 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. And welcome back to Las Vegas. Good afternoon to you. No matter where you're watching here in the U.S., we know it is afternoon as we wind up our coverage here day three at AWS re-invent here on theCUBE. One of seven venues we're in right now that's hosting various satellite events right now. We're in the Sands Expo. We're back at night, John Walls with Russ Curry, the Vice President of Enterprise Strategy at NetScout. Russ, good to see you, sir. Nice to see you again. I got to be careful. I've got two Bostonians of sorts here. Sorry, sorry. If I don't get something on the accent, you just let me know, all right? We'll talk amongst ourselves. Sorry if you're sports inferior. Just talk slowly. You're the champion, whatever. Russ, if you would. First off, your take about what you're seeing here because here we are day three. As you know, you've been in a lot of shows. Day three kind of usually hits a different gear, right? It slows down a little bit. There's still a lot of excitement here. There are still a lot of people around. This show has a little different vibe to it. It really does and it's interesting because it becomes a little bit more serious, I think. At this point in day three for this show, it's now people are really kind of, they've been exposed to an awful lot in the last three days and they're really saying, okay, now I really want to understand the nuts and bolts of it. And they're spending a little bit more time sitting and learning and understanding what you have to offer them in terms of your solution sense. So it's been an awful lot of fun. Also, we did a couple of speaking engagements so it's really good getting the folks that went and saw our guys speak and then come into the booth and say, I want to talk more about that. Well, I want to talk more about that. So you have a new marketing campaign, but first, for the viewers who are not familiar with NetScout, you're a Fortune 500 company, but tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you do. Right, so what we do is we provide visibility into the communications between servers and clients and basically see all of the traffic that traverses the network and whether the network is in a public cloud, a private cloud, or a non-prem environment. And by looking at that traffic, we're able to understand the performance of the services that are being delivered and ensure the security and performance of those services. So by providing that perspective, we give IT the tools that they need to get quicker to the mean time to knowledge, identifying where a problem might be or where a risk may exist and being able to solve those tough problems. So it's been a year since you've been on theCUBE. I know the esteemed John Walls interviewed you. We go way back. Yes. What's new this year? What sort of advancements, progressions have you implemented? So last year when we came in was really our first entry into the public cloud environment and our first entry into AWS. Since then, we've got a lot of really good traction, a lot of embracing of our technology. We partnered more closely with AWS and got ourselves onto the marketplace. We also enhanced our partnership with VMware and now we're part of their NetX integration so we have high levels of integration into both of those platforms, which of course is strong to this entire audience. We've introduced new features and functionality into our product to be able to provide greater visibility, even go deeper into understanding the way the applications are functioning and also added some more security profiling into our product and being able to identify threats as they come into the enterprise network and also as they go out. So it's been interesting. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. When you talk about the hybrid cloud, obviously we're hearing that here this week, right? So AWS is obviously slightly shifting its perspective a bit in terms of on-prem and dealing with the public cloud as well and find that merger. Your clients, is there any arm twisting that you still have to do or are people buying into it a little more wholeheartedly now in terms of the public cloud and that you've addressed these security concerns? I think actually we becoming an enabler and often times for our customers to move to the cloud with confidence where they kind of were a little bit concerned that as they move into the cloud, what kind of investment and tools are they going to have to make? What are they going to potentially lose as they provide that put their workloads into the cloud? Do they lose a degree of visibility and control? And what we've been able to do is ensure that they have that same experience no matter where they deploy. We were talking earlier about one of our customers that's in the travel and entertainment business and they have been using our gear on cruise ships and in their on-prem data center but have expanded themselves into AWS to extend their capabilities and provide a better user experience for those on ship and now what they really have is the ability to have visibility from ship to shore to cloud and have that perspective and have the confidence that they're delivering a high quality experience to their customers. Ship to shore to cloud, not every company can say that. There you go, exactly. But speaking of mottos, you have a new marketing campaign, visibility without borders. What does that mean? What are you trying to evoke there with your customers? What we're really trying to look at there is the ability to provide visibility no matter where you're deployed. If you have a deployment in a public cloud environment like AWS, you want to have that same level of visibility in your on-prem environment, you want to have it no matter where you have a workload, wherever you have an instance that you want to manage, you want to have that same perspective. One of the things we talk about a little bit is the idea that providing a single pane of glass into the service assurance experience. And I think that oftentimes when people try to get to that single pane of glass, they end up with more of a single glass of pain. They're trying to aggregate so much stuff that really doesn't come together real well. But because we focus in on the data source itself, then it just provides that continuity regardless of where they deploy. And the importance of visibility obviously when you talk about end-to-end right now and whether you're on-prem again or whether in the public cloud, you're not particular, right? As a user, I just want to see my operation from start to finish and I don't care where it is. Exactly. I mean, it's providing that end-to-end perspective and being able to understand how I'm delivering services, what the customer experience is no matter where I deploy. And especially when we take a look at taking advantage of some of the elastic compute capabilities and the like that exists in the cloud, you want to ensure that you're actually getting what you pay for as well. You want to have those controls in place that you're knowing that what you're delivering is meaningful and impacting the business in a positive way as opposed to potentially a negative way and spending too much for something that doesn't improve anything in terms of the customer experience. So from the customers, when they want to talk about return on investment, what excites them most? I mean, what kind of things are you showing them that is delighting them? Oftentimes it's really about meantime to knowledge. We spend a lot of time pointing fingers at each other when we're trying to solve a problem instead of pointing our fingers at the problem. And that's really what we try to focus in on, really getting down into the real details of why something is not performing properly, not what might be performing improperly. So being able to really get down to that detail and get the right people working on the right problem. I often talk about it in terms of getting the right information to the right person at the right time to do the right thing. And if you're able to do that, you're going to provide a better user experience to your customers. You mentioned that a lot of your personnel, a lot of your folks who have been speaking, talking to various groups, I always find that interesting, right? Because it's usually the Q and A. Yes. That when things pop up. So if you had to generalize about the kind of feedback you're getting from those sessions in terms of the questions, the concerns, the challenges, what are you hearing from folks out there? It's kind of funny. One of the things that we get a lot of times is like, are you really can do this? You know, is this real what you're showing? And it's like, yes, this is actual traffic. We're showing you exactly what we're seeing. And then they are often pretty amazed at our ability to bring this all into something that visualizes these complex applications that they're delivering across multiple different environments. And they have that aha moment where they go, oh gosh, I really need this. You know, this is really that end to end view that I've been looking for for so long, but I really can't get when I use a bunch of disparate tools to try to bring that together. So what you've just described is really the definition of innovation, which is providing customers with things that they want, that they maybe didn't even know they wanted. How do you stay innovative? I mean, here we are at AWS, Amazon, one of the most innovative companies on the planet in the history of the industry. How does a company, you're based in Westford, Massachusetts, how do you stay on the cutting edge? We spend an inordinate amount of time working with our customers and listening to them in terms of where they're going, what their plans are, what new technologies might they be implementing. What are their major initiatives? We regularly reach out and we have constant contact with them to get that feedback and make sure that we're developing solutions that are meaningful to them. It's really about not what neat feature can I deliver, but what can I provide as value that's going to make their lives better? Because as an IT person, it's a tough job, right? You're usually the person that people look at and say, why isn't this working? And not being able to have an answer to that is not a good position to be in, right? So what we're really trying to do is provide them with that answer and give them that ability to be able to answer the tough questions and solve those tough problems. And you talk about finger pointing, it happens, right? It does, you know? Right. So what we're really all about is making sure that they're able to get the problem solved as quickly as possible. One of the interesting things I've been hearing from our customers too is that they're looking to this concept of a versatileist rather than having just a straightforward specialist coming in to work on problems, having people that are a little bit broader in terms of their capabilities and looking at things, not only from the perspective say I'm a network guy, I'm going to look at the network and the app guy's going to look at the app, you've got to cross-pollinate a little bit and provide that ability to see sides of that problem. So that's starting to happen in our customers. Which certainly presents a challenge for your workforce, right? And all of a sudden, you've got to be a little smarter and wear a lot of different hats. Exactly. Versatilist, I like that, you heard it here first. Russ, if you're going to go ship the short of cloud, you let us know. Okay. Because we want to take that journey with you, all right? There we go. All right? Love to. Thanks for being with us again. Good to see you. Thank you. It was a pleasure. You bet. Safe trip home. Back with more here from AWS re-invent. You are watching us live on theCUBE.