the product. So we'd love to be able to feed back in, so the product just pops up and says, hey, you're exhibiting the classic symptoms of a memory leak. You ought to think about taking a look at this. And again, headlights into where it's going. So the data's there today, it's just distributed. The data is there, it's really, it's really by and large customer by customer. We have some analytic engines up in the cloud, but you're right, in terms of the big data, we are definitely putting big data to work. We have a customer who's actually a tech retailer and who has over 20 billion transactions in their data store. And I mean, they've said to us, your data is second to none in the industry. Period, flat out. And if anything, we're working with them to figure out how to open that up a bit, so because they do want to merge that with some other data sets that they have. Mike, can you talk about that SaaS piece that's announced here today? What's the role that's going to be? What drove the company to go down that path? Absolutely, so we have a variety of capabilities. With the move to cloud, our app internals product, APM, has a very rich data capture capability. That can capture data, the one second granularity. Saves it, we see every transaction. That currently is designed to operate, it operates in the cloud today, it operates on-prem, operates where you want it. And oftentimes, so we have several customers who have it up in the cloud, monitoring apps that they have in the cloud. Great, no problem. The issue is they really wanted to be a, much easier to consume. Didn't want to have to really provision it themselves, upgrade it, monitor it. But they also wanted to, we've got an increasing call for broadening the data set. As our customers, classic on-prem customers who have gone with a cloud-first strategy have said, you know, particularly on the NPM side and on the infrastructure side, feeling a bit blind in the cloud. And would really love more insight. So what we have done is we've gone out with, first of all, we've developed an approach so that with a simple spin-up and spin-down of say workload in AWS, the agent with it will capture NPM and infrastructure data. It also can instrument the code. So depending on what they're looking for, they can get basic info, they can get rich info. But the reality is we've made it so that it's very easy to consume as a service. Okay, so will customers actually be able to learn from what their peers are doing? Do you aggregate data from kind of an anonymize all, everything that's happening there? Let's just say, getting there, not, you know, so fully expect, you know, there's no question with that. There's plenty of opportunity. Now I will add, by the way, you know, with the addition, we've just added attorney into the portfolio. Eternity does leverage benchmarks. It is very possible. And, you know, we fully expect to be providing, let's say, insights that really span enterprises. Are you selling painkiller or vitamins? What's that? Are you selling painkiller or vitamins? Oh, okay. For both. No, I mean, you're kidding me, this is all about health and it's all about growth. So it's definitely the vitamins. It is, I'd say it's a byproduct. Yeah, sure, it takes some headaches away. But, you know, at the end of the day, this is intended to power, all of our customers want to get out of the business of going chasing the root cause. That's the pain part. What they really want to do is they want to engage in the strategic. They want to engage in, you know, let's go after the most strategic projects that we're dealing with, we're opening up time for them. So arguably it's on the vitamin side. How do you license this? Is it a, talk about the pricing model? The SAS? Yes. SAS is right now, it's out in beta. We're still doing some work on that. But, you know, fully expect in the, you know, consistent with what we've done, at least traditionally, likely to be a, you know, an agent-based approach. But we're still working through a few details on that. So that'll be forthcoming with a Q4 official launch. Yeah, I mean, pricing's always tricky, right? And you've got to get initial feedback, see what customers like. You want to optimize certain things for both you and the customer. So it takes some time to figure that out. What's the rollout plan? Can you give us a sense of the timing? Well, yeah, I mean, right now, as I said, at least for the Steel Central SAS, that's in beta and Q3. Our expectation of GA will likely be late Q4. But we are, you know, we fully expected to be offering it and going out to, our beta is already with a number of those customers who are in pain. And we are very much looking forward to, you know, leveraging the go-to market that we have and the customers. We've got a wonderful, wonderful rich customer base that we'll be, you know, taking it to on a first line basis. Mike, what kind of feedback have you gotten on the announcements from the audience here today? Great feedback so far. I'd say, you know, first of all, just reiterating the Steel Central message and what it is that we're doing in terms of the platform that we've created. That's, you know, that's been great. But then, great feedback on the eternity acquisition. That has really played very well. We have many customers in fact who are either have both or are thinking about having both. And they see very clearly the synergy between the two. So that's been super. Feedback on SAS, excellent. Very eager to learn more. And you know, I think it goes without saying Steel Connect absolutely needs the visibility that to help power that into the marketplace. So we're really doing that. We're looking to effectively over time make that invisible. And that'll be just be embedded into Steel Connect over time. So when we're disrupt, let's say, a year from now, even two years from now, what should we expect from your business unit? What's the narrative around it? A couple of years from now. A couple of years from now, we will be, A, we'll absolutely be having a conversation around cross enterprise insights. No question what we have fed back into the product. We will absolutely be having the conversation about ease and the impact that we've had making it incredibly easy for customers to consume our entire suite as a service. And deployed on a ubiquitous basis, shall we say. I fully expect that customers aren't going to, I think they want to get out of the point monitoring business and would rather have a much more comprehensive plan. I mean, when you look at our customer base, the majority, not just our customer base, excuse me, the marketplace, two thirds of the market are still in fragmented point to a land. And I would fully expect a couple of years from now, we will help to have matured the marketplace. So we'll have a much more, shall we say, a comprehensive footprint where architecturally, inside enterprises, they've got a really a very mature approach to building out performance management excellence. So they really know how to consume the insights. And it doesn't matter whether it's on-prem or it's up in the cloud. They will be far advanced in terms of putting those insights to work and feeding that insight back. Because they ultimately care about the insights. They don't want to be spending their time deploying the tools. All right, excellent. Well, theCUBE bringing you insights to our audience. Mike, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate it. My pleasure, thanks for having me. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest, special guest coming up right after this short word.