 Live from New York, it's The Cube. Covering Riverbed Disrupt, brought to you by Riverbed. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Hi, everybody, welcome back to Riverbed Disrupt. This is The Cube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Hantang Bay is here as the CTO of Riverbed. Fresh off the keynote this morning, great interview you had with the CEO of Palo Alto Networks, thanks for coming on The Cube. Absolutely, thanks for making the time. Appreciate it, you guys have a good time. You're welcome. So, let's start with Disrupt. Okay. So what's going on here? What have you been talking to customers about? What's the vibe? So it's interesting because Riverbed is a company that's almost synonymous with the one product that people know us by. Predominantly, somewhat optimization. And really my mission is that's so last year, I don't want to talk about that, right? Disrupt is about giving IT people a gun to a gunfight. Because guess what? We've been coming to a gunfight with a knife every damn time, right? So I'll give you some examples. I was talking to an application guy and he said, Hantang, it's like, you guys take so damn long, I can roll out a patch in a day or two. And I said, let me ask you a question. How many servers do you have? It's about 40 of them. I said, okay. If one dies, anybody going to notice? He said, probably not. I said, you know what happens if the backbone dies? Everybody notices, right? So the one time that when something you expect doesn't happen, all hell breaks loose, right? And so this is why infrastructure IT people, it's in our DNA, slow and steady, right? Don't change it if it ain't broke. It's the, that's why we have change controls in retail since the beginning before Thanksgiving in the States, right? Because you can't, guess what? If you don't touch the network, they tend not to break, right? Cause people make stupid human mistakes. That's what we do. And this is what IT people have been fighting since the dawn of time. And now with this truck, we have the ability to give our customers a weapon to fight this insurmountable battle, which is how do you keep, what are the chances that one guy, typing away, never makes a mistake? So I'll give you an example. Give me one example where you typed an email or Twitter or tweet or Facebook post and never had to hit the backspace. That's never happened in the history of time, right? So people make mistakes. In the world of IT, being off by one can be cataclysmically bad because your access list that you thought was protecting you, guess what? You're off by one digit, now you're not protected, right? And people are just not equipped to do that kind of work over and over and bat a thousand, right? So that's what we're here, right? We got a machine, we have a system that gives people the ability to bat a thousand. And for those of you overseas, that's a baseball reference, meaning it's perfect, right? I don't know what the reference is in cricket. I'm sorry, but whatever it is in cricket, it's the perfect game and that's what we're here to do. So you have a point of view, a perspective, a premise that says that IT has been left behind. Absolutely. And it's time to catch up with, first of all, why has IT been left behind? It's because Nick Carr wrote an article and every CEO read it, or was he right? Or obviously he wasn't right, you know, we see IT does matter, but what happened? So it's as slow and steady wins the race mentality, right? That's in our DNA like I talked about. And I mean, you just take any industry, any example, and I'll give you one. Next time you rent a car, go to a no-name rental car place and they're going to give you a rental car, but God forbid a key. And you know what you're going to do? You're going to walk up to your car and you may end up breaking your fingers because you think it's proximity sense and the door will automatically open because cars nowadays, you don't even have a fob, you don't even have to take it out. And when you have to put that key in to open or close, you're going to go, oh, this sucks. It only takes three seconds, but you've been conditioned to say either just click a button, right? Or think about the window. What do you do when you pull up to a car and you say, hey, can you roll the window down? Our generation of people, you do this. My kids will go like this, right? So we expect ease of use. In every industry, in every field, ease of use is job one. You know what IT people are doing? We're still using console cable kits. We're still using terminal servers. We're still using CLI because slow and steady wins the race. Don't break it if it ain't broke, but social media happened. And business said, I can't wait for you. If you can't keep up with my pace, you will perish. That's the bottom line, because I can completely bypass IT and do SaaS and do cloud. So my IT brothers and sisters out there, you have a choice. Either keep up or get the hell out of the way because if businesses don't need you anymore, right? You can ignore it or you can embrace it. And we're giving the tools for IT people to embrace it and think like a business unit. Okay, so there's no doubt that speed is critical these days. Can you give us a little bit of a view inside Riverbed? Riverbed's, you know, sold off some pieces. They made some acquisitions recently. You have a large partner ecosystem, kind of the, you know, build it, buy it, partner with it. How do you view it kind of the code base? Yeah, so I think some of the, you know, given the choice, I'm a technology guy, right? So given the choice, I like more technology, but they were kind of in a tangential space where our salespeople couldn't quite emotionally connect to it. And if you're not passionate, it's going to come through. Your customers, having been a customer, can pick up passion, right? They can pick up what's real, what's phony. So we are in the networking space and what we didn't know was we were well suited for this new fangled SD-WAN, right? We just didn't know to call it that. And now that we have a sexy name, that every vendor is claiming, we've been doing this for 10 plus years, right? We were making applications just work. And if you boil it down with all the acronyms and all the technology, it still comes down to, does my application work where I am in a way that I wanted, in the time that I wanted to take? If you can answer yes to that, that's what SD-WAN says, and that's what we've been doing. So let's talk about it. I want to challenge that a little bit. Please, you know, give us a little bit more to unpack that because absolutely I'd agree, Riverbed from a networking standpoint has looked at application from day one. I remember I worked with Riverbed, you know, a decade ago working at replication solutions. And if I can shrink that pipe, that has huge ramifications. But I think at its core, SD-WAN is a little bit different, and maybe just an evolution of where you've been. But it seems that, I mean, network is so much complex. I've got cloud, I've got mobile, I've got so many different pieces, you know, preparing for this. I looked at all the different touchpoints and components and some of them you own. Some of them are your partners and then the applications, of course, have to tie into it. So I think SD-WAN is a much broader scope than what Riverbed is doing. I think it definitely ties in nicely with what you've been doing. Yeah, and so I'll ask you a question back, right? Why are we building the network? Why do we have internet as a, you know, breakout to internet? Why do we have MPLS, right? We don't build networks for the sake of building networks. We do it for one reason, one reason only. You have consumers and producers, right? You have either end users who are consuming and you have applications and developers who are producing the content. That's it. Either you're going to use the application, play the game or trade on that application or call somebody, do video chats. And that's the only reason why network's there, right? There's no other reason to have a network other than to do that. So what's the most important ingredient of that? User experience, right? This is what I call a death by a thousand paper cuts. The one click that didn't work, a knowing, okay. You click on something, doesn't, I don't see it refreshing like everybody else. We click on it again, click on it again. Maybe this time it'll work, we'll click on it again. Now I'm a little bit more upset, okay? So that's six paper cuts. There comes a point where the right guy or the right cloud complains, okay? And then everybody jumps on the chip. And as an IT guy, your only defense against these anecdotal experiences is to deflect. My network's fine, I rerouted, I have plenty of capacity. But yet, we've all been on SWAT calls and Tiger teams where you are dearly wishing for another problem somewhere else so people will forget about this problem because there's no way in hell I'm getting to root cause. So SD-WAN says, let me simplify the basics of networking. How to get from point A to point B. How to classify the application that's important and transport it in a manner that suits me, right? In my timeframe. And some of the use cases are very specific. Why is it that no one cares about backup? Because they do it at nighttime. Backup over the network, right? But what happens if the backup job is missed and it comes back around at six AM? Now it's 10 o'clock, all hell is breaking loose. Why? The backup is occurring. It's filling the pipe, okay? In the world of SD-WAN, that cannot happen, ever. Because in the world of SD-WAN, you say, backup, you must use the internet, you must have low priority. All the time, every time. So now we have this living, breathing network that can accommodate where BU's and the users can impose their will on the router, right? That's SD-WAN in a nutshell. I'm, as a user, I'm going to impose my will on the router to say, no, I don't want to go that way. I'm important, I want to go this way, right? So SD-WAN finally gives us that dynamic nature to network. All right, thank you. And I appreciate that, and I totally agree. So a little bit different question, though. I loved what you guys are doing with the cloud. You've got partners, we had Microsoft on our program. You've got a partner from IBM. Amazon's there. What's to stop some of those big cloud guys of just, you know, building this into some of their software where it's good enough to take away the secret sauce from our event. Absolutely, so that's a perfect question to my next. So SD-WAN and, you know, the application working, it's all about ingredients, right? You're baking a cake, you need ingredients. What happens if you take one ingredient out? The cake's going to suck, right? So if you take sugar out, cake's not going to taste so good. So to make this application work, in any place, from anywhere, from any user, to make just seamlessly work, one of the things that we have to overcome is the speed of light. So, and you can Google this, about four years ago, there was a scientist who said, hey, these neutrinos flew faster than the speed of light. You might, I do remember it. And they said, we don't think that's possible, but we reconfirmed our data and it's true. We need some help to understand how the fundamental laws of physics was violated. Neutrinos flew faster than the speed of light, right? And they said, we need help interpreting this data. And it turned out to be a faulty cable. It was a faulty fiber cable that was almost dead but not completely dead, right? So it turns out speed of light is still the same. And this poor guy who asked for help was run out of town. He got fired from CERN, okay? And yeah, I mean, if you're going to go against Einstein, you better have some extraordinary data, but he didn't, but he did ask for help. I mean, he asked for help. He didn't say I found a new way. He said I need help and he still got run out of. So my answer to you is, cloud vendors can absolutely do that and they should. I believe in competition, competition drives innovation. Let the cloud vendors have that secret sauce added. What they can't do is get the application to the user faster because they still deal with the speed of light. We trick the application because we go deep into the application and make it go faster, right? So we are kind of suspending this speed of light problem by overcoming the chattiness, right? That's the secret sauce of what we do. And so as a result of that, if you can do that, so steering is the first ingredient, encrypting it with IPsec all the time, every time is second ingredient. The third ingredient, and maybe the most important, is applications have to perform. And that's what we're about, right? And so that's why we're uniquely qualified to get from point A to point B in a manner that suits me, in a manner that suits the business, right? And you can start to think of all kinds of things, right? So what about World Cup? Or what about Super Bowl, okay? So in those times, maybe, maybe the broadcast of Super Bowl takes a little bit higher priority than your normal. Because people overseas, soldiers, sailors and airmen's and Marines, watching it from APHIS and Armed Forces radio and whatnot, it matters to them, right? So maybe during that time, video should take a higher precedent. You know what happens today? To do that, you have to jump on 60 boxes and modify a class map to accommodate that video class being a little bit better than the normal, right? With SD-WAN, click of a button. You set it and you forget it with apologies to Ron Popil, right? In SD-WAN, you set it, you forget it, it happens. All the time, every time, okay? So the idea is there's nothing magical about SD-WAN. So let's just kind of go there for a second. There's a lot of talk, the whole event is about SD-WAN visibility. But those of you out there from experience know, you can do all of this on your own with the exception of one thing, simplicity. It's one thing to engineer something. It's an entirely different matter to care for it on a day-to-day basis. If your network only has three routers, you can geek out and make it the most complex Rube Goldberg design you want. You can still manage it. When it's 30, 50, 60, 100, 100, 10,000, 30,000, you have no chance. Well, this is the thing about cloud of scale, right? It's giving us scale or die. And with scale comes complexity. So the last question for you is, talk about scale, why is it so hard? What things should people think about when scaling and how do they deal with that complexity? That's like six questions in one, but have at it. So I'll kind of go off the reservation here and you got to think about your ass. And you're looking at me like, what did he just say? So there's two camps, application guys, network guys, right? Let's just say. My network, my ass, my app, my ass, right? If one of those two don't work, it's your ass. Turns out that's a great mnemonic because that ass is about agility, stability, security. Okay, so if you have agility, you can keep up with the business. You don't have to be the downtrodden guy that Debbie Downer that says, I know that's a great idea, but it's going to take me six weeks to get that up and running. And I mean, one tweet that goes viral overnight, you're talking six weeks, right? That's agility, stability. What's stability about? Why do we have these brittle and complex change controls? People make mistakes. We're so deathly afraid of making that change because it's a complex ecosystem, right? And the unintended consequences are too big for a human to comprehend. We've gone past that stage. So stability, let the computer do it because you know what they do great? Menial tasks, they never fail. So let them do that, okay? So security is about, yes, what Nir talked about with having a platform or security matters, but let's start with the basics. Let's make sure content filtering for not-safe-for-work happens all the time. Let's make sure that a trusted partner in the cloud like Azure and AWS gets preferential treatment to Facebook unless you're in marketing because then your critical app is Facebook, right? So all the things that I just talked about, the agility, stability, and security is what allows the IT guys to finally step into the 21st century, finally put that console kit down and say, everyone else is swiping on tablets, except for IT guys. We're still CLIing it, right? So now I'm saying the time has come. That's what distrub is about. Distrub inertia, distrub what you've been doing. Just because you've been doing it for 20 years doesn't mean you've been doing it right for 20 years, okay? And we finally have the technology that says we'll free you from this tyranny. But it ain't broke, break it. Wow, that's a lot of people going to have the trouble getting their minds around it, but people are starting to accept that change is here and change is inevitable. Henson, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thanks for your time. Really great to talk to you. Thank you, absolutely. You're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody. This is theCUBE, we'll be back from the big Apple right after this short break.