 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here at Cisco Live 2019 in Europe. This is theCUBE's three days of wall-to-wall card day two. I'm John Furrier, your host, but Dave Vellante co-hosting with me, as well as Stu Miniman who's been in and out on interviews. Our next guest is Alex Penthorne Iwani, Vice President of Marketing for our company, Thousand Eyes. Welcome back to theCUBE, welcome to the show. Thanks, great to be here. So talk about what you guys do for us. I guess do a very interesting business, rapidly growing business. What is Thousand Eyes? What do you guys do? What's your product? Who's your customer? Okay, so the vision of Thousand Eyes was really to help organizations deal with all the connected experiences that they have to deliver. So we're giving visibility into those connected experiences but not just how they're, you know, if they're working or not, but all the external dependencies that they rely on. So we developed a ton of expertise on how the internet works, how the networks work, how routing works and all that. And we can give that insight so that all the things that IT now no longer controls and owns, but has to own the outcome for, we're giving that visibility. And you guys sell out SaaS solutions of software, what's the product? Yeah. Who's the buyer? So we're a SaaS platform. And the way that we gather this data is we're primarily doing active monitoring at a few different layers. So we're monitoring the app layer, things like HTTP and page loads and things like that. You would think of that as a synthetics, classically, but we've paired that with some patented ways of understanding how everything connects from a user out in the internet or from a branch office or from a data center out to somewhere else, typically across the internet. All those networks, the cloud networks, going through things like Zscaler, all those complex pieces that, again, you don't control. We can trace all that and then map it down even to internet routing. What are the kind of cool thing we add into all that? We do that on an agent basis, so we have agents around the world and you can put them in your data centers, your VPCs and your branches. And the value proposition is what? It's visibility into the patterns, optimization. What's the outcome for the customer? The outcome is ultimately that we're going to help IT deliver the digital experiences for their employees, for their customers, that could be e-commerce, e-banking, could be open banking or PSD2 here in Europe and the UK. So full knowledge of what's going on. Right. And the name talks to that. It just talks to the problem that you're solving. Right, and it's really, the focus is, and our specialty is all the external things. You've always had a lot of data, maybe too much data, on the stuff that you did own in IT. Okay, you could collect packets and flows and device status and all that sort of thing and sort of, but a challenge was always to know, what does that mean? But whether or not that's perfect, it existed. But you simply can't get that from outside. Yeah. So you just have this big drop-off in visibility once you get to the edge of your data center, et cetera. Alex, talk about the dynamics in IT. We were talking before we came on camera here about, you know, our lives in IT and going back and look at the history and how it's changed. But there are new realities now. Certainly Cisco here, we're talking about intent-based networking, ACI anywhere, HyperFlex anywhere, the ecosystems growing, the world's changed, security challenges, IOT, the whole things, completely going, high, large scale, more complexity. IT, what's the impact to IT? What's the structural change of IT from your perspective? Well, the way we see it, what's happening with IT is the move from owning and controlling all the stuff. It's, you know, and managing that, granting access to that, to a world where, you really don't own a lot of the stuff anymore. You don't own the software, you don't own the networks, you don't own the infrastructure increasingly, right? So how do you operate in that world? Changes. What the role of IT is in that world really changes. And then out of that comes a big question, is how does IT retain relevance in that world? And a lot of the role is shifting away from being that proprietor, to being more of like a manager of an ecosystem, right? And you need data to do that. So that's one of the, that's, I think, a really big thing. This is now a actually job description kind of thing. The roles and the makeup of the personnel in IT is changing because of the SaaS, cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. It's more like a product management role than it is the classic operations role, you know? And we observe some really big changes in just operations. Like, so when you own all the stuff, you can find and fix, right? That's a classic statement of IT operations. But when all the stuff is outside, you can't fix it directly. So you go into what we call evidence and escalation. You have to actually persuade someone else to fix it for you. And if you can't persuade them, you don't have governance, you don't have accountability, and you don't have the outcome that you're supposed to deliver. So the infrastructure is a service players, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, more SaaS, all this is taking data away from your control and obviously network visibility. So how are you guys dealing with that? What are some of the nuances of whether it's SaaS or different infrastructures as service providers? And I would add to that, you know, SD-WAN, shift to the internet, I would add to that just the increasing number of digital experiences that companies offer to customers, right? So the way that we deal with that is that we believe that you need a highly correlated way of understanding things because at the top layer, if the outcome that IT is supposed to deliver is a digital experience, right? The customer is at the center now, not the infrastructure, right? So I have to start with experience. So we need to look at how's the app performing, how's it delivering to that end user. And now you have to think about it from a persona basis to who, where, right? So that's why we have all these agents deployed around the world in different cities because if you're offering a, let's say, e-banking portal and you're serving 100 cities as markets, you need to see from those cities, right? You also then need to be able to understand the why. When something is not working well, whose fault is it, right? Is it us? It's the network guy. Right, and what you don't want to get is into the everlasting war room, circular firing squad kind of scenario where nobody actually knows, right? This is what happens because the issue is that if you, you know, often times you suspect it's not you, maybe, right? You know, that's so for innocence, but again, that's not enough because the whole point is to deliver the experience. So now who could it be? All right, let's say you're offering e-banking or e-commerce. Is it your CDN provider? Is that your DNS managed provider is not responsive or something's down? Are you under a DDoS attack or some of your ecosystem is? Is one of your backend providers like your brain tree payments not working right? There's so many pieces. Is there an ISP in the middle there that's being affected? There's so many moving parts now. If from each persona or location, just to get to one URL, could be traversing several ISP networks, dozens of hops across the internet, how on earth are you supposed to isolate and go and even find who to ask for help? That's a really sticky problem. So this exposes all those external dependencies. So we expose all those things. So we expose these multiple layers and we have some patented correlation, visual correlation. So you can say, all right, I see a drop in the responsiveness of a critical internal application or of, I mean, it would never happen, but let's say it's SaaS like Salesforce or something like that. And it may not be their fault by the way, right? It's not them being a problem, but there's the users having a problem. So you see this drop and say, well, where's it happening? You can now say, is it a network issue or is it an app issue? Now, if it is a network issue, I can look at the whole, all the paths from everywhere and say, aha, there's a commonality here. For example, we could surface through our collective intelligence that there's an ISP outage in the middle of the internet that's causing us. Or we can say, hey, you know what? Your ISP is having an issue. Or guess what? Salesforce is, maybe, you know, things happen. People have problems in data centers sometimes. It's not the, you know, it's not- So there's two things. There's the post-mortem view and then there's the reactive policy-based intention and you say, okay, hey, we've got an outage, go here, reroute, do some things. Take some action. So some of those things you can automate. But the fact of the matter is that automation requires learning and machines need to be taught and humans have to teach them. I mean, that's one of the sort of the sticky parts of automation, right? It's not auto-magic, it's automation. So you guys are in the data business, basically. I mean- Yeah, visibility, data, right. Big data, some solid data, you're servicing data. Insights, actionable insights, all this stuff's coming together. So the question is, on AI, because AI plays a role here, IT ops and machine learning, you get deterministic and non-deterministic behavior. How do you solve the AI ops problem here? Because this is a great opportunity for customers to automate all this complexity and moving parts to get faster time to data or insight. Okay, so I would say that the prime place where you could do AI and ML is where you have a relatively closed system of, let's say, infrastructure that you do control and you have a ton of data, like a high-volume metric set of data, different data streams, that you can then train a machine to interpret. The problem with externalities is one, that you have sparse data. For example, we have to use agents because you can't get all that traditional data from it. So that means that, that's why we built this in a visually correlated way because it's the only way to figure it out. But the other aspect to that is that when you're dealing with external providers, you have an essential human part of this. There's no ways, as far as I know, to automate an escalation process with your service providers, of which now you have so many. First of all, you have to figure out who. And then you have to have enough evidence to get an escalation to happen to the right people, empowered people, so they don't go through the 3Ds of provider response, which is deny, deflect, and defer, right? You have to overcome plausible deniability and that's very human interaction. So the way we deal with that is we, all this interactive, correlated data, we make it ridiculously easy to share that in an interactive way with a deep link that you send to your provider and say, just look and see. And you can see that it's, you're having issues. So get the evidence escalated, that's the goal as best as possible. Then your time, like your mean time to repair now in the cloud is dependent on mean time to effective escalation, right? Who are some of your customers? So we have our kind of foundational customers. We have 20 of the top 25 SaaS companies in the world as our customers. We have five of the top six U.S. banks, four of the five top U.K. banks. 100 plus of the global 2000 and growing fast. Lot of verticals, I would say enterprise side, we started with financials, not surprisingly, but now we see heavy manufacturing and telecom and oil and gas and all that. And what's going on here at Cisco Live, what's your relationship with Cisco? So with Cisco we have a number of integration points. We have our enterprise agents. So we have these cloud agents pre-deployed, the same software is what we call the enterprise agent. That's been certified as a VNF or as container deployments on a variety of Cisco and routing platforms. So that's kind of our integration point where we can add value and visibility from those branch data center or other places out to the cloud or outside in as well. And who's your buyer typically? Who's your two? I would say a couple of years ago we'd have been very network centric. But now because of the change in IT and our crossover into the largest enterprises, we find that now it's the app owners. It's the folks who are rolling out Salesforce to 40,000 people and they're adopting lightning. Or they're putting Office 365 out and they're dealing with the complexities of a CDN based service or a centralized service like SharePoint, right? So we're seeing those kind of bars emerge along with the classic IT operations and networks. And this only gets better for you as more API centric systems get out there because as there's more moving parts it's basically an operating system. And you look at holistically and you got to understand the IO if you will. The microservices way of doing everything means that when you click something or you interact with something as a user, there are probably 20 things happening at the back end at least half of which are going off across the internet. And all of them have to work flawlessly, right? For me to get that experience that I'm expecting whether I'm trying to buy something or get something done. And what's your secret sauce in the application? So I'd say our secret sauce comes down to a couple really key things. One is the data that we've generated. So we have a unique data set from all these vantage points we have now. That's what allows us to do this collective intelligence. Nobody else has that data. As an example, we did a study, a couple studies last year, major research studies using our platform to look at public cloud performance from the internet within regions, into region and between clouds. We found some really interesting phenomenon. Again, nobody else had ever published that before. A lot of assumptions, a lot of end reclaims. We were actually able to show with data exactly how this stuff performs. Well, I'm sorry, you guys have published that? Yeah, so we have that published. We also did another major report on DNS. Is that on your website? It's on our website. So definitely something to check out. All right, well, Alex, thanks for coming on. Give the quick plug. What's up for you guys? Hiring, what's new? Give the quick two cents. So here in Europe, we're scaling up, hiring a lot and expanding across Europe. We have major offices in London and Dublin. So that's a big deal. And I think in this next year, you'll see some bigger top-down ways that we can help folks understand, not just how the internet is affecting them, but more of the unknown unknowns of internet behavior. So there's going to be some exciting things coming down the pipe. Well, we need a thousand eyes on all the instrumentation as things become more instrumented. Having that data-centric data is going to help feed machine learning. And again, it's just the beginning of more and more complexity being abstracted away by software on network programmability. It's theCUBE bringing you the data here from Barcelona, Francisco, live Europe 2019. Stay with us for more day two coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching.