[Music] hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube conversation from our outstanding studios in Palo Alto California got a great conversation today we're gonna be talking about some of the challenges and changes taking place in the MSP the managed service provider part of the marketplace made possible by software to find when SD Wang technologies and to do that we've got Alastair Johnson as a principal architect at nuage Networks here with us on the cube today Alastair welcome to the cube Thank You Peter it's great to be here so let's start corporate update nuage Networks what's going on well we've had a pretty good year so far a number of customers that we'll be announcing over the next few months that we've established this year in addition to the the major wins that I'm sure most of the markets familiar with over the last few years we're really seeing that in the managed services space that Sdn is gaining a lot of traction we're finding that particularly outside of North America but with increasing North American interest that enterprises are looking towards a managed SD wine service as opposed to doing it themselves going down the path of having a carrier come in and provide them with both connectivity and the service layer or looking at taking the service layer from a managed services provider and sourcing the connectivity themselves so this is an area that's especially fruitful and open for some significant innovation and innovation that's going to have enormous impact in how the market pays so let me let me run something by you so here's the observation I've made over the years that servers Moore's law meant that there was this kind of smooth growth and performance and even in software it would kind of followed Moore's law but network because of its because of the degree of interplay and natural integration amongst the components there was always this kind of weird step function where every four or five years the big telecommunications companies our managed service providers would make major investments in their networks and you got this very rough course odd step function and that sometimes scared some of these companies away from participating in all the innovation of the cloud have I got that right absolutely I mean the tradition of having both your service layer and your transport layer being coupled you know an IP Network is offering both the IP transport but also the services like MPLS VPNs or layer 2 VPNs has meant that you know the tech lifecycle became relatively long the process to qualify deploy managed and then eventually automate services and the delivery of those services took a long time Sdn has presented a really interesting opportunity for the carrier's as long along with the broader audience in the industry to really leverage software and the frequency of updates the software can give you without needing to make those hardware changes at the same time so you can still do the hardware changes but you get a smoother upward innovation curve absolutely so the underlying transport platforms the routers the DWDM systems etc those can be changed as needed to buy capacity demands or vendor changes or new technology that comes out in those spaces but we can use Sdn or in this case st wan to smooth out the service offering on the top and as it becomes a software delivered function we can upgrade that much faster and we can roll it out much more like we update our you know cell phones our tablets etc and introduce new functionality into the service layer much faster than we were able to do in the past where we had a very much a hardware coupled service offering now I made a comment that in many respects some of the big telecommunications companies some of the beginner Spees have not participated in this explosive innovation that's associated with the cloud and part of the reason is because when you think about cloud someone can say I can think of a new service and then they can create it and deploy because it's largely in software whereas a lot of the telecommunications MSP type companies go I get to give a new service but then they look around and they say oh the hardware's not ready and I don't wait for the hardware to be ready how does this notion of SD win and this software to find service layers start to alter the way that some of these big companies think about their underlying infrastructure cost structures how they think about automation how they go about competing for new services well well it's it becomes a very big competitive differentiator because you know I can be a carrier and I can offer new services much faster a we touched on I'm getting a benefit of automation very quickly because Sdn was heavily around automating the configuration in the service elements and I can become a lot more cost-effective with that you know customers are looking for more self control more self management information Diagnostics tooling etc but without the overheads of running very large IT and network specialized personnel so the carrier's get that advantage the enterprise's get that advantage everyone is getting you know effectively a much more modern service experience we saw that with the cloud I guess revolution if you want to put it that way that you know I no longer needed to order a server put it in a rack deploy an operating system put my application on it take six months that changed with the cloud everyone understands that the network layer did not change it's fast and that's where we saw Sdn and the data centers come along to address that problem that's what we're solving with sd1 as well so when we think about the relationship between big cloud players and some of these nm msps it is that we've got the big cloud pairs that are virtualizing everything the msps are still kind of physically stuck but still have the vast majority of those last miles that are so crucial to having that end and productivity and compatibility absolutely does that start to change as we start to think about new wireless technologies how does SD LAN improve the MS Pease ability to both bring new automation and bri new but also introduced some of these new technologies that will bring make it easier to think cloud last-mile in the same breath well it's an interesting point I mean you could look at an MSP that has no lost mile infrastructure at all.they or maybe reselling a carriers infrastructure or procuring a full their enterprise customers now they have the ability to actually manage the service layer and they could be using carrier a today to reach the customers location but they strike a new deal tomorrow with carry a B and they can swap that customer over effectively changing the engines on the airplane in flight the customer experience doesn't change for the enterprise they're still getting the same Sdn service but maybe they swapped from DSL to cable as a transport or they've added an MPLS service to a new site as well for greater reliability so this allows the msps and the carriers to you know get services out to the customers faster decoupling it from whatever the last mile technology may be and this where there's opportunities for wireless you know we're seeing a lot of interest from enterprises to augment with LTE and in the future 5g as a backup connectivity to their sites particularly in retail I mean I'm sure in Silicon Valley you've seen everyone here is swiping your card on a tablet well you know you don't want that tablet to be offline it needs connectivity or they're not making money so making sure you have reliable connectivity with the same experience is a big deal for these enterprises and and they're msps but it's not becomes part of a coherent solution as opposed to I'm gonna do my cloud thing and I'm gonna do my MSP thing absolutely and so that's another area where we're seeing a lot of interest I mean even if I look at what our internal IT is doing which is you know we need to make sure that the cloud is part of our LAN and we need to make sure that we can you know drop an application in our private data center but have resources in our public infrastructure also using that and the experience for me sitting at my desk down the street from here is the same regardless of where that application is being accessed from all right the last thing I want to talk to you about Alastair is this this notion I have I'm going to test something by you and see if I if I got it right and if I can if I'm anticipating some of the changes over in C so a lot of people presume that the cloud was a one-way ticket to something centralized and big and that had an enormous impact on how people think about the cloud we actually think about the cloud as a strategy in the technology for more easily and coherently distributing data and distributing function to where it needs to be on location basis and in certain respects I can look at the cloud kind of as a network programming model where the some of those hybrid cloud services are they're being introduced by some of the big cloud players now are really almost a layer 7 they're providing some structure to the developer about how to think about building hybrid distributed applications now I want to test that does that resonate with you from a networking standpoint absolutely and again that's something we see a lot of interest in a reasonable amount of demand as enterprises and their internal developers are getting their heads around that concept that the application can live anywhere whether it be on premises at the branch data center or in the cloud and that cloud as you point out can be rightly geographically distributed and being able to be the network glue that binds all of those locations together allows the developer and the IT organization supporting that developer to have you know if the effect of a single fabric regardless of where the application or the user is seamlessly connecting them and so it also suggestions there's nothing on a test with you that that that we are it makes it possible to imagine greater specialization in what those distributed services look like especially from a networking perspective which means that if MSPs and big teller codes do successfully incorporate some of these technologies improve their automate ability their ability to think about the service and then deliver the service very rapidly then we could see them actually being able to pick up a sizeable piece of this cloud business because they can introduce services that are specialized with a network strong network affinity that have that build on that heritage of distribution of function absolutely and you see that today you know the carriers are already providing a valuable service connecting the enterprises to the cloud but that goes beyond in you know an SDN 2.0 model I need to move certain applications to the branch there's some things that always need to live there and as an IT manager I need to manage that networking effectively but I have applications that I want to have that are running you know in a very public cloud you know SAS applications etc and I want to give my users the most efficient path to them but I also have my private applications that it may be running in a public environment but I want to carry that as if it was part of my internal corporate one and being able to get that the from an enterprise you know services perspective from an MSP from a carrier that can bundle all of this together that's a huge advantage and a time-saving for me yeah the one other thing I'd say is that we're actually talking some very large enterprises right now that are discovering that their customers there their customers are demanding very concrete strict and well-documented notions of the capabilities that they provide and this idea of SD wine is making it easier for them to sell services in to companies that want that digital interface that highly competent working digital interface absolutely so it's what last thing is we think about where this is going is there any technology on the horizon that you think Sdn is going to make easier to deploy or that's gonna make SD went that much more important oh that's an interesting question and I think as you know the ongoing digital transformation of business happens you know we're connectivity is more important than ever making sure it's reliable and available and that the user experience regardless of what type of site I'm visiting as a you know an enterprise employee making sure that you know my telephony works that my can access my documents that my R&D teams can span the globe that is a key requirement of today's enterprise at Nokia that's how we need to work internally and that's how we do work I travel around the world visit our offices my experience is seamless in the same and that I think is where Sdn is bringing a huge amount of automation value security in many cases and tell you some great anecdotes that we found in the Sdn world there and just the management and control layer well let's save another cube conversation to talk about those security antidotes well but this is Peterborough's we've been talking to Alastair Johnson who's a principal architect at nuage networks about the potential for SD when to increase the relevance of MSPs telecom providers in a marketplace that is being dominated by the cloud experience and how greater automation leads to improve service opportunities for a lot of customers and a lot of cloud related service providers Alastair thanks very much for being on the cube thanks Peter and once again on Peter Burris and you've been watching another cube conversation until next time [Music] you