 Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of Dell World. 2012, we're down here in Austin, the great city of Austin, fantastic mojo here, Dell World, about 5,000 customers and partners here at Dell World and theCUBE is covering it end to end live. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jeff Kelly also with wikibon.org. Thanks for having me on, Dave, I appreciate it. We're here with Scott Hollis, who will be our next guest, Director of Product Marketing for Performance Monitoring Business at Quest Software. Welcome. Thank you, it's good to be here. Thanks for coming on Inside theCUBE. So Quest Software, recent acquisition, about $860 million acquisition by Dell, I think back in September. That's right. So this is your first Dell World as a member of the Dell team. How are you liking the show? And tell us a little bit about kind of your role inside of Quest and now inside of Dell. Enjoying the show, making a lot of good context because we were only acquired a few months ago. Power of integration has been proceeding incredibly well. We're forming a separate software group called the Dell Software Group. And that really has three businesses within it, systems management, business intelligence and security. And that's going to be within the Dell Software Group. And we've already been talking about that here today, John Swenson in his presentation, discussed that already. And we're actually, as far as the business that I'm in is the application performance monitoring business. And so I have product marketing for all of the performance monitoring, which includes the database performance monitoring, virtualization performance monitoring, network performance monitoring and application performance monitoring. And so I think application performance monitoring is a large draw because it's all about the applications today. It's whether it's in the data center, in the cloud, private, public, it doesn't matter. What really matters is is the service that the application is intended to deliver being delivered to the end user. And so that's where we're focused. But the family of products that we have allows us to do that from the end user's perspective and to show organizations what that end user interaction, maybe it's an online revenue site, maybe it's a customer service app that the customer service team needs real time when they're on the phone. But not only do we show that front end of the user experience with the application and then the transaction tracing through the application, we allow, we provide the depth on the network, on the database, on the virtual infrastructure. So when there is that problem, our customers are able to quickly identify where in the stack, in the technology stack it's occurring. And that's really the key difference between application performance monitoring and more traditional performance monitoring that was really focused on the components themselves rather than the whole. So how does remediation occur in this model? Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of how automated it can be? Yeah, sure. There's with APM and without APM. Without APM, what happens is each of the functional silos has their own monitoring tool. When a problem occurs, there's a war room call set up and each of the experts that representing that functional team, functional teams being the network, the database, the virtual, they get on this call and they all say, it's not me. DefCon six, let's get in, right? Yeah, and it's not me, the network is great. They're pointing fingers. Exactly, and this could go on for hours, for days, for weeks. And so CIOs and VPs of IT ops have just said I've had it. I need a way that ties everything together, but there's some more traditional well-known software vendors that provide a huge monolithic platform that could take years to fully implement. What we've done is we've leveraged a very fast time to value solution that ties everything together in a modular way, and it's collaborative so that each of the distinct owners of the pillars are able to see the same thing. And then the person that owns the application that's responsible to the business is able to quickly identify where the problem is and then get right at the root cause. Because ultimately they're accountable to the business. There's service levels that have to be met for the business. So when you say it's collaborative, you have tools for them to collaborate, is that part of the? Yeah, instead of being distinct tools that they're each looking at and each of them getting a different view, there's one truth, and that one truth is in the APM solution in our fog lights. So give us a sense of how you do it. Like what's the secret sauce? I mean, you've got all this data and metadata locked within these silos. So you need to get access to that information in order to solve the problem, is that right? So how do you do that, and how do you unify that view? Well, it really has to do with each of the functional components can be installed whether it's for, like let's say, for the database administrator. The database administrator might have another tool they're using, but they will install our component there as well to gather that data. So each of the components gets installed and it feeds into a central management server. And from that, the user interface interacts with that management server. But what's really different about what fog light brings to the table is the end user's experience. We actually record what the end user's doing on the screen, and we can play that back. We also provide synthetic transactions. So from that users, not only that real user, but synthetic transactions from different points of presence so that the organization can know what the performance is of that application around the world. You're not measuring the light on the server, the server level, but you're measuring application performance as a user would see it. We're doing both. But the difference is we start from where the user sees the performance, what the user's real experience is. And then we have a synthetic ability to actually script and playback transactions. So even when there may or may not be end users, there's the synthetic is always checking availability. But when there is a problem, we also provide, which is different than most APM solutions, we provide the depth in the functional pillars, meaning the network monitoring, the database monitoring, the virtual, and these are best-of-breed solutions that we have. So we can actually drill down to find root cause. Okay, so once you find root cause, take us through what happens next. Well, there's, in order to, you want to reduce, once you find the root cause, there's a mean time to resolution. We call it MTTR, mean time to resolution, that you want to minimize. That's what the VP of IT Ops wants, that's what the CIO wants, the business exec wants. So once you can quickly identify where it's occurring, now, potentially we don't provide the depth, maybe down at the record level in the database that is needed. I know we do, but potentially, if that isn't there, then other tools would play into the picture in resolving the problem, getting at the data to resolve the problem. But we have a major auto manufacturer who had an accelerator sticking problem, and they had all the customers wanting to get at the repair, and then all of their dealerships needing to get parts as well, and they were having one problem after another. They had 37 different monitoring solutions. It was a very broad, expansive environment, a very difficult time resolving the issue. They brought in fog light, leverage fog light, and to the state forward, they've not had any of those issues. Jeff, I know you want to get into the analytics side of things, because ultimately we're trying to figure out, okay, can you use predictive analytics to solve these problems? So why don't you pick up on that next one? Right, exactly. I mean, so when we're talking about performance and monitoring of an application, I mean, it's critical not just to find, when there's a problem, but also to kind of predict and prevent that from happening ahead of time. And of course that takes a lot of analytics and under the cover. So how do you play in that space? What is your approach to that? And really, can you kind of articulate the value you think that provides to your community of customers and users? Trending data over time is something that all of our customers want. We provide that, there's extensive reporting, but what the customers really want is more, they'd love predictive, but more times than not, the predictive solutions that are out there have false positives enough. But if they can look and see utilization trends over time and then get recommendations on ways they might correct those, that especially exists in our virtualization monitoring components. There's really, really powerful capacity planning. We've got charge back capabilities. So depending on who's utilizing the infrastructure, there's ability to charge appropriately. And then of course the performance monitoring, which is key, but like you were asking, the analytics around trends, and really we look at it in three ways. There's advice, there's analysis, and there's automation. So it's one thing to monitor and provide some advice. And that's like the first step of any solution out there would do. The analysis and providing the analytics and providing some recommendations on what should be done or when capacity might be exceeded if certain changes are not made, that's pretty powerful. Even more powerful is the automation of either making those changes dynamically or allowing the self-service that we know is so popular in supporting cloud environments. And the automation is really the key. It's the nirvana that everyone is going for. Right, so does Quest provide all three distinct capabilities in a really unified manner as you were talking to Dave about? Yeah, absolutely we do. So we provide the advice, the analysis, and the automation and that's a big differentiator for us versus the other products that are out there. So we've heard a lot about conversion infrastructure and private clouds at this show. Dave and John have been talking a lot about it with many guests. So how does virtualized environments and specifically as Dell really makes this push into the private cloud business and really trying to take their customers on that journey to the private cloud, how does Quest's job become more difficult or what are the challenges associated with those kinds of environments versus a more traditional architecture that you might see that is common today but is increasingly moving to this kind of cloud-like model? Well the private cloud environments leverage virtualization heavily and the automation layer on top of that is critical and monitoring all the different components that make up a transaction because in a highly, in a private cloud environment and in a virtualized environment workloads move dynamically and when they move the different components that make up an application or a service that's being delivered to the end user you might not think that by moving application A onto host B it looks like that would be not a problem but then there's application C that's sharing resource there and you may not have realized that you're indirectly impacting application C so it gets really complicated really fast so our solutions simplify all of that and allow these organizations to adopt and thrive in a private cloud environment and here recently we announced our fog light for Windows Azure applications so if organizations are choosing to use platform as a service like Windows Azure we have support for that as well and we do that different than other vendors our customers want to know what the end users experience is with that application and yes they also want to know how the application is performing and the different components that make up the application they want both but most of the other solutions out there focus really on how the components are performing and they don't tie it together with the end user experience which is what we're known for really so the idea being certainly you want your underlying infrastructure to be operating efficiently but the most important thing is that the user the application user is enjoying a solid experience even if at times perhaps the infrastructure is not operating as efficiently as possible it's important but there are two kind of separate though tied together concepts really they are and it's interesting there's two perspectives of it one of our customers has 10,000 florists that they support and they have the infrastructure for fulfillment and the point of sale systems and everything and so real time on Mother's Day which is the big day they were actually using Foglight as in a trial capacity to see how, you know, what it could provide for them and they were noticing they were they were, the revenue was down a little bit all of a sudden and they couldn't figure out why with Foglight they could actually play back and see that in the shopping cart when you went to purchase that there was a promotion code and when they entered the promotion code it failed, that app failed and so they were getting abandoned shopping carts people going, you know, trying another so they quickly found that and they were just in awe that we can do that but then something else was interesting I went to visit them and they told me that okay, we have 26 web servers and, you know, something else I love about your product is I got a call from the boss and he says, okay, one of the web servers is at 95% CPU I need you to drop everything and go figure it out what's going on and he says, well, wait a second so he pulled up the Foglight UI and he looked at what the end users were experienced and the transaction flow and he says, but everything's I'm even better than normal all of 100% are doing great and so he called back up and he said, you know I realize there's a problem with one of the web servers but the other 25 are handling just fine and it's not a busy time of year none of our, we're not impacted revenue none of our user experience is impacted in any way he says, how about I work on that tomorrow and finish this key project that you wanted me to finish today? He said, great, wonderful so it allows you to prioritize activities and be more proactive in supporting the business instead of just being reactive and so kind of you mentioned earlier you know, Windows Azure and for instance, that kind of got me thinking about the big data space there Windows, Microsoft is working with Hortonworks on their Hadoop platform and making it available from the cloud it's very early days for big data applications that is applications built on some of these no SQL databases but how do you see that potentially impacting kind of what you do from an application performance and monitoring and management landscape? Well, the more data there is obviously there are more that application transactions are occurring and the more workloads there are it's synonymous one goes with the other in most cases and so the applications themselves rely on the databases and the file systems to be responsive and obviously if there's a hiccup in the delivery of the service to the end user you want to know where that is and if that has to do with access or processing of the data then you want to know that right away and so with APM, actually with APM in its pure state the way some of the, one analyst in particular is viewing it is that it's really just the end user's experience with the application and the application processing itself in reality, APM is making sure that that application and that service is being delivered to the end user and so you have to be able to identify and have some depth in the key components in the converged infrastructure which includes the network, the database, the processing infrastructure, the applications, the web servers, everything the virtual infrastructure was virtual or physical all of that you have to have visibility into and I mentioned earlier that we were, we provided a modular solution a lot of our customers will start with the application layer in the end user or they'll start with the database performance or they'll start with the virtual performance monitoring and then they'll expand from there because it's all integrated but it doesn't require a rip and replace you can start where your current point of pain is and over time move out some tools and consolidate so that there's one UI and one truth and we call it, the war room calls I mentioned earlier we call it blame storming you can eliminate the blame storming when you have a single view of the truth and I'm sure the internal teams will appreciate that and people get along a little bit better when you eliminate that so All right, listen guys we got to go we got to wrap the planes are backing up as they say but Scott thanks very much for coming on theCUBE we appreciate your perspective it's great to be here thank you Jeff, thanks so much right there everybody this is Dave Vellante and we're here live from Dell World in Austin, Texas 2012 this is theCUBE Silicon Angles coverage we'll be right back after this word