>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE.
With digital coverage of VMworld 2020,
brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman.
And this is theCUBE coverage of VMworld 2020,
our 11th year covering this show.
And of course, networking has been growth story
for VMware for a number of years.
Going back to the Nicira acquisition
for over a billion dollars,
really leveraging all of the virtual networking
and SD-WAN has been another hot topic.
Couple years ago, it was the VeloCloud acquisition.
And now happy to welcome to the program
two of the VeloCloud business executives.
First of all, we have Sanjay Uppal,
he is the Senior Vice President
and General Manager of that mentioned division of VMware.
And joining him is Craig Connors,
who's the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
for that same division.
He was the Chief Architect of VeloCloud.
Craig, Sanjay, thank you for joining us.
>> Thank you.
>> All right, so Sanjay, first of all,
nice, call outs and a lot of news
that we're going to get to dig into in the morning keynote,
Pat Sunday, The Team.
A couple of years ago Pat talked about,
the next billion dollar business is networking,
your team helping to add to that,
and a new term thrown out
that we're going to get to talk a little bit about.
Our friends at Gartner termed it SASE.
So I'll let you, explain a little bit the news
that this wonderful new four letter acronym
that Gartner tossed at us.
Why don't you start us there?
>> Yeah, I couldn't be more excited to be here at VMworld,
announcing this expansion of what's going on in SD-WAN.
So SD-WAN was all about bringing branch office users
to their applications,
and doing that in a really efficient manner,
throwing out all those complex hardware appliances,
and simplifying everything with software,
increasing the quality of experience for the user.
But now what has happened is,
they want security to be dealt off in the same way.
Same simplicity and automation, same great user experience.
And at the same time, blocking all these attacks
that are coming in from various places.
And COVID has just driven that even more
meaning that you need to get to networking
and network security to be brought together
in this simple and automated way,
while keeping the end user experience be great.
And while giving IT what they need,
which is high security and good manageability.
So this acronym SASE, Secure Access Service Edge.
It really is the bringing together of networking,
and network security both as a service,
that service angle is really important.
And the exciting part
about what we're announcing at Vmworld here,
is the expansion of the SD-WAN POPs
and gateways into becoming SASE POPs.
And now customers can get a whole slew of services,
both networking and network security services from VMware.
So that's the announcement.
>> Wonderful.
Craig, since you've helped with so much
of the architecture here, I want to kick out a little bit.
When it comes to the security stuff
that Sanjay was talking about.
I remember dealing back with WAN Optimization Solutions,
trying to remember, Okay, wait, when can I compress?
When can I encrypt?
What do I lay on top of it?
SD-WAN, fits into this story.
Help us understand, what does VeloCloud do?
What is it from the partner ecosystem?
There's some good partners that you have helping us.
Help us understand what exactly we mean,
'cause security is such a broad term.
>> Yeah, thanks.
So there's four components in the SASE POP
that we're bringing together.
Obviously, VMware, SD-WAN is one of those.
Sanjay mentioned the changing workforce.
We have off net users that aren't coming
from behind an SD-WAN branch more and more today.
So we also have secure access
powered by our Workspace ONE Solution
that's bringing those remote users into the SASE POP.
And then two different security solutions,
Secure Web Gateway functionality,
and that is a next generation Secure Web Gateway
that includes things like DLP and remote browser isolation.
And as you saw on the news today,
that's powered through our OEM agreement
with Menlo security.
And then we have Next-Gen Firewalling
for securing corporate traffic.
And that's powered by our own VMware NSX Firewall,
which has been recently augmented
with our Lastline acquisition.
So those are the four key components coming together
within our SASE POP.
And of course, we also have
our continued partnership with Zscaler,
for our large joint VMware Zscaler Customer base
to facilitate that security solution as well.
>> Yeah, so Sanjay, maybe it would make sense.
As you said, you've got a portfolio now in this market.
You've got VDI you've got Edge.
Walk us through if you could,
some of the most important use cases for your business.
>> Yeah, so, the use case that has taken off
in the last several years since the advent of SD-WAN
is to get sites.
So these would be branch offices
and a branch office could be an agricultural field.
It could be a plane, it could be an oil rig.
It could be any one of these.
This is a branch office.
So these sites, how to get them connected
to the applications that they need to get access to.
So telemedicine example.
So how do you get doctors, diagnosticians and all that,
that are sitting in their clinics and hospitals
to get great access to the applications.
And the applications can be anywhere,
they don't have to be back in your data centers.
After data center consolidation happened,
some of the apps were in the data centers.
But then after the Cloud Advent came,
then the apps were everywhere, they're in the public Cloud,
both in IaaS as well as in SaaS.
And then now, they're moving back towards the Edge
because of the advent of Edge Computing.
So that's really the primary use case
that SD-WAN has been all about.
And that's where, we have staked the claim
to be the leader in that space.
Now, with COVID, the use cases are expanding.
And obviously, with work from home,
you take the same telemedicine example,
the doctors and diagnosticians
who used to work from hospitals and clinics
now have to get it done when they're working from the home.
And of course, this is a business critical app.
And so what do you do?
How do you get these folks who are at home
to get the same quality of experience, the same security,
the same manageability.
But at the same time,
you cannot disturb the other people
who are working from home.
Because that is an entire ecosystem.
You serve the business user, but you also serve the needs
of the home users, keeping privacy in mind.
So these two cases brach access, and then remote access,
which Craig talked about.
These are the primary use cases,
and then they break down by vertical.
So, depending on whether it's health,
or it's federal, or its manufacturing, or its finance,
then you have sub use cases underneath that.
But this is how we from a from a VCN standpoint,
came to have 17,000 customers
that have deployed our networking solutions.
A large fraction of those being our SD-WAN solutions today.
>> Yeah, okay.
Craig, one of those terms
that gets thrown around a lot in the industry, is scale.
I look at certain parts of the market, say Kubernetes.
Kubernetes was about bringing together lots of sites,
but now we're spending a lot of time talking about Edge,
which is a whole different scale.
Same thing, if you talk about devices and IOT.
Can you speak to us a little bit about, fundamentally,
that branch architecture I think sets you up well,
but when I start thinking about Edge,
it probably is, larger number and some different challenges.
So maybe some differences that happen to happen in the code
to make that happen.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think, we've been fortunate in the success
that we've had in our SD-WAN deployments.
More than 280,000 branches deployed
with our SD-WAN solutions.
So scale is something that's been near and dear to our heart
from the beginning.
How do you build a multitenant service in the Cloud?
How do you build Cloud scale?
And we brought that aspect into all of these components
through containerization.
As you mentioned, through horizontal scalability,
bringing them into our own dedicated POPs
where we control the hardware, we control the hypervisor,
obviously built on top of VMware ESXI.
That allows us to deliver scale in a way
that other competitors may not be able to achieve.
>> Yep.
Sanjay, it's been a couple of years
since the acquisition by VMware.
Give us a little bit of an update,
if you would, as to what...
I'm sure, obviously customer reach and adoption,
greatly increased by the channel and go to market,
but directionally and any difference in use cases
that you've seen now being part of VMware?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
There's been an expansion in the use cases,
which is why this fit was very good,
meaning VeloCloud being a part of VMware.
So if you look at it, what the wider network does,
we're the place where tie's, we tie it all together.
And tie what together?
If you look at the end user computing,
which Craig was mentioning,
the clients are digital Workspace ONE client.
Well, those clients now will connect to our SASE POPs.
So that's one tying that obviously we couldn't have
and we were an independent company.
The other side of it, when you go from the SASE POP
into the data center, then we tie into NSX,
not just at the Cloud firewall,
but in the data center itself.
So we can extend micro-segmentation.
So that's another use case that is becoming prevalent.
Then the third aspect of this
is really when you run inside telecom operators.
And VMware has a very robust business
as it goes off to telcos with a software stack.
And so running our gateways, running our SASE POPs
at the telco environment then gets us
to integrate with what's going on
with our telecom business unit.
We also have what we are doing on our visibility
and telemetry perspective.
So we had acquired a company called Nyansa
which we are crafting into
an Edge Network Intelligence product
that then fits in into VMware's overall foray in this space.
We have a product suite called vRealized Network Insight.
And so that network insight combined with what we are doing,
from a business unit standpoint gives customers
an end to end view from an individual client,
through the Cloud, even up to an individual container.
And so we call this, Client to Cloud to Container.
All of this is possible, because we are part of VMware.
The last piece of this is something that's going to happen,
we believe next year which is Edge Computing.
When Edge Computing comes in,
and I jokingly say to my team, this acronym of SASE,
which is S-A-S-E, you got to insert a C in the middle,
so it becomes S-A-C-S-E.
And out of that pronounce that says SACSE.
So I know it sounds a bit a little bit awkward (laughs).
But that C stands for the compute.
So as you put compute in,
the computer is going to run at the Edge,
the computer is going to run at the POP,
and the SASE is going to become SACSE,
and who better to give that to you then VMware.
Because we have that management stack
that controls compute for customers today.
>> Well, definitely I think you're drawing
from the Elon Musk School
of how to name acronyms and products (indistinct).
So, sometimes it's really interesting.
Craig talk us a little bit about that vision to get there.
What do we need to do as an industry?
How's the product mature?
Give us a little bit of that roadmap forward if you would.
>> Yeah, I think SASE is really the convergence
of five key things.
One is this distributed POP architecture.
So, how do you deliver this compute
and these services near to the customers premise.
And that's something that companies like us,
have had years of experience in building out.
And then the four key components of SASE that we have,
Zero Trust Access, SD-WAN, Next-Generation Firewalling,
and Secure Web Gateway.
We're fortunate, as Sanjay said, to be part of VMware
where we don't have to invent some of these components,
because we already have Workspace ONE.
And we already have the NSX Distributed Firewall.
And we already have VMware SD-WAN.
And so a lot of companies you'll see
are trying to put all of these parts together.
We already had them in house,
so we're putting them under one umbrella,
The one place where we didn't have the technology
within VMware, that's where we're leveraging
these partnerships with Menlo and Zscaler to get it done.
>> Sanjay, I think the telco use case that you talked about
is a really important one.
We've definitely seen, really good adoption
from VMware working in those spaces.
The one place I want to understand though,
if you look at VCF and how that moves to AWS, to Azure,
even to Oracle's, talked about in the keynote this morning.
How does SD-WAN fit into
just that kind of traditional hybrid Cloud deployment
we've been talking about for the last couple of years?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
So, when you look at SD-WAN,
the name connotes software defined.
But it doesn't, it's not specific
to branch office access at all.
And when you look at VCF, what VCF is doing
is really modernizing your compute stack.
And now you can run this modern compute stack
at your own data centers,
you can run it in the private Cloud,
you can run it on the public Cloud as well, right?
So you can put these stacks on Amazon Azure, Google
and then run them.
So what an SD-WAN architecture allows you to do
is not just get your branch and secure users
to access the applications that are running
on those compute stacks.
But you can also intermediate between them.
So when customers come in and they say
that they want simplified networking and security
between two public Cloud providers,
this is the multicloud use case.
Then getting that networking to work in a seamless fashion
with high security can be done by an SD-WAN architecture
and our SASE POP is perfectly situated to do that.
And all you would need to do is add virtual services
at the SASE POP.
An enterprise customer would come in
and they say they want some VNet's here
and some VPC's there.
They want to look at them in an automated fashion,
they want to set it up with the point and click architecture
and not have to do all this manual work.
And we can get that done.
So there's a really good fit between SASE, SD-WAN
and where VCF is going to solve the multicloud problem
that people are having right now.
>> Excellent, I really appreciate that explanation.
Last thing I guess I'll ask is,
here at Vmworld, I'm sure you've got a lot of breakouts,
you've probably got some good customers
sharing some of their stories.
So, anonymous if it has to be,
but we'd love if you've got,
either of you, some examples to help bring home
the value that your solutions are delivering.
>> Okay, why don't I start with one
and then Craig can fill in the other one.
So let me start off with the telemedicine example.
So we have a customer called MD Anderson Cancer Center.
And these are the folks in Texas and they provide
a really, really important service.
And that service is providing patients
who are critically ill
to give them all the kinds of services,
whether they come into the clinic,
or whether they are across a network connection,
and their radiologists and doctors are sitting at home.
So I think this is a very important use case.
And we started off by deploying in the hospitals
and the clinics, but when COVID hit
they had to send a lot of these folks to work from home.
And then when they work from home,
it's really this device that goes in which you can see here.
This is our VeloCloud Edge.
And this, as said in one of my favorite songs.
Says, "there's nothing this box can't do."
All right?
So this box goes home, into the doctor's home,
and then they are talking to their patient
getting telemedicine done.
Because it solves the problem of performance.
Some of those folks have literally said
that this thing was a Godsend.
Now, it's not very often that networking people
have been told that their products are like Godsend.
So I'll take that with a little bit of grain of salt.
But we are solving a very important problem,
increasing the performance.
We are also, this is a secure device,
so it's not going to be hacked into,
and then makes things much more manageable
from an IT standpoint.
So this is one of those use cases.
And there's plenty of them.
But Craig has his favorite, so I'll turn it over to him.
>> There's so many, I could bore you.
I think one really interesting one
is an investment banking company that we have as a customer.
And they used to go work in the office five days a week,
and everything that they did was on their computer
in the office.
And with this pivot to work from home,
post COVID, they think their future is a flexible workforce
where sometimes they're in the office,
and sometimes they're remote.
And when they're remote,
they're already peeing into their desktop
that is sitting in their office.
And with their legacy remote access VPN solution,
they had to connect,
say I'm a user sitting in Southern California,
I'm connecting my VPN to Chicago,
to then come across the network back to Los Angeles,
to get to my desktop, so that I can work from home.
And now with SASE, my secure access client
from Workspace ONE connects to the closest SASE POP.
I get to my desktop in my office,
tremendously lower latency,
tremendously higher quality of experience for the users,
whether they're at home, on the road,
anywhere they need to access that device.
>> Well, Craig, Sanjay.
Thank you so much.
Love the customer example.
Sanjay, good job bringing out the box to show people.
It's a software world but the SASE hardware
is still needed at times too.
Thanks for joining us.
>> All right, thank you, Stu.
Thanks Craig.
Cheers. >> (indistinct)
>> All right, Stay with us for more coverage of VMworld 2020.
I'm Stu Miniman.
Thanks as always for watching theCUBE.
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