Thor Wallace, NETSCOUT | CUBEConversation, January 2020

Thank you.

Sure, so let me start by telling a little about NetScout. So NetScout is a network monitoring and a service assurance company. As the CIO, I am obviously responsible for providing the tools and the environment for running the company. I'm also heavily involved in, for example, understanding the applications and the business direction that we're taking. We're also working on improving our customer relationships and experiences. For example, we have a customer portal that we're re-evaluating and improving. And we're also obviously trying to drive user productivity worldwide. We have very briefly about 33 locations worldwide. We're headquartered here outside of Boston. And have large offices both in Texas and California.

Exactly, so let me tell you a little bit about what we're trying to achieve, what are the kinds of, some of the why's are, where we are at this moment. Yeah, so we as a company are being challenged by the same sort of environment that everyone else is being challenged with which is to be able to move as quickly as we can and provide as much of an impact to our customers as possible. So, how I've read that mandate and that remit is to really focus on improving our customer experience as I said. Working with a new platform and re-platforming and re-factoring our application, our customer service application. But also really focusing on how best to improve user productivity. So those are the areas that we've been focusing on. Driving IT productivity is important to me. So it's a fairly substantial argument for moving operations to the cloud. And where also part of that is transforming a hardware-based environment to a much more of a virtualized and software-based environment. So that includes cloud, that includes virtualization which we've obviously taken a lot of ground on. And, for example, what we've already done is virtualize all of our operations in the data center. Over the years, we've also moved a lot of workloads to cloud, where we are cloud-agnostic. But we have a fairly large environment with Salesforce.com, we use Office365 which are obviously major applications in the cloud. So we have a workload that's quite mixed for today. We maintain on-prem data centers. We have a fairly large engineering footprint as well. So we kind of live in all of the worlds. So we live obviously on-prem, we have cloud. And one of the things that I think we've learned over the years is that in order to continue the journey of cloud, we need to really worry about a couple of things. One is, we want to make sure that we keep our operations in an excellent place so, and I can talk more about that in a few minutes and as I said, we want to continue to maintain our ability to execute in really what I call velocity to be able to add value. And cloud actually presents some of those opportunities for us but also obviously makes things quite complicated in that we have multiple environments. We have to make sure that people still get the services and the applications they need to do their job. And provide those in a very productive way in a cost effective way so that we can maintain that as an IT organization.

I think that's a huge challenge for us and I think frankly for most people. I think you have to re-think how your network is designed fundamentally from the ground up. And if you think about networks in the past, mainly in on-prem world, you basically had to back haul a lot of traffic in our case 33 locations worldwide. A lot of back hauling of services and transactions back to wherever that application exists. So for example, historically we've had Office, excuse me, the Microsoft mail system or exchange on-prem. We have other services that are on-prem. For example, Oracle and our ERP system et cetera. And the challenge was to move all that traffic back to basically our core data center. And as you move to the cloud, you have an opportunity to actually re-think that. So we've been in the process of doing over the last say year has been to re-design our network from the ground up and moving away from the central monolithic network to more of a cloud/edge-based network. So with that, we've also moved from hardware basically a fairly heavy investment in hardware in each of the offices for example. And we're now, or we've actually in the process very far along, in the process of converting all our hardware into software to find network that allows us to do some things that we had never been able to do operationally. For example, we can make deployments from one central location worldwide both for security and patching et cetera. And so, what we've also done is we've moved, as I said, we have a lot of our workloads already in the cloud and we continue to put more in the cloud. One of the things that's become important is we've got to maintain and create actually a low latency environment. So for example, ultimately putting our unified communications system and technologies in the cloud, to me, worries me without having a low latency environment and low latency network so that we can actually provide dial to worldwide without worrying about performance. So what we've already done is we've transitioned from this centralized network into an edge-based network. We've actually have now a partner that we now are putting in services into a local presence idea worldwide into three locations for Equinex. And with that comes a software-based network and allows us to move traffic directly to the edge and therefore once we're at the edge, we can go very quickly in backbone speeds into whatever cloud service we need. Whether it's Azure or AWS or Salesforce or any other provider, Office365. We can get that sort of speed and low latency. That has created a new environment for us which is now virtual, software-based. It gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility and moving in what I consider fairly heavy and significant workloads that remain on-prem. It gives us the option of moving that to the cloud. So with that, one of the key things that comes with that is making sure that we can hold our vendors accountable for performance. So for example, if we experience an issue with Office365 performance whether it's in Punnet or Westford or wherever it is, we want to be able to make sure that we have the information and the data that says to Microsoft in this case, 'hey, you know, where actually the performance isn't great from wherever those users are, wherever that office is'. So we want to provide them information and to basically prove that our network or our internal capabilities and network are performing very well but maybe that there is an issue with something on performance on their side. So without these sort of fact-based information, it's really hard to have those discussions with vendors. So one of the things that I think is important for everyone to consider when you move more to the cloud is you've got to have the ability to troubleshoot and make sure that you can actually maintain a very complicated environment. So one of the things that we have done is, and we continue to do, is use our own products actually to give greater visibility than we ever had before in this new multi-cloud, multi-prem environment which is a very powerful thing for us. And the team that is using this technology is seeing visibility things that they've never really been able to see before. So that's been quite exciting but I think that's, frankly, table stakes moving forward into deeper, more cloud or workload independent model that we're seeking.

Exactly, I mean you know at the end of the day, IT is still responsible for user productivity. So whether somebody's having an application issue in terms of availability or frankly if it's not performing up to what it should be, you're still accountable as an organization regardless of where the workloads are. It could be, as you point out, back in the day you could always go to your data center and do a lot of investigation and really do a lot of troubleshooting within the four walls. Today, you don't have that luxury. And so it's a whole new world and we all are relying increasingly on vendors.

Presents an issue and you know having these conversations with a vendor or a contractor, regardless of your relationship with them, you're still again you're on the hook for doing this so you've got to have some facts, you've got to have some story, you have to show in terms of, hey you know we're good on this side the issue really is on you. And we've actually had situations where there was performance issues or service interruptions or bugs from different vendors where they've impacted the NetScout organization. And without deep understanding of what's going on, you really don't have anywhere to go. You really have to have this sort of greater visibility. And this is one of the things that is a lesson learned from, at least from the journey that we're taking. And so I think that's part of the story of the cloud and migration and virtualization story is you really have to have this newfound visibility. So I think that's been really important for us.

Right, exactly. And you know, as I said, we've seen this movie and without having what we have, I think we would have struggled as an organization actually to resolve the issue. And that's not good for the company because IT, part of the mandate and the remit for us is to make sure that people are as productive as they can be. And so, not having the ability to provide that environment is actually a huge problem for I think a lot of people. And one of the ways we're working with it is to have that sort of visibility. It also means upgrading the team's skills which we've done a lot of work on. So you take folks that are in IT that may have had a certain set of skills in the on-prem environment. Those skills are quite different in that cloud or mixed exposure environment. So I think upskilling, having more information better information is really part of the story that we're learning.

Exactly, yeah.

Exactly.

Thank you.