 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. Good morning, welcome back here on theCUBE in Washington D.C. We are live at the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, along with John Furrier. I'm John Walls, glad to have you with us here in our nation's capital, the Walter Washington Convention Center, with us now from Riverbed, the VP of the US Public Sector, Davis Johnson. Davis, good morning, sir. Good morning to you. Yeah, just first off, your take on the show. What this thing has grown from being a little baby a few years ago to a pretty impressive performance, a pretty performance venue. This is my third show and I've done two re-invents and I tell you, it's starting to feel like a re-invent. It's getting so big. And there's a lot more developers here. I've had several people come by, talk to us in our booth who are in the DevOps community. When I first started coming to this summit, it was mostly partners and government employees, but it's really exciting to see so many developers here this year. A lot of interest in the cloud, obviously. Seeing that, NGOs and nonprofits to government, whatever. You're all about making that migration easy for people, right, taking the headaches out of it or taking the concerns out of it. Tell us a little bit about just your overall focus as a company, Riverbed, what your mission is and how you help people do that. Sure, there's three core things we do to help people be successful in the cloud. Number one is our visibility suite. We have a suite of tools that allows people to see how applications behave over the network and in the cloud. And really, with cloud services today, it's really about the end user experience and actually what's happening with the application. So the great thing about cloud is it's put the focus back on the customers and the applications themselves. And all that other stuff in between doesn't matter anymore. So our visibility suite's really, really helpful to help see if problems are occurring in the application code across the infrastructure, the pipes and the servers and the data centers, all the way to the applications running on the end user device to see how they're behaving. Optimization is how we really got started in 2004 with our Steelhead product for WAN optimization. And what that does is it accelerates applications to the cloud. So a lot of the problems with cloud services is it takes a long time to get the application from the cloud service provider to the application because it's further away. A lot of times, especially in the government, whether it's GovCloud or C2 West, there's only one or two cloud data centers that you're running the applications from. So it creates a lot of latency. So our optimization suite, very, very applicable. And then finally, the control piece is our on ramp to the cloud. We call it Steel Connect. It's also well known in the industry as SD WAN. And SD WAN gives you two things. Number one is it's an on ramp to the cloud. So if you're old enough, you remember the CDs that you used to get from WAN. Well, believe me, we're old enough. Right? Remember, you used to stick to... Yeah, in the mail, he's coming in all the time attached to the magazine. And you attach, and that's what SD WAN gives you. It's an on ramp to the cloud. So you can actually, with one click provision cloud services to remote sites directly from Amazon. And then the other piece is orchestration, setting policies so that if you want certain applications to have all the resources they need all the time, because they're more mission critical than they'll have them. One of the benefits of the cloud, obviously the public sector is that you can move fast and also keep existing legacy. So there's a lot of interesting, you know, examples of people moving to the cloud pretty quickly. So I think that's a good strategy there. But at the end of the day, they also want invisible infrastructure. Right. So you're seeing a lot of automation being done around the Ops side, but also there's still the plumbing and moving packets around. Yep. Which is still where the Waldo works being done. You need low latency. You have internet of things on the edge of the network. You have potentially multi-cloud opportunities or hybrid IT. Hybrid IT. So this is your sweet spot. So can you talk about how you guys are helping public sector market ease the pain of glass that they have or have that single pane of glass where they can have really reliable, programmable infrastructure. I mean, how do they get through that not whole? So it's a combination of applications, government applications which are born in the cloud versus legacy applications which the government's trying to move to the cloud. It's actually really, really hard to take legacy applications and move them to the cloud, because the data is just doesn't, especially if it's dynamic and changing is hard to move. I had a great conversation last night with one of the business unit leaders at AWS for the government, specifically on this subject. And he had a customer in the intelligence community with multiple petabytes of data, had a perfect application, but it's hard to move multi petabytes of data from a legacy infrastructure to the cloud. So the problem we're solving for the legacy IT folks is we moved data about five to 10 times faster. So I talked last night about it. Well, if you just want to migrate from legacy infrastructure to cloud with our optimization capability, we can make it a lot faster to get to the cloud. For the ones that are born in the cloud, we're doing application performance management organically in cloud service providers like Amazon and the other ones. So we actually look at code level metrics to determine if the application itself could be the problem. Because sometimes it's just poorly designed code that's causing your end users to have unsatisfactory experiences. And the networking is dynamic, while they say serverless or whatever term people use, but in the cloud it's a dynamic resource pool. The application optimization seems to work well there for you guys. Absolutely, absolutely. And the other piece I didn't mention is the end user experience. So the great thing about cloud, as I said a minute ago, puts the focus back on the applications and the end user experience. So we have a set of tools that actually run on these things or iPhones or laptops that actually meters how quickly applications are executing on the device. So if you're looking at an application and you want to move it from your traditional infrastructure to the cloud, you know exactly how it behaves now. And hopefully it's going to work better. But if it doesn't, at least you have the baseline. So you can say, hey, this is what we had over here. We're over here now. It's not what we expected. So how do we get to where we want to be? Whether it's the network. Sometimes the network needs to be redesigned. A lot of the legacy networking infrastructure doesn't work for cloud services or the application itself. Dave, I want to ask you a professional opinion on this because you're in the front lines in public sector right now. Certainly one of the things that we've been looking at and trying to analyze and understand further is no debate on the cloud. Everyone's going there. Amazon might have a huge share of that. But how do they buy and consume technologies changed? How they procure it, the processes. What's going on right now in terms of the new market here? I mean, is it the same old procurement methods? How is it changing? The tools available to the IT folks? How are they deploying it? You mentioned end user. Kind of brings up that whole notion of your customer's changing. How they buy and how they use the tech. Can you share some color? So once again, I've been doing this for a while. So there's this whole interim phase of using financial modeling or financial engineering to create OPEX-like models for consuming IT as opposed to the legacy, just going out and buying it and deploying it and capitalizing it over five to seven years. I think we're at an inflection point right now where customers are truly, truly looking at as a service, consumption-based licensing models for the first time. We certainly see that with our products. A lot of our customers buy our products and then through the integrator community, consume them as a service. Now we actually have the government come into us for the first time and saying, hey, we want you to virtualize your product, take it out of the infrastructure because we have a legacy of tens of thousands of appliances all throughout networking, unbundle it from the hardware and allow me to consume it directly from Amazon or Azure or Google or wherever we go. And I want to pay by the drink. So we've got two products right now fully configured for consumption-based models and we're in the process of converting to desktop. So you can play in both camps. Absolutely. So the nice thing we had Marlin on yesterday talking about, it was a use case where you shift basically a data center in a box to the edge of the network or in Antarctica or somewhere. I mean, that's possible too. So this is, again, the effect of the appliance. We talk about going full circle. You want an appliance? We actually do a lot of that. It's an interesting business for Riverbed because- He didn't say data center, by the way. That's what I said. He said integrated servers and storage. The further away you are, the bigger the problem is. That's a trend. The trend is to ship a data center. Not have to make data moving across the network but putting stuff at the edge. Correct. There's hyper-converged infrastructure going out to edge sites, right? But most of the data center, most of the virtualization technology has still been in the data center and there's a lot of applications which still have to run out at the edge whether it's a mission application for DOD or the intelligence community or in the case of the Laskin school system that Marlon talked about yesterday. They just have unreliable comm links so they have to have infrastructure. They have to run the applications when the links fail. Think of that in the DOD community or in the intelligence community as the same thing. The further away you get from the data center, the more important it is that you have that infrastructure at the edge site. It's almost the same game but it's been disrupted and recalled. I mean, SD-WIN, Wide Area Networks is the world we live in. That's called the internet. But it's interesting they call it new names but it's campus. You guys, you remember the term campus network thing? Absolutely. I told you, I'm old. I mean, I know all those terms. Hey, it's a campus. Well, this is not a new, it's a topology issue. The topology is changing. That's the point with Cloud. What is the key difference now? I mean, you can call it campus. That's a great point. The key difference is sometimes referred to as hybrid IT, hybrid networking is a lot. The applications are either running in the legacy client server mode or perhaps they've been put up in a private cloud. Perhaps they've been moved to an Amazon cloud or they're just SaaS. So it used to be when you were a networking administrator and designing networking technology, everything was hub and spoke, right? It all came back to your data center very, very predictable and contained. Now, if you push an application out to an iPad or an iPhone, depending on whether it's a salesforce.com, a CRM type tool or if it's your email or if it's a mission application, it could be going to any one of those four data centers I just described. So the networking hasn't kept up. The old model of backhauling everything back through a trusted internet connection and going back out to one of those four sites is actually creating more latency than historically we had in the network. So. You're going to be smart about the traffic, basically. This is where you guys come in. Is that where you guys saw it all? Yeah, what we tell people all the time is we shouldn't make decisions about the network without talking to the line of business or the mission leadership. So how does this application have to behave? And then let's design the network around the application. We call it application-defined networking or the application enforcing its will on the network. So instead of the network telling the application how it needs to behave, the application should have more say over the topology and the configuration. So where's the next, is it about networking? In terms of improvement now, is that it seems like you've got a lot of nice pieces in place, speed, power, availability, all those things are working well. So what's the next hurdle then? Or is it networking to handle the capabilities that have been developed? The next hurdle is networking and network virtualization for the edge sites. So data centers have evolved dramatically over the last 10 years, but the edge sites pretty much are still running the same technology that they bought 20 years ago. To change a policy on a router at a branch office so that the voice traffic goes over a private line where internet traffic perhaps goes over just a broadband connection, requires you to log into every single router and enter, you know, CLI commands. What SD-WAN brings to the table is zero-touch provisioning and one-click policy enforcement across all your branch sites. That's huge. So if you want to change the policies for something like let's take video conferencing, for example, so that voice goes over your private MPLS line, but the video goes over the internet because, well, we got to have voice, but if, you know, the video's a little bit unpredictable, we can live with that, you might save, I mean, millions of dollars across a large enterprise like some of the USDA. Or say, hey, we want a video conferencing to have higher priority, but all those YouTube videos you're surfing, maybe throttle them down a little bit. I mean. That's a big part of it. That's all what, you know, SD-WAN brings to the table. You can set policies based on the type of traffic, the type of data, the websites people are going to. And let's be honest, I talked to one defense senior leader and he was like, during the World Cup, I actually changed the policy so they could see the World Cup because it was important for morale. So it's not always the way you might think. Yeah, like boss, hey, let's take a final round of drinks. Watch the World Cup. Great, great thing. This is huge. I think on a policy based world that we lived in and historically have known in networking is becoming very dynamic and different, but it has to be programmable. So my final question is, how do you see this programmability adapting to this application to find them? I love that term, by the way, just tweeted it out. It's very relevant. How do you be more dynamic to applicant? How do you build a network around the apps in a world that's ever changing and make it programmable We see two things happening. One of them is going to be for born digital companies and they're going to do everything from the Amazons of the world, including deploying wide area networking to their edge sites, 100%. And then there's going to be companies, more traditional, large enterprises, government entities, commercial entities, where they're going to want to provision the networks themselves, but use the same policy based automated technology that SD-WAN brings to the table. Whether it's having an SD-WAN at your corporate headquarters or at your main data center, which, by the way, could actually be a service provider like a Verizon AT&T, or if you're born digital and you really do use AWS as your core data center, you'll be able to do everything, including provision your network services directly from Amazon and you do it all from one place. So congratulations on your digital transformation. You have both camps, both worlds. Business models changing to be consumption based that aligns with cloud native. It's awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on. Well done. Thanks for being with us here on theCUBE, Davis. Thank you. Always good to have Riverbed on. Thank you. Back with more here from AWS, Public Sector Summit 2017, theCUBE live from the nation's capital, Washington DC.