Masergy Performance Edge Solves the Unsolvable Middle Mile Problem

welcome to zcapps everybody i'm zeus caraval from zk research i'm your host uh for this video uh this is another one of my thought leadership series where i interview spark people from different companies talk about different industry trends uh before i get started though i want to thank my media partner eweek the z casts are done in conjunction with the ewe e-speak series uh today's guest chris you have the honor of being the first two-time z cast guest so congratulations on that distinct honor maybe i'll make you a little plaque and send it to you or something like that but uh chris mcfarland for those who don't know him he's the ceo of masergy communications um why don't you just uh remind us of who masergy is and what you do there this is good to see you as always and uh appreciate the uh the honor for those of you who are not aware of who who masonry is we're kind of a pioneer in software-defined networking and as the world has evolved and changed networking we really focused on you know helping enterprises you know kind of continue down their path with their cloud journey no matter where they're at and we take that perspective from kind of the network security and network services you know standpoint and we very much today view ourselves as a leader in the secure edge networking space yeah and you guys have been uh you know around a long time i think you just celebrated your 20th anniversary uh congratulations on that i actually became familiar with masergy uh right when you guys were founded is like the company that solved video over long distances so that that you know back then that was you know really tough problem to solve so you guys have evolved nicely since then um i want to start off with uh kind of an industry question right so now that com more and more companies are moving to a permanent remote and hybrid work model um what trends are you seeing from your customer base you know what problems have been solved or still need to be solved and where are it leaders still struggling yeah i know great great question and i will tell you that you know i know there's been a lot of hype around the word hybrid the last handful of years and what i think we've learned through the the pandemic and you know thank god that i think we all kind of see you know some light at the end of the tunnel now is that for most knowledge workers in north america and especially in western europe we're seeing very much this evolution to kind of this hybrid work environment where people are going to spend x amount of days every week you know working from home and at the same time you're spending x amount of days in the office right so i think the work configuration is going to change there but one of the things that that we've realized and what we've been working on with our customers is how do you provide you know the same communications and security components around that user when they're sitting there at their house versus just sitting um you know inside of their office and so that security parameters change and the networking technologies have changed and clouds you know changing the way that that applications flow and so what we've seen is that you know there's a lot more reliance on on broadband connections which you know has a lot of challenges with and so when you take a look at data from you know groups like almond salon you know you'll see that that there's this growing and growing reliance on on broadband infrastructure and that you know sometimes the application performance there for roughly half the time is not sufficient and that you know if you think about saving money challenges you can't really get private ethernet to most people's houses and so when you think about these things it creates some unique challenges and i think that you know we're one of the first companies in the world to introduce some technology that we're excited about that we're just announcing you know actually today yeah that's um uh that the trend of uh the hybrid work is interesting because when i talk to business leaders about it everybody's got a different idea of what hybrid work looks like some companies have people coming in three days some people make it optimal companies make it optional right but the the commonality though is that we are going to be in hybrid that person's home network is becoming more important and as you mentioned getting private ethernet or you know even t-ones and things like that which wouldn't suffice today to somebody's home is prohibitively expensive so you know you hinted on this i know you made a big announcement today something called performance edge uh that helps it organization solve one of the big problems with broadband today so why don't you double click on that and drill deep and tell us what performance edge is yeah no absolutely so we're incredibly excited you know about this announcement today we're adding a new technology component to all of our customers that leverage you know broadband connections across their manage sd-wan secure platforms and we think it's just the natural evolution of what we'll see with with sassy and so when you think about application prioritization and dynamic traffic steering and all these other things that we're able to do in these intelligent networks you know the broadband becomes the weakest link if you think about that being the connection path you know back from somebody's house or for somebody's branch office or maybe even a medium-sized office so we think that this technology because we have such deep visibility through our apps platform and we've been watching every connection to the matrg you know secure edge platform for over a decade now and so we can see now is that when we see you know significant packet loss or jitter moving all over the the map and we see applications that perform right our a ops platforms can make a recommendation to an i.t administrator and say hey we think that this is a candidate for performance edge and for kind of a small incremental fee that's automatic they can opt into performance edge what performance edge does is it uses you know some technology from not only aiops but you know we're leveraging some of our technology partners to do some you know adaptive you know forward error error correction techniques that allows us to create up the path and based upon the challenges that we're seeing from aiops we can make decisions about how much remediation needs to take place with that length and then we change it what we have seen in our lab and with our early adopters of this technology is the fact that it could perform from a connection standpoint we can clean up and make it perform almost just like private dedicated ethernet access now we can't fix the mean time to repair challenges that might exist you know with this broadband feature so it's not a scenario where it's a hundred percent rip and replace of everything that's going on this isn't a ethernet killer per se but for work from home users branch offices and probably any offices that leverages probably a hundred megabits or less you know connectivity day this is an area where we can make broadband perform dramatically better and at the end of the day they'll get the application performance that they need but at the same time it changes their cost structure too so it's one of these rare instances where this capability technology that's cloud derived will actually give them more value and cost them less money versus having you know higher cost dedicated internet access or even private ethernet if they had private ethernet in that location before if you've been around the internet for a while you might just remember your first experience with public broadband yes it was a game changer downloads way faster than dial-up or dsl always on all at a great price it's no surprise a lot of businesses rely on broadband today to power their cloud applications and connect their employees partners and customers broadband delivers a great experience until it doesn't like when you're in the middle of something it's all going smoothly and then out of nowhere the connection starts to slow down or freeze wouldn't you like to get all the advantages of broadband including its great price with the performance your business really needs well now you can masergy the leader in sd-wan and sassy solutions is now delivering the superior cloud and broadband performance today's market demands with masergy performance edge take your corporate network add masergy performance edge to any broadband connection by a sassy or sd-wan then say goodbye to packet loss and congestion and hello to performance comparable to a private connection without paying private line prices all while taking full advantage of masergy ai powered service control and real-time analytics why put up with plain old broadband when you don't have to get the performance edge you and your business deserve masergy performance edge get started today at masergy.com yeah well if you can get close to even ethernet performance at the cost of consumer broadband you know that's fantastic and i think of all the homeworkers today you know contact you know call center workers even knowledge workers doing a lot of video you know any kind of degradation of that network has a big implication on the business right so if you can bring a little bit of uh you know performance and quality that uh you know that could be a big win for companies so um with that being said though you know i i if i think back to the early days of sd-wan that was being painted uh by a lot of vendors uh as the panacea to all network woes right it was gonna solve all our problems solve world hunger you know feeder kids at the end of night and things like that and and it and it did serve a pretty big purpose right when you had redundant connections into branches and stuff and it really helped with reliability but what does performance edge do that traditional sd-wan's don't yeah great great great question and you're right when you think about the early you know kind of hype cycle around sd-wan a lot of it was around you know the oems and the hardware companies saying mpls is dead well we know four years five years later that it's not now there is a technology transitions that's taking place and i think we're kind of still in the third inning right and there's still the more locations to transition to kind of sd-wan sassy then there are location legacy locations that you know within the mpls or some other type of technology they had prior to this what performance edge does for um people that want to leverage broadband infrastructure is that you know they're they're paying a fee for it you know it's a modest fee call it you know roughly let's say it's a hundred dollars a month and it cleans up that broadband connection when it needs to absolutely take that and it does it from the measure g edge network in an aiops through its analytics engine looking at it and making a recommendation for when that needs to occur and then how many how do we clean up the packets you know itself now this is something that none of our competitors are doing this today because i think as we've talked about your prior podcast is if you don't have the analytics and don't understand actually what's happening in real time you can't make these decisions to help help customers evolve so it's something that we think is absolutely revolutionary and where it's really applicable is the work from home environment that we were talking about earlier potentially the work from anywhere environment because we can help them if they're sitting in a hotel or even a starbucks and then secondarily we also believe that branch offices you know mid-market companies that may have most of their locations kind of being looked similar to branch offices and then even the retail vertical inside of really large enterprises was where this might have a significant impact to help their performance but then keep their their costs you know at a low low a little bit lower level so what i think this means is that you know basically when we look forward from we're at today there's a heck of a lot more competitive in the marketplace in terms of helping customers kind of continue down that longer term cloud journey yeah it's now you mentioned forward error correction and you know that technology has been around for a while um you know uh it's not all widely deployed but it has been around for a bit is this uh is this performance edge something that a business could build themselves or is there something unique about the way you have it implemented as being part of your managed service that makes it more consumable yeah great question so ford error correction as you know has been around for a long time specifically you know in in cellular networks going back to you know the the advent of moving things from tdm to to take you to traffic you know the challenges that we've seen is we've seen a lot of people try to implement forward error correction mostly hardware vendors without a tremendous amount of success because they try to bucketize it and make one version of it fit all and then it has to be bookended too from a technology standpoint so you eliminate the ability to see what's taking place across your network infrastructure and you kind of pigeon your house you pigeonhole yourself into the situation to where you may get a little bit performance enhancement but the trade-off is you know what's going on with your apps you don't know what's going on with users you have to have it on both ends and it just creates unique challenges and so what we put together is a platform that's cloud derived it's an extension of what we're doing with sassy that is taking a look you know minute by minute and then making decisions on whether we even need to have it or not and so i can tell you if we have a broadband connection with a customer that is not going to see any value from performance edge we're never going to make the recommendation that they should utilize this technology and then when we see challenges and challenges may present themselves at certain times of the day or may present themselves you know certain days of the week we can make the changes so this is an adaptive implementation where we're taking a look at all of their apps and how they're performing and so we've made this tremendously more robust because we have analytics and then algorithms and then the implementation of the technology behind it and so you know i would i would tell you this that if you compare the technologies this is like you know regular cruise control in your car versus autopilot that you get from tesla that's interesting and you know when i when i think of masergy though i you know i think you're known for your soft refined network you've done a lot of innovation in the middle mile you've got some really unique slas and you know in full disclosure before i was an analyst i was actually a corporate buyer of telecom services and i thought slas were a joke because you know the ones you get from the traditional telcos really have no teeth to them but the ones you have actually are pretty meaningful so now that you've added the performance edge you it seems like you can deliver this kind of end to end last mile middle mile uh type of performance optimization and so you've alluded to this a little bit before but who do you really see as the ideal targets for performance edge and masonry services here yeah great great question so our business just like many businesses have been changing we've been thinking about how do we serve you know a broader landscape if you think about the fact we've been in business for you know in excess of two decades now the majority of those two decades were really focused on large enterprise and maybe medium enterprise depending how you you think about it right think about businesses that are at a 500 million to 10 billion in revs was really really our sweet spot over the last year we've pivoted so we think in addition to that we think the mid market is an area where we have you know service offerings where we absolutely excel and we've seen you know generally you know a significant amount of uptake that area so we actually think that almost any multi-location business whether they're headquartered in north america or western europe are really really good um opportunities for us and then businesses that clearly have remote or partially remote workforces we can absolutely help in very meaningful and significant ways and when you think about you know what we've been trying to focus on it we really haven't changed our dna which has always been about reliability on one end of the spectrum service level agreements that matter but more importantly having transparency to what's really happening with your network and your applications and user performance so this is just one more way for us to provide you know nothing more value but to give people you know more control over what's happening with their applications and their users and enhancing their security postures so again we're super super excited about this announcement and we think it's going to be meaningful and very relevant to you know almost all of our customers today we're hopeful you know over the next handful of years we'll we'll grow it you know at a pretty healthy clip of this yeah i think the other area of innovation that you you touched on which i want to bring to the forefront is uh what you're doing in ai i believe you were uh you're a very early adopter and ai ops in fact i think you were the first service finder to actually come out with an aiops offering and you've integrated into your sassy and sd-wan products and as you automate more network functions and drive towards it fully autonomous solution you know you talked about tesla's autopilot it's kind of that idea where what's the role of performance edge here so performance i think plays a meeting for all right because it's it's another function that is is is making a recommendation whether it turns on what level it needs to turn on at if it does and the ability to turn off automatically but if you think about you know the company you know we we are now into year 16 of having significantly invested in analytics for our customers and what we recognized about a year into that process so call it 2015 is that most of our customers were just barely scratching the surface of the analytics that we're providing them through our portal and what we saw was they were really leveraging it when they had you know what i would consider to be critical issues going on inside of that enterprise and so the product and engineering teams here inside of our company started thinking through how do we get our customers to leverage their data so they have more actionable and meaningful insights and one of the things that we found was the fact that if you looked at some of the biggest challenges that we saw in our network operations centers and our security operations centers were kind of these ongoing things where they deployed a new server somewhere or they opened a new office or they had a new application but they didn't configure everything perfectly for their entire global enterprise and so we started thinking about what are the things that we could do from an algorithmic standpoint if we were just sitting inside of that enterprise and so we started off with some base algorithms then we thought that well we can make these algorithms better through some machine learning we call it ai but let's just be you know blood these are you know super supervised machine learning algorithms that do get better over time and and you know we started thinking through well we'd like to have a solution someday that's self-optimizing self-healing you know and self-organizing in terms of where does the network need to go how does it change evolve how do apps you know that come out of the network how do we treat them and so our next phase that we believe that we're at is you know sometime late next year you know we'll be to intent based network where our customers can kind of describe what they're wanting and the network will be able to configure itself that way and we think we're probably three years maybe two and a half to three years out but we'll have an autonomous networking but part of that process is you have to have network administrators engineers security engineers and architects all trust the platform yeah until they see the recommendations flowing through and today you know to symbol sms message or a simple text um or a simple you know message coming through the portal that says hey this is what we recommend this is what we're seeing we suggest it's changed and then we change it and then we come back and follow and say hey we actually did see the performance improver this is how much less bandwidth you're actually consuming or this application is now not has doesn't have any contention so we're able to demonstrate the challenge the recommendation and then follow back up with it absolutely did fix and improve the environment for that customer and we feel like this is such a huge you know component because you know i t for all intensive purposes you know every business every industry is getting disrupted in some form or fashion so the ability for it to be that much more strategic is out of the foundation it's our job to make you know this really complex you know network security and services you know component to the infrastructure look a lot more simple to them yeah you mentioned uh the trust that has to be built and that's interesting too i i think about people that buy teslas and they have autopilot uh they tell me the first time they use it their hands are stuck to the wheel they don't trust them at all and then after about a month they're you know they're they're falling asleep at the wheel so not that you should do that i have a 19 mile commute 17 miles on the highway uh 16 and a half of the 17 miles my tesla is doing you know arguably 99 of the work so it is it has come a long ways yeah and it's great innovation for the network engineer so anyways chris congratulations on the launch uh like i said between that and what you've announced with the ai ops and some of the sd-wan and sassy offerings you've had you've had a pretty good year so congratulations on that thank you it's good to see you appreciate the times yeah anyways uh thanks for watching don't forget to click to subscribe and i'll see you next time on zcast you

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