from the cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu mana man and welcome to a special cube conversation talking to leaders around the globe happy to welcome to the program two guests actually one is a cube alumni the other one I believe the first time on the program the Khan brothers I have a mirror and on TIFF so gentlemen thanks so much for joining us oh thank you for having us again yeah so here you know you and your brother you're coming out of stealth al Kyra is the company you two both work together at many companies we know you most recently from Katella we're a mirror you know we've spoken with you on the cube I believe right after that acquisition proc it was another company back in the day also happened to sell to Cisco but we know that you know networking is one of the you know toughest things in our industry now everybody thinks that their environment is is something challenging but you know we know networking in the weeds there's so many protocols and while networking as a whole doesn't change really fast there have been a lot of waves of change happening most recently of course cloud having a major impact on what's happening to the networking world Amir let's start with you you're the CEO your brother a tip is the CTO you're both co-founders give us a little bit of the background and the why of Al Kyra yes but after we sold patella I was looking for the next idea and we talked to multiple customers and multiple service providers a common theme that came across was the cloud networking was complex and when it came to multiple clouds it became exponentially complex it was not only learning multiple clouds but all the underlying constructs were different in each one of us so we decided that we need to take a look at a common solution which provides one way of connecting to all clouds that exist out there and provides common services like firewall and then from the governance perspective it becomes very challenging if you have very diverse environments so we are bringing analytics a common way of monitoring and managing the networks on top of that so it's a very comprehensive solution that the industry needed and they needed it as a service so we we dug deeper and came up with this idea went to the VCS and got funded very quickly to solve the problem and very proud to say that we are the first ones were in the industry for bringing computer networking as a service for multi cloud environments to the market all right now that's a that's a big vision and definitely something you know we hear from talking to customers you know absolutely multi-cloud most of the people there trying to figure out exactly what that means to their cuspid to their companies as well as it is not simple today aught if I want to pull you in you know we've seen you know many you know groups of talented you know development engine developers and engineers sometimes they try Ville in packs so when you look at you know what Amir just talked about the challenge in front of you give our audience a little bit of the understanding of you know the history of what you've been working on and is this you know a you know just turning the crank based on the latest and greatest technologies is that the coming together of some of the pieces that you've been thinking about for many years you know help us under the hood a little bit as to you know that this problem and the talents and what you're moving forward with for the last many many years both Amma and myself and other team are other team members we've been working on large customer networks whether those are service provider networks or whether those are enterprise networks so we have a deep understanding of the challenges they have based over over time so and now as I mentioned customers are transitioning to public clouds they are transitioning to SAS environments and there are a lot of challenges with which they are running into so we decided to take this challenge on and we brought together like a stellar team we have people who joined us from from botella as well as people from other large organizations they've been working on we have people from AWS we have people from Azure via people from other large companies so we have put together a great team we are very well funded and as I mentioned our approach has always always been to work with customers always understand their pain points and solve the real issues which which are having so that's approach we took and that's what we are doing here Adele here yeah so I did if I want to dig down a little bit more and actually we've got a slide I think you'll talk to because we know in networking a lot of the words sound the same you know is this an overlay I'm your said that at the service what gets deployed where is it what are the customers need to do where does this all live so if you could explain this this this diagram here for our audience so what the buildings do is a is a service and it's a cloud services exchange if you look at it and what it is comprised off is east cloud exchange points you can think of these as virtual pops and virtual polos and you can you can decide which region in the world or on the globe you want the DC X is to be spun up you come to our portal since it's consumed as a service you decide like what needs to reside on the CX PS which networking services you need there you can bring your own services or you can consume LTS services and when I talk about services or when I say services these can mean security services other networking services such as load balancers ipam DDI whatnot from the EC XPS you're gonna connect to multiple pounds from here without you as as Enterprise know without you knowing need to know anything about the underlying cloud providers networking concerts so all you do is you give us the requirements you say that you need to connect to this cloud this this is your appointment and we we do it for you so what basically what we are doing is we are virtualizing the clouds networks it's a so in the past we virtualize the when in our previous company and patella if you look at it it's virtualizing plan over different types of transports here we are virtualizing cloud it doesn't matter which public clouds you're sitting on which public cloud you need to connect to you know one service to consume you know one way of doing about networking great III that diagram definitely helped me a lot Amir let's talk my understanding you've got some customers what are some of the early things that they're using this for is this you know hybrid cloud going from their data center to a public cloud we talked about multi cloud does that mean we're actually connecting services between some of the public clouds help us understand what what your customers are seeing and starting to use it's a very interesting questions too we've been talking to multiple customers that we said and without a doubt every single customer that we are talking to has some sort of a multi cloud strategy and the reasons for them to get into multiple clouds could be either their some teams are using some applications which are optimized for a particle cloud one of the customers that we went to they were using one cloud and then acquired a company because of which you know another cloud was brought into the environment so all of a sudden they have a need to very quickly you know integrate those two environments and then there are you know with what's going on in the market today people are going to remote access requirements you know people are working from home and they need to get onto the network very quickly and consume applications which scale much better in the cloud so there's a demand from that perspective right so and in some cases one company becomes let's say Amazon becomes a competitor somewhere and people want to move to another cloud that could be another alternative right so so without fail many people are you know getting into cloud environments and the primary reason that I'm hearing now that many more companies will move into the cloud is going to be regulatory issues right so people are starting to think about pushing all the financial companies the healthcare companies to adopt multiple clouds for redundancy for high availability etc yeah you bring up a great point one of the questions we've been asking for the last couple of years is how is multi-cloud the same or different from what we used to see with multi-vendor aught if you know I think back to you go back you know 10 15 20 years ago and some of the M&A discussions that Omer was talking about you know you know I buy another company Oh what are they doing for their network well throw out their whole network and let's standardize on the vendor of choice that we have because it's better if I can go homogeneous well it's not as easy to do that in the public cloud so help us understand you know it's not as easy as that saying oh all these clouds they have API is they all use similar type type of abstractions and the like you know where does Al Kira really help make things easy for customers when they're when they're doing multi cloud so you know every cloud is doing things differently when it comes to networking so yeah at the end of the day functionality might be the same but how to achieve that how to get that working it's very different between each plug so now what we are seeing with these enterprises is that they have to build a deep understanding of each cloud before they can take on that cloud and nowadays cloud architects are in big demand they don't come cheap either so you don't necessarily just need the personal cloud architect with expertise in one account you need like architects with the expertise and multiple thoughts so so we wanted to solve that problem that's why we took this challenge on and we wanted to make it a make it one way of working with all these clouds so from a cloud architects perspective from a enterprises perspective why can't there be just one way of connecting to all these clouds why do I have to know the details of each cloud as armor said each cloud spring brings its own own its own value in different ways and there is a multi cloud strategy out there so either customers are in multiple pounds or they're looking at at multiple doubt so that's that's a big challenge right now and since what we are offering is as a service it's a unified global multi cloud network and again we're virtualizing the cloud network all right Amir you mentioned early on in the conversation that Acura is well funded you've got Sequoia and kleiner perkins as two of your investors you know definitely companies that look closely and understand the networking space help us understand the basics of the company though coming out of stealth right now is the product available where is it available you know where are you with with customer and deployments certainly we are making our product available on April 15 and many customers are trying it right now they're in the process of deploying it in production these are across industries healthcare manufacturing high-tech you know financial industries so customers span across multiple different verticals in addition to that many service providers are working with us to offer this to extend their capabilities into the cloud so many service providers have been struggling with that and this makes it very easy for them to complement their private connectivity solutions and extend their reach deeper into the cloud so the industry is very excited right now and we are excited because this is an opportunity you know which the cloud migration has brought to the table from networking perspective and if we had thought about it 10 years ago 20 years ago it was just not possible and now we have this capability in the clouds to offer in lastik capabilities do not only provide connectivity but but integrate the services like firewalls scale them up and down and provide proper governance yeah you bring up such a such a big point there I talked before about multi vendor and today you know the network team it's not just oh well I touch all of the gear that I manage as you said it's the service providers public clouds they need to span all those environments we've definitely seen a huge shift in service riders and their relationships with the public cloud over the last five years or so atif I guess that brings up a the important point here who's gonna be managing all this when it comes to a Keira is this the traditional Network person if they've been you know doing land maybe a little bit of an are they going to be doing it is the cloud team you know where does this sit in the you know conversation and jostling of roles that we're seeing as organizations are more and more embracing public cloud so it's Stu it's still a networking solution so what we are seeing working with our customers is that it's a it's a cloud architects who are were very excited when they see our solution now they can see that the network can can can show the same agility which they have been very they're being seen with with compute and storage and and rest of the stuff moving into the cloud so network was always like behind it took a lot lot of effort a lot of work to get the network to extend into clouds meeting all the all the enterprise requirements so now network architects are excited because they it's it's become very simple for them to to move into the cloud or extend their private connectivity into the club I'll give you an example we've been working with some large enterprises and they many of them they don't need to open up a manual or documentation to use our solution so our goal was always to make it so simple that anyone should be able to connect to a cloud without knowing anything about the networking constructs of a given cloud so you just come in you should just be able to give us the requirements that you need need this much capacity you need this much throughput you need B services to front-end the clouds these are your security policies which are global and you need like a multi global transport or global network a multi-level network and you should be able to just bring it up and you should on you should not need like certifications in cloud networking or certifications in using tools to orchestrate cloud connectivity so we are built a very scalable infrastructure which allows the customers to get a service from us or use our service which which meets the requirements all right I'd like to ask both of you you know it's April 2020 you're coming out of stealth you know I'm sure the product has you know all the features that your customers are asking for today but give us a look as we go through the kind of the next six to 12 months armor first from kind of a customer standpoint not if from the technology standpoint what should people be looking at both with your product how you're working with partners and you know really this multi cloud networking landscape our focus is on mid to large size enterprises and depending on which company you talk to their strategy varies to get into the cloud somewhere some are at a very early stage others have moved significant amount of workloads into into the cloud already the reality that we are seeing out there is that the hybrid environment is going to exist for a long long time and that's why we have built a solution which seamlessly integrates their existing wide area networking infrastructure to bring traffic into our solution and then we tie them seamlessly to the cloud and provide integrated services and Governors governance on top of that and they can define their own internal policies based on you know their enterprise needs so that's what we are seeing right now and going into the future I think that industry is going to continue to evolve it's still early the solutions will evolve quite a bit we have a first mover advantage to provide networking as a service and we are so excited to just continue to you know accelerate and help customers to migrate into the cloud as quickly as possible provided with the highest resiliency and security yes so from from a technology perspective as I said like we we believe in working with the customers and solving their use cases we are innovating at a very rapid pace and there are many many different use cases which which we are working on we have some of the use cases which we are which we have delivered so far where we are going out with a certain number of use cases and we will be adding more use cases as we as we go support support for more use cases and we support like all the major clouds right now we will be adding more clouds to our offering we offer a Marketplace on our portal as well so it's a it's a it's a cloud service with a built in marketplace of network services we will be expanding that marketplace as well with more services it's all based on the on the customer requirements and and we prioritize our offerings based on the requirements and there's a there's a lot of work ahead of us also it's just the beginning and as I said we are very excited to solve all these problems and make our customers successful excellent if you're a good setup for armors last slide here so we've got a slide here is that how do customers get started walk us through yeah as I have said we've our goal is to make it as simple as possible you know we live in a different world now where things change very very quickly but the customers just come to our portal they register or our service just like any other SAS based service they you know basically are taken to a canvas where they can draw their infrastructure drop services create policies within minutes and then you know across the globe and then click on the provision button and they can go and have coffee and the full infrastructure comes up literally in less than an hour as a matter of fact in many cases we have seen a comment in around half an hour across the globe this is the type of a solution or capability that the industry has never seen before in the industries we are very proud of bringing the solution to the market well congratulations both of you a lot of work goes into bringing a company to launch before I let you go I do have one last question you two are brothers you've worked together at a number of companies so you know give our audience but you know what it's like and you know what what keeps bringing you back to working together well we are very close family we've always you know you know studied together work together and many different companies we live about five minutes away from each other our kids hang out together we travel together so you know it's kind of interesting you know we've always had a very very close relation yeah this is this is a fifth company I guess where we are working together as he said like we have always worked together we have a we we have a same circle of friends also so so we have very very close to each other so yeah this is one of the best squash players in the country and nowadays he doesn't get much time but he was ranked in the top three for a long time in amateurs in the country well that is awesome well hopefully you know you get to get a little bit of break you know once the company goes into spell they know a lot of work moving forward but I'm Erin atif congratulations and thank you so much for joining us to announce coming out of stealth thank you thank you for having us thank you it's a pleasure to talk to you alright and we definitely look forward to tracking al Kyra in the future as that they move forward with adoption with their customers and their solution I'm still minimun and as always thank you for watching the queue [Music]