 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Dave Vellante. We're going to talk about unified communications and its role in digital transformations. Ray Krug is here. He's a solutions architect at Netscout. Ray, good to see you. Thanks for coming. Hi Dave, good to be here. So talk a little bit about Netscout. You guys are into a lot of different things, but give us the overview. Yeah, I mean, Netscout, I mean, what they're primarily focused on is providing the visibility to assure digital business initiatives, to provide availability assurance, performance assurance, as well as security assurance as well. And we do this using our smart data and smart analytics platform. We kind of do this for, okay, we've got a huge customer base. We do this for like over 90% of the Fortune 500s, 95% of the carrier service providers. So we scale to these large enterprises, sophisticated service providers, providing the visibility they need to assure their services. So as a solution architect, what specifically is your role? Yeah, I mean, so it's probably worthwhile giving a bit of history because I know we're talking about unified communications. So I have been with Netscout now for about eight years it's been, and I came from an acquisition. The acquisition was from a British company, a spin out of British telecom called PsyTechnics. And we specialized, this is eight years ago, well, 10 years ago, in analyzing the IP network for voice and video traffic and actually being able to understand how we can take impairments in the network and how that translates to impairments in voice quality over voice over IP. So that was the original data transformation project, the so-called digital transformation from TDM networks to IP. So yeah, we took those analytics and basically figured out how to do that. So deep understanding of actually what's going on in the network? Yeah, absolutely. And what was exciting, I mean, back to Netscout is that when they acquired PsyTechnics, they took this technology and put that into their probe technology. They did that within like three or four months. Our technology was in their probe, monitoring the voice over IP networks. And then what was interesting, like within 12 months, all our workflows that we'd created for ensuring performance of voice over IP networks got embedded into the Netscout portfolio of products. And since then, okay, eight years winding on forward, we've been embedding more and more technology into our Ingenious One platform to give you better and better voice, video, and unified communication analytics. I love that story, Ray, because the vast majority of mergers and acquisitions fail to meet their original objectives. They take too long to integrate. So some companies are good at it, some not so good at it. So it must have been pleasing to see that happen. You can see your baby actually scale like that. All right, let's talk about big picture. What are the big trends that you see sort of driving unified communications today? Yeah, I mean, unified communications is like getting more and more complex and perhaps I want to call it sophisticated. But you kind of think, okay, most common use case for us is typically contact center because at the end of the day, contact center, the customers are demanding more and more ways to interact with the business, whether it traditionally it was voice, but now they want web, web chat, video, whatever it might be. So contact center is a big consumer of unified communications. And then there's the different technology trends like of course, Microsoft Skype for Business evolving into like Microsoft Teams or Cisco Jabba, unified communications and all that sort of thing. Whole bunch of other topics going on. Again, part of digital transformation initiatives, SIP Trunking, we're still seeing that going on. So, you know, I was talking about TDM to IP, so that was back in my day in Cytechnics. Now it's taking those and transferring IP to SIP Trunking to safe costs. That's the main thing, but it is a change and it is more, not instrumentation, but more appliances on a network in order like session border controllers in order to add your SIP Trunking. And of course, there's also other technology migration to the cloud as well, which ends up from our perspective, what we're seeing is in very hybrid environments. So now you've got a lot of on-prem stuff and some cloud stuff. So we've got to work together and in order to make a voice video unified communication successful. Isn't another sort of challenge, I'll call it give the people what they want. I mean, you said talk about contact centers being a primary source. People want to communicate in different ways. Young people maybe want to use chat. Some people like me want to pick up and talk to a human. I mean, is that part of the challenge is bringing all those together to serve us all these different constituents? Yeah, absolutely. Because at the end of the day, if it's a contact center, you want to make sure you provide an engaging experience to your customers, however that might be, omnichannel or whatever word you want to do it. The longer and happier the customer is dealing with your business, perhaps the more money they'll spend with your business, perhaps the better brand awareness they have of your business as well. So double click into some of the challenges of actually bringing the stuff together, making it work, is it cost? You mentioned complexity before, is it understanding the analytics, who's using what, predicting? What, drill down, double click on that. Okay, that's a big topic. But we talked about new features and immersive experience from unified communication. So that's all brilliant. The trouble is, high quality is key. You've got to make sure that it's successful. So any migration project, you need to be successful to make sure that you've succeeded, okay? So that's number one. Quality is key. But also in terms of cost, sometimes these initiatives about cost savings. So SIP Trunking is a good example of that. I want to make my service the same as it was before, have some sort of future upgrade capability but kind of make it cheaper. That's what SIP Trunking does for you as well. So those are some of the sort of reasons for doing it, but then that introduces more components in your infrastructure to make all that stuff work. And it's not just about voice and video, it's all about the other backend servers as well to make it all happen, whether that's mail or chat or presence or whatever it might be. Lots of components now that have to work together, stuff that you control, but also stuff that you don't control. Like SIP Trunks is a good example. That's, or gateways out to the PSDs. Things that you don't control. And that makes it kind of really tricky to deal with. There's a bunch of other stuff as well. It's important, network convergence. You've got all these applications converging onto that one network infrastructure. How do you manage that? Quick tangent, so you mentioned SIP Trunking. Explain what that is for our audience so they don't have to Google it. Yeah, so SIP Trunking basically, if you think about gatewaying out to the PSTN in terms of making your plain old telephone calls, dialing a number and sending out. SIP Trunking does that all from an IP perspective. So the idea is you don't necessarily do a conversion to TDM, traditional phone systems. It all goes IP. So basically, you then send everything out IP over the network, it gets to the other end and the whole purpose of that, it's a service that you buy from your service provider and it's much cheaper. Okay, you talked about these challenges. Generally, how does the industry approach solving these problems and specifically how does Netsco solve them? Okay, great question. So traditionally, I mean, let's sort of rewind a little bit. I talked about a lot of components that need to work together to make your unified communications experience. Lots of servers, lots of network infrastructure, firewalls, session boarder controllers and all that. Traditionally, what you do is monitor each of those devices. Take a look at that, CPU utilization or take a look at how the servers are performing and often very little is taken into account about the network and how that's behaving because again, I said it's a converged network. So you end up with a picture saying all my servers are working fine but then you end up with the problem but users are complaining because they can't dial. Users are complaining because the quality is bad. So that's kind of the problem with trying to bring all those together using the different metrics and coming up with some sort of- And then it's finger pointing, right? Oh yeah, classic. Which mold of whack? Yeah, in constant use cases, war rooms, okay. All my lights are green for every person in that war room but the people are still complaining, absolutely. Okay, so talk more about how Netsco approaches this. Yeah, I mean, so the name gives it away really. We always focus on what's going on in the network. Wherever that network may be, so we're taking a look at that, we call it wire data, it's packet data and we're able to translate that whatever's going over the wires, whether it be an application going over the wires or whether it be unified communications going over the wire like voice over IP, RTP or signaling, SIP, as an example of those. So we're able to get that picture of how everything is communicating with each other and we're being able to raise that level. So packets are notoriously hard to interpret but we've cracked it. We've got a sort of a technology, it's a patented technology called ASI, Adaptive Service Intelligence. We call it really smart data but it's converting that wire data into meaningful key performance metrics. So you name it, you name the application, we've got performance metrics. So whether it be voice, voice quality, me and opinion score, we're taking that from the wire data. Whether it be application performance from a database that might be running or a mail server that might be running. We have performance, whether it's this signaling that goes on to get data and all that, we have performance metrics about that. So we, using the same data set, the wire data, bring it up to our analytics, our ASI layer and then we have an understanding of what components failing. Is it the voice that's failing? Is it part of the network that's failing? And then for voice, there's a whole topic on how we understand that, remembering my background and the analytics behind that. So your secret sauce is you've got this deep probe into the network, you've got this ASI, this patented technology and you've got an architecture to leverage that capability. And that is really your big differentiator from a technical perspective, is that right? Well, from a technical perspective, absolutely. And from an obvious perspective, we solve in the easiest way the most complex problems. It's kind of where it's coming. Because these are tricky problems to do. They sometimes go unseen for ages, but because we've got that overall visibility, we get to that root cause very quickly. Okay, let's talk about the business impact. Maybe you can give us some examples, customer examples, and how it affected their business. Yeah, okay, so that's important. A couple of things. Let's imagine you're a contact center, a service company. So it's got one in mind. May have, and the one that I have in mind, six contact centers. They take up to about 100,000 calls in a day. So it's like, it's important. They're a service company, so people phone them up to have their service. If you can't make contact with your service company, maybe the impact of that is, okay, that service is rubbish. I'm gonna go to a competitor as an example. Or you don't get your service that you require. So there's huge implications. In this example, we found that calls were dropping as an example. So people are connecting with their agent, calls were dropping, okay, hopeless. It's like really, really problematic. And it's interesting that you pointed out about warms and finger pointing. And that's exactly what happened. What they'd done, they'd engage in a SIP trunking project to deploy SIP trunking. They were going to save a million dollars a month by implementing this SIP trunk, right? So that's huge. Okay, yet, when they deployed this, they were having a bad experience. So that's critical. So they needed to achieve that successful migration. So they had tools, but nothing that could spot what was going on with these call dropping. So along come NetScout. We deployed our probe and very quickly. And it's just amazing, but very quickly we were able to analyze the reason for the call dropping. Turned out it was a firewall issue, complex network. So it's kind of difficult to know where the traffic is routing. We were able to figure that out, give you the evidence to say the signaling, the SIP was dropping. And we were able to pinpoint that and they got that fixed very quickly. Which meant that they were able to realize that million dollar a month. Precisely, yes, exactly. Let alone any business that might have been affected by the fact that people couldn't call in. Any other examples you can show? Yeah, I've got a really great one, probably closer to a lot of people's hearts and relates to a hospital. And they were going through a digital migration project. It's as simple as changing their phone handsets from one vendor to another, in some respects about 2,000 phones that they were replacing. So it's kind of interesting. So, you know, I've now got a nice new shiny desk, shiny phone in my desk. When I pick it up the phone, I get very bad quality and stuff like that. And you just blame the phone and all that sort of thing. Sometimes that's change. People don't like change. They like all the buttons on their old phone. And sometimes it's real. But in a way, the business impact for that one is if I'm a customer, a patient, I'm phoning up my doctor for some records and the phone quality is bad, then I'm not gonna have that much confidence that the doctor's gonna be able to cope with my ailment that I might have. So it's really important to have quality. And it's like, you know, when it's about your health, then it's really important that it's there, so. Awesome. So let's end on some advice that you would give to customers. So you've got people trying to do digital transformations, they're trying to pull all these different communication systems together, they're trying to understand, you know, where the exposures are, their performance issues. What advice would you give to people that are struggling with these problems? Where should they start? And, you know, what should their journey look like? Okay, I mean, that's great. I mean, in some respects, I think visibility is key, both before pre-migration, during migration, and afterwards. So in my example, before having visibility of the performance of the phones before in this migration issue, and then as they go through the migration, being able to just check that when they've deployed the new phones, everything's working. And then, of course, once, if there were any problems, so in my example, it was a QoS problem, QoS, quality of service. So that's a networking problem, and it goes back to because we're in the network, looking at the network, as much as that's the most complex problem to solve, and it's everywhere, QoS problems is everywhere, it's the simplest thing for us to fix. So monitoring during migration, seeing what the behavior of the phones are during that process, correcting everything quickly so that the migration project is successful, and then post-migration, business as usual monitoring, so if there are any problems, you can quickly react to it. Got it, so okay, so you're going to go through a business case, you're going to make this part of your digital transformation, you're going to bring together all the stakeholders, but I think your point is, if you don't have visibility on what's going on in the network, there are going to be some blind spots that you potentially run into. If you have visibility in the network, you're going to be able to remediate those. In the example you gave with the services company, you're going to be able to achieve your expectations and your ROI results and have confidence that you're going to be around for the next project. So Ray, thanks very much for coming on and sharing this. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE.