 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE here in Palo Alto, California for a special conversation with an industry analyst who's been, who travels a lot, does a lot of events, covers the industry up and down economically and also some of the big trends to talk about how the at scale problem that's the COVID-19 is causing, whether it's a lot of people that are working at home for the first time to at scale network problems. The pressure points that this is exposing for what I would call the mainstream world is a great topic. Zece Carvala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, friend of the CUBE. Zece, welcome back to the CUBE. Good to see you remotely. We're working in place here. I came to the studio with our quarantine crew here to get these stories out because they're super important. Thanks for spending the time. Oh yeah, thanks. It's certainly been an interesting the last couple of months and we're probably maybe halfway through this, I'm guessing. Yeah, and no matter what happened, the new reality of this current situation or a mess or whatever people want to call it is the fact that it has awakened what us industry insiders have been seeing for a long time, big data, new networks, cloud native, some microservices, kind of at scale, scale out infrastructure. Kind of the stuff that we've been kind of covering is now exposed to the whole world to see on a Petri dish that's called COVID-19 going, wow, this is the world has changed. This is highlighting the problems. Can you share your view of what are some of those things that people are experiencing for the first time and what's the reaction? What's your reaction to it all? Yeah, it's been kind of an interesting last couple of months when I talked to CIOs about how they're adapting to this. You know, before I was an analyst, John, I was actually in corporate IT. I was part of a business continuity plans group for companies. And the whole definition of business continuity has changed. When I was in corporate IT, we thought of business continuity as being able to run the company with a minimal set of services for a week or a month or something like that. So for instance, I was in charge of corporate technology and financial services firm and we thought, well, if we have 50 traders, can we get by with 10? Business continuity today is, I need to run the entire organization with my full staff for an indefinite period of time. And that is a substantially different mandate than thinking about how I run a minimal set of services to just maintain the bare minimum business operations. And I think that's exposed a lot of things for a lot of companies. You know, for instance, I've talked to so many companies today where the majority of the employees have never worked remote. For you or I, we're mobile professionals. We do this all the time. We travel around. We go to conferences. We do this stuff all in second nature. But for a lot of employees, you think your contact center agents, in-store people, things like that, they've never worked from home before. And so all of a sudden the new reality is they've got to set up a computer in a kitchen or in their bedroom or something like that and start working from home. Also for companies, they've never had to think about a world where everybody worked remote, right? So the VPN infrastructure to have, the cloud apps they have, the remote access technology to have was set up for a subset of users, maybe 10%, maybe 15%, but certainly not everybody. And so now we're seeing corporate networks get crushed, all the cloud providers are getting crushed. I know some of the, the, the conferencing companies, the video companies are having the double triple capacity. And so I think to your point when you started this, we would have seen this eventually with all the data coming in and all the new devices being connected. It just, I think what COVID did is just accelerated this to the point where it's exposed everything at once. Yeah. And you know, I, you know, a lot of being an entrepreneur and I've done a lot of corporate legal contracts. The word force major is always a phrase that's a league jargon, which means act of God. So it's being something that you can't control. I think what's interesting to your point is, is that the playbook in IT, even, even some of the most cutting edge IT is forecasting some disruption, but never like this. And also disaster recovery and business continuity, as you mentioned, have been practices, but state of the art has been percentages of overall, but disaster recovery was a hurricane or a power outage. So generators, fail oversights or regions of your cloud, not a change in a new vector. So the disruption is not disruption. It's an amplification of a new work stream. That's the disruption. That's what you're saying. Yeah, no, that's, that's correct. Business economy used to be very data center focused. It was how do I get enough power? How do I create some replicate my office and have 50 desks in here instead of 500? But now it's everybody working remotely. So I got to have ways for them to collaborate. I have to have ways for them to talk to customers. I have to have ways them to deliver services. I have to enable people to do what they did in the office, but not in the office, right? And so that's been a big challenge. And I think it's been an interesting test for CIOs that have been going through digital transformation plans. I think it's shifted a lot of budgets around and make companies look at the way they do things. There's also the social aspect of it, John. People like to go to the office, they like to interact with coworkers. And I've talked to some companies where they're bringing in medical doctors, they're bringing in psychologists to talk to their employees because if you've never worked from home before, it's quite a big difference. The other aspect of this that's underappreciated, I think, is the fact that now all our kids are home, right? So we've got to contend with that. And I know the first day that the shutter in place already got put in place for the San Francisco area, a new call, I believe a new version of Call of Duty had just come out. We had some new shows pop up in Netflix, some series continuances. So now these kids who are at home or bored, they're downloading content. They're playing games. At the same time, we're trying to work and we're trying to do video calls and we're trying to bring in multiple video streams. Or even if they're in classrooms, they're doing Zoom-based calls, that type of thing. So we're using WebEx or an application like that. And it's played havoc on corporate networks, not just company networks. And so- Well, also Comcast and the providers, AT&T, and the fiber seems to be doing well, but Comcast is throttling. I mean, this is the crisis. It's a new vector of disruption. Yeah, YouTube said that they're gonna throttle bandwidth. Well, I think what this is, is it makes you look at how you handle your traffic. And I think there's plenty of bandwidth out there. And even most basic home routers are capable of prioritizing traffic. And I think there's a number of IT leaders I've talked to have actually gone through the steps of helping their employees, understand how you use your home networking technology to be able to prioritize video and corporate voice traffic over top. There are corporate ways to do that. For instance, Aruba and Extreme Networks both offer these remote access points where you just plug them in and you're connected to a corporate network and you pick up all the policies. But even without that, there's ways to do it with home. So I think it's made us rethink networking instead of the network being a home network, a Wi-Fi network, a data center network, right? The internet. We need to think about this grand network as one network and then how we control the quality of a cloud app from the person's home to the cloud all the way back to the company because that's what drives user experience. I think you're highlighting something really important and I just want to illustrate and have you double down on more commentary on this because I think the one network or we're all part of one network concept is shows that the perimeter is dead. That's what we've been saying about the cloud. But also if you think about just the crimes of opportunity they're happening. You got the hacker hacking situation. You got all kinds of things that are impacted. There's crimes of opportunity and there's disruption that's happening because of the opportunity. Can you just share more and unpack that concept of what this one network? What are some of the things that businesses and then are thinking about now? Get the VPN. You got collaboration tools that sometimes are half baked. I mean, I love Zoom and all, but Zoom is crashing too. I mean, WebEx is more corporate oriented but not really as strong as with Zoom is for the consumer. But still they have an opportunity but they have a challenge as well. So all these work tools are kind of half baked too. Well, the thing is they were never designed. I remember seeing in an interview that Chuck Robbins had on CNBC where he said, we didn't design WebEx to support everybody working from home, right? It just was, that wasn't even a thought. Nowhere did he ever go to his team and say, build this for the whole world to connect, right? And so every one of the video providers and the cloud collaboration providers had problems and I don't really blame them because this is a dynamic we were never expecting to see. I think you brought up a good point on the security side. A lot has been written about how more and more companies are moving to these online tools like Zoom and WebEx and applications like that to let us communicate. But what does that mean from a security perspective? Now all of a sudden I have people working from home, they're using these web-based applications. I remember a conversation I had about six months ago with one of the world's most famous hackers who does nothing about penetration tests now. He said the cloud-based applications are his number one entry point into companies and to penetrate them because people's passwords and things like that are fairly weak. So now we're moving everything to the cloud, we're moving everything to these SaaS apps, right? And so now it's creating more exposure points. We've got fishers out there that are using the term COVID or Corona as a way to get people to click on links they shouldn't. And so now our whole security paradigm has blown up, right? So we used to have this hard shell we could drop around our company. We can't do that anymore and we have to start worrying about things on an app-by-app basis. And it's caused companies to rethink security to look at multi-factor authentication tools. I think those are a lot better to look at CASB tools, the cloud access tools, trying to monitor what apps people are using, what they're not using, trying to cut down on the use of consumer tools, right? So it's a lot for the security practitioners to take a hold of too. And you have to understand even from a company standpoint their security operation center was built on the concept they pull all their data into one location. Sock engineers aren't used to working remotely as well. So that's a big change as well. How do I get my data analyzed into my sock engineers when they're working remotely? You know, we have coined the term Black Friday or the day after Thanksgiving and then- Thanksgiving, yeah. Yeah, the big surge, but that's a term to describe that first experience of holy shit, everyone's going to the websites and they all crashed. So we're kind of having that same moment now to your point earlier. So I want to read a statement that was on Nima Badly's LinkedIn, he's at Google now, former pivotal guy, you probably know him. He has a whole thing, a little graphic that says, who led the digital transformation of your company? It's got a poll with a question mark. A, your CEO, B, your CTO or C, COVID-19. And it circles COVID-19, that's the image and that's the meme that's going around. But the reality is it is highlighting it. And I want to get your thoughts on this next track of thinking around how people may shift their focus and their spend because, hey, hybrid cloud is great. Multi-cloud is the next big way, but screw multi-cloud. If I can't actually fix my current situation, maybe I'll push off some of the multi-cloud stuff or maybe I won't. So how do you see the give and get of project prioritization? Because I think this is going to wake everyone up. You mentioned security. Yeah. Clearly. Yeah, well, I think it has woken everybody up but I think companies now are really rethinking how they operate. I don't believe we're going to stop traveling. I think once this is over, people are going to hop back on planes. I also don't believe that we'll never go back into the office. I think the big shift here though, John, is we will see more acceptance to hire people out of region. I think that it's proved that you don't have to be in the office, right? Which will drive these collaboration goals. And I also think we'll see less use of desktop phones and more use of video means. So now that people are getting used to using these types of tools, I think they're starting to like the experience. And so voice calls get replaced by video calls and that is going to crush our networks in buildings. So we got Wi-Fi 6 coming, we got 5G coming, right? We've got lots of security tools out there. And I think you'll see a lot of prioritization to the network. And that's kind of an interesting thing because historically the network didn't get a lot of C level time, right? It was those people in the basement. We didn't really know what they did. I'm a forward network engineer. I was treated that way. But most digital organizations now have to come to the realization that they're network-centric, right? And so the network is the business. And that's not something that companies have put a lot of focus on. But if you look at the building blocks of digital, IoT, mobility, cloud, the writing was been on the wall for a while. And I've written this several times that you need to pay more attention to the network. And I think we're finally going to see that transition and some prioritization of dollars there. I will attest you have been very vocal and right on point on that, so props to that. I do want to also double-amplify your point. The network drives everything. That's clear. I think the other thing that's interesting, and it used to be kind of a cliche and a pejorative way, is the user is the product. That's a term that's been coined to Facebook. Your data, you're the product. If you're the product, that's a problem. To describe Facebook as the app that monetizes you, the user. I think this situation is really pointing out that, yes, it's good to be the product. The user value and the network are two now endpoints of the spectrum. The network's got to be kick-ass from the ground up, but the user is the product now. And it should be in a good way, not exploiting. So I think if you're thinking about user-centric value, how my kid can play Call of Duty, how my family can watch the new episode on Netflix, how I can do a kick-ass Zoom call, that's my experience. The network does its job, the application service takes advantage of making me happy. So I think this is interesting, right? So like we're getting a new thing here. How real do you think that is? Where are we in the spectrum of that nirvana? Oh, I think we're rapidly approaching that. I think it's been well documented that 2020 was the year that customer experience became the number one brand differentiator, right? In fact, I think it was actually 2018 that happened, but Walker and Gartner and a few other companies predicted to be 2020. And what that means is that if you're a business, you need to provide exemplary customer service in order to gain share. I think one of the things that was lost in there is that employee experience has to be best in class as well. And so I think a lot of businesses over-rotated to spend away from employee experience to customer experience and rightfully so, but now they got to rotate back to make sure that their workers have the right tools, have the right services, have the right data to do their jobs better. Because when they do, they can turn around and provide customers better experience. So this isn't just about training your people to service customers well, it's about making sure people have the right data, the right information to do their jobs to collaborate better, right? And there's really a tight coupling now between the consumer and the employee, or the customer and the employee. And Corona kind of exposed that because it shows that we're all connected in a way and the connection of people, whether the customer is employees or something that businesses have to focus on. So I think we'll see some dollars spin back to internal, not just customer facing. Yeah, well, great insight and first of all, we all connected, you're a great CUBE alumni, but you're also right up the street in California, we're in Palo Alto, you're in San Mateo, you literally could have driven here, but we're sheltering in place. You know, great insight and thanks for sharing that. And I think it's good content for people to be aware of this, obviously they're living in it right now, but I think the world is going to be back to business soon, but it's never going to be the same. I think it's didn't- No, it will never be the same. I think this is a real watershed point for the way we work and the way we treat our employees and our customers. And I think you'll see a lot of companies make a lot of change. And that's good for the whole industry because it'll drive innovation. And I think we'll have some innovation come out of this that we never saw before. Quick final word for the folks that are on this big wave that's happening, it's reality, it's the current situation now. What's your advice for them as they get on their surfboard, so to speak, and ride this wave? What's your advice to them? Yeah, I think use this opportunity to find those weak points in your networks and find out where the bottlenecks are because I think having everybody work remotely exposes a lot of problems and processes and where a lot of the hiccups happen. But I do think my final word is invest in the network. I think a lot of the networks out there have been badly under-invested in, which is why people get frustrated when they're at stadiums or hotels or casinos. I think the world is shifting. Applications and people are becoming network-centric and if those don't work, nothing works. And I think that's really been proven over the last couple of months. If our networks can't handle the traffic and our networks can't handle what we're doing, nothing works. You know, you and I can do a podcast show called No Latency. Define the Law. No Latency, that'd be good. These thanks for coming on. I appreciate taking the time to stay safe and I want to follow up with you and get a check-in further down the road a couple of days or maybe next week if you can. So, I appreciate your time. Yeah, look forward to it. Thanks a lot. Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto Studios doing the remote interviews. Getting the quick stories that matter help you out and extract the signal from the noise of the great guests there. Check out ZK Research, a great friend of theCUBE cutting edge, knows the networking. This is an important area. The network, the user's experience is critical. Thanks for coming and watching today. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.