 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this CUBE conversation where we welcome an ESG senior analyst, Bob LaLiberte. Bob, good to see you. Great to see you too. Thanks for having me. So, love it. I love to have the analyst session. Set it up. What's your scope? What's your area of expertise? Yeah, so my coverage area right now is networking in its entirety. So that spans everything from enterprise networking, wired, wireless, campus, data center, et cetera, all the way up through telco and cloud networking. So how do you look at the landscape? I mean one of the big things I think about a lot is how does the shift to cloud migration? How does that affect the existing network players? I mean you've got Cisco as the big whale and it's amazing to me. They still have whatever percent markets here. They have 60, 65% of the market. Are things, what's happening in the competitive landscape? How is cloud affecting that? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think the interesting piece is so many times organizations think about the network as plumbing. But the reality is it's really important plumbing because as you talk about cloud and things get more distributed, well guess what connects those distributed locations? It's the network. And so organizations as they've moved to the cloud, you've seen a big shift with things like SD-WAN and so forth. How do I get more efficient connectivity up to that cloud? How do I not only enable better connectivity between my data centers in the cloud but now all my remote workers in the cloud? And so there's been a lot of big shifts going on that have driven the importance of having not only a network but secure networks. So like I said, cloud is one thing and you're moving your applications there but with the pandemic you saw the remote work. So think about the network administrators who were managing, hey, I've got to control network connections between my data centers, a couple clouds and maybe dozens, maybe a hundred remote branches. And now I'm connecting to 10,000 micro branches that I need to ensure that they can connect up to these applications and so forth. So hell of a lot more complex environment today than it used to be for these network teams. When we look at what we're seeing how the networking providers are responding, it's by driving comprehensive end-to-end solutions. So unifying wired wireless and WAN, driving efficiencies there. You're seeing even thousand eyes for Cisco and things like that because they know the internet's becoming more integral part of the corporate network. So being able to drive those types of things, being able to I think look at how to drive those operational efficiencies through AI and ML. So one of the big shifts we've seen in networking is the transition to cloud-based network management. And obviously that couple of things that helps with, first of all, the operations teams who are working remotely can more easily access it. But once all that data's up in the cloud, it creates a platform to be able to invest in AI, ML and be able to drive intelligent alerting and even automation. And that's really what's needed because as the environments get more distributed and complex, you need to have those operational efficiencies, that automation, that intelligence to help them. How has remote work and hybrid work affected sort of network spending priorities? I mean, obviously when the pandemic hit, you had to accommodate end points. And I always have this theory, okay, when people come back to the office, and I know it's going to be a different world, but the HQ probably needs some love as well. So has that been a tailwind for the industry? Yeah, absolutely. That's what we're seeing now. I think when the pandemic first hit, everyone said, I've got to ramp up my VPNs. I've got to scale out my concentrators. I've got to add more firewalls in my data center. And then after a while, when they realized this was here to stay, they said, okay, we just created that hub and spoke network that we just got rid of with SD-WAN. So what are the better solutions we can implement? So now you're seeing them, not only implement better networking solutions for the remote workers, but reimagining what the campus looks like. Because it's not going to be ever 100% full or maybe it will, but for how many times a year will it be 100% full? So you've got to go from 80% cubes and 20% conference and collaboration areas to 80% collaboration areas and 20% cubes. So we're seeing a lot of transition taking place in the campus environment as organizations are deploying newer technologies like Wi-Fi 6E that have greater bandwidth to allow for those collaboration apps to run in those collaboration areas instead of just having the single wired conference room for video, right? Everyone's got to be able to run their voice and video collaboration app. So how do you look at the landscape now? I mean, again, we can't talk about networking without talking about Cisco. They've up there, I saw you and Zia's talking about Cisco's quarter and other networking topics. You know, they're up, their long-term guidance is for 6% growth for a company that size, that's really outstanding. I mean, Cisco's really has always been an execution machine, of course. It's a new era now under Chuck. But so you got that, but you know, there's more than ankle biters. If you look at Aristos doing pretty well, there's guys like Extreme, there's others that are out there, but nobody seemed to be able to unseat Cisco. What's happening in the landscape? Well, yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, Cisco's just been around for so long and been so big for so long. And you have to also keep in mind that with Cisco, it's not just about the technology, but the fact from a, if you think about it from a cultural standpoint, these are workers who have been trained on Cisco since some of them, since high school, right? The educational component that Cisco has done has groomed generations of network technologists. So when they come into the market, right, they're fully familiar and used to Cisco. Plus they make a really good product and they've got products that cover everything, right? They cover the whole gambit. So they're still able to maintain their share, they're able to grow, right? They're able to move. They've made a shift last year, they announced in last spring that they were going to focus more on end to end. So instead of just having, hey, here's a point product, here's a point product, here's a point product, let's think about it in its entirety, let's deliver a complete end to end solution, solve bigger problems for customers, which obviously makes it much harder to remove when you're just trying to remove a piece of that single problem. But the other competitors are also having good years, right? And I think also the rising tide floats all boats. And so because of this distributed nature, the importance of the network, everyone is doing that. Plus obviously this has to be said the supply chain issues where people are ordering ahead as well. But organizations, you look at ERISTA, they've gone from just being a data center company to expanding all the way down to the campus edge, wireless, right? They're creating an end to end environment. Extreme did the same thing, right? They went out and made a lot of acquisitions. They pulled them all together, integrated. They're all moving to this cloud based, right? End to end network management. ERISTA has been on a tear, bringing in a lot of, not only innovative technology, but innovative technologists. So if you look at some of the organizations they bought, you call it a Route 128, it's 128 technologies. Okay, so sorry folks, I live in Massachusetts. It's always been Route 128. You remember when, don't you? But yeah, 128 technologies, MIST was their big, MIST was kind of like their VMware, right? VMware to EMC was, MIST was to Juniper. And so we call it the mystification of Juniper, where every organization, every company they bring in, they're rolling under that and MIST is the AI engine. So they're bringing in the 128 technologies into that. They've got their own stuff under that, their wired switches. So they've got this unified wired and wireless and WAN assurance now that they have. So they've been gaining a lot of traction with that. And again, for the things we were talking about, because it's far more distributed and complex, you need to have, it's not like people are getting replaced. It's not like, hey, we're leveraging this automation. So that we can get rid of network teams. It's because it's getting so much more complex, just to have the same number of people manage that more complex environment, we need those intelligent solutions. So I want to ask you about networking and multi-cloud. And so it's kind of tongue in cheek because we coined this term super cloud. And so what we meant by that, so here's the premise, and I wonder if you could give us your perspective. So multi-cloud, I've said many times is, I think largely a symptom of multi-vendor. I run in this, I run in AWS or Azure, I've done the work to understand their primitives and or Google, whatever it is, but it's not like an abstraction layer that's floating above all those, but now you're starting to see that. In fact, it reinvent in November, the ecosystem, it seemed like was, everybody was focused on developing what we call the super clouds. And again, it's tongue in cheek, this abstraction layer, it hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs adds incremental value on top of that. So there's a company ProSimo, which Steve Herrod is invested in and others, Praveen Akiraju, you know, from Viptella. Aviatrix is another company that's sort of, Steve Mulaney has come on theCUBE and talked about what they're doing. Like, yeah, that's super cloud. So it seems like it's something new and different than just multi-cloud, which is kind of connecting in to different clouds. It's that value on top. What do you think about that? And what does that mean for networking? Yeah, no, that's a really good point because we are starting to see the inception of organizations going beyond having multiple cloud providers and looking at starting to deploy applications across multiple clouds. It's still really early. The vast majority of organizations are still, I use this application for this cloud and this application for that cloud, but that's the next frontier. So that's what they're trying to solve is, how do I create this basically cloud fabric and make it as simple as possible? And again, all the things we've been talking about, how do I, instead of you having to learn Amazon, Google, right, Azure networking technology, learn mine. I'll take care of it. I'll abstract all that complexity from you and make it so much simpler to be able to connect to these, interconnect and connect to them in a seamless fashion. And so that's what they're really trying to do, is they're, right, and the hard part is it takes really sophisticated solutions to remove that high level of complexity and make it simple for an organization to do that. So yeah, absolutely. If I had more time, I'd make it shorter as somebody writes a lot. Exactly. So, okay, and I think you're right. I think it is future. It's definitely not here today, but the other thing is it ties into digital transformation. You know, we used to, again, throw that buzzword around, but companies, not just tech company, I mean, everybody's becoming like a tech company, but organizations, financial services companies, healthcare, they're building their own clouds on top of the hyperscalers who spend $100 billion a year on CapEx. And that seems to be a trend that I think is going to take legs over this next decade is, just like in the previous decade, everybody was thinking, okay, we're going to sassify our business, software's eating the world, and now it's software and cloud services are the way in which I'm going to create customer experiences. Correct. Yeah, it's why should I go out and make an investment in technology when the technology's already there and I can rent it for when I need it, scale it as I need it and do all of that. So I agree with that. I think that's something that we're seeing. And you know, the interesting part though is that when we look at our data points, I, you know, probably less than 40% of the applications and workloads are in the cloud today. Right, so there's still a role that the corporate data center plays. We are seeing over time, they expect that to progress and transition, but I think there's still always going to be maybe a quarter of the workloads and applications may never leave, right? Depending on how they're built, et cetera. So there's always going to be that distributed environment where you've got workloads in the private data centers, workloads in multiple public clouds, and also that the big thing too is don't forget about the edge, right? We're seeing a lot more edge activity take place as organizations recognize as they deploy more IoT devices and want to get real-time business insights, they've got to deploy the compute there. Well, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about, but going back to what you just said, which is I agree with you. So that suggests to me, Bob, that we're just kind of with cloud just entering the steep part of the S curve. I mean, Amazon's headed toward $100 billion run rate business. Maybe they probably won't get there this year, but they will next year, but we're entering that steep growth phase. It really could be, I mean, it's incredible, but I wanted to ask you about the edge because you're right, we've got to move compute to the edge. ARM is going to dominate, I would think, the edge. They already are with our smartphones. How do you see the cloud guys participating in the edge? Whether it was Andy Jassy or now Adam Salipsky or anybody at Amazon, they have the dogma of in the fullness of time, all workloads are going to be in the cloud. So they either have to change their definition of cloud or they're wrong. So what's your thought on that? Yeah, I think it really starts coming down to what's your definition of edge. And so much like when the cloud technologies first came about and you had all the shadow IT, everyone running off and everyone thought, oh, this is all great. Until you realize you had to operationalize it and you had to pull the brakes, stop doing that, we're going to make sure IT operations. Call the CIO? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Finding out where stuff was by going through accounting and seeing credit card charges. For the edge, what we've seen, I think, is maybe organizations really saying, I've got to deploy my servers in my own site right at that edge in order to get the lowest possible latency. And so what I think we're starting to see is organizations looking at that and saying, okay, well, I'm in a metro and I've got 25 locations in a metro and I've deployed technology to every single one of those sites. Do I need it there or can I put it in an Equinix facility that's less than five milliseconds from all 25 sites? So I think there's starting to be this pragmatic approach of looking at, let's look at the edge, let's take a look at what type of latencies, what is our definition of real time, right? When do we actually need the data and so forth? What kind of connectivity do we have? And then from there, figure out how we go about connecting it. And so for companies like AWS and Google and Azure, a lot of them, there's the local zones and things like that, they're deploying them in those colos because they don't have data centers in every metro but they can leverage an Equinix, they can leverage someone else's hardware that's there to deploy their software stack within that location. So I think that's something that we're starting to see more and more of is the edge and obviously the association with the telcos as well. They've got a great footprint if you want to get close to the edge with their colos, right, their home offices and things like that and whatnot. So their ability to move the compute closer to the edge, the base stations of the antennas and things like that are certainly significant and that's why you're seeing the wavelengths and things like that, programs like that. So I was going to close but there's some really interesting topics you just brought up. So call it, what are we going to call it? Near edge, far edge or deep edge. So and you mentioned real time. So for those Equinix data centers, I don't need, you know, true real time, right? But for Tesla, I need real time. I need real time inference at the edge, probably using a bunch of ARM cores and I can't go back to any cloud. So how do you look at that? I mean, both, I would think big markets, do you have a sense as though is one bigger than the other or are they both just enormous or we don't even know yet? Yeah, I'm not sure that we know yet. I think certainly, you know, it's riding the tail of the IoT. So the more sensors, the more things that are deployed, the more that that data, businesses realize they can leverage that data to make real time business insights to drive either better experiences or if you're in retail, right? So location based services and real time offer management. It doesn't do any good to offer a coupon for something that you've, that's 40 yards behind you, right? That's past, like you said with the cars, there's, I've seen some studies recently they say, well, based on the latency, if the, if the command is to stop and it's, you're at one millisecond, it stops within four inches. If you are at 50 milliseconds, it stops 10 feet later, right? That's a big difference. You know, and I don't know if those numbers are right, but you get the idea about the impact, what the real time impact is. Margin for error is not huge. Exactly. So, so that's where organizations, I think first and foremost need to take a pragmatic approach to determine what is real time for us? What's our definition of it? And then that can lead them to where do I need to place this compute technology? And then that goes to how do I then connect to it? So for the Teslas and so forth, obviously you're going to want 5G connections if possible, right? Ultra low latency and not just any 5G, right? The, the good stuff, the, the millimeter bandwidth stuff that's the ultra low latency. All right, so let's wrap. So, so what's going on in your research world? Obviously the big, big acquisition tech target, they seem to be investing in ESG guys are really, really growing and hiring. That's awesome. Any research that you're working on? Yeah, there's a couple of, a couple of projects we have going on right now. We're, we're wrapping up a four part distributed cloud research series. So we did it on distributed cloud infrastructure, applications, observability. And now this last one is on the edge coincidentally. So we're working on that. We've got some new network modernization research that we've published. And we're going to be looking from a networking perspective, looking at end to end network modernization, which will be coming out soon. Awesome. Bob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really would love to have you back and chat about some of those things. Observability, hot space, God, I wish we had more time. All right, thanks again. Absolutely, appreciate it, thanks. And thank you for watching this CUBE Conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.