 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. And welcome back to our nation's capital where we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, some 10,000 strong in attendance this week here in the Walter Washington Convention Center, just about a mile from the U.S. Capitol, John Walter, John Furrier. John, do you feel the energy of the centerpiece of the political universe? It's hot here in D.C., it's a pressure cooker, the humidity. But it's not global warming, we know that, because climate change is- Climate change is not real, it's from what I heard. It's always been told. The problem with D.C. is it's a data lake that's turned into a data swamp, so someone really needs to drain that data swamp. Well, you know to help us do that, who's going to help us do that? Amazon Web Services. Marlon McFate's going to help us do that. He is the technical leader of the Advanced Technology Group of the Office of the CTO, and Riverbed, and Marlon, thank you for being with us here on theCUBE your first time, I believe. Yes, it is my first time on theCUBE. So you're a Cube rookie? Yes, Cube rookie. Good to have you aboard. I appreciate it, thanks. Tell us a little bit first about Riverbed, about what you do there, specifically what you do there, and what the company's mission is overall. Absolutely, so I work for the Advanced Technology Group. The Advanced Technology Group works underneath the Office of the CTO. There's actually two groups that work under the Office of the CTO, my group, the Advanced Technology Group, and another one called the Strategic Technology Group. The ATG Group, the one that I belong to, we focus on being the subject matter experts of our products. There's about nine of us now, and we all focus on different products, right? Riverbed's grown from a company of being just the WAN Optimization Company, to really being the performance company, right? Whether that be visibility, whether it be optimization, whether it be network optimization. Each one of us focuses on a different piece. I predominantly focus on our WAN Optimization, our SteelConnect product, and at times our SteelFusion project, which is the combined edge product. Take a minute about it, please. SteelConnect, yeah, tell us what that's all about. SteelConnect is not actually our most recent product that come to market. We have a couple of visibility products that have come out recently, but SteelConnect addresses the idea that we have been doing networking for the same way, say, you know, 1993, beyond, right? We were still doing it the same way. Everything within our industry, whether you take a look at virtualization, whether you take a look at cloud, whether or not you take a look at storage, right? Everything has changed substantially in how we do it, and this brings that change to networking. The idea is, is when you think about servers, you say, I no longer want to think about hardware. I never want to think about that. I want to think about resources. Maybe I don't even want to worry about operating systems. I only want to worry about containers, right? Now when it comes to networking, I don't necessarily want to have to worry about each individual piece within my network. I want it to be orchestrated and controlled centrally, and what I tell it to do, I want it to do. I shouldn't have to do that. I mean, it's the challenge, we've heard Verner Vogels on stage here at Amazon Public Sector Summit here in DC say, hey, it's a new normal. We had another entrepreneur on just before you from Fugue, who said, hey, it's inevitably the world of the future, and it's inherently different or intrinsically different cloud than it is on premise with enterprises. So the question for you is, what is the use case that you guys are winning at? Because the cloud is impacting federal government and public sector, but a lot of times they have old antiquated systems like back in 1993, 94. So they're moving fast to commercialize, to modernize. That's the focus. How do you guys help them? What's the big linchpin for you guys and that gold mission of the customer? All right, so you're absolutely right. The government has been here, or the government or public sector as a whole has been moving to the cloud quite quickly here recently. We've seen this move more on the commercial side first, obviously, and now in the public sector. One of the very large use cases that we address is the ability to provision for your applications. Some of the characteristics that you find in commercial worlds, such as, I want to use internet as transport, you don't see as much in public sector, but you do see, I can spin up an application in the cloud. If you go to your cloud person and say, how long are going to take me to get application B? They could possibly come back to you and say, well, would this afternoon be okay? Right, can you provision a network like that? Can you get the policy in place for users? Could you get the connectivity? Could you get any of that in place in the same amount of time? That is a use case that SD-WAN addresses. Without having to rip up, take out the network that you already have, which is the physical network, or what we refer to as the underlay, being able to give you that flexibility on top of that network. And the big thing that customers have a challenge on is the other focus that's DevOps trend of programmable infrastructure is another one. So that they want to make it programmable. So how do you guys fit into that? Because one of the things that we hear is, look, I have developers, all they want to do is have infrastructure just works as code. That's all I need for whatever use case. Yeah, we actually see that DevOps is actually one of the probably the first movers to the cloud for the public sector, right? With our, pretty much every single one of our products, whether or not we're talking about SteelConnect, Steelhead, SteelCentral, any one of them, there's a restful API for every single one of them. So you can actually go in and utilizing very easy scripting, a restful API directly itself and spin up whole environments, and then spin them down if you wanted to do that. So it fits very, very nicely into that DevOps world. Do you have SteelEdge yet? SteelEdge? Yeah. Okay, that's my, okay. No, I think, I think- I'll be right on the cube. Yeah. It might be a razor company that might have that. I don't know. Well, the edge of the network is huge, and this is where we're talking about, as you guys deal with SD-WAN, I mean, come on, wide area networks, you can't get any more edgier than that. You guys have a core competency in this. So how do you guys look at the edge in IoT and all these use cases popping around? Well, we do actually have a product that has edge and it was SteelFusionEdge. We can address that in a couple of different ways. I want to make sure that I understood your question, though. Your question was around IoT specifically. Well, how do you guys look at the edge, and the trends right now are simply hyped up right now. If you have an edge, intelligent edge is a big message we're hearing from others. IoT is an edge application with its industrial edge, with machinery, sensor networks, public safety, surveillance. All this is edge devices. It still ends up in the end being, and that has, we've heard the change from people calling it branch to calling it edge, which is probably pretty apropos, right? But really in the end, what it comes down to is connectivity, right? So if I have IoT sensors in a warehouse, whether or not I have an application, whether or not I have a group of users, whether or not I have mobile users in the end, what it really comes down to is connectivity. And we all- And tower. Yeah, and well, yeah. But we all, especially with our cell phones, right? We have come pretty much to the point where we expect our data and our connectivity to be there at all times, right? And that's one of the things SD-WAN addresses. Whether it be directly our SD-WAN products, Steel Connect, or whether or not it works with some of the pieces that move further into the land architecture like our wireless access points are switching, right? So you can imagine here, right? I can provide policy for my IoT devices. I can provide that policy one time at an organizational or an agency level. I can have that policy filter down all the way down to the access point. And now the access point might be my access point to my IoT or to my users. So in the end, it still comes to connectivity. Marlon, what's the, some of the use cases or scenarios you've been involved with with customers where it's been super exciting from an architectural standpoint, where you guys are doing some cutting edge things. Like is it more in the network side? Is it software? Is it edge? I mean, I'm trying to get a sense of, can you share a personal perspective? Absolutely. So one of the ones that we're working on right now that I think is probably the most exciting is combining some aspects that you could call it NFV. You could call it SD-WAN. You could call it gray box. What I like to call it is just a combined edge piece, right? Which encompasses both the steel connect piece which handles your firewall characteristics, your identity management characteristics, built into that, some switching virtualization so you can run other products on there. But the customer really wanted to end up doing was they had school systems, a school system that was in a very far away place. And that school system, they were putting in a router, a switch, an access point, all these different little pieces and devices, right? What we did was we were able to take that design and crunch it down into basically one box, right? They have enough switch ports. They have the ability to run virtual machines because they said that they had a server here there. They had their virtualized steel connect gateway which gives them the firewall capability gives them the routing capability. And this is all combined in a box that already has the WAN optimization built in. So they get everything that they would have had on site in one box. Is there something to working to bring up education as an example, but in that space overall and the .gov or .edu space, that's, you know, separate and aside from commercial partners or commercial relationships that different concerns, different priorities, and yet they're using the same technologies. Yeah, most certainly. The only thing that I could really say from using technology, right? I mean, there are some pockets where different technology, like far off weird technology is utilized. But I would say that they are the public sector schools, federal, government, Intel, they're all using a lot of the same technology, right? It's when they adopt it. When do they bring it into their environment and then what are the special characteristics of their environment? So for example, what I said earlier, right? Your commercial customers are looking at utilizing SD-WAN to move maybe completely off of MPLS. It's probably not something that we're going to see within the public sector, right? They want to still use some sort of private networking. I do have some customers that are utilizing public internet, but then they're tunneling in an overlay back to an MPLS entry point to get back into their cloud. We just have interesting requirements, whether that be a trusted internet connection, whether or not that be JRSS. We have different security requirements in the public sector. Well, I love some of what you're doing. Sean, you get all that MPLS stuff there? Yeah. Tunneling. I got the first four. I want to jump in, double down on that. It's this interesting conversation because the whole trend right now is hybrid cloud on the enterprise side. Absolutely. Which is a leading indicator to the government, a little bit lagging on that. So whatever that translates to in terms of hybrid or legacy, it's going to be somewhat similar, I believe. But really multi-cloud is a trend that people are talking about. It's super hyped up, but it's not yet real. The thing that's holding multi-cloud back, not multi-cloud in the sense that I got a workload over here to work a little bit, but about moving resources around the network, data, compute, whatnot, is latency. Huge problem. Yep. You mentioned MPLS and Tunneling. There's still the latency problems. How do you get the laws of physics down to the point where you can actually have those kinds of latencies? What is Riverbed doing? You share some insight to that direction because that's the holy grail right now. That's the last hurdle. Right. And then we'll get it all in silicon. It's still a final hurdle, but latency's critical. So problem number one there, right? Even if it is cloud to cloud in that example, right? Is first, how do I get a WAN optimization device, something that can optimize that traffic for me, something that can affect my latency for me into that environment. Riverbed has worked tirelessly to get that in there, right? But to your point, you can't change how an electron flies, right? Speed of light is the speed of light. You're not going to get an electron to move any faster. So what Riverbed developed, it's still very relevant today, is the ability to, instead of change your latency, mitigate the negative effects of your latency, right? So if I have to make sure- Or program around it, right? Or work around it. Absolutely, and you can do that at the application level. Absolutely, program around it. But there are a lot of protocols out there that aren't necessarily optimized for that longer latency environment, right? So what we do is, or the adage is, the trip never taken, right? The shortest trip. So if I have to, not to get into the weeds or anything like that, but if I have to make 1,000 round trips to accomplish something, right? And I can put something in there that understands what I was getting, right? That data that I was getting each one of those times. And I can take less trips. Well, then that just made that faster. So if I have 1,000 round trips and it takes a minute to do, and now I can do 10 round trips and it only took 10 seconds, or six seconds if we're doing math, right? It's kind of like here in DC, your local, I noticed that coming from Dulles Airport, they have surge pricing on the toll roads. That's basically private networking right there. That's right. Least cost, path routing. Although I was beginning to think it's very responsible. I was in the, you know. I thought Marlin was more like describing my trips to the hardware store on the weekends. 1,000 round trips, be a lot more economical. Yep. But you're right. If you're off the road, if you're off the packets are on the network. Yep, yep. That saves some room for someone else. More traffic, you're more traffic at the higher speeds. Could, so you get two benefits. One is the increase in speed, but the other is the perceived capacity increase of your network, right? And we accomplish these things through compression, which is really, really simple. I think compression is a must, right? But through our data duplication. Data duplication is I've seen these patterns before, and it's the byte level. We're not talking about an object. I haven't seen a file. No, I've seen these byte level patterns before. I don't need to resend them. And in a traditional network or traditional applications that you see pretty much in any organization, right? We typically can get somewhere between 50 and 80, if not sometimes 90% reduction total in traffic. My final question, we're wrapping up the segment here, is share with the folks. Take a minute to talk to the audience about what you're doing here with Riverbed at the show, and what they should know about the current Riverbed. I know you guys are trying to transform each and yourselves. Yes. Give a quick plug, go ahead. Absolutely. What we're specifically doing here, or one of the pieces that is a differentiator for us and our SD-WAN, is we went ahead and we thought, why couldn't we make an AWS VPC or a cloud instance, one of my edge sites, right? Connecting into the cloud, there's many different ways to do it, but why couldn't we make a very simple way of doing that? Why couldn't I take the technology that I'm already putting in place at my data centers, I'm already putting in place at my branch offices? Why can't I utilize that to create a secure connection into my VPCs? And to your point, actually, earlier, one of the things that's also interesting was cloud to cloud. Why couldn't I take that same technology and connect multiple clouds? Whether they be private cloud or two public clouds or two, you know, connect them all together. It's just network. And take the best of all worlds, right? The best from each, and make the best infrastructure that I possibly can. So what we're showing off here from a Steel Connect perspective is our ability to do that. I can take an AWS VPC, actually I can take all, I think there are 16 regions within AWS and I can interconnect them in less than 10 minutes with a click of a button. And then back into my infrastructure. So that and then we also have brought Aternity, which is one of our visibility products, that is basically rounded out our visibility play within the market. We had the network, we had the app, we had the database, now we have the end-users computer. Well, if you could interconnect me to my home in 10 minutes, I'm a client, I'd be sold to be all over. I'm going to be in the same traffic as you later. I'm not that far from here, but it might as well be another day. Marlon, thanks for the time. Absolutely, it was my pleasure. Good to have you on theCUBE, all right? Thanks, hopefully we can do it again. Marlon, a riverbed has joined us here on theCUBE, we'll be live with more from Washington DC right after this.