 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of VMworld 2020, virtual, it's theCUBE virtual, not there in person this year because of COVID. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We also got Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, all the CUBE folks covering, of course, with VMware and VMworld 2020. We've got two great guests here to talk about the future of the workforce solutions and the impact of network security and partnerships. Tom Gale, a Senior Vice President and General Manager of Networking and the Security Business Unit at VMware, and Puneet Minochia, who's the EVP of Business Development and Corporate Development at Zscaler, two great companies, all doing extremely well as customers are dealing with COVID and the realities of this market and putting plans in place for coming out with a growth strategy. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today. Yeah, John, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, John. Tom, I want to start with you. Obviously, the partnership with Zscaler is the discussion of this topic, but you guys do have some hard news around the future of workforce solutions. What's the hard news and how does that relate to all this? Yeah, we sure do, John. So networks were built in a very different time. Networks were built when work was a place that you came. Now work is a thing that you do, oftentimes you do from your living room or your den, as I am. And so it really calls into question some of the fundamental principles of how we build and deploy networks. In the old model, we would set up something like a branch office and we would backhaul traffic using a dedicated circuit, like an MPLS circuit, backhaul it to one of the handful of locations that we called the DMZ or eMilitarism. And those are locations where you would stitch together a security ensemble made out of dedicated hardware appliances, firewalls, web proxies, IPS systems and the like. And that model served us well as an industry for many decades, three, I'd say, 30 years. All of a sudden, the whole notion of the workplace has changed and changed dramatically. We're all living through that and experiencing it firsthand. And so the original model of backhauling traffic to some point in, you know, precipitating New Jersey so that you can run it through some magic black box, that model doesn't apply anymore. And so at VMware, we have a new vision for how we can take the security, the reliability, the performance that you get when you're on the corporate network and extended into people's homes. And this is in line with what industries are calling SASE or secure access services edge. And so the news that we're announcing is we have a complete SASE solution that involves zero trust access. It involves firewall, IDS, IPS capability, advanced security services, and then importantly, a very strong partnership with Zscaler, and we can walk through how that works, but it's really driven by this new shape of the workplace. Pudde, talk about the partnership with VMware. We've been following Zscaler for a long time. What a great success story, great technology team, great business model, growth in your marketplace. Congratulations on all your success. As you guys continue to grow, the world has spun in this disruption kind of world we're in now. You guys are well poised for that. Talk about your partnership with VMware here. Great, thanks, John, and thank you, Tom, for that quick overview. Just to play out this idea, we started over a decade ago. The basic idea was the users are pretty much everywhere and the applications are moving to the cloud. And so back to Tom's comment, we had these networks where you were backhauling. Maybe I'll just give a very simple analogy. The CIO of Nestle, you know, when he first deployed Zscaler, you know, and realized a tremendous amount of cost savings, better security, but then more importantly, the employees of Nestle actually started blogging that the internet had gotten faster. And when the CIO came to our customer advisory board meeting, he made a very simple analogy. Imagine having to get out to the internet through four major international airports worldwide, all right? So you couldn't directly traverse from point A to point B, but you had to transit through these four. It would be very inefficient. It would really slow you down and more often than not, you'll be complaining. That was the old network architecture. And what we have chosen to do here from a security standpoint at Zscaler is make that security closer to the end user. Now, we pride ourselves from a security standpoint and we certainly need networking to also adapt to that. And that's where we have found our partnership with VMware to be particularly strategic. We started partnering with VMware actually prior to them acquiring Vettel Cloud, which is the software defined when networking provider, just primarily because they were a cloud-based networking player. And this idea of locally breaking out to the internet, getting out to the end destination as quickly as possible is something that they did quite seamlessly. And so we started this journey, this partnership with them a few years ago. And today at VMware, we are enhancing that, expanding the partnership, not only from a product standpoint, but then more importantly, we're leaning in from a sales, go-to-market customer support standpoint. You know, that's a great point. I've been saying this in the queue for a while, the joke was, the WAN is the new LAN. I mean, we used to have the old days, remember, oh, campus connecting networks, drive to the airport, as you mentioned, the great analogy there, by the way, it has to be better. People are working at home, you got technically a LAN, non-secured at home, you know, working at home, people are realizing this, these core services have to change. It's not just connect to the internet the old way. It's everywhere, it's networking everywhere. This is the reality of the kinds of intranet things that used to go on, where it was kind of cool and secure. You know, you got a perimeter, everything was working great. But you mentioned it, why drive to the airport to four airports for the world, that's a great analogy. Tom, this points to the future ready concept. Access anywhere, services that are needed for the security, and more importantly, the user experience. I don't want to slow down to go faster. I want to make a good experience happen. What's your thought? Yeah, well, I mean, I think we're all living through this new world where we're working from home, and sometimes the user experience is less than perfect. In fact, in this broadcast, you may see Stutterang and Breakup of the video, and that's a problem that I think needs to be solved. And it's a problem that we're able to solve with virtualization. So the idea behind virtualization by putting a layer of software on top of a physical asset, you can make it easier to manage that asset. You can make that asset more efficient. We certainly did that with servers. It was really obvious. Now we're doing it to the network itself. So what this means is we have some customers, we have one customer that is in the healthcare industry, like during the height of the crisis, all of their doctors and researchers had to work from home. And yet they needed to use video communication tools like we're doing here, and they needed a consistently good end user experience. And so we were able to ship these customers within 8,000 boxes over the course of two weeks into people's home. So think of a little tiny device about the size of a set top box, it shows up in your house, and all of a sudden your Zoom or your WebEx sessions just work. No more Stutterang, no more Breaking Up, because we're able to manage the network and virtualize, prioritize traffic and deliver consistently good end user experience. So managing the quality of service is a foundational capability, and we have unique ways to do that with virtualization that I think never existed before. The second step is I wanna make sure not only that it's a good user experience, but my security, all of those controls that used to live in black boxes that those are applied. This is where our partnership with Zscaler is so important. So Zscaler has the same philosophy that we do of like, let's put this stuff in many points of presence around the world. I think you're in like 100 or so points of presence. So we were 150. And so whatever an end user is, you just find that nearest point of presence connect and make the shortest route possible to deliver good quality end user experience and also consistent world-class security. Imagine what the future network is going to look like. It's interesting. First of all, we'll sign up for theCUBE virtual. We need that video lately, it challenges. But we shouldn't have to be video engineers to manage the packets on the round trip. The software, I mean, you know, WebEx, Zoom, they build their entire application to manage these kinds of intellectual property challenges. So that brings up the complexity of applications. So people are going to have all these new complexities and how do you integrate it all? Yeah. You know, obviously Zoom and WebEx companies are, you know, this is core to what they do. The challenge is you got to control both ends of the wire. And so with our network virtualization, we actually control the wire itself, right? We can make the wire behave in a way. We can prioritize traffic so that your Zoom goes ahead of Xbox Live or Netflix, do things like traffic shaping, which are techniques that are actually well understood but difficult to deploy in a physical world, in a virtual world, which deploy these techniques constantly adapting and changing to make sure that end user experience is smooth and easy. And that's really pretty impactful. Puneet, what's your reaction to all this? Because, you know, if I'm a customer, you know, I'm like, what's in it for me guys? The integration with ZScale or VMware, what's in it for me? Because I got now multi-clouds in the horizon. I'm dealing with multiple clouds today. I got complexity in applications themselves. And I want to create the nirvana that you laid out, which is access anywhere high speed. So I might not have the expertise in house. What do I do? What's in it for me? Take me through the value proposition. Absolutely. So, you know, Tom touched on it, you know, the idea of bringing security as close to the end user as possible. If you step back for a minute and you start to think about security, usually security and user experience are contradictory. Usually if you add more security, you lose user experience and vice versa. That's sort of what ZScale has started to go solve. And so, you know, over a decade ago, you know, when we started to build the architecture, it was built with a few core principles in mind, right? The idea of being completely distributed. Today we are in over 200 points of presence worldwide. And that gives us a pretty good footprint to be as close to the end user. We absolutely could not compromise on security. So this idea that if you have a finite appliance, maybe the appliance has a, you know, it's a limited amount of CPU or horsepower. And so I will tweak the security so that I can get more performance, not the case with how we ran about, you know, offering security. All security services run all the time, right? So without any compromise to the end user. And then finally, you know, when it comes to the actual security itself, architecture is based on something called a proxy. And usually, again, if you start to think about a proxy in security worlds, people don't think in a very favorable manner. They usually think it slows things down, it adds latency, it breaks applications. And again, I go back to, you know, the foundational elements of Zscader. When we started this journey, it was with this idea that we're going to build this proxy from the ground up. Very high performance, micro second-like latency, something that you would not see in the market anywhere. With this partnership now, right? Seamless integration between VMware and Zscader. You are now able to set up these tunnels instantly, automatically. So go back to Tom's example. 8,000 set-top boxes like devices sent out to this healthcare institution, right? You can automatically set up tunnels such that the traffic is pointing to Zscader. There's failover capabilities. So any and all of that has been instrumented in software. The end customer sets that up, you know, can automate that templates all across those 8,000 devices. You now have security at the same time with user experience. So faster way to go adapt to business needs, agility, you know, being able to keep up and lower your costs because you're substantially reducing the MPLS footprint. So there's a whole bunch of disparate, you know, advantages that an enterprise gets, but the biggest one amongst them in my mind is just being able to address the business needs. I mean, how many CIOs today with COVID are starting to realize my network is not adapting to this new normal, right? And so that's where this partnership between VMware and Zscader comes in. It's very timely. Everyone's like, they want more about their network and that's like, you know, everyone's banging on the table. Great, great point there. Thanks for taking that great explanation. I want to just follow up with you, if you don't mind. Compare that, what you just said in terms of the value of Zscader with this partnership versus the old way. Because what you just laid out was, you know, dynamic provisioning, setting up connections, having software automate things, compare what it was like before. Because remember, I mean, people who've been around the industry know the pain in the butt that it's been and human error, compare what the old way was like and now with this experience. Can you just give some- Absolutely, and I'll let Tom talk about, you know, things on the network side, you know, where you might have had a large behemoth like a Cisco box where you try to tweak some policy and the entire box would fall over something along those lines. From a securities standpoint, usually when you had a box, you know, you know, folks would call it a UTM box, a God bout box with, you know, as much security as you could push into a finite amount of appliance, a unified management function. Usually what would end up happening the old way was, you know, you would have some basic security capabilities, maybe it was, it's a traditional DMZ that Tom alluded to, you know, there's a firewall, there's an IPS, there's some web proxy capabilities and that was the journey that a customer had, you know, so they would replicate this box in all those various locations or in the case of Nestle before Zscaler, they had those DMZs in four locations around the world, right, and the moment security, security keeps changing, right? The threat landscape keeps adopting. I mean, today within the Zscaler cloud, we provide over 125,000 updates every day, right? That's how dynamic security is. And so because the threat keeps changing, usually one of the things that vendors would try and do is add more security to that existing appliance, right? So you're trying to make sure that a customer bought an appliance and they need to make sure that they recoup the full investment, let's add a little more security to it. Let's add a little more security to it so that I can keep up with the latest threats. Well, the problem with that is when you have a finite amount of horsepower within an appliance, the performance starts to drop. And so usually that was the trade-off that enterprises were making with the security now being in the cloud, right? And this idea that in a way, you sort of have infinite compute. You are now decoupling security from those branch devices that Tom just alluded to. I mean, that 8,000 boxes, right? One of the key points of a sassy framework that Tom alluded to is a very lightweight branch. And that's the piece, that's the North Star that I think both VMware and Zscaler have had, right? That low end, not low end, but a very thin branch and let the heavy lifting, whether it's on the QoS side from a networking standpoint, whether it's security as it relates to Zscaler, let that heavy lifting be done in the cloud. Yeah, and of course there's a lot of moving parts so it might be lower in lightweight, but it's more functionality. That's what the cloud does, I get that point. And by the way, anyone in the DMZ knows that as you add more stuff in there, get more cooks in the kitchen, nothing good comes from that. Tom, I want to get your thoughts for your audience out there and your customers and your prospects. What does the Zscaler partnership mean for them? Well, like I said, it's an opportunity to think differently about how we build and deploy enterprise networks. This is a dramatic change. Most of us have been familiar with the old model where you had, I was referring to, those big heavy boxes, the VPN concentrators. And at the same time, most of us have been employees of those companies and we've had the sort of less than stellar experience of turning the VPN on and all of a sudden the internet goes slow. And that's not what we want to achieve. And so having the ability to use a distributed architecture is being forced upon us. Everyone is distributed where they like it or not. And so having a distributed architecture where I can put security and quality of service network controls closer to the end user is really, really critical. And I think just as Puneet was saying, they started with this idea of pushing security close to the end user, we started with VeloCloud with the idea of virtualizing the network in lots of physical places. So retail locations. So when you've got thousands of stores around the world, you need to deliver video and audio services into those stores with a very high quality. So we were designed to have a very light entry point and a light entry point can just be pure software. It can be a small box. The advantage of a small box is it's so turnkey. It's designed that totally unskilled operator can use this, retail people, right? A store manager gets a little box in the mail, you plug it in, you know, snap to ethernet cables into it and it just works. And again, Puneet referred to this. This is part of our value proposition is you plug this thing in as an end user, all you know is that you're not just got faster. You don't have to configure proxy settings. What's my IP range? Like that stuff is, yeah, exactly. And this is so many of us are feeling it now when you have, you know, suboptimal network connections. So being able to deliver a quality end user experience. Yeah. You know, COVID has accelerated a lot of opportunities, also exposes the scabs and, you know, the things that can lay in around and some suboptimal projects. I mean, and everyone's going to be doubling down on things that are working and probably, you know, putting on the back burner or killing projects that don't make sense. So this is a great opportunity. And I think forces things right in you guys wheelhouse. And so I appreciate taking the time. For the last minute that we have left, Tom and Puneet, if you don't mind, I'd love to get your thoughts real quick on what's next after cloud, obviously cloud brings up all these benefits you're talking about. What do you guys see as what's next after cloud? Tom, we'll start with you. I think that the, you know, the range of services that we'll deliver in this format is not at all limited to traditional DMZ services. So thank API gateways. Think about core infrastructure offerings like DNS, pretty much everything that we used in the network can actually now be delivered as a service in software more efficiently than standing up boxes and rack in stacking yourselves. And so our view is that COVID has killed the appliance once and for all. And that's broadly, that's not just at the edge. That's in the core of the data center, things like load balancers, they're all moving to software. We scale out infrastructure software running on X86. And so I think that change of that magnitude will still take a while to roll out, but it's happening. COVID killed the appliance. That's the headline right there. Love that. Puneet, after cloud, what's next? Well, you know, I'd say this job very similar to what Tom just mentioned. I think we are in the early innings. You know, when we would talk to our customers about transforming the network and adopting to this new normal, you know, we had some early adopters, but there was still a fair number of people that were skeptical and that loved their appliances. COVID has changed a lot of that. And so we have seen a general acceleration of the business. The market is moving in our direction. And we feel that with this partnership, you have two market leaders coming together, right? VMware on the networking side, on the cloud networking side, on the data center, Zscaler as it relates to cloud security, use of a security. This idea that we are a zero trust exchange that allows users to connect to applications, to the internet in a safe manner and at scale. That's the beauty of, you know, this partnership that we have brought together and we are hopeful that customers will embrace it with confidence. And I'm mindful that we're in the early innings. Great points, gentlemen. Awesome stuff, great insights. And I think the cloud native integration shows that people in the ecosystem is evolving to be cloud native, to have these kinds of integrations, these value points, physical virtualization, Tom, great point. I mean, we're not in face to face, but we're here virtually. theCUBE is going to be virtual. It's software defined operations. The world has changed. I think everyone is now seeing it. Thanks for this insight and congratulations, Tom, on the news. Putting a thank, congratulations on the partnership with VMware. Sounds like it's great for customers. Looking forward to digging in. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Okay, that's the CUBE coverage here. We're in Palo Alto, California. We're in the Bay Area, but this is VMworld virtual. We're not in person, but we're virtual. I'm John Furrier, host for coverage of VMworld 2020. Thanks for watching.