 Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another Cube conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders from around the industry to bring you the best ideas and insights about how to improve your business with technology. One of the many things that CIOs and business leaders have to think about is how are they going to execute digital transformations? What will be the priorities? We all know the relationship between digital transformation and the use of data differently, but different technologies assert themselves in a different way, and very important, different relationships, especially with cloud vendors, assert themselves in different ways. And that's one of the many challenges that CIOs have to deal with today. Serve the business, better attend to those relationships, and drive the company forward to achieve its own outcomes and objectives. So to have that conversation today, we've got a great guest. Thor Wallace is the Senior Vice President and CIO at NetScout. Thor, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what the CIO at NetScout does. So let me start by telling you a little bit about NetScout. So NetScout is a network monitoring and a service assurance company. As the CIO, I'm obviously responsible for providing the tools and the environment for running the company. I'm also heavily involved in, for example, understanding the applications and the business direction that we're taking. We're also working on improving our customer relationships and experiences. For example, we have a customer portal that we're sort of reevaluating and sort of improving. And we're also obviously trying to drive user productivity worldwide. We have very briefly about 33 locations worldwide. We're headquartered here outside of Boston and have large offices both in Texas and California. So you're a traditional supplier of technology services that's trying to make a transition to this new world. And as part of that, NetScout itself is going through digital transformation so that it can better support its customers' digital transformations. We got that right? Exactly. So let me tell you a little bit about sort of what we're trying to achieve, what some of the whys are and sort of where we are at this moment. Yeah, so we as a company are being challenged by the same sort of environment that everyone else is being challenged with, which is to be able to move as quickly as we can and provide as much of an impact to our customers as possible. So how I've read that sort of mandate and that remit is to really focus on improving our customer experiences, as I said, working with a new sort of new platform and re-platforming and refactoring our application, our customer service application, but also really focusing on how best to improve user productivity. So those are the areas that we've been focusing on, driving IT productivity is important to me. So that's a fairly substantial argument for moving operations to the cloud. And we're also part of that is transforming sort of a hardware-based environment to a much more of a virtualized and software-based environment. So that includes cloud, that includes virtualization, which we've obviously taken a lot of ground on. And for example, what we've already done is virtualized all of our operations in the data center. Over the years, we've also moved a lot of workloads to cloud, we're, you know, cloud agnostic, but, you know, we have a fairly large environment. It was salesforce.com, we use Office 365, which are obviously major applications on the cloud. So we have a workload that's quite mixed for today. We maintain on-prem data centers. We have a fairly large engineering footprint as well. So we kind of live in all of the worlds. So we live obviously on-prem, we have cloud. And one of the things that I think we've learned over the years is that in order to continue the journey of cloud, we need to really worry about a couple things. One is we want to make sure that we keep our operations in an excellent place. So, and I can talk more about that in a few minutes. And as I said, we want to continue to maintain our ability to execute in really what I call velocity to be able to add value. And so cloud actually presents some of those opportunities for us, but it also obviously makes things quite complicated in that we have multiple environments. We have to make sure that people still get the services and the applications they need to do their job and provide those in a very productive way, in a cost-effective way, so that we can maintain that as an IT organization. So you've got Salesforce.com, you've got Office 365, you've got some other objectives of moving some other applications up into the cloud. Each of those applications though, has been historically associated with a general purpose network that you get to control. So that you can give different quality of service to different classes of workload or applications. How is that changing? And what pressures is that putting on your network as you move to more cloud-based operations? Well, I think that's a huge challenge for us and I think, frankly, for most people, I think you have to rethink how your network is designed fundamentally from the ground up. And if you think about networks in the past, you know, in mainly an on-prem world, you basically had a backhaul, a lot of traffic in our case, 33 locations worldwide, a lot of backhauling of services and transactions back to wherever that application exists. So for example, historically, we've had Office, excuse me, the Microsoft mail system or exchange on-prem. We have, you know, other services that are on-prem, for example, Oracle and our ERP system, et cetera. And the challenge was to move all that traffic back to basically our core data center. And as you move to the cloud, you have an opportunity actually to rethink that. So what we've been in the process of doing over the last, say, year has been to redesign our network from the ground up and moving away from sort of the central monolithic network to more of a cloud slash edge-based network. So with that, we've also moved from hardware, basically a fairly heavy investment in hardware in each of the offices, for example. And we're now, we've actually been in the process very far along in the process of converting all that hardware into a software-defined network that allows us to do some things that we have never been able to do operationally. For example, we can make deployments sort of from one central location worldwide, both for security and patching, et cetera. And so what we've also done is we've moved, as I said, we have a lot of our workloads already in the cloud and we continue to put more in the cloud. One of the things that's becoming important is we've got to maintain and create actually a low-latency environment. So for example, ultimately putting our unified communication systems and technologies in the cloud, to me, worries me without having a low-latency environment and a low-latency network so that we can actually provide dial-to worldwide without worrying about performance. So what we've already done is we've transitioned from the centralized network into an edge-based network. We've actually have now a partner that we now are putting in services into a local presence idea worldwide into three locations for equinex. And with that comes the software-based network and allows us to move traffic directly to the edge. And therefore, once we're at the edge, we can go very quickly at backbone speeds into whatever cloud service we need, whether it's Azure, AWS, or Salesforce, or any other provider, Office 365. We can get that sort of speed and low-latency. That has created a new environment for us, which is now virtual, software-based. Gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility in moving what I consider fairly heavy and significant workloads that remain on-prem. It gives us the option of moving that to the cloud. So with that, one of the key things that comes with that is holding, making sure that we can hold our vendors very accountable for performance. So for example, if we experience an issue with Office 365 performance, whether it's in Pune or in Westford or wherever it is, we wanna be able to make sure that we have the information and the data that says to Microsoft in this case, hey, you know, we're actually, the performance isn't great from wherever those users are, wherever that office is. So we wanna provide them information and to basically prove that our network or our internal sort of capabilities and network are performing very well, but maybe that there's an issue with something and performance on their side. So without this sort of fact-based information, it's really hard to have those discussions with vendors. So one of the things I think is important for everyone to consider when you move more to the cloud is you've gotta have the ability to troubleshoot and make sure that you can actually maintain a very complicated environment. So one of the things we have done is we continue to do is use our own products, actually, to give greater visibility than we've ever had before in this new sort of multi, this multi sort of cloud, multi-prem environment. So which is a very powerful thing for us and the team that is using this technology is sort of seeing visibility, things that they've never really been able to see before. So that's been quite exciting, but I think that's sort of, frankly, table stakes moving forward into a deeper, more cloud or sort of workload independent model that we're seeking. Well, so one of the, let me build on this because I have conversations like this all the time and I don't think people realize the degree to which some of these changes are really gonna change the way that they actually get work done. When you have control of the network and the application and the endpoints, if there's an issue, you can turn to someone who works for you and say, here's the deal, fix this or I'll find somebody else that can fix it. So you have an employment based almost model of coercion. You can get people to do what you want to do, but when you move into the cloud, you find yourself having to use a contracting approach to actually get crucial things done and problems crop up either way. Doesn't matter if you own it all or somebody else owns it all, you're gonna encounter problems and so you have to accelerate and diminish the amount of back and forth haggling that goes on and as you said, the best way to do that is to have fact-based, evidence-based visibility into what's actually happening so that you can pinpoint and avoid the back and forth about whose issue it really is. Exactly, I mean, at the end of the day, IT is still responsible for user productivity. So whether somebody's having an application issue in terms of availability or frankly, if it's not performing up to what it should be, you're still accountable as an organization and regardless of where the workloads are, it could be as you point out, back in the day, you could always go to your data center and do a lot of investigation and really do a lot of troubleshooting within the four walls. Today, you just don't have that visibility, you don't have that luxury, call it. And so it was a whole new world and we all are relying increasingly on vendors. Which means a contracting style of coordinating and getting things done. Which presents an issue and sort of having these conversations with a vendor or a contractor, regardless of your relationship with them, you're still, again, you're on the hook for doing this. So you've got to have some facts, you've got to have some story to have to show in terms of, hey, we're good on this side. The issue really is on you and we've actually had situations, whether it was performance issues or service interruptions or bugs from different vendors where they've impacted the Netscout organization. And without deep understanding of what's going on, you really don't have anywhere to go. You really have to have this sort of greater visibility. And this is one of the things that is a lesson learned from at least from the journey that we're taking. And so I think that's part of the story of the cloud and sort of migration and virtualization story is you really have to have this new found visibility. So I think that's been really important for us. So I'm gonna see if I can't generalize that a little bit because I think it's a great point. As you go into a network redesign to support good operations, excellent operations in a cloud, you have to also go into a sourcing and information redesign so that you can be assured that you're getting the information you need to sustain the degree of control or approximate the control that you had before. Otherwise, you've got great technology but no way to deal with problems when they arise. Exactly. And as I said, we've seen this movie and without having what we have, I think we would have struggle as an organization actually to resolve the issue. And that's not good for the company because IT part of the mandate and the remit for us is to make sure that people are as productive as it can be. And so not having the ability to provide that environment is actually a huge problem for I think a lot of people. And one of the ways we are working with it is to have that sort of visibility. It also means upgrading the team skills which we've done a lot of work on. So you take folks that are in IT that may have had a certain set of skills sort of in the on-prem environment, call it. Those skills are quite different in that in the sort of cloud or the mixed exposure environment. So I think upskilling, having more information, better information is really part of the story that we're learning and that part of that part of it. Because at the end of the day, it's not about upgrading the network, it's about upgrading the network capabilities. Exactly, yeah. And you can't do that, especially in the new world if you don't upgrade your ability to get information about how the whole thing is working together. Exactly. All right, Thor Wallace, Senior Vice President, CIO at Netscout, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you. And once again, I want to thank you for participating in today's conversation. Until next time.