 Hi everybody, welcome back to the Mandalay Bay. We're here at Cisco Live, this is Dave Vellante, John Furrier in a break. The hall is cranking, it's probably about 20,000 people here this morning in the keynotes. Very exciting keynotes, a message on simplification. I think Cisco nailed it. Ronek Desai is here, he's the Senior Vice President and the General Manager of Cisco AppDynamics, AppD, amazing acquisition that Cisco made a number of years ago. And of course he also looks after a full stack observability, which is the hot topic today. And he's joined by Alice McElroy, the Director of Operational Excellence at Royal Caribbean Group. Welcome to theCUBE, great to see you both. Thank you very much, Dave. Alice, you're very welcome, Alice, your business, wow. I mean it was in the news every day and you kind of were the bellwether you know when the shutdown occurred and then things came back booming. I mean it's been like a slingshot. What's the state of Royal Caribbean today? You know, absolutely, slingshot is a great way to describe it, you know. We're one of the few companies, the only companies that, well one day you're doing full-fledged business and the next day it completely stops. Yeah, and thanks goodness, you know, we're coming back with a boom, the business is looking good. People have that appetite to want to get out and travel and we're just super excited at what the future brings for us. Yeah, ironic, big week for Cisco, right? I mean, huge theme around simplification. We actually wrote a piece prior to Cisco Live, kind of sort of challenging Cisco, like let's see you attack IT complexity, Cisco complexity, and I think you really nailed it. Full stack observability is a key piece of that that's threaded throughout the security cloud, the networking cloud. Explain how important that is and maybe your strategy overall and then we'll get into it a little bit. Yeah, so if you look at it, like we did a little survey with 2000 folks and what we found when it comes to observability, people have somewhere between 10 to 100 tools to monitor, 10 to 100 tools, right? Just think about it. And it's all for every ops domain, right? So there's application guys have their own tools, network guys have their own tools and then security has their own, right? But at the end of the day, when you have application problem, your end users are facing trouble from a performance perspective. It really doesn't matter where you have a problem, right? And so our customers are screaming at us saying, hey, you know what? You need to bring all of this thing together. So we've been on this journey from a full stack perspective where we are looking at bringing the network intelligence, Cisco being networking giant, right? Looking at security and bringing security and application observability from an app dynamics perspective and bringing it together as a set of solution and a capability so that our customers can really try to give that best digital experience, right? And with COVID, I mean, Alice can talk about it, right? Digitization just accelerated, right? Everybody is interacting with your app and that's how they are experiencing your brand, right? So it has become very, very important and this is where we are sort of investing heavily and we had a big announcement today, launching a lot of the things which we talked about at last at Skolau. So very exciting week for us. Yeah, I like it for people not familiar with this space. I mean, it was the old days of full stack observability, really application performance management, lots of logs and metrics and alerts. You ever have your phone blow up and everybody's texting you at once and okay, imagine that times a hundred and it's impacting your business right now. So we do live this every day, right? So paint a picture of your environment for us and really what's your role and your team's role? So yeah, I mean, maybe it's a better place of where we started, you know? So you're absolutely right. We had a challenge that our customers were telling us our websites were down or they couldn't make a cruise booking. We had the challenge of that when those incidents did happen, it took a small army to figure out what was wrong and that triage process of the silos. And then with that, obviously it was increasing our meantime to resolution. So we started this journey of wanting to simplify and figure out, you know, how do we use tools to help us get out of that? And we turned to APTI at that point. We formed a centralized monitoring team. We also had the tool sprawl issue. We tried to simplify the stack in that manner. It was easier for me at that point to list the tools that I didn't own than I do own. So we went through that transformation and as we got APTI in place, we were able to reduce the number of people that it took to resolve issues. And mainly we got great results in our meantime to resolution. We cut it by over 50%. So that's a huge number for us and what does it mean to, it means that this means those critical business applications are still up and running more efficiently and effectively. So would you think about full stack observability? You know, it's sort of a funny term, right? Explain what that means versus not full stack observability. What's different about full stack? So I think the key differentiation in like the way I look at it, full stack, you can imagine what we are talking about, right? But really associating with some of the business metrics which Alice is talking about, right? Is where the secret sauce is, right? This is where we sort of like bringing in, of course we will bring and differentiate ourselves with anything which is out there considering the overreach on networking and security. But adding business context on top of it, right? So that you can have that conversation with your business partners and saying, you know what, I have a performance issue but this is how it's affecting. Like 50% of the customers are getting stuck on the last step when they're trying to book their cruise, right? Getting that level of those business metrics is where we sort of bring it all home together. And that's where it's resonating very well. And I believe that with full stack, tools sprawl, complexity, and the last thing which is from a business partner's perspective, of course, we want to have that great conversation. But even amongst the ops teams, can we create an environment that there is a better collaboration, right? We at Cisco, and you know Cisco for a long time, we're not going to force convergence of the organization in our customers' environment but can we create tools so there's a better and less frictions among the ops teams, right? This is where we are focused on full stack, right? Bring, and observably in my mind, is a data problem. It's not really anything else. So if you solve from that perspective, I think it will help from all those angles. So Alice, what's the scope of observability? And I'm curious, it's obviously important in the transaction system, people trying to swipe a credit card. But then there's the whole customer experience. Have you, does observability extend into that? I mean, it's got to, right? Absolutely, I mean, really we're doing all this because it's about, so Roarkiving has an idea. We're really not a cruise line. We're a company that creates awesome customer experiences and technology is enabling all those experiences. So that's why it was critical for us to understand the applications and those capabilities that technology is enabling. So once again, we began to monitor that. We also have use cases where our e-commerce teams are using the business metrics. So what do I mean by that? We're actually looking at the funnels, the booking funnels, seeing retention rates as the customers travel through that funnel. And when we see drop-offs, we're able to react. Another example of where we're using business metrics is, everyone knows about the war rooms and doing checks. We would sit down and actually have a manual Excel spreadsheet and ask each team, is your system green, yellow, red? Now we've tied monitoring behind that. So there's actual data driving those indicators. And more importantly, we're not just looking at system health, we're looking at business health. So we're also looking at our booking revenue for both our e-commerce channels. Where's the data live? Because it's obviously, you have to pull it from a lot of different systems. Is it in a central data warehouse or is it sort of a real-time monitoring system? So we're using real-time. We are using the real-user monitoring tool so we can watch a transaction from the time that that customer interacts with it, for instance, as a website, all the way through until it reaches the end system. So there's no analytic latency. You're not waiting for a data scientist. I mean, I'm sure you do some analytics in the back end, but in real-time, before you lose the customer, you're able to ideally respond. That's what I define as real-time, before the customer leaves. Because we all know, I think someone was talking to one of those sessions, is like, with this generation, they expect that experience. And if they don't get, that's your brand. And if they don't get the experience they're expecting, you're gone and you don't have the opportunity to regain that customer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and I think to Alice's point, right? Tying that together from a really end-user perspective to the internet in the middle, right? Because the users are coming from all over the world. And I'm sure you access internet from your flight. Of course, yeah. So now when users are coming from all over the place, accessing your application, either in your private data center or a public cloud, and those applications actually are accessing some of the SaaS APIs in the back, right? So there's a big internet in the middle. And this is another one which we did it, where we brought in 1000Is, intelligence which we have it, and then app dynamics and we brought it together. So now you can actually get all the way from your mobile or browser sessions into your application stacks and all the components in the middle, right? And then today morning, I was doing a keynote and we really showed our customers and partners that we can actually see what you're doing on your laptop, masking of PIN information, technology called session replay. So it's almost like I'm watching over your shoulders, what you're doing it, and where you're struggling it, and giving that intelligence to the developers, right? So think about how powerful it is when we bring all of this thing together and easier, meantime to repair, but become proactive, right? And this is where the game is. And your customers, it's a floating data center, right? So what kind of challenges does that bring in terms of observability? So you know, that's where we're hoping to leverage 1000Is even more, because you're right. We have a floating data center that relies on satellite connectivity. And even though we've announced our relationship with Starlink, it's still a satellite, so there's still going to be outages. You know, really, I'm really curious to understand, you know, as transactions do have to come off the ship, go through the satellite and the shore and back, where are our bottlenecks? Where's the bandwidth consumption with that? We're looking forward, we're working with 1000Is to really tune that and get some really good use cases so we can see that performance in the usage. I've always felt like AppD was this sort of asset that could explode. And it seems like now you've got the pieces in place. Do you feel confident that now, especially with 1000Is integration, that it's ready to just really change the game? No, I think you're spot on. What has happened is when we have conversation with just about APM, you lose the customer, because that's so like, okay, fine, I understand the application stack visibility, but I think where most of our customers are saying, you know what, we need to bring this together holistically and look at it and delivering 1000Is AppD together as a full stack use case. Looking at and bringing in Kena security, Panoptika, Talos and AppD together as a something which we call it business's observability. Is where we've done all of this and this is all available, right? This is not like future. This is available now, customers can consume it, right? And I think the big thing which, you know, I'm sure you heard this morning was around the platform, right? This is where we are enabling the partner, like entity, right? And like, can we enable them, right? Because the ecosystem is so complex, we can't potentially build all the capabilities, right? So we want to open up the system for our partners to come in, use the extensibility which we have it in the platform and really kind of solve those use cases which our customers need, right? Okay, so a company like Cisco's never done, right? As a customer, what's next? What do you want these guys to deliver next to make your life easier? And I'm listening and making notes of it. You know, we're really happy to see the expansion. You know, I kind of consider that we've been on this full stack of observability march before it had a fancy name. So we're extremely happy to see the expansion in the time of all the different solutions into one. I think that's definitely the upside for us right now. You've got the sort of platformatization is appealing to you. I feel like, I mean, to me, I saw three clouds this morning, probably security cloud, a network cloud, and a full stack of observability cloud with a thread, a thousand eyes through all of them. And we were just talking to Tom Gillis, there's actually a lot of connectivity. So I would expect over the next couple of years, that's going to become one platform for in terms of how you envision it. Is that the right North Star? Is that the right thing to think about? So when it comes to observability, right? If you look at it from a perspective of how our customers look at it, that's a domain. This is ops teams. Of course we have many ops teams, right? So we don't want to develop tools and sell backup tools, right? We want to sell it as a solution from a platform is a perfect way to do it. So that's a persona we're trying to address, right? And when we talk about networking cloud, right? It's the persona which just looks at Wi-Fi and your campus and your data centers and your internet and et cetera, right? So we're sort of looking at this, but there is absolutely a thread amongst this all, right? So when we look at network and multi-cloud, that observability is going to sit on FSO platform, right? We're not going to create yet another offering just because you want to monitor networking, right? It's going to be part of the FSO. So okay, so the business impact, obviously a better customer experience, but there's also an internal impact in terms of your resource, right? Because you're not running around putting out as many fires. So, A, is that true? And what have you done with that resource? How are you sort of redeploying it? So, you know, right now we are on this quest to reduce the noise and we did realize that we needed some help with that. I also want to make sure that, you know, we are maturity level where we think we are. So long story short, we've partnered with NTT to help us on that journey. You know, I always want to make sure I'm getting the value out of the platform, out of the solution. So NTT has come in and done a maturity assessment and we're working now on action plans of how do we take our current existing apps and even better them getting monitored better and then increase their maturity from like a goal to a platinum level. And with the end result being that I'm going to get more adoption of the platform, I'm engaging my engineering teams again, making sure I've got the usage and I don't have some unknown tools for all out there. Does that involve a rationalization exercise as well as those sort of investigations often do, where you say, you know, where's the real value of my portfolio, if I can consolidate these and double down on those? Absolutely, absolutely it does. And I think, you know, it also helps us look overall, are we really going in the right direction? You know, because what's going to be key to us? You asked earlier, where are we going? You know, we've gone from that reactive to proactive. I want to get to predictive and I've got to have clean data. So I'm hoping that what we're doing with NTT and this maturation will get us to a predictive and set us up for AI. Anticipatory, all right, Ronek, we'll give you the last word, I know you guys. Yeah, no, I think it's super excited. Anybody listening to this, I just want them to look at three things, FSO, business observability, and that end user data digital monitoring, right? We all have that three demos working on the booth here. So if you are listening to this, please go visit. Exciting week for us, products are here to your point. This is the time for us to take off. Yeah, well congratulations and awesome to see you guys back booming and really thrilled for you. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much, Alice. Thank you, Dave. All right, our pleasure. All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante, John Furrier, we back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE at Cisco Live 2023 from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, right back.