 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Well, good morning, and welcome back to Las Vegas. Day two here at AWS re-invent, along with Justin Moore and I'm John Walls, and we're joined by Errol Bella Hallowell at NetScout. Good morning, Arabella, good to see you. Good morning. Everybody have a good night last night, by the way. You know, at Las Vegas, treat everybody okay? Yeah, it was pretty good. It was good. Yeah, it was good. Good dinner, all that, right? I'm on East Coast time, so, you know, any time past midnight is, you know, a long evening. It's always a tough transition, isn't it? All right, tell us a little bit about NetScout and your primary responsibilities there. Yeah, sure, so NetScout is a company that's been helping the largest organizations, 90% of Fortune 100 organizations, about 90% of the world's communication service writers, basically troubleshoot their most complicated application and service problems. And we've been helping these organizations for, you know, almost three decades. And what's really interesting about a show like this is we've seen so much technical transformation. It's so rapid right now. I mean, even as we talk about, you know, serverless, you know, agentless computing, you know, we're talking about microservices and containers, still, when it comes to our customers' IT teams, they still have the very same problem that they were tasked with, you know, 20, 30 years ago, which is, it better work. Make sure that that service that's being delivered to customers works and we want to make sure it has the, you know, the performance and the security that our customers and our business need. And it's interesting because if anything, that kind of watermark is getting higher and higher for the IT organization, yet what they've been dealt with is so much more complexity because of all of this innovation. And so that's what's really exciting as well is how do we help our customers manage to this, you know, new transformation and make sure that they're successful for their organizations, making sure that service experience, the customer experience is protected. So you talk about complexity. Is that the driver of the biggest problems today? Because you said this has been going on 20 or 30 years, but now because of the sophistication of the technology, we've got a whole new slew of problems. So, I mean, how would you categorize them today as opposed to 10 or 15 years ago? Yeah, I mean, I think that the biggest sea change is, you know, in many ways, you know, some of these definitions that we hear about here, you know, hybrid cloud, most organizations have been on a journey for a number of years, sort of transforming their physical footprint to virtual footprint and then a public cloud footprint. And, you know, they see it sometimes linear and then sometimes people may kind of a dramatic move forward. I think what we're going to see, you know, here and over the next year is basically that whole definition of hybrid cloud should actually be rethought of as almost a data center without walls because going back to the complexity, the new technologies, the new capabilities of being able to have a workload anywhere you want, being able to spin something up, you know, using, you know, some kind of instance that kind of goes up and then it goes down is amazing from the business perspective because they can have what they want when they want it and the piece of innovation is dramatic. The complexity comes into the, from an IT perspective, how do you manage that exponential increase in, you know, the number of services, being able to see all those services, where are they, what are they doing, and what are all the dependencies? So that's where you were saying, you know, five, 10 years ago, you know, a war room where people kind of, hey, there's a problem somewhere, you know, is it the network team, is it the server team, is it, you know, whose problem is it? Right now that problem has just become so much harder to diagnose and that's really what we're trying to help our customers do, how do they get that end to end visibility around what's happening in this kind of, you know, data center with our walls, which is essentially, you know, where it's all going. Yeah, that's certainly a theme that's come up, we spoke about it a little bit yesterday, John, that this complexity of the data systems and these workloads, it could be anywhere and there's so many more of them when we've got microservices, we've got serverless. Keeping track of that as humans, the problem is so complex now that it's almost beyond human capability. So we need to augment the humans with some kind of technology. Do you see that with customers? Is that what they come to NetScout for, is that help? Absolutely, and in many ways, you know, as we've seen with the technology transformation, you know, even in our homes today from smart refrigerators and driverless cars, you know, technology can, you know, make the human spotter, but I think the pace of innovation is almost too fast for the human because it's so hard to grapple that type of complexity. And oftentimes it's organizational because even if you can spin up these new things, you can compute anywhere, anytime, if you're an IT organization and you still have the same people, processes, tools that you've always been working towards, that's where you really run into problems. And that's where we're seeing some organizations say, you know, it's not just DevSecOps, it's how do I change the mindset and the processes, and then it just comes to the tooling, and the tooling isn't really available either to get that visibility into this new landscape. Most organizations still have silos of different types of data, different types of interfaces, and at the core of that is the IT organizations still tends to have their more traditional silos. And to your point, it's because humans often are slow to change. You know, we're probably the biggest inhibitor to the technological progress. Well, I like to say that there's three parts to it. There's people, process, and technology, and technology's only one of those three things, so you need to change the people in process in order to make use of these new technologies. It does sound like we're moving to a higher level of abstraction though, where rather than worrying about particular servers or pieces of infrastructure, we're now looking at workloads and data that could be anywhere, and we're now managing that at this higher level of abstraction. Is that what you see that business users are going for, where they don't really want to deal with the nuts and bolts of the IT? Yeah, they don't, I think that, again, this goes back to having a data center without walls. I think in the future, and even today, it's increasingly hard to say and point to, is that server and that data center that's causing the problem? Because it's so spread out, and it's made up of so many different components. So I would say yes, the business wants that higher level information, which is I want my workload anywhere, anytime with the service levels that I require. The problem with that is the IT organization then has to manage often a very difficult environment where the business maybe have chosen to put an application or workload in this place because of regulatory requirements or they like the service levels or they like what that particular vendor did. But then you've got basically a panoply of all of these different capabilities and how do you manage that when someone says, I can't have any latency over a 5G network. That's just, you can't have latency when it's some kind of operating room cardiac machine. You can't say to a parent, hey, you know, that latency kind of caused a big problem during the operation. It's just unacceptable with a new type of technology. And again, it is a human issue. The technology that we're using is to fuel human progress, but we at the end of the day have to find a way to manage the complexity. And I think that begins with actually the people first. You know, how does the IT organization potentially need to reorganize so that they can get to that level of abstraction and understand it from that perspective? Because most of the time they're looking at their silos and data. You know, you mentioned a little bit ago about the rapidity of change, innovation. What about expectation versus innovation in terms of your clients? And trying to, I guess, to satisfy that, you've just alluded to it yourself just a few moments ago. It's really hard to keep up, if you will. So how do you manage that with your clients about what they're looking for you to point them toward as opposed to what's realistic? Yeah, I mean, I think that again progress and understanding where change is going, you never want to resist it because it's scary but making sure that you can manage that transition and that journey with confidence is what we really focus on with our customers. So even something as relatively simple as, we're taking a cloud that was in a physical data center or even in a software data center and putting it in a public cloud environment. Do you know the service dependencies? Do you know what it looked like before you went? And then once you're there, how do you make sure that you still have the same types of performance that you've always had? So even though that sounds bread and butter for many, many organizations, making sure that they can kind of move to this more fluid, frictionless environment and sort of have a continuous type of visibility and end-to-end visibility is key because as we started this whole conversation, at the end of the day, the problem is what it was 20 years ago which is, is my service working as it should for the customer or the business on the other end? You know, does it have errors, does it have latencies? Is it insecure? And so continuing to provide that regardless of where. So we work with AWS, we work with VMware, we're trying to work with every single part of this new fabric so that our customers can still have that same confidence. That's kind of the goal for us. It's a brave new world. It's a brave new world. Good luck in the journey. Thanks for sharing your time with us this morning. Great, thank you very much. You bet, thank you for being here. We'll continue here on theCUBE, we're live in Las Vegas at AWS. We're gonna get back to you.