 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of next level network experience event brought to you by Infoblox. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage and co-hosting of the Infoblox next level networking experience virtual event. It was a pop-up event only a few hours, but four great segments. Obviously, Stu Miniman helped me kick it off this morning and Stu, I want to bring you in. Stu Miniman, who's the key host of theCUBE covering networking with me. Stu, we do all the cloud native shows. We can smell what's relevant and I want to get your take on this because Infoblox putting out some pretty good content with some great guests. But next level networking, let's just unpack that. Next level networking and next level networking experience. The word experience changes the context of that definition because going the next level with networking is one thing. Having an experience is another. Just what's your take? You've seen, we're talking about this all the time. What's your take? Yeah, so John, one of the words that we've talked about so much is, how do we simplify this environment? Networking is known for its complexity. Too often it's stuck down in protocols and just the arcane arts that I don't want to think about. Networking at its best is just going to work and I don't want to think about it. So if I'm adopting SaaS models, if I'm going cloud native, it should tie into everything else we're doing. What I was hearing the themes John in the interviews you discussed, they're talking about SaaS, they're talking about cloud native. Things like visibility, moving real time, really changes so much of these environments. So IP addresses used to be a lot more static. We know now things just change constantly and that's one of the big challenges. How do I monitor that environment? How do I keep them secure? And that's where modern environments need to go to the next level to be able to keep up with all of those changes. The word experience means something to me in a sense I think contemporary, right? I think something new, relevant and cool. And still we're old enough to remember the 80s and 90s and I was coming out of college late 80s and I remember I never had a punch, never did any programming with a punch card. I was kind of the young gun coming into the workforce with a technical degree. And I remember looking at the mainframe guys going, who are those old relics? And those guys hung onto their job as long as they could and the smart ones moved and said, hey, I'm gonna jump on this mini computer bandwagon of this inter-networking and local area networking that the PC toys are attaching to. That's interesting. And so you had a migration of systems talent move to the new way. Some didn't. And I look at that and I say, hmm, that's similar to what's going on networking. If you're the old networking guy or gal and you're hugging onto the router or you're hugging onto that old way, you could be extinct because there is a new experience coming. It's programmable. It's automation. It's different. It's not the big old way, similar to the mainframe. So a lot of psychology in this networking industry right now is, and the young people come in, it's like, why do we do it that way? This to me is about next level networking experience. Your reaction to that. Yeah, well, John, it's been interesting here in 2020. You talk about the acceleration of things moving, people that were dipping their toe in cloud and have to move in a matter of weeks, if not hours and days to get things up and running. So leveraging software, open source is a big component of what a lot of companies are doing. And of course, cloud in that cloud experience means in the public cloud and edge environments, you talked a bit about IoT in some of these cases, the order of magnitude of networking challenges that are out there are such that I have to have automation. It needs to be simpler because I could not do things the manual old way. John, I lived through so many generations. You work with the people. In the networking, it's manually done. It was done via CLI because I knew how to do it. Maybe I did some scripting. But in today's day and era, things change too fast. And the amount of work that needs to be done is so much. So that's why automation needs to be front and center. And you see info blocks, some of their new solutions, especially leveraging the snap route, take advantage of the modern way that people need to do things. Well, we actually did a deep dive on snap route and it was super impressive. Again, I thought it was way too early, but they were doing some stuff with Kubernetes thinking, it's thinking like Linux kernel low level thinking. And I think, Stu, this is what I want to get your thoughts on because in the industry, we cover Cisco aggressively. We saw them buy open DNS, manage services versus low level. Got automation, you got Amazon out there. I mean, hell, I can just have a screen that goes in and manages my DNS in the cloud. I can start thinking differently about how I wire my services together. If I think about Amazon, for instance, or hybrid and multi-cloud, this is a whole new level of thinking. And these are going to be new solutions. And this is the theme that came up and it's come up across every single major vendor, whether we're talking the Google, because they have a pretty damn good network. You got Cisco, you got all these people out there. They got to reinvent themselves and new expectations require new solutions. This has been something that's clearly coming out of the COVID that, you know what, I like working from home. I'm more productive. We don't need the real estate costs. Why do we even need a VPN? Why are we over provision? What are we paying for? Let's just build and secure. So again, all these projects are going to come out of the woodwork, I think that are going to create a new vendor, a new brand or new opportunity because these new solutions need to come because the demand has been highlighted by COVID and other cloud scale. What's your thoughts on that? Because this may not be your grandfather's networking company that comes out of the woodwork. It might be a cloud app. Well, yeah. Well, John, first of all, I think you nailed it. You look at a company like Infoblox founded back in the dot com era, back in 1999 and dominant in their space. So they're not here saying, oh, we're the tried and trusted company that you work with and you shouldn't try that new fangled Kubernetes piece or anything like that. It's not ready for prime time. As you said, they're looking to skate to where the puck is going. They are aggressively going after these environments to make sure that they maintain their leadership in this environment. And you're absolutely right. For the longest time, generally in networking you were talking about, it was Cisco and everybody else out there, but now the cloud is such a big piece of what's going on. We've seen chip acquisitions by the big hyperscalers. We've seen how they build their environments. And in many ways there's been consolidation but there's also been disaggregation. So a fundamental layer, but like what Infoblox has with their DDI stack is something that customers need. I need to make sure my identity and my IP is something that I can manage wherever I am in all of these environments. It's funny still, we joke about SD-WAN and now that's the internet. And you're thinking about the internet, one constant in all of it is, you got to move packets from point A to point B and store a packet in a storage device. And ultimately you need to have to resolve the addresses and DNS as old as it is, is fundamentally the standard. And a lot of people take it for granted. So to me, DNS has survived. It's a low level building block, but as things evolve, new abstraction layers come up. And I think we'll see more. I mean, I think there'll be a new naming system on how to deal with different scale across multicloud. And I think Amazon is talking about it. We hear Aviatrix talking about it. We hear things going on within Google talking about it. So I think you're going to start to see new levels of innovation because that's where the packets are moving. That's where the bad guys are. And you can't cover your footprints if you're trying to get in there. So huge changes coming. We'll be on it and theCUBE will be monitoring it. As always, we can see the waves coming. Stu, what do you see? What's your future ball tell you as we come out of COVID? Networking world, cloud collision, multicloud, apps, microservices, all this massive wave. What's your take? What's going to happen? Well, well, John, you know, we've talked so much. It's those builders out there. How do I make sure that I can build my application, allow my users to access things wherever they are? The shift we hear for post COVID, it goes from work from home to work from anywhere. So we're not going to see everybody just go back to the pre COVID era. This will have a lasting impact. And especially from a networking standpoint, we were starting to look at how does 5G and IoT change the way we think of networking? This just accelerates what we needed to look at. Some networking technologies take a long time to go through their maturation and standards, but being able to manage my entire environment, be able to spin up my new applications. And as you said, John, you know, DNS, like identity is something that is a fundamental piece that I need to make sure is rock solid so that I can get my employees access to the information while still just keep things secure. Well, when you click on a link, that's malware, that's DNS. So that's just where the action is and people got to preserve it. Stu, we're going to be covering it. We're going to be watching all the waves. And again, this is the cube on top of the big wave of networking. And as networking evolves, I just, Stu, I just still think it's one big IoT world now and it's an internet of things, they're all connected. There's no perimeter, it's borderless. This is going to change the game. I think in the next 18 months, we're going to see really different connected experiences and whoever can deliver them will be the winner. And of course, we'll be watching it. Go to siliconangle.com. We have a special report on next-gen networking. Rob Hope and Paul Gillin are constantly reporting. Stu's been getting a ton of great interviews. And again, we're getting the stories out. During COVID-19 with our remote interviews, thanks for watching theCUBE for this special next-level networking experience event by Infobox.