um brief introductions so my name is will sit on the product team here at QBs um obviously for a lot of people QBs is kind of that software procurement piece the idea with some of our other technology stack um it to just give you a little bit to differentiate so we’ve got some up and cominging Technologies and the likes of live action that really gives you the chance to offer something different and the idea of today is we’ve got Luke on the call as well who’s the international Channel director at live action and we’re just going to give you a little bit of a high level taste into what live action really is and where we think we can add value back um if you’ve got any questions kind of put them in the chat and we’ll work through them as we as we go through but what I’ll do now is I’ll pass on to Luke um who’s just going to give you a little bit of a presentation and yeah we’ll go from there thanks very much so I’m just gonna I want to make sure I close down this webinar viewer I hope it doesn’t kill me out of it but ah no okay good all right so thank you very much for joining really appreciate everyone taking taking their lunch out to come and uh listen to me for the next I think probably 30 minutes or so so I know we’ve got an hour but you know I reckon probably about 30 minutes the idea like will said is to give you a high level overview of what live action does but also talk about a lot of problems that all organizations of all size face and and how we then help those organizations overcome those problems what I’ll do is I’ll just turn off my camera because my Wi-Fi is a little bit funny today uh okay so oh all right so one of the things that I want to talk about is why visibility the network is so critical to a lot of organizations you know all over the world really and as organizations start to expand out that issue becomes much much larger within getting that visibility of the network and it affects any type of organization pretty much even the ones that are well known have big budgets and you think would have everything that they need in order to get that visibility and to keep networks up and running so I’ll start firstly with a story which is that back in September 20 uh 2023 Volkswagen who you would expect to have a large budget for networking and and would have all of their ducks in a row had a a network outage uh that affected their vehicle production size so this was this happened originally in Germany and you can find this online it had a major Network outage it caused production of all the cars to just H and the important thing to know is that this affected the whole group it includes Porsche it includes Ali because it’s obviously Volkswagen Ali and uh they spent you know a lot of time initially running around trying to find the problem they couldn’t isolate all or understand where the problem was originating from so they had to go and investigate this issue they said that they had an unspecified it malfunction of network components at a site in Germany which is its Global headquarters they then realized that this outage started to affect other sites in Germany emden osbrook hanov Dresden and all these other places and the minute that Network stopped it was tossed down you got to remember that this is you know operational technology so there are robots working there are people working there are Machines working and everything is backed off onto the network so the minute they stopped you’ve still got electricity lighting bills to pay you’ve got staff to pay you’ve got back orders of stuff coming through and the minute that Network went down that was it everything ceased now they did and a lot of people on this call will probably be thinking well it’s probably a Cyber attack however that wasn’t the case they reckoned that an external attack was very unlik to be the cause um and that they were adding those efforts to fix the problem and highest priority they needed to get this back up of money another um news Outlet reported that it was one of the worst it crises in the automaker history production had been disrupted not only in Germany but then started to impact China and the US and and other places so this this issue started to spread now the cause of the problem was actually an application and this application then got restarted but they everything halted for about 24 hours within that 24 hours their share price dropped by 1.2% which you would think is not that much of an impact it’s still an impact right but it’s not that much of an impact but that’s 24 hours to drop 1.2% but if you look at Gartner Gartner in all their Infinite Wisdom believe that n the average Network downtime cost around about $5,600 a minute take that with a little bit of pinch of salt I would guess but in 24 hours there’s 1440 minutes and if you use that sum it costs around $8 million just from this outage now VW never said how much it cost them I don’t think you could even quantify it and you can’t quantify it because of the potential brand damage how many people were waiting for their Volkswagen and then got that delivery pushed back how many people turned around and said you know what I’m going to move away from Volkswagen I’m gonna go buy a BMW or a VW or Mercedes or whatever it might be right and then when you’re at a dinner table with a load of friends and people are saying hey what happened to your car thought you were getting a VW no you know big issue it push back blah blah blah don’t buy a Volkswagen etc etc right so there’s a big big impact to this but I would estimate that the cost was probably half that I would say probably about $4 million um at a general guess now it’s not just Volkswagen there are a lot of other organizations out there that suffer from impacts on the network and you know just you know back in April uh last year Virgin Media had a big problem within their Network um it affected the reachability of Virgin UK Network and its services right to to thousands of customers AWS had a big issue a wide ranging outage impacting a load of major websites the network 3 again I think they uh when they went down it impacted about 13,000 users right and then Microsoft as well who you would think would have the network you know pretty much figured out they had a big issue uh just January last year around Office 365 applications and what they actually suffered from was high levels of packet loss across the network so VW are not alone and I’m pretty confident that most of the people on here no one iation that has suffered an outage of some description and the reason for this is that if if you look at a traditional Network and this is a very slim down version but it helps explain my point when there is an issue within the network what tends to happen is Network Engineers run around with their heads on fire they try to find what is the needle in the H stack where is the problem coming from where is it originating from and if you ask a lot of network Engineers they don’t often find the problem but it just resolves itself which is great in the short term however you’re not then learning from that experience and then putting the necessary steps in place to prevent it from happening again so generally speaking if there’s an issue in the network you may end up going to the firewall which in this example is 40 net I’m going to log on to 40 monitor um I’m not going to log on to it because I need a security guy I need someone who’s available who is working who is security cleared who has an understanding of 40 monitor I need my security guy he’s probably going to turn around and say hey it’s not me everything’s fine uh it’s the network because what tends to happen is you have the network team blaming the security team and vice versa so maybe it’s not with the firewall maybe it’s somewhere else maybe the customers using Cisco vmanage they’ve got some Cisco switches again it’s not the security guy that’s going to need to go to vmanage it’s going to be a networking engineer and that engineer needs to be available it needs to be be able to understand vmanage and understand if the issue is coming with this particular switch which may not be in the same data center as their located so they would need to access the other data center but most customers don’t just have Cisco completely they will have a mixture of different things the old Juniper switch here that has never suffered a problem so why replace it and again I can’t see Cisco from 4et or 40 monitor I can’t see my Juniper switch from The Cisco uh admin console so I need to then log on to Juniper and you can see as this problem starts to expand out into things like routers into things like applications and applications like like uh like um uh Volkswagen suffered from it’s not just the application it’s also talking about bandwidth what about the device that the application is actually installed on is it a configuration problem right there’s a ton of different things where most organiz ation have to run around exploring and trying to find the problem which is why Volkswagen H an outage of just just 24 hours and it was enough to Halt the entire production and they had no preventative measures in place once you start then adding things like the cloud the problem just becomes much much larger and much wider Office 365 you know Microsoft themselves suffered from packet loss there which brought the service down um you know a WS same same thing they suffered an issue Salesforce all these different things is it the cloud applications is it the infrastructure maybe that I have in in the cloud that is affecting the problem how do I then find this issue and this is where live action comes into place but to understand the problem really when you speak to a lot of organizations they’re just using way too many different tools they’re using Cisco foret they’re using maybe a few mpm tools that that can’t see ever think they all these tools are not designed to work with one another so you can’t jump from one to the other or have a single pain glass View and they’re all managed by different people and different skill sets and then as we all know in the industry there’s a massive skill shortage so it’s very difficult to find these Engineers to pull them into the business to then learn about these different tools as we know it takes way too long to identify the issues and then carrying on from that is actually addressing these issues and resolving the problem we call this the the meantime to resolution or the meantime to innocence the network guys want to turn around and and actively say it’s not me it’s security right and it’s those guys because I can prove to you that everything in the network is running fine but you need to check the firewall this then obviously leads to Extended Network down types poor customer experience brand damage share price drop in terms of VW this you know profit loss all this other stuff that everyone wants to avoid a lot of organizations especially organizations that we talk to are moving to sd1 and they’re adopting sd1 now planning for the capacity around sd1 is a very very long process it’s a long process for any consultancies or partners that are involved in this process because you need to understand how many switches routers firewalls bandwidth all these different locations in all these different places in order to really scope out sdw so by adopting something like liveaction you can actually reduce that time massively which is beneficial not just to Partners but to the customers as well and again if you look at Gartner $5,600 a minute pinch your salt with that but uh you know I would say that it’s it’s probably half that number potentially depending on the type of business that is impacted by it but they reckon that on average an Enterprise organization will go down or the network will go down for 87 hours per year so this is a total of $20 million $29 million which is a vast sum of money uh to be losing just from having a network outage now I said that a lot of organizations is dependent on on the impact in terms of how much money it costs but if you look at Amazon they suffered a network outage just for 49 minutes and they reported that it cost them $5 million now I’ll stress that this actually happened nearly 11 years ago Amazon is a much different company now so if they suffer the same 49 minute outage how much would it be it wouldn’t be five million I’m sure it would be a lot more than that and people would be up in arms right um especially my wife so who is live action and you know why are we talking about this and how do we know about this and and you know where have we come from so back in 2006 we actually won a tender for the Department of Defense the the dod who’s still a customer today wanted to be able to have Network visibility regardless of the location regardless of the vendor that they were using regardless of the device type and they wanted a single paining glas View and they wanted it very very Visual and they wanted it very easy to use and we designed a solution purely to fit those parameters in 2012 DOD was our only customer but at that point we decided to commercialize the product we went and seek investment and we wanted to put that investment back into the solution and make it better so in 2014 Cisco actually came in and invested in the company and then 2016 Insight Partners who I’m sure a lot of you guys will know uh actually invested as well so Insight Partners now I think hold the hold the majority share we’ve made a few Acquisitions along the way living objects savus for packet capture and stuff like that and also counterflow AI um just to bolster the solutions and to to expand them out and provide more features of functionality so what does live action do well we are an Enterprise Network intelligence platform but what does that actually mean what we do is we provide three different solutions we designed to work together so you have live an X which is part of or is Network visibility virtual cloud or physical where we intersect except flow apis SNMP Cloud traffic in order to paint a picture for for the for the customers that are using it in order to give them visibility of what is going on within the network at that specific time and then we have live wire for Network forensit so packet capture and Analysis um and then we also have threat ey as well so that’s threat Network detection and response this is a solution that pulls packets from live wi and then can be utilized to send to the security operations center or to integrate into things like Splunk stealth watch or whatever it might be in terms of seam tools um where an investigation can occur now all of these Solutions are designed and integrated with one another so you can go from live and x and jump into Livewire for example um and and start investigating further how do we help so what we do is we provide a single pain glass View completely vendor agnostic again doesn’t matter on the device type whether it’s firewalls router switches whatever it might be and we provide visibility across the entire network so again it doesn’t matter where those networks are located geographically either so we we’re helping that customer by providing intelligence so that they can eliminate those Network blind spots they can focus on those performance issues where those issues resonating from or originating from um and then how do we resolve those issues we help organizations understand that performance so the customer will then provide themselves their own slas uh you for example if there’s a latency between this firewall and this rout or this switch or whatever if it drops between below a certain threshold then we’ll change the color of that as a as a very Visual and easy way to understand using traffic light system so green is good orange is a warning red is really really bad you need to do something about that so we’re being we’re taking a much more proactive approach and providing that to the customer based on the parameters that they outline it’s not for us to tell them what the right latency requirement should be right it’s down to the customer we provide them with the visibility tool and then we provide very actionable insights to reduce that meantime to resolution or meantime to innocence so you can actually play back in time and everything is recorded so you can see exactly what’s happened during the life cycle of that communication or that traffic so you can actually replay it and go actually I want to look at what happened a week ago so that I can learn from this and understand that maybe a firewall rule was changed over here or maybe we had a power outage and that’s had a knock on effect and caused an issue uh and I can go back in time and actually Replay that as as it went through through the hours and days and weeks and months one of the reasons why customers choose live action is the way that we present that data it’s very very easy to understand it’s very logical and everything is widget based so most people most customers will have this first top left Enterprise visibility view in their knock or or networks Operation Center where they will see colors changing in kind of real time green orange red as things happen within that Network so from this main screen here you can actually Zoom straight in and go almost down to street view like Google Street View and understand exactly what’s going on so we start here at the Enterprise visibility on the top left and then as we kind of go along we can we can zoom in a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more and understand and then finally we can go all the way down to that packet packet level or packet layer um to understand if packets have been dropped lost or or whatever it might be so a lot of financial organizations use packet analysis they need to have it for compliancy reasons they need to be able to prove that they’ve been capturing packets and what happened and where they went if they were lost or dropped or whatever it might be so everything is customizable for for the customer um anyone can go and just create widgets and I’ll zoom in oh to this one second uh this one here so everything is is kind of widget based and each one of these widgets is actually a report so you can actually create these reports you know set them out so that they get sent to customers or or or to end users or the relevant person within the organization on a regular basis um and each one of these is a report that you can just you can bring up or adjust or have as a widget on that view so it’s been designed with with massive amounts of of usability and also to be very very Visual and very clear there’s a number of different use cases as to why customers choose live action so Cloud monitoring is one sd1 is a big one so when customers are deploying or planning for sd1 what we can do is actually deploy the live action solution in their environment we don’t need to install any any uh any agents on the end end devices or anything like that we put a few Network probos within the network which then starts to build that Network out and we can even pull up things like device health as well so on on certain devices which will show CPU utilization RAM usage and all that other stuff as well uh application performance monitoring so applications are a a big problem for a lot of organizations now the question always comes up is it the application is it the device is it the bandwidth so a lot of organizations purchase live action to understand which one is it is it the app is it the bandwidth is it the device and we actually have you know we use a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to predict bandwidth consumption so we can show bandwidth consumption within the solution but we can also show what the predictability of that bandwidth consumption will be over the next three four five six months so that customers can actually plan a lot of organizations have actually saved money just reducing their leas line costs because it’s surprising how many people don’t understand how much bandwidth they’re actually consuming in the network a big one is voice and video optimization it’s it’s a massive part of our business um organizations need to understand you know how much bandwidth is being consumed what the application is doing when things like Zoom big call centers and things like that that are using it and you know everyone’s had it you you’re speaking to someone on the phone and they sound like a robot what is the reason behind that is it due to latency is it a handset what is it so what we’re doing is providing this intelligence so that the customer knows exactly where they need to go and what they need to fix at that moment in time uh Wi-Fi diagnos as well is a big one for us um and so is Wang capacity planning like we said so a lot of organizations trust live action every vendor’s got a slide like this right everyone’s seen this type of thing before the interesting one for me is for you know customers like AR rubo or net app or even Cisco themselves right um where they’re using some form of live action within their environment in order to to bolster their Network visibility um but there’s a number of customers on here a lot of people will know things like Costco or Sant andere and and these sorts of people so very us Centric slide this one I fully appreciate um we do have a number of customers in the UK as well obviously uh and all the way across Europe we actually you and I mentioned it earlier that a lot of customers save money on reducing their leas line costs and what we wanted to do was understand fully customers of liveaction the amount of money that they actually save by deploying this solution because budgets are constrained people aren’t adopting as much technology as they used to um you know a lot of budget goes towards things like cyber security and and stuff like that which is absolutely relevant um but when customers deploy live action they actually see a return on their investment of 153% and they actually pay for our solution in the first 12 months of owning it which is staggering there’s not a lot of not a lot of solutions out there that can actually say that and this happens because of that reduction meantime to resolution so identifi the problem fix the problem uh streamlining that report generation so because our solution can be automated in the sense of report generation so for example if something happens within a data center I can then integrate with things like service now to raise a ticket a ticket that goes to the relevant person who manages that that device or that set of devices within that data center location to flag it to him as an ENT critical thing so someone hasn’t got to be there to actually click the button and send the email or pick up the phone and call the person right so we reduce a lot of those manual processes by automating a lot of the functions there’s always going to be a massive amount of increase business productivity if the network is up people are making widgets they’re selling things they’re they’re building things they’re you know in the case of Volkswagen cars are being made right the minute that Network goes down that’s when the impact happens business productivity stopped but you’re still as a business paying to have the lights on uh so keeping that Network up is going to keep those things flowing through and it’s going to keep revenue being generated and then the large one that we found which I was quite surprised with was avoided equipment and bandwidth cost so obviously we talked about leas line and and reducing that leas line cost but one of the things I never really thought about was that reduction in the equipment cost so for example if a customer is complaining that the switch keeps falling over um you know it could be that they’ve got a multitude of different switches but their traffic is filtering through one so by using live action you could actually determine and say well actually if I pointed it to this other switch I would unburden this other one and therefore wouldn’t need to spend tens of thousands of pounds on a nice fancy brand new Switch that I necessarily don’t really need uh so it’s about creating a smarter Network and more efficient Network for the customer and saving them money now one question that always comes up and I hear this from everybody is hang on this looks like Cisco thousand eyes don’t they do this well no um as you as we as we discussed thisis go is an investor in the organization they they obviously bought thousand eyes they’ve they’ve spent a large amount of time and energy integrating thousand eyes into their product portfolio and thousand eyes is a fantastic product but we do not compete with it what we do is we see real traffic in real time so we are looking at everything the customer owns switches firewalls routers all that sort of stuff and then we are in real time helping the customer to understand why device flow yeah why there is congestion forming in this part of the network at this moment in time thousand eyes is a little bit different so thousand eyes is generally for application performance they’re using synthetic testing it’s not generally real data and it’s more about if I have an application outside of my network and I want it to Traverse the network and connect to this endpoint or this device or whatever what’s the logical route that I should take based on congestion within the network now this is really important it’s great for uh you know planning it’s great for um understanding you know what the correct route should be within that Network however networks change over the time so if I ran this test today but I ran it again tomorrow I would probably get two different answers right both equally important Solutions I would suggest ours is more important um but I would say that you know they’re both you both important and they both make or form part of that what we call that full observability stack um which is that full visibility of the entirety of the network we have a number of different Integrations with a lot of different organizations so Cisco being a main one we have some very very key Integrations with Cisco for at sd1 gigamon Pao with there specific Integrations that we have with those companies uh service now as I said earlier um but we essentially work with any vendor um and we we help any any organization to get that visibility regardless of what they’re using so we can integrate with anything we’re you know and completely vendor agnostic but we have some very key and very cool specific Integrations with some of these different vendors here so short and sweet I wanted to make sure that everyone has enough time to actually eat their lunch and and and not listen to me waffle on I will talk about one other thing which is you know a lot of our audience today will be partners so it’s important to understand that liveaction is a 100% Channel company there’s no exception to this rule right I’ve been in the industry oh nearly nearly 16 17 years right so I know that when an organization sometimes says they’re 100% they’re 98 99 they’ll take an order from HSBC because they need to or whatever we’re not like that we’re 100% Channel orientated and focused every order has to go through a partner in the international team um which is everywhere outside the US and Canada we provide really really good margins and discounts we do a lot of the heavy lifting for partners as well so we’re not expecting Partners to be fully trained on from a technical aspect uh at least initially um unless they want to be if they do want to be technically trained and they want to be able to run their own poc’s their own demos they want to be able to charge for servicing and all that sort of stuff great we provide free Technical Training for for partners and Technical Resources um but a lot of the time what we do is we find that we want Partners to open the door to your customers so we can help these customers to understand this network issues that they all suffer from and therefore we’ll do the presenting we’ll do the poc’s we’ll do the demos and all that sort of stuff for the partner what we’re looking for is a partner to essentially bring opportunities to us so that we can work together and close those deals so we provide things like deal registration and and all that sort of stuff as well so um that’s everything that I’ve got on here but if you have any questions please feel free will don’t know if we have any questions yeah no I don’t think we’ve uh got anything at the minute I suppose the only thing that might be relevant for people is kind of who who you typically compete with just while we’re closing out yeah so there’s a number of different solutions and different vendors every I think every sector and every uh different tool at Network visibility or cyber is incredibly crowded um I would say we typically compete with the likes of solar winds and and and people like that on occasion they tend to be more SNB mid-market Focus from what at least from what we’ve seen we tend to be much more mid-market all the way to high Enterprise with kind of infinite scalability um we also find you know sometimes as riverbed sometimes as net Scout and these other guys we tend to be a lot easier to to quote so for example there are two line items for live and X are visibility solution it’s an engine and a per device cost that’s it um you look at a familiar one with someone like a net scouty you’re probably talking 15 to 25 different it can be incredibly complicated and confusing not just for partners but for customers as well right so we’re very simplistic but we know we we generally are more cost effective than a lot of those Solutions as well so um you know we tend to tend to not really lose all those many deals to those types of guys perfect and what would be your average deal size you say when you’re coming up on a live action opportunity oh it’s it’s a difficult one really because we have you know some some some big ticket customers that have spent Millions with us but I would say on average it’s anywhere between $75,000 um you know to maybe $150,000 um on an annual recurring Revenue basis um but again you know it’s it’s completely wide you know we recently sold to a 60 user organization um because they wanted to understand bandwidth cons you know consumption and that was the only thing that they wanted um although they got the entire product that was the only use case that they had they wanted to address so we can we can service any size customer and I don’t think we’ve got any any more questions kind of coming in but what I would say if there anybody who doesn’t kind of want to ask them out loud just to reach out to either myself or Luke we’ll make sure that on the followup that our details are there um and we’ll also share a copy of the recording as well so we kind of there if you do have any questions or just want to understand if there’s a potential fit with some of your use cases I I would also say that really the power in the solution is getting customers to see it once customers see the solution they have a technical demo they start to work out different use cases so I I actually went and met with a large um Power or or energy grids provider uh in central eastern Europe and we sat down and presented to him and he turned around and said are you able to help us understand bandwidth consumption we said yes we are he said great I want a POC and I said well that was very very quick it doesn’t normally happen that fast uh and he said well the reason is is because my cyber security counterpart has this really fancy network uh 5G Network that I want to be able to get some of the bandwidth out of and every time I ask him there’s just never enough um and he says no I want to prove that wrong so there’s a there’s an absolute ton of use cases and every single time we present it to a customer or to a specific team they end up saying actually I know that John over there in the different team has actually suffered from a problem that this would actually help solve so you know getting customers onto onto a demo is definitely the best first step so they can actually understand exactly what we do it’s hard to do it on a presentation like this to show the true power of the of the solution so I would fully recommend you know booking a demo or or you know a demo initially with us and then proof of Concepts because generally speaking we don’t ship Hardware or anything like that it’s not really a requirement so it’s very easy for us to stand up proof of concept within the customers environment very quickly and they can see the true power in a very fast way perfect thanks for that Luke um yeah we’ll give everybody a little bit of time back in the day and thanks for everybody that’s attended obviously anybody who qualifies we’ll make sure you get over the lunch vouch but appreciate your time and we’ll uh we’ll speak to everybody later thank you thank you very much everyone appreciate it
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