(upbeat digital music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another, theCUBE Conversation. This week, we're in our Palo Alto studios, with Saurabh Sandhir. Saurabh is the Vice President of Product Management at Nuage Networks, which is a Nokia company. >> That's right. >> Saurabh, thank you very much for being here today. >> Thank you, Peter. Happy to be here. >> So, tell us a little bit about Let's start off. Tell us a little bit about Nuage Network. It's a new company out of a big company. What's the focus, how is Nokia helping? >> So, Nuage, well, while it's new but it's not quite new, we have been in the market for four years, and the way Nuage started was it was part of Alcatel-Lucent earlier, and now a part of Nokia, we are really the SDN BU or the SDN arm of Nokia. What we are focused on from the beginning is building a platform for secure, automated, connectivity for out data centers as well as WAN. And we have built that platform and successfully introduced it in many enterprises and service providers. So the unique aspect of Nuage is while in terms of innovation, while in terms of global market, we work as a start-up. While we have the service and support that's offered by Nokia as a mother ship so I have the unique, best in both worlds combination of a start-up as well as a large company. >> Nokia is still regarded as one of the finest brands in enterprise networking in the world. So, you said SD-WAN, software defined, wide area networking. >> Correct. It's a term that a lot of people have heard something about, but what are some of the high level benefits, number one, and then number two, why right now? >> Right. If you look at how enterprise connectivity services were offered down the ages, it was, you had to get some kind of a VPN access, whether it was an MPLS or a VPLS access, you got a dedicated leased line, you got a specific device, and that's how you would connect your enterprise branches to the network, and to each other. And SD-WAN, what it does, is it changes that paradigm. It provides secure automated connectivity in line with cloud principles for enterprises across the board. And in terms of why now, I think it is the combination of factors that arise from how the modern enterprise is evolving, and how there is a need to deliver, not just connectivity, but IT services over IP, whether it is access to the public cloud, whether it is access to SAS applications like Office 365, or Skype, or whether it is the fact that you want, not just pure connectivity, but you want application aware connectivity. All those trends coming together have created the demand, and the need for SD-WAN. >> So, you mentioned the cloud principles, and that has been a dominant feature of the industry. We call it the cloud experience, and the cloud experience is typically associated with abstracting and virtualizing hardware. So, in many respects what we're talking about is bringing that same class of technology to the wide area network, the circuits, the access points, everything else, by having a software defined experience that allows the business to rapidly re-configure, based on what its needs, against the access to the underlying WAN network that it has. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely correct. What SDN-WAN basically does is, if you look at a traditional branch router, it has access to a particular type of network, MPLS or VPLS, it has a data plane, it has a control plane, as the management plane by which you configure it. What SD-WAN does is takes those control and management planes, puts it in the cloud, takes the data plane and sort of makes it agnostic to the access technology. So, you run the data service, irrespective of whether you are on internet, whether you are on LTE, whether you are on MPLS, and using those principles of centralized control, centralized management, standardized x86 based devices offering CP services, and voila, you get SD-WAN. That's exactly correct. >> So, I can see what the advantages to an enterprise are-- >> Yep. >> I can reconfigure my business faster-- >> Yep >> Especially business that's more digital in nature. But, is this going to be something that the service providers are going to embrace? >> Absolutely, absolutely. While the enterprise, and the reason for services providers to embrace this, is, for the existing customer this offers an up sale opportunity, for the people who are already on their VPN services, this is an opportunity to broaden the scope from just pure connectivity, this is an opportunity for them to access customers who were, where the cost to serve was to high. Where they just could not go because they were outside of their geographic reach, or outside of their existing business modeling or business plan. >> Or, for example, you might be a mid-size business that required a more expensive circuit, or maybe not quite a more expensive circuit. The cost of setting the circuit up, servicing that customer, et cetera, might have been to great. >> Absolutely, and that's what SD-WAN sort of provides, a level playing field. In some ways, what it does, is it delinks the service, which is the VPN service from the transport, and the transport can be Internet, can be MPLS, and there you have the benefits for the service provider, for the enterprise, in terms of agility, in terms of time to service, in terms of overall cost. >> But, that's inside the nature of telecommunications oriented services. Is SD-WAN going to make it easier for service providers to perhaps start moving into more value added, data oriented services, above just the traditional communication services? >> That is the holy grail. That is really where the service providers are going and that's where enterprises want them to go, and the reason for that is, today, when you look at what an enterprise branch, or an enterprise office needs to operate, there is connectivity, but, then also there is security services, be it firewall, intrusion detection system, intrusion protection system, URL filtering, anti-virus. Take it with on top of that, there is transport optimization, WAN optimization services. There is emergence of IoT, there are wi-fi controllers. All of these services to the enterprise are being offered as a stand alone appliance, virtual or physical, and there is no centralized control. They are extremely rigid, and all of these providers lock-in. What SD-WAN does is, from a tel-co or service provider perspective, is, it also offers a platform to provide all of these services on top of SD-WAN. So, the benefit, it's a symbiotic relationship in the sense that benefits are both towards the enterprise, because they get these services and the service agility. There is resource optimization, source utilization, and cost, and from a tele-co perspective, the ability to sell beyond connectivity. That's one. >> So, if I'm your counter part at a service provider, I can now think in terms bringing up new service, with cheaper connection, lower cost, lower risk, bringing the customer on board, onboarding. At least, if not better, security, et cetera, because, I'm now using software defined approach to making all those connections, and, also, managing the service itself. >> That is correct. What it allows me to do is, in that role, is to provide on demand programmable services. So, for example, a firewall, as an enterprise I can go to a service provider portal and select which of my sites need, which of my branch sites need, firewall at what point in time. What kind of resources I want to assign to that firewall, and voila, on demand, I have it in place. And from a service provider's perspective, it's additional revenue, it's additional services. >> It's a software defined firewall, and it's much more automated, and much better organized, because it brings all the possibilities of software defined automation, which might include some machine learning, pattern recognition, et cetera, to bear on the wide area network world. >> That's correct, that's correct. >> Alright, so, we've talked a bit about security itself. What are, can you just give us one or two clear differences in how the old world handled security, and the software defined world's going to to handle security in the WAN regime. >> Right, so, the thing with security is, the security paradigm has changed massively. In the old world, which wasn't that old-- >> Peter: It's still here in many respects. >> Still here, absolutely, still here. The security was all about east west, sorry, north south protection, which means that you are protecting towards threats and traffic coming inside and going outside of data center or your branch office, but what has happened, is most of the threats today, most of the attacks today, are focused on east west traffic, which is traffic within branches, from one branch to the other, within the data center itself. That's one. The second aspect is there a multi-cloud aspect to the enterprise IT. You don't access application only on the branch itself. Your applications that run in a data center that's owned by you, private DC, you run application that in a public cloud, AWS Azure, you have access to applications that are offered as software as a service, be it Office 365, Skype, Salesforce, and so on, and that has fundamentally changed the threat surface, or the threat perimeter, that you have to deal with, and you have to now essentially deal with threats that are coming within this whole expanded branch, or enterprise, territory or perimeter. >> So, you're effectively by virtualizing all of these different elements, you're reducing the threat surface. >> Yeah, what we are doing with SD-WAN is a few things. First, and foremost, is the fact that, as you were talking about, these value added services, you can bring these up on demand. You can put a firewall at a particular branch location, for say, guest wi-fi traffic. You can be specific. >> On this point, you can bring a new service up and not have it immediately associated with a whole bunch of capital expense. >> Exactly, exactly. On demand programmable, right, that's one. The second thing is the aspect of PAN network visibility. You also have the ability to see what exactly is going on in your network, the network that's spread across the branch office, a private data center, a public cloud site, and you have full visibility and insight into who's talking to whom, and at what time. >> Peter: At scale. >> At scale. >> Very very big and very small and we know that there's a whole bunch of mid-size companies that can't afford a NOC type of capability, but, now through >> Yep SD-WAN they get some of the same benefits that the big guys get. >> Absolutely, and the threat aspect here is, using this information, you have closed loop automation, or machine learning, where, as opposed to saying all of my traffic has to go through this possible intrusion detection function, because, once in six months I might have a attack, versus, I see abnormal traffic pattern, and the system automatically optimizes that particular traffic flow to go through this particular function, and that allows it to be much more scalable, that allows for much more on demand, in terms of how we perceive security. not just as a lock that needs to remain on a door at all possible points in time, but, a function that can be instantiated when you need it. >> But, I also got to believe, and test me, I'm going to test you, you tell me if I'm right on this, that the historical conversation between a service provider and an enterprise, centered on the characteristics of the circuits that were being provided. And those circuits were often very much grounded in hardware, associated with the specific links, et cetera. And if you ended up with a security problem, you're now having a whole bunch of haggling and a very complex set of interactions. The minute you bring SD-WAN in on that, now you're talking about being able to use software in a software response, not necessarily a hardware response, to being actually able to identify, mediate, contain, et cetera, security threats on the WAN. Have I got that right? >> Correct, correct. Earlier, the conversation was really in terms of providing a circuit, providing connectivity, and what you were doing was, you were providing this connectivity over some kind of a private IP. That's where you were as a service provider, that's what the service you were offering. Now, you expand that same paradigm with security, with access to cloud, to really offer IT services on top of the IP layer, and that's the fundamental difference, that's the change. >> That break apart between the service and the transport. >> Absolutely. >> So, I kind of said the old way, and you corrected me, and said, wait a minute, this is really the way we're, SD-WAN is trying to make changes, trying to affect a new way of thinking. But there is another technology on the horizon here that actually could really accelerate this process, and that's 5G. >> Mm-hmm >> We're not going to go to far out here, but, tell us what some of the near term, how 5G and SD-WAN are likely to co-evolve, if you will. >> Right, right. They're two sides of the same coin if you ask me, and the reason is, while 5G, as with all the mobile technologies in the past, as we went from 2G, to 3G, to 4G is about speeds and feeds, and absolutely, we'll have more band width, low latency, sure, but what 5G is also about is access to applications from, that is in the cloud, or reside whether closer to the users. And in that sense, what 5G stands out to do, or sets to do, is create network slices, and provide access for applications such as, self-driving cars, such as remote surgery. All of these applications, not just need speeds and feeds, but, require dedicated access all the way from the user, onto an application that runs in the data center. And if you look at that paradigm, how SD-WAN plays in this is by providing a programmable network, on demand services, by providing on demand resource allocation. If you take SD-WAN, if you take 5G, then SD-WAN becomes a component of 5G, because if you are a user, say, conducting remote surgery, and you need access to an application that's in the data center, SD-WAN allows you to provide that overlay network, on top of existing services, and there is a certain quality of service, with a guaranteed access, that is critical to 5G. >> But, as you said, it's a fact that 5G's going to promise such greater device density-- >> Right. >> Within a network-- >> Yes. >> And in many respects, you're going to need SD-WAN to honestly take advantage of the benefits that 5G is going to provide. You may not need 5G to take advantage >> Yup, right. of the SD-WAN benefits, but, you're going to need SD-WAN if you're going to to take advantage of 5G. >> Right. >> So, that kind of suggests, that the companies that start, the service providers, and the enterprises that start, early on this SD-WAN thing, are likely to be in the best position to reap the full benefits of 5G when it shows up. Have I got that right? >> I absolutely believe so, because at the end the day, 5G is all about application-aware networking, right. A remote surgery application versus me trying to access Facebook cannot be treated the same way, and that's where SD-WAN comes in. And especially if you combine SD-WAN with some other technologies that are coming out of a company such as Nokia, then you have a end-to-end traffic engineered path that is been created all the way from the user on to the backend data center that enables all these applications-- >> Coming back to the point about security, there is one group that hopes you treat your Facebook and your surgery data the same way, and that's the bad guys. >> Absolutely, and that's what we need to protect against. >> This is a fascinating subject, and it's going to be a lot of discussion and change over the course of the next few years, as multiple of these technologies co-evolve, but, it's pretty clear that SD-WAN has potential to further accelerate many of the changes that we're seeing in enterprises today as they try to become more digital in nature. >> Sure, SD-WAN is the future and it's here and now. >> Excellent. Once again, Sandhir, I'm sorry. Once again, So, you can cut this, I blew it. Sorry, Chuck. (laughing) Once again, Saurabh Sandhir, VP Product Management, Nuage Networks, an Nokia company, thanks for joining us here in this Cube Conversation. >> Thanks, Peter Thanks for your time. (upbeat digital music)

(upbeat digital music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another, theCUBE Conversation. This week, we're in our Palo Alto studios, with Saurabh Sandhir. Saurabh is the Vice President of Product Management at Nuage Networks, which is a Nokia company. >> That's right. >> Saurabh, thank you very much for being here today. >> Thank you, Peter. Happy to be here. >> So, tell us a little bit about Let's start off. Tell us a little bit about Nuage Network. It's a new company out of a big company. What's the focus, how is Nokia helping? >> So, Nuage, well, while it's new but it's not quite new, we have been in the market for four years, and the way Nuage started was it was part of Alcatel-Lucent earlier, and now a part of Nokia, we are really the SDN BU or the SDN arm of Nokia. What we are focused on from the beginning is building a platform for secure, automated, connectivity for out data centers as well as WAN. And we have built that platform and successfully introduced it in many enterprises and service providers. So the unique aspect of Nuage is while in terms of innovation, while in terms of global market, we work as a start-up. While we have the service and support that's offered by Nokia as a mother ship so I have the unique, best in both worlds combination of a start-up as well as a large company. >> Nokia is still regarded as one of the finest brands in enterprise networking in the world. So, you said SD-WAN, software defined, wide area networking. >> Correct. It's a term that a lot of people have heard something about, but what are some of the high level benefits, number one, and then number two, why right now? >> Right. If you look at how enterprise connectivity services were offered down the ages, it was, you had to get some kind of a VPN access, whether it was an MPLS or a VPLS access, you got a dedicated leased line, you got a specific device, and that's how you would connect your enterprise branches to the network, and to each other. And SD-WAN, what it does, is it changes that paradigm. It provides secure automated connectivity in line with cloud principles for enterprises across the board. And in terms of why now, I think it is the combination of factors that arise from how the modern enterprise is evolving, and how there is a need to deliver, not just connectivity, but IT services over IP, whether it is access to the public cloud, whether it is access to SAS applications like Office 365, or Skype, or whether it is the fact that you want, not just pure connectivity, but you want application aware connectivity. All those trends coming together have created the demand, and the need for SD-WAN. >> So, you mentioned the cloud principles, and that has been a dominant feature of the industry. We call it the cloud experience, and the cloud experience is typically associated with abstracting and virtualizing hardware. So, in many respects what we're talking about is bringing that same class of technology to the wide area network, the circuits, the access points, everything else, by having a software defined experience that allows the business to rapidly re-configure, based on what its needs, against the access to the underlying WAN network that it has. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely correct. What SDN-WAN basically does is, if you look at a traditional branch router, it has access to a particular type of network, MPLS or VPLS, it has a data plane, it has a control plane, as the management plane by which you configure it. What SD-WAN does is takes those control and management planes, puts it in the cloud, takes the data plane and sort of makes it agnostic to the access technology. So, you run the data service, irrespective of whether you are on internet, whether you are on LTE, whether you are on MPLS, and using those principles of centralized control, centralized management, standardized x86 based devices offering CP services, and voila, you get SD-WAN. That's exactly correct. >> So, I can see what the advantages to an enterprise are-- >> Yep. >> I can reconfigure my business faster-- >> Yep >> Especially business that's more digital in nature. But, is this going to be something that the service providers are going to embrace? >> Absolutely, absolutely. While the enterprise, and the reason for services providers to embrace this, is, for the existing customer this offers an up sale opportunity, for the people who are already on their VPN services, this is an opportunity to broaden the scope from just pure connectivity, this is an opportunity for them to access customers who were, where the cost to serve was to high. Where they just could not go because they were outside of their geographic reach, or outside of their existing business modeling or business plan. >> Or, for example, you might be a mid-size business that required a more expensive circuit, or maybe not quite a more expensive circuit. The cost of setting the circuit up, servicing that customer, et cetera, might have been to great. >> Absolutely, and that's what SD-WAN sort of provides, a level playing field. In some ways, what it does, is it delinks the service, which is the VPN service from the transport, and the transport can be Internet, can be MPLS, and there you have the benefits for the service provider, for the enterprise, in terms of agility, in terms of time to service, in terms of overall cost. >> But, that's inside the nature of telecommunications oriented services. Is SD-WAN going to make it easier for service providers to perhaps start moving into more value added, data oriented services, above just the traditional communication services? >> That is the holy grail. That is really where the service providers are going and that's where enterprises want them to go, and the reason for that is, today, when you look at what an enterprise branch, or an enterprise office needs to operate, there is connectivity, but, then also there is security services, be it firewall, intrusion detection system, intrusion protection system, URL filtering, anti-virus. Take it with on top of that, there is transport optimization, WAN optimization services. There is emergence of IoT, there are wi-fi controllers. All of these services to the enterprise are being offered as a stand alone appliance, virtual or physical, and there is no centralized control. They are extremely rigid, and all of these providers lock-in. What SD-WAN does is, from a tel-co or service provider perspective, is, it also offers a platform to provide all of these services on top of SD-WAN. So, the benefit, it's a symbiotic relationship in the sense that benefits are both towards the enterprise, because they get these services and the service agility. There is resource optimization, source utilization, and cost, and from a tele-co perspective, the ability to sell beyond connectivity. That's one. >> So, if I'm your counter part at a service provider, I can now think in terms bringing up new service, with cheaper connection, lower cost, lower risk, bringing the customer on board, onboarding. At least, if not better, security, et cetera, because, I'm now using software defined approach to making all those connections, and, also, managing the service itself. >> That is correct. What it allows me to do is, in that role, is to provide on demand programmable services. So, for example, a firewall, as an enterprise I can go to a service provider portal and select which of my sites need, which of my branch sites need, firewall at what point in time. What kind of resources I want to assign to that firewall, and voila, on demand, I have it in place. And from a service provider's perspective, it's additional revenue, it's additional services. >> It's a software defined firewall, and it's much more automated, and much better organized, because it brings all the possibilities of software defined automation, which might include some machine learning, pattern recognition, et cetera, to bear on the wide area network world. >> That's correct, that's correct. >> Alright, so, we've talked a bit about security itself. What are, can you just give us one or two clear differences in how the old world handled security, and the software defined world's going to to handle security in the WAN regime. >> Right, so, the thing with security is, the security paradigm has changed massively. In the old world, which wasn't that old-- >> [Peter] It's still here in many respects. >> Still here, absolutely, still here. The security was all about east west, sorry, north south protection, which means that you are protecting towards threats and traffic coming inside and going outside of data center or your branch office, but what has happened, is most of the threats today, most of the attacks today, are focused on east west traffic, which is traffic within branches, from one branch to the other, within the data center itself. That's one. The second aspect is there a multi-cloud aspect to the enterprise IT. You don't access application only on the branch itself. Your applications that run in a data center that's owned by you, private DC, you run application that in a public cloud, AWS Azure, you have access to applications that are offered as software as a service, be it Office 365, Skype, Salesforce, and so on, and that has fundamentally changed the threat surface, or the threat perimeter, that you have to deal with, and you have to now essentially deal with threats that are coming within this whole expanded branch, or enterprise, territory or perimeter. >> So, you're effectively by virtualizing all of these different elements, you're reducing the threat surface. >> Yeah, what we are doing with SD-WAN is a few things. First, and foremost, is the fact that, as you were talking about, these value added services, you can bring these up on demand. You can put a firewall at a particular branch location, for say, guest wi-fi traffic. You can be specific. >> On this point, you can bring a new service up and not have it immediately associated with a whole bunch of capital expense. >> Exactly, exactly. On demand programmable, right, that's one. The second thing is the aspect of PAN network visibility. You also have the ability to see what exactly is going on in your network, the network that's spread across the branch office, a private data center, a public cloud site, and you have full visibility and insight into who's talking to whom, and at what time. >> [Peter] At scale. >> At scale. >> Very very big and very small and we know that there's a whole bunch of mid-size companies that can't afford a NOC type of capability, but, now through >> Yep SD-WAN they get some of the same benefits that the big guys get. >> Absolutely, and the threat aspect here is, using this information, you have closed loop automation, or machine learning, where, as opposed to saying all of my traffic has to go through this possible intrusion detection function, because, once in six months I might have a attack, versus, I see abnormal traffic pattern, and the system automatically optimizes that particular traffic flow to go through this particular function, and that allows it to be much more scalable, that allows for much more on demand, in terms of how we perceive security. not just as a lock that needs to remain on a door at all possible points in time, but, a function that can be instantiated when you need it. >> But, I also got to believe, and test me, I'm going to test you, you tell me if I'm right on this, that the historical conversation between a service provider and an enterprise, centered on the characteristics of the circuits that were being provided. And those circuits were often very much grounded in hardware, associated with the specific links, et cetera. And if you ended up with a security problem, you're now having a whole bunch of haggling and a very complex set of interactions. The minute you bring SD-WAN in on that, now you're talking about being able to use software in a software response, not necessarily a hardware response, to being actually able to identify, mediate, contain, et cetera, security threats on the WAN. Have I got that right? >> Correct, correct. Earlier, the conversation was really in terms of providing a circuit, providing connectivity, and what you were doing was, you were providing this connectivity over some kind of a private IP. That's where you were as a service provider, that's what the service you were offering. Now, you expand that same paradigm with security, with access to cloud, to really offer IT services on top of the IP layer, and that's the fundamental difference, that's the change. >> That break apart between the service and the transport. >> Absolutely. >> So, I kind of said the old way, and you corrected me, and said, wait a minute, this is really the way we're, SD-WAN is trying to make changes, trying to affect a new way of thinking. But there is another technology on the horizon here that actually could really accelerate this process, and that's 5G. >> Mm-hmm >> We're not going to go to far out here, but, tell us what some of the near term, how 5G and SD-WAN are likely to co-evolve, if you will. >> Right, right. They're two sides of the same coin if you ask me, and the reason is, while 5G, as with all the mobile technologies in the past, as we went from 2G, to 3G, to 4G is about speeds and feeds, and absolutely, we'll have more band width, low latency, sure, but what 5G is also about is access to applications from, that is in the cloud, or reside whether closer to the users. And in that sense, what 5G stands out to do, or sets to do, is create network slices, and provide access for applications such as, self-driving cars, such as remote surgery. All of these applications, not just need speeds and feeds, but, require dedicated access all the way from the user, onto an application that runs in the data center. And if you look at that paradigm, how SD-WAN plays in this is by providing a programmable network, on demand services, by providing on demand resource allocation. If you take SD-WAN, if you take 5G, then SD-WAN becomes a component of 5G, because if you are a user, say, conducting remote surgery, and you need access to an application that's in the data center, SD-WAN allows you to provide that overlay network, on top of existing services, and there is a certain quality of service, with a guaranteed access, that is critical to 5G. >> But, as you said, it's a fact that 5G's going to promise such greater device density-- >> Right. >> Within a network-- >> Yes. >> And in many respects, you're going to need SD-WAN to honestly take advantage of the benefits that 5G is going to provide. You may not need 5G to take advantage >> Yup, right. of the SD-WAN benefits, but, you're going to need SD-WAN if you're going to to take advantage of 5G. >> Right. >> So, that kind of suggests, that the companies that start, the service providers, and the enterprises that start, early on this SD-WAN thing, are likely to be in the best position to reap the full benefits of 5G when it shows up. Have I got that right? >> I absolutely believe so, because at the end the day, 5G is all about application-aware networking, right. A remote surgery application versus me trying to access Facebook cannot be treated the same way, and that's where SD-WAN comes in. And especially if you combine SD-WAN with some other technologies that are coming out of a company such as Nokia, then you have a end-to-end traffic engineered path that is been created all the way from the user on to the backend data center that enables all these applications-- >> Coming back to the point about security, there is one group that hopes you treat your Facebook and your surgery data the same way, and that's the bad guys. >> Absolutely, and that's what we need to protect against. >> This is a fascinating subject, and it's going to be a lot of discussion and change over the course of the next few years, as multiple of these technologies co-evolve, but, it's pretty clear that SD-WAN has potential to further accelerate many of the changes that we're seeing in enterprises today as they try to become more digital in nature. >> Sure, SD-WAN is the future and it's here and now. >> Excellent. Once again, Sandhir, I'm sorry. Once again, So, you can cut this, I blew it. Sorry, Chuck. (laughing) Once again, Saurabh Sandhir, VP Product Management, Nuage Networks, an Nokia company, thanks for joining us here in this Cube Conversation. >> Thanks, Peter Thanks for your time. (upbeat digital music)

(techy music playing) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBEConversation. I'm here with Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa, from our beautiful Palo Alto theCUBE Studios, and we're talking a bit about some of the trends and most importantly, some of the real business value reasons behind some of the new network virtualization technologies, but before we get there, Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself, how did you get here? >> Okay, thank you, Peter, thanks for having me in today. I am CEO of Pensa, I've been there for about six months, company's about three years old, so I joined them when a lot of the engineering work had already been done and I've been around the tech industry, mostly on the enterprise side, for a long time. I worked with Hewlett-Packard in a number of different roles, I worked at Dell, I worked at EMC and a number of startups. So, I've been through, you know, a lot of different transitions in tech, as you have, over the years, and got excited about this because I think we're on the cusp of a number of big transitions with some of the things that are coming down the road that make a company like Pensa really interesting and have a lot of potential. So, it's been a tremendous amount of fun working in startup land again. >> So, what does Pensa do? >> So, Pensa is a software company and again, we're based here in Mountain View. Most of our operations are here. We also have an engineering team over in India, and they're all people that are focused on networking technology. They have a long history there and what we do is help primarily service providers, you can think the classic telecommunications industry, but also other modern service providers, build modern networks. We're very focused on network functions, virtualization technology or NFE, which is about building network services that are highly flexible in software that you can deploy on industry standard server technologies, you know, kind of cloud native network service development as opposed to, you know, what many folks have done with hardware-based and siloed networking technologies in that industry for a really long time. So, what we help them do is use intelligent automation to make it easy to build those things in incredible combinations with a lot of complexity, but do it fast, do it correctly every time, and deliver those network services in a way that they can actually transform their businesses and develop new apps a lot faster than they could do otherwise. >> So, Tom, I got to tell you, I'm an analyst, I've been around for a long time and every so often someone comes along and says, "Yeah, the tel-cos are finally going to "break out of their malaise and do something different," yet they always don't quite get there. What is it about this transition that makes it more likely that they succeed at becoming more than just a hauler of data to actual digital services provider? >> Yeah, I mean, it's an excellent question. Frankly, you know, it's one that I face all the time. You know, as you traffic around Silicon Valley people are focused on certain hot topics, and you know, getting folks to understand that, you know, we are at a cusp point where this industry's going to fundamentally change and there's a huge amount of money that's actually being spent and a lot more coming. You know, a lot of folks don't necessarily, who don't spend their time there everyday, realize what's happening in these communications service providers, which you know, we used to call tel-cos, because what's happened, and I think, you know, I'm interested in your perspective on this, over time you see long periods in that industry of things don't change and then everything changes at once. >> Yeah. >> We've seen that many, many times, you know, and the disruptions in that industry, which were very public, you know, 15 years ago and then another 10 years before that, those were trigger points when the industry had to change, and we strongly believe that we're at that point right now where if you look at the rest of, like, enterprise IT where I've spent most of my career, we've gone through 15 years of going from hardware-based, proprietary, siloed to software-based, industry standard servers, cloud, and cloud native. >> Peter: And service-based. >> And service-based, right, and the formerly known as tel-co business is late to the party, you know. So, it's almost like that industry is the last domino to fall in this transition to new technology, and right now they're under enormous pressure. They have been for a while, I mean, I think if you look at the industry it's a trillion dollar plus business that touches basically every business and every person in the world, and every business and every person has gone to wireless and data from wire-line and the old way of doing things, and these service providers have pretty much squeezed as much as they can possibly get out of the old technology model and doing a great job of adapting to wireless and delivering new services, but now there's a whole new wave of growth coming and there's new technologies coming that the old model won't adapt to, and so frankly, the industry's been trying to figure this out for about five years through standards and cooperation and investment and open-source stuff, and it's kind of only at the point now where a lot of these technologies work, but our job is to come in and figure out how do we make them, you know, work in production. How do we make it scalable, and so you know, that's why we're focused there is because there's an enormous amount of money that gets spent here, there are real problems. It's not crowded with startups, you know. We have kind of a free shot on goal to actually do something big, and that's why I'm excited about being part of this company. >> Well, the network industry is always, unlike the server and storage industries, always been a series of step functions, and it's largely because of exactly what you said, that the tel-cos, which I'll still call them tel-cos, but those network service providers historically have tied their services and their rates back to capital investments. >> Tom: You're right, yeah. >> And so they'd wait and they'd wait and they'd wait before they pulled the trigger on that capital investment-- >> Tom: Mm-hm. >> Because there was no smooth way of doing it. >> Tom: Right, yeah. >> And so as a consequence you've got these horrible step functions, and customers, enterprises like a more smooth set of transitions, >> Tom: Yeah. and so it's not surprising that more of the money's been going to the server and the storage guys and the traditional networking types of technologies. >> Mm-hm, yeah. >> But this raises an interested question. Does some of the technology that you're providing make it possible for the tel-co or the network service provider. >> Tom: Yeah, yeah. >> To say, "You know what, I can use NFV "as a way of smoothing out my investments "and enter into markets faster with a little bit "more agility so that I can make my customers "happy by showing a smoother program forward." You know, make my rates, adjust my rates accordingly, but ultimately be more likely to be successful because I don't have to put two or three or $10 billion behind a new service. I can put just what's needed and use NFV to help me scale that. >> That's exactly right, I mean, we're really bringing software programmability and devops kinds of capabilities to this industry, us and other folks that are involved in this, you know, this transition, which we think is enormous. I mean, it's probably one of the biggest transitions that's left to happen in tech, and the old model of set it and forget it. I put in my hardware based router, my switch, build out my, make a big investment, that step function you talked about, and depreciate it over a long period of time doesn't work it anymore, because during that long period of time new opportunities emerge, and these communication service providers haven't gotten all the growth because other people have jumped into those opportunities, the over-the-top people, the Netflixes, probably increasingly cloud players and saying we're going to take that growth, and so if you're one of these... You know, there's a few hundred large communication service providers throughout the world. This is an existential problem for them. They have to figure out how to adapt, so when the next thing comes along they can reprogram that network. You know, if there's an opportunity to drop a server in a remote branch and offer a whole range of services on it, they want to be able to continually reprogram that, update those, and you know, we've seen the first signs of that, we saw-- >> And let me stop-- >> Right, as an example of that. >> But not just take a hardware approach to adding new services and improving the quality of the experience that the customers have. >> That's exactly right, they want to have software programmability. They want to behave like everybody else in the world now-- >> Right. >> And take advantage, frankly, of a lot of things that have been proven to work in other spheres. >> So, the fundamental value proposition that you guys are providing to them is bring some of these new software disciplines to your traditional way of building out your infrastructure so that you can add new services more smoothly, grow them in a way that's natural and organic, establish rates that don't require a 30-year visibility in what your capital expenses are. >> That's right, I mean, so one of our, you know, our flagship customers is Nokia. Nokia you can think about as kind of a classic network equipment supplier to many of those service providers, but they also provide software based services through things like Nuage that they own and some things they got from Alcatel-Lucent, and they do system integration and they've been kind of on the leading edge in using our technology to help with that of saying, "Look, let's deliver you "industry standard, intel-based servers, "running network functions in software," and what we help them do is actually design, validate, build those capabilities that they ship to their customers, and you know, without something like Pensa... Somebody has to go in and code it up. Somebody has to really understand how to make these different parts work together. I've got a router from one place. I've got a virtual network function from someplace else. Interoperability is a challenge. We automate all of that. >> Peter: Right. >> And we're using intelligence to do it, so you can kind of go much faster than you otherwise could. >> Which means that you're bringing value to them and at the same time essentially fitting their operating model of how they operate. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So, you're not forcing dramatic change in how they think about their assets, but there are some real serious changes on the horizon. 5G, net neutrality and what that means and whether or not these service providers are going to be able to enter into new markets, so it does seem like there's a triple witching hour here of the need for new capital investment because those new services are going to have to be required, and there's new competitors that are coming after them. We like to think that, or we think in many respects the companies that are really in AWS's crosshairs are the tel-cos, and you guys are trying to give them approach so that they can introduce new agility or be more agile, introduce some services, and break that bond of rate-based, capital investment-based innovation. >> Yeah, exactly right, and also, frankly, break the bond of having to buy everything from the same tel-co equipment provider they've done for the last 20 years in extraordinary margins. People want to have flexibility to combine things in different combinations as these changes hit. You know, 5G, you mentioned, is probably the biggest one, you know, and I'd say even a year ago it was clearly on the horizon but way out in the distance, and now almost every day you're seeing production deployments in certain areas, and it is going to fundamentally change how the relationship works between businesses and consumers and the service providers and the cloud people. All of a sudden you have the ability to slice up a network, you have the ability to program it remotely, you have the ability to deliver all kinds of new video-based apps and there's a whole bunch of stuff we can't even conceive of. The key thing is you need to be able to program it in software and change it when change is required, and they don't have that with technology like this. >> That's right, and 5G provides that density of services that can actually truly be provided in a wireless way. >> Exactly. >> All right, but so this raises an issue. Look, we're talking about big problems here. These are big, big, big problems, and no company, let alone Pensa, has unlimited resources. >> Tom: Hm. >> So, where are you driving your engineers and your team to place their design and engineering bets? >> Yeah, I mean, look, there's clearly a set of problems that need to be solved, and then there's some things that we do particularly well. We have some technology that we think is actually unique in a couple of areas. Probably the heart of it is intelligently validating that the network you designed works. So, let's say you are a person in a service provider or you're an SI providing a solution to a service provider, you make choices based on the requirements, because you're a network engineer, that I'm going to use this router, I'm going to use a Palo Alto Networks firewall, I'm going to use Nginx, I'm going to use Nuage, whatever that combination is, so I've got my network service. Very often they don't have a way to figure out that it's going to work when they deploy it. >> Peter: Hm. >> And we build, effectively, models for every single element and understand the relationships of how they work together. So, we can, you know, pretty much on-the-fly validate that a new network service is going to work. The next thing we do is go match that to the hardware that's required. I mean, servers, you know, they're not all the same and configurations matter. I mean, we know that obviously from the enterprise space and we can make sure that what you're actually intending to deploy you have a server configuration or underlying network infrastructure that can support it. So, our goal is to say, you know, we do everything, frankly, from import network services or onboard them from different vendors and test them from an interoperability standpoint, help you do the design, but the real heart of what we do is in that validation area. I think the key design choice that we are making, and frankly, have had to make is to be integratable and interoperable, and what that means is, you know, these service providers are working with multiple different other vendors. They might have two different orchestration software platforms. They might have some old stuff they want to work with. What we're going to do is kind of be integratable with all of the major players out there. We're not going to come in and force, you know, our orchestrator down your throat. We're going to work with all of the major open-source ones that are there and be integratable with them. You know, we believe strongly in kind of an API economy where we've got to make our APIs available and be integratable because, as you said, it's a big problem. We're not going to solve it all ourselves. We've got to work with other choices that one of these customers makes. >> So, we like to say at Wikibon that in many respects the goal of some of these technologies, the NFV software defined networking technologies, needs to be to move away from the device being the primary citizen to truly the API being the primary citizen. >> Mm-hm. >> People talk about the network economy without actually explaining what it means. Well, in many respects what it really means is networks of APIs. >> Tom: Yes. >> Is that kind of the direction that you see your product going and how are you going to rely on the open-source community, or not, to get there, because there's a lot of ancillary activity going on in creating new inventive and innovative capabilities. >> Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a really big question and to kind of tackle the key parts of it in my mind... You know, open-source is extremely valuable, and if you were a communication service provider you may want to use open-source because it gives you the ability to innovate. You can have your programmers go in and make changes and do something other folks might not do, but the other side of the coin for these service providers is they need it to be bullet-proof. >> Peter: Right. >> They can't have networks that go down, and that's the value of validation and proving that it works, but they also need commercial software companies to be able to work with the major open-source components and bring them together in a way that when they deploy it they know it's going to work, and so we've joined the Linux Foundation. We're one of the founding members of Linux Foundation networking, which now has open NFV, and has ONAP, and a number of other critical programs, and we're working with them. We've also joined OSM, which is part of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, which is another big standards organization. I'm not aware of another company in our space or related to NFV that's working with both, and so we feel positively about open-source but we think that there's a role for commercial software companies to help make it bullet-proof for that buyer and make... If you are a very large service provider you want somebody that you can work with that will stand behind it and support it, and that's what we intend to do. >> Well, as you said, your fundamental value proposition sounds like yeah, you're doing network virtualization, you're doing the, you're adding the elements required for interoperability and integration, but also you're adding that layer of operational affinity to how tel-cos, or how service providers actually work. >> Tom: Mm-hm. >> That is a tough computing model. I don't know that open-source is going to do that. There's always going to be a need to try to ensure that all these technologies can fit into the way a business actually works. >> Tom: Yeah. >> And that's going to be a software, an enterprise software approach, whoever the target customer is, do you agree? >> Yeah, we use a great partnership between the open-source community, commercial software companies like us, and the service providers-- >> Peter: Right. >> To build this thing, and we've seen that happen in enterprise. Devops was that kind of a phenomenon. You have winning commercial software providers, you have a lot of open-source, and you have the users themselves, and we think a lot of those concepts are going into this service provider space, and you know, for us it's all about at the end of the day we want to have the ability to get people to do their job faster. You know, if things change in the industry, a service provider using Pensa or an SI using Pensa can design, validate, build and run that next thing and blow it out to their network faster than anybody else. >> Peter: Time to value. So, it's time to value. >> Right, time to value. >> And certainty that it'll work. >> And in many respects, at the end of the day we all want to be big, digital businesses, but if you don't have a network that supports your digital business you don't have a digital business. >> That is correct. >> All right, so last question. >> Tom: Yes. >> Pensa two years from now... >> Tom: Hm. >> What does it look like? >> Yeah, I think we're, our goal right now is to line up with some of the leading industry players here. You know, folks that service those large service providers and help them build these solutions and do it faster. I think our goal over the next two years is to become a control point before service providers and again, folks like SIs that work for them and sometimes help run their networks for them. Give them a control point to adapt to new opportunities and respond to new threats by being able to rapidly change and modify and roll out new network services for new opportunities. You know, the thing we learned in the whole mobile transition is you really can't conceive of what's next. What's next two years from now in this space, who knows? You know, if your model is buy a bunch of hardware and depreciate it over five years you won't be able to adapt. We want to be-- >> You do know that. >> We know that, you know, we want to be one of those control points-- >> Peter: Right. >> That helps you do that quickly without having to go wade into the code. You know, so our goal is to allow... You know, our whole tagline is think faster, which means use intelligent technology to drive your business faster, and that's what we intend to be in two years. >> Excellent, Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> And for all of you, this is Peter Burris. Once again, another great CUBEConversation from our Palo Alto Studios. Look forward to seeing you on another CUBEConversation. (techy music playing)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's the CUBE. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017, brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live with the CUBE coverage where Cloud Native and the SmartThings Conference from Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, the founder, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. Co-host of the cube here with Redg Snodgrass, who's the chairman of ReadWrite and ReadWrite Labs. >> Hello everybody. >> Also been an entrepreneur, he's done the Wearable World events, done a lot of things in tech, riding the waves. You seen them, a lot of action going on, Redg. Want to get your the thoughts as we wrap up day one of two days of wall-to-wall coverage of the cubes, Samsung Developer Conference, a lot going on. You know Samsung, they're trying to play their best hand that possible. Obviously, they're not going to come out and say, We're not really ready for primetime, for the cloud. But the reality is, they're not ready for primetime for the cloud and IoT. However, huge strides in positioning, messaging, and the self awareness of their stove pipes. They are series of stove pipes that they've recognized, We've got to make this a 2.0 Bixby that crosses across all of Samsung, open up IoT. >> Redg: Which I thought was great. >> Open ecosystem, everything else, to me, is a work in progress, kind of, cover the, hide the ball, a little bit, I mean, what's your thoughts? Do you agree or what's your reaction? >> Oh man, I was on a panel earlier today. And somebody was like, oh, this is great. And I wanted to go back to, back when we did the open API service with Alcatel-Lucent, when we roll out all this stuff for the telcos. I mean, it's just, it's a lot of hype, initially. But what I do like about it is it seems like there's a dogged commitment to creating all the different documentations necessary and bringing that in, I mean, if they really put the full marketing weight behind it, this could get really interesting really fast. I mean, they own almost every device in your home already. >> Well, I said the word hide-the-ball. Maybe I should take a step back and not be too harsh. What I mean by that is, they're not hiding the ball on purpose, I think they're, by design, and I think Greg mentioned this earlier. Greg Narain said, they're doing it by design. And I think that that's a good call. SmarterThings is a good positioning because it highlights multiple devices and connecting it together. I think if they played the data card and the cloud too much, they would've overplayed their hand, and it's not needed. I mean, do you think it's needed? I mean, I don't think it's needed. >> Well, one of the biggest problems with IoT right now is that you have multiple different silos creating data. And then all those data silos have to figure out how to come together and talk about it. I mean, it seems like they're taking a step out, and saying, hey, we want to build that solution. Which is great, I'm more interested in the orchestration between different OSs, like, how are they really going to do that? Because it, we talked a lot about, when you build one of these ecosystems, you're really just building an economy. And the more open that you let your economy, right, the more business models come in, the more people that can be there. And so, if we were to start thinking about these OSs as real economies, like what do you need to have economy work? >> Well, I think this is why, we were talking earlier, I think that you had a good point. I think that validates what I'm thinking out loud here, which is, why play the data card. They don't need to because it's still open-book. They still got to figure it out, and that's not a bad thing. They play with their best hand, which is the consumer hand. >> Redg: It's consumerism is where they're at >> The devices are awesome, the screen on the phones are phenomenal, they got TVs. They got a little bit of a family hub going on with the living room, kitchen thing, with the refrigerators. That's IoT, they got healthcare because it's a device issue. So they're working their way from the consumer edge into the industrial edge. Now, if you're in the IT world, you have security problems. So most people that we talk to, at the humans, they say, hey John, my plate is full, I got to staff up my DevOps and my application developers. I got to unbolt security from my IT department, make that report to the board as a profit center now. And I got all this machine learning and Cloud Ops, and you want me to do what? Like, instrument my entire factory with this IoT thing? So people are holding the brakes. >> Well, I mean think about it. Every day, right, you're confronted with another executive that has like fallen on a sword of a major security hack, a major security issue. And so, as an executive of a major like business unit, with a technology group in front of you, you're sitting there making all these decisions every day. And it used to, you used to come and say, okay, we're going to make decisions every eight, nine months. And you have this big waterfall thing in front of you. And you know that, from your vendors, that. >> John: It's predictable >> Everything was predictable, and now it's like, oh man, I got to get into this Google Glass stuff, and I've got, no, now it's wearables, and wearables, that doesn't work, I need my IoT infrastructure stuff. And so we're moving the court, you know, away from all these CIO, CTOs consistently of what they need to think about next. >> It's interesting, if you look at the stack, go back to the old 80s OSI model, you got the lower level stack, middleware, and then application stacks. If you follow the data, and the networks, and the packets, how it moves, you can almost see the trends, batch versus real time. And I think what we've seen in the big data world, in data sciences, which can be analytics, obviously specialty industry. But the role of data and realtime, self-driving cars, really highlights this really huge wave coming, which is how that people dealt with data and software, the relationship between software and data was different. You store it in a database, build the database, call the database, get the data out, load it in, slow, monolithic, siloed. But now you have data that you need in really low latency at any given time, in any different app, from any different database, in less than a millisecond how do you do that. >> Well, think of it. >> John: That takes intelligence. >> About two years ago, I had a great conversation with a big packet moving company that managed most of the packet movement for most of the internet. And we were talking about, what does it look like per person in the US in the next like three or four years? And it could be up to a petabyte a day at a per person. Now that sounds awesome because if you look at all the different like videos we watch, it's like, oh, that's great, really cool flying car. You know, connecting windows, no one's really doing the math on that. And if it's a petabyte per day per person, like in the US a year even, or you know. I could see models where it could be a month. Think about what that does to the network load. We just don't have the math to be able, you know, possibility to handle that. >> This is why the decentralization with Blockchain is interesting. Even though Blockchain is hyped up, I think it's fundamental to the internet, as this Dr. Wong from Alibaba, who told me that last week. He said it was like a TCP/IP, I agree with him because you have distributed computers, which we know about. We've been there, done that, but now you got decentralized and distributed, two different concepts at the same time. That's a fundamental paradigm shift. >> Well, I mean it's just, so, I mean, you got to. >> It's intoxicating to think about what that disrupts. >> No, no, I love it, I mean, honestly, I've fallen in love with narrow band networks the last week. For some reason, I'm the weirdest person on the planet. Because it's such a solution for security. It's such a solution for a lot of this back calling and data that we're going to have. It'll be interesting to look at, but when you think about the pure math on this. >> John: Are you back calling data or are you back calling compute? >> Oh, well it's so. >> That's a different conversation. The trend is, don't move the data. Throw the compute at it because compute is, this is an architectural renaissance happening, people are re-imagining. >> How many, how many startup. >> In global infrastructure. >> Execs can even like draw architecture? Right, with all the lame startups, I mean, when was the last time you saw like somebody pitch. When they came to pitch, it's like, let me talk about my architecture. >> John: That should be the first slide. >> It should be the slide that you talk about as an executive and everything, I don't see. >> If he can't get on the whiteboard. >> Startups deliver architecture. >> If you can't get on the whiteboard and lay out an architecture on fundamentally the core engine of your technology, you shouldn't get funded. >> Well, so that is a major issue that's happening right now because I do think that we have this group think where we've disallowed a lot of R&D thinking. We don't do longterm R&D before we get a product to market. And now, like all. >> John: Sometimes you can't. Sometimes you have to sprint out and put a stake in the ground and iterate. >> Think about all of the connected device product. How do you test the connected device product to scale? Right, I mean the iPhone, you know Samsung, everybody has all these devices out there, they're getting this data, it's coming in they can actually iterate on that product and make decisions, right? >> Well, that brings up a good point. We saw this at the Cube at VMWorld. For the first time we heard people grumbling in the hallways like, you know, I love the ENC tries, but they just haven't tested this use case. And the use case was a new workload that had unique characteristics. In this case they needed low latency. It was an edge device, so it was mandatory to have no latency with all this was trickling data in. But in this case, they had set up their virtual SAN in a tiered basis. And they needed a certain hardware configuration with vSAN. And they've never tested the hardware stack with the software stack. So it's just one of those things that the hardware vendor just never imagined, you can't QA the unknown. So this is where I'd see Samsung doing things like in-chip and seeing what Intel's doing with some of their FPGA stuff. You can see that these infrastructure guys got to bring that DevOps concept to the consumer world. >> Redg: Oh, it's going to be so hard. >> Which is programming the. >> Redg: So hard. >> The hardware at will. >> Yeah, well. >> John: Like the cloud DevOps ethos. What do you think of that? >> Yeah, no, no, no, look, I mean, I'm such a big fan of being able to get your product in people's hands, to be able to see the use cases, develop them out and push that forward. You know, big corporations can do that. You have 10 iterations of almost every iPhone right now, with thousands of engineers iterating on it. So when you look at like the competitor, which is your device right now, versus every other piece of IoT technology that isn't been perfected or anything. Our biggest issue is we're driven by the success of the smartphone for every other piece of technology today. And that's, that makes it hard to drive adoption for any other devices. >> So I get your thoughts on this, 'cause we wrap up day one. Obviously, let's talk about the developers that they're targeting, okay. >> Okay. >> The Samsung developers that they're targeting is the same kind of developers that Apple's targeting. Let's just call it out, however, you see voice-activated touch, you're seeing the services tools, now they're bringing in an IoT. You're not hearing Apple talk about IoT. This is unique, you got Google onstage, wink, wink, hey, everybody we're here, we're Google, Android, coming together. What is in the mind of the developer in the Samsung ecosystem right now, what's your take on it, what's the psychology of that developer? >> I built an app at one point in time. It was dating app a long time ago, right, with some other guys, they built it, I was just the mouth. It's called Scout and we were on the Simian platform, and the iPhone, and we were on web, we were on mobile web. And in the iPhone app store, all with one engineer. And it was really hard because we had real-time chat. It was just so much crazy things. At the end of the day, what always matters is, again, you're building economies, you're not building fun playgrounds or anything else like that. And if your economy is, your platform is the easiest to use, it has the capabilities and advantages that are the norm, right, you'll win. Bass Diffusion is great it's this guy out here, he won a Nobel prize, but what Bass Diffusion says, in order for you to win in a market, you need two things, imitation and innovation. Imitation, for instance, in TVs, is your TV black and white, is it color. As things move up, innovation eventually overtakes, and always becomes innovation. So when you look at like what's needed in market, the platform that is the easiest to use, the platform that has the most capable imitative qualities, it's just very easy for you to push things to market universally from OS to OS, along with certain pieces of innovation around business models, certain API capabilities that may make it easier for them to deliver revenues. If those are the things that are delivered, that we see pushed out, a good blend of imitation and innovation, the win. It's that person that actually can deliver it. >> Well, we're seeing gaming in entertainment really driving change, Netflix earnings just came out. They blew it away again, you're seeing the cord cutters are clearly there. >> So much for Disney, right? >> E-commerce, yeah, I mean, Amazon's still got to make some moves too, even though they were still winning. No one's really falling out of the chair for Prime. I mean, no, I don't know a lot of people who rigorously turn on Prime, they shop on Prime, but not necessarily watching any entertainment. So I'm a little critical of Amazon on that. But, then again, but Amazon's doing the right thing. Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, you're seeing a culture of digital entertainment shifting. E-commerce is shifting, and now you got web services. I think Amazon encapsulates, in my mind, a great strategy, retail and services, but if you extend that out to the rest of the world, voice-activated apps, you can blend in commerce entertainment, you can replicate Amazon. I mean, they could replicate everything out there in the open. >> Amazon is so good at understanding where they fit in the stack and then, pushing the edge case further and further and further along. They're really brilliant, versus like VMware that's like, oh man, we can make apps, no problem. They went to make apps, and it didn't work out so well, they're great with VMs, so. >> John: They're great with operators in the enterprise, not so much with DevOps. >> No, no, no, no, and it's. >> They got pivotal for that now. Michael Dell bought everyone up. >> Yeah, exactly. It's understanding where you fit in the stack and being able to take advantage of it strategically. I mean, like I said, I think Samsung's positioned really well, I mean, I wouldn't have come and hung out with everybody if I was like, ah, I'm going to be bored all day. There's a lot of really exciting things. >> We got a lot of eye candy, no doubt about it. I love their TVs, love their screens. The new Samsung phone, is spectacular, you what I mean. >> I'm pretty ecstatic. >> It was the first phone that wanted me to get transferred off my iPhone. And I ended up getting the little junior Samsung here, but. >> Oh no, well it'll be interesting as they start to connect their platform together as all a lot of these other developers start pushing the pieces of their strategy together. Remember, it's like whenever you throw a strategy out here like this, it's like you have a big puzzle with a lot of empty pieces. >> I mean, the question I have for you is, let's just close out the segment. What do you think, what area should Samsung really be doubling down on or peddling faster, I should say. What should be developing faster? Is it the open APIs, is it the cloud? And they got to get the open ecosystem going, in my opinion. That's my take, what do you think they should be working on the most right now? >> Yeah, I mean like look, cloud is going to be really, really, there's a lot of competitors out in cloud. There's a lot of multiple, there's a lot of choices, right. Where I've seen them like really do well, I'll go back to the fact that I firmly believe that Google never really monetized the Android that Samsung did that a lot better. And so, by looking at the different points in the market, where they're good, I mean, their ecosystem is solid. I mean, yes, I mean it seems like the sexy thing is Apple, but I've talked to several developers, and I know where they make their money, and they do a strong amount of revenue, if not equivalent to where the iPhone is, at least from what I've heard so far. >> The android market share it's not shabby at all. >> Not, so. >> Damn good. >> So they've, they've been able to do this, like, from that, taken that Android stack, applying that imitation and innovation on top of it, fascinatingly so, I wouldn't count them out for this. And I'm pretty encouraged to see all the other aspects, but I like the ecosystem built out too. >> Redg Snodgrass, ReadWrite Labs, quick plug for you. What's going on in your world? Got some recent activities happening, please share update. >> So, yeah it's great, so we just launched our IOT revolution event series where we look at the atomic unit of different markets. And what that means is, we find the real buyers and sellers, a lot like what Debbie Lann, who I love, did. And we look at the buyers and sellers together, along with the top series A startups, all around newsworthy issues. And so, whatever it's like, is it hacking and Russia. You know, then we'll get cybersecurity experts up, and we'll talk about those issues from an executive point of view. And that's the thing that's making me most excited because I get to have all these conversations with people. It will be on video, onstage, November 13th, is the first one, it's a private event, but we'll work out anybody. >> Where's it going to be? >> It'll be in San Francisco, around 100 Broadway. So it's kind of a quiet thing, but I'd love for everybody to come if you're interested. >> It's a quiet thing but I want everyone to come. It was, not going there, too many people are going. >> It's like my parties, right? >> It's like a Yogi Berra. Well, thanks for coming out, appreciate, wrapping up day one of coverage The Cube. This is Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Hashtag SDC2017, that's what they're calling it. Lot of great guests today go to YouTube.com/siliconangle for all the great footage. And also check the Twitter sphere, lot of photos. And shout-out to Vanessa, out there has like helped us set everything up. Appreciate it and great to the team. That's day one wrap up, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)