Shiv Radhakishun: 0:02
We’re using AI as the foundation for many different product innovations coming up. When I say predictive right now, thousandeyes can tell you that there is an outage. We will soon be able to tell you that we’re predicting an outage. In fact, we can actually do that today. We can predict an outage leveraging AI Today.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:17
I have the pleasure in having a chat with Shiv Radhakishan, who is the head of ANZ and Japan at Thousand Eyes of the channel. Shiv’s a fellow podcaster and mentor in relation to speaking, public speaking and also done the Shiv Show. Shiv welcome.
Shiv Radhakishun: 0:32
Thank you, mbr, and I gotta say you pronounce the last name very, very well.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:36
Oh, but maybe a bit of coaching. No one needs to know that. No, that’s okay. Look, I mean I’ve known you long enough and everyone only knows you, shiv, even when I I sort of was a bit intimidating, but I appreciate you getting me through it. Before we get started, do you mind just telling people who are listening a little bit about your background and what led you to your current role as, obviously, head of channels at Thousand Islands, covering Australia and Japan and New Zealand, of course.
Shiv Radhakishun: 0:56
Yeah, absolutely. I fell into tech, like many people, and so about 14 years ago I was running my own business and I was selling cell phones in Canada, in the Caribbean. Funny to do that in university. That kind of got me through uni and after uni I realized that the market is extremely saturated. Maybe I should look into tech.
Shiv Radhakishun: 1:12
And I fell into a job at a company called Bell Canada, which was an SP in Canada, a partner of Cisco as well, and I worked there for six months. It started brand new in sales and it was full cold calling. And when I say full cold calling, I mean I had a machine, a device attached to the phone, automatically calling businesses and I would have to sell them lines. I ended up doing really well at that and that taught me sales, because how many rejections are you going to get when you’re trying to sell business lines to people? So about six months in, a third party walked into the room and said hey, everyone, you’re doing such a great job, but unfortunately, to save money and to make sure this business is even more profitable, we’re outsourcing this team to India. Wow, so if you want to keep your job, you have to move to India. And I was 22 at the time and didn’t know how to challenge them. And they walked out of the room and I said to myself well, this is a very interesting intro into into tech. Now, the reason I’m telling you that story is there’s a silver lining.
Shiv Radhakishun: 2:04
Cisco was a partner of Bell Canada and ended up being in the office that day and they saw us walking around moping and trying to figure out what we’re going to do with our life and someone came to me and said hey, we know a sales team is hiring within Cisco. Do you want an interview? And I said, sure, I’d love one. And that was on a Tuesday. On the Thursday I interviewed at Cisco and on the Monday, after I started at Cisco and I guess throughout my career at Cisco, I’ve been here for about 12 years now started off in selling SMB mid-market, moved on to public sector and enterprise, and then I did a four-year stint at Meraki, which was probably a great four years of my life and going into cloud and looking at what customers were looking for in the cloud business.
Shiv Radhakishun: 2:43
Meraki was a very big part of the conversation. And then in 2020, cisco quietly acquired a company called ThousandEyes and because I knew the visibility pitch really well. I was very intrigued in this company and what I saw ThousandEyes as was really visibility outside of the network, where Meraki was very much visibility inside of the network. So, as Michael Chopper-Reed was the chief revenue officer at the time, I spoke to him, went through quite a few interviews and then started off my journey at Thousand Eyes and it’s been about two and a half years there running the channel in Australia, new Zealand and quite recently Japan and I got to say the channel role is a great role. I get to work with people like you, get to work with people around different countries and definitely enjoying it.
Michael van Rooyen: 3:25
Right, look, it is amazing. I remember seeing Thousand Eyes for the first time myself and I know certainly we interviewed one of your colleagues for one of our earlier episodes and, of course, timely. We had a global outage over the weekend and, ironically, I actually went to the Thousand Eyes dashboard first when I started hearing about it and it was interesting to see the mapping of what was broken. It was phenomenal. Just a quick lens on it rather than trying to deep dive, so so for those who haven’t heard a thousand eyes or are not familiar with them, um, do you mind just explaining why you guys exist? You know what problem you’re trying to solve and how customers are really using.
Shiv Radhakishun: 3:58
Yeah, sure the way I like to put it and I’ve stolen this from michael chopper reed is we’re the google Maps of the internet, and really what we do is we have data collection points or as we call them, agents around the world, on routers, on switches, in data centers, collecting information and data across the internet, looking for outages, finding outages. We take that data and then, of course, we report it back to our customers. What we also do really well is network assurance, and that’s the problem that we’re trying to solve. We offer visibility into things that you normally don’t control Microsoft Azure, aws and that’s just a small portion of what we do.
Michael van Rooyen: 4:38
Wow, Wow. And so what you’re really trying to solve is observability. Right, and you touched upon it earlier about Meraki being very much a network lens, infrastructure lens and that’s where the industry has come from historically around. How’s my network performance? This is network infrastructure as opposed to application. How to find the root cause, analysis quickly and really the end user experience is what people are really looking for today, so observability continues to become a critical component. Can you, from your travels working with the US, being a leader for this region, describe the current state of observability in the industry and where you think it is and where we’re going?
Shiv Radhakishun: 5:12
Yeah, absolutely so.
Shiv Radhakishun: 5:13
If you look at Thousand Eyes, for example, it’s 10 plus years old, but what I’ve noticed is observability, or the conversation, is very new to customers that we speak to, mostly because a lot of the mentality is very much yes, we had an outage, but I’m sure it’ll fix itself. And we saw again one of the biggest global outages I think we’ve ever seen, yes, in our lives, over the weekend. People are now starting to understand how big of an impact these outages have, so I think observability is becoming more and more important now. What I will say has changed is the COVID world that we live in today. 75% of companies have adopted work from home strategies, which means we are more dependent on open face applications like Microsoft, like AWS, like SAP, and if there is an outage in one of these applications, it can mean a revenue loss for my business as a customer. Observability is becoming more and more important now today, especially with AI, which I’m sure we’re going to touch on later, but it should be a part of a strategy for every single customer going forward.
Michael van Rooyen: 6:14
Yes, and off that you touched on knowing outages, knowing the root cause, analysis, that what it costs money. But how can customers or organizations really leverage these sorts of tools, monies but how can customers or organizations really leverage these sorts of tools to really improve their operations, get better insights? What are you kind of seeing on a global scale?
Shiv Radhakishun: 6:31
So I like to put it this way, if you are looking for something in the dark, you’re probably going to find it. You’re going to stub your toe on the way.
Michael van Rooyen: 6:38
That’s a good point.
Shiv Radhakishun: 6:39
You might fall and it might take you a lot of time. So you’re probably going to find it. But where network assurance and observability comes in is where we keep that light on.
Shiv Radhakishun: 6:48
You can find it right away. If you’re looking for something in the dark, you may fall. You’ll experience pain is really what I’m saying. That pain can go away if you invest in observability. And what we’re seeing globally is, again, more and more customers, more and more companies really understanding the impact that observability has in their network. And I’ll tell you, mbr, and you probably heard this as well Sometimes we ask the question what happens when you experience an outage? What does this mean for your business? A lot of times the answer is I don’t know.
Michael van Rooyen: 7:15
Where.
Shiv Radhakishun: 7:16
I like to, and it’s scary, right, it’s a scary realization Because in the back of their mind, what they’re trying to think of is a revenue loss. And I always ask the question what does this mean? Most of the time, when we boil it back to a revenue number, that’s when we see companies really turn that light on and say, wow, well, that one outage has actually cost me X number of productivity hours, which means money. It’s lost me revenue. I should look at observability. Some of the major banks in Australia that have all invested in ThousandEyes. Some of the largest companies in the world Oil Gas have invested in ThousandEyes as well. So again, people want to keep that light on.
Michael van Rooyen: 7:51
Wow, it’s interesting and I guess I don’t think about it because front of mind for me is observability. Being an organization that manages customer environments, that’s front of mind for us all the time, but interesting to hear that many customers haven’t really boiled it down to that. And then I take the other side of the spectrum. When we work with OT customers, they are very clear in knowing exactly what production downtime costs them. Absolutely, and I’m happy you touched on that. People like oil and gas are looking at observability because I originally think people were seeing Thousand Eyes as a real corporate enterprise type product. But I know the way it can be deployed and utilized. If I think about our OT business and helping customers with that OT story, how it can play a role in that space, oh, absolutely.
Shiv Radhakishun: 8:30
I mean, we do really well with energy companies, oil and gas companies, and the reason why is, if one minute of downtime is not accepted, of course Not accepted at all- and that can mean millions of dollars of revenue loss, and a lot of these companies rely on Thousand Eyes to make sure that if there is an outage they can act very quickly. And it’s actually a matter of when there is an outage. There will always be outages, and we know that. But how do you react quickly? And that’s where Thousand Eyes comes in.
Michael van Rooyen: 8:55
Yeah, I think what it really helps with and I’ve seen this before is how to use the tool to do that root cause analysis, how to get in a war room. I really like your thing about finding things in the dark. What Thousand Eyes really gives you is not just a flashlight right or the torch in Australia around the room, but it kind of be the bright light that shines the whole room to expose exactly where the issue is, straight away.
Shiv Radhakishun: 9:17
Exactly. You’ve just taken my analogy and made it better. This is what NBR does. I love it. I love it.
Michael van Rooyen: 9:22
Very good, very good. It’s a bit like that story of the specialist being called in to get a nuclear power plant up and running again and this is probably another Thousand Eyes analogy and he walks around, walks around and has a look and basically it’s a hammer out of his toolkit and just hits a particular sensor and the whole plant comes alive again. And the plant operator gets the bill and wonders why the bill was so expensive and and and the breakdown of the bill was, you know, call out a hundred dollars, but to know exactly where to hit the hammer was you know 20 grand. So there you go, there you go it’s funny.
Shiv Radhakishun: 9:52
you mention that right and and a lot of the the companies that we speak to talk about the resourcing where they’ve been experiencing an issue for 10 to 12 months. The amount of money spent on those resources to go and fix the issue that hasn’t been fixed is a lot of money and again we can turn that torch on. So I said, flashlight Canadian, we can turn that torch on and help you find that issue right away. And if I can steal a page out of Meraki’s book and this is why I love the Meraki business but the mission statement from Meraki is how do we give our customers time back in the day to do things they love? And I actually find Thousand Eyes doing that very well. We want to give you time back in the day to go do things, not run a network. How do we give you time back to go spend with your family, go kick the ball with your kids?
Michael van Rooyen: 10:38
That’s kind of where the technology is going and that’s what we can help companies help companies do yeah, if I think about that in the context of even an outage again or a failure you’d normally do again, war room scenario, that’s days of work trying to look at all different tools, making assumptions but having a concise viewpoint, being able to a troubleshooter and also point it out to where the fault is right, not blaming fault but just helping diagnose, whereas always we still have this network versus cyber, versus application stack discussion and this is really a holistic view, right.
Shiv Radhakishun: 11:08
Absolutely. I mean, I’ve been in many war rooms. I’m sure you have as well.
Michael van Rooyen: 11:11
They’re not fun.
Shiv Radhakishun: 11:12
Tensions are high, of course. Of course, everyone’s blaming everyone, usually the network, which is why one of our taglines is go ahead, blame the network. We’re so confident we can show you that it’s not the network. In fact, the large outage that we saw on Friday, who was blamed first? The network was actually blamed first, of course, and then right away, I saw on LinkedIn a lot of comments saying, whew, the network had a break this weekend. But the network is usually pointed at at first. So what we do is I actually call it Thousand Eyes, the war room eliminator. We don’t need the war room anymore. Now we can confidently tell you the data is showing this problem. Let’s go fix it and give you back time in your day to go home and spend time with your family.
Michael van Rooyen: 11:49
It’s funny. You say spend time away with the family. I was actually on leave on Friday and I was actually wearing the Thousand Eyes shirt, all right, and I’ve got a photo of me sitting there looking at my iPad to see what was going on and I’m actually wearing the shirt. I have a more wife took a photo of that, so it’s ironic. I’d love to see that. I’d love to see that. I’ll get it sent to you.
Shiv Radhakishun: 12:09
Funny enough, I wear that shirt. I live here in Sydney. I’d be wearing that shirt taking the train into work or walking on the street. People would actually stop me and say, hey, where did you get that shirt? What is this? And I would quickly pitch them Thousand Eyes. But it is a popular shirt. And it’s funny because not just partners who we speak to, but customers as well, the network is always blamed Always and historically. Before Thousand Eyes, we would spend time in this war room where the network would be at the forefront and all they would be doing is defending.
Shiv Radhakishun: 12:37
So we’re not actually trying to find the problem, we’re defending ourselves. We don’t need to do that anymore with thousand eyes, with observability as a whole, because we’re now opening doors to things that you normally don’t control.
Michael van Rooyen: 12:48
And it’s more than that. Right, it’s not to mix the two together, but it’s not just necessarily proving infrastructure is working. It’s actually about the user experience, right? So how do we make sure the user experience is well, because it does more than just say it’s not the network. It actually shows where latency is, where all these variables are from a tech point, and I think about again the value it brings, the time it reduces, the way people can associate the cost reduction. But probably what I want to ask you was what are you seeing the biggest challenges customers are having or organizing when they’re trying to implement observability, and how do you guys help them navigate those obstacles? Resourcing.
Shiv Radhakishun: 13:21
If I can boil it down to one word it’s resourcing and customers are busy. Everybody is tasked to do more with less. The economy isn’t the best that it has been over the years. What we’re seeing is that customers are struggling with resourcing. This is where managed services can come in, and I know Oro is doing some great things around managed services. And just to give you a quick stat that I read off of Gartner earlier, the managed service expectation in Australia by 2026 will be $44.5 billion, and that to me screams a lot right.
Shiv Radhakishun: 13:53
It’s screaming that customers need help and they’re open to it. The challenge that I see is definitely, definitely resourcing, and I’ll give you an example. We spoke to a customer a few days ago where they were experiencing an issue. They had no idea if it was a network or not for 12 months and it was the resourcing that they were spending to fix this issue. Every month was on the balance sheet, so they just knew that they had to spend money to try to find the issue. We offer them a trial. Within 24 hours, they found the issue and they called us and said thank you so much. And we looked at that and we made a joke and said well, you can take that off your balance sheet.
Shiv Radhakishun: 14:27
I think, from a resourcing perspective, a lot of customers that I’m finding don’t want to manage the network themselves anymore. They want some help. They also want to make sure that they’re keeping the SPs honest. They want to make sure that they have a trusted advisor and a partner that is manning the network and they also want to know that if there is an issue and when an outage occurs, that this managed service partner is jumping onto it.
Michael van Rooyen: 14:49
Yes, that’s a great perspective because, you’re right, I’ve seen deployments where customers you get caught with too much red tape trying to get it approved. Now there’s plenty of ways you can deploy the technology, but the resourcing is definitely one that I’d agree with you, and certainly the outsourcing of the network is becoming a common feature today right, I’m a podcaster, so I naturally have questions for you as well.
Shiv Radhakishun: 15:12
Sure, go ahead. I’m going to shoot the same question back to you. What sort of challenge do you see when you speak to your customers?
Michael van Rooyen: 15:19
Well, exactly that. Probably two areas. First of all, definitely getting the resources available. The intent is there, the customers want to see it, they see the value, they see the demonstration. Across all technologies, a thousand noises are standout. But then when it comes to, and in the industry, we use this word POC for a proof of concept and I don’t think it’s a proof of value, which I get, but for me it’s really a proof of capability and a proof of competence. I think are the two areas that I really like to use the POC word for.
Shiv Radhakishun: 15:47
I’m going to steal that from you Sure Take all the credit as well, no problem, no problem, put it out there.
Michael van Rooyen: 15:50
But I think that’s a differentiator. But definitely in getting them to commit and then do it, and then normally depending on the customer’s appetite, how motivated they are to see the outcome, but also the red tape it can always be the killer, right About. The intent is there, they want to see the value out of it, they invest in the time. Then you’ve got the opposite, which is how do we keep a pace with them? I do see a blend You’re 100% right where people are wanting to now outsource the network as a paid service.
Michael van Rooyen: 16:15
People that don’t use your mobile never think about building the network. You never run your own LTE network, you just buy it from a carrier. And I think, with the NBN and all these improvements in our connectivity, people are just wanting to outsource that right, even from a security point of view. Why should it be that different to just a utility right? You don’t worry about how you build electricity network, you just use it right. So so, if I think about the deployment of observability, if I think about the broader context of digital transformation, are you seeing customers use it as one of the tools in their tool bag for digital transformation, or is it always a post transformation uh aspect that they take?
Shiv Radhakishun: 16:51
so good, really good, question. I think we’re seeing a bit of both and historically, as I mentioned, observability is kind of new to customers. But we’re now starting to see observability be a part of the original digital transformation project and I guess my comment to customers and companies listening to this podcast is really look to try to invest in companies that work with others. What I mean by that is and if I can use thousands as an example we integrate with so many different companies. We integrate with Splunk, we integrate with Zendesk, we integrate with Microsoft, with Slack, with SAP, and what that really means is we’re opening doors for you, for digital transformation, because the way I see digital transformation is, you are trying to make your existing network better.
Shiv Radhakishun: 17:32
If I can simplify it for the non-technical folks like me, we are trying to make our existing network work better and increase the processes and help the processes in that company. If you invest into companies that open doors to working with others, then you’re doing just that. To me, it’s a night and day approach, if I can go back to the analogy of being in the dark. You will not see things if your digital transformation is one-sided. When you open up your mind and you open up the doors. You’re going to be seeing a lot of different things, and you can do that with integrations, and ThousandEyes does that really well with APIs, and many other observability companies do that as well.
Michael van Rooyen: 18:05
Yeah, the Splunk thing has happened. Yes, we can talk a little bit more about that. I know there was a wait and see for quite a while. There was quite a bit of discussion. I watched the Cisco Live Vegas update and there was a lot of talk about observability to Splunk and some of the new innovations. And then I think about AI. Obviously, everyone’s talking about AI and machine learning being integrated. From what I read into your observability tools, can you touch on a bit about that? What’s the future, what you can talk about today, of course, and how that’s going to really enhance this portfolio? Definitely so what you can talk about today, of course, and how that’s going to really enhance this portfolio, definitely.
Shiv Radhakishun: 18:38
So I’ll be honest to say that we always integrated with Splunk, of course, from the very beginning. Thousandeyes always integrated with Splunk. When we heard of rumors of Cisco acquiring Splunk last year, we all got very excited and then it kind of got quiet. I remember it happened for a few months and then all of a sudden we heard that the acquisition is going through. So from a ThousandEyes perspective, this opens up the door and I actually think it helps with the digital transformation for ThousandEyes as well. So we can now go to Splunk customers that haven’t really heard of network visibility or network assurance and speak to them about it, just as much as Splunk can now go to ThousandEyes customers and talk to them about observability as a whole.
Shiv Radhakishun: 19:16
So, as you know, appdynamics is rolling into Splunk. That’s very public. From a ThousandEyes perspective. What Cisco has decided to do is keep ThousandEyes on the network side, which is what we do very, very well, but we feed in to Splunk through APIs. So it’s not changing what we do, but it will be opening more doors for our customers going forward Right right.
Michael van Rooyen: 19:37
And then I think about the Splunk engine, the AI, more integration with Meraki, more embedded into the actual hardware that you guys are delivering at Cisco as a whole, Correct Agents more I think Jonathan was talking about it on stage about the global area network how do we monitor and manage the global area network, which is just a different lens, right? How do we add all this data to it? And then we think about security. I think there’s a lot of use cases that Thousand Eyes hasn’t been used for yet in the security space. How do we use it for breach detection? What looks odd, right? There’s so many different variables, yeah.
Shiv Radhakishun: 20:08
And I think with digital transformation as well. If you look at Thousand Eyes, we are integrated with Meraki, as you know. On the MX, we’re integrated with collaboration. We work with the data center team, we work with the security team on Zero Trust and Cisco AnyConnect, Cisco Secure Access. Now we are embedded into every single business unit within Cisco. Going back to digital transformation and network assurance, it is a must for customers. Now it’s Splunk. I call it observability on steroids. So we cannot wait to see what the future has in store, and it’s all happening right now, which is very exciting for us.
Michael van Rooyen: 20:41
It’s great If I then pivot a bit out of the organization. I’m sitting here in one of your rooms and I see the word hybrid workspace on one of your screens. Here Can you talk a bit about obviously off the back of COVID people working remotely. We see that. An interesting conversation I had just the other day with a workspace specialist, kind of the 33% is where they’re seeing people in the office. That’s kind of a number they’re seeing in the ANZ region. What role is observability holistically playing in that and how customers are really benefiting from that work anywhere. Scenario.
Shiv Radhakishun: 21:10
Yeah, absolutely so. As I mentioned before, 75% of companies have tagged on to remote working. In fact, a large number of those customers aren’t even returning to the office. From an observability perspective, how do these observability companies offer visibility and observability? To understand what employees are going through and understanding the employee experience? We wanna make sure that if they jump onto a WebEx or a Zoom or a Google Meet, that they have the best experience possible. As if I can boil it back to Thousand Eyes, we have something called the Endpoint Agent where we deploy an agent on your laptop. We can make sure that you understand your Wi-Fi or CPU, make sure that we understand your employee experience. That alone, that product has grown from 13% to almost 40 plus percent since COVID.
Shiv Radhakishun: 21:52
So you would have heard of the great resignation a year or two ago and arguably it’s still happening at the moment. What a lot of companies and I noticed this when I spoke to customers is. The employee experience was kind of pushed to the side because they wanted to make sure the network was working. They would also complain that employees are leaving their company and I would always ask well, what sort of experience is your employee having? Have you spoken to them? Are they having a good experience hopping onto the network from home? No idea. And this is where the endpoint agent comes in, and we have some customers at the moment that really understand that without their employees doing their job and feeling productive, they will not be resourceful. Therefore, revenue will take a hit if that’s the case.
Michael van Rooyen: 22:30
Yeah, fair enough. If I think about your global footprint and I want to see if I can try and tease out an idea here or thought, but sustainability is a big topic and I want to just cover kind of current topics that are floating around the industry. Sustainability is becoming a big priority for organizations. Are you seeing customers that are looking at observability in a way to look at solutions that provide more sustainable IT practices? That is a great question.
Shiv Radhakishun: 22:55
There’s a few things on that. The most important part to think about is accurate data gives you the ability to act fast and when customers act fast they don’t have a lack of resourcing or the loss of resourcing, which helps with the sustainability piece. I also read ThousandEyes is working on helping companies reduce power on switching, making sure that, let’s say, packet loads go through a very low energy source, making sure that they’re keeping up with the sustainability piece. So ThousandEyes is helping with that and I’m sure other observability companies are doing that as well.
Michael van Rooyen: 23:24
Yep, yep, fair enough too. And if I just turn a little bit away from the ThousandEyes observability and look at your history and working as a leader in the organization, what are the qualities you believe are essential for driving innovation in technology, but also in this field of observability?
Shiv Radhakishun: 23:41
So I love this question. My answer might be a bit different than what you’re looking for, but the biggest quality that I think companies need to have and leaders need to have is the ability to accept culture change. I love this analogy because I’m a new father and someone said to me that observability is really learning, understanding and having the ability to call your baby ugly. And I love that because babies are super cute my baby’s very cute, eight-month-old but I laughed. I laughed a lot, but I said what that is. That is actually very true.
Shiv Radhakishun: 24:10
A lot of times when we speak to companies around observability, we Sometimes get some people that think that we are calling their baby ugly or their idea very bad. That’s not our intent. Our intent is to actually expose the issues that you’re facing so you can clean up and have a better resourceful company. When we talk about opening doors and putting the light on, when you accept that observability can actually help you rather than stop you. You could do a lot more quicker and I’ll give you another example. We spoke to a large SP last year. We helped them deploy Thousand Eyes internally and we found a lot of issues and some folks on the team got extremely angry at us and said hey, get out we don’t want you here and how we turn that conversation is.
Shiv Radhakishun: 24:55
Well, what we’ve done is we haven’t exposed you. What we’ve done is show you how you can fix these issues to better serve your customers. Some folks don’t understand that. It is a culture change. It’s very different than what you’ve been doing for the past 20 years in IT, observability is new and it is here to help.
Michael van Rooyen: 25:11
Yeah, and are you seeing some of the success stories you’ve got from some customers?
Shiv Radhakishun: 25:16
that has actually helped them drive continuous improvement and innovation in organization using the data that’s now available to them absolutely, absolutely and, and, to be honest, all it takes is one champion and we can go very, very far and help a lot of companies out.
Michael van Rooyen: 25:28
So, yes, yeah, do you get that? Do you get those moments where customers are ringing you’re saying, oh, I can’t believe what you’ve provided for me, you know, do you get? Customers are like blown away. Absolutely. Culture change, innovation change Absolutely.
Shiv Radhakishun: 25:39
Absolutely, we have again. So I spoke about a customer that we spoke to recently that had that issue for 12 months and we got to take it off the balance sheet. That same customer called and said can we get those? Go ahead, blame the network t-shirts. We sent them 15 t-shirts to their office, nice, and we call it the aha moment, as you would know right. So when we show an issue that they have been looking for for months and months, we see it in their eyes, nbr, and we love this, and I’m sure you see it when you speak to your customers.
Shiv Radhakishun: 26:05
The aha moment is the best feeling.
Michael van Rooyen: 26:19
No-transcript. What advice, from once you do meet, would you give emerging leaders in the tech industry who want to look into the space, want to be part of the industry but really take to this observability and intelligence space?
Shiv Radhakishun: 26:33
Yeah, that is a very good question. I guess a few things. Number one be prepared to challenge the status quo. You have to ensure that you know that people are going to come and attack you. I was going to say, and you need to be prepared for that. So that would be advice number one. Number two the time to start is now. So we are in an era of AI, we’re in an era of things completely changing. We are in the observability era. At the moment, I wouldn’t tell anyone to jump right in and go to every single one of your customers and say, hey, we have observability, pick one and start small. Why I say start small and pick one customer is because I want that person to experience that aha moment with that one customer, and that will keep them going. And again, if anybody needs help, I’m always here. They can reach out to me. Obviously, you look at what’s happening in the industry. There’s so many observability companies at the moment that are doing some really great things. There is endless education out there as well.
Michael van Rooyen: 27:24
Yeah, yeah, and I know you’re also extending that footprint into a product you acquired, sam knows, into devices. You know you’re thinking about mobility experience, but this is very centric to devices, networks et cetera. But I think about the end user experience from a mobility point of view Absolutely. But I think about the end user experience from a mobility point of view Absolutely. That’s a great angle as well.
Shiv Radhakishun: 27:42
Oh, we spoke to someone and of course I won’t mention the company, but they are looking to only do that, so they only want to look at the mobility piece, and this is public. It was launched at Cisco Live, so I can say it. But very soon, and with the help of Sam knows, we will have endpoint agents on iPhones, Google phones, Samsung phones, so Android as well as iPads going into even cars. So, with the help of Cisco IoT, we’re looking at putting endpoint agents into cars to understand what’s happening there. Really really cool stuff. But we spoke to a company that is looking to only do mobile device management, or mobile devices endpoint agents, and that ties into their MDM strategy as well.
Shiv Radhakishun: 28:22
So great great time to jump into this sort of industry.
Michael van Rooyen: 28:25
Yeah, the value I don’t think has been fully appreciated yet, right.
Shiv Radhakishun: 28:29
And do you know the average loss of revenue per minute? It’s about $5,600. If there is an outage, and depending on, obviously, which company, 5600 bucks is the average that we see in terms of loss. So again, until they experience this, usually they won’t see how important this is and looking forward from what you can speak about.
Michael van Rooyen: 28:49
Obviously, everything we talked about today is public knowledge. You know, we’ve seen it’s in the market, or go and go and look online. You’ll find some of the stuff, but, uh, what you can talk about, or maybe just your thoughts from the space you spend time in what are the future directions, innovations you anticipate will shape, observability in the landscape, or what’s coming that we may not know about today?
Shiv Radhakishun: 29:07
ai ai ai is coming in hot mvr as the kids say, don’t don’t sleep on ai. Ai is driving a lot of the product innovation at the house and I’m sure it’s driving a lot of product innovation at observability companies. In general, we are being more predictive. Ai allows us to analyze data in different ways, summarize it differently for customers, and we’re using AI as the foundation for many different product innovations coming up in the future.
Shiv Radhakishun: 29:33
When I say predictive, right now, thousandeyes can tell you that there is an outage. We will soon be able to tell you that we’re predicting an outage. In fact, we can actually do that today. We can predict an outage, and if you change from WAN link one to WAN link two, your experience and productivity will increase by this much percentage.
Michael van Rooyen: 29:50
That’s cool.
Shiv Radhakishun: 29:51
That’s something that Thousand Eyes can do today leveraging AI, and it will always need the human touch, and I’m big on that. Everything I do outside of work is very big on the human touch, and I’m big on that. Everything I do outside of work is very big on human touch and interactions and communication. You would have heard many people say that our jobs will be taken over by AI, and I don’t think it’s true. But our jobs will be taken over by people that understand AI and that are utilizing AI. So advice to that person that wants to get into the industry educate yourself around AI, because it’s not going anywhere.
Michael van Rooyen: 30:19
I interviewed a few seasons ago your former cto, kevin block and you know would have dealt with kevin no doubt over the years and uh, him and I talking about exactly that. Uh, if I think about, it’s almost a year ago that we had this discussion and we’re talking about prompt engineering, how to use ai effectively.
Shiv Radhakishun: 30:33
The point that we were touching on was about how english is now the new programming language, right yep, it’s, it’s really interesting and and heath and Heath Russell, my partner in crime here at Thousand Eyes, absolute genius, and he’s an AI scholar. He just understands it, he studies it and he was showing me a report that we can pull for Thousand Eyes the other day and we can pull it in any language. We can make it extremely simple, we can make it very detailed and I think for people that want to enter into the business, ai will actually help them walk into doors of customers and say here’s a report on an outage that you just experienced. If it’s a very technical person, we’re going to make this report 12 pages. If it’s not, we’re going to make an executive summary of two pages. So very exciting.
Michael van Rooyen: 31:12
Very, very Coming to the near the end of our chat here, I just want to take a moment to ask you if you reflect on your career, and I think about all the way from Bell Labs selling carriage all the way to now monitoring carriage, ironically so that’s almost full life cycle. What have been some of the most rewarding experiences that you’ve seen or that you’ve been through, but also what continues to motivate you, and you’re correct great, great question.
Shiv Radhakishun: 31:34
what motivates me and my best experiences over the past 14 years in tech have been the people that I’ve met along the way and remember I mentioned at the beginning I years in tech have been the people that I’ve met along the way and remember I mentioned at the beginning I jumped into tech. I had no idea what I was doing.
Shiv Radhakishun: 31:45
I just knew that I had to pick up a phone and try to sell stuff. And, through the years, the mentors that I’ve had at Cisco, the people that I’ve met along the way that motivates me to keep going. And right now I’m lucky to work surrounded by absolute geniuses that keep me on my toes, that keep me educating myself. I get to meet people like you, mbr, who are you’re spreading this love, you’re spreading this education to people, which is amazing, and to me that’s motivating and I love that you’re doing this and I really hope you continue doing it.
Michael van Rooyen: 32:15
So I hope that answers the question Absolutely. It’s a great dimension. Rob, You’re right. Everyone talks about the technical aspects or a particular angle, but the people aspect is never going to go away and I appreciate that. That’s a great dimension. As we wrap up, have you got a key takeaway or message you want to leave with some of the listeners regarding observability, future observability and the importance in the industry Two?
Shiv Radhakishun: 32:35
Number one it’s very easy to step into observability. So, again, if anyone needs help, they can contact me, they can contact Oro. Just give it a shot. We offer free trials. Number two, which is probably the biggest piece of advice, is it is not a matter of if you have an outage, it is a matter of when yes. And I’ll leave it at that.
Michael van Rooyen: 32:57
Yeah, it’s very similar to the cyber ring. It’s going to happen at some point.
Shiv Radhakishun: 33:00
Right, it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen and we’ve had companies call us back to say, hey, thank you for coming in last month. We weren’t interested then, but we are damn interested now after our outage on Wednesday last week.
Shiv Radhakishun: 33:12
Can you help us out? Absolutely so. Sometimes it will take that outage, but we don’t want it to get there. We don’t know what that means in terms of loss of revenue. We don’t know how much time you’re going to be spending in war rooms. We don’t want it to go there. So if you look at network assurance or as I saw I heard someone call it last week- network insurance.
Michael van Rooyen: 33:32
We want people to step in and start small. And then the last one, which can be pretty broad, and I like to ask this of each guest is tell me about the most significant technology change or shift that you’ve been involved with or seen in your career.
Shiv Radhakishun: 33:44
Yeah, mvr, I think we’re in it now, so the first one was probably MPLS to SD-WAN a few years ago.
Michael van Rooyen: 33:49
Good point, that was big.
Shiv Radhakishun: 33:51
And we saw a lot of major SPs reduce pricing on MPLS to combat. But being at Meraki at that point was great because we got to see in real time how this helped companies, how much money it saved them. Now, with AI, I think we’re in a shift. At the moment, the IT industry is changing, which is why, again, advice to everyone is go and educate yourself on AI. Ai won’t take your job, but people that know how to use and understand AI will. What about you? Mvr?
Michael van Rooyen: 34:17
For me, that’s a good question. I would also think it’s similar.
Michael van Rooyen: 34:21
N what about you? Mvr? For me, that’s a good question. I would also think it’s similar.
Michael van Rooyen: 34:23
Nbn, MPLS, the rollout of NBN for Australia I’m talking about Australia holistically, but I think the shift to SD-WAN really revolutionized it and being able to get that bandwidth and capability I’ve been a digital plumber at heart for many, many years obviously cover cyber as well, but I think the way we’re able to provide connectivity holistically now and the way we’re able to provide connectivity holistically now and I think about low-open satellite and all that’s all part of that same category. I think the network is still at the core and heart of everything. That was definitely a big shift. I think the other one everyone talked about AI and definitely we haven’t seen the outcome of that.
Michael van Rooyen: 34:51
I think for me, the iPhone and the capability of this device in your hand if I think about the power, the performance, the services you can deliver on probably the two biggest shifts. It is obviously got some evil parts to it that people know about, but very, very good, uh, in many ways. So I think, definitely connectivity connectivity properly performing properly and and I think, a device that can do everything in your pocket is probably the two, two large ones for me, that’s actually.
Shiv Radhakishun: 35:13
I totally forgot that one. Funny enough, because I used to sell cell phones, as I mentioned, and for me the biggest was when we went from motorola razors. You remember that?
Michael van Rooyen: 35:21
oh, yes, I had one of them the tron, the tron phone.
Shiv Radhakishun: 35:24
Yeah, yeah, exactly so we went from motorola razor and then we heard about blackberry yes everybody was going crazy over the blackberry and I was always sticking to my razor. I’m like, I’m keeping this. And then, of course, we shifted. We were with blackberry and then iphone came out and then completely took over the market. But yeah, definitely that’s.
Michael van Rooyen: 35:42
That’s a really good point yeah, shiv look, appreciate the time today. Uh, always great to chat and catch up.
Shiv Radhakishun: 35:47
Thanks again thank you, MVR, and then, before we cut again, thank you for doing what you do, thank you for spreading the education and I’m looking forward to listening to many more. Thank you very much have a good day.
