 from San Diego, California. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. We're here at the San Diego Convention Center for Cisco Live 2019, 30th year of the show, 28,000 in attendance. I'm Stu Minnan. We're actually at the midpoint of three days of live wall-to-wall coverage here and happy to bring back to the program two CUBE alumni. First to my right is Ben Nye, who is the CEO of Turbanomics, and sitting next to him is Thomas White, who's the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of AppDynamics or AppD, as everybody calls them here at the show. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. It's great to be here, Stu. All right, so Thomas, first of all, we had you on it reinvent, like soon after the acquisition of AppD by Cisco. It's been about two years. I believe it's been about two years that Turbanomics has been partnering with Cisco, so let's start with you and what's changed in those two years? Yeah, it's been amazing. Two years ago, we were on the doorstep of an IPO and it's been a rocket ship ride ever since. AppDynamics, after the last two years, the business has more than doubled. The team size is more than doubled and today we're really happy to be the largest and fastest growing provider of application performance monitoring in the market. But the reason why that is, is because our customers are embarking on this digital transformation and the application has really become the foundation of their modern day business. That's the way brands are engaging with their users now more than ever and then the application landscape has gotten way more complex with microservices and multiple clouds and all of the threats that go on in the infrastructure. And so what AppDynamics has been doing is just really providing that real-time business and application performance that our customers need to ensure business outcomes. We think of ourselves as the MRI for the application or the infrastructure. That's awesome. So Ben, it's been interesting to watch in the networking space for the last few years. For the most part, applications used to be that it's just this thing that ran through the pipes every once in a while. I need to think about performance. I need to make sure I got buffer credits or it's now going east-west rather than north-south and the like. But it was solutions like Turbinomic that sat on top of it and helped understand and help people manage their applications. Of course, AppD, pulling that story together even tighter. So give us the latest. We've talked to you at Cisco Live before, an important partnership. What's the latest in your world? Well, so one of the things we're doing is we're building an actual bundle together with AppD. And if you think about APM, you're getting the application topology as well as response time, end-user response time, which is critical to maintaining the brand and the digital economy that we're talking about. When you look at every one of those hops in the application note, there's an entire application stack that sits underneath there, a resourcing stack. And what we're doing is we're bringing ARM, which is application resourcing management with AI so that they're automatically adjusting the resources in all times continuously in order to support the performance needs that AppD is showing us. When you put together APM plus ARM, you have total application performance and that customers are really queuing to. So much so that we've actually decided to put this bundle officially together in the marketplace. We just became the first AppD resale software product and now we're taking that to market as C1 plus AppD. Well, congratulations on that partnership. Thomas, bring us inside the customers a little bit. What does this mean for them? What's that journey we talk about for the last 10, 15 years? Got to break down those silos. It's not just the networking team, tossing over some bandwidth and latency and them coming back and saying, I need some more. No, no, we're not going to give you any service level agreement or anything like that because that's not our job. We'll just set this up and you use what you got. So what's happening in your customers? The trend that we're seeing is a move toward this concept of AI ops, which is really the consolidation of bringing end user application, network and infrastructure monitoring closer together and tying that together with AI based insights to drive automation and actioning and very similar to what TurboNomics specializes in here. And so what we're seeing is the combination of Cisco plus AppDynamics plus companies like Turbo is beginning to build that self-healing, self-learning environment where developers and IT environments need to be able to drive automation and that automation ultimately gets to more innovation when you can reduce the mundane tasks that really take a lot of our developers' time. And so we're really excited about some of the work we're doing together when you think about the ability to take real-time business insights from the application and reprogram the network based on the needs of the app or change out the workloads and move them around on different servers depending on the needs of the app. These are all things that the combination of Turbo and Cisco and AppDynamics are doing together. Yeah, but actually I did a whole show down in DC a couple months ago, Cisco partner focused on AI ops and we understand customers had a lot of tools that they have to deal with. We need to simplify this environment, allow them to focus on their business, not managing this complex environment of all these tools. How does that whole concept of AI ops and automating this environment and managing my workloads, what are you seeing with your customers? Well, I think all the customers are saying, look, there's too many tools today. They don't need another resource monitor, et cetera. What they need is they need to understand through the lens of the application all the resource dependencies. So instead of looking at a field of servers and saying I have five nines of availability or storage or whatever, what they really want to see is what are the servers and storage and resources dependent on this specific app that runs the bank or the CPG company or the manufacturer? And can I make sure that those resources are supporting the performance of the application? And that's this total application performance concept, much more so than whether I have five nines of availability and all my other hosts. Make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Did you have a comment on that? I'm just going to say we're seeing so many different customers and different verticals, whether it's retail, hospitality, automakers, they're all benefiting from the cloud migration and now that they have the cloud migration, the ability to have that elasticity of their workloads, they're scaling in and out based on the application demands. This is becoming critical. This is no longer a luxury for the most cloud-dative companies in the world. Enterprises with mission-critical systems are all becoming dependent on these more modern technologies and I think they need partners like ours more than ever. One of the questions we've had is you talk to customers today and they are multi-cloud, but that multi or hybrid cloud is a bunch of pieces and one of our premises we asked from a research standpoint, how can the sum of those pieces be more valuable than just the independent pieces alone? Kind of the one plus one with an extra factor. Talk a little bit about the customers and also what does this combination do that I couldn't just grab these pieces together and kind of make it work in my portfolio of those dozens of tools that I have. Go ahead, Ben. I was going to say, I think that the customers, one of the things that's neat is we literally announced this partnership publicly two weeks ago and already have closed the first two just out of momentum that folks are realizing the need to be able to say, look, I can host my applications on-prem with a number of different vendors. I can host my applications off-prem with a number of different vendors, but the real question is, where am I going to get the most performance? Where can I do it in a compliant way with all my policies and how can I make sure that I'm doing it cost effectively? And when there's a multiplicity of trade-offs where I can choose, then it's incumbent upon each of those vendors, strategic as they are, to be able to offer the best service, the best performance, the best compliance and resourcing and that's what we're bringing to them and I think that's why you're seeing the pipeline is built to several double digit millions and already deals are closing. The other thing I'd add to that is that, going back to the point around AI ops and the evolution of a lot of these monitoring and automation technologies, a lot of our customers have a hybrid environment of different tools and providers that they leverage and so one of the things that we're really focused on is an open ecosystem where you'd be able to ingest data sources from various different players. Some of them can be Cisco, Turbinomics and ABD, but some of them can be other providers that also have very good products in very specific domains. I think the key is that being able to be able to bring that data together, drive cross-domain correlation in a more automated way than ever before, leveraging some of the more modern AI capabilities which drives the action that people really need and that is really the automation step is where customers start to see the benefits but I think the better and more valuable the data that you have, the better automation you can do because your predictability of your algorithms are much better at that point. All right, Ben, your customers that have rolled out this solution, I know the joint solution is brand new, but what are some of the key metrics? How do they define success? How do they know that they've reached that success? So, first and foremost, the line of business who's the customer to central IT, whether it's hosted or not, they care the most that performance does not degrade and is always improving, okay? But when they do that and they can show that, then all the decision that the rest of central IT takes down in from the container layer to the pods, to the virtual, to the cloud, IS, on-prem and off, those become acceptable choices for central IT to make because fundamentally line of business is saying, yep, we're good, right? So that's where we're seeing the value of being able to see the response time and bridging the application performance to the application resourcing that frankly hasn't ever been solved in five decades of IT and I think it goes back to what Thomas was just saying, it's the quality of the analytics that comes from AIOps. I don't think people need more tools to capture more data, right? There's a lot of data out there. The question is, can you make it actionable and are your analytics correct and frankly, are they the best? And I think we see that that's been a big parcel of what we've done. During the two years, Cisco's told us on multiple occasions, it's the fastest software OEM they've had by bringing it through, starting with the data center team and growing up through traditional Cisco and then with their purchase of AppD two years ago, that combination makes a ton of sense and now you've got the top all the way to the bottom and that's a pretty special spot, I think, unreplicated by any other strategic to date. Yeah, the other thing I just added that is the importance of being able to monitor the business in real time as well and so a lot of what we've talked about are the technology analytics, the IT operational analytics that we run our business on but being able to correlate the business transactions running through the application, so users, what their journey looks like, their abandonment rates, revenues, the ability to engage with the users, tying that back to the specific IT infrastructure in a way that's used to been a black box before, now that all comes to life by the combination of these technologies. So, Thomas, big trends we see at this show. Cisco's transformation towards a software company and the world of multi-cloud. AppD plays a pretty important piece of that. Discussion, talk a little bit about kind of where you are and where do you see Cisco moving along that journey and then help tie in where Turbinomic fits. Yeah, so I think it really goes back to the fact that as our customers are making this digital transformation, they're really looking at a variety of infrastructures, cloud providers to be able to offer these applications and what AppDynamics has done is really created this monitoring fabric that sits across any infrastructure and it tightly ties to the business value of the application. So if you combine that with a lot of what Cisco is doing around connectivity, securing the cloud, securing the infrastructure around it and tying that to where we're strong in networking and bringing all that together, I think fundamentally we've got a lot of the pieces of the puzzle to truly enable AI ops but we don't have them all and I think that's what's important that we partner with people like Ben because it brings together a set of automation capability around application resourcing that we don't have and our customers are better suited working with Ben and team on that. So how do we integrate those things in a frictionless way and make that part of our sales process? That's really what this partnership's all about. All right, Ben, where do we see the partnership going down the road? Oh, I think it's going to get more exciting. So right now we're pulling unidelectionally from AppD, I think we're going to go right back the other way. What Thomas referred to, which is one of my favorite parts of AppD is the business IQ, right? It's where you say what is the cost of the latency in any one hop and where do the abandonment rates happen from consumers on that application, right? Now we can price for the first time, what's the cost of the latency in that one tier and across the application overall? And then more importantly, what do we do about it? Well, that's the resourcing and the congestion that's being resolved in real time. And so I think the ability to look at the resiliency of applications both across and up and down, the APM plus the ARM and being able to guarantee or assure performance, total application performance, that's a big message. All right, want to give you both just final word here, about halfway through the conference here in San Diego. Thomas? Oh, I would just say that the energy that we're seeing, the feedback that we're getting from customers and the business insights, part of the world of solutions has been phenomenal. I think there's so many more developer oriented, application developer oriented individuals that's just go live than ever before. And I think that serves both of our businesses quite well. Look, I think this has been a great show, but one of the things you're going to see is all of these vendors who have had global presence for in this case, 30 years, Cisco Live, 30 years long, but now being able to think through, how do I become that much more application relevant? If you think about transformation of applications, it's going to come top down, not bottom up. And so while we have all the evolution and frankly disruption happening, digital disruption happening across it, the way to know which are the ones that are going to stick, they're going to come top down. And I think the moves that they're making all the way through buying app D, all the way through partnering with CWOM or Turbinomic has been emblematic of what that opportunity is in the marketplace and the realization that customers care about their applications, their applications run their business and you've got to look at the topology and you've got to look in response time and you've got to look at the resourcing. But that's a really fun spot for us to be in together. Ben and Thomas, congratulations on the expanded partnership and thanks again for joining us on theCUBE. Thanks Stu, always a pleasure. All right, we're here in the DevNet Zone, three days wall-to-wall coverage, I'm Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante's in the house, Lisa Martin's here too, we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE.