 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Diego, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Stu Minimitz here, Lisa Martin as well, but we've got a very special guest now, Ken O'Reilly, my good friend is here. He's the director of customer experience for Cisco Stealth Watch. Kenny, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Well, thanks for having me, Dave. Good seeing you as well. Yeah, so customer experience. People think about customer experience and security. It's not always great, right? It's a challenging environment. They're constantly sort of chasing their tails. It's like the arms race with the bad guys. So what is customer experience all about in the context of security? So our number one goal for our security customers is to accelerate their value realization. So our challenge is to make sure that they get the value out of the product, that they're buying, because every minute of every day the bad guys are trying to get their assets and their IP. And when they buy a technology, the quicker you can get it up and running and protect, the better it is for our customer. So how do you measure like value? It's like reducing the amount of data that you're exposed to losing. Is it increasing the cost of the bad guys getting in? Because that's kind of, if I'm a bad guy and it costs me more to get in, I'll maybe go somewhere else. How do you measure that? Right, so you're right. So our whole product strategy is to increase the cost for the bad guy to get the IP or the assets. And so for us, we have to understand what the value proposition is for our product so that the customers can realize that value. So whether it's trying to help them with the use cases or operationalize the product or in our case, what we try to do, we have both network users and security users. We try to get both groups to adopt the technology and then expand it from their operation centers to the guys that are doing the threat hunting, to the investigations, et cetera. So that's how we sort of gauge the values, the number of people that are using the technology and the number of use cases, they're actually implementing. So we've been talking about security all week, Stealth Wash, obviously one of the flagship products. Cisco's security business grew 21% last quarter. So that's got to be an interesting stat. Services is 25% of the company's revenue. So you're at the intersection of two pretty important places for Cisco. So specifically when you come into a customer engagement, who are you engaging with? Is it a multidisciplinary? Are you primarily dealing with the SecOps group or do you touch other parts of the organization? So typically when a company's looking, it's usually they're looking for network visibility. So we're dealing with the network architecture teams and they typically bring in the security architects because today they're working hand in hand. And then from there, that's where we try to kind of, what we say, preach the gospel of Stealth Wash. We always say you can never have enough Stealth Wash, okay, because you can never have enough visibility. Because once you turn the lights on and they can see what's going on in their network, it's very illuminating for them and then they realize the challenges that they have and what they have to do to protect their assets. Yeah, I joked at Google Cloud Nexus, like the cockroaches all scrambling. Oh yeah. You know, for the corners when you turn the lights on. And Stealth Wash at its core is, you don't need a lot of fancy AI even though you can apply fancy AI, but you start with the basics, right? What do you got? Where are the gaps? Okay, so now once it's exposed, what do you do with that information? Is the customer experience group come in and help implement it faster? That's part of the value? Yeah, yeah. So time to value. Yeah, so time to value With our experts, of course, we understand the space. We understand our product. We understand the challenge. And of course, our network and security customers are overwhelmed. The stat that they throw out there is that our large customers have any from, we're from 50 to 100 security products. So how do you stand out? So as a vendor, our number one goal is to build that relationship with the customer to become the trusted security advisor. So we know better than anybody how to get that value, how to get it quickly. And the number one problem that they have, Dave, is how to operationalize all these tools. Because StealthWatch sits in the middle, we're a big integration platform. We take data, telemetry, net flow from a lot of different products. And we bring that data together to figure out, to help that customer figure out how to make sense of it, update their policies, create better policies and really tighten up their security posture. They might like to reduce the number of tools, but they really can't, because they're using them. And so what you do is you bring in a layer to help manage that. But you're also solving a problem, just in terms of exposing gaps. And then do you also have tooling to fill those gaps? Or is that partners tools, is that StealthWatch? So we have our own, what we call integration platform, where we have a platform that helps integrate other, not only other Cisco security technologies into our platform, but other security technologies as well outside of Cisco. So, it's a platform that we've built, it's part of our customer experience sort of tool set. But it's a tool set unlike anybody else ever has. So that along with what we do with the DevNet group, we've built our own set of APIs to integrate in with the product APIs. So we can pump data out to data lakes, we can pump data out to sims like Splunk and some of the others. So that's where we are, we're a solutions group. That's what we do, we work on the solutions, long-term value, we work on the life cycle sort of value chain with customers, we're there with them the whole time. Our goal, retention, we want them to renew, which means they're investing in us again. And of course as cloud, as their infrastructure's moving to the cloud and our technologies are moving to the cloud, we have to be there to help them get through all those technology challenges. So, the pricing model is a subscription model, is that right? It can be? Yes, well what we call it, term. All right, but it's essentially subscription. We have switched over the last 18 months from a perm to a term-based model. Which I mean, Chuck Robbins on the conference calls, the earnings calls talks about the importance of increasing, they having a rateable model and recognizing subscription. So, when you say a term, so I got to what? Sign up for a year or two years, three years or something like that. Select three? Yeah. So who doesn't, right? So you sign up for three years and then, but the price book says monthly, I'm sure, right? So you can make it look smaller. But it makes sense though, because you're not going to start, stop, start, stop with your security. You really want to get success out of it. So you got to have some kind of commitment. Let's talk a little bit more about the analytics side of it. And how you're applying machine intelligence. I mean, it's always been some form of analytics, largely for reporting and things of that nature. But now it's getting more automated. So take us on that analytics journey. It's been around for, Southwest has been around for what, five years? 15. Yeah, over 15 years. 15. Yes, yes. Oh wow, maybe I just found out about five years ago. Right. Okay, so. No, but I mean. Take us back five years. Five years. So, the big thing for us in the data that we collect is context, right? So you've talked to TK about the more context you can add to that data. The better you are at analyzing that data. So for us, that's one of the things that we do. We add a lot of context to that data through ice. So identity information, what kind of assets they are. And that's where we get to, through our tools, add more context so that our analytical engines, so like the cognitive threat analytics, the encrypted threat analytics that we have, that they're able to analyze that data a lot better. And that's what we've been doing now for the past three plus years, since we were acquired by Cisco, is to find a way to add more context to the data so that helps our analytics become much more effective. And then you can interact with through APIs, say for instance Splunk, you mentioned that. So you got that data that you can operate on. Do you see a point where the machines are actually going to plug the holes? I mean, are we on the cusp of that? In other words, you see a gap, today a human has to take action. Do you see a point, maybe it's two, three, five, 10 years, but are we going to get to that point? I think so, down the line, I mean because we've seen, as we've been able to get better visibility and better context about that data, we can make better decisions through the machine. So it doesn't take an army of people to read the matrix. We're getting better at synthesizing that matrix down. You take our network segmentation capabilities that we've built as part of the StealthWatch customer experience team. We can get to well over 90% identification of the assets on the network, which is a lot better than anybody else in the industry. So we're getting there, and through the final stages of reading that matrix, we're getting to the point where we understand a lot more what's on people's networks, what those assets are. So as a security practitioner, how do you think we're doing as an industry? I mean, I used to go back every year and say, okay, how much was spent on security? Are we more secure, less secure? And it felt like, you know, as data grew, it felt like we were getting more and more and more exposed. You've seen the stats where when a company gets infiltrated, it takes on average 250 days for them to realize they've been infiltrated, is that changing? Are we getting better as an industry? I think in Cisco we are, because of the products that we have and that integrated architecture. So when we first joined three years ago, that was the drumbeat, and now today we integrate with ICE. We're going to integrate with Next Generation Firewall. Through the integration of the sort of analytics that we've got in the cloud, that's happening. And we are trying to integrate with other products, but you know, you go down on the floor and you see the number of point products, that is a nightmare for our customer. So for us, through the customer experience in our organization, we're there to take that complexity out and bring all of those technologies together. And when you get to that point, then you're really making progress with a customer. A customer that's got 50 to 100 products in the mix, that's a recipe for disaster. And if that, if it's still like that five years from now, customers are still going to be challenged. A big part of your customer experience mission is simplification, speed, time to value. Raise the cost to the bad guys and then do it all over again. Yeah, it's just rinse and repeat and that's a life cycle journey. And that's what we take our customers through. Now I notice you have on your phone, you got the Bruins logo. That's right, right here, brown. So big game tomorrow. That's right. Four, three in overtime, Bruins. Oh my God, I have my heart to take that, Dave. It's going to be an overtime game. Well, as you know, it's rare to have a game seven in any, at the very final one, a lot of game sevens, but not to win at all. I think the last time in Boston was 1984. Is that right? Yeah, it's been a long time. So I'm excited. I know you are. That's right. Warriors fans too, we got that thing going out. I mean, I don't know for all you hoop fans out there. Hopefully there's a game seven for that as well. Yeah, let's go, right? Why not? Why not? Game seven all around. All right, so Charr is going to play with his broken jaw or whatever's going on. Matt Grislich, I hope is back. Yeah, that would be key. That would be key. Yeah, right? Sure, up to defense. Cause you know, he's a plus minus leader. Charr. Oh yeah. That's right. All time. Even though we give him a lot of grief. That's right. He may look snow, but he's the all-time plus minus leader. That's right. Katie, hey, thanks so much for coming in. All right, Dave, thanks for having me on. Great to see you. All right, go Bruins. We will be right back. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman and Lisa Martin. We're live from Cisco Live in San Diego. You're watching theCUBE.