 Hi, this is Yoosup in Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFI Let's Talk. And today we have with us Mike Howe, VP of Product Marketing at Glowware. Mike, it's great to have you on the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having Glowware back on your show. It's great to have you folks, of course, back on the show again. And today we are going to talk about a lot of things, but I want to start with, I mean, if you look at the modern businesses, of course, there are a lot of businesses that were born in the whole cloud native era, a lot of businesses that were around there for a long time. Different businesses are in different stages of their business transformation. We talk about a lot of other things, cloud and everything else, but we don't talk about the importance of network. So I would like to understand, you know, the importance of not only network, but also the network automation or automated network as a platform, what role they play, not only in business transformation, but business are tied to success and a lot of other factors are there. So talk about that. That's a great question, I mean, I think it really kind of is starting to bring things together here with this theme and this movement that Gartner has really brought to bear called hyper automation. And that's this notion that, you know, while there's been such a focus on, you know, cloud and get to cloud and whatever cloud native and these other things is that large enterprise, you know, we're talking enterprises that their core business is not technology. So you can think, you know, banks and financials and pharmaceuticals. Technology is an enabler for them, but really historically they see technology as a cost and they see the network as a cost, right? And, you know, I kind of came up in networking myself in the early 90s and that's when networking was hot, really. That was the explosion of the internet and the network was considered where you'd want to put your resources. Everyone talked about building up the network. Nowadays, really the focus is on building out AI and it's, you know, the hot thing kind of keeps moving. Security has been really hot for a while. So what I would say is, you know, that while some of that say that focus in the industry has been taken away from the network, the network is still that key underlying layer that enables everything. And essentially without the network layer working and working efficiently and being secure, you don't have the plumbing for any of the applications to work. Your AI systems aren't gonna work, your connectivity to the cloud's not gonna work. And so, you know, I think that's where when the hyper automation movement now has been coming, it's a focus bringing it back to being really considering the end-to-end process or how the application is delivered and considering all aspects of that that does fundamentally start with the network. And I think that's a key hallmark to start and ensure your network is automated to be able to move on to those next, more complicated things. Talk a bit about, once again, when we talk about the cloud, the holistic, we talk about the storage, CPU is there, of course, networking is there. Talk about some of the challenges that, because first of all, in all the IT days, there were different silos. Storage was silent, networking was siloed, security was siloed, now we are talking about DevOps, everything is moving, shift left is happening. Talk about some of the major challenges that kind of looked like intimidating for enterprise customers. So when they look at their automation goals and they look at these as challenges. Yeah, you know what take away from that that I have, I can share with you is that there has been this significant move from task-oriented, which is silo-oriented behaviors to process-oriented behavior and business outcomes. And I think that's a key, it's a change that's happening in the technology, but it's happening in automation. And again, tied to hyper-automation, there is this movement towards you. You've been hearing things like robotic process automation, RPA technologies out there automate back-end systems and application layer. Well now, GlueWare is also, and other companies are on this path, applying process automation to the networking layer and enabling it through API connections and integrations to accomplish end-to-end processes. So when you do that, you're able to kind of begin to break down the silos. And this, we can really go off on a tangent here because it really does become a people process technology type of problem because you may have technology that can be integrated and span across multiple domains or silos, but if organizationally you're not prepared for that, it becomes a problem. And I think that's where you need leadership that sees silos as problems and is asking and challenging the organization to enable that kind of cross-pollination from a people standpoint and enable the technology and the processes so that your technology can actually automate end-to-end. And this is really key because it's not just about some technical change, like I have a foot in marketing, so I was kind of on that hype bandwagon for software-defined and for intent-based. And these are kind of technology approaches, but at the end of the day, you're looking at things that can transform the business. And so breaking down the silos, enabling especially things like automation to work across your silos from security and cloud and storage and the networking infrastructure to accomplish a business goal, that really changes things and it really ties to high-level priorities like compliance, security, and being highly efficient to deliver on a business initiative. You're talking about cultural point, but let's also talk about technical side-off because culture is a harder problem to solve. Technology is actually easier problem to solve. Talk a bit about what kind of solutions are available, and the creeper solutions are available, especially from Glover's perspective, which do kind of reduce some of these pain or address these pain points. Glover is in a unique position because in the industry, for more than 10 years, there's been this big movement towards automation equals programming. It means you have to jump into, in the networking world, you have to jump into Python, you have to learn Ansible, and it's a very low-level process. And while a lot of these technologies are open source, there's a lot of hidden costs. So from the management side, they viewed, well, are you automating, and your teams would say, yes, we're automating, but they never really dug into how and how long it took to automate and what the cost was to automate. So Glover's unique position is delivering a suite of applications that deliver automation capabilities really kind of out of the box with network inventory and config drift monitoring and configuration auditing, and then moving towards your configuration management, all with a no-code approach. And then about a little over a year ago, we introduced Network RPA, which is process automation, and that's really been a fundamental shift in what I was talking about earlier is evolving from task-based automation to process automation. Network RPA enables the orchestration of the automation, so you can do an audit before you make a config change or you can verify a state before and after an OS upgrade, and you can integrate APIs, so you can tie into things like your service now platform or your remedy platform, for ticketing ITSM or source of truth integration, and those API integrations, and I almost, not even jokingly, kind of talk about automating the automation. Oftentimes, people have automation, but they're individual low-level scripts or playbooks, and there's some human doing a lot of work before and after it, and ultimately, that's not highly effective. So that's where Gluer, with their out-of-the-box suite of applications that have purposeful apps as well as process automation, that's really where we're helping enterprises accelerate their automation journey. Talk a bit about some of the recent update. Of course, you folks came out with Gluer 5.1 as well. Just talk about some of the updates there, and also if you look at what is the evolution curve of Gluer, let's talk about 5.1, and then we can also talk about the next thing that you folks are working on. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, sometimes, you know, when you hear a release number, 5.1, you think, oh, it's a minor release. We don't actually use the first number as a major only. Usually the first number indicates something really significant in the app. Like when we introduced our topology app, we went from our 4.x to 5.x. So 5.1 is a major platform release. It consists of about four months of development. We usually have about three major platform releases a year. And then we do package releases every two weeks. So sometimes customers or people say, well, I can't, how do you get new features in your product if you're only having two or three releases a year? And the answer is, well, we have package updates that come every two weeks that deliver functionality. So 5.1 had really kind of four key buckets of capability. The first is around our platform itself. We introduced a new centralized credential management. And I mentioned it a little bit before, but GlueWare, it sells into the very large and complex enterprise. A lot of them are in, you know, financials and pharmaceuticals and highly regulated industries. They have requirements around password management and things like related to that for compliance and conformance. So GlueWare's introduction to centralized credential manager really simplifies things and can assist with processes like when you add devices into the GlueWare system, you don't have to add them with credentials. All of that can be centrally managed and you know, you don't have to import and put, you know, some clear text password in some file or it just, so that that is really about centralizing and standardization on a highly encrypted password scheme as well as the ability to integrate with third party credential managers. So that was the first big rock. The second is around our network RPA app as I've been talking about the process automation. We've had really great adoption of this throughout our customer base. So we've introduced new capabilities like error handling with try catch logic, being able to import and export your workflows, a new state assessment capability that exposes our GlueWare's ability to just drop in state assessment at any point in a workflow. So a state assessment, you can think of like a show my BGP neighbors or look at my route counts or, you know, look at an interface status. You can drop any state assessment in anywhere in a workflow and just makes it very flexible. And then really opening up the platform to expose programmatic objects that start and stop individual tasks. And what that just really means is like, if you run like a state assessment where you're doing a show IBGP neighbor, you get a block of result and GlueWare can wrap that in JSON and make anything from that output programmatically accessible. So I can look at my neighbor count or various things like that. So that's really powerful. And the third major block, we introduced topology a little under a year ago about summertime, late summer this last year. And topology is built for the visualization of the network and generating site documentation. And we just layered in more advanced features to that like new layouts, link aggregation support, VLAN support. And then the fourth major bucket is just really expanding on vendor support. There's been a focus on supporting southbound APIs. So we've expanded our Cisco ACI support, our Cisco Maraki support and even added other vendors like Versa Networks in this release. So it is a big release and our customers are really enjoying digging into all the features and really expanding their automation. First of all, thanks for talking with us. Now, as I mentioned, you were talking about earlier the cultural, I want to go back to the cultural point as well. We see a lot of culture shifts happening. We talk about DevOps movement, DevSecOps, shift left, chaos injuring, SREs, platform injuring. Talk a bit about what kind of culture movement you're seeing from networking perspective where you still see there are still silos and what is the right approach, how organizations should approach network automation projects? Yeah, Swapno, I think that people are excited about technology again. And I think we can give some credit to the movement around AI and data and the importance of data. Someone said recently, I heard, well, AI and ML is just statistics rebranded. I thought that was kind of funny because you could take a topic like statistics and it's kind of very dry, but also you apply AI, ML and it gets exciting. And I think that's sometimes what we need in our industry is a little bit of refreshing to make it new and exciting again. I mentioned the movements around software to find networking or intent based. It's easy to get kind of slip into low level. Like when you dive into API automation or integrating APIs, it can get kind of bland pretty quickly. But if you're able to have a leader who understands process automation can be transformative to your business and having products and people who can integrate APIs and build end to end automation and can look at and evaluate how you're automating and ensure your company's moving up into more modern approaches. I think that's the trap we fall into in technology is kind of getting stuck in old technology for too long. And what Glure is offering and enabling customers is this acceleration path that's built on data modeling and that has built in API integrations and is fully customizable to expand those API integrations. And this starts to get exciting to business leaders because they realize they can accomplish those business goals of compliance and security and efficiency. So I think sometimes it's breaking down the silos, enabling cross pollination, enabling your technology teams exposure into the other areas that gives them growth. They don't feel pigeonholed and like just security or just storage or just networking. You get exposure into these other areas and see how things work end to end. And you really just expand in your business in terms of its ability to automate and its ability to deliver for the business. So I think that's a key takeaway that I'm seeing and it's a nice trend that's happening. I think there's new energy given to the networking teams and the infrastructure teams that are delivering technologies that ultimately power exciting technologies like AIML. Are you happy with the culture shift that is happening or you feel that this is what we need but not a lot of progress is happening and company need to do more of your like, no, we are on the right path, the trends are all positive. I have the pleasure of working with very large enterprises and I can tell you they often vent frustration because the larger the organization the harder to turn the ship so to speak, right? It's just, it changes difficult and change within organizations is difficult. So I think it does vary and I think that what you end up seeing is some of these old companies come under competitive pressure or they have a hack or something that affects their business, right? Like an outage or some, so sometimes it takes a catalyst to create the change that catalyst can come through new leadership joining the company or organizational change. We all know in technology there's this whole emphasis on efficiency and cost savings and there's been a lot of head count reductions in organizations and that puts more of an emphasis on automation and so I think that the cultural and those types of problems are kind of, let's say organizational specific but I think everyone realizes that efficiency is important automation is important but from a people perspective giving the people opportunity to grow and expand beyond their single silo or domain give them opportunities to learn and grow and solve unique and complex business challenges that I think things can get really exciting. We work with a very large pharmaceutical and I was working with an engineer recently and he said, you know, like he literally said like our company is working on solving or creating ending cancer really like the treatment of critical diseases. They're not, so technology is just an abler for that business to do that faster and I think when you can frame it in that perspective of whatever your company's goal is and that your technology and the work you're doing is enabling that then I think it gets exciting and that's why you see good leaders out there and leaders that are moving a little slowly and if you get out executed, chances are change is coming. Mike, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about network automation and of course updates to BlueWear. Thanks for all those insights as well and I would love to chat with you again. Thank you. Thank you Swapnil, really enjoyed it. Take care.