Evolving Network Monitoring Strategies – Jeremy Rossbach, Broadcom

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstruck TV. I got a person.

I want to introduce you here. Always our next guest. His name is Jeremy rossback.

Jeremy is a chief technical evangelist with broadcom and Jeremy. Welcome to Tech strong TV. Thank you.

Alan. Really really great to be here. Thank you.

Thank you for coming on. So Jeremy, you know what before we jump into what I want we want to talk about today. Why don't we start off with a little bit of kind of the Jeremy rossback story if you will not do embarrass you but yeah share with the audience, of course Phil, trust me.

I don't mind Spotlight. So all right. I spent the first half of my career being the it consumer so I ran data centers for the likes of Northrop Grumman T row price here on the east coast in Baltimore Department of Veterans Affairs and some startups.

I worked my my way up from PC tech all the way to Data Center architect and and manager. So I had a blast being the it consumer running data centers racking and stack in setting up routes and and t1's to Branch offices. And then I moved over to CA Technologies formally Computer Associates.

And ran some data centers for them. They consolid a lot of their data centers back in the 2010s and I moved into more of a pre-sales role of demoing and helping our customers adopt our software. And then finally into product marketing and evangelism, which is actually marketing is where I got my degree in college.

So kind of Full Circle so around yeah, so I love to be able to sit down and tell War stories with our customers, you know my days and data center management and everything we went through when it comes to troubleshooting and triaging, you know, user experiences back then and help them solve problems today. So I I just enjoy helping our customers solve these challenges. Absolutely, you know, it's interesting.

I've seen so I sit in an interesting seat here, right? Because I see all it's like sitting on a river bank watching the water go by and you start to see patterns and then you start seeing sort of anti patterns. So kind of an anti-pattern then I'm starting to see early.

It's still early. is that A little bit of pushback against the cloud. Mmm back to the data center because what they're saying is you know, what?

I'm not recognizing all of these savings that they told me I was going to get with the cloud. In fact, I'm spending more money than I did it my data center. Number one number two this whole elasticity thing.

It's a one way or less this city. It keeps getting bigger, but it never gets small. It's kind of like having pants right once you make them too short.

You can't make them longer again. Right? So the the elasticity it turns out it's a one way unless this city and it just keeps driving my prices up number three.

You know, I thought I was comfortable kind of giving up control and this is something we're going to come back to on network, but I thought I was comfortable letting someone else worry about. the platform but I'm not so comfortable as I thought I'd be giving up control and so I'm looking to maybe saying hey, maybe the data center wasn't such a bad place after all and I'm not saying Amazon AWS is going out of business or anything like that, but I'm definitely seeing this anti pattern. Mm-hmm starting to flow in there that I think boats for a continued sort of hybrid existence between data center public Cloud private cloud Etc I wonder is that something that broad Karma you guys seeing anything in that way or Well, you know you mentioned control and the answer is yes, you know, we call it the new Enterprise Network right the fact that you know, statistic States 75% of the user experience now exists outside of the Four Walls of the data center versus maybe when you and I we're doing networking and running data centers where we knew every single packet when you do every single route, we knew every single user we knew every single how many hops it took to get from branch office a to application be those days are gone.

You know, it's it's insane. How network operations has been turned on its head with cloud with hybrid work, right? You know, I'm doing this for my house on my home Wireless going to my Verizon FiOS residential and then God knows how many other routing isps out there and then maybe into Google Cloud which is what broadcom uses for a lot of our resources.

I didn't mention the data center there at all. I'm not VPN in I'm not going through a data center. So if I call my it department and say listen Alan on the other end was saying that my audio was buffering and in it out.

You know fix it. They're gonna be like, you're not running across the broadcom network. How are we going to do that?

And that's that control and visibility folks have lost with migration the cloud with SAS adoption with hybrid work. They they only see 25% of that network path anymore. And that is the challenges.

We're seeing with all of our customers, you know, the fact that they've lost that visibility and control of looking at what the network path looks like for what is today's user experience. Yeah, Jeremy this reminds me of a very similar conundrum that my friends in this we call it cyber now, but I security my friends and security went through with the whole Cloud migration, which is we have a seed control of a lot of the security of our applications in data to the cloud provider. You know, but they they try to massage a straight to to soothe Us by saying don't worry.

These Cloud providers are spending a fortune on cloud security. They're gonna do it better than you can anyway, but the funny thing was when this you know, what hit the fan it wasn't the cloud providers who took the hit. It was the Enterprises and the Enterprise security area.

Who said hey, what do you mean you have an insecure thing here? This went down. It got hacked it got breached.

Yeah. It's so I we you know, it's security we call it responsibility without control. That sucks.

I mean, yeah, excuse my language. Yeah. Yes.

Well, you know, I tell a funny story and it's related not with security but more along Network visibility observability. So we say now when we talk to our customers you are now responsible. For the entire infrastructure that makes up the user experience whether you own that infrastructure or not, right?

So the story I tell which my kid always kills me when I tell it is, you know, I got a kid who's 22 years old. She's had to replace three of her bumpers on our car and a fourth may be coming and when that happens she's gonna call the insurance company and say I need to submit a claim but you know what Alan most of these customer care agents are working from home now and they are accessing a claim application that is in the cloud and that network path does not look like it looked 10 years ago five years ago, right? So if my kid calls and says, I need to create a claim and the customer service agent is having Home wireless issues or having residential ISP issues or maybe Google cloud is having an outage on the East Coast.

She can't tell my kid. I'm sorry. Can you call back?

I can't seem to get I'm maybe I'm having network problems. I can't get to the claims application that Happened because that insurance company's it department is responsible for all the infrastructure that makes up my kids user experience or that claim providers user experience whether they own the infrastructure or not. And that's what folks are our challenge with today.

Especially our customers, you know is getting that visibility and control back because they're responsible when you know, what hits the fans. And they can't just say sorry. It's a Google issue.

Right? Right. That's gonna hurt the brand that's gonna hurt Revenue.

It's gonna you know, they're not saving anything when it comes to costs or or remediation time. So that that's the challenge. We're happy to be have helping our customers with today.

Absolutely. So I I guess my next question to you then Jeremy is what would we what do we supposed to do though? What do you what's the channel?

How do you solve this challenge because people aren't we're not you know, well, we are moving back to the office RTO, you know slowly but surely but we're still working from home sometimes and we're still it's like the movie that won the Oscars everything everywhere all at once. We're still accessing everything everywhere all at once that's a great way to say it and so how You know what it what's important network engineer to do here. Yeah, so we have a tagline at broadcom that we're using and we're using it at our upcoming May 3rd virtual Summit, which we'll talk about but we're very excited, especially with the acquisition of apnetta that happened last February, which I'm sure you know about you know, we're 99% of all internet traffic traverses over some type of broadcom Technology, whether it's you know chips in a smart car or you know data center switching or you name it.

You're you know, your iPhone has five broadcom chips in it. We're everywhere and we're connecting everything and what we want to do now, especially with our three decades of network monitoring expertise and the Beyond the Edge of the network visibility that apnetta delivers is to validate the delivery of any service on any network for any user so that everything everywhere all at once and where we're excited to be able to extend that monitoring expertise and observability expertise beyond the network Edge now because you and I know that's where the user experiences traversing most of the time and that net is key capabilities. Is to be able to understand with this primary proprietary technology.

What are the Hops look like inside of my wireless home network? And then when it connects to my Verizon FiOS residential ISP, and then whatever other ISP networks, and then finally maybe into the Google Cloud they have the ability to see all those Hops and then identify degradation packet loss. Latency Jitter Etc, especially for voice and video like we're doing now and you know, that's just the tip of the iceberg with their benefits and this enables our customers to be able to gain that control and visibility back Beyond the Edge of the network that they lost to Cloud migration SAS adoption hybrid work.

Can we fix a router in Verizon fiosis network? Of course we can't but imagine the hours saved in war room fighting and finding that needle in a haystack when you've observed. That the home Wireless is working fine and and you know the data centers working fine and you've been able to isolate a device in an ISP Network that is having greater than 10% packet loss imagine that that meantime the Innocence we call that, you know, our customers are being able to identify their innocence 1995% faster than ever before because of this visibility they gain back into these unmanaged Networks.

Absolutely. I'm sorry, you know I didn't realize the the broadcom's reach. Because you know, I I mean, I knew broadcom is hardware and chips but I've been so focused on the software for the last eight nine years, right?

And I think and I think that she had another thing that affects our thoughts around the network today in that. In the network used to be a lot about Hardware. Right, even, you know the land where we had our big firewalls and our switches and routers and all of that good stuff.

So much of that has been buried. Below our kind of Event Horizon, right because it's all about software, right? and I mean there's a role to play there for the hardware.

There's a role to play. Jeremy I want to do we you know, we're gonna run out of time here soon. So I want to Come back.

You mentioned a virtual event coming up in May. Give us a scoop. It's our third annual netops virtual Summit.

And what we do is we're showcasing. Customers success stories with the broadcom solution of network monitoring and and digital experience monitoring and their ability to extend their control and monitoring visibility Beyond the Edge of their Network because they support network delivery of user experiences at Traverse over unmanaged networks. Like ISP and Cloud that mean we're all doing it.

They all have the exact same challenges. There's some really great sd-wan underway and overlay correlation. You just mentioned, you know, software and Hardware that overlay and underlay correlation.

That's so critical for netops teams today. And then like I mentioned the visibility into ISP and Cloud providers to give that full end-to-end user experience Network delivery visibility. So we have a lot of customers talking we have broadcom exact talking.

It's May 3rd. It starts at 11:00 am Eastern and if you check out the show notes, we'll have the link to register in the show notes for today's session and I invite everyone to check. Out tons of videos downloads white papers customer success stories.

We even have some F1 racing. Folks that are joining us and talking about some really inspirational stories around how they have used broadcom software to help them win in their their F1 racing tournaments, you know, interesting. I think that's right around the time of the Miami Grand Prix F1 event that are Florida.

Yeah. Yeah, well you Williams Racing and broadcom is a partnering and have been partners for years. So it's a year, so it's really exciting to see technology help.

F1 racing which I never thought you know, that was something we would dive into a use case of but you know super exciting so I invite folks to check it out. Yeah, no it you know what like everything else car racing is all about detect today. Yeah, so it's absolutely right Jeremy.

I want to thank you for coming on Tech strong TV and and having this conversation. Love to continue it with you. Let's let's continue it and we will get that information out here on this virtual event, right?

Thank you so much for having me and my pleasure sailored. All our friends out of broadcom. Jeremy respect Chief techno technical evangelist here on broadcom network or broadcom.

It's not just broadcom networks broadcom talking about the new Enterprise Network. We're gonna take a break here on Tech strung. We'll be right back.