 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AIOps Virtual Forum brought to you by Broadcom. Welcome back to the Broadcom AIOps Virtual Forum. Lisa Martin here talking with Usman Nasir, Global Product Management at Verizon. Usman, welcome back. Hi, Lisa. Hello, what a pleasure to be back. Good to see you. So, 2020, the year that needs no explanation of the year of massive challenges. I wanted to get your take on the challenges that organizations are facing this year as the demand to deliver digital products and services has never been higher. Yeah, so Lisa, I think this is something it's so close to all the far far, right? It's something that's impacted the whole world equally. And I think regardless of which industry you're in, you have been impacted by this in one form or the other. And the ICT industry, the information and communication technology industry, you know, Verizon being really massive player in that whole arena. It has just been sort of struck with this massive transformation that we have talked about for a long time. We have talked about these remote surgery capabilities whereby you've got patients in Kenya who are being treated by experts sitting in London or New York. And also this whole consciousness about, you know, our carbon footprint and being environmentally conscious, this pandemic has taught us all of that and brought this to the forefront of organizational priorities, right? The demand, I think that's a very natural consequence of everybody sitting at home. And the only thing that can keep things still going is this data communication, right? But I wouldn't just say that that was kind of at the heart of all of this. Just imagine if we are to realize any of these targets that the world leadership is setting for themselves. Hey, we have to be carbon neutral by X here, where the country, as a geography, et cetera, et cetera. You know, all of these things require you to have this remote working capability, this remote interaction, not just between humans, but machine-to-machine interaction. And there's a unique value chain which is now getting created, that you've got people who are communicating with other people or who are communicating with other machines. But the communication is much more, I wouldn't even use the term real-time because we've used real-time for voice and video, et cetera. We're talking low latency, micro-second-deceit-making that can either cut somebody's, you know, our trees or that could actually go and remove the tumor, that kind of stuff. So that has become a reality. Everybody's asking for it. Remote learning being an extremely massive requirement where, you know, we've had to enable these virtual classrooms, ensuring the type of connectivity, ensuring the type of privacy, which is just so, so critical. You can't just have everybody, you know, go on the internet and access a data source. You have to be concerned about the integrity and security of that data the foremost. So I think all of these things, yes, we have not been caught off guard. We're pretty forward-looking in our plans and our evolution. But yes, it has this fast track, a journey that we would probably, the leap we would have taken in three years, it has brought that down to two quarters where we've had to execute it. Right, massive acceleration. All right, so you articulated the challenges really well and a lot of the realities that many of our viewers are facing. Let's talk now about motivations. AIOps as a tool as a catalyst for helping organizations overcome those challenges. So yeah, now all that I said, you can imagine, you know, it requires microsecondacy and making. Which human being on this planet can do microsecondacy and making on complex network infrastructure, which is impacting end-user applications which have multitudes of effects, you know, in real life. I used the example of a remote surgeon. Just imagine if, you know, even because if you just use your signal or the quality or that communication for that microsecond, it could be the difference between killing somebody and saving somebody's life. It is that critical. We talk about autonomous vehicles. We talk about this transition to electric vehicles, smart motorways, et cetera, et cetera, in federal environment. How is all of that going to work? You have so many different components coming in. You don't just have a network and security anymore. You have software-defined networking that's becoming a part of this. You have mobile edge computing that is rented for the technologies 5G enabled. We're talking augmented reality. We're talking virtual reality. All of these things require that resources and while being carbon conscious, we don't just wanna build a billion data centers on this planet, right? We have to make sure that resources are given on demand. And the best way resources can be given on demand and could be most efficient is that the seed-making is being made at million microseconds and those resources are accordingly being distributed, right? If you're then flying on people, sipping their coffees, having teas, talking to somebody else, you know, just being away on holiday, I don't think we're gonna be able to handle that well that we have already stepped into. Ryzen 5G has already started businesses on the transformational journey where they're talking about end user experience, personalization, you're gonna have events where people are gonna go and it's going to be three-dimensional experiences that are purely customized for you. How does that all happen without this intelligence sitting there? And a network with all of these multiple layers, the sub-spectrum, it doesn't just need to be intuitive, hey, this is my private IP traffic, this is public traffic, you know, it has to now be into, or this is an application that has to prioritize over another, has to be intuitive to the criticality and the context of those transactions. Again, that surgeon's surgery is much more important than Usman sitting and playing a video game. I'm glad that you think that, that's excellent. Let's go into some specific use cases. What are, in some of the examples that you gave, let's kind of dig deeper into some of the, what you think are the lowest hanging fruit for organizations kind of pan industry to go after here? Excellent, right? And I think this, this like different ways to look at the lowest hanging fruit, like for somebody like Ryzen, who is the managed services provider, you know, very comprehensive managers, but we obviously have food timing much lower than potentially for some of our customers who want to go on that journey, right? So for them to just go and try and harness the power of their health, the fruits might be a bit higher hanging. But for somebody like us, the immediate ones would be to reduce the number of alarms that are being generated by these overlay services. You've got your basic network, then you've got your whole software-defined networking on top of that. You have your hybrid clouds, you have your edge computing coming on top of that, so all of this means if there's an outage on one device on the network, I'm going to make this very real for everybody, right? It's like outage on one device on the network does not stop all of those multiple applications or monitoring tools from raising havoc and raising thousands of alarms in their own capacity. If people are attending to those thousands of alarms, it's like you're having a police force and there's a burglary in one bank and the alarm goes off in 50 banks, how are you going to make the best use of your police force? You're going to go investigate 50 banks and you're going to investigate one. Where's the problem in? So it's as real as that, and I think that's the first win where people can save so much cost, which is currently being wasted and resources running around, trying to figure stuff out. Immediately, I tied this with network and security. Network and security is something which has eluded even the most amazing of brains in our engineering world. We typically have network experts, separate people, security experts, separate people to look for different things, but there are security events that can impact the performance of a network and then use your applications, et cetera, which could be falsely attributed to the network. And then if you've got multiple parties which have to play as stakeholders, you can imagine the blame game that goes on, pointing fingers, taking names, not taking responsibility. That is how it's always happened. This is the only way to bring it all together to take, okay, this is what takes priority. If there's an event that has happened, what is its correlation to the other down-chain systems, devices, components, and user applications, and then subsequently, you know, like isolating it to the right cause, where you can most effectively resolve that problem. Certainly, I would say on-demand virtualized resource. Virtualized resource is the hardened soul, the spirit of status that you can have them on demand. So you can automate the allocation of these resources based on, you know, customers' consumption, their peaks, their trends, all of that comes in. You see, hey, typically on a Wednesday, their traffic goes up significantly. So this particular application, you know, going to this particular data center, you could have this automated CIS AIOps, which is just providing those resources, you know, on-demand services to have a much better commercial engagement with customers and it's a much better service assurance model. And then one more thing on top of that, which is very critical, is this, as I was saying, giving that intelligence to the networks to start having context of the criticality of a transaction, that doesn't exist today. You can't have that because for that, you need to have this, you know, multi-layered data. You need to have multiple systems, which are monitoring and controlling different aspects of your overall user application value chain to be communicating with each other and, you know, that's the only way to sort of achieve that goal and that only happens with AIOps. It's not possible with that. You can't prioritize transaction. So Uusman, you clearly articulated some obvious low-hanging for use cases that organizations can go after. Let's talk now about some of the considerations. You've talked about the importance of the network in AIOps. The approach, I assume, needs to be modular. Support needs to be heterogeneous. Talk to us about some of those key considerations that you would recommend. Absolutely. So again, basically, starting with the network because it says if the network sitting at the middle of all of this is not working, then things can't communicate with each other, right? And the cloud doesn't work, none of this works. And that's because it's the heart of all of this. But that's the security. When you talk about machine-to-machine communication or IoT, which is the biggest transformation in the span, every company is going for IoT now to drive those cost efficiencies and have some customer experience. The integrity of data becomes paramount, right? The security integrity of that. How do you maintain integrity of your data beyond just the secure network components that is traversed, right? That's where you get into the whole arena of blockchain technology, where you have these digital signatures or barcodes, that machine, then an intelligent system is automatically able to validate and verify the integrity of the data and the commands that are being executed by those end user terminals, or end user terminals, so it's IoT machines, right? That is paramount. And if anybody is not keeping that into their equation, that in its own self is an AIOF system that is there for maintaining the integrity of your commands and your code that sits on those machines, right? Second, you have your network. You need to have an AIOF platform which is able to rationalize all of that network information, et cetera, and couple that with that data integrity piece because for the management, ultimately, they need to have a coherent view of the analytics, et cetera. So they need to know where the problems are again, right? So let's say there's a problem with the integrity of the commands that are being executed by a machine. That's a much bigger problem than not being able to communicate with that machine in the first place because you'd rather not talk to the machine or haven't do anything if it's going to start doing wrong things. So I think that's where it's just very intuitive. It's natural. You have to have it. Subsequently, if you have some kind of a, and let me use that use case of autonomous vehicles again, I think we're going to see in the next five years because it's smart photo waves, et cetera, they're all separate autonomous vehicles. It's much more efficient. It's much more space, et cetera, et cetera. So within that equation, you're going to have systems which will be specialist in looking at aspects and transactions related to those systems. For example, an autonomous moving vehicles brakes are much more important than the wipers, right? So this kind of intelligence, there will be multiple systems to have to sit and nobody has to, one person has to go and own these systems. I think these systems should be open source now that you're able to integrate them, right? If something's sitting in the cloud, you're able to integrate with it obviously the regard of the security and integrity of your data that has to cover us from one system to the other, extremely important. So I'm going to borrow that integrity theme for a second as we go into our last question. And then let's kind of take a macro look at the overall business impact that AIOps can help customers make. I'm thinking of, you know, the integrity of teams, aligning business and IT, which we probably can't talk about enough. We're helping organizations really effectively measure KPIs that deliver that digital experience that all of us demanding consumers expect. What's the overall impact? What would you say in Summeration? So I think the overall impact is a lot of cost that customers and businesses, excuse me, some customers use the term enterprises. The difference was inevitable. It is something that for the first time will come to light. And it's something that is going to, you know, start driving cost efficiencies and consciousness and awareness within their own business, which is obviously going to have, you know, a domino kind of an effect. So one example being that, you know, you have problem isolation. I talked about network security, there's multi-layered architecture, which enables this new world of 5G. At the heart of all of this, it is to identify the problem to the source, right? Not be bogged down by 15 different things that are going wrong. What is causing those 15 things to go wrong, right? That speed to isolation in its own self can make millions and millions of dollars to organization, every organization. Next one is obviously overall impact is customer experience. The 5G world, you're gonna have your customers expecting experiences from you, even if you're not expecting to deliver them in 2021, 2022, you will have customers asking for those experiences or walking away if you do not provide those experiences. So it's almost like a business can do nothing every year. They don't have to reinvest if they just want to die on the vine. Businesses want to remain relevant. Businesses want to adopt the latest and greatest in technology, which enables them to, you know, have the superiority and continue it. So from that perspective, that continuity will read that there are intelligent systems that are rationalizing information and making decisions. Supervised by people, of course, who were previously making some of those decisions. That was a great summary because you're right, you know, with how demanding consumers are, we don't get what we want. Quickly, we turn, right? We go somewhere else and we could find somebody that can meet those expectations. So Uusman, thanks for doing a great job of clarifying the impact and the value that AIOps can bring to organizations. That sounds really now as we're in this even higher demand for digital products and services, which is not going away. It's probably going to only increase its table stakes for any organization. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving us your thoughts. Pleasure, thank you. We'll be right back with our next segment.