 We are back and we're continuing the coverage on HPE Aruba's news today around the DSX-CX10K with Pensando. Now we want to get the perspective of a system integrator because they're in the front lines. They understand how to put the pieces together. We're happy to bring John Gallatea of Dasher Technologies, Dasher's an end-to-end IT solutions provider. They got a focus, a lot of expertise on infrastructure. John, welcome. Thank you for having me, good to be here. That's our pleasure. So I wonder if you could give us a little bit more color on Dasher, where you focus, what your core competencies are, what industries you focus on, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. So at Dasher we assess, architect, implement and manage IT solutions that digitally transform businesses. Our practice areas include cyber security, networking, cloud, data center, and we also offer professional services around those practice areas. We partner with all the major tech companies in the space. Some of the examples are HPE, Cisco, Aruba, Palo Alto, AWS, and many others that fill out that practice area. Well, that's great. So you have a very wide observation space. That's why we like talking to SIs. You have an independent mindset and you can kind of tell it like it is. But so what are you seeing with customers? IT execs, we hear a lot about digital transformation. You mentioned security, you're obviously doing cloud. That's, it's almost like, John, these pieces are all coming together to power digital and digital transformation. And we were forced into it over the past 18 months. And now people are stepping back saying, hey, okay, we have all these resources. How do we put them together and really transform our business? What do you see? Yeah, seeing similar things. So, you know, our customers are telling us that they're looking for more speed, more agility, you know, limited complexity because they're trying to do more every single day with less staffing and a sophistication of integrating functionality that breaks down IT silos. They're also evaluating, you know, security span versus effectiveness and they're moving towards zero trust. Yeah, so I want to, I'm going to come back and ask you about that. So I've written a lot about this is that you look at how much we spend versus, as you say, the effectiveness and there's sort of an imbalance there. It's like we can't spend enough. Look at IT budgets, they're not infinite. And even though security is top priority for CIOs, they've got other things that they have to fund. And then zero trust, you know, before the pandemic, John, that was a buzzword. And now it's become a mandate. Any thoughts on that? In terms of zero trust, absolutely. It is a mandate. We've seen more and more of our customers, you know, moving toward in this direction and defending themselves against cyber threats. And yeah, absolutely. It accelerated during the pandemic and is continuing to accelerate today. Right, and I think there's some things that we've reported are now going to be permanent with regard to obviously hybrid and the like cloud security and so forth. So, okay, let's get into some of the news here. What's the big trend, John? Can you explain the relevance of the HPE Aruba and Pensando news? Yeah, I mean, when I first heard of it, you know, I looked at it as a whole new category because it's a category that's going to deliver cloud scale distributed services closer to where applications are. It's going to simplify. One of the things we mentioned earlier was limiting complexity. So it simplifies the network by putting security provisions and operations in a unified management platform. And it helps improve your security posture around, you know, moving towards zero trust and limits the appliance and vendor sprawl that you might ordinarily have in an existing network today. Okay, so that's kind of the business cases. You're consolidating a lot of piece parts and that's from a system integrator standpoint. You know, it's funny, people often say, well, isn't that bad for the SI? I'm like, no, they don't want to be in the business of plumbing. They want to be in the business of more strategy. If they just end up bolting stuff together, they're going to go out of business. They need to extend their value. So as a strategic partner, you got an early preview of this launch, the DSS-CX-10,000. What was your initial impression, reaction? You called it a new category. What do you mean by that? Well, it's a new category of a data center switch in the digital infrastructure because it includes or incorporates security. And more specifically, it includes security around East West traffic, which doesn't eliminate your perimeter firewall, but it actually incorporates more functionality, which leads to better simplicity and easier use of management of a platform. So for us, I'm really excited to go position and talk to our clients about this. Yeah, so we're seeing the flattening of that network. That's even, it's obviously been accelerated by the pandemic. Everybody talks about that, but if you think about the traditional headquarter, hierarchical network, and now all of a sudden everybody's working remotely using more cloud, using more distributed infrastructure, that flattens the network. That creates security challenges because you can't just build a perimeter and say, okay, we're safe. You now have to go to where the adversary is and that's everywhere. So what's your sense as to how customers are going to react to this new category of switch? I think really, my sense is that I've got a really positive outlook on this product. I mean, hardware firewalls are costly and deploying software agents can be very disruptive even when you're integrating it into the switch layer. So I think the CX-10,000 provides a great alternative to an embedded accelerated services, embedded in accelerated service into the DC fabric. It's great for brownfield migration, rack pod and any standard space leaf, L2, L3. And it doesn't necessarily replace, as I mentioned earlier, the perimeter security, but it can cap and grow with DSS and east-west firewall traffic. Yeah, and I think we've seen when we talked to CISO. So like you said, it doesn't replace the traditional perimeter security, but you're going to see a shift in spending priorities, obviously, to accommodate. Because as I said earlier, there's not infinite budget. But John, give us the big takeaway and bring us home. What do you want to leave our audience with? Yeah, I think the number one takeaway is it's a massive opportunity to reduce complexity, enhance security and lower costs in the data center by eliminating dedicated devices and embedding services through software capability in the network, closer to where workloads are moving. So that's the big takeaway for me and for our clients. Other things are, the data center perimeter is no longer confined to an open, a non-prem's location, but it extends out, right? We're seeing customers extend out to the cloud and across disparate locations, co-locations. So the traditional architecture isn't going to be well suited for this. And I think the CX 10,000 and its feature set are going to be really great for addressing the changing market. Yeah, that's all. I mean, again, we're seeing the democratization of everything and networking is no exception, the notion of simplification. John, really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Okay, keep it right there. We're unpacking the changing trends in networking, generally and specifically switch networking with HPE Aruba and Pensando on theCUBE. Keep it right there.