Bruce Kelley

Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, NETSCOUT SYSTEMS INC

Bruce Kelley and Darren Anstee, NETSCOUT | MWC Barcelona 2024

🎥 Feb 28, 2024 📺 SiliconANGLE theCUBE ⏱ 24m 👁 7795 views

Darren Anstee, CTO for security at NetScout, and Bruce Kelley, SVP and CTO of NetScout, speak with theCUBE Research ...

About Bruce Kelley

Bruce Kelley, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Netscout, discussed the company's role in network observability and security during an interview at MWC Barcelona 2024. He described Netscout as a "smart data company" that provides high-definition visibility into subscriber activity on the largest networks globally, including 90% of tier-one carriers. Kelley noted that as 5G moves into the cloud, networks can "go blind" to east-west traffic between microservices, creating gaps that Netscout's technology aims to fill. He announced a partnership with Palo Alto Networks to feed Netscout's data into Palo Alto's solutions, characterizing Netscout's role as "detection" and Palo Alto's as "mitigation." Kelley also stated that 5G network slicing, which he described as building virtual networks over physical infrastructure, remains "three to five years away" due to market maturity and device availability, and that the "killer app" for 5G has not yet been found. In a 2017 interview, Kelley emphasized that Netscout's core mission is providing visibility to help carriers become more agile as they transition to cloud-based, software-defined networks. He noted that carriers are moving toward the model of large web players like Facebook and Google, using common hardware platforms and automation to roll out services quickly. Separately, in a 2018 sermon at a Deaf Baptist conference, Kelley spoke about holding fast to the King James Version of the Bible, rejecting evolution as "nonsense," and encouraging listeners to "seek the Lord, not the things of this world."

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Bruce Kelley's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (79 segments)

John Furrier0:06

Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage from theCUBE stage here in Barcelona, Spain, for MWC24, formerly Mobile World Congress. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante, my co-host, extracting the signal from the noise here at this great show. Telecom, cloud, data all happening at once. We got two great guests from NetScout. We're going to unpack the future of telco, cloud, and security. We've got Bruce Kelly, known as BK. BK, good to see you.

Bruce Kelley0:32

Yeah. Good afternoon.

John Furrier0:34

Darren Anstee who's the CTO for Security. Bruce is the SVP and CTO. Guys, thanks for coming on.

Bruce Kelley0:39

Thanks for having us.

John Furrier0:40

You guys are subject matter experts, obviously, in security, cloud, and telco. BK, your history, as entrepreneur, go back to the roots of the deck. You know a lot about open systems networks, entrepreneur, and NetScout. You're pioneering a lot of work in telco going back years, and you've got a great product right now, but the telcos are moving faster than they've ever done before. And guess what? Territory is cloud, large scale, and AI, new for the telcos, but they have to move.

Bruce Kelley1:09

Yes, absolutely. It's a very interesting time. If you look, they have a dilemma. They saturated the mobile phone market, right? So they have their existing infrastructure, existing network, 4G. But now to grow, they need to get into 5G and get at the enterprise. And when you look at those two architectures, it's very disruptive. And it's because when you went from 3G to 4G, it was a physical network, north-south traffic, it just got faster. Now when you go 4G to 5G, it's a game changer, because all the wheels of the car are off. You're going cloud native, everything's being encrypted. So there's new barriers that come in. And so we've been working very closely with the ecosystems that are involved in building out 5G. And it's complicated. And it's because of the skills gap. You not only have to know voice and data, you now got to know cloud and all these things.

John Furrier2:05

Let's lay out the key areas that I want to cover here, because you mentioned a few things. 5G is going to help the telcos make money with enterprise. That's one. You got mobility across public, private, 5G, and public 5G. But then you got the whole infrastructure scale, the data opportunity involved. So now you have a lot of touch points. So let's lay out the landscape of what we want to talk about here. What are the core areas that you guys want to unpack here?

Bruce Kelley2:31

So I think that the core areas are, it goes back to basics. When you look at 5G, and you move it into the cloud, all of a sudden you go blind. What does that mean? That means you got microservices talking to each other, inside the cloud, east-west, and you're not seeing that traffic. So for observability, that's critical. You've got gaps. If you're trying to secure, if you look at telcos, they're typically five9s from the old voice days. Now they're going to be selling to banks, hospitals, with 5G slicing when it's eventually here. And they're going to have to guarantee it. So observability is going to be a must. They're going to have to be able to see, and the SLAs. At the same time, they're going to have to offer clean slices to these banks and enterprises. So they're going to have to secure and assure it. And the challenges we've seen in the cloud native world is that we had to work with the ecosystems. It wasn't like one player could come in. So we started working with the Ericssons, the Nokias, the new players, the barn-in-the-cloud, mavaneers, just to make sure that we had access to the communications east-west, in an encrypted world. So once you get beyond that, and we spent two and a half years on that and we've removed those barriers, you now get into, I can secure and assure, right? You have the foundation laid. And so that's been a challenge.

John Furrier3:45

So that opens up what benefit? More market opportunity for the telcos, and usability by the enterprise? Is that right?

Bruce Kelley3:52

Yes. And the enterprise is going to want guarantees. They're not going to just sign up for 5G and say, 'Well I hope it works.' They're going to hold them to a certain latency, a certain throughput that's promised, the service they're signing up for, and they're going to want to guarantee it all the time. It's not humans on a phone where you drop a call and you go, 'Oh, I'll just recall.' These are banks, these are hospitals. It could be life or death, it could be loss of revenue, it could be brand reputation. So the telcos are going to have to go back to the five9s with 5G slicing.

John Furrier4:19

Yeah, and they don't control the environments outside their own networks.

Bruce Kelley4:23

Yes, yes. And so Darren, maybe you want to talk a little bit about the importance of not just assuring it and having visibility or observability, but the security angle.

Darren Anstee4:32

Yeah, so one of the key things that we've realized recently is that the data set that we build for observability, to help our customers assure performance and all of those kinds of things within their networks, within the services that they deliver to their enterprises, that data set can also drive a lot of different security value propositions. And as Bruce mentioned, enterprise wants these new services to be secure. Whether it's LAN/WAN extension, whether it's OT, ICS, any of these things, there needs to be security built into these services. So we kind of realized early on that we can't be everything to everybody. The data set can be everything to everybody, but we can't be everything to everybody. So for example, we announced a partnership yesterday with Palo Alto, where we're going to feed some of our data sets into their solutions, so that they can make more use of them, to enrich their capability, and the overall service that the mobile operator can offer to the enterprise as they roll out private 5G, sliced 5G, higher value services, things like that. But then there's also things that we've seen now around the subscriber side of what the operators are having to deal with. If you look at where the security pillar in NetScout came from, our product set there has always been very focused in wire lines, securing wire line ISPs, giving visibility within wire line ISP networks, mobile operators, especially as fixed wireless access has rolled out in the subscriber space, which is a key revenue stream, they're seeing a lot of the same problems that wire line ISPs have seen over the years. So we've been looking at moving our capability from the wire line side into the mobile side, using some of the same technology that Bruce has been talking about, leveraging that same data set to drive those new capabilities. So we're kind of looking at both the subscriber services, the high value services, and how we use the data as fuel to drive the use cases, to drive the value for the mobile network operator.

John Furrier6:23

If I can back up a little bit and explain to the audience a little bit about NetScout. You said you can't do everything. You're in security, but you're not security pure play necessarily. You're talking about observability. How should people think about what you are? Everybody wants to put companies in buckets. And I think you're a difficult company to do that, 'cause you're so specialized, but you have data that feeds so many parts of the industry. So explain how you think we should understand your company.

Bruce Kelley6:52

Okay, so in simple terms, think of us as the smart data company. We sit on the largest networks in the world, all the tier ones, we're in 90% of them. We got very high definition visibility into the subscriber, the type of device they're on, the cell tower they're off of. We track all of that. And so think of us as the fuel needed for three key areas. The first area is where we started, which is NetOps, which is service assurance. And now you got the second area, SecOps, where you're saying, 'Hey, we got to secure and assure.' But what we haven't talked about, which is critical when you go into a connected world with 5G, is that it's going to be a machine. So you're going to have to get into AIOps, which is automation, AI, and ML, to really be in control of this. So when you look at the observability space, think of NetScout as a smart data company. But now we can play into the ecosystems with that smart data, in those three buckets. Service assurance, NetOps, SecOps, which Darren is covering, but now AIOps. And inside these telcos, they have their own big data groups, AIOps groups. So the ecosystem there would be, hey, we got this great data that they can leverage, and maybe they're monetizing. It's not always about just troubleshooting and securing, which could be attacks. They want to monetize this data. It's very valuable.

John Furrier8:07

They need to protect that too.

Bruce Kelley8:08

Yes.

John Furrier8:09

So explain that. So SecOps, so a telco would say, 'Okay, we're going to guarantee you this service level. We're going to charge you X, give you Y, and we're going to make sure we can monitor that, and our margin is that delta.' You actually preserve that margin so that they don't have to overprovision. That would be an example, correct?

Bruce Kelley8:28

Correct.

Darren Anstee8:32

If you look at the way the mobile operators are rolling out private 5G now, sliced 5G in some cases, they're offering a kind of a vanilla service to a degree. What they're trying to do is make more money from their expertise in delivering the capability. So they want to be layering on top of that vanilla service, security capability. They want to be layering on top of their service assurance capability, so that can guarantee to that enterprise that they are getting what they need. And that becomes hugely important when you start trying to manage risk as an enterprise. Because if it's LAN/WAN extension, that's one side of things. If it's an industrial control process, or autonomous public transport, smart environments, there are very different levels of risk there, where you really need that built in capability that uses data from within the mobile network and the kind of the threat detection capabilities that we expect in those spaces.

John Furrier9:23

So how's the Palo Alto deal work? What's that all about? Is that a go-to-market deal? Is Palo Alto adding value on top of your data? Explain how everybody wins there.

Bruce Kelley9:32

I can take that. So, think of Palo Alto as not really being mobile aware. They don't understand the subscriber, they understand an IP address. They don't understand a handset is an iPhone or a Samsung. So when you look at smart data, that's what we have. So we got this very rich data set, with a very large market presence, that can start to play into the ecosystem. Think of NetScout in security as detection. Think of Palo Alto as mitigation. So we can say, 'Hey, you should block this subscriber, or you should block this cell tower.' You can't just shut off good traffic, right? And so that's the revenue generating.

John Furrier10:02

You're enabling them to have a better security product.

Bruce Kelley10:06

Correct, yes.

John Furrier10:09

And now I get this right now. I'm going to try to connect the dots in real time here. You have a great presence, and you're tapping the networks of the telcos that have great subscriber metadata. Their problem is that you have now disparate environments, like cloud, which is growing, with microservices and encryption, which is traffic now over encrypted lines, which is standard, that's causing an observability problem. Which means that the software that everyone's getting VC money for ain't working. I'm putting it bluntly. So now the problem is how do you make it work? And you're saying that's what you guys are doing, because you're the mobile side of the piece of the puzzle.

Bruce Kelley10:44

Yeah, we give them mobility intelligence, mobility data set. They're very good at blocking and things like that, mitigation. So just think of detection and mitigation.

John Furrier10:55

Yep.

Bruce Kelley10:56

And then what I would say is a differentiator, would be, if I go to a CSP and they say, 'Hey, I'm signing up a bank,' and I can give you clean slices, secure slices, that's a value that maybe differentiates that carrier's slices from another, right?

John Furrier11:11

So you're helping the telcos make more money.

Bruce Kelley11:13

Yeah, yeah.

John Furrier11:14

And you're giving the ecosystem protection.

Bruce Kelley11:16

Yes.

John Furrier11:19

The traditional five9s that they always had.

Darren Anstee11:26

Service creation and monetization is the thing in the operators at the moment. They're all looking for new ways of getting services out there, monetizing data sets, monetizing their expertise fundamentally.

John Furrier11:37

Well, what BK described earlier is like two separate CapEx tranches that have to go in. So that's why Darren's point is, monetization is everything for these guys. They got to lower the cost of running the networks, but they're going to make money on top. I mean it's trillions that they're putting in.

Bruce Kelley11:53

And if you look at the coverage that we do today, just to give a little bit of depth, we sit truly end to end. We sit on all the links. N1, N2, N3. So when we look at a subscriber, we are looking at them end to end in the network, even from the air interface in. And so that data set is pretty powerful when you want to get into automated data centers hopefully in the future. The data set is going to enable that.

John Furrier12:15

We've been talking about that for a while. But so what's the secret sauce in your tech? Explain that.

Bruce Kelley12:20

So the secret sauce is, we've been doing this for over 35 years. And we were in the stock trading floors, which are sub-second. And if I think of that, and I look at 5G, they're just getting there with low latency. Banks have been doing that, with computers trading against computers, not humans, with the stock market. And we were monitoring all the Wall Street trading floors, that's where we started. And so now we look at 5G, it's the same movie all over again. It's playing to the enterprise, so, yeah.

John Furrier12:48

And they have real time needs.

Bruce Kelley12:50

Yeah, so our secret sauce is real time, very granular data. So we are watching stock trades, now we're watching business transactions in a mobile network. And so it gives them complete observability end to end. They know the customer experience.

John Furrier13:03

You can't do the 'Can you hear me now?' thing with 5G.

Bruce Kelley13:07

That's right.

John Furrier13:08

Sorry, transaction dropped. And machine's not going to call and complain.

Bruce Kelley13:12

About to buy that flight. Oops, you know? So online e-commerce. So we're all going digital. So back to the cloud.

John Furrier13:17

So cloud's been a big part of this show. Those guys are coming in. Hyperscalers are adopting a lot of AI right now. So AI has been a big story. How do you see AI becoming an accelerant for your business model? Obviously you guys are doing something completely different. But I'm sure AI's going to help you, because you got data too. A lot of data here, with systems that need to be used. What's the AI angle for you?

Bruce Kelley13:43

One of the advantages we have, and we've already implemented, and it's running in live networks, and we'll GA it pretty soon, is that we've got a ton of domain knowledge, from 2G all the way up to 5G. So when you say AI, it's like a buzzword. What we are blending is domain knowledge with AI. We use AI as a tool. So think about like a carpenter building a house, he's got a hammer, and then you got a power drill. Well that's not the only tool you'll need to build a house. You need other tools. So when I look at the space with AI, there's a lot of hype. And so our approach is different. We understand voice networks, we understand video. And so when you blend those two together, you can start to automate true root cause in the observability space, for example.

John Furrier14:23

What are some of the big implementation changes you're seeing right now? Obviously with 5G, there's a lot of talk about hybrid implementations. Public, private, private 5G, everyone's smoking that big time right now, and saying there's a lot of hype in private 5G. How real is private 5G? What are some of the components starting to look like, and where do you see the puck going?

Bruce Kelley14:43

Yep, so I think 5G, when you look at the enterprise, you can have in-a-box simple private 5G. Or it could just be a slice. Just depends on the use case. Each industry is different. And so I think that 5G is slowing down right now. They're looking for the killer app. So there's all this hype around 5G and it's going to deliver all these things. But the killer app hasn't been found yet. The application developers need to come along in the banking industry, the healthcare industry, and all these things. They'll talk about gaming. Well, will gamers want to pay? So I still think they got to figure out how to monetize. And so the jury's out.

John Furrier15:20

It's a telco challenge.

Bruce Kelley15:22

A telco challenge.

John Furrier15:22

What's slowing down? You're saying the investment is slowing down? The adoption is?

Bruce Kelley15:26

Investment is slowing down, because they're under a lot of price pressure. The killer app is not there. Fixed wireless access is successful. You're not digging up streets. And so there's different initiatives at different times where you're investing. And so this is going to be a journey.

John Furrier15:38

Let's say it's like the CEOs on day one in the keynotes were saying they have a $200 billion shortfall. These are European telcos, $200 billion CapEx shortfall. Of course they're trying to negotiate to be able to consolidate and get a better deal. I mean you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what happens next. Fixed wireless is a good thing. Okay, that's positive, check. So we're evolutionary. So it's still, but now the developer angle is interesting. We've been observing here at this show, not a lot of discussion about developers. This is the chicken and the egg, the cart before the horse. You got to get the infrastructure down. Okay, fixed, check. 5G. Now the applications, if they're going to come from banks and enterprises, guess what they're going to be like? 'We don't want anything that's not secure or drops or it's not reliable.' So this seems to be what you keep repeating. We're at a point now where there's a reliability problem, there's a serviceability problem, there's an observability problem. And that's the bottleneck. That happens, then the experimentation on the app side will kick in. And where's that going to come from? Is it the cloud ecosystems? I mean we've been asking this. The GSMA announced the open APIs, and okay that's cool, open. Is it open gateway? Before they had a funny word for it, COTS, commercial off-the-shelf software. Before that, everybody developed their own apps. Is that what's going to happen inside of banks, or is it going to be that cloud ecosystem, where AWS created such a frenzy of application developers, Microsoft, of course, Google. What are your thoughts on that?

Bruce Kelley17:11

It's been interesting, 'cause I've watched the whole history of this over time, where the telco was going to open up, and you could get geolocation, all that. And it never really happened. So one of the things that I look at, but it's further out, is that when you look at NetScout's angle, smart data, so I'll just give you an analogy. What we did in the banking world, and what I think can happen in the 5G world with enterprises. So in the banking world, you've got computers trading against computers. So they'll just hook up to three carriers, it's AT&T, Verizon. And on a given day it's the speed of the trade that they care about. So what we were was the feedback loop to say, 'AT&T is faster than Verizon today. Send the trade down that way,' so the app developer could leverage that information and beat the competition. Now when I look at 5G, the telcos network, the last mile has been a blind spot for the app developer. You could, instead of showing the physical infrastructure, you could show a logical view of that, so that they could, like the banking, leverage that. So they could be APIs for the app developer that comes along. And maybe this is a differentiating service of a CSP that says, 'Hey, I just opened up that last mile, and maybe you're doing a gaming experience. And I can give you a feedback loop.' It's not about troubleshooting, it's about a better customer experience with that application. And so I think APIs is the answer. Who gives you those APIs? We'll see. But I think the world is going towards automation, APIs, and they'll come from somewhere. They'll leverage the low latency, they'll leverage the throughput, but it will take time.

John Furrier18:35

BK, and Darren, if you had a magic wand and you could just wave it right now, what would you want the wish to be? For the telcos and for the enterprises, what would be the ideal dream scenario?

Bruce Kelley18:49

The dream scenario is we get to 5G slicing. I think there's a lot of hype, and I would say to people, 'Hey, it's three to five years away.' They thought I was crazy. At NetScout, we went and implemented it all, but it's in the labs and you don't have the devices. So the market needs to mature. You got the cloud migration going on, it's like all the wheels of the car are off.

John Furrier19:08

So 5G slice, for the people who don't know what it is, explain what it is real quick, and why is that different than just using 5G fixed wireless?

Bruce Kelley19:15

Yep, so think of, I go to the carrier, and it's really multi-tenancy is the way I look at it. You're taking the mobile infrastructure and you're sharing it. So it's basically building virtual networks over the mobile infrastructure. So I can come along and be Coke, and say, 'Well Coke, I'm going to sell you a slice. So you're using the shared network, you think you have your own network, your own virtual network, and you're going to get a guarantee of certain latency of throughput that you need.' So all slicing is doing is carving up that physical infrastructure.

John Furrier19:43

It's another network.

Bruce Kelley19:44

Yeah, it's just another network, like VLANs were with ethernet, you now can do on the mobile infrastructure. That's simple.

John Furrier19:49

Yeah.

Bruce Kelley19:50

And it's attractive, because I'm not digging up streets, running fiber expense. It's all wireless. It's simple. And so it's going to allow agility. Like think of a manufacturing floor, you don't have unions, moving things around. You can quickly change, quickly adapt, quickly compete.

John Furrier20:06

Yeah. And then can you add to that Darren?

Darren Anstee20:09

Yeah, so I'm completely with what Bruce said, because the key thing that this does, as we bring out more sliced services, and they become more scoped and more defined, is it broadens the ecosystems that we can use our data sets in. And that means the app developers get an advantage in terms of understanding locality, understanding the individual that's using something, and all of those kinds of things. But the operators also get much more of an ability to monetize those data sets into those ecosystems and into those new use cases.

John Furrier20:38

Well, I got to ask the final question as we wrap up here, since you just laid out the secret sauce on the big problem. All the competition's watching, and they're going to replicate and steal your idea, and say, 'Oh, they just identified the big market problem. I'm going to go do slicing, I'm going to create virtual networks, and thanks guys for the tip.' How do you keep this from? What's the difference between you guys and the competition? What's the competition look like, and what's your differentiator? How does NetScout provide that? Because the telco's got to be motivated. If that's happening, the competition might come in. So how do you guys differentiate from an alternative, or is there an alternative?

Bruce Kelley21:13

So I think one of the biggest things is, it's easy to say, but when you got to go do it, and we've already done this, so we've spent 20 years on the largest networks in the world, and it's all about scalability. And so you can come up if you're a startup, and you can win the product, you'll spend the next five, 10 years, like we had to, just trying to scale to a Verizon network, or an AT&T, or Reliant size network, that's not easy. It takes a small army. So we've accomplished that. We've got scalability, we watch a hundred million subs. And we've got the history of 3G, 4G, 5G, and we deal with multi-generational networks. 4G's not going away. So they've got to support the old and the new.

John Furrier21:52

Right. You speak telco.

Bruce Kelley21:54

Yeah, we speak telco. And I think it's an ecosystem, and we'll go to Darren, but I think we are not going to go do it alone. There's ecosystems, and you got to figure out where you fit. When you ask the question, 'Hey, what's NetScout's role?' We know we're the fuel, the smart data for SecOps, DevOps. But there's other players like Palo Alto, or like Ericsson.

John Furrier22:09

Or you're a service provider for data, for telco data. Darren?

Darren Anstee22:12

I think the key thing for me is that we understand the ecosystems and the requirements on both the enterprise and the service provider side, because we've got a long history of working with both large enterprise and the mobile operators and the wire line operators. So we can pull those three things together to help create something that's a lot better integrated.

John Furrier22:28

Great stuff guys. Really appreciate your time here. We're going to have to unpack this back at the studios. But final 30 seconds left, each of you tell us about what's going on at MWC? What do you think of the show? What's the top story? Give a quick 30 seconds each on MWC. Darren, you go first.

Darren Anstee22:47

Yeah, so for me, it's busier than it has been in the previous couple of years. We seem to be back to where we were pre-COVID. I know personally, I've had back-to-back meetings for the first couple of days, and that's going to continue. So yeah, lots of AI, lots of buzz around new ways of using data, lots of things like that. So really interesting this year.

John Furrier23:16

Awesome.

Bruce Kelley23:18

Yeah, similar for me. I came in for two days, 'cause I was skeptical of how well it would be attended, and I think it's very well attended. And so we'll be back with a bigger booth next year. We actually didn't do a booth this year, because we were just wondering if it's really back, and if it's worth the investment, and it clearly is. And the big buzz to me is all around AI. It's about automation in 5G.

John Furrier23:43

It's a good, and the world's spun in your backyard now. It's on your doorstep. Waiting for your value proposition. Another growth vector for you.

Bruce Kelley23:51

Yes.

John Furrier23:52

Alright guys, thanks so much for sharing.

Bruce Kelley23:54

Thanks for having us.

John Furrier23:55

Really great conversation. As the fixed wireless expands, more opportunity, more bandwidth. I mean, I wired my home with fiber optic, what did I do that for? More wireless, more bandwidth, but slicing is going to be key. And the enterprise and the monetization for telcos. TheCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona. Stay with us for more after this short break.