 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, just theCUBE virtual's coverage of DevNet Create virtual, we're not face to face. theCUBE's been there with DevNet and DevNet Create since the beginning. DevNet Create was really a part of the DevNet community looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here who's been, the company's been on theCUBE many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco. Thousand Eyes, we have Joe Vicar. I was Vice President of Product. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Great, thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom. You're the Vice President of Product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, make everything run on. Thousand Eyes, you guys have been providing common language across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud, microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area. It's converged in multiple theaters and technology. Super important, so I want to get into that with you. But first, Thousand Eyes is recently acquired by Cisco. Big acquisition, super important. The new CEO of Cisco is very clear, API everything. We're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at DevNet Create. The ecosystem of Cisco is going outside their own, their walls, outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking developers, talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, obviously the COVID hits, you get acquired by Cisco. Tell us what's happening. Yeah, it's really been an exciting six months for Thousand Eyes and the entire team and our customers. As we all kind of shifted to the new normal, working from home. And I think that change alone really kind of amplified even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that cloud is becoming the new data center for customers that internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SaaS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more SaaS applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to name your employees to be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what 1000Is is trying to solve for and I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses. I've talked to many CXOs, CISOs, C security is huge. The whole of the conference talk check we'll get to in a second. But it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint. As people start to look at their priorities and going, hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home. VPNs are passing. Maybe it's SD-WAN, maybe it's something else. They're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet. A lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running over these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID has exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what is Thousand Nights thinking about this? You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional, say internal hosted applications. And that was a fairly simple connectivity path. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. Users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed, disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think then how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across this public internet backbone, ultimately to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party SaaS applications to fulfill the key functions of that application. Those three things together, ultimately are creating that level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately the IT organization is really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And yet then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility of that experience, you know, to measure it and understand it, to provide that intelligence. And then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers, are getting the right overall approach to be able to leverage those assets. It's funny, you know, as you get into some of these high scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging, you know, we hear terms like automation, self-healing networks. You mentioned microservices, early you mentioned the cloud is a new data center, or WAN is a new land, however we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance. Because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like catching, looking for a needle in a haystack. Right, so we've had this conversation with you guys on theCUBE before. How does automation occur? When you guys look at those kinds of things, what's important to look at? Can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find and resolve those? Yeah, it's really great. As you mentioned, automation really plays at a key. When you think about the, just a broad problem that IT is trying to drive. And, you know, from our lens, we look at it in, you know, in really three ways. You know, first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to test and be able to provide a level of active measurements across the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network, but then also from the right vantage points you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right is that, you know, data alone doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are streaming across the screen. You have to then enable that data to provide meeting. You need to enable that data to become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly. It'll allow you to be able to see the unseen. It'll allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your IT workflow, as well as be able to be used as a signaling engine to be able to then make the fundamental changes back of the network fabric, whether that is addressing or modifying your BGV peering that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers as well as their employees. Classic policy based activities taking to home to the level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home, okay? Because you know, most IT people like, oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted 100% work from home which puts a lot of pressure on everything? So I got to ask you now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID hit and we saw this rise of work from home, IT teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this say VPN infrastructure or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence now you have potentially thousands every employee is acting across their own corporate network. And people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their say VPN infrastructure across backend of corporate network as well as then using our thousand eyes endpoint agents that runs on a local user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile connectivity because when a user calls up support and says I'm having trouble say accessing my application whether that Salesforce or something else what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your local home router. It could be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application and to be able to understand that full end to end path. You know IT teams have also been disrupted. They've been on off site property as well as you get the cloud. How is your technology help the IT teams? Can you give some examples there? Yeah, great way is how people use Thousand Eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action? And where in the past it might be able as an IT administrator to walk over to their network team to say, hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing? Now that's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as an IT organization? You know, we think at Thousand Eyes and how our customers are using us, Thousand Eyes becomes a common operating language and allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure through those different layers of the network, what's happening and where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore within Thousand Eyes in terms of enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know what? Here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the IT organization, but it goes even further and many times in recent times as well as over the course of people using Thousand Eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own IT organization, they're having worked collaboratively with the different ISPs that they're pairing with with their cloud providers that they're pairing, they're leveraging or the SaaS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. So I've got to ask you the question, when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for IT teams, you see a lot of benefits with Thousand Eyes, you pointed out a few of them. So I've got to ask you the question. So if I'm an IT person in the trenches, are you guys an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example? Because there's a lot of pain point out there. So give me a couple of advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler too. The new things are evolving, you pointed out some use case. Talk about the difference between where you're helping people, pain points, and also enable them to be successful for IT teams. Yeah, that's a great analogy. I think it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum. You know, Thousand Eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for IT organizations when issues are happening, as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the different on call to be able to jump into a war room situation. Thousand Eyes is that trusted source of truth to allow them to focus, to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But Thousand Eyes also, when we think about baselining your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging Thousand Eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing, is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? The internet itself is constantly changing, it's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as that network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can begin to use that as you mentioned in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baselining basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light as people using Thousand Eyes as part of, say, an SD-WAN-based rollout where you're looking to say benchmark and gain confidence as you look to scale out in either benchmarking different ISPs within that ugly connectivity or as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that confidence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. That's great insight. It's the classic financial model, you got baseline and upside, right? You got handle of baseline, as you pointed out, and the upside, use of experience, connectivity, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point, great insight. Joe, thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. Who doesn't love automation? Automation's awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on as everything is a service or XAAS as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything as a service. Because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great drum to bang all day long. But then also you got the same business side saying, as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products. That means not trivial. Talk about how you look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. Yeah, ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve? And ultimately, what is the, that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right? They're being exploded with increase of data that they need to be able to, not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of. And then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you've said gather the insights from it, you need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that IT experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain, as you adopt, say, increased complexity within your infrastructure by moving to a multi-cloud architecture where you look to increase the number of, say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience, ultimately you need with the level of automation to be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a way as possible. And data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view in terms of the visibility you gather, the intelligence you generate, and then ultimately how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking for. It's like a feature, it's under the hood. The feature of everything as a service is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness and software. That's really kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it? Final question for you as we wrap up DevNet Create, really again, it's going beyond Cisco's DevNet community, going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. These are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code, so network programmability, huge topic, we've been having that conversation with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, hey, I just want to develop code. Like, you know, you guys got that, that was nice, thanks so much. You know, you take care of that, I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities? What's your message? You know, ultimately, I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger, ultimate system and your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon, not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network it's connected to, and then ultimately the user and the standard that user. If I leveraging thousand eyes and being able to then, you know, integrate thousand eyes into how you think policy on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developer is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of how your users will access that application is critical. Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything. Letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. We've been following you guys for a long time and great technology chops, great market traction. Congratulations to everyone at thousand eyes. Thanks for coming on, sharing. I appreciate it, thanks for having me. Joe Vicar, vice president of product here for thousand eyes, now part of Cisco. John Furrier, host of theCUBE, CUBE Virtual for DevNet Create Virtual. Thanks for watching.