Arista Brings Cognitive Campus to the Mid-Market

welcome to z cast everyone i'm zs caraval from zk research and as always i'm your host i'm here live in person at aristas campus uh it's really exciting to be back in person it's been a long time seen it seems since we've done this i'm joined by two great guests today not just one ed chapman who's the vp of business development and alliances media entertainment and wi-fi and that is one long title thank you and i'm also here with heather pawnee director of product management that's a much more compact and i'll let both of you introduce yourselves talk a little bit about what you do here so heather why don't we start with you uh yeah i'm heather ponnay i am here based here in arista um at santa clara office i've been working on arista's edge threat management products for the last four years um other than that for the last 20 years i've been in the san francisco bay area working for various networking and cyber security companies how are you you're a long time ariston i am a long time arista i've been with arista since uh boy it's coming on 11 years uh and worked with the team for a long long time and other other companies excited to be here this i i think uh you know i'm happy that we're together in in not in a virtual sense looking forward to the conversation and from my perspective um it's a great time to have this conversation because you know people are coming back to work and there's a lot more opportunities for us to provide new solutions in the marketplace yeah and uh while i love zoom i can only do so many zooms and uh before i get started though i do want to give a quick shout out to e-week because my media partner all z casts are done in conjunction with the ewe he speaks program now we're going to be talking about a relatively new solution for a risk that targets the mid market right and which is interesting because when i think of arista i don't really think a mid-market i think a web scale i think a large enterprise i think of trading desks and things like that so i am you know pretty excited that you moved into this market given the heritage where you came from uh before we talk about the product though uh let's talk a little bit about the mid market itself uh what challenges are you seeing in this environment for it pros that maybe they didn't face before so i think there's a couple of key trends that are driving us to take a good look at this market so first and foremost companies of all sizes are more and more globally distributed than ever so for example we did a survey in june to our channel partners and we found that 33 of businesses with 500 employees or less are globally dispersed across 50 locations or more and that's pretty huge so even with only 500 employees exactly yeah now that does take into account of course remote employees as well working from home but there's a lot in there of hq and branch offices as well so for the it department how do you connect that many people globally dispersed how do you give them access to business applications and services when they're so globally dispersed and what do you do about people that are connecting from all sorts of different wi-fi networks that it doesn't necessarily have control over and then another thing um that is very uh prevalent to mid markets as well is just the sheer number of attacks that have been in the news for the last 12 to 18 months so colonial pipeline jbs foods those types of things for a mid-market company if you get hit by one of those and you have a huge ransomware demand you're not necessarily going to be able to stay in business if you pay that and every day your business is down um you're less likely to be able to ride it out compared to an enterprise company yeah in fact i talked to a hospital in florida that they they told me they were buying bitcoin just to pay the ransoms right so they didn't even try and fight it anymore they were just paying them which to me is the wrong way to do it now again right like we said when i think of arista i think big iron and trading centers and you know things like that so what was it about the mid market that you found so attractive that thought you wanted to be part of that now well i think one of the things you just brought up you know web scale large enterprise and taking that knowledge that we've learned from our cloud engagements and our large enterprise engagements and delivering a solution that then can be processed into the mid market or commercial where they don't necessarily have the same i.t step right they don't have huge amounts of people who are dedicated to managing the network infrastructure have a great amount of knowledge about the threats that you know heather was talking about and being able to provide a solution that solves those sorts of problems for them essentially building out an expert system that delivers services to them where they don't have to have a huge i.t staff to support especially we've talked about you know this is not a zoom session but yeah um you know if someone's at home and they're experiencing an issue with zoom or whatever application they're using it's hard to understand what's going on in that space they're not the home users aren't ccies they're not you know people who yeah exactly they don't understand what's going on so you have to provide tools that allow the network administrators especially for these commercial sized companies the ability to troubleshoot that effectively without having to send someone out there right and that's where we're taking the findings we found from managing large corporate infrastructure web infrastructure and then deploying that in a way that can be utilized by these commercials actually one of the things you said is a pretty interesting change in the idea landscape so before i was an analyst i was actually in corporate id i think you know that was it right and you know we we didn't take any responsibility for people in your home right but if you work from one of those on you and also i think when people worked at home it was generally the technically savvy the person that could do basic troubleshooting into their vpn connection and and things like that it was really that kind of power user right today we have people working from home that never work from home before right contact center regions inside sales people right these folks have never worked from home before but yet you know we've put the onus on them to be able to troubleshoot their own problems so now as i mentioned earlier you did you recently entered the mid-market with a product called q right which stands for cognitive unified edge which is the evolution of your cognitive campus vision but before we talk about q can you describe what is cognitive campus what what's that what's the vision of that so cognitive campus is essentially what arista are doing to build a cognitive network for a business so it essentially provides a way to build automation for provisioning for deployments and configuration with a cloud-based component to do that all right now it's built on aristis cloud vision which i know you've had for quite some time many mid-market customers that may not be familiar with cloud cloudvision so can you provide an overview of what that is so cloudvision is a application that manages the entire infrastructure so we talked about cognitive unified edge that's the edge of the infrastructure where you've got the uh where essentially applications or devices connect into the network either through wi-fi or poe switch and then cloud vision manages that and provides the information about what's happening at the edge in the infrastructure through the poe switch into the campus campus you have got distribution switches then into the data center and all the way to the cloud infrastructure whether you're running at aws or gcp or one of those so it's a system that manages the entire network infrastructure and provides a series of tools that allow you to configure deploy and through automated ai constructs or machine learning constructs actually identify issues before you may experience them or tell you what's happening the way an application is being run at a particular site and tell you boy you know if you change something you're going to get a better experience we have the ability to put something called ava sensors on our poe switches i don't i think we talked to you about it and that's a very interesting thing if you think about it we're delivering a tool because most people right now whether they use you know virus checkers or anything like that on the on their pcs or apples or other devices having the ability to have a sensor on a switch which then allows us to use our back-end ai constructs to identify hey this camera that you had for a long long time for some reason is talking to a site in you know belarus never done that before maybe you should take a look at that so that ability uh with cloud vision to manage the entire infrastructure and then also provide additional ai and ml capabilities to identify issues where you know in the past you had a very large it organization to understand these things and we're providing the tools to do that so cloud missions encompasses the management of the entire network infrastructure from the edge of the infrastructure all the way to the cloud when i think of cloud vision i think of it as your single single pane of glass yes and i use that because i know some of your competitors have multiple single panes of glass yeah right so i always you know tease when you're a bigger competitor say you're not being the market leader in single panes of glasses actually customers out so now i know i know there's a lot of ai built into it and i actually think ai is going to be the biggest uh change in networking that we've ever seen right and uh can you just give a couple of examples of what those ai capabilities are well i'll give you one example we have something called quality of experience and it looks at a wide variety of applications that people use one of them is we've talked about zoom so i'll just use that as an example we actually built out a lot of zoom love here a lot of them yeah i think it's because it's it's standard yeah it's almost become like a you know like xerox right you know like xerox this paper people say zoom people know immediately what you're referring to so we have built out a model that understands how zoom it should be behaving in in a good way right and then uh looks at analyzes all the the zoom traffic off our wi-fi access points in a customer's environment and then if there's anything where there's an outlier meaning that we know what the behavior of zoom is when someone's experiencing a good zoom session if something starts to become an outlier to that we can identify that through these ai heuristics and be able to then provide them with hey this particular customer or a device or user is experiencing an issue with zoom we can proactively tell the network administrator without them having to understand all the ins and out of zoom and everything from a wi-fi perspective hey why don't you do this it could be once you change a particular wi-fi parameter we can do that automatically or make a recommendation to do that or maybe you need to put a particular qos uh implementation on your switches and stuff to make sure that that's a better performing zoom session in that particular see what i find exciting about that is one of the things that media has been writing about for all the way back to when i was in corporate id was that it needs to be more proactive it needs to be proactive and i get a little offended by that right like id it's not like iit doesn't want to be proactive we just never really have the tools to be proactive right right so you can't be proactive unless you're predictive and i think what you're talking about there is bringing a level of predictability to how things are running to let it be proactive finally so we're not just running around fighting fires all the time yeah and that's the biggest thing being able to identify issues because there's a lot of noise right yeah so there'll be a lot of noise a lot of noise so being able to figure out what is really going on and being able because we have something called a network data lake which actually cloud vision and all of our devices wi-fi aps the edge threat management all feed into this network data lake that is a repository of information that we can then mine from an ai perspective to understand what's going on and we're doing this not only across a single customer's network we're actually doing that across all of our customers networks because based upon that information if someone is experiencing an issue in one area it's likely that maybe someone else has experienced that same issue and we can proactively identify that issue based upon the information we're receiving from a lot of different sources and we're not forcing a customer to comb through that themselves we have the ability to take a look at that information and raise the relevant uh points to them so they can the system can proactively address the issue or they can make a change on their yeah now when you rolled out netdl i actually thought that was a very uh seminal moment in rista's history because when it comes to ai right there's a expression data science is a good data leads to get insights well the the corollary is true where partial data leads to fragmented insights and i'll i know a number of your competitors have lots of data but they tend to be fragmented so you're not really getting a full picture where i thought you did a nice job with an fdl uh bring that together to let your customers actually have a good end-to-end view absolutely so so let's let's go back to q all right that's what you're we're supposed to be here to talk about uh what is q like how does it work can you give some details on it for that uh that mid market segment i can start off with that so q is essentially everything that you need for a business to get started with it so it includes your router it includes your switches and it includes your access points powered by the switches and it also includes threat management to make sure that the network that you deploy is secure all the way across it so a couple of things that includes it includes our new 710p switches so those are great for mid markets because they're smaller form factor they come in 12 or 16 ports and various options for power so that they can power even our most feature complete wi-fi access points well that's that's interesting it includes the security as well right and is that uh so this is another trend that we've talked about for years right bringing network and security together and i still don't really believe that's happened in the very large enterprises you know where you you guys have a big install base but are you seeing more and more of that in the mid market i think that goes back to a little bit about the globally distributed networks that we talked about there when people started to all work from home and split up into various different locations the emphasis there was on getting people connected and the thought of securing getting people connected was in some cases a bit of an afterthought because everything happened so quickly but certainly over the last year or 18 months that has been the piece that you absolutely have to layer on top of it because of the things that we're seeing in the news and that many attacks that we've seen so if i'm a mid-market customer i'm interested in queue uh and uh what would my experience be like post-deployment like how how automated would it be what kind of you know ai features are there things like that specifically for this segment well everything that we do we're building to make it as easy to deploy easy to manage and easy to provision as possible so for anybody setting this kind of thing up when they set it up they don't even have to go to the physical locations to get everything up and running troubleshooting is made very very easy over across all of our products we include things like automatic updates as well so that everything once it's set it will just work and have you seen a fair amount of uptick in that or uh i know when it comes to automation uh you know use the technical term and give some customers the heebie-jeebies right so are you finding more and more customers especially now that it you know has to work remote as well are willing to look at automation tools i i absolutely think so okay here's here's the problem when you now distributed your workforce right it used to be you know we're here erisa's corporate hq and we were just talking about this before how many people are coming in and we're still operating from a remote works workforce perspective and and uh you know it's worked out very nicely for us no no productivity hits we're running you know just like we did prior to code i think you know now that you've distributed this out how do you manage that so if you're going to send out networking infrastructure out to either you know maybe it's a a smaller work element you know workspace or even to someone's house you want to have that provision automatically you don't want to have that person who's receiving that have to go in okay uh i need to do i'm going to log into this thing set up my own ip infrastructure make sure it's talking to the appropriate uh whether it's a vlan or vxlan that's going to go out to corporate set up the vpn set up all the firewall rule it's just not going to happen right so absolutely people are looking at this and going i need the ability for this to be called ctp or zero touch provisioning so that when they get shipped out to a location it's already pre-provisioned the most complex thing you're gonna have to do is plug it in and plug in an ethernet port and then the entire thing is provisioned so absolutely that's a necessity and i think that's a necessity whether you're the largest enterprise or you're a mid-market or commercial because probably more so in a market commercial because they just don't have the i.t staff to to do it in a large scale so we're absolutely seeing a huge uptick in that sort of deployment model and then you know heather can talk to you about what that means from a security perspective because once that's in place then having the appropriate security policies to ensure that someone working remotely has the same sort of security behind it as if they were in this building that you know vista hq or customers hq yeah and i think going back to what you were saying uh um are they gonna it's about trust essentially so if you're going to go for things like automated provisioning or um automatic updates for example you need to trust that the vendor you're using is they're not going to update it to something that's going to break so once you've got that trust then they're going to set it and forget it and that makes their lives a whole lot easier yeah well i think we're all used to consumer examples where they do break sometimes yeah yeah yeah so you did mention the hardware before can you just give a bit more detail on that i know everyone while a lot of the innovation and networking is in software people still love their hardware right so uh so maybe get it and talk a little bit how it fits in with the rest of the portfolio yeah so i mentioned the switches before the 710p switches so there's also a variety of access points that can work for any type of environment you know indoor outdoor all sorts of things depending on how the business is distributed and then we also introduced what we call our q series of hardware and that includes hardware specifically pre-provisioned with our next generation firewall so next generation firewall is where you get your web filtering your threat prevention your virus blocking and your things like that to keep the network safe and secure so we introduced three q series appliances for that q8 q12 q20 and then i was talking before about distributing the um the corporate network all the way to the edge so in your branch offices you would deploy micro edge there and for there we have a couple of hardware devices the q6 and the q6e wl and those are the devices for micro edge they provide a level of security at the edge they hook the network back up to corporates but they also optimize the internet at the branch offices as well so it's partial when optimizer as well as yeah absolutely because sometimes at those branch offices the internet connection is not going to be as good as it would be at hq queues so that optimization is very important and microwave do i think of that as somebody's home even down to that small it can be used at home but for home you're going to be able to use various different types of vpn connectivity that you can get to through a next generation firewall and things like that yeah and i think the benefit that you're bringing here too is even though they're the devices are quite varied it's single policy right cloud measure right and so single management applications yeah it's q cognit cloud vision cognitive unified edge but that manages the entire super nuts it manages from again the access point and the devices that are connecting to it all the way through the poe switch and then through the firewall infrastructure through the microwave infrastructure into the corporate hq their data center the corporate network infrastructure and with cloudy us and other operations that we have even into gcp aws or whatever you may be running any cloud-based applications all right so now now this audience the mid-market they're not it's clearly not as technical as a lot of your larger customers and so they're going to leverage channel more and so can you describe you know how you're using the channel in this case to help get this product into customers hands and and you know get it up and working well i think as ed mentioned before um we are very msp friendly so ed was mentioning that uh smaller companies they won't necessarily have all the ccie accreditation and networking certifications so what we make sure we do is make sure it's very very easy for either a small business who doesn't have people with that much knowledge in their it departments or who will i wholly or in part on an msp for all their i.t needs we make it really really easy for them to get up and running with our products and just keep them running overall we make it really easy for msps to support multiple clients and to scale their business with us and grow so to net it out it's very important for us and we've been reaching out to a variety of channel partners for with programs and training around queue we're very excited about the uptick we've seen from our channel in response to this new initiative for arista and it is important because again if we think about these commercial the commercial market segment and you mentioned you know where arista's had success in the past we need to scale we need to embrace the channel and engage with them because we we just don't have the reach in terms of direct sales representatives able to go out and talk to every commercial or mid-market customer that's out there and really a lot of times their trusted advisor in that space will be a channel partner whether it's msp or you know they're the guy that they've been doing business with for 20 years so we need to reach out and with the programs that we have in place the training that we have in place we're very excited about the opportunity that cube brings to our channel organization all right well last question then um without getting into too much anything forward-looking right now when you're violating the safe harbor uh what's next for the product yeah so i think one of the things i was mentioning before the the sheer number of cyber attacks that have hit the news recently yes the problem is that's not going to go away and there's going to be more of them what's amazing is we're spending record amounts on security technology today and we're still having record breaches right so yeah but we have to keep going on that so every time you build a security product that can keep out all the people that know how to break in today you build something they're going to break down that wall and you've got to build something else so that's going to keep happening it's kind of like a game of cat and mouse you know they're trying to outwit the cat all the time and they're going to be successful but the cat's going to keep on coming so yeah i think that the key thing for us as we look going forward is to again continually add features some functionality that uh enable us to analyze the data that we have in our network data lake and then raise up that information proactively to our to to customers again whether they're commercial or whether they're large enterprises so we talked about you know you know the ability for us to put those what we call awake sensors onto our onto our switches what that immediately did as an example that we immediately did that made every networking device the ability the ability to capture information send that back to within the network data lake and then have our awake ndr system analyze that data and so then that raises up it's it's it's taking all what essentially is a huge amount of data separates the wheat from the chaff and elevates that so you can identify oh you know i've mentioned that story about you know this ip camera is doing something it's never done before and i think that's doing more of that where we're starting to look at are there different things that we can do now that we have this vast repository of information that can make the administration of the network simpler and simpler and use ai constructs to actually simplify that and proactively address issues so uh is there a problem with a you know particular wan connection we're seeing some is it the actual physical interface on that or is it something that's inherent within that network infrastructure that we need to change so from my perspective and and what we're going to be continuing to deliver into queue and cloud vision and risk in general is delivering more and more services that take advantage of the network data lake and providing that level of ai and ml constructs on top of it that proactively manage the infrastructure so it i know it's a long answer but in a in a in a more precise way to look at it is we're going to start solving a lot of your problems without you having to do things yeah yeah and i know corporate it spends an awful lot of time doing troubleshooting yeah i and i and i do think as people come back to the office it's going to get harder i talked to this one company that has redid their entire building for remote work and they they added a bunch of motion sensors cameras environmental sensors and uh the ci there said they have more ot devices on the network than i thought i said now so and those are things that a lot of id networking just probably have no idea they're even there yep right so so it's it's good you're focusing on i'm glad that glad to hear that so uh anyways on behalf of uh ed heather thank you very much for joining me on this i think uh uh it's it's a very exciting product and a new market opportunity for you guys so uh good luck with that so thanks for that if you're interested in q i'll include a link in the description of the youtube video other than that ed heather thanks for joining me i'm zscaravala from zk research don't forget to click to subscribe and i'll see you next time on zcast

This transcript was generated automatically from the video's captions and may contain errors.