Invité IT de la semaine #22 2018/19 John Morrison Senior Vice President EMEA Extreme Networks

Yes, absolutely. Extreme Networks is a customer-driven, network-focused company, and we feel we have a fantastic message now to show that we can deliver solutions from the application and data center through the campus right to the network edge. Those solutions resonate now more than they ever did in terms of mobility, bring-your-own-device, the use of applications in business, and the importance of connectivity to deliver those true customer connections for our enterprise customers. This means we now have a message that is taking the network from being part of infrastructure to being a core part of delivering real business value. That's the key message we want to get out there.

Absolutely, but we are really focused on the end-user experience. So we see our customers as not only the companies that buy network equipment, but how we can deliver them the tools to change the experience of the people that use their services, to the end-user. And really to give the tools to know what kind of experience an end-user has when they are engaging with the company via a network on an application. It's those kinds of tools that we think deliver a real differentiation for Extreme Networks into the marketplace.

There absolutely is. I see a couple of things about how we see the data center within the marketplace. We see companies eventually going into a multi-cloud environment whereby certain applications they will put in data center environments delivered by third parties like AWS or Azure or Google, certain applications they will build their own cloud environment, and certain applications they will have on-site. In that environment, it is becoming in some ways more complex, but there is a lot more focus on where the data and the application sits, especially around security and GDPR. From that perspective, we are very focused on being able to deliver solutions that allow you to understand the performance from the data center of the application right the way through to the user. So we are building analytics that can look at application performance right into the cloud, into on-premises, into private cloud, into hybrid cloud environments, such that companies can make the choice they want to make about how they use and store their data and applications in the most effective way, but still be able to deliver against that performance.

Yes, absolutely. The agility for us is to give customers choice: to look at the applications, to look at the data, and say, 'Well, this data is more effectively in the cloud, this data we want to keep on site, these are applications we want to keep on site or put in our own cloud or even put out on a very cost-effective and efficient Amazon cloud.' So there is an element of choice there. That element of choice we deliver with our software and our application visibility to allow you to measure that performance. The second element of that gives agility: the ability to choose, change, decide something. So you want to bring it in-house, you want to move data and applications exactly where you want them, and then view how that is doing and decide, 'No, I want to do something differently,' without necessarily having to reinvest, giving you the agility to change decisions to do what's best for your business on a go-forward basis. The second element you mentioned, which is absolutely accurate, is that now with the enormous growth in available applications, with applications coming from many sources, people wanting to use personal applications on iPhones, business applications moving to the cloud, the enormous amount of data that can now be gathered and utilized based on users — I think I read somewhere they expect an individual to generate about 1.7 megabits of data per second, which is enormous for every person on the planet. So you need to be able to move at the speed of business, and that's where automation comes in. That's where cross-domain workflow management comes in, which allows you to automate certain activities as you spin up applications, as you use applications in the data center, to allow them to be launched quickly, spun up, spun down, and give the kind of ability that you need in today's fast-moving environment.

No, I don't. I think there are almost two competing factors going on in the world. The value that you attain from Google Maps, for instance, is a good balance of letting them know where you are. So there are competing forces: applications and cloud environments to live in value, and then there is a counterforce around GDPR where people are saying, 'Hang on, I want to control data. I don't necessarily want to sell access to information on the basis of the value of an application.' And that flows through to businesses as well. Therefore, the focus on security of data is increasing at the same time as the potential of applications to deliver value. For me, as that goes forward and changes, that is going to have an impact on companies' decisions on where to store the data, where to put the applications, the balance of efficiency and effectiveness against security and personal data, and trust that businesses and governments will have to have with their customers.

Containerization of IT on its own won't give simplicity. What creates the simplicity is the ability to have automation based on policy. You can't do it without automation.

No, we absolutely do have all the elements to fulfill that promise or that strategy in terms of being able to supply. It will always involve, as you develop new software and new applications, that increases the ability to deliver automation. The reason I think that's important is that the experience of the user is based on from the data center and the applications and the data right the way through to the edge. Users connect at the edge, they go over the campus to access applications, and having that under a single management system with visibility from end to end is what allows you to set policy and control to deliver that user experience. That's why it's key in terms of having all the pieces. The acquisitions we have made have fitted in beautifully to the jigsaw. The acquisition from Brocade gave us the data center capability, but probably more importantly, the cross-domain workflow automation with Extreme Workflow Composer, which can start to allow you to automate spinning up compute, storage, and applications to launch a service quickly. Then in the campus environment, that really came from Avaya's campus fabric, which delivers absolute simplicity with a single shortest path bridging protocol that allows the management of the network to be simplified in terms of hands, moves, and changes, launching multicast. We have figures about the time saved there. And then finally out to the edge, which is always going to be a mixture of mobile and fixed connections, with the mobility and cloud mobility capabilities from Motorola Wireless, which we acquired from Zebra, and of course the Extreme switching and in Terraces, which really drove the management, control, analytics, and visibility. So the acquisitions have fitted perfectly with the strategy, and I'd say we are now just getting started in terms of driving that growth and message into the marketplace. We have completed the integration, we have our messaging, and we are ready to go.

As I mentioned earlier, with things like GDPR, with things like the WannaCry virus that hit companies globally, including some critical healthcare environments, security needs to be built into the network. You have firewalls which control access of data and information in and out of the network, but you also have to always look at things that are directly connected to the network, and that's where IoT comes in. The likelihood is that nearly every manufactured device will have some kind of internet connection to it, and that means often things are being wheeled into the environments physically past firewalls and then simply plugged in and they connect to the internet. Where Defender really came in was a recognition that a number of devices that connect to the network were created and manufactured by companies which weren't networking companies, and therefore they often had limited security in terms of the connection capabilities. They had their own security, exactly, and so they were very, very vulnerable to being hacked. But the value was still there in connecting them, and very often these devices you can't just chuck away and change. Certainly in healthcare, MRI machines are particularly expensive and you are going to keep them. So for those kinds of devices, we built an inline capability called Defender which allowed you to isolate the traffic and stop any possibility of hacking through that device. We are going to take that software into a wireless environment because clearly many things are connecting wirelessly. But we also always had security built into the campus itself by using a layer 2 protocol: you can't get access to any IP information, you can't identify routes, you can't identify where traffic is going, and that gives you the ability to segment traffic, to have stealth within your campus environment all the way through to the data center. We see this as security-assisted networking. It's a different kind of environment from firewalls, but it is for us equally important and a core part of what we offer.

From our perspective, we almost think of ourselves as a 100% software company now, but we package our solutions with hardware. So the real value absolutely sits in the software, that's why the R&D is there. But we do not see ourselves as moving away from supplying hardware because we think that's key to providing a complete solution to an enterprise. We don't want to ask an enterprise to go out and source their own white box or to find the right hardware or to think about what hardware they might need. We want to help them solve business problems, and that means we will for the foreseeable future be providing a packaged solution. But when we talk about what that solution does, we will always be talking about the software.

I think it will, yes.

Thank you.