The Key to Maximizing your ROI with Tony Davis, Chief Client Advisor at Broadcom

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Tony from Broadcom about what meaningful observability actually means. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Tony at 00:00:09) CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:13) What's been going on in your life for the past year since we've talked?

(Tony at 00:00:17) Sure. You may remember from the last time I was on, we talked about a methodology. At the time, I called it Business Service Reliability, but it was a concept that we should be looking as IT operations folks, we should be looking at things that are more related to a customer experience than just individual pieces of data. And so I think, as you said, it's been a little bit over a year now, but I think what I mentioned back then was that, you know, we wanted to explore. That's one of the reasons I came to Broadcom, was the opportunity to explore how we could use methodologies like that to make the customer experience better and bring down what you have to spend to do that. And so I think that's where I told you, that we're hoping that over the next year or so I could come back and tell you that we've done something. And so that's why this is great timing and I'm excited, is because in the past year we've taken that type of methodology and we've brought it into the NOC. So if you think about the NOC, just imagine your typical NOC that you've seen and, for myself, that I've worked with for 30 years now.

(Tony at 00:01:26) In that typical NOC, there are usually, of course, very smart network knowledge experts. But sometimes what happens is, in the NOC, it's a network-centric approach and you're not really getting feedback on what's happening with your customer experience. And so if there's a problem, you actually are focused on the network side of things. And that's fine because you're the NOC, network operations. But what we're now doing is trying to take that NOC environment and make it more experience-focused.

(Tony at 00:02:03) So you still have those core capabilities that any NOC would have. But what if you could bring what I call meaningful observability? So it's a little bit different from the other ways of observability. So, that was a long way to answer you, but basically in this past year, instead of me being able to come on and talk about it in theory, we're actually doing it in our software now. So that's what's so exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:29) Yeah. So can you describe, in your context—I know Broadcom is huge—what is a NOC for people who don't know, and what exactly are they doing in there related to customer experience?

(Tony at 00:02:44) Sure, and I'll tell you what that is traditionally and then where we're taking it now. So traditionally, I'll go back 30 years ago when I started working at FedEx, actually. So I live in Memphis, Tennessee. Right here in Memphis is the world headquarters, and 30 years ago I started working on a team in the NOC. And that obviously is a network operations center. So I work specifically in an area called FedEx.com, so it was the e-commerce part of FedEx.

(Tony at 00:03:13) So the way that the NOC would function in relation to FedEx.com is we would run the network. We were responsible for running the network that provided FedEx.com to our customers. And that was mostly internal to FedEx. So, obviously, you can tell I've gone back 30 years, right? Because it's so simple what I just described, but it really was that simple. And so let's pretend for a moment that there was a problem with customers not being able to get to FedEx.com. On the NOC side of the house, on the network operation side, we would literally go through all of our tools and look at the state of our network, and we were able to determine, for instance, that, hey, there's nothing wrong with the network. It must be some other problem.

(Tony at 00:03:57) It could be application or a database or a mainframe, but in the NOC we were focused on our network. And so that's sort of—it's funny that I just said that's 30 years ago, and in my job now with Broadcom, I meet with a lot of executives now, and it's funny I hear similar comments from them that our NOC is focused on the network and we leave the applications to other teams. We try to get together, but it's sort of a separated duty, not in every case, but still in most cases. So that would have been 30 years ago. That's what I see a lot of now. And so you said, tell me how it can be used related to customer experience.

(Tony at 00:04:37) So what we're doing now at Broadcom is—you may remember we talked, I think, the last time about an acquisition we made of a company called AppNeta. And that type of technology, AppNeta, is what guys like me who have been around for a long time call network intelligence. So in other words, it not only gives you data on the network itself, the transport, but it gives you data on the associated delivery of what's going across that transport. So the way I like to think of that is, imagine this country that we live in. The main infrastructure that we have are the roads, the interstate systems. And, you know, we're really focused on maintaining those roads so that those roads can let the delivery of cars and trucks go across it.

(Tony at 00:05:27) That's a lot like the network. It's the infrastructure. But what I'm talking about that Broadcom's doing with what we call it Experience-Driven NetOps or an Experience-Driven NOC is, inside that NOC, which is focused on the infrastructure, the delivery paths, inside that NOC we're now able to give them that second layer of looking at what's happening with the applications that are traveling across that infrastructure. So, what's happening with the car that's driving on the infrastructure? So it's a real switch from the way that NOCs have been run over the past 30 or 40 years.

(Tony at 00:06:04) And the reason I say it's a real switch is that customer experience mostly spent its time over in what I call the application world. So people with tools like application performance management or customer experience management tools, that was mostly in the application side of the house and didn't really cross over into the NOC. But what we're doing now is we're taking that piece of data that's so critical to knowing what's going on with your customer and putting it inside the NOC. It's almost like the first responders now have all of the information, not just part of it, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:40) Yeah. Okay. So do the application developers, do these car manufacturers, do they have to put special code in there for them to read on what's going on, or can it just read, like, maybe crash reports? How do you get data from the application?

(Tony at 00:06:55) You're right. And back in the day, there was no way to get that kind of knowledge without putting stuff into the code and having the developers do extra work. But with AppNeta, with a network intelligence platform, you don't have to do that anymore. So what we create is an active monitoring profile. So we have two types of profiles with AppNeta, and this is the stuff we put into our NOC or our NetOps package.

(Tony at 00:07:18) We have two profiles of monitoring. So one of them is a passive form of monitoring where we identify internal paths inside our corporation, but now that would not be enough, right? So we also have to see all of the cloud paths that we have, paths to SaaS providers for some of our services. Everything's a hybrid now, right? I mean, nobody can say, well, I just have my physical data center and I just have my managed network. You can't say that anymore. Everybody has more than physical data centers. They have cloud data centers and they have colos.

(Tony at 00:07:54) And then you can't say that you only have providers of services within your company. Everybody has SaaS providers. So with this technology, instead of having to put code all through the cloud and trying to monitor things all through the cloud, we create these two profiles. The passive profile is sort of always-on testing the different paths that your business is taking through the cloud. So it could be your internal world, but these days it's mostly through the cloud or across—if it's internal, it's still going to be across like SD-WAN, right? And so you tend to lose visibility in those scenarios. And so this type of monitoring, the passive monitoring, is sort of always-on testing all of those paths that we're taking. And then the second part, and this is the exciting part to me, is what we call active monitoring. So on the active monitoring, we actually write tests to simulate exactly what your customers are doing with you.

(Tony at 00:08:53) So those tests are married—and then this is the part that, if you've been around network intelligence to see this in action, it's really cool stuff—it marries the path of data, so stuff that we're used to, like jitter, latency and loss, errors, network errors, it marries that with the associated customer experience testing that we're doing, that's the active monitoring.

(Tony at 00:09:20) It puts the two together, and now, if you're sitting in the NOC, now you don't have to say, well, the problem is not the network, it's probably the application. Instead of saying that, I can go, well, the problem is not the network. I can see that. But I can also see that there is a problem with the application. I'm actually seeing errors in the application. And the big reason that's such a big deal is that typically wasn't a statement that anybody in the NOC would make. That was left to the application support team, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:53) What type of visibility do you have into the errors for an application?

(Tony at 00:09:58) Pretty much anything. So we'll see the waterfall of the calls that happened. So when you use this type of technology, you will get the waterfall of what was encountered through the test, and that will usually give you enough to point to the problem. So you remember, I think you and I talked about this last time too. You remember back when APM, application performance management and monitoring of application performance, there was a time—and I was part of this too—like at the early 2000s to the 2010 time frame, where that was sort of the holy grail, was the ability to get, and it truly felt like the holy grail to me, I can tell you that, because it was amazing. I had never seen things like that back in 2000. That was what people wanted to get, was a full APM platform to monitor everything in existence that they had from an application standpoint. But the reality, and I'm just speaking for myself, the different companies I've worked for, right? The reality is two things. If you profile every application you have with APM-type tools, it's very expensive. So it costs a ton of money. On top of that, it takes a lot of work to actually instrument the things that you want in those applications.

(Tony at 00:11:15) So those are two inherent—I shouldn't say problems, because these are great tools. These are beautiful sets of data if you're a data geek like I am. If you literally just love looking at data, you have no life, then you love these type of tools. But another problem that I noticed from about that 2010 time frame on is you can have the most expensive, the most thorough application performance management footprint in the world. Like, think of a financial system. Think of a financial services company, like a huge bank, right? They may have this huge system of application performance monitoring, but you might be shocked at how few people even look at that data. So in other words, it's possible, and I'm speaking from things I've seen personally, it's possible to see tens of thousands, if not more, metrics from applications being consumed and taking up space, and no one looking at the vast majority of those metrics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:08) Because who could, right?

(Tony at 00:12:27) I mean, you could say that AI could do it, right? Because AI can do everything now. But the fact of the matter is, if you've ever been responsible for the customer experience, you're a little bit hesitant about turning over decision-making when it could mean your job, right?

(Tony at 00:12:44) So APM and everything that you get out of APM, in my opinion, is best used on a limited scale and at the time that you need it. If you do it that way, then you reduce a massive amount of cost out of your IT operations, just massive. And you probably don't have enough people to sit and look at this all day anyways. I mean, the days of having 20 people who can devote all of their full time to looking at monitoring metrics, those days are over. Now, you know, we don't have that kind of luxury. Most places I visit with, including very large corporations, most places I visit with now have between three to six people that can even really analyze this kind of thing. And so that's why—are you saying it too?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:34) Well, I mean, I'd say most of my guests do not have the opportunity of being inside of many different companies and getting to see. And so I'll go visit guests and be introduced to people when I'm traveling and go walk through their operation center. Obviously, I can't talk in detail about any of it, but I can tell you that that is one of the big surprises for me is, in the movies, you see all these people in the NOC and, like, this big thing. And then when you go into, let's say, a multibillion-dollar e-commerce company and there's, like, four or five people sitting in the room, it still looks cool. It's dark. There's the screens everywhere. They're monitoring stuff, watching numbers and everything like that. But it was way fewer people than I thought it would be.

(Tony at 00:14:16) Yeah, because we all sort of get the picture in our minds of, like, NASA, like the control room of the space shuttle. And you think that all these people are lined up. And I've been to maybe a few places that do have a lot of people in there, but there was one—I'll give you an example. There was one bank that I went to outside of the United States, but it was a very large bank in South America. And I went there and the executive in charge of their command center and their IT operations was giving me a tour and we went into his command center. And it truly did look a little bit like a NASA, you know, shuttle launch place. They had the people lined up. They had all the screens, like you said. And I asked him at the time, I was like, so wow, this is like, you know, something like 25 people in rows. And I was like, this is amazing. So all these people looking at these screens, what are they doing right now? What are they analyzing? And he told me, he said, well, actually, they're not doing anything really, not much, related to what you see on the wall. Mostly what they're doing are different projects that they're working on right now.

(Tony at 00:15:19) And so what I got from that is that he had spent a ton of money on an incredible NOC. I mean, beautiful. It looked like everything, like you said, out of the movies. But the majority of that spend was just to put things up on the wall. You see what I'm saying? Any little error that happens was going to be handled by one operator. So it wasn't as if all those people were really needed to do that. It was interesting when I saw that. That's been about four years, five years ago now. But you brought up a good point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:50) Yeah. And it seems to me, when you don't talk to a lot of people, you think you have a really good idea of, like, how terms are used and certain things. And I thought I really understood what a NOC was, and then I talked to many different people, and there's a lot of flexibility. So maybe you can help clear this up. In one aspect, when I hear NOC, I hear the people that are monitoring your network for security attacks, and that's what they're doing. They're sitting there, they're watching it. Maybe they have, you know, 50 customers, and whoever is getting attacked, like, comes up and they manage that attack. And then I also hear about it from, like, a managed services type point of view where they have many different applications and they're supporting stuff. But then I also hear about it from, like, a pure, like, internal, like, on an e-commerce thing. Like, they're calling their NOC the place where they're watching the network traffic and they're watching the sales and all of that. So this term, is it—do I have an incorrect understanding of this, or is it really that flexible?

(Tony at 00:16:44) I think your term or your statement where you said it feels like it's very flexible, I think that's accurate. At most of the companies that I visit with, the first thing that you mentioned was watching for security attacks, you know, threats, hackers, vulnerabilities, and everything. Most of the places that I work with, that would be called their SOC. So it'd be their security operation center. And a lot of times, I know this sounds crazy, but a lot of times, the SOC is separate from the NOC.

(Tony at 00:17:09) So the SOC will be focused on those threats that you talked about. Whereas the NOC, in many places that at least that I visit, the NOC is focused on the operations of the network. So, you know, think about these huge corporations like the ones you were mentioning that you have visited. Think about those huge corporations. How many things like switches and routers and circuits that they have to maintain every day to just run their business.

(Tony at 00:17:36) And most places I go, the NOC is responsible for that. Because all of those things, routers, switches, everything, and circuits, of course, they can go down. They can, you need to reroute traffic. Those are all the kind of things that the NOC does. Looking for fault, looking for performance and the flow of the data.

(Tony at 00:17:54) That's typical. The SOC is looking for threats. And then it's funny that you brought up what you did because I had the same experience. So at FedEx, we had a really, this would be back in the early 2000s. I really like the way we set up the same structure that you just described.

(Tony at 00:18:09) The IT operations team had the NOC to run the network. Our infosec team had the SOC for security. And then when it came to fedex.com, we also had what we called a reliability team or if you go back to what Google started. Right? The SRE model.

(Tony at 00:18:26) We followed that SRE model pretty closely. And that was the team that really monitored what went on from an application perspective on fedex.com. So, even way back then, I saw those three very different orgs and had a chance to sort of manage each of the or many of those different orgs and functions. If that, I hope that explains the difference between them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:50) It really helps me, like, understand because I'm not working at those companies, so I'm kind of passing through having conversations and, you know, got a NOC and SOC. They're very similar, and it's funny, and tell me if I'm wrong, but I think one time I was in a NOC, and they had a screen dedicated to the SOC because they would outsource their SOC stuff, but they would still have it on their, you know, control center, all the cool screens in the dark room.

(Tony at 00:19:17) Yeah. And that's the thing that, you know, it's funny you'd say that because it's always stood out to me too. One time, I worked for a few years for a bank and, you know, we had in the NOC, we had a couple of screens devoted to the SOC. And the thing that we always loved is how cool their dashboards were. You know, it looked like something, you know, attacks coming in and we're like, are we under attack?

(Tony at 00:19:34) You know, and they're like, calm down. Calm down. You know? So it was, they always had the coolest dashboards for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:41) So are you with Broadcom? Are you guys putting out content on this phrase meaningful observability? Are you writing books? How are you making that phrase a thing in the industry?

(Tony at 00:19:53) Yeah. So we're about to have two articles come out on meaningful observability, one in CIO magazine and one in IT Operations Times. And they both explain what the meaning of why we need to have observability a little bit different than the way it's been defined. And then I wanted to tell you something about that in a minute, but I did want to also mention, if you look up experience driven NetOps, we actually have several, they're really cool. They're like on YouTube.

(Tony at 00:20:23) They're like a whiteboard, but it's reversed, you know? So Jared Rosbach, yeah. He's like the chief technical evangelist for NetOps, for our experience driven NetOps, and he's doing it and showing why those things are so important. So he does a beautiful job of drawing this out and, you know, why we actually have to have something that addresses a new, I guess, you would say, level of visibility.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:50) That's interesting. Yeah. For those of you who are listening, Josh pulled up a website, and we're looking at some of this observability content.

(Tony at 00:21:00) Yeah. The Jeremy's whiteboard, I guess, you'd call it our lightboard, I think is what they call it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:04) I've seen them. I've seen them on YouTube. Yeah.

(Tony at 00:21:06) Yeah. They're so cool. I know. And he's a great guy. But, yeah, it's he and I believe the same thing about observability.

(Tony at 00:21:14) And it really comes down, this is only, I'll say this is my opinion. And the reason I say that is because everybody seems to have their own definition of observability. And what do you get? So, but my belief, and I truly believe this, is that when we look at IT and especially the operational unit of IT, which is responsible for everything that happens to run your business from a technical perspective. This observability, I don't want to say buzzword, it's just sort of like a trend that came out that you should have observability. And years ago, when I saw this trend start, I enjoyed, again, because I'm a data geek, I enjoyed all of the different components that were said to be required, technical components that were required to reach observability.

(Tony at 00:22:03) But over time, I was in so many meetings. As a matter of fact, two weeks ago, Jeremy and I went to New York City. And we met with about 20 different executives from the financial services industry in New York City. So the Wall Street and on up to Midtown area. And so we went out to dinner with these guys and we were talking with them. And, you know, they had the same thing.

(Tony at 00:22:24) They're like, well, why do we have so many definitions of observability? And how do I get real observability? And so I think that's a little bit of a problem. So for me, observability should go back to some of the basic forms of the term. And the basic forms of the term, in many cases, did not have anything to do with IT.

(Tony at 00:22:47) They were born out of manufacturing. And so I was fortunate to spend a couple of years running IT operations for an IoT manufacturing firm. I think I mentioned this to you last time, but there's something that I learned that I will never forget about observability in those two years. So I'll give you an example of what they had. So you know these manufacturing facilities, it doesn't matter what you're manufacturing, but they all have their secret sauce, right?

(Tony at 00:23:15) So they'll have this huge robotic, you know, some huge thing. Right? And that's where the secrets take place. And so but this really relates to observability and the original term observability. So where I worked, we had this secret place for the main manufacturing of our IoT devices.

(Tony at 00:23:35) Right? It happened to be, because of the size of the IoT devices, it happened to be like 200 feet long. I mean, this is amazing. 200 feet long like a black box. It looked like the size of a tractor trailer, but maybe two of them stacked or something end to end.

(Tony at 00:23:51) And the work product would, it would be prepared, and it would go in one end of this long black box. And this black box had something like 12 different chambers in it that the product would move through. And then on the other side at the end of the factory, the product would come out as finished goods. And now you couldn't really see inside this 200 foot long thing. But it went through the 12 chambers and then it came out magically as finished goods.

(Tony at 00:24:19) But the reason observability is so important is because I had the chance to work with some of the process engineers who built that long 200 foot thing. And they could go to the end of the line and they could pull off a finished good. And they could look at it and they could say, it looks good but there's a defect right here. And they point to this little tiny place and they said, there's a defect right there. And you know what, this one fellow that I walked around with, Ludd, he could point to a little tiny defect and you know he could tell me exactly which one of the 12 chambers that defect happened in as it went through the black box.

(Tony at 00:25:01) That's observability. Because the original definition is can you just look at a finished product and observe where the defects are and what caused those defects? So if you're running IT, you need observability like that. Just as simple as that. Can we look at our finished product that we deliver every day to our customers?

(Tony at 00:25:23) And can we tell where the defects are and not just tell where the defects are, but can we make things better so we no longer get that particular defect? So that's when we talk about experience driven NetOps. And when Jeremy and I talk about meaningful observability, my whole point or my personal view is we need to reduce some of the things we're looking at. I can't tell you how many of the people that I meet with, a lot of them executives, say I have spent so much money on acquiring monitoring data. And I had one recently, the one in the New York City.

(Tony at 00:25:58) He told me, I do not have a data problem. I have all the data that I could ever want, billions of pieces of data per day. What I have is a problem figuring out what part of that data is important to my customer and my customer experience. So when we're trying to do experience driven NetOps, we're trying to eliminate that problem. Not like give me more data, give me more data.

(Tony at 00:26:21) Those days are over. I mean, we all know how to get data now, and all of us know how to ingest endlessly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:28) Well, I mean, look at us. We are under 20 people as a company, and we have data stuff going on all the time. You've got multiple systems. We have, like, 300,000 contacts, and so syncing them across systems and our, you know, bulk emailing platform versus our contact, and then it, it's a lot, and that's on a super small scale. I can only imagine when you're talking about, like, terabytes of this stuff, of contact data or that type of data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:55) It can get so messy so fast. So my experience is similar to what you're saying about you can definitely get overwhelmed with data. What I'm thinking of when you're talking is my experience with Datadog when I was writing some Ruby, and then you could see the stack all the way through the application, how long each thing took to process. And then it just made me feel so overwhelmed because I'm like, there's 400 places I could make this software better. But at the end of the day, I have to go do something that's going to directly, you know, impact the customer or I'm not going to be in business anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:26) How do you do return on investment? I don't know if you're in the sales section or if you're a part of those conversations, but if I say, okay. You guys are spending all this money and all this data, and I'm going to give you meaningful observability on it. Ecommerce seems maybe kind of clear because you could do dollars per downtime and, you know, some basic metrics like that. But let's say a services type company, how would you do the mathematical ROI on it?

(Tony at 00:27:54) Well, for me, I'll just go back to my personal life before I came to Broadcom for this role. So the majority of the time before I came to Broadcom, I was running those IT departments that I told you about at different companies. Right? The ROI for meaningful observability, the ROI for experience driven NOC comes from my experience from two main places. The first place is consolidation.

(Tony at 00:28:21) So if you think about it, we probably, I think about the customers that I talk with now for Broadcom. I can't think of any customer that I have out of a pretty big group of people that I work with where they run their NOC with one platform. In other words, like one tool sort of does it. Right? What I typically see when we do, sometimes I'll do like an, not an inventory, but, you know, I'll go in as an advisor and say, okay.

(Tony at 00:28:49) Well, let's talk about how you run your NOC. And what I'll usually get is a long list of a ton of different tools that come together from one person who knows this tool to another person who knows this tool, on and on. They all come together to give a view of what the NOC wants to see. So that's not a bad thing because different tools do give different types of functionality. The bad part of it is the cost associated with having that many tools.

(Tony at 00:29:19) And that's a big cost for a place that is running their NOC, actually. Millions and millions of dollars for the places that I visit. The second thing is what it costs to not only maintain those tools, but to have subject matter experts in those tools. So if you have, let's say, you know, 15 different tools that really run your operation every day, you really, if you're going to get any value out of the money you spent on those tools, you need to have some people who know all those tools. But what I typically see is people who aren't really trained, like professionally trained on a tool, but where a tool is given to them.

(Tony at 00:30:01) And they said, this tool, I'll give you an example. This tool can do path visualization. It can track movement through the cloud of a packet. Alright? And I need you to watch our packets and check the flow.

(Tony at 00:30:13) What kind of flow do we have? Okay. So I need you to do that. So the person will get that assignment without, like, a formal training. At best, they might get some YouTube videos or something like that, but they won't get, like, a formal training on how to use the tool.

(Tony at 00:30:27) And that one piece of the tool that maybe their manager said, well, I need you to watch these packets. That's a tiny piece usually of what these suites of tools can do. And so what you end up is you're using 10% or 20% of what the tool is capable of, and you have to have somebody devoted to even learning that 10 or 20%. So I think our ROI, when we go into a company and we talk about this new concept of an experience driven NetOps and an experience driven NOC, is that we can help consolidate a lot of that down both from a tool perspective, but also from a training perspective. Now we don't have to have, you know, 10 people all trained on different things.

(Tony at 00:31:12) We can get them sort of standardized. I know you know the story. This is old story, but it's true. Southwest Airlines only uses one type of plane. Right?

(Tony at 00:31:20) 737. Why in the world would they only use a 737? It's because now they only have to train pilots and mechanics on a 737. And over time, that's an enormous cost savings. So that's probably one of our biggest, I would say, ROIs is that we can help you really get efficient.

(Tony at 00:31:39) A lot of places call it, you know, reaching operational excellence. I believe in that too. Is that you can really get efficient in your operations and your people can get better. Because, I mean, think about it. If you only know 10% of a product and that's what you're focused on, you can't really spread out and learn more.

(Tony at 00:31:56) You're limiting your skill set as a, I'm saying as a technician or an engineer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:01) And are you at the point where, you know, we talked last year it was theory, now it's in practice, but it's a little fuzzy for me. Is Broadcom have a software? Are they consultancy? Like, how do you interface with customers?

(Tony at 00:32:14) Yeah. We certainly help our customers in a consultative fashion. So you nailed it on that part. But what our main business is, I'm in a sort of a division called agile operations. So our focus is how do we take a company's IT operations, the things that they do every day, and make it more agile and more efficient.

(Tony at 00:32:31) So the way we do that is with our software. And the area that I work that focuses on observability, we have, I would, I guess you would say one of the most bulletproof long term NOC pieces of software and we call it NetOps. Okay? And so if you take away the titles and you think about what that is, it's a suite of software that gives your NOC operator the ability to look at fault and performance for all of their network. And not just, and that's why I say it's sort of funny because this suite of products, you know, actually the core of it was started over 40 years ago.

(Tony at 00:33:10) And so over 40 years, it's continued to be one of the bulletproof pieces of software for running a NOC. But it's interesting that it started as a, you know, I mean, think back. I mean, 40 years ago, we had barely LANs. Right? Forget WANs.

(Tony at 00:33:24) I mean, we were mostly organized companies, and this supported that. But over the years, of course, it's grown to support the WAN environment. And now the exciting thing, to your point, is it supports the SD-WAN environments, both overlay and underlay. And that's very important if you've ever had to roll out SD-WAN because you need to know. Otherwise, you're in big trouble.

(Tony at 00:33:46) And also with the Apneta piece that I told you about, we have now integrated Appneta into the rest of the NetOps platform. And so that gives the folks in the NOC—remember, I really feel that many times the folks in the NOC are really focused on the SD-WAN, the network, the circuits, the pieces of infrastructure. Now they have one thing that we're the first to do, which is bring in that network intelligence with the experience layer. So the customer experience, we're bringing that directly into the NOC console, which is the software we provide.

(Tony at 00:34:24) So when you say, "Well, I'm going to look at NOC software out there," you know, Broadcom will come up at the top because we've been providing that suite of software for thirty years or more now that it's actually been for sale. And now we've added customer experience. And that's, you know, we talked theoretically last time, and that's why I'm so excited, because all those things we talked about about getting experience more into the NOC—now we've done it. And so that's the exciting thing for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:53) How long have you been at Broadcom?

(Tony at 00:34:55) This is coming up just shy of two years now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58) How do you like it?

(Tony at 00:34:59) I love it, and it was for the reason that I told you. I mean, when we talked last time, I might have been with Broadcom maybe six months or something at that point. But I remember telling you the reason that—because I had spent so many years on the other side of the equation. I had spent so many years with companies doing IT operations.

(Tony at 00:35:16) But the opportunity—and we talked about the methodology and the customer experience methodology that I was working on for several years, right? But Broadcom gave me the opportunity to be one of the people who designs this new world of meaningful observability. And so I walked into the job, you know, sort of being the chief, I guess you'd say, client advisor on observability.

(Tony at 00:35:44) So just to say what that means: we work, let's say, with maybe probably the five biggest banks in the United States, so financial services firms. So if one of those clients is wanting to get to another level of observability, that's a space where I'll go in and say, "Okay, well, let me tell you first just a little bit about what I've seen, my opinions on observability. And then let's take a look at what you have and see if I can give you some opinions on how to design a full-stack observability for your company."

(Tony at 00:36:16) So that's sort of my role. And then the ability to actually take those original thoughts and now to see it as a release of our product—yeah, that's—there's no—

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:30) That's awesome.

(Tony at 00:36:30) Yeah. I mean, think about it. I mean, how many times in our life do we actually get a job where we can say we want to create or help create something with some other folks, and it actually gets created? I mean, it's a great feeling. It's—I love my job. I love going and visiting with our clients. That's number one. The best part of the job is when you go sit down and work with them on a new design or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:54) It is incredibly fun. You know, I did entrepreneurial before, building different applications and understanding different industries from real estate to financial software, and I liked going around. And that's why the podcast ended up suiting me so well, is, you know, three times a week I get to talk to different people in different industries working on different problems. So I'm definitely living the dream as far as getting to do the thing that I enjoy the most. If I didn't do this, I'd be some consultant of some type, probably doing something very similar. Yeah. I like solving problems.

(Tony at 00:37:29) Yeah. If I didn't do this, I'd be a snowboarder professionally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:32) A professional snowboarder?

(Tony at 00:37:34) That's what I would do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:35) Yeah. In Memphis, Tennessee?

(Tony at 00:37:36) Yeah, I know. It's sort of shocking to hear. Yeah, you're looking at me going, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, come again?" Yeah. That. Yeah. I've snowboarded for thirty years, and, you know, it's amazing. Yeah, after thirty years I'm still not that much better than when I started, but I do love it. So, yeah. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:52) Yeah. Because I live, like, three hours from you, and I was like, there's definitely not a lot of snow around here.

(Tony at 00:37:58) No, I still go out to Colorado because we used to live out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:02) Okay.

(Tony at 00:38:02) And so I'll go out every year for a couple of times and go out there and hit the slopes and pretend that I'm way better than I am. So, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:09) But you have to. You've got to have the nicest gear, look like you're world-class professional expert, and then you just do a basic run, call it a day, get some food, and go home.

(Tony at 00:38:19) I have a swallowtail snowboard from Japan, and I get on that and then I come down a green, and I think I'm going so fast, and then that's about it after two runs. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:30) I love it. I love it. I saw that last time we talked to you guys, you just acquired Appneta. And then I saw, when I was preparing for this interview, I did some googling, and you guys acquired VMware for, like, 60-something billion, some crazy multiple-billion-dollar number—I didn't put it in my notes. But that's bonkers. You guys are—did you double your business? How much did it grow bringing on VMware?

(Tony at 00:38:59) Well, the one thing that's interesting about that is it's such a big deal, of course, that it's still going through some sort of regulatory process. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) Oh, it's not done yet. Okay.

(Tony at 00:39:09) It's not done. Yeah. And I'm actually not part of that team, so I don't know anything about that. I can just comment from just a regular consumer point of view that, you know, the things VMware has done over the years are amazing. And, you know, it seems to me—again, I'm not on that team that's doing the acquisition—but it seems to me that the synergy between Broadcom and VMware could be very powerful. So it's exciting. I hope everything goes well and it closes whenever they're planning to close it. So, yes, very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:40) Yeah. I've gotten to meet a handful of the people, like, the executive team. They're obviously so big, so there's different divisions and whatnot. But they were all incredibly world-class people. Many of them had been at the company for, like, twenty years and just grew with it. And so that's typically, for me, one of the positive signs for culture when I see those things—as people not leaving, staying for a long time, and always growing inside of there. And so that—you seem like that type of person, too. That's why, you know, I know Broadcom's huge, right? From what my experience has been with their leadership, they have been just awesome human beings.

(Tony at 00:40:18) Yeah. It's a great place to work. I mean, you and I, if we look back over our careers—I mean, this isn't a knock on any company anywhere, but certainly I've spent times in my career where I've worked someplace that I just didn't have the joy, you know, and I didn't feel that the culture was just right. And I didn't feel all the time fully supported. And so I'm going to say it's a good time to say Broadcom has been that type of place. Fully supported. My role that I told you about, that I was so excited to come to Broadcom for—the day I was told my role that they were wanting me to come do, to this day I've been fully supported in that exact role. And I've got to tell you how rare that is. You know, the joke is, "Oh, well, you got hired to do this, but here's what you're really going to do." That's sort of the joke. That's not what happened to me at Broadcom. They were very clear that, you know, we have this as a mission. And now I have almost two years—I'm on the same exact mission, seeing fruition, everything come to fruition. So, yeah, big vouch of support for folks who are looking to come to Broadcom. I can say that for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:24) I love it. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email—[email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.