 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE coverage of VMworld 2020, our 11th year covering the show. And of course, networking's been a big growth story for VMware for a number of years, going back to the NICERA acquisition for over a billion dollars, really leveraging all of the virtual networking. And S.D. Wham's been another hot topic a couple of years ago, is the VeloCloud acquisition. And now, happy to welcome to the program two of the VeloCloud business executives. First of all, we have Sanjay Upal, he is the senior vice president and general manager of that mentioned division of VMware. And joining him is Craig Connors, who's the vice president and chief technology officer for that same division. He was the chief architect of VeloCloud. Craig, Sanjay, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so Sanjay, first of all, nice call-outs and a lot of news that we're gonna get to dig into in the morning keynote. Pat, Sanjay, the team, a couple of years ago, Pat talked about the next billion dollar business is networking, your team helping to add to that. And a new term thrown out that we're gonna get to talk a little bit about, our friends at Gartner, who termed it Sassy. So I'll let you explain a little bit the news, that this wonderful new four-letter acronym that Gartner sponsored us, why don't you start us there? Yeah, I couldn't be more excited to be here at VMworld, announcing this expansion of what's going on in SDVan. So SDVan was all about bringing branch office users to their applications and doing that in a really efficient manner, throwing out all those complex hardware appliances and simplifying everything with software, increasing the quality of experience for the user. But now what has happened is, they want security to be dealt off in the same way. Same simplicity and automation, same great user experience and at the same time, blocking all these attacks that are coming in from various places. And COVID has just driven that even more, meaning that you need to get to networking and network security to be brought together in this simple and automated way, while keeping the end user experience be great and while giving IT what they need, which is high security and good manageability. So this acronym SASE, Secure Access Service Edge, it really is the bringing together of networking and network security, both as a service. That service angle is really important. And the exciting part about what we're announcing at VMworld here is the expansion of the SDVan pops and gateways into becoming SASE pops. And now customers can get a whole slew of services, both networking and network security services from VMware. So that's the announcement. Wonderful. Craig, since you've helped with so much of the architecture here, I want to geek out a little bit. When it comes to the security stuff that Sanjay was talking about, I remember dealing back with VAN optimization solutions and trying to remember, okay, wait, when can I compress? When can I encrypt? What do I lay on top of it? SDVan fits into this story. Help us understand what does, you know, VeloCloud do? What is it from the partner ecosystem? You know, no, there's some good partners that you have helping us. Help us understand, you know, what exactly we mean because security is such a broad term. Yeah, thanks. So there's four components in the SASE pop that we're bringing together. Obviously VMware SDVan is one of those. Sanjay mentioned the changing workforce. We have off-net users that aren't coming from behind an SDVan branch more and more today. So we also have secure access powered by our Workspace One solution that's bringing those remote users into the SASE pop. And then two different security solutions. Secure Web Gateway functionality and that is a next generation secure Web Gateway that includes things like DLP and remote browser isolation. And as you saw in the news today, that's powered through our OEM agreement with Menlo Security. And then we have next gen firewalling for securing corporate traffic and that's powered by our own VMware NSX firewall which has been recently augmented with our last line acquisition. So those are the four key components coming together within our SASE pop. And of course we also have our continued partnership with Zscaler for our large joint VMware Zscaler customer base to facilitate that security solution as well. Yeah, so Sanjay, maybe it would make sense. As you said, you've got a portfolio now in this market. You've got VDI, you've got Edge. Walk us through if you could, some of the most important use cases for your business. Yeah, so the use case that has taken off in the last several years since the advent of SD-WAN is to get sites. So these would be branch offices and a branch office could be an agricultural field, it could be a plane, it could be an oil rig, it could be any one of these. This is a branch office. So these sites, how to get them connected to the applications that they need to get access to? So telemedicine example. So how do you get doctors, diagnosticians and all that that are sitting in their clinics and hospitals to get great access to the applications and the applications can be anywhere. They don't have to be back in your data centers. You know, after data center consolidation happened, some of the apps, you know, were in the data centers but then after the cloud advent came, then the apps were everywhere. They're in the public cloud, both in IAAS as well as in SAS. And then now they're moving back towards the edge because of the advent of edge computing. So that's really the primary use case that SD-WAN has been all about. And that's where, you know, we have stake the claim to be the leader in that space. Now with COVID, the use cases are expanding. And obviously with work from home, you take the same telemedicine example, the doctors and diagnosticians who used to work from hospitals and clinics, now have to get it done when they're working from the home. And of course, this is a business critical app. And so what do you do? How do you get these folks who are at home to get the same quality of experience, the same security, the same manageability, but at the same time, you cannot disturb the other people who are working from home because that is an entire ecosystem. You serve the business user, but you also serve the needs of the home users keeping privacy in mind. So these two cases, branch access and then remote access, which Craig talked about, these are the primary use cases and then they break down by vertical. So depending on whether it's health or it's federal or it's manufacturing or it's finance, then you have sub use cases underneath that. But this is how we from a VCN standpoint, claim to have 17,000 customers that have deployed our networking solutions, a large fraction of those being our SDVAN solutions today. Yeah, okay. Craig, one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in the industry is scale. I look at certain parts of the market, let's say Kubernetes. Kubernetes was about bringing together lots of sites, but now we're spending a lot of time talking about Edge, which is a whole different scale. Same thing if you talk about devices and IoT. Can you speak to us a little bit about fundamentally that branch architecture, I think sets you up well, but when I start thinking about Edge, it probably is larger number and some different challenges. So maybe some differences that happen to happen in the code to make that happen. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we've been fortunate in the success that we've had in our SDVAN deployments, more than 280,000 branches deployed with our SDVAN solution. So scale is something that's been near and dear to our heart from the beginning. How do you build a multi-tenant service in the cloud? How do you build cloud scale? And we brought that aspect into all of these components through containerization, as you mentioned, through horizontal scalability, bringing them into our own dedicated POPs where we control the hardware, we control the hypervisor, obviously built on top of VMware ESXi. That allows us to deliver scale in a way that other competitors may not be able to achieve. Yeah, Sanjay, it's been more a couple of years since the acquisition by VMware. Give us a little bit of an update if you would, I'm sure obviously customer reach and adoption greatly increased by the channel and go to market, but directionally and any difference in use cases that you've seen now being part of VMware. Yeah, absolutely, there's been an expansion in the use cases which is why this fit was very good, meaning VeloCloud being a part of VMware. So if you look at it, what the wider network does, we're the place where we tie it all together. And tie what together. If you look at the end user computing, which Craig was mentioning, the clients are Digital Workspace, Workspace One Client. Well, those clients now will connect to our SASE POP. So that's one tie-in that obviously we couldn't have and we were an independent company. The other side of it, when you go from the SASE POP into the data center, then we tie into NSX, not just at the Cloud Firewall, but in the data center itself. So we can extend micro segmentation. So that's another use case that is becoming prevalent. Then the third aspect of this is really when you run inside telecom operators. And VMware has a very robust business as it goes after telcos with a software stack. And so running our gateways, running our SASE POPs at the telco environment, then it gets us to integrate with what's going on with our telecom business unit. We also have what we are doing on a visibility and telemetry perspective. So we had acquired a company called Nianca, which we are crafting into an edge network intelligence product that then fits in into VMware's overall foray in the space. We have a product suite called VRealize Network Insight. And so that network insight combined with what we are doing from a business unit standpoint gives customers an end-to-end view from an individual client through the cloud, even up to an individual container. And so we call this client to cloud to container. All of this is possible because we are part of VMware. And the last piece of this is something that's gonna happen, we believe next year, which is edge computing. When edge computing comes in, I jokingly say to my team, this acronym of SASE, which is S-A-S-E, you've got to insert a C in the middle. So it becomes S-A-C-S-E. And how does that pronounce? That says SASE. So I know it sounds a little bit awkward, but that C stands for the compute. So as you put compute in, the compute that's gonna run at the edge, the computer that's gonna run at the pop and the SASE is going to become, you know, sassy. And who better to give that to you than VMware? Because, you know, we have that management stack that controls compute for customers today. Well, definitely I think you're drawing from the Elon Musk school of, you know, how to name acronyms and products do. So it's not something that's really interesting. Craig, talk us a little bit about that vision to get there. You know, what do we need to do as an industry? How's the product mature? Give us a little bit of that roadmap forward if you would. Yeah, I think, you know, sassy is really the convergence of five key things. One is this distributed pop architecture. So how do you deliver this compute and these services near to the customer's premise? And that's something that companies like us have had years of experience in building out. And then the four key components of sassy that we have, you know, zero trust access, SD-WAN, next generation firewalling and secure web gateway. We're fortunate, as Sanjay said, to be part of VMware where we don't have to invent some of these components because we already have workspace one and we already have the NSX distributed firewall and we already have VMware SD-WAN. And so a lot of companies you'll see are trying to put all of these parts together. We already had them in-house. We're putting them under one umbrella. The one place where we didn't have a technology within VMware, that's where we're leveraging these partnerships with Memo and Zscaler to get it done. Sanjay, I think the Telco use case that you talked about is a really important one. We've definitely seen, you know, really good adoption from VMware working in those spaces. The one place I want to understand though, if you look at VCF and how that moves to AWS, to Azure, even to Oracle's talked about in the keynote this morning, how does SD-WAN fit into just that kind of traditional hybrid cloud deployment we've been talking about for the last couple of years? Yeah, that's a great question. So you know, when you look at SD-WAN, the name connotes software defined, but it doesn't, it's not specific to branch office access at all. And when you look at VCF, what VCF is doing is really modernizing your compute stack. And now you can run this modern compute stack at your own data centers. You can run it in the private cloud. You can run it on the public cloud as well, right? So you can put these stacks on Amazon, Azure, you know, Google and then run them. So what an SD-WAN architecture allows you to do is not just get your branch and secure users to access the applications that are running on those compute stacks, but you can also intermediate between them. So when customers come in and they say that they want simplified networking and security between two public cloud providers, this is the multi-cloud use case, then getting that networking to work in a seamless fashion with high security can be done by an SD-WAN architecture. And our SASE Pop is perfectly situated to do that. And all you would need to do is add virtual services at the SASE Pop. An enterprise customer would come in and they say they want some VNets here and some VPCs there. They want to look at them in an automated fashion. They want to set it up, you know, with the point and click architecture and not have to do all this manual work and we can get that done. So there's a really good fit between SASE SD-WAN and where VCF is going to solve the multi-cloud problem that people are having right now. Excellent, I really appreciate that explanation. Last thing I guess I'll ask is, you know, here at VMworld, I'm sure you've got a lot of breakouts. You've probably got some good customers sharing some of their stories. So not a miss if it has to be, but we would love if you've got either of you so some examples to help bring home the value that your solutions are delivering. Great, why don't I start with one and then Craig can fill in the other one. So let me start off with the telemedicine example. So we have a customer called MD Anderson Cancer Center and these are the folks in Texas and they provide a really, really important service and that service is providing patients who are critically ill to give them all the kinds of services, whether they come into the clinic or whether they're across a network connection and their radiologists and doctors are sitting at home. So I think it's a very important use case. And we started off by deploying in the hospitals and the clinics, but when COVID hit, they had to send a lot of these folks to work from home. And then when they work from home, it's really this device that goes in, which you can see here. This is our fellow cloud edge and this has said in one of my favorite songs says, there's nothing this box can't do, all right? So this box goes home into the doctor's home and then they are talking to their patient, getting telemedicine done because it solves the problem of performance. Some of those folks have literally said that this thing was a godsend. Now it's not very often that networking people have been told that their products are like godsend. So I'll take that with a little bit of grain of salt, but we are solving a very important problems. Increasing the performance. We are also, this is a secure device. So it's not going to be hacked into and then makes things much more manageable from an IT standpoint. So this is one of those use cases and there's plenty of them, but Craig has his favorite, so I'll turn it over to him. There's so many I could bore you. I think one really interesting one is an investment banking company that we have as a customer. And they used to go work in the office five days a week and everything that they did was on their computer in the office. And with this pivot to work from home post COVID, they think their future is a flexible workforce where sometimes they're in the office and sometimes they're remote. And when they're remote, they're already peeing into their desktop that is staying in their office. And with their legacy remote access VPN solution, they had to connect. Say I'm a user sitting in Southern California, I'm connecting my VPN to Chicago to then come across the network back to Los Angeles to get to my desktop so that I can work from home. And now with Sassy, my secure access client from workspace one connects to the closest Sassy pop. I get to my desktop in my office, tremendously lower latency, tremendously higher quality of experience for the users whether they're at home, on the road, anywhere they need to access that device. Oh, Craig Sanjay, thank you so much. Love the customer examples Sanjay. Good job bringing out the box to show people. It's a software world, but the Sassy hardware is still needed at times too. Thanks for joining. All right, thank you Stu. Thanks, Craig. Cheers. All right, stay with us for more coverage of VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks as always for watching theCUBE.