 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of next level network experience event brought to you by Infoblox. Welcome back to our coverage, theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here with a virtual event with Infoblox on next level networking. It's a virtual event hosted with theCUBE. We have a great guest, Kineya Vasuni, who is the EVP of products and corporate development with Infoblox. Kineya, thank you for coming on, appreciate it. My pleasure, John. You guys are, the theme of this is next level networking, which I love, next level, it really kind of illustrates. We are going to the next level with COVID-19, we're seeing it everywhere. Security, DNS, topic that most people aren't familiar with, but in IT, you know all about it. You guys are leading and reinventing DDI for the folks that want to know what that is. It's DNS, DHCP, and IP address management for the hybrid cloud and borderless enterprise, which is basically everything now. This is super, super important as we see every single company living this right now, which is workforces working from home, workplaces that are transforming, the surface area is huge, you still got to connect to the internet, you still need to go to websites, you still do e-commerce, you need to run your business. This is a huge, huge problem that's been highlighted. Secure access there, you guys are in the forefront of the next generation of networking, tell us what you define as next level. So John, I think one of the things you will see is if you look at the trends happening in our business, there is an increasing adoption of SaaS services, whether it's infrastructure as a service being consumed from AWS, Azure, or Google, or all the IT applications moving into SaaS. You're already seeing a shift away from this data center being the center of the universe in the enterprise IT infrastructure to more of a cloud edge world, where a lot of the applications now sit in the cloud, some in your private cloud still, but a lot in the public cloud. And then you have your enterprise edge from where you want to get to these applications directly instead of backhauling all the traffic into your traditional data center. We're also seeing a big portion to the number of devices coming into the infrastructure, whether it's BYOD, IOT, 5G, so more devices coming into the infrastructure. As you said, that perimeter and the surface area of the enterprise has exploded. So you have to start to think about security from a different standpoint. So all of these trends are starting to play out in the market. I think what you're going to see is over the next couple of years that the network inside the enterprise is going to look very different from what it is today. Today, everything gets backhauled to the data center and that's where all the action is. I think what you're going to see is a big shift towards what we call a hybrid, multi-cloud enterprise where you may have some workloads sitting in your data center, some workloads sitting in public clouds, some in your private cloud, and then you want the ability to move these workloads around. You're virtualizing everything, all your applications. You are actually containerizing all your applications and you want all this stuff to move around. So it poses a very, very interesting challenge and that's why we say you need a next level network experience to deal with all the changes that enterprises are going through right now. That's a great point. This is our top story that we've been reporting for a long time, but most recently with COVID-19, this notion of multiple networks, multiple environments, multiple clouds. Certainly hybrid cloud has been ratified. Everyone pretty much acknowledges that cloud operations on-premises to the cloud are there, but you got to still move packets from A to B, move them around and now you're storing them and all kinds of things are happening. But I want to get your thoughts on a trend that even makes what you just said even more complex because the complexity is crazy right now. There's a trend of managed services. As cloud explosion comes on, you mentioned SaaS. More companies are deploying managed services, sometimes multi-tenants, sometimes pure instances in the cloud or on-premises and data center. That's causing access. I still want to integrate that into a web presence. I got to integrate all these things. It's not that easy. Now again, DNS has been a big part of the web presence, but now you have a new dimension of hosted applications. You have managed services that are easy to stand up, but now I got to integrate them. This is one of the hardest challenges that we're hearing. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that. Yeah, and I think COVID has certainly accelerated the shift that we talked about. So I think good point there in terms of just COVID acting as a big accelerant in terms of the shift to the cloud. I think one of the key role that we play as the enterprise gets much more dynamic is you need three elements. You need the element to get visibility into everything that's going on in your infrastructure. You need to provide a layer of security, a foundational layer of security in your infrastructure, and you need automation because when you have workloads moving around, you need to automate all your ITSM workflows around allocating IP addresses to these VMs or containers and moving as containers move around, reclaiming IP addresses, assigning new IP addresses, managing DNS records for them. So the work we do, the DDI layer really becomes the lifeblood of how this hybrid multi-cloud enterprise comes along. And as you get to a much more distributed IT infrastructure, you are not going to be able to manage this entire infrastructure yourself the traditional way, right? So if you are an enterprise IT administrator, you cannot sit there and say, look, I'm gonna do the traditional model of deploying software on-premise or appliances on-premise and I will have IT guys going out there and managing the administration of that software and every six months I have to do a software upgrade and I'll do all that. What you need because the enterprise has become so distributed and dynamic is you need a cloud-managed paradigm or a managed services paradigm, right? In either case, basically what you see, what you're looking at is a centralized management model and the ability to sort of spin up and tear down these services dynamically. We are strong believers in SAS or a cloud-managed approach and a cloud-native architecture being the right architecture for the next level network. And that is something from a delivery standpoint and MSP can use. A managed services provider can leverage this cloud-managed architecture that we have to offer these services to enterprise customers and take away the whole headache of managing and administering their own infrastructure. I like how you said DDI layer because there's an abstraction you can create, take away that complexity. That was pretty straightforward in the past. You had DNS, DHCP, IP addresses. Okay, you manage those spaces, no problem, naming, whatnot. Now you have a dynamic environment. That's key. I want to get back to, and follow up when you said about the IT folks, your customers and the enterprise. They're sitting there saying, hey, I'm used to the on-premises world and I have cloud. What's the difference in your mind between on-premises and cloud-managed DDI? And why does it matter? Yeah, look, I think in the traditional world, all the IT infrastructure, right? Again, was sitting in one or more regional or regional or centralized data centers. And it was easy to manage. You could deploy appliances from Infoblox and it was easy to sort of, you had IT folks sitting in these data centers and they could manage the entire infrastructure using some on-premise management tools and things of that nature. But now think about it, if you're a Walmart and you have 12,500 store, right now, if you want to push DNS, DHCP, IP address, management software into all these 12,500 locations, it is very difficult to do that by deploying individual appliances or by deploying sort of shrink-wrapped software that has to sit in every one of these locations. It's just from an IT administration standpoint, it's a much heavier lift. But if I could take all the management and all the policy management, the policy framework and pull that up into a SaaS cloud that you can access from anywhere on the planet, right? And I'll leave the protocol serving engines, if you will, on-premise. So you have a container that gets spun up, that can sit on any third-party hardware that's sitting at your infrastructure. But it is all managed through the cloud, it's zero-touch provision and completely orchestrated. Now you're sitting at a central dashboard and if you are in a COVID environment, you're sitting at home and just accessing our SaaS service and managing your entire infrastructure from your home, from your couch at your home, right? So it just becomes so much easier for IT administrators to operate and run such a network. They'll have so much free time on their hands, they'll be able to watch this virtual event, so it'll be fun. They might do that, yes. They might do that, yes. Stash dashboard, that's a great point. I want to get your thoughts because I like how you, first of all, I love the term next level, anything. Going to the next level has been something that you talk about, whether you're a technical person or an entrepreneur or a business person, let's go to the next level, it means go to the next level. But you add the word experience in there and I want to get your thoughts on that because it is about the user experience. What do you guys do to provide that? What does Infoblox provide specifically to provide that next level experience? Yeah, that's a great question. We are firm believers, again, that the future of networking and security in IT is going to shift to a cloud managed, cloud native paradigm, right? Which means you should be able to, just like the hyperscalers, the AWS is the Google's and Azure's of the world, right? If you look at how they build out their cloud infrastructure, it's all about separating the infrastructure layers for the compute layer from the applications that sit on top of them. So the compute nodes can scale at a different pace from the applications. That same mindset needs to come into managing networking and security services as well. So if you have a thousand different edge locations, let's say, right? You can decide through a centralized policy framework what services you want to spin up at all these thousand locations. Now today, you would have to buy a box, a small, medium, large box from Infoblox or any one of the networking guys out there. And you would have to deploy that and most likely you will end up over provisioning each site because you don't want to run out of capacity. The next level experience would say, look, just tell me what sites you want to deploy. The sites will call home. They will download the number of services needed based on some centralized policy that was defined. And you would get a right size deployment of services at that particular site. You need more services because say the user profile, the profile of the users at that site change, which means you need to spin up, let's say, a couple of additional security services. Well, that gets automatically pulled from the cloud and gets instantiated in that particular site. If you need more capacity because it's end of the quarter and you're doing a whole bunch of some financial transactions for closing the books, you need more capacity for some of the security applications. Those additional containers with those security applications can get spun up. So you are starting to scale out as you need and scale back when you don't need the capacity. But this whole thing becomes a very dynamic experience in terms of how services get spun up, they get torn down. And it's all driven by this whole notion of the users that are sitting at a location, the context of the users, so what devices they are trying to access these applications from. What is the time of the day? How is the security profile of that device? You bring all that know-how into the how services get provision and how services get operationalized at any particular site in any particular enterprise, right? So a very simple experience when it comes to networking and security and how do you deploy that scale? And the thing that that sets up is what you were saying earlier about automation. Because once you're in this mode and this experience, the environment lends itself well to automation because it is downloaded in the right services you need. But since it's dynamic and it needs to be ready, how does automation fit into that piece? Absolutely, right? If it is SaaS managed, it is already automated for you. And now if you wanted to drive further automation and orchestration through integration with your DevOps, SecOps, NetOps tools, we have public APIs through which this can be driven. So two ways to manage this, right? We have a cloud services portal. So if somebody wanted to go in and leverage our portal to manage their infrastructure, they can do that. If they wanted this to be completely programmatic and driven through their DevOps, SecOps tools, then through the public APIs, we will tightly integrate into all the tools they have, whether it's Ansible, Terraform, some of the DevOps tools, or on the security side, if you want to integrate us into your SOAR platform, security orchestration platforms, you can do that in your entire workflow, where networking as well as security can be completely automated. That's awesome. I want to get, as we get a little bit of time left, I know you got it to go and we have to hard stop with the segment here. Customer example, obviously customers have a need for this. You're in business to do this. Can you give an example of a customer that kind of illustrates the next level networking? We have 6,000 plus active customers. We have over 50% share when it comes to this DNS, DHCP, IPAM market. So you will see us deployed in 95 out of the Fortune 100 enterprises, right? So Infoblox is someone you will see in any customer that you go through. We have some public references such as Adobe, a great customer of ours on our website. Their entire global network runs on the foundational layer of DDI. We have some very large customers that are not as comfortable being public references, but we have, again, if you have 95 out of the Fortune 100 enterprises running you, you can imagine how sticky we are and how broadly deployed we are. Typically what happens is we would go in and we would go in as the DDI layer for them to control and manage their IP address space and their DNS in the infrastructure. Then they take on more of a, they take on a security lens at this and say, look through DHCP and IPAM, I know everything that is sitting in my infrastructure and through DNS, I have full visibility into all the communication happening from that endpoint. So that's a great data source for me to leverage to as a first layer of defense from a security standpoint. So then they start to bring in security into the mix in terms of how they leverage our product. And then through our SaaS platforms and SaaS offerings, they take that and extend it as they are driving this edge transformation. So they push these services now to the edge of the infrastructure. So, and the new offerings, our Blocks One platform is our SaaS platform and Blocks One based applications are our new offerings that integrates very nicely with some of our traditional offerings. So you get a very comprehensive single pane of glass in terms of how you can manage your entire enterprise footprint, whether it's on-prem at the edge, in the public cloud, at the cloud edge. Right? You know, having a good business model that puts abstractions and reduces complexities is a great one. We've seen the innovation with DNS and anything that needs an internet address, you got to connect and IoT only creates more need for connections. This is the key. And it prices no DNS, they know that it's the plumbing, we all know, but every time there's an innovation inflection point, a new abstraction layer emerges for simplicity, ease of use. DNS is the phone book of the internet, right? So you want to call anywhere you have to first do a DNS lookup and you brought up IoT, that's a great example. You're not going to be able to put in these IoT sensors, you're not going to be able to put endpoint security software, but they are going to call home. So you can leverage DNS and do some behavioral analysis of the DNS traffic coming out of those IoT sensors or IoT endpoints and say, hey, look, is there something malicious going on? Why is my thermostat talking to a server in China? You can detect that through a DNS based security layer that is foundational in your infrastructure. And to your point, whether it's a light bulb or anything that's a device, they're being turned on and turned off all the time at massive scale. There's no other way to handle it, but have an abstraction and automation. Absolutely. Kania, thank you very much. Thank you very much for your time, great segment. We're here at the Infoblox virtual event, this is theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. Thank you, John. You're welcome.