>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation I am stupid a man and this is a special cube conversation we've been talking a lot of course for many years about the ascent of cloud and today in 2020 multi cloud is a big piece of the discussion and we're really happy to help unveil coming out of cell al kiram which is helping the networking challenges when it comes to multi cloud and I have the two co-founders they are brothers I have Amir who is the CEO and a DIF who is the CTO the Khan brothers thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the launch of the company thank you sue for having us on the show it's a pleasure to see you again all right so Amir we've had you on the program your previous company that you've done was of course the fella you the two of you have worked together at I believe five companies successful companies acquired you know the most recent one into Cisco so a mirror obviously you know you know strong networking theme your brother the CTO I was going to talk to us about the engineering but give us you know just the the story of Al Kyra what you've been building and now ready to unveil to the world certainly needs to so in around 2018 timeframe we started looking into the next big problem to solve in the industry which was not only a substantial you know from the market size perspective but also from the customers perspective was solving a major pain point so when we started looking into the cloud customers and started talking to our customers they were struggling from the cloud networking perspective even in a single cloud and it was a new environment for them and they had to understand all the nitty-gritty details of each one of these clouds and when you go to multi cloud environment it becomes exponentially complicated to address not only connectivity but how to deploy services like firewall and other services including low balancers and IP address management etc and remote access so we started digging deeper into this problem and start working with the customers and took a clean sheet of paper and came up with a very comprehensive approach to offering a solution which is as a service this time we are not shipping any hardware or software it is you know just like any other SAS application you just come to our portal I just drag and drop literally draw out your network and click on provision and you know come back after 40 minutes or so your full global cloud infrastructure is up and running so out if your brother laid out a pretty broad vision there any of us from the networking world we know there's a lot of complexity there and therefore it takes a lot of work when I want to do things simply as a service is you know a huge growth area bring us inside the engineering challenges that you and the team have been working on to build this solution second let's do so we've been working both our men and myself in the networking industry for more than 25 years now and our the way we have worked and what we have believed in is that we need to solve customer problems we never believed in like doing a science project so here also we started working with customers as we have always done in the past we understood the customers pain points the challenges they were facing especially in this case and in cloud networking space multi-cloud networking space based on the user requirements users or the customers use cases we started the building a service and here what we have built is a complete network as a service it's a multi cloud met work as a service which not only provides connectivity to multiple routes but also addresses the needs for bringing in networking services as well as security services making sure that you have a full policy based infrastructure on top of it you have deep visibility into into the clouds as well as into on-premise into and visibility into and monitoring troubleshooting and all of it is delivered to you as a service so that's what we have been doing here at ELQ here excellent so when we look at multi-cloud of course you know every cloud they have some similar things they have some different things they all tend to do things a little bit differently you know one of the secret sauces that have been talked about for the last few years is ESP BAM space like you and built with Nutella to help really enable those environments so if we've got a diagram here which I think will help explain a little bit as you know we're out here it how it plugs into these different environments walk us through a little bit what we're seeing here and what you're actually doing a tell Kira so here we are building a global unifying the multi cloud Network it's consumed as a service think of it as consuming it just like you would consume any other SAS like our SAS issue so you come to lqs portal you register and then there you go and you start building your global multi-cloud unified network with integrated services so here what you see is is a Elka's cloud services exchange with comprises of cloud exchange points you can bring these up these cloud exchange points up anywhere on the globe you can decide like what networking services security services you need in these cloud exchange points you can connect the multiple clouds from there you can bring your existing on-premise connector matiee into the CX PS all these CX B's have a full mesh of overlay high speed low latency connectivity among each other so there is a full network which comes up between these CX B's and this the whole infrastructure scales with customers as as a customer scale so it's a horizontally scalable veil a very highly redundant and resilient infrastructure which we have both all right so armor now that we understand the basics of the technology you've got some strong investors including Sequoia kleiner perkins give us you know what is being announced day you're coming out of stealth where are you with the product you know how many employees you have and where are you with the discussion of customer adoption so stew we're obviously bringing this to the market and we will be announcing it on April 15th it's available for the customers to consume our solution as a service on that day so they are welcome to reach out to us and we'll be happy to help them and as a matter of fact just come to our website and register for the service and yeah we rightly said that we have a superstar team of not only the venture capital companies but also the board members representing those companies the bill Cochran and mamoon Hamid Wright who the leading VCS are on the board of our company including myself inactive all right I'm all right love to actually bring up the second slide that we have here walk us through you said you know the service you know how do people get started how do they understand you know what would walk us through what what they do so the biggest challenge when we started looking into these problems you know Stu was that it was very complicated you have to piecemeal bring up instances and the cloud and stitch them together and when you try to integrate the services that was a different challenge for the customers right so we wanted to make sure that it was so simple and clean that the customer didn't even have to think about any underlying construct on any of the clouds they should not have to worry about learning each individual power from the you know networking perspective so here's your portal you just come you know step one is come to a portal or register step two is you start drawing your network based on your intent what on-prem an activity you want to bring into this service what type of services you need like all all the firewalls and then you know what pilots you need to connect and everything happens seamlessly the from on pram pram through services into the cloud and across multiple clouds it's a seamless service that we have created and with full analytics capabilities and full governance built in alright so I'll to bring us into what this means for customers you know how do they manage it you know is this the networking team is it the cloud architects you know what api's are there how does this fit into kind of what customers are doing today and you know solve some of those challenges that we laid out earlier in the discussion yes trauma from the customers perspective it's as I said it's it's completely delivered as a service customers come to our portal they draw out the network they select the services they click on provision and the whole network comes up within minutes so the main thing here is that from a customer's point of view if they are connecting to different clouds they don't need to understand any of the underlying specifics or underlying constructs of any of the of the cloud in order to bring can I bring up connectivity so we what we are doing here is we are abstracting the clouds here so we are building a virtual cloud network so if you if you think of if you compare it with what we did in the in the previous life be virtualized the when so here would be a doing is we are virtualizing the cloud network so underlying doesn't matter which cloud you sit on which cloud you need to connect to which networking services whether cloud native services or whether you you want to consume our care services or we also support like customer bringing in third-party services as well so it's all all offered from our platform all offered is a service for to the customer again no expertise required in any of the underlying networking constructs of any of these cards give us what we should be looking at from a technology roadmap from Akira through the rest of 2020 good question as to so as I mentioned earlier our roadmap is dictated by customer requirements so we prioritize what customers need from us so we have come out with a scalable platform we have come out with a marketplace for networking services in there in the near term we'll be expanding our market place with more services we will be addressing more use cases and when I talk about use cases I can give you some examples like there's a view you not just only need connectivity into cloud you might have different requirements from from throughput perspective or bandwidth perspective or different services that you need to front-end your cloud but you may have certain applications such as internet basing application where you eat like traffic coming in from the internet inbound to those applications you might need services like a load balancer like an external load balancer in our services exchange you might also need like a firewall you might need traffic engineering or sorry service eaning capability is where you would chain service through multiple or traffic through multiple of these services like a firewall in the load balancer so we have built a platform which gives you all those capabilities going forward we will be adding more services more use cases to it we have a long ways ahead of us and we will be putting all our effort in delivering a roadmap as we go all right so Amma your technical team definitely has their hands full and uh you know robust after work on uh give us the the high-level what we should be looking for out Kira for people that are out there you know multi-cloud and networking you know tend to get talked a lot there's many big companies and some small ones what will separate al Kira from the rest of the market today and what should we be looking to see the company's progression through 2020 yeah thanks for asking that yeah certainly I mean you know from the solution perspective out it's said that you know it's so fundamentally important to have a very strong basis right and that's what we have done we are bringing out a certain number of services and now we will continue to grow on that will create a big marketplace we will continue to improve on which clouds we connect to and how and we will be building our own services in certain cases as well now building a technology is just one piece of it we have to go out to market with a company that the customers can trust every single you know the department in that company whether it's sales or how they do business with us all the business back-end pieces have to be sorted out and that's what we've been working with and you know then go to market partners that is very very important right support is very important so let me spend a little bit of time on go to market strategy we have been working with the service riders so that we can extend our reach not only to the large customers but also to midsize customers across the globe so you will see us in the future announcing major service water partnerships as well as we've been working with large sis bars and system integration in a partners and also we have taking a slightly different approach this time because it's a service so we are going with telecom master agents which have been you know working with the service providers the cloud providers the cable providers as a channel and they have a huge reach into the customer base so we we have a very comprehensive strategy not only from the go to market in the technology perspective but also how we are going to support our customers and continue to build a relationship to build a lasting company yeah I'm a super important point there absolutely we've seen the maturation and change in the service providers as today they are working with many of the public cloud providers and they're as you said a close touch point and a trusted partner of our customers all right so before I let you go you know YouTuber brothers everybody in today's day and age is spending even more time with family but you know your your situation you've worked together for a long time what keeps bringing the two of you together working together and then talk about that ball so I mean we're very close-knit family we have four brothers and one sister and obviously active and I have been the closest because we have been working together for the longest we have at least work in five different companies together our families travel together we have three daughters each we live about five minutes you know walk from each other and we you know just have this bond where we not only have you know the family close but also very close-knit friends a circle which we both hang out with and we you know obviously have common interest in the sports as well we play squash and tennis and work out so after four if they want to take a stab at it but also yeah so we've always been very close in fact we've been together for the last like ever since I can remember like even even college days he was we were roommates for for some time also he ever say we have like our circle of friends is the same also so again we're very close and we work well together so we complement each other's skills and and it's it's worked out in the past hopefully it will work out again and I look forward to working with them for many many more years to come yeah well I'm or not - thank you so much for sharing the the coming out of stealth for Al Kyra we definitely look forward to watching your progress and you know seeing how you're helping customers in this multi-cloud world thank you for joining us - thank you so much thank you for having us all right I'm Stu minimun and thank you so much for watching this special cube conversation on the cube [Music]

(electronic music) >> From Santa Clara, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, its theCUBE. Covering Altitude 2020, brought to you by Aviatrix. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude. (upbeat music) Please keep your seat belts fastened and remain in your seat. We will be experiencing turbulence, until we are above the clouds. (thunder blasting) (electronic music) (seatbelt alert sounds) Ladies and gentlemen, we are now cruising at altitude. Sit back and enjoy the ride. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers, cloud architects and enlightened network engineers, who have individually and are now collectively, leading their own IT teams and the industry. On a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds. Empowering enterprise IT to architect, design and control their own cloud network, regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them. It's time to gain altitude. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Mullaney, president and CEO of Aviatrix. The leader of multi-cloud networking. (electronic music) (audience clapping) >> Steve: All right. (audience clapping) Good morning everybody, here in Santa Clara as well as to the millions of people watching the livestream worldwide. Welcome to Altitude 2020, all right. So, we've got a fantastic event, today, I'm really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started. So, one of the things I wanted to share was this is not a one-time event. This is not a one-time thing that we're going to do. Sorry for the Aviation analogy, but, you know, Sherry Wei, aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do has an aviation theme. This is a take-off, for a movement. This isn't an event, this is a take-off of a movement. A multi-cloud networking movement and community that we're inviting all of you to become part of. And why we're doing that, is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds, so to speak and build their network architecture, regardless of which public cloud they're using. Whether it's one or more of these public clouds. So the good news, for today, there's lots of good news but this is one good news, is we don't have any PowerPoint presentations, no marketing speak. We know that marketing people have their own language. We're not using any of that, and no sales pitches, right? So instead, what are we doing? We're going to have expert panels, we've got Simon Richard, of Gartner here. We've got ten different network architects, cloud architects, real practitioners that are going to share their best practices and their real world experiences on their journey to the multi-cloud. So, before we start, everybody know what today is? In the U.S., it's Super Tuesday. I'm not going to get political, but Super Tuesday there was a bigger, Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago. And Aviatrix employees know what I'm talking about. Eighteen months ago, on a Tuesday, every enterprise said, "I'm going to go to the cloud". And so what that was, was the Cambrian explosion, for cloud, for the enterprise. So, Frank Cabri, you know what a Cambrian explosion is. He had to look it up on Google. 500 million years ago, what happened, there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex, multi-cell organisms. Guess what happened 18 months ago, on a Tuesday, I don't really know why, but every enterprise, like I said, all woke up that day and said, "Now I'm really going to go to cloud" and that Cambrian explosion of cloud meant that I'm moving from a very simple, single cloud, single-use case, simple environment, to a very complex, multi-cloud, complex use case environment. And what we're here today, is we're going to go undress that and how do you handle those, those complexities? And, when you look at what's happening, with customers right now, this is a business transformation, right? People like to talk about transitions, this is a transformation and it's actually not just a technology transformation, it's a business transformation. It started from the CEO and the Boards of enterprise customers where they said, "I have an existential threat to the survival of my company." If you look at every industry, who they're worried about is not the other 30-year-old enterprise. What they're worried about is the three year old enterprise that's leveraging cloud, that's leveraging AI, and that's where they fear that they're going to actually wiped out, right? And so, because of this existential threat, this is CEO led, this is Board led, this is not technology led, it is mandated in the organizations. We are going to digitally transform our enterprise, because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that. And so, IT is now put back in charge. If you think back just a few years ago, in cloud, it was led by DevOps, it was led by the applications and it was, like I said, before the Cambrian explosion, it was very simple. Now, with this Cambrian explosion, an enterprise is getting very serious and mission critical. They care about visibility, they care about control, they care about compliance, conformance, everything, governance. IT is in charge and that's why we're here today to discuss that. So, what we're going to do today, is much of things but we're going to validate this journey with customers. >> Steve: Did they see the same thing? We're going to validate the requirements for multi-cloud because, honestly, I've never met an enterprise that is not going to be multicloud. Many are one cloud today but they all say, " I need to architect my network for multiple clouds", because that's just what, the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run in whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that. The second thing is, is architecture. Again, with IT in charge, you, architecture matters. Whether its your career, whether its how you build your house, it doesn't matter. Horrible architecture, your life is horrible forever. Good architecture, your life is pretty good. So, we're going to talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network. If you don't get that right, nothing works, right? Way more important than compute. Way more important than storage. Network is the foundational element of your infrastructure. Then we're going to talk about day two operations. What does that mean? Well day one is one day of your life, where you wire things up they do and beyond. I tell everyone in networking and IT -- it's every day of your life. And if you don't get that right, your life is bad forever. And so things like operations, visibility, security, things like that, how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it's not just about configuring it in the cloud, it's actually about how do I operationalize it? And that's a huge benefit that we bring as Aviatrix. And then the last thing we're going to talk and it's the last panel we have, I always sayyou can't forget about the humans, right? So all this technology, all these things that we're doing, it's always enabled by the humans. At the end of the day, if the humans fight it, it won't get deployed. And we have a massive skills gap, in cloud and we also have a massive skills shortage. You have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects, right? There's just not enough of them going around. So, at Aviatrix, we said as leaders do, "We're going to help address that issue and try to create more people." We created a program, what we call the ACE Program, again, aviation theme, it stands for Aviatrix Certified Engineer. Very similar to what Cisco did with CCIEs where Cisco taught you about IP networking, a little bit of Cisco, we're doing the same thing, we're going to teach network architects about multicloud networking and architecture and yeah, you'll get a little bit of Aviatrix training in there, but this is the missing element for people's careers and also within their organizations. So we're going to go talk about that. So, great, great event, great show. We're going to try to keep it moving. I next want to introduce, my host, he is the best in the business, you guys have probably seen him multiple, many times, he is the co-CEO and co founder of theCUBE, John Furrier. (audience clapping) (electronic music) >> John: Okay, awesome, great speech there, awesome. >> Yeah. >> I totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I'm excited, here at the heart of silicon valley to have this event. It's a special digital event with theCUBE and Aviatrix, where we're live-streaming to, millions of people, as you said, maybe not a million. >> Maybe not a million. (laughs) Really to take this program to the world and this is really special for me, because multi-cloud is the hottest wave in cloud. And cloud-native networking is fast becoming the key engine, of the innovations, so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming. We have a customer panel. Two customer panels. Before that Gartner's going to come out, talk about the industry. We have global system integrators, that will talk about, how their advising and building these networks and cloud native networking. And then finally the ACE's, the Aviatrix Certified Engineers, are going to talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed. So, let's jump right in, let's ask, Simon Richard to come on stage, from Gartner. We'll kick it all off. (electronic music) (clapping) >> John: Hi, can I help you. Okay, so kicking things off, getting started. Gartner, the industry experts on cloud. Really kind of more, cue your background. Talk about your background before you got to Gartner? >> Simon: Before being at Gartner, I was a chief network architect, of a Fortune 500 company, that with thousands of sites over the world and I've been doing everything in IT from a C programmer, in the 90, to a security architect, to a network engineer, to finally becoming a network analyst. >> So you rode the wave. Now you're covering the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi-cloud, is really what everyone is talking about. >> Yes. >> Cloud-native's been discussed, but the networking piece is super important. How do you see that evolving? >> Well, the way we see Enterprise adapting, cloud. The first thing you do about networking, the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way. Is usually led by none IT, like a shadow IT, or application people, sometime a DevOps team and it just goes as, it's completely unplanned. They create VPC's left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and they have Direct Connect or Express Route to any of them. So that's the first approach and on the other side. again within our first approach you see what I call, the lift and shift. Where we see like enterprise IT trying to, basically replicate what they have in a data center, in the Cloud. So they spend a lot of time planning, doing Direct Connect, putting Cisco routers and F5 and Citrix and any checkpoint, Palo Alto device, that in a sense are removing that to the cloud. >> I got to ask you, the aha moment is going to come up a lot, in one our panels, is where people realize, that it's a multi-cloud world. I mean, they either inherit clouds, certainly they're using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever. When's that aha moment? That you're seeing, where people go, "Well I got to get my act together and get on this cloud." >> Well the first, right, even before multi-cloud. So there is two approach's. The first one, like the adult way doesn't scare. At some point IT has to save them, 'cause they don't think about the tools, they don't think about operation, they have a bunch of VPC and multiple cloud. The other way, if you do the lift and shift way, they cannot take any advantages of the cloud. They lose elasticity, auto-scaling, pay by the drink. All these agility features. So they both realize, okay, neither of these ways are good, so I have to optimize that. So I have to have a mix of what I call, the cloud native services, within each cloud. So they start adapting, like all the AWS Construct, Azure Construct or Google Construct and that's what I call the optimal phase. But even that they realize, after that, they are all very different, all these approaches different, the cloud are different. Identities is constantly, difficult to manage across clouds. I mean, for example, anybody who access' accounts, there's subscription, in Azure and GCP, their projects. It's a real mess, so they realized, well I don't really like constantly use the cloud product and every cloud, that doesn't work. So I have, I'm going multi-cloud, I like to abstract all of that. I still want to manage the cloud from an EPI point of view, I don't necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products, but I have to do that and in a more EPI driven cloud environment. >> So, the not scaling piece that you where mentioning, that's because there's too many different clouds? >> Yes. >> That's the least they are, so what are they doing? What are they, building different development teams? Is it software? What's the solution? >> Well, the solution is to start architecting the cloud. That's the third phase. I called that the multi-cloud architect phase, where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud. Fact, even across one cloud it might not scale as well, If you start having like ten thousand security agreement, anybody who has that doesn't scale. You have to manage that. If you have multiple VPC, it doesn't scale. You need a third-party, identity provider. In variously scales within one cloud, if you go multiple cloud, it gets worse and worse. >> Steve, weigh in here. What's your thoughts? >> I thought we said this wasn't going to be a sales pitch for Aviatrix. (laughter) You just said exactly what we do, so anyway, that's a joke. What do you see in terms of where people are, in that multi-cloud? So, like lot of people, you know, everyone I talk to, started at one cloud, right, but then they look and then say okay but I'm now going to move to Azure and I'm going to move to... (trails off) Do you see a similar thing? >> Well, yes. They are moving but there's not a lot of application, that uses three cloud at once, they move one app in Azure, one app in AWS and one app in Google. That's what we see so far. >> Okay, yeah, one of the mistakes that people think, is they think multi-cloud. No one is ever going to go multi-cloud, for arbitrage. They're not going to go and say, well, today I might go into Azure, 'cause I get a better rate on my instance. Do you agree? That's never going to happen. What I've seen with enterprise, is I'm going to put the workload in the app, the app decides where it runs best. That may be Azure, maybe Google and for different reasons and they're going to stick there and they're not going to move. >> Let me ask you guys-- >> But the infrastructure, has to be able to support, from a networking team. >> Yes. >> Be able to do that. Do you agree with that? >> Yes, I agree. And one thing is also very important, is connecting to the cloud, is kind of the easiest thing. So, the wide area network part of the cloud, connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple. >> Steve: I agree. >> IP's like VPN, Direct Connect, Express Route. That's the simple part, what's difficult and even the provisioning part is easy. You can use Terraform and create VPC's and Vnet's across your three cloud provider. >> Steve: Right. >> What's difficult is that they choose the operation. So we'll define day two operation. What does that actually mean? >> Its just the day to day operations, after you know, the natural, lets add an app, lets add a server, lets troubleshoot a problem. >> Something changes, now what do you do? >> So what's the big concerns? I want to just get back to the cloud native networking, because everyone kind of knows what cloud native apps are. That's been the hot trend. What is cloud native networking? How do you guys, define that? Because that seems to be the hardest part of the multi-cloud wave that's coming, is cloud native networking. >> Well there's no, you know, official Gartner definition but I can create one on the spot. >> John: Do it. (laughter) >> I just want to leverage the Cloud Construct and the cloud EPI. I don't want to have to install, like a... (trails off) For example, the first version was, let's put a virtual router that doesn't even understand the cloud environment. >> Right. If I have if I have to install a virtual machine, it has to be cloud aware. It has to understand the security group, if it's a router. It has to be programmable, to the cloud API. And understand the cloud environment. >> And one thing I hear a lot from either CSO's, CIO's or CXO's in general, is this idea of, I'm definitely not going API. So, its been an API economy. So API is key on that point, but then they say. Okay, I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers, aka you called it above the clouds. So the question is... What do I do from an architectural standpoint? Do I just hire more developers and have different teams, because you mentioned that's a scale point. How do you solve this problem of, okay, I got AWS, I got GCP, or Azure, or whatever. Do I just have different teams or do I just expose EPI's? Where is that optimization? Where's the focus? >> Well, I think what you need, from a network point of view is a way, a control plane across the three clouds. And be able to use the API's of the cloud, to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do day to day operation. So you need a view across the three clouds, that takes care of routing, connectivity. >> Steve: Performance. >> John: That's the Aviatrix plugin, right there. >> Steve: Yeah. So, how do you see, so again, your Gartner, you see the industry. You've been a network architect. How do you see this this playing out? What are the legacy incumbent client server, On Prem networking people, going to do? >> Well they need to.. >> Versus people like a Aviatrix? How do you see that playing out? >> Well obviously, all the incumbents, like Arista, Cisco, Juniper, NSX. >> Steve: Right. >> They want to basically do the lift and shift part, they want to bring, and you know, VMware want to bring in NSX on the cloud, they call that "NSX everywhere" and Cisco want to bring in ACI to the cloud, they call that "ACI Anywhere". So, everyone's.. (trails off) And then there's CloudVision from Arista, and Contrail is in the cloud. So, they just want to bring the management plane, in the cloud, but it's still based, most of them, is still based on putting a VM in them and controlling them. You extend your management console to the cloud, that's not truly cloud native. >> Right. >> Cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch. >> We like to call that cloud naive. >> Cloud naive, yeah. >> So close, one letter, right? >> Yes. >> That was a big.. (slurs) Reinvent, take the T out of Cloud Native. It's Cloud Naive. (laughter) >> That went super viral, you guys got T-shirts now. I know you're loving that. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But that really, ultimately, is kind of a double-edged sword. You can be naive on the architecture side and ruleing that. And also suppliers or can be naive. So how would you define who's naive and who's not? >> Well, in fact, their evolving as well, so for example, in Cisco, it's a little bit more native than other ones, because there really is, "ACI in the cloud", you can't really figure API's out of the cloud. NSX is going that way and so is Arista, but they're incumbent, they have their own tools, its difficult for them. They're moving slowly, so it's much easier to start from scratch. Even you, like, you know, a network company that started a few years ago. There's only really two, Aviatrix was the first one, they've been there for at least three or four years. >> Steve: Yeah. >> And there's other one's, like Akira, for example that just started. Now they're doing more connectivity, but they want to create an overlay network, across the cloud and start doing policies and things. Abstracting all the clouds within one platform. >> So, I got to ask you. I interviewed an executive at VMware, Sanjay Poonen, he said to me at RSA last week. Oh, there'll only be two networking vendors left, Cisco and VMware. (laughter) >> What's you're response to that? Obviously when you have these waves, these new brands that emerge, like Aviatrix and others. I think there'll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork. How do you respond to that comment? >> Well there's still a data center, there's still, like a lot, of action on campus and there's the wan. But from the cloud provisioning and cloud networking in general, I mean, they're behind I think. You know, you don't even need them to start with, you can, if you're small enough, you can just keep.. If you have AWS, you can use the AWS construct, they have to insert themselves, I mean, they're running behind. From my point of view. >> They are, certainly incumbents. I love the term Andy Jess uses at Amazon web services. He uses "Old guard, new guard", to talk about the industry. What does the new guard have to do? The new brands that are emerging. Is it be more DevOp's oriented? Is it NetSec ops? Is it NetOps? Is it programmability? These are some of the key discussions we've been having. What's your view, on how you see this programmability? >> The most important part is, they have to make the network simple for the Dev teams. You cannot make a phone call and get a Vline in two weeks anymore. So if you move to the cloud, you have to make that cloud construct as simple enough, so that for example, a Dev team could say, "Okay, I'm going to create this VPC, but this VPC automatically associates your account, you cannot go out on the internet. You have to go to the transit VPC, so there's lot of action in terms of, the IAM part and you have to put the control around them to. So to make it as simple as possible. >> You guys, both. You're the CEO of Aviatrix, but also you've got a lot of experience, going back to networking, going back to the, I call it the OSI days. For us old folks know what that means, but, you guys know what this means. I want to ask you the question. As you look at the future of networking, you hear a couple objections. "Oh, the cloud guys, they got networking, we're all set with them. How do you respond to the fact that networking's changing and the cloud guys have their own networking. What's some of the paying points that's going on premises of these enterprises? So are they good with the clouds? What needs... What are the key things that's going on in networking, that makes it more than just the cloud networking? What's your take on it? >> Well as I said earlier. Once you could easily provision in the cloud, you can easily connect to the cloud, its when you start troubleshooting applications in the cloud and try to scale. So that's where the problem occurred. >> Okay, what's your take on it. >> And you'll hear from the customers, that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the clouds by definition, designed to the 80-20 rule which means they'll design 80% of the basic functionality. And then lead to 20% extra functionality, that of course every Enterprise needs, to leave that to ISV's, like Aviatrix. Because why? Because they have to make money, they have a service and they can't have huge instances, for functionality that not everybody needs. So they have to design to the common and that, they all do it, right? They have to and then the extra, the problem is, that Cambrian explosion, that I talked about with enterprises. That's what they need. They're the ones who need that extra 20%. So that's what I see, there's always going to be that extra functionality. In an automated and simple way, that you talked about, but yet powerful. With the up with the visibility and control, that they expect of On Prem. That kind of combination, that Yin and the Yang, that people like us are providing. >> Simon I want to ask you? We're going to ask some of the cloud architect, customer panels, that same question. There's pioneer's doing some work here and there's also the laggards who come in behind their early adopters. What's going to be the tipping point? What are some of these conversations, that the cloud architects are having out there? Or what's the signs, that they need to be on this, multi-cloud or cloud native networking trend? What are some of the signal's that are going on in the environment? What are some of the thresholds? Are things that are going on, that they can pay attention to? >> Well, once they have the application on multiple cloud and they have to get wake up at two in the morning, to troubleshoot them. They'll know it's important. (laughter) So, I think that's when the rubber will hit the road. But, as I said, it's easier to prove, at any case. Okay, it's AWS, it's easy, user transit gateway, put a few VPC's and you're done. And you create some presents like Equinox and do a Direct Connect and Express Route with Azure. That looks simple, its the operations, that's when they'll realize. Okay, now I need to understand! How cloud networking works? I also need a tool, that gives me visibility and control. But not only that, I need to understand the basic underneath it as well. >> What are some of the day in the life scenarios. you envision happening with multi-cloud, because you think about what's happening. It kind of has that same vibe of interoperability, choice, multi-vendor, 'cause they're multi-cloud. Essentially multi-vendor. These are kind of old paradigms, that we've lived through with client server and internet working. What are some of the scenarios of success, that might be possible? Will be possible, with multi-cloud and cloud native networking. >> Well, I think, once you have good enough visibility, to satisfy your customers, not only, like to, keep the service running and application running. But to be able to provision fast enough, I think that's what you want to achieve. >> Simon, final question. Advice for folks watching on the Livestream, if they're sitting there as a cloud architect or CXO. What's your advice to them right now, in this market, 'cause obviously, public cloud check, hybrid cloud, they're working on that. That gets on premises done, now multi-cloud's right behind it. What's your advice? >> The first thing they should do, is really try to understand cloud networking. For each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitations. And, is what the cloud service provider offers enough? Or you need to look to a third party, but you don't look at a third party to start with. Especially an incumbent one, so it's tempting to say "I have a bunch of F5 experts", nothing against F5. I'm going to bring my F5 in the Cloud, when you can use an ELB, that automatically understand eases and auto scaling and so on. And you understand that's much simpler, but sometimes you need your F5, because you have requirements. You have like iRules and that kind of stuff, that you've used for years. 'cause you cannot do it. Okay, I have requirement and that's not met, I'm going to use Legacy Star and then you have to start thinking, okay, what about visibility control, above the true cloud. But before you do that you have to understand the limitations of the existing cloud providers. First, try to be as native as possible, until things don't work, after that you can start thinking of the cloud. >> Great insight, Simon. Thank you. >> That's great. >> With Gartner, thank you for sharing. (electronic music)

(electronic music) >> From Santa Clara, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, its theCUBE. Covering Altitude 2020, brought to you by Aviatrix. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude. (upbeat music) Please keep your seat belts fastened and remain in your seat. We will be experiencing turbulence, until we are above the clouds. (thunder blasting) (electronic music) (seatbelt alert sounds) Ladies and gentlemen, we are now cruising at altitude. Sit back and enjoy the ride. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers, cloud architects and enlightened network engineers, who have individually and are now collectively, leading their own IT teams and the industry. On a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds. Empowering enterprise IT to architect, design and control their own cloud network, regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them. It's time to gain altitude. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Mullaney, president and CEO of Aviatrix. The leader of multi-cloud networking. (electronic music) (audience clapping) >> Steve: All right. (audience clapping) Good morning everybody, here in Santa Clara as well as to the millions of people watching the livestream worldwide. Welcome to Altitude 2020, all right. So, we've got a fantastic event, today, I'm really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started. So, one of the things I wanted to share was this is not a one-time event. This is not a one-time thing that we're going to do. Sorry for the Aviation analogy, but, you know, Sherry Wei, aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do has an aviation theme. This is a take-off, for a movement. This isn't an event, this is a take-off of a movement. A multi-cloud networking movement and community that we're inviting all of you to become part of. And why we're doing that, is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds, so to speak and build their network architecture, regardless of which public cloud they're using. Whether it's one or more of these public clouds. So the good news, for today, there's lots of good news but this is one good news, is we don't have any PowerPoint presentations, no marketing speak. We know that marketing people have their own language. We're not using any of that, and no sales pitches, right? So instead, what are we doing? We're going to have expert panels, we've got Simon Richard, of Gartner here. We've got ten different network architects, cloud architects, real practitioners that are going to share their best practices and their real world experiences on their journey to the multi-cloud. So, before we start, everybody know what today is? In the U.S., it's Super Tuesday. I'm not going to get political, but Super Tuesday there was a bigger, Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago. And Aviatrix employees know what I'm talking about. Eighteen months ago, on a Tuesday, every enterprise said, "I'm going to go to the cloud". And so what that was, was the Cambrian explosion, for cloud, for the enterprise. So, Frank Cabri, you know what a Cambrian explosion is. He had to look it up on Google. 500 million years ago, what happened, there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex, multi-cell organisms. Guess what happened 18 months ago, on a Tuesday, I don't really know why, but every enterprise, like I said, all woke up that day and said, "Now I'm really going to go to cloud" and that Cambrian explosion of cloud meant that I'm moving from a very simple, single cloud, single-use case, simple environment, to a very complex, multi-cloud, complex use case environment. And what we're here today, is we're going to go undress that and how do you handle those, those complexities? And, when you look at what's happening, with customers right now, this is a business transformation, right? People like to talk about transitions, this is a transformation and it's actually not just a technology transformation, it's a business transformation. It started from the CEO and the Boards of enterprise customers where they said, "I have an existential threat to the survival of my company." If you look at every industry, who they're worried about is not the other 30-year-old enterprise. What they're worried about is the three year old enterprise that's leveraging cloud, that's leveraging AI, and that's where they fear that they're going to actually wiped out, right? And so, because of this existential threat, this is CEO led, this is Board led, this is not technology led, it is mandated in the organizations. We are going to digitally transform our enterprise, because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that. And so, IT is now put back in charge. If you think back just a few years ago, in cloud, it was led by DevOps, it was led by the applications and it was, like I said, before the Cambrian explosion, it was very simple. Now, with this Cambrian explosion, an enterprise is getting very serious and mission critical. They care about visibility, they care about control, they care about compliance, conformance, everything, governance. IT is in charge and that's why we're here today to discuss that. So, what we're going to do today, is much of things but we're going to validate this journey with customers. >> Steve: Did they see the same thing? We're going to validate the requirements for multi-cloud because, honestly, I've never met an enterprise that is not going to be multicloud. Many are one cloud today but they all say, " I need to architect my network for multiple clouds", because that's just what, the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run in whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that. The second thing is, is architecture. Again, with IT in charge, you, architecture matters. Whether its your career, whether its how you build your house, it doesn't matter. Horrible architecture, your life is horrible forever. Good architecture, your life is pretty good. So, we're going to talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network. If you don't get that right, nothing works, right? Way more important than compute. Way more important than storage. Network is the foundational element of your infrastructure. Then we're going to talk about day two operations. What does that mean? Well day one is one day of your life, where you wire things up they do and beyond. I tell everyone in networking and IT -- it's every day of your life. And if you don't get that right, your life is bad forever. And so things like operations, visibility, security, things like that, how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it's not just about configuring it in the cloud, it's actually about how do I operationalize it? And that's a huge benefit that we bring as Aviatrix. And then the last thing we're going to talk and it's the last panel we have, I always sayyou can't forget about the humans, right? So all this technology, all these things that we're doing, it's always enabled by the humans. At the end of the day, if the humans fight it, it won't get deployed. And we have a massive skills gap, in cloud and we also have a massive skills shortage. You have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects, right? There's just not enough of them going around. So, at Aviatrix, we said as leaders do, "We're going to help address that issue and try to create more people." We created a program, what we call the ACE Program, again, aviation theme, it stands for Aviatrix Certified Engineer. Very similar to what Cisco did with CCIEs where Cisco taught you about IP networking, a little bit of Cisco, we're doing the same thing, we're going to teach network architects about multicloud networking and architecture and yeah, you'll get a little bit of Aviatrix training in there, but this is the missing element for people's careers and also within their organizations. So we're going to go talk about that. So, great, great event, great show. We're going to try to keep it moving. I next want to introduce, my host, he is the best in the business, you guys have probably seen him multiple, many times, he is the co-CEO and co founder of theCUBE, John Furrier. (audience clapping) (electronic music) >> John: Okay, awesome, great speech there, awesome. >> Yeah. >> I totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I'm excited, here at the heart of silicon valley to have this event. It's a special digital event with theCUBE and Aviatrix, where we're live-streaming to, millions of people, as you said, maybe not a million. >> Maybe not a million. (laughs) Really to take this program to the world and this is really special for me, because multi-cloud is the hottest wave in cloud. And cloud-native networking is fast becoming the key engine, of the innovations, so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming. We have a customer panel. Two customer panels. Before that Gartner's going to come out, talk about the industry. We have global system integrators, that will talk about, how their advising and building these networks and cloud native networking. And then finally the ACE's, the Aviatrix Certified Engineers, are going to talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed. So, let's jump right in, let's ask, Simon Richard to come on stage, from Gartner. We'll kick it all off. (electronic music) (clapping) >> John: Hi, can I help you. Okay, so kicking things off, getting started. Gartner, the industry experts on cloud. Really kind of more, cue your background. Talk about your background before you got to Gartner? >> Simon: Before being at Gartner, I was a chief network architect, of a Fortune 500 company, that with thousands of sites over the world and I've been doing everything in IT from a C programmer, in the 90, to a security architect, to a network engineer, to finally becoming a network analyst. >> So you rode the wave. Now you're covering the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi-cloud, is really what everyone is talking about. >> Yes. >> Cloud-native's been discussed, but the networking piece is super important. How do you see that evolving? >> Well, the way we see Enterprise adapting, cloud. The first thing you do about networking, the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way. Is usually led by none IT, like a shadow IT, or application people, sometime a DevOps team and it just goes as, it's completely unplanned. They create VPC's left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and they have Direct Connect or Express Route to any of them. So that's the first approach and on the other side. again within our first approach you see what I call, the lift and shift. Where we see like enterprise IT trying to, basically replicate what they have in a data center, in the Cloud. So they spend a lot of time planning, doing Direct Connect, putting Cisco routers and F5 and Citrix and any checkpoint, Palo Alto device, that in a sense are removing that to the cloud. >> I got to ask you, the aha moment is going to come up a lot, in one our panels, is where people realize, that it's a multi-cloud world. I mean, they either inherit clouds, certainly they're using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever. When's that aha moment? That you're seeing, where people go, "Well I got to get my act together and get on this cloud." >> Well the first, right, even before multi-cloud. So there is two approach's. The first one, like the adult way doesn't scare. At some point IT has to save them, 'cause they don't think about the tools, they don't think about operation, they have a bunch of VPC and multiple cloud. The other way, if you do the lift and shift way, they cannot take any advantages of the cloud. They lose elasticity, auto-scaling, pay by the drink. All these agility features. So they both realize, okay, neither of these ways are good, so I have to optimize that. So I have to have a mix of what I call, the cloud native services, within each cloud. So they start adapting, like all the AWS Construct, Azure Construct or Google Construct and that's what I call the optimal phase. But even that they realize, after that, they are all very different, all these approaches different, the cloud are different. Identities is constantly, difficult to manage across clouds. I mean, for example, anybody who access' accounts, there's subscription, in Azure and GCP, their projects. It's a real mess, so they realized, well I don't really like constantly use the cloud product and every cloud, that doesn't work. So I have, I'm going multi-cloud, I like to abstract all of that. I still want to manage the cloud from an EPI point of view, I don't necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products, but I have to do that and in a more EPI driven cloud environment. >> So, the not scaling piece that you where mentioning, that's because there's too many different clouds? >> Yes. >> That's the least they are, so what are they doing? What are they, building different development teams? Is it software? What's the solution? >> Well, the solution is to start architecting the cloud. That's the third phase. I called that the multi-cloud architect phase, where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud. Fact, even across one cloud it might not scale as well, If you start having like ten thousand security agreement, anybody who has that doesn't scale. You have to manage that. If you have multiple VPC, it doesn't scale. You need a third-party, identity provider. In variously scales within one cloud, if you go multiple cloud, it gets worse and worse. >> Steve, weigh in here. What's your thoughts? >> I thought we said this wasn't going to be a sales pitch for Aviatrix. (laughter) You just said exactly what we do, so anyway, that's a joke. What do you see in terms of where people are, in that multi-cloud? So, like lot of people, you know, everyone I talk to, started at one cloud, right, but then they look and then say okay but I'm now going to move to Azure and I'm going to move to... (trails off) Do you see a similar thing? >> Well, yes. They are moving but there's not a lot of application, that uses three cloud at once, they move one app in Azure, one app in AWS and one app in Google. That's what we see so far. >> Okay, yeah, one of the mistakes that people think, is they think multi-cloud. No one is ever going to go multi-cloud, for arbitrage. They're not going to go and say, well, today I might go into Azure, 'cause I get a better rate on my instance. Do you agree? That's never going to happen. What I've seen with enterprise, is I'm going to put the workload in the app, the app decides where it runs best. That may be Azure, maybe Google and for different reasons and they're going to stick there and they're not going to move. >> Let me ask you guys-- >> But the infrastructure, has to be able to support, from a networking team. >> Yes. >> Be able to do that. Do you agree with that? >> Yes, I agree. And one thing is also very important, is connecting to the cloud, is kind of the easiest thing. So, the wide area network part of the cloud, connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple. >> Steve: I agree. >> IP's like VPN, Direct Connect, Express Route. That's the simple part, what's difficult and even the provisioning part is easy. You can use Terraform and create VPC's and Vnet's across your three cloud provider. >> Steve: Right. >> What's difficult is that they choose the operation. So we'll define day two operation. What does that actually mean? >> Its just the day to day operations, after you know, the natural, lets add an app, lets add a server, lets troubleshoot a problem. >> Something changes, now what do you do? >> So what's the big concerns? I want to just get back to the cloud native networking, because everyone kind of knows what cloud native apps are. That's been the hot trend. What is cloud native networking? How do you guys, define that? Because that seems to be the hardest part of the multi-cloud wave that's coming, is cloud native networking. >> Well there's no, you know, official Gartner definition but I can create one on the spot. >> John: Do it. (laughter) >> I just want to leverage the Cloud Construct and the cloud EPI. I don't want to have to install, like a... (trails off) For example, the first version was, let's put a virtual router that doesn't even understand the cloud environment. >> Right. If I have if I have to install a virtual machine, it has to be cloud aware. It has to understand the security group, if it's a router. It has to be programmable, to the cloud API. And understand the cloud environment. >> And one thing I hear a lot from either CSO's, CIO's or CXO's in general, is this idea of, I'm definitely not going API. So, its been an API economy. So API is key on that point, but then they say. Okay, I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers, aka you called it above the clouds. So the question is... What do I do from an architectural standpoint? Do I just hire more developers and have different teams, because you mentioned that's a scale point. How do you solve this problem of, okay, I got AWS, I got GCP, or Azure, or whatever. Do I just have different teams or do I just expose EPI's? Where is that optimization? Where's the focus? >> Well, I think what you need, from a network point of view is a way, a control plane across the three clouds. And be able to use the API's of the cloud, to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do day to day operation. So you need a view across the three clouds, that takes care of routing, connectivity. >> Steve: Performance. >> John: That's the Aviatrix plugin, right there. >> Steve: Yeah. So, how do you see, so again, your Gartner, you see the industry. You've been a network architect. How do you see this this playing out? What are the legacy incumbent client server, On Prem networking people, going to do? >> Well they need to.. >> Versus people like a Aviatrix? How do you see that playing out? >> Well obviously, all the incumbents, like Arista, Cisco, Juniper, NSX. >> Steve: Right. >> They want to basically do the lift and shift part, they want to bring, and you know, VMware want to bring in NSX on the cloud, they call that "NSX everywhere" and Cisco want to bring in ACI to the cloud, they call that "ACI Anywhere". So, everyone's.. (trails off) And then there's CloudVision from Arista, and Contrail is in the cloud. So, they just want to bring the management plane, in the cloud, but it's still based, most of them, is still based on putting a VM in them and controlling them. You extend your management console to the cloud, that's not truly cloud native. >> Right. >> Cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch. >> We like to call that cloud naive. >> Cloud naive, yeah. >> So close, one letter, right? >> Yes. >> That was a big.. (slurs) Reinvent, take the T out of Cloud Native. It's Cloud Naive. (laughter) >> That went super viral, you guys got T-shirts now. I know you're loving that. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But that really, ultimately, is kind of a double-edged sword. You can be naive on the architecture side and ruleing that. And also suppliers or can be naive. So how would you define who's naive and who's not? >> Well, in fact, their evolving as well, so for example, in Cisco, it's a little bit more native than other ones, because there really is, "ACI in the cloud", you can't really figure API's out of the cloud. NSX is going that way and so is Arista, but they're incumbent, they have their own tools, its difficult for them. They're moving slowly, so it's much easier to start from scratch. Even you, like, you know, a network company that started a few years ago. There's only really two, Aviatrix was the first one, they've been there for at least three or four years. >> Steve: Yeah. >> And there's other one's, like Akira, for example that just started. Now they're doing more connectivity, but they want to create an overlay network, across the cloud and start doing policies and things. Abstracting all the clouds within one platform. >> So, I got to ask you. I interviewed an executive at VMware, Sanjay Poonen, he said to me at RSA last week. Oh, there'll only be two networking vendors left, Cisco and VMware. (laughter) >> What's you're response to that? Obviously when you have these waves, these new brands that emerge, like Aviatrix and others. I think there'll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork. How do you respond to that comment? >> Well there's still a data center, there's still, like a lot, of action on campus and there's the wan. But from the cloud provisioning and cloud networking in general, I mean, they're behind I think. You know, you don't even need them to start with, you can, if you're small enough, you can just keep.. If you have AWS, you can use the AWS construct, they have to insert themselves, I mean, they're running behind. From my point of view. >> They are, certainly incumbents. I love the term Andy Jess uses at Amazon web services. He uses "Old guard, new guard", to talk about the industry. What does the new guard have to do? The new brands that are emerging. Is it be more DevOp's oriented? Is it NetSec ops? Is it NetOps? Is it programmability? These are some of the key discussions we've been having. What's your view, on how you see this programmability? >> The most important part is, they have to make the network simple for the Dev teams. You cannot make a phone call and get a Vline in two weeks anymore. So if you move to the cloud, you have to make that cloud construct as simple enough, so that for example, a Dev team could say, "Okay, I'm going to create this VPC, but this VPC automatically associates your account, you cannot go out on the internet. You have to go to the transit VPC, so there's lot of action in terms of, the IAM part and you have to put the control around them to. So to make it as simple as possible. >> You guys, both. You're the CEO of Aviatrix, but also you've got a lot of experience, going back to networking, going back to the, I call it the OSI days. For us old folks know what that means, but, you guys know what this means. I want to ask you the question. As you look at the future of networking, you hear a couple objections. "Oh, the cloud guys, they got networking, we're all set with them. How do you respond to the fact that networking's changing and the cloud guys have their own networking. What's some of the paying points that's going on premises of these enterprises? So are they good with the clouds? What needs... What are the key things that's going on in networking, that makes it more than just the cloud networking? What's your take on it? >> Well as I said earlier. Once you could easily provision in the cloud, you can easily connect to the cloud, its when you start troubleshooting applications in the cloud and try to scale. So that's where the problem occurred. >> Okay, what's your take on it. >> And you'll hear from the customers, that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the clouds by definition, designed to the 80-20 rule which means they'll design 80% of the basic functionality. And then lead to 20% extra functionality, that of course every Enterprise needs, to leave that to ISV's, like Aviatrix. Because why? Because they have to make money, they have a service and they can't have huge instances, for functionality that not everybody needs. So they have to design to the common and that, they all do it, right? They have to and then the extra, the problem is, that Cambrian explosion, that I talked about with enterprises. That's what they need. They're the ones who need that extra 20%. So that's what I see, there's always going to be that extra functionality. In an automated and simple way, that you talked about, but yet powerful. With the up with the visibility and control, that they expect of On Prem. That kind of combination, that Yin and the Yang, that people like us are providing. >> Simon I want to ask you? We're going to ask some of the cloud architect, customer panels, that same question. There's pioneer's doing some work here and there's also the laggards who come in behind their early adopters. What's going to be the tipping point? What are some of these conversations, that the cloud architects are having out there? Or what's the signs, that they need to be on this, multi-cloud or cloud native networking trend? What are some of the signal's that are going on in the environment? What are some of the thresholds? Are things that are going on, that they can pay attention to? >> Well, once they have the application on multiple cloud and they have to get wake up at two in the morning, to troubleshoot them. They'll know it's important. (laughter) So, I think that's when the rubber will hit the road. But, as I said, it's easier to prove, at any case. Okay, it's AWS, it's easy, user transit gateway, put a few VPC's and you're done. And you create some presents like Equinox and do a Direct Connect and Express Route with Azure. That looks simple, its the operations, that's when they'll realize. Okay, now I need to understand! How cloud networking works? I also need a tool, that gives me visibility and control. But not only that, I need to understand the basic underneath it as well. >> What are some of the day in the life scenarios. you envision happening with multi-cloud, because you think about what's happening. It kind of has that same vibe of interoperability, choice, multi-vendor, 'cause they're multi-cloud. Essentially multi-vendor. These are kind of old paradigms, that we've lived through with client server and internet working. What are some of the scenarios of success, that might be possible? Will be possible, with multi-cloud and cloud native networking. >> Well, I think, once you have good enough visibility, to satisfy your customers, not only, like to, keep the service running and application running. But to be able to provision fast enough, I think that's what you want to achieve. >> Simon, final question. Advice for folks watching on the Livestream, if they're sitting there as a cloud architect or CXO. What's your advice to them right now, in this market, 'cause obviously, public cloud check, hybrid cloud, they're working on that. That gets on premises done, now multi-cloud's right behind it. What's your advice? >> The first thing they should do, is really try to understand cloud networking. For each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitations. And, is what the cloud service provider offers enough? Or you need to look to a third party, but you don't look at a third party to start with. Especially an incumbent one, so it's tempting to say "I have a bunch of F5 experts", nothing against F5. I'm going to bring my F5 in the Cloud, when you can use an ELB, that automatically understand eases and auto scaling and so on. And you understand that's much simpler, but sometimes you need your F5, because you have requirements. You have like iRules and that kind of stuff, that you've used for years. 'cause you cannot do it. Okay, I have requirement and that's not met, I'm going to use Legacy Star and then you have to start thinking, okay, what about visibility control, above the true cloud. But before you do that you have to understand the limitations of the existing cloud providers. First, try to be as native as possible, until things don't work, after that you can start thinking of the cloud. >> Great insight, Simon. Thank you. >> That's great. >> With Gartner, thank you for sharing. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to ALTITUDE 2020. For the folks in the live stream, I'm John Furrier, Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix. For our first of two customer panels with cloud network architects, we've got Bobby Willoughby, AEGON Luis Castillo from National Instruments and David Shinnick with FactSet. Guys, welcome to the stage for this digital event. Come on up. (audience clapping) (upbeat music) Hey good to see you, thank you. Customer panel, this is my favorite part. We get to hear the real scoop, we get the Gardener giving us the industry overview. Certainly, multi-cloud is very relevant, and cloud-native networking is a hot trend with the live stream out there in the digital events. So guys, let's get into it. The journey is, you guys are pioneering this journey of multi-cloud and cloud-native networking and are soon going to be a lot more coming. So I want to get into the journey. What's it been like? Is it real? You've got a lot of scar tissue? What are some of the learnings? >> Absolutely. Multi-cloud is whether or not we accept it, as network engineers is a reality. Like Steve said, about two years ago, companies really decided to just bite the bullet and move there. Whether or not we accept that fact, we need to not create a consistent architecture across multiple clouds. And that is challenging without orchestration layers as you start managing different tool sets and different languages across different clouds. So it's really important to start thinking about that. >> Guys on the other panelists here, there's different phases of this journey. Some come at it from a networking perspective, some come in from a problem troubleshooting, what's your experiences? >> From a networking perspective, it's been incredibly exciting, it's kind of once in a generational opportunity to look at how you're building out your network. You can start to embrace things like infrastructure as code that maybe your peers on the systems teams have been doing for years, but it just never really worked on-prem. So it's really exciting to look at all the opportunities that we have and all of the interesting challenges that come up that you get to tackle. >> And effects that you guys are mostly AWS, right? >> Yeah. Right now though, we are looking at multiple clouds. We have production workloads running in multiple clouds today but a lot of the initial work has been with Amazon. >> And you've seen it from a networking perspective, that's where you guys are coming at it from? >> Yup. >> Awesome. How about you? >> We evolve more from a customer requirement perspective. Started out primarily as AWS, but as the customer needed more resources from Azure like HPC, Azure AD, things like that, even recently, Google analytics, our journey has evolved into more of a multi-cloud environment. >> Steve, weigh in on the architecture because this is going to be a big conversation, and I wanted you to lead this section. >> I think you guys agree the journey, it seems like the journey started a couple of years ago. Got real serious, the need for multi-cloud, whether you're there today. Of course, it's going to be there in the future. So that's really important. I think the next thing is just architecture. I'd love to hear what you, had some comments about architecture matters, it all starts, every enterprise I talked to. Maybe talk about architecture and the importance of architects, maybe Bobby. >> From architecture perspective, we started our journey five years ago. >> Wow, okay. >> And we're just now starting our fourth evolution over network architect. And we call it networking security net sec, versus just as network. And that fourth-generation architecture should be based primarily upon the Palo Alto Networks and Aviatrix. Aviatrix to new orchestration piece of it. But that journey came because of the need for simplicity, the need for a multi-cloud orchestration without us having to go and do reprogramming efforts across every cloud as it comes along. >> I guess the other question I also had around architecture is also... Luis maybe just talk about it. I know we've talked a little bit about scripting, and some of your thoughts on that. >> Absolutely. So for us, we started creating the network constructs with cloud formation, and we've stuck with that for the most part. What's interesting about that is today, on-premise, we have a lot of automation around how we provision networks, but cloud formation has become a little bit like the new manual for us. We're now having issues with having to automate that component and making it consistent with our on-premise architecture and making it consistent with Azure architecture and Google cloud. So, it's really interesting to see companies now bring that layer of abstraction that SD-WAN brought to the wound side, now it's going up into the cloud networking architecture. >> Great. So on the fourth generation, you mentioned you're on the fourth-gen architecture. What have you learned? Is there any lessons, scratch issue, what to avoid, what worked? What was the path that you touched? >> It's probably the biggest lesson there is that when you think you finally figured it out, you haven't. Amazon will change something, Azure change something. Transit Gateway is a game-changer. And listening to the business requirements is probably the biggest thing we need to do upfront. But I think from a simplicity perspective, like I said, we don't want to do things four times. We want to do things one time, we want be able to write to an API which Aviatrix has and have them do the orchestration for us. So that we don't have to do it four times. >> How important is architecture in the progression? Is it do you guys get thrown in the deep end, to solve these problems, are you guys zooming out and looking at it? How are you guys looking at the architecture? >> You can't get off the ground if you don't have the network there. So all of those, we've gone through similar evolutions, we're on our fourth or fifth evolution. I think about what we started off with Amazon without Direct Connect Gateway, without Transit Gateway, without a lot of the things that are available today, kind of the 80, 20 that Steve was talking about. Just because it wasn't there doesn't mean we didn't need it. So we needed to figure out a way to do it, we couldn't say, "Oh, you need to come back to the network team in a year, and maybe Amazon will have a solution for it." We need to do it now and evolve later and maybe optimize or change the way you're doing things in the future. But don't sit around and wait, you can't. >> I'd love to have you guys each individually answer this question for the live streams that comes up a lot. A lot of cloud architects out in the community, what should they be thinking about the folks that are coming into this proactively and, or realizing the business benefits are there? What advice would you guys give them on architecture? What should be they'd be thinking about, and what are some guiding principles you could share? >> So I would start with looking at an architecture model that can spread and give consistency to the different cloud vendors that you will absolutely have to support. Cloud vendors tend to want to pull you into using their native tool set, and that's good if only it was realistic to talk about only one cloud. But because it doesn't, it's super important to talk about, and have a conversation with the business and with your technology teams about a consistent model. >> And how do I do my day one work so that I'm not spending 80% of my time troubleshooting or managing my network? Because if I'm doing that, then I'm missing out on ways that I can make improvements or embrace new technologies. So it's really important early on to figure out, how do I make this as low maintenance as possible so that I can focus on the things that the team really should be focusing on? >> Bobby, your advice there, architecture. >> I don't know what else I can add to that. Simplicity of operations is key. >> So the holistic view of day two operations you mentioned, let's can jump in day one as you're getting stuff set up, day two is your life after. This is kind of of what you're getting at, David. So what does that look like? What are you envisioning as you look at that 20-mile stair, out post multi-cloud world? What are some of the things that you want in the day two operations? >> Infrastructure as code is really important to us. So how do we design it so that we can start fit start making network changes and fitting them into a release pipeline and start looking at it like that, rather than somebody logging into a router CLI and troubleshooting things in an ad hoc nature? So, moving more towards a dev-ops model. >> You guys, anything to add on that day two? >> Yeah, I would love to add something. In terms of day two operations you can either sort of ignore the day two operations for a little while, where you get your feet wet, or you can start approaching it from the beginning. The fact is that the cloud-native tools don't have a lot of maturity in that space and when you run into an issue, you're going to end up having a bad day, going through millions and millions of logs just to try to understand what's going on. That's something that the industry just now is beginning to realize it's such a big gap. >> I think that's key because for us, we're moving to more of an event-driven or operations. In the past, monitoring got the job done. It's impossible to monitor something that is not there when the event happens. So the event-driven application and then detection is important. >> Gardner is all about the cloud-native wave coming into networking. That's going to be a serious thing. I want to get your guys' perspective, I know you have each different views of how you come into the journey and how you're executing. And I always say the beauty's in the eye of the beholder and that applies to how the network's laid out. So, Bobby, you guys do a lot of high-performance encryption, both on AWS and Azure. That's a unique thing for you. How are you seeing that impact with multi-cloud? >> That's a new requirement for us too, where we have an increment to encrypt. And then if you ever get the question, should I encrypt, should I not encrypt? The answer is always yes. You should encrypt when you can encrypt. For our perspective, we need to migrate a bunch of data from our data centers. We have some huge data centers, and getting that data to the cloud is a timely expense in some cases. So we have been mandated, we have to encrypt everything, leave in the data center. So we're looking at using the Aviatrix insane mode appliances to be able to encrypt 10, 20 gigabits of data as it moves to the cloud itself. >> David, you're using Terraform, you've got FireNet, you've got a lot of complexity in your network. What do you guys look at the future for your environment? >> So many exciting that we're working on now as FireNet. So for our security team that obviously have a lot of knowledge base around Palo Alto, and with our commitments to our clients, it's not very easy to shift your security model to a specific cloud vendor. So there's a lot of SOC 2 compliance and things like that were being able to take some of what you've worked on for years on-prem and put it in the cloud and have the same type of assurance that things are going to work and be secure in the same way that they are on-prem, helps make that journey into the cloud a lot easier. >> And Louis, you guys got scripting, you got a lot of things going on. What's your unique angle on this? >> Absolutely. So for disclosure, I'm not an Aviatrix customer yet. (laughs) >> It's okay, we want to hear the truth, so that's good. Tell us, what are you thinking about? What's on your mind? >> When you talk about implementing a tool like this, it's really just really important to talk about automation focus on value. When you talk about things like encryption and things like so you're encrypting tunnels and encrypting the path, and those things should be second nature really. When you look at building those back-ends and managing them with your team, it becomes really painful. So tools like Aviatrix that add a lot automation it's out of sight, out of mind. You can focus on the value, and you don't have to focus on this. >> So I got to ask you guys. I see Aviatrix was here, they're supplier to this sector, but you guys are customers. Everyone's pitching your stuff, people knock on you, "Buy my stuff." How do you guys have that conversation with the suppliers, like the cloud vendors and other folks? What's it like? We're API all the way? You've got to support this? What are some of your requirements? How do you talk to and evaluate people that walk in and want to knock on your door and pitch you something? What's the conversation like? >> It's definitely API driven. We definitely look at the API structure that the vendors provide before we select anything. That is always first of mine and also, what problem are we really trying to solve? Usually, people try to sell or try to give us something that isn't really valuable, like implementing a Cisco solution on the cloud doesn't really add a lot of value, that's where we go. >> David, what's your conversation like with suppliers? Do you have a certain new way to do things? As it becomes more agile, essentially networking, and getting more dynamic, what are some of the conversations with either in commits or new vendors that you're having? What do you require? >> Ease of use is definitely high up there. We've had some vendors come in and say, "Hey, when you go to set this up, "we're going to want to send somebody on-site." And they're going to sit with you for a day to configure it. And that's a red flag. Well, wait a minute, do we really, if one of my really talented engineers can't figure it out on his own, what's going on there and why is that? Having some ease of use and the team being comfortable with it and understanding it is really important. >> Bobby, how about you? Old days was, do a bake-off and the winner takes all. Is it like that anymore? What's evolving? Bake-off last year for but still win. But that's different now because now when you get the product, you can install the product in AWS and Azure, have it up running in a matter of minutes. So the key is that can you be operational within hours or days instead of weeks? But do we also have the flexibility to customize it, to meet your needs? Because you don't want to be put into a box with the other customers when you have needs that are past their needs. >> I can almost see the challenge that you guys are living, where you've got the cloud immediate value, depending how you can roll up any solutions, but then you might have other needs. So you've got to be careful not to buy into stuff that's not shipping. So you're trying to be proactive and at the same time, deal with what you got. How do you guys see that evolving? Because multi-cloud to me is definitely relevant, but it's not yet clear how to implement across. How do you guys look at this baked versus future solutions coming? How do you balance that? >> Again, so right now, we're taking the ad hoc approach and experimenting what the different concepts of cloud are and really leveraging the native constructs of each cloud. But there's a breaking point for sure. You don't get to scale this like someone said, and you have to focus on being able to deliver, developers their sandbox or their play area for the things that they're trying to build quickly. And the only way to do that is with some consistent orchestration layer that allows you to-- >> So you expect a lot more stuff to becoming pretty quickly in that area. >> I do expect things to start maturing quite quickly this year. >> And you guys see similar trend, new stuff coming fast? >> Yeah. Probably the biggest challenge we've got now is being able to segment within the network, being able to provide segmentation between production, non-production workloads, even businesses, because we support many businesses worldwide and isolation between those is a key criteria there. So the ability to identify and quickly isolate those workloads is key. So the CIOs that are watching are saying, "Hey, take that hill, do multi-cloud." And then you have the bottoms up organization, "Pause, you're like off a little bit, it's not how it works." What is the reality in terms of implementing as fast as possible? Because the business benefits are clear, but it's not always clear on the technology how to move that fast. What are some of the barriers, what are the blockers, what are the enablers? >> I think the reality is that you may not think you're multi-cloud, but your business is. So I think the biggest barrier there is understanding what the requirements are and how best to meet those requirements in a secure manner. Because you need to make sure that things are working from a latency perspective that things work the way they did and get out of the mind shift that it was a tier-three application and the data center, it doesn't have to be a tier-three application in the cloud. So, lift and shift is not the way to go. >> Scale is a big part of what I see is the competitive advantage by these clouds and used to be proprietary network stacks in the old days, and then open systems came, that was a good thing. But as cloud has become bigger, there's an inherent lock-in there with the scale. How do you guys keep the choice open? How are you guys thinking about interoperability? What are some of the conversations that you guys are having around those key concepts? >> When we look at from a networking perspective, it's really key for you to just enable all the class to be able to communicate between them. Developers will find a way to use the cloud that best suits their business needs. And like you said, it's whether you're in denial or not, of the multi-cloud fact that your company is in already that's it becomes really important for you to move quickly. >> Yeah. And a lot of it also hinges on how well is the provider embracing what that specific cloud is doing? So, are they swimming with Amazon or Azure and just helping facilitate things, and they're doing the heavy lifting API work for you? Or are they swimming upstream and they're trying to hack it all together in messy way? And so that helps you stay out of the lock-in because there, if they're using Amazon native tools to help you get where you need to be, it's not like Amazon is going to release something in the future that completely makes you have designed yourself into a corner. So the closer, more than cloud-native they are, the more, the easier it is to deploy. >> Which also need to be aligned in such a way that you can take advantage of those cloud-native technologies. Will it make sense? TGW is a gamechanger in terms of cost and performance. So to completely ignore that, would be wrong. But if you needed to have encryption, TGW is not encrypted, so you need to have some type of Gateway to do the VPN encryption. So, the Aviatrix tool will give you the beauty of both worlds. You can use TGW or the Gateway. Real quick on the last minute we have, I want to just get a quick feedback from you guys. I hear a lot of people say to me, "Hey, pick the best cloud for the workload you got, then figure out multicloud behind the scenes." Do you guys agree with that? Do I go more to one cloud across the whole company or this workload works great on AWS, that workload works great on this. From a cloud standpoint, do you agree with that premise, and then when is multi-cloud stitching altogether? >> From an application perspective, it can be per workload, but it can also be an economical decision, certain enterprise contracts will pull you in one direction to add value, but the network problem is still the same. >> It doesn't go away. >> You don't want to be trying to fit a square into a round hall. If it works better on that cloud provider, then it's our job to make sure that service is there and people can use it. >> I agree, you just need to stay ahead of the game, make sure that the network infrastructure is there, security is available and is multi-cloud capable. >> At the end of the day, you guys are just validating that it's the networking game now. Cloud storage, compute check, networking is where the action is. Awesome. Thanks for your insights guys, appreciate you coming on the panel. Appreciate it, thanks. (upbeat music) >> John: Our next customer panel, got great another set of cloud network architects, Justin Smith with Zuora, Justin Brodley with EllieMae and Amit Utreja with Coupa. Welcome to stage. (audience applauds) (upbeat music) >> All right, thank you. >> How are ya? >> Thank you. Thank You. >> Hey Amit. How are ya? >> Did he say it right? >> Yeah. >> Okay he's got all the cliff notes from the last session, welcome back. Rinse and repeat. We're going to go into the hood a little bit. And I think they nailed what we've been reporting, we've been having this conversation around, networking is where the action is because that's at the end of the day you got to move packet from A to B and you got workloads exchanging data. So it's really killer. So let's get started. Amit, what are you seeing as the journey of multicloud as you go under the hood and say, "Okay, I got to implement this. "I have to engineer the network, "make it enabling, make it programmable, "make it interoperable across clouds." That almost sounds impossible to me. What's your take? >> Yeah, it seems impossible but if you are running an organization which is running infrastructure as a code it is easily doable. Like you can use tools out there that's available today, you can use third party products that can do a better job. But put your architecture first, don't wait. Architecture may not be perfect, put the best architecture that's available today and be agile, to iterate and make improvements over the time. >> We get to Justin's over here, so I have to be careful when I point a question to Justin, they both have the answer. Okay, journeys, what's the journey been like? Is there phases, We heard that from Gardner, people come into multicloud and cloud native networking from different perspectives? What's your take on the journey, Justin? >> Yeah, from our perspective, we started out very much focused on one cloud and as we've started doing acquisitions, we started doing new products to the market, the need for multicloud becomes very apparent, very quickly for us. And so having an architecture that we can plug and play into and be able to add and change things as it changes is super important for what we're doing in the space. >> Justin, your journey. >> Yes. For us, we were very ad hoc oriented and the idea is that we were reinventing all the time, trying to move into these new things and coming up with great new ideas. And so rather than it being some iterative approach with our deployments that became a number of different deployments. And so we shifted that toward and the network has been a real enabler of this. There's one network and it touches whatever cloud we want it to touch, and it touches the data centers that we need it to touch, and it touches the customers that we needed to touch. Our job is to make sure that the services that are available in one of those locations are available in all of the locations. So the idea is not that we need to come up with this new solution every time, it's that we're just iterating on what we've already decided to do. >> Before we get the architecture section, I want to ask you guys a question? I'm a big fan of let the app developers have infrastructure as code, so check. But having the right cloud run that workload, I'm a big fan of that, if it works great. But we just heard from the other panel, you can't change the network. So I want to get your thoughts, what is cloud native networking? And is that the engine really, that's the enabler for this multicloud trend? What's you guys take? We'll start with Amit, what do you think about that? >> Yeah, so you're going to have workloads running in different clouds and the workloads would have affinity to one cloud or other. But how you expose that it's a matter of how you are going to build your networks. How you're going to run security. How you're going to do egress, ingress out of it so -- >> You said networking is the big problem to solve. >> Yes. >> What's the solution? What's the key pain points and problem statement? >> The key pain point for most companies is how do you take your traditionally on premise network and then blow it out to the cloud in a way that makes sense. You have IP conflicts, you have IP space, you have public IPs on premise as well as in the cloud. And how do you kind of make sense of all of that? And I think that's where tools like Aviatrix make a lot of sense in that space. >> From our side, it's really simple. It's a latency, it's bandwidth and availability. These don't change whether we're talking about cloud or data center, or even corporate IT networking. So our job when these all of these things are simplified into like, S3, for instance and our developers want to use those. We have to be able to deliver that and for a particular group or another group that wants to use just just GCP resources. We have to support these requirements and these wants, as opposed to saying, "Hey, that's not a good idea." No, our job is to enable them not to disable them. >> Do you guys think infrastructure is code? Which I love that, I think that's the future in this. We even saw that with DevOps. But as you start getting the networking, is it getting down to the network portion where its network as code? Because storage and compute working really well, we're seeing all Kubernetes on service mesh trend. Network has code, reality is it there? Is it still got work to do? >> It's absolutely there, you mentioned net DevOps and it's very real. In Coupa we build our networks through terraform and not only just terraform, build an API so that we can consistently build VNets and VPC all across in the same way. >> So you guys are doing it? >> Yup. And even security groups. And then on top and Aviatrix comes in, we can peer the networks bridge all the different regions through code. >> Same with you guys. >> Yeah. >> What do you think about this? >> Everything we deploy is done with automation and then we also run things like Lambda on top to make changes in real time, we don't make manual changes on our network. In the data center, funny enough, it's still manual but the cloud has enabled us to move into this automation mindset. And all my guys, that's what they focus on is bringing, now what they're doing in the cloud into the data center, which is kind of opposite of what it should be or what it used to be. >> It's full DevOps then? >> Yes. >> For us, it was similar on-prem is still somewhat very manual, although we're moving more and more to ninja and terraform type concepts. But everything in the production environment is code, confirmation terraform code and now coming into the data center same (mumbles). >> So I just wanted to jump in Justin Smith, one of the comment that you made, because it's something that we always talk about a lot is that the center of gravity of architecture used to be an on-prem and now it's shifted in the cloud. And once you have your strategic architecture, what do you do? You push that everywhere. So what you used to see at the beginning of cloud was pushing the architecture on-prem into cloud. Now, I want to pick up on what you said, do you others agree that the center of gravity is here, I'm now pushing what I do in the cloud back into on-prem? And then so first that and then also in the journey, where are you at from zero to 100 of actually in the journey to cloud? Are you 50% there, are you 10%? Are you evacuating data centers next year? Where are you guys at? >> Yeah, so there's there's two types of gravity that you typically are dealing with, with the migration. First is data, gravity and your data set, and where that data lives. And then the second is the network platform that wraps all that together. In our case, the data gravity solely mostly on-prem but our network is now extending out to the app tier, it's going to be in cloud. Eventually, that data, gravity will also move to cloud as we start getting more sophisticated but in our journey, we're about halfway there. About halfway through the process, we're taking a handle of lift and shift and -- >> Steve: And when did that start? >> We started about three years ago. >> Okay, okay. >> Well for Coupa it's a very different story. It started from a garage and 100% on the cloud. So it's a business plan management platform, software as a service run 100% on the cloud. >> That was was like 10 years ago, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> You guys are riding the wave of the architecture. Justin I want to ask you, Zuora, you guys mentioned DevOps. Obviously, we saw the huge observability wave, which essentially network management for the cloud, in my opinion. It's more dynamic, but this is about visibility. We heard from the last panel you don't know what's being turned on or turned off from a services standpoint, at any given time. How is all this playing out when you start getting into the DevOps down (mumbles)? >> This is the big challenge for all of us is visibility. When you talk transport within a cloud, very interestingly we we have moved from having a backbone that we bought, that we own, that would be data center connectivity. Zuora's a subscription billing company, so we want to support the subscription mindset. So rather than going and buying circuits and having to wait three months to install and then coming up with some way to get things connected and resiliency and redundancy. My backbone is in the cloud. I use the cloud providers interconnections between regions to transport data across and so if you do that with their native solutions, you do lose visibility. There are areas in that that you don't get, which is why controllers and having some type of management plane is a requirement for us to do what we're supposed to do and provide consistency while doing it. >> Great conversation. I loved what you said earlier latency, bandwidth, I think availability were your top three things. Guys SLA, just do ping times between clouds it's like, you don't know what you're getting for round trip time. This becomes a huge kind of risk management, black hole, whatever you want to call it, blind spot. How are you guys looking at the interconnect between clouds? Because I can see that working from ground to cloud on per cloud but when you start dealing with multiclouds workloads, SLAs will be all over the map, won't they just inherently. How do you guys view that? >> Yeah, I think we talked about workload and we know that the workloads are going to be different in different clouds, but they're going to be calling each other. So it's very important to have that visibility, that you can see how data is flowing at what latency and what availability is there and our authority needs to operate on that. >> So use the software dashboard, look at the times and look at the latency -- >> In the old days, Strongswan Openswan you try to figure it out, in the new days you have to figure out. >> Justin, what's your answer to that because you're in the middle of it? >> Yeah, I think the key thing there is that we have to plan for that failure, we have to plan for that latency in our applications. If certain things are tracking in your SLI, certain things are planning for and you loosely coupled these services in a much more microservices approach. So you actually can handle that kind of failure or that type of unknown latency and unfortunately, the cloud has made us much better at handling exceptions in a much better way. >> You guys are all great examples of cloud native from day one. When did you have the tipping point moment or the epiphany of saying a multiclouds real, I can't ignore it, I got to factor that into all my design principles and everything you're doing? Was there a moment or was it from day one? >> There are two reasons, one was the business. So in business, there were some affinity to not be in one cloud or to be in one cloud and that drove from the business side. So as a cloud architect our responsibility was to support that business. Another is the technology, some things are really running better in, like if you're running Dotnet workload or your going to run machine learning or AI so that you would have that preference of one cloud over other. >> Guys, any thoughts on that? >> That was the bill that we got from AWS. That's what drives a lot of these conversations is the financial viability of what you're building on top of. This failure domain idea which is fairly interesting. How do I solve our guarantee against a failure domain? You have methodologies with back end direct connects or interconnect with GCP. All of these ideas are something that you have to take into account but that transport layer should not matter to whoever we're building this for. Our job is to deliver the frames and the packets, what that flows across, how you get there? We want to make that seamless. And so whether it's a public internet API call or it's a back end connectivity through direct connect, it doesn't matter. It just has to meet a contract that you've signed with your application, folks. >> Yeah, that's the availability piece. >> Justin, your thoughts on that, any comment on that? >> So actually multiclouds become something much more recent in the last six to eight months, I'd say. We always kind of had a very much an attitude of like moving to Amazon from our private cloud is hard enough, why complicate it further? But the realities of the business and as we start seeing, improvements in Google and Azure and different technology spaces, the need for multicloud becomes much more important. As well as our acquisition strategies are matured, we're seeing that companies that used to be on premise that we typically acquire are now very much already on a cloud. And if they're on a cloud, I need to plug them into our ecosystem. And so that's really changed our multicloud story in a big way. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on the clouds versus the clouds, because you compare them Amazon's got more features, they're rich with features. Obviously, the bills are high to people using them. But Google's got a great network, Google's networks pretty damn good And then you got Azure. What's the difference between the clouds? Where do they fall? Where do they peak in certain areas better than others? What are the characteristics, which makes one cloud better? Do they have a unique feature that makes Azure better than Google and vice versa? What do you guys think about the different clouds? >> Yeah, to my experience, I think the approach is different in many places. Google has a different approach very DevOps friendly and you can run your workloads with your network can span regions. But our application ready to accept that. Amazon is evolving. I remember 10 years back Amazon's network was a flat network, we would be launching servers in 10.0.0/8, right. And then the VPCs came out. >> We'll have to translate that to English for the live feed. Not good. So the VPCs concept came out, multi account came out, so they are evolving. Azure had a late start but because they have a late start, they saw the pattern and they have some mature setup on the network. >> They've got around the same price too. >> I think they're all trying to say they're equal in their own ways. I think they all have very specific design philosophies that allow them to be successful in different ways and you have to kind of keep that in mind as you architect your own solution. For example, Amazon has a very regional affinity, they don't like to go cross region in their architecture. Whereas Google is very much it's a global network, we're going to think about as a global solution. I think Google also has advantage that it's third to market and so has seen what Azure did wrong, it seeing what AWS did wrong and it's made those improvements and I think that's one of their big advantage. >> They got great scale too. Justin thoughts on the cloud. >> So yeah, Amazon built from the system up and Google built from the network down. So their ideas and approaches are from a global versus original, I agree with you completely that is the big number one thing. But the if you look at it from the outset, interestingly, the inability or the ability for Amazon to limit layer to broadcasting and what that really means from a VPC perspective, changed all the routing protocols you can use. All the things that we had built inside of a data center to provide resiliency and make things seamless to users, all of that disappeared. And so because we had to accept that at the VPC level, now we have to accept that at the WAN level. Google's done a better job of being able to overcome those things and provide those traditional network facilities to us. >> Just a great panel, we could go all day here, it's awesome. So I heard, we will get to the cloud native naive questions. So kind of think about what's naive and what's cloud, I'll ask that next but I got to ask you I had a conversation with a friend he's like, "WAN is the new LAN?" So if you think about what the LAN was at a data center, WAN is the new LAN, cause you keep talking about the cloud impact? So that means ST-WAN, the old ST-WAN kind of changing. There's a new LAN. How do you guys look at that? Because if you think about it, what LANs were for inside a premises was all about networking, high speed. But now when you take the WAN and make it, essentially a LAN, do you agree with that? And how do you view this trend? Is it good or bad or is it ugly? What you guys take on this? >> Yeah, I think it's a thing that you have to work with your application architects. So if you are managing networks and if you're a server engineer, you need to work with them to expose the unreliability that it would bring in. So the application has to handle a lot of the difference in the latencies and the reliability has to be worked through the application there. >> LAN, WAN, same concept is that BS? Can you give some insight? >> I think we've been talking about for a long time the erosion of the edge. And so is this just a continuation of that journey we've been on for last several years. As we get more and more cloud native and we talked about API's, the ability to lock my data in place and not be able to access it really goes away. And so I think this is just continuation. I think it has challenges. We start talking about WAN scale versus LAN scale, the tooling doesn't work the same, the scale of that tooling is much larger. and the need to automation is much, much higher in a WAN than it wasn't a LAN. That's why you're seeing so much infrastructure as code. >> Yeah. So for me, I'll go back again to this, it's bandwidth and its latency that define those two LAN versus WAN. But the other thing that's comes up more and more with cloud deployments is whereas our security boundary and where can I extend this secure aware appliance or set of rules to protect what's inside of it. So for us, we're able to deliver VRFs or route forwarding tables for different segments wherever we're at in the world. And so they're trusted to talk to each other but if they're going to go to someplace that's outside of their network, then they have to cross the security boundary, where we enforce policy very heavily. So for me, there's it's not just LAN, WAN it's how does environment get to environment more importantly. >> That's a great point in security, we haven't talked it yet but that's got to be baked in from the beginning, this architecture. Thoughts on security, how you guys are dealing with it? >> Yeah, start from the base, have app to app security built in. Have TLS, have encryption on the data at transit, data at rest. But as you bring the application to the cloud and they're going to go multicloud, talking to over the internet, in some places, well have app to app security. >> Our principles day, security is day zero every day. And so we always build it into our design, build into our architecture, into our applications. It's encrypt everything, it's TLS everywhere. It's make sure that that data is secure at all times. >> Yeah, one of the cool trends at RSA, just as a side note was the data in use encryption piece, which is homomorphic stuff was interesting. Alright guys, final question. We heard on the earlier panel was also trending at re:Invent, we think the T out of cloud native, it spells cloud naive. They have shirts now, Aviatrix kind of got this trend going. What does that mean to be naive? To your peers out there watching the live stream and also the suppliers that are trying to supply you guys with technology and services, what's naive look like and what's native look like? When is someone naive about implementing all this stuff? >> So for me, because we are in 100% cloud, for us its main thing is ready for the change. And you will find new building blocks coming in and the network design will evolve and change. So don't be naive and think that it's static, evolve with the change. >> I think the biggest naivety that people have is that well, I've been doing it this way for 20 years, I've been successful, it's going to be successful in cloud. The reality is that's not the case. You got to think some of the stuff a little bit differently and you need to think about it early enough, so that you can become cloud native and really enable your business on cloud. >> Yeah for me it's being open minded. Our industry, the network industry as a whole, has been very much I'm smarter than everybody else and we're going to tell everybody how it's going to be done. And we fell into a lull when it came to producing infrastructure and so embracing this idea that we can deploy a new solution or a new environment in minutes as opposed to hours, or weeks or months in some cases, is really important in and so >> - >> It's naive being closed minded, native being open minded. >> Exactly. For me that was a transformative kind of where I was looking to solve problems in a cloud way as opposed to looking to solve problems in this traditional old school way. >> All right, I know we're at a time but I got to asked one more question, so you guys so good. Give me a quick answer. What's the BS language when you, the BS meter goes off when people talk to you about solutions? What's the kind of jargon that you hear, that's the BS meter going off? What are people talking about that in your opinion you here you go, "That's total BS?" What triggers you? >> So that I have two lines out of movies if I say them without actually thinking them. It's like 1.21 gigawatts are you out of your mind from Back to the Future right? Somebody's giving you all these wiz bang things. And then Martin Maul and Michael Keaton in Mr Mom when he goes to 220, 221, whatever it takes. >> Yeah. >> Those two right there, if those go off in my mind where somebody's talking to me, I know they're full of baloney. >> So a lot of speeds and feeds, a lot of speeds and feeds a lot of -- >> Just data. Instead of talking about what you're actually doing and solutioning for. You're talking about, "Well, it does this this this." Okay to 220, 221. (laughter) >> Justin, what's your take? >> Anytime I start seeing the cloud vendors start benchmarking against each other. Your workload is your workload, you need to benchmark yourself. Don't listen to the marketing on that, that's just awful. >> Amit, what triggers you in the BS meter? >> I think if somebody explains to you are not simple, they cannot explain you in simplicity, then it's all bull shit. >> (laughs) That's a good one. Alright guys, thanks for the great insight, great panel. How about a round of applause to practitioners. (audience applauds) (upbeat music) >> John: Okay, welcome back to Altitude 2020 for the digital event for the live feed. Welcome back, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE with Steve Mullaney, CEO Aviatrix. For the next panel from Global System Integrated, the folks who are building and working with folks on their journey to multicloud and cloud-native networking. We've got a great panel, George Buckman with DXC and Derrick Monahan with WWT, welcome to the stage. (Audience applauds) >> Hey >> Thank you >> Groovy spot >> All right (upbeat music) >> Okay, you guys are the ones out there advising, building, and getting down and dirty with multicloud and cloud-native networking, we just heard from the customer panel. You can see the diversity of where people come in to the journey of cloud, it kind of depends upon where you are, but the trends are all clear, cloud-native networking, DevOps, up and down the stack, this has been the main engine. What's your guys' take of this journey to multicloud? What do you guys think? >> Yeah, it's critical, I mean we're seeing all of our enterprise customers enter into this, they've been through the migrations of the easy stuff, ya know? Now they're trying to optimize and get more improvements, so now the tough stuff's coming on, right? They need their data processing near where their data is. So that's driving them to a multicloud environment. >> Yeah, we've heard some of the Edge stuff, I mean, you guys are-- >> Exactly. >> You've seen this movie before, but now it's a whole new ballgame, what's your take? Yeah, so, I'll give you a hint, our practice is not called the cloud practice, it's the multicloud practice, and so if that gives you a hint of how we approach things. It's very consultative. And so when we look at what the trends are, like a year ago. About a year ago we were having conversations with customers, "Let's build a data center in the cloud. Let's put some VPCs, let's throw some firewalls, let's put some DNS and other infrastructure out there and let's hope it works." This isn't a science project. What we're starting to see is customers are starting to have more of a vision, we're helping with that consultative nature, but it's totally based on the business. And you've got to start understanding how lines of business are using the apps and then we evolve into the next journey which is a foundational approach to-- >> What are some of the problems some of your customers are solving when they come to you? What are the top things that are on their mind, obviously the ease of use, agility, all that stuff, what specifically are they digging into? >> Yeah, so complexity, I think when you look at a multicloud approach, in my view is, network requirements are complex. You know, I think they are, but I think the approach can be, "Let's simplify that." So one thing that we try to do, and this is how we talk to customers is, just like you simplify in Aviatrix, simplifies the automation orchestration of cloud networking, we're trying to simplify the design, the plan, and implementation of the infrastructure across multiple workloads, across multiple platforms. And so the way we do it, is we sit down, we look at not just use cases, not just the questions we commonly anticipate, we actually build out, based on the business and function requirements, we build out a strategy and then create a set of documents, and guess what? We actually build it in a lab, and that lab that we platform rebuilt, proves out this reference architectural actually works. >> Absolutely, we implement similar concepts. I mean, they're proven practices, they work, right? >> But George, you mentioned that the hard part's now upon us, are you referring to networking, what specifically were you getting at there when you said, "The easy part's done, now the hard part?" >> So for the enterprises themselves, migrating their more critical apps or more difficult apps into the environments, ya know, we've just scratched the surface, I believe, on what enterprises are doing to move into the cloud, to optimize their environments, to take advantage of the scale and speed to deployment and to be able to better enable their businesses. So they're just now really starting to-- >> So do you guys see what I talked about? I mean, in terms of that Cambrian explosion, I mean, you're both monster system integrators with top fortune enterprise customers, you know, really rely on you for guidance and consulting and so forth, and deploy their networks. Is that something that you've seen? I mean, does that resonate? Did you notice a year and a half ago all of a sudden the importance of cloud for enterprise shoot up? >> Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it now. >> Okay. >> In our internal environment as well, ya know, we're a huge company ourselves, customer zero, our internal IT, so, we're experiencing that internally and every one of our other customers as well. >> So I have another question and I don't know the answer to this, and a lawyer never asks a question that you don't know the answer to, but I'm going to ask it anyway. DXC and WWT, massive system integrators, why Aviatrix? >> Great question, Steve, so I think the way we approach things, I think we have a similar vision, a similar strategy, how you approach things, how we approach things, at World Wide Technology. Number one, we want a simplify the complexity. And so that's your number one priority. Let's take the networking, let's simplify it, and I think part of the other point I'm making is we see this automation piece as not just an after thought anymore. If you look at what customers care about, visibility and automation is probably at the top three, maybe the third on the list, and I think that's where we see the value. I think the partnership that we're building and what I get excited about is not just putting yours and our lab and showing customers how it works, it's co-developing a solution with you. Figuring out, "Hey, how can we make this better?" >> Right >> Visibility is a huge thing, just in security alone, network everything's around visibility. What automation do you see happening, in terms of progression, order of operations, if you will? What's the low hanging fruit? What are people working on now? What are some of the aspirational goals around when you start thinking about multicloud and automation? >> So I wanted to get back to his question. >> Answer that question. >> I wanted to answer your question, you know, what led us there and why Aviatrix. You know, in working some large internal IT projects, and looking at how we were going to integrate those solutions, you know, we like to build everything with recipes. Network is probably playing catch-up in the DevOps world but with a DevOps mindset, looking to speed to deploy, support, all those things, so when you start building your recipe, you take a little of this, a little of that, and you mix it all together, well, when you look around, you say, "Wow, look, there's this big bag of Aviatrix. "Let me plop that in. That solves a big part "of my problems that I had, the speed to integrate, "the speed to deploy, and the operational views "that I need to run this." So that was what led me to-- >> John: So how about reference architectures? >> Yeah, absolutely, so, you know, they came with a full slate of reference architectures already out there and ready to go that fit our needs, so it was very easy for us to integrate those into our recipes. >> What do you guys think about all the multi-vendor inter-operability conversations that have been going on? Choice has been a big part of multicloud in terms of, you know, customers want choice, they'll put a workload in the cloud if it works, but this notion of choice and interoperability has become a big conversation. >> It is, and I think that our approach, and that's the way we talk to customers is, "Let's speed and de-risk that decision making process, "and how do we do that?" Because interoperability is key. You're not just putting, it's not just a single vendor, we're talking, you know, many many vendors, I mean think about the average number of cloud applications a customer uses, a business, an enterprise business today, you know, it's above 30, it's skyrocketing and so what we do, and we look at it from an interoperability approach is, "How do things inter-operate?" We test it out, we validate it, we build a reference architecture that says, "These are the critical design elements, "now let's build one with Aviatrix "and show how this works with Aviatrix." And I think the important part there, though, is the automation piece that we add to it and visibility. So I think the visibility is what I see lacking across industry today. >> In cloud-native that's been a big topic. >> Yep >> Okay, in terms of Aviatrix, as you guys see them coming in, they're one of the ones that are emerging and the new brands emerging with multicloud, you've still got the old guard encumbered with huge footprints. How are customers dealing with that kind of component in dealing with both of them? >> Yeah, I mean, we have customers that are ingrained with a particular vendor and you know, we have partnerships with many vendors. So our objective is to provide the solution that meets that client. >> John: And they all want multi-vendor, they all want interoperability. >> Correct. >> All right, so I got to ask you guys a question while we were defining Day-2 operations. What does that mean? You guys are looking at the big business and technical components of architecture, what does Day-2 operations mean, what's the definition of that? >> Yeah, so I think from our perspective, with my experience, we, you know, Day-2 operations, whether it's not just the orchestration piece in setting up and let it automate and have some, you know, change control, you're looking at this from a Day-2 perspective, "How do I support this ongoing "and make it easy to make changes as we evolve?" The cloud is very dynamic. The nature of how fast it's expanding, the number features is astonishing. Trying to keep up to date with the number of just networking capabilities and services that are added. So I think Day-2 operations starts with a fundamental understanding of building out supporting a customer's environments, and making the automation piece easy from a distance, I think. >> Yeah and, you know, taking that to the next level of being able to enable customers to have catalog items that they can pick and choose, "Hey I need this network connectivity "from this cloud location back to this on-prem." And being able to have that automated and provisioned just simply by ordering it. >> For the folks watching out there, guys, take a minute to explain as you guys are in the trenches doing a lot of good work. What are some of the engagements that you guys get into? How does that progress? What happens there, they call you up and say, "Hey I need some multicloud," or you're already in there? I mean, take us through how someone can engage to use a global SI, they come in and make this thing happen, what's the typical engagement look like? >> Derrick: Yeah, so from our perspective, we typically have a series of workshops in the methodology that we kind of go along the journey. Number one, we have a foundational approach. And I don't mean foundation meaning the network foundation, that's a very critical element, we got to factor in security and we got to factor in automation. So when you think about foundation, we do a workshop that starts with education. A lot of times we'll go in and we'll just educate the customer, what is VPC sharing? You know, what is a private link in Azure? How does that impact your business? We have customers that want to share services out in an ecosystem with other customers and partners. Well there's many ways to accomplish that. Our goal is to understand those requirements and then build that strategy with them. >> Thoughts George, on-- >> Yeah, I mean, I'm one of the guys that's down in the weeds making things happen, so I'm not the guy on the front line interfacing with the customers every day. But we have a similar approach. We have a consulting practice that will go out and apply their practices to see what those-- >> And when do you parachute in? >> Yeah, when I parachute in is, I'm on the back end working with our offering development leads for networking, so we understand and are seeing what customers are asking for and we're on the back end developing the solutions that integrate with our own offerings as well as enable other customers to just deploy quickly to meet their connectivity needs. So the patterns are similar. >> Right, final question for you guys, I want to ask you to paint a picture of what success looks like. You don't have to name customers, you don't have to get in and reveal who they are, but what does success look like in multicloud as you paint a picture for the folks here and watching on the live stream, if someone says, "Hey I want to be multicloud, I got to to have my operations Agile, I want full DevOps, I want programmability and security built in from Day-zero." What does success look like? >> Yeah, I think success looks like this, so when you're building out a network, the network is a harder thing to change than some other aspects of cloud. So what we think is, even if you're thinking about that second cloud, which we have most of our customers are on two public clouds today, they might be dabbling in it. As you build that network foundation, that architecture, that takes in to consideration where you're going, and so once we start building that reference architecture out that shows, this is how to approach it from a multicloud perspective, not a single cloud, and let's not forget our branches, let's not forget our data centers, let's not forget how all this connects together because that's how we define multicloud, it's not just in the cloud, it's on-prem and it's off-prem. And so collectively, I think the key is also is that we provide them an HLD. You got to start with a high level design that can be tweaked as you go through the journey but you got to give it a solid structural foundation, and that networking which we think, most customers think as not the network engineers, but as an after thought. We want to make that the most critical element before you start the journey. >> George, from your seat, how does success look for you? >> So, you know it starts out on these journeys, often start out people not even thinking about what is going to happen, what their network needs are when they start their migration journey to the cloud. So I want, success to me looks like them being able to end up not worrying about what's happening in the network when they move to the cloud. >> Steve: Good point. >> Guys, great insight, thanks for coming on and sharing. How about a round of applause for the global system integrators? (Audience applauds) (Upbeat music) >> The next panel is the AVH certified engineers, also known as ACEs. This is the folks that are certified, they're engineering, they're building these new solutions. Please welcome Toby Foss from Informatica, Stacey Lanier from Teradata, and Jennifer Reed with Viqtor Davis to the stage. (upbeat music) (audience cheering) (panelists exchanging pleasantries) >> You got to show up. Where's your jacket Toby? (laughing) You get it done. I was just going to rib you guys and say, where's your jackets, and Jen's got the jacket on. Okay, good. >> Love the Aviatrix, ACEs Pilot gear there above the Clouds. Going to new heights. >> That's right. >> So guys Aviatrix aces, I love the name, think it's great, certified. This is all about getting things engineered. So there's a level of certification, I want to get into that. But first take us through the day in the life of an ACE, and just to point out, Stacy is a squad leader. So he's, he's like a-- >> Squadron Leader. >> Squadron Leader. >> Yeah. >> Squadron Leader, so he's got a bunch of ACEs underneath him, but share your perspective a day in the Life. Jennifer, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so I have actually a whole team that works for me both in the North America, both in the US and in Mexico. So I'm eagerly working to get them certified as well, so I can become a squad leader myself. But it's important because one of the critical gaps that we've found is people having the networking background because you graduate from college, and you have a lot of computer science background, you can program you've got Python, but networking in packets they just don't get. So, just taking them through all the processes that it's really necessary to understand when you're troubleshooting is really critical. Because you're going to get an issue where you need to figure out where exactly is that happening on the network, Is my issue just in the VPCs? Is it on the instance side is a security group, or is it going on prem? This is something actually embedded within Amazon itself? I mean, I troubleshot an issue for about six months going back and forth with Amazon, and it was the VGW VPN. Because they were auto scaling on two sides, and we ended up having to pull out the Cisco's, and put in Aviatrix so I could just say, " okay, it's fixed," and actually helped the application teams get to that and get it solved. But I'm taking a lot of junior people and getting them through that certification process, so they can understand and see the network, the way I see the network. I mean, look, I've been doing this for 25 years when I got out. When I went in the Marine Corps, that's what I did, and coming out, the network is still the network. But people don't get the same training they got in the 90s. >> Was just so easy, just write some software, and they were, takes care of itself. I know, it's pixie dust.  >> I'll come back to that, I want to come back to that, the problem solved with Amazon, but Toby. >> I think the only thing I have to add to that is that it's always the network's fault. As long as I've been in networking, it's always been the network's fault. I'm even to this day, it's still the network's fault, and part of being a network guy is that you need to prove when it is and when it's not your fault. That means you need to know a little bit about 100 different things, to make that work. >> Now you got a full stack DevOps, you got to know a lot more times another hundred. >> Toby: And the times are changing, yeah. >> This year the Squadron Leader and get that right. What is the Squadron Leader firstly? Describe what it is. >> I think is probably just leading on the network components of it. But I think, from my perspective, when to think about what you asked them was, it's about no issues and no escalations. So of my day is like that, I'm happy to be a squadron leader. >> That is a good outcome, that's a good day. >> Yeah, sure, it is. >> Is there good days? You said you had a good day with Amazon? Jennifer, you mentioned the Amazon, and this brings up a good point, when you have these new waves come in, you have a lot of new things, new use cases. A lot of the finger pointing it's that guy's problem , that girl's problems, so how do you solve that, and how do you get the Young Guns up to speed? Is there training, is it this where the certification comes in? >> This is where the certifications really going to come in. I know when we got together at Reinvent, one of the questions that we had with Steve and the team was, what should our certification look like? Should we just be teaching about what AVH troubleshooting brings to bear, but what should that be like? I think Toby and I were like, No, no, no, no. That's going a little too high, we need to get really low because the better someone can get at actually understanding what's actually happening in the network, and where to actually troubleshoot the problem, how to step back each of those processes. Because without that, it's just a big black box, and they don't know. Because everything is abstracted, in Amazon and in Azure and in Google, is abstracted, and they have these virtual gateways, they have VPNs, that you just don't have the logs on, is you just don't know. So then what tools can you put in front of them of where they can look? Because there are full logs. Well, as long as they turned on the flow logs when they built it, and there's like, each one of those little things that well, if they'd had decided to do that, when they built it, it's there. But if you can come in later to really supplement that with training to actual troubleshoot, and do a packet capture here, as it's going through, then teaching them how to read that even. >> Yeah, Toby, we were talking before we came on up on stage about your career, you've been networking all your time, and then, you're now mentoring a lot of younger people. How is that going? Because the people who come in fresh they don't have all the old war stories, like they don't talk about it, There's never for, I walk in bare feet in the snow when I was your age, I mean, it's so easy now, right, they say. What's your take on how you train the young People. >> So I've noticed two things. One is that they are up to speed a lot faster in generalities of networking. They can tell you what a network is in high school level now, where I didn't learn that til midway through my career, and they're learning it faster, but they don't necessarily understand why it's that way here. Everybody thinks that it's always slash 24 for a subnet, and they don't understand why you can break it down smaller, why it's really necessary. So the ramp up speed is much faster for these guys that are coming in. But they don't understand why and they need some of that background knowledge to see where it's coming from, and why is it important, and that's old guys, that's where we thrive. >> Jennifer, you mentioned you got in from the Marines, it helps, but when you got into networking, what was it like then and compare it now? Because most like we heard earlier static versus dynamic Don't be static is like that. You just set the network, you got a perimeter. >> Yeah, no, there was no such thing. So back in the day, I mean, we had Banyan vines for email, and we had token ring, and I had to set up token ring networks and figure out why that didn't work. Because how many of things were actually sharing it. But then actually just cutting fiber and running fiber cables and dropping them over shelters to plug them in and all crap, they swung it too hard and shattered it and now I got to figure eight Polish this thing and actually should like to see if it works. I mean, that was the network , current cat five cables to run an Ethernet, and then from that I just said, network switches, dumb switches, like those were the most common ones you had. Then actually configuring routers and logging into a Cisco router and actually knowing how to configure that. It was funny because I had gone all the way up, I was the software product manager for a while. So I've gone all the way up the stack, and then two and a half, three years ago, I came across to work with Entity group that became Viqtor Davis. But we went to help one of our customers Avis, and it was like, okay, so we need to fix the network. Okay, I haven't done this in 20 years, but all right, let's get to it. Because it really fundamentally does not change. It's still the network. I mean, I've had people tell me, Well, when we go to containers, we will not have to worry about the network. And I'm like, yeah, you don't I do. >> And that's within programmability is a really interesting, so I think this brings up the certification. What are some of the new things that people should be aware of that come in with the Aviatrix A certification? What are some of the highlights? Can you guys share some of the highlights around the certifications? >> I think some of the importance is that it doesn't need to be vendor specific for network generality or basic networking knowledge, and instead of learning how Cisco does something, or how Palo Alto does something, We need to understand how and why it works as a basic model, and then understand how each vendor has gone about that problem and solved it in a general. That's true in multicloud as well. You can't learn how Cloud networking works without understanding how AWS and Azure and GCP are all slightly the same but slightly different, and some things work and some things don't. I think that's probably the number one take. >> I think having a certification across Clouds is really valuable because we heard the global s eyes as you have a business issues. What does it mean to do that? Is it code, is it networking? Is it configurations of the Aviatrix? what is, he says,the certification but, what is it about the multiCloud that makes it multi networking and multi vendor? >> The easy answer is yes, >> Yes is all of us. >> All of us. So you got to be in general what's good your hands and all You have to be. Right, it takes experience. Because every Cloud vendor has their own certification. Whether that's SOPs and advanced networking and event security, or whatever it might be, yeah, they can take the test, but they have no idea how to figure out what's wrong with that system. The same thing with any certification, but it's really getting your hands in there, and actually having to troubleshoot the problems, actually work the problem, and calm down. It's going to be okay. I mean, because I don't know how many calls I've been on or even had aviators join me on. It's like, okay, so everyone calm down, let's figure out what's happening. It's like, we've looked at that screen three times, looking at it again is not going to solve that problem, right. But at the same time, remaining calm but knowing that it really is, I'm getting a packet from here to go over here, it's not working, so what could be the problem? Actually stepping them through those scenarios, but that's like, you only get that by having to do it, and seeing it, and going through it, and then you get it. >> I have a question, so, I just see it. We started this program maybe six months ago, we're seeing a huge amount of interest. I mean, we're oversubscribed on all the training sessions. We've got people flying from around the country, even with Coronavirus, flying to go to Seattle to go to these events where we're subscribed, is that-- >> A good emerging leader would put there. >> Yeah. So, is that something that you see in your organizations? Are you recommending that to people? Do you see, I mean, I'm just, I guess I'm surprised or not surprised. But I'm really surprised by the demand if you would, of this MultiCloud network certification because there really isn't anything like that. Is that something you guys can comment on? Or do you see the same things in your organization? >> I see from my side, because we operate in a multiCloud environments that really helps and some beneficial for us. >> Yeah, true. I think I would add that networking guys have always needed to use certifications to prove that they know what they know. >> Right. >> It's not good enough to say, Yeah, I know IP addresses or I know how a network works. A couple little check marks or a little letters body writing helps give you validity. So even in our team, we can say, Hey, we're using these certifications to know that you know enough of the basics and enough of the understandings, that you have the tools necessary, right. >> I guess my final question for you guys is, why an ACE certification is relevant, and then second part is share with the live stream folks who aren't yet ACE certified or might want to jump in to be aviatrix certified engineers. Why is it important, so why is it relevant and why should someone want to be a certified aviatrix certified engineer? >> I think my views a little different. I think certification comes from proving that you have the knowledge, not proving that you get a certification to get an army there backwards. So when you've got the training and the understanding and you use that to prove and you can, like, grow your certification list with it, versus studying for a test to get a certification and have no understanding of it. >> Okay, so that who is the right person that look at this and say, I'm qualified, is it a network engineer, is it a DevOps person? What's your view, a little certain. >> I think Cloud is really the answer. It's the, as we talked like the edges getting eroded, so is the network definition getting eroded? We're getting more and more of some network, some DevOps, some security, lots and lots of security, because network is so involved in so many of them. That's just the next progression. >> Do you want to add something there? >> I would say expand that to more automation engineers, because we have those now, so I probably extend it beyond this one. >> Jennifer you want to? >> Well, I think the training classes themselves are helpful, especially the entry level ones for people who may be "Cloud architects" but have never done anything in networking for them to understand why we need those things to really work, whether or not they go through to eventually get a certification is something different. But I really think fundamentally understanding how these things work, it makes them a better architect, makes them better application developer. But even more so as you deploy more of your applications into the Cloud, really getting an understanding, even from people who have traditionally done Onprem networking, they can understand how that's going to work in Cloud. >> Well, I know we've got just under 30 seconds left. I want to get one more question then just one more, for the folks watching that are maybe younger than, that don't have that networking training. From your experiences each of you can answer why should they know about networking, what's the benefit? What's in it for them? Motivate them, share some insights of why they should go a little bit deeper in networking. Stacy, we'll start with you, we'll go then. >> I'll say it's probably fundamental, right? If you want to deliver solutions, networking is the very top. >> I would say if you, fundamental of an operating system running on a machine, how those machines start together is a fundamental changes, something that start from the base and work your way up. >> Jennifer? >> Right, well, I think it's a challenge. Because you've come from top down, now you're going to start looking from bottom up, and you want those different systems to cross-communicate, and say you've built something, and you're overlapping IP space, note that that doesn't happen. But how can I actually make that still operate without having to re IP re platform. Just like those challenges, like those younger developers or assistant engineers can really start to get their hands around and understand those complexities and bring that forward in their career. >> They get to know then how the pipes are working, and they're got to know it--it's the plumbing. >> That's right, >> They got to know how it works, and how to code it. >> That's right. >> Awesome, thank you guys for great insights, ACE Certified Engineers, also known as ACEs, give them a round of applause. (audience clapping) (upbeat music) >> Thank you, okay. All right, that concludes my portion. Thank you, Steve Thanks for having me. >> John, thank you very much, that was fantastic. Everybody round of applause for John Furrier. (audience applauding) Yeah, so great event, great event. I'm not going to take long, we got lunch outside for the people here, just a couple of things. Just to call the action, right? So we saw the ACEs, for those of you out of the stream here, become a certified, right, it's great for your career, it's great for not knowledge, is fantastic. It's not just an aviator's thing, it's going to teach you about Cloud networking, MultiCloud networking, with a little bit of aviatrix, exactly like the Cisco CCIE program was for IP network, that type of the thing, that's number one. Second thing is learning, right? So there's a link up there to join the community. Again like I started this, this is a community, this is the kickoff to this community, and it's a movement. So go to community.avh.com, starting a community of multiCloud. So get get trained, learn. I'd say the next thing is we're doing over 100 seminars across the United States and also starting into Europe soon, we will come out and we'll actually spend a couple hours and talk about architecture, and talk about those beginning things. For those of you on the livestream in here as well, we're coming to a city near you, go to one of those events, it's a great way to network with other people that are in the industry, as well as to start alone and get on that MultiCloud journey. Then I'd say the last thing is, we haven't talked a lot about what Aviatrix does here, and that's intentional. We want you leaving with wanting to know more, and schedule, get with us and schedule a multi hour architecture workshop session. So we sit down with customers, and we talk about where they're at in that journey, and more importantly, where they're going, and define that end state architecture from networking, computer, storage, everything. Everything you've heard today, everybody panel kept talking about architecture, talking about operations. Those are the types of things that we solve, we help you define that canonical architecture, that system architecture, that's yours. So many of our customers, they have three by five, plotted lucid charts, architecture drawings, and it's the customer name slash Aviatrix, network architecture, and they put it on their whiteboard. That's the most valuable thing they get from us. So this becomes their 20 year network architecture drawing that they don't do anything without talking to us and look at that architecture. That's what we do in these multi hour workshop sessions with customers, and that's super, super powerful. So if you're interested, definitely call us, and let's schedule that with our team. So anyway, I just want to thank everybody on the livestream. Thank everybody here. Hopefully it was it was very useful. I think it was, and Join the movement, and for those of you here, join us for lunch, and thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music)