 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live at Cisco 2018, Cisco Live 2018. It's theCUBE Live coverage here in Orlando, Florida. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, my co-host. For the next three days of live coverage, our next guest is Brooks Portriding, Presidency of Live Action and Darren Kimura, Chief Strategy Officer and Vice-Chair for Live Action. Fresh off the heels of a great acquisition. Next generation monitoring, networking. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Good to see you again. So love, love the action going on, literally live action with M&A activity. You guys got some good news happening around the company. But also Cisco's event here really is perfectly poised for what you guys are doing. The CEO on stage literally saying to his army of customers, this old way is now old. This is the new modern era and really talking about what is multi-cloud basically. And so his entire army of customers are moving to next generation. So it's right intersects with what you guys are doing. So take a minute to talk about live action and the news. So I think first of all, live action, we've always been known to be a leader in network management. We've worked very, very closely with Cisco for a dozen years. And what we help companies do is take the complexity of the management of their large networks. So that's been the core fundamental value proposition that we've always delivered is how we simplified the network in these increasingly complex environments. So what's interesting now with this period of time is networks continue to become more and more complex. You have things like digital transformation. You have things like cloud and multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. You have things like software defined networks. Each of them in their own right just makes the wide area that much more complex. And more endpoints every day. I think he threw a stat out, another couple hundred million endpoints are coming now. So it's not ending. That's true. And in that market transition, it gives us a great opportunity because our core value proposition has always been simplifying the network. Now that's even more essential than ever before. What are the critical problems that come out of that? Obviously, it's a tsunami of endpoints as one. We heard the security threats with encryptions and other one. So the need to instrument seems obvious, but also it's almost overbearing. Like what do you do? How do you guys see the core problems that you're attacking? Why don't you take that? Well, I think the big, what we're trying to do at Live Action is simplify the network. That's really at the core of everything we're trying to do. And when we talk to our customers, we understand from them that most times they might have four, 10 different tools. So the first thing we're trying to do is figure out what are the biggest use cases and combine them all into one singular tool. And that's what we're producing at Live Action is the ability for you to see your entire network from end to end, east-west and north-south. So as we take a look at things like the cloud environment, you know, what exactly is that, right? Is it north-south? It's all of the above. And what we're trying to do at Live Action is have a full stack application that can basically provide visibility and analytics so you can understand all of it in one place. So any vector, no matter what it is, and certainly that makes sense with the perimeter gone. Yes. It certainly has to have that baseline. Right. All right, so we'll give you a good example of that as now with the whole software-defined network and what we're doing with SD Access, for example. But now we're going back into the data center and there's these complex terms around the overlay network and underlay network and logical and physical and it's becoming incredibly complex. We give you the ability to actually see the flows like through those complex fabrics. And that's an essential toolkit now because you need to be able to find out when there's an issue. Where is that coming from, right? That is the, what is the source of the issue? How quickly can you identify that and how quickly can you then remediate it? Before you get there, I want to follow up on that because one of the focus with here in DevOps side is automation. If you can't see it, how do you know to automate it? Right. Is that coming through the dialogue or is that? That is the dialogue for us here. So we provide situational awareness. We help for our end users to understand what's happening across their networks real time. And then we work with Cisco, for example, hand-in-hand on the intent-based network. So being able to provide insights for the next generation of the products to be able to actually take action. Yeah, one of the things we've been watching in the networking space for many years is the use of analytics. And you recently made an acquisition, really ties into that space. Why don't you give us what led to the acquisition? Yeah, so we had news on Friday. And to be fair, I mean, Darren's been leading this charge for us for quite some time because we've been a net flow-based solution for a long period of time. Meaning that we can provide visualization for the devices that we have integrations with, essentially. There's a lot of devices that don't have net flow. So we couldn't actually capture them into our visualization engine. So what we did on Friday is we announced the acquisition of Savius. And Savius is a packet capture and inspection technology company. Been around a long time, so very famous products with OmniPeak and OmniFliance, for example, that are consumed by thousands of customers. And now we're able to, with that appliance, actually tap into all sorts of devices and suddenly propagate all of that into our visualization engine. So it opens up a dramatically larger addressable opportunity for us. And we're kind of defining this to be the next generation of network performance management because no one else is doing this visualization across that scope of devices like we are. Your observation space is massive now. It is. Yeah, Darren, I wonder if you could follow up that because one of the big questions I had coming into this is if I'm a networking person, what about all that networking that I don't control anymore, that I'm on the hook for it? It's, you know, we actually, the network here went down even for a few minutes and we're like, we're here at Cisco Live with, you know, probably the largest single concentration of network people and wireless experts and the like. So, yeah. So one of the things that we're trying to do now is we're trying to capture all data from basically all endpoints, whether it be a client to a server, a VM container, doesn't matter what it is. We want to see it all. We want to get it from the granular, most granular packet level all the way up. But take all of that data and make it simple for people to understand and put it on a simple UI, understand a very simple workflow so that they can automatically associate problem or good network behaviors right there on screen, without having to, you know, go through the 5,000 page Cisco manual and really understand what exactly is going on. Okay. I think what's important about that is how quickly can you identify the source of the issue? That's really where we come into play. We talk a lot even these days about MTTR, mean time to resolution. That continues to be an essential kind of metric that people measure. But what's more important to that even is the initial diagnostic. So is it the network? Is it, you know, something at the edge of the network? Is it the service provider? You know, where in the network does this happen? And by being able to provide that essential information to the first point of contact, it really does help expedite and accelerate the entire process. Easy acceleration. Daren, I want to ask you a point, I'm sorry to interrupt, but on the acquisition, help the customers that you had on one side understand the benefits of the NetFlow integrations and the NetFlow customers understand the new benefits. What is the customer's orientation? What should they do? I mean, how should they understand the new live action? Yeah, so what we've added on is the ability for us to diagnose at a significantly deeper level. So one of the things live action has always been really good at is voice and video. But we do it at a NetFlow level. So the problem is when we try to get down to the very granular level, what exactly is going on? Where is it happening? We're blind to that, frankly. Now with the packet capture technology, we can actually go all the way down and capture down to the millisecond and be able to look back over time and understand exactly where the problem occurred. And that allows our users to actually go in and fix it once and for all. And what are they solving with that problem? More point problems, solution versus resolution, routing and policy, where does it value? It's all of it, it's all of it. Understand where the packets are dropped. Understand, we get down to deep packet inspection. So understanding applications and users and who really is having the problem and why. Fake news, maybe, can help us identify all the fake news out there. I haven't thought about that yet. That's the Russia's packet. That's the Russia's packet. We've been talking in the network, the surface area has continued to grow as we push out to the edge, push out to SaaS, push out to public clouds. How's that impacting you and your customers? So we're definitely trying to stay ahead of that with a few things that we've done recently. So one of them is, for example, we now have an agent that we can deploy onto servers and workstations in a mass quantity. So you can now get those elements to be fed into your visualization network as well. We also have the ability to deploy that type of concept into the cloud and into SaaS applications so we can then get a pulse coming from them. And so we're starting to correlate all of that together into the same type of workflow. Yep. Guys, take a minute to talk about the relationship with Cisco. Obviously we're here at Cisco Live, their show. They got their priorities pretty laid out. They got a lot of work to do. And we heard the CEO talk about some of the pressure they're under with the security alone. I mean, they're running huge networks, networks are changing. What are you guys doing next? Now they got your acquisition papered up and you got to do some quick integrations and roll out the integration. How are you taking that to the next level with Cisco? What are some of the things on your radar, on your horizon that you could share? Well, I think we worked so closely with Cisco and the Cisco Enterprise Networking Team that we're often looking ahead of the curve as far as where we want to develop and invest in next. For example, you see that with the way we're prototyping the SD Access and Cat9K management. So we did that in Barcelona actually about six months ago. So we were the first out with that. We're doing the exact same thing now with DNA Center and integration with DNA Center. So they're able to talk about how live action as a third party is integrating into their framework and extending that framework out for a lot of new innovation. Your strategy is to go deep with Cisco. You go down as deep as you can, get everyone geared up on the engineering side. You're not in your head. Absolutely. That's been our strategy since day one. It's been an awesome partnership for us. I think we've been able to bring a different point of view and also provide validation, a third party perspective for the end user to understand and have confidence on what exactly the network is doing. I get this all the time. Entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley always asked me about Cisco and Cisco's had a sustained track record of letting partners take big white spaces. To them, it's a white space to accompany an IPO potential. So this is a Cisco thing. Talk about that dynamic as you guys seem to be really solving a big problem and they're happy with it. I think what we've, to your point about white space, I think what live action has been able to really effectively do is be a strong partner to complement the solution that Cisco is already putting out there. So as Brooks had mentioned, in our past we worked very closely with the Cisco Prime team and we brought in things like visualization, for example, quality of service configuration. And as the infrastructure began to, I guess change over time, through IWAN and now into Viptela, we bring the same kind of ideas. We bring the same posture to the party, if you will, meaning that we try to make it, we try to understand what Cisco product management is doing and bring what we do best, the situation awareness, visibility, action ability to that. All right, one of my final questions is, bumper sticker the bottom line for your customers. With the acquisition on Friday, with what you guys got on Cisco, what's the bottom line for your customers? What are they going to see? What's the immediate headline for the customer? So we've adopted this tagline of defining the next generation of network management and we think we have a very unique position in defining where that market is going now with the acquisition of Savius and what we're doing with the ability to visualize all these different elements. There really isn't anybody out there that's doing anything close to that as far as how we're making it easy to manage increasingly complex networks. It's as simple as that. We've had great conversations here already with many of some of the largest companies in the world and what they're looking for is, I need help to simplify. And run at a high level. That's right, to deliver the service levels that I'm expected to hold to my Fortune 500 type of enterprise, I need better tools to help me cope with this increasing complexity. Brooks and Darren, I'm going to put you on the spot for the last question. Where it's day one of Cisco Live, what's the big story you see emerging? I know it's day one, we've got two more days, but you can almost see the smoke screen coming and the signals there. What is the top story coming out of Cisco Live 2018 in your opinion? I still see software defined WAN as being massive. I think that, I think I still his answer. But you know, it's been a topic for such a long time, but now we're seeing the implementations happen and it's so exciting because it's actually bringing real change to networking, something we haven't seen in 10 plus years. What's different about SD WAN than in what the promises were, say five years ago? That's happening now. What's happening differently? Now people are actually monetizing it. So now it's enterprise ready. I think Cisco led the whole industry a step forward with the acquisition of Viptella and increased kind of the pace of the maturity of those offerings. And now that it's six months in, they're being adopted at scale. You have a lot of reference cases now that people are using it. They're getting, driving the monetary benefit from it. You know, they're taking this step into software defined and we're kind of in that mainstream adoption phase is what I would say right now. Thanks so much for sharing. Great commentary. Congratulations on the success. The new acquisition and the continued integration deep with Cisco. You know, good stuff pays off. Of course, we're here with all the live action coverage both live action company and also live cube action here at Cisco Live 2018. Here, stay with us. Three days of wall to wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you.