 Live from San Francisco, California, it's the Cube at VMworld 2014 brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to VMworld 2014 everybody. We are live here in Moscone, we're in Moscone South, right inside the lobby, take a right and come see us. Love to see you, say hello. So Stu and I are here and we're going to talk to Shehzad Merchant who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Gigamon. We've been talking about software to find everything, software to find networking, obviously hit the world by storm. Shehzad, welcome to the Cube, it's good to have you. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here, thanks for having me here. So talk about Gigamon, set up the company, a lot of people may not be familiar with it and we can get into sort of the whole SDN thing. Absolutely, so Gigamon is in the business of providing visibility into business critical IT infrastructure and we do this through our visibility platform where we enable active real-time and pervasive visibility into physical, virtual and cloud environments and along with our tool partners that actually use our visibility fabric as a platform for delivering security, application performance, network performance or customer experience management solutions as well. So this is a big problem because visibility when you virtualize everything is hard, right in the physical world, you know what connects to what, who connects to whom and it's much easier to find things when you have a performance problem, you can dig into it. Absolutely. It's like a science project in the virtualized world, isn't it? So how did you guys get started? This has been a problem for a while and how do you approach that solving that problem? That's a great question. At the end of the day, this is, you know, for us, this is driven by our customer needs. Our customers have been coming to us and as they've embarked on their own journey to virtualization, typically they would take their tier two, tier three applications first, virtualize those first as they start moving towards tier one applications. The need to monitor that becomes very important and so they would approach us and they would ask us for solutions that give them equivalent visibility in the virtualized world as they had in the physical world. So that was the beginning of the journey to build solutions for the virtualized environment so that customers could actually manage the physical and virtualized workloads equivalently. And so that was the genesis of our solution and the genesis of our relationship with VMware as well. Okay. So early on in the journey to the cloud, the demand for your services wouldn't necessarily be as high, but then, it's like Marit said many, many years ago, we're going to virtualize any application anywhere. Absolutely. There were a lot of skeptics. That's what's happened. Absolutely. So you're working with SAP, Oracle apps, other mission critical supply chain stuff. Is that right? Yeah. A lot of large customers use a lot of these solutions that you've talked about and they want to maintain visibility into these environments. Now what's also interesting, let me point this out, is that there's another trend around the whole virtualization world which is NFV, network functions virtualization as well, where people are taking network appliances and virtualizing that. Now if you think about what that means is you are taking mission critical infrastructure which is your network and you're virtualizing that. When you start doing that, the need for visibility is extremely critical, right? Because people want to make sure that the mission critical infrastructure which is a network is operating at peak efficiency at all times. So that's another big driver towards the need for visibility into the virtualized world. So it started with apps, right? Absolutely. Network virtualization thing has just exploded onto the scene. It's a great tailwind for you guys. Shazad, so you keep using the term visibility into what's going on. Can you just parse for us, kind of unpack for us? Orchestration, management, visibility, of course VMware in many ways is an orchestration tool. Absolutely. So how do you fit into that and can you just unpack that for our users? Great question. Think about visibility, right? And we talk about traffic-based visibility. If you step back and look at the world of how do you gain visibility into your IT infrastructure, there are many ways to go do that. Your traditional way would be through a management solution, for example, using REST APIs or SNMP-based interfaces. Then there are solutions that look at actual network traffic. Then there are solutions that look at, for example, log messages. There are multiple ways to gain visibility. However, as we look at what people are doing more and more so is they are leveraging the network infrastructure, looking at actual traffic to gain real-time visibility into the infrastructure. And that's becoming a huge area of growth in the industry itself. In fact, if you look at the world of the tools, today you have tools focused on network performance management, application performance management, security tools, data leak prevention tools. All of them are leveraging the network as a platform for visibility. And that's really the space we're focusing on. That's one of my critiques, actually, is if you look at SDN, it's not just adding a tool, but there's a whole toolbox that gets thrown on top of it. You're going to need this even more, at least in the early phases of SDN. Absolutely. Can you comment on that? What would your take on the state of SDN today? It's a great question. A couple of pieces on that question. The first is, if you really look at the transition of computing itself from the days of the mainframe to where we are today at the age of the cloud computing era, the role of the network has increased significantly from those days to where it is now. And each stage in the transition has increased the role of the network and the reliance on the network itself. And today, the network is the only platform that really straddles the physical, virtual, and the cloud worlds. And so it's no wonder that people are now looking to the network more and more so for visibility. Now, when you think about taking the network itself and transforming the network through SDN or through network virtualization, that transition has to happen in a very measured and in a very thoughtful way. Because unless you do that in a measured and thoughtful way, you will lose the ability to manage, to secure, and monitor that infrastructure. So I think that's where people are today, is that the interest in SDN, the interest in network virtualization is extremely high. The advantages are immense, but the transition has to be carried out in a phased manner and in a very thoughtful manner so that you can manage, you can troubleshoot, and monitor that transition as well as you could do it before in the traditional approach as well. Yeah, so when you talked about SDN, you talked about interest out there. I talked to a service provider on theCUBE earlier this week and he said, you know, interest in SDN, but until Cisco and VMware sort out this fight, I'm not touching it. You know, what are you hearing out in the trenches? You know, where are customers in that kind of adoption for SDN? It's a great point you bring up. I think if you look at the benefits of SDN, the benefits are there. If you look at the benefits of network virtualization, they're right there and people want to adopt these solutions, what they are waiting for is for some of this uncertainty to be solved and for the ability to manage that transition. Certainly VMware and Cisco are both heavily involved in the game. They have different solutions in the game. In my view, I don't think it's one or the other. I think both solutions are valid. Both have a role to play and ultimately, the industry will coalesce around the fact that both solutions can coexist. Yeah, so you bring up an interesting point. If we look at it, it's no longer just a VMware world. We're living in a multi-hypervisor world, it's a multi-cloud world. Absolutely. You know, how does that environment impact, the way Gigamon goes to market? That's a great question. I think the multi-hypervisor, the multi-cloud, and really the physical and virtual worlds are going to coexist for a long time and that is going to become the norm. And so any solution we think about has to play in that environment, physical virtual cloud, SDN network virtualization, and multi-hypervisor. And so our solutions are really built upon this notion of a platform that can span all of these environments, physical virtual cloud, SDN, across multiple hypervisors as well. You know, we were talking earlier about when you move to the software defined environment, does it destroy the silo? What does it do to the changing jobs? From the networking standpoint, how do you see the role of the network administrator changing and how do you plug into kind of general orchestration, visibility, beyond just the network? Yeah, I mean, we are seeing the lines blurring, right? I mean, networking has moved inside the server today. In fact, if you look at everything that VMware is doing around NSX, that has really taken networking well within the domains of the server. Now, what we are seeing externally from our customer perspective as well is that the IT silos are beginning to dissolve. It's slow, it's going to take time, but people are now beginning to coalesce different IT silos into one organization. So we see the trends out there. Will it happen overnight? Certainly not, but the trend is certainly in that direction. All right, so you're the chief strategy officer for the company. What kind of things are exciting you and, you know, what can you give us as kind of, you know, if today it's the discussions all around SDN, a little bit NFV in certain parts of the market, what are some of the things that we should look for? Yeah, you know, we tend to think about this from the perspective of our customers and how are our customers embarking on their journey. And, you know, several of our customers are today looking at visibility as a way to enable monitoring, as a way to be able to consolidate the monitoring infrastructure. But if you think about the customer journey, once they've done that, right, the next phase in that journey is really being able to take this as a platform and then provide this as a platform for delivering service assurance, for delivering security, for delivering compliance. Now, if you look beyond this, what we have our customers thinking about is how visibility can actually enable an agile business environment where the business can actually respond in real time. It can actually anticipate and respond as opposed to react. And that, I think, is a very interesting part and a very interesting phase in terms of where the industry will go. Yeah, so how do analytics fit into the whole discussion of visibility? You know, we've seen that the network has a huge amount of information in there and workloads are spanning locations even more. So I guess one is, do you tie into analytics from the network and how do things like big data analytics, the internet of things change the way that you look at the world? Yeah, that's a great question. So a couple of key pieces in that question behind it, right? One is what we are seeing today is we're seeing the world of virtualization as being extremely dynamic. In fact, one of the key things that NSX enables is this notion of location independence, right? Because you can now actually move workloads across layer three boundaries as an example. Now, when you think about analytics and if you think about visibility, this is actually a problem because now as your workloads move, how do you gain visibility into what's happening in the new destination, right? Unless your tools are actually getting data from that destination. And so this notion of being able to have pervasive visibility no matter where your workload is is going to be pretty important. Once you can enable that pervasive visibility that location independent visibility, then on top of that, you can actually start building the analytics to take advantage of all the data you have coming out. And there we're seeing people deploy big data type solutions, Hadoop type solutions to look at all the data coming in from all these different locations to be able to reduce that data into what's not relevant and what's relevant and then provide meaningful information. Now, the key part to all of that is the data gathering facility, right? And that's really coming from the Gigamon fabric. We are the ones who feed the data into those engines so that the engines can then take the analytics to the next level. She's out. I wonder if you could comment. So it seems intuitive that the move toward network virtualization would increase the demand for visibility solutions. What differentiates your solutions from others in the marketplace? Absolutely. So Gigamon really pioneered the space. We were the ones who actually created the technology for the industry. And what we have done as part of this process is we've not taken a product-oriented approach to the solutions, right? We've taken an architectural approach to the solution where we've built out a platform for delivery of services. Now, because we've done that, our platform can actually span the physical, virtual, and cloud worlds. It can work in a multi-hypervisor environment as well. And it is that platform and solution-oriented approach which really differentiates us from where the competition is coming in. So, in thinking about this move toward network virtualization, what's the go-to-market look like? How are you guys engaging with customers? How are you aligning your strategy with customer strategies? It's early days, right? For customers, you know, a lot of enthusiasm. You hear VMware and the conference calls talk about the momentum and the growth. But it's from a very, very small base. So, I wonder if you could talk about that. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So, when we think about how do we go to market with some of these solutions, there are multiple facets to that, right? The first is clearly having the partners align. For example, we've just signed a fantastic relationship with VMware where we are working with VMware on extending visibility into the software-defined data center. As part of that, we come together with a set of solutions. Those solutions will then ultimately be taken to the channel and then through the channel to the customer. In parallel, the intention is to be able to work with the customer directly in being able to go deploy those to get the proof of concepts going so that the solutions are well understood. And out of that comes across a set of use cases that can be replicated very easily for future deployments as well. So, you've got a hybrid sales model, both direct and indirect, or are you predominant? Yeah, so we actually go to market both through our direct sales force, but we also have the channels that we work with. We also work with system integrators who then take our solutions, package it, and sell it to customers as well. And what's the mix, roughly? Sort of indirect and direct? So, today it's largely direct fulfillment through the channel, but that is beginning to rapidly change where the channel is actually bringing deals to us as well. Okay, so that'll bring better operating leverage and wide coverage. And it makes sense as well, right? Especially when you start thinking about a solution-oriented approach where you're taking a VMware solution, you're taking a Gigamon solution, and some of our tool partners, and packaging that all into one big solution. I think, you know, taking the system integrators into the equation will actually bring a tremendous amount of leverage. You can go do this. What's the nature of the deal that you did with VMware? So, you're... Yeah, so we recently announced a partnership. We put out a press release yesterday where we signed a relationship with VMware where we will extend our visibility to work in the software-defined data center. And as part of that, we will work on bringing visibility into the virtual network environment. So, we'll extend visibility into the physical underlay, but also into the virtual overlays that the NSX environment enables. That's one piece. The other piece also is to make sure that we have visibility into the dynamic workloads that this virtual environment enables as well. So, as VMs move around, you maintain visibility regardless of the location of the VM wherever it is housed at. Okay, last question. Where do you think we'll be a year from now? Specifically as it relates to this whole network visibility trend. I think, I'm pretty confident a year from now we will see tremendous success. We will go from proof of concepts with the NSX solution and a gigamon to actual live deployments. So, I think that'll be very exciting for us. All right, she's out. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it coming on and sharing with us your insights. Thanks for having me here. You're welcome. Okay, so we'll be right back, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We're live from VMworld 2014. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.