(funk music) (funk music) (funk music) (funk music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every enterprise is responding to the opportunities of cloud with significant changes in people, process, how they think about technology, how they're going to align technology overall with their business and with their business strategies. Now those changes are affecting virtually every aspect of business but especially every aspect of technology. Especially security. So what does it mean to envision a world in which significant new classes of services are being provided through cloud mechanisms and modes, but you retain and in fact, even enhance the quality of security that your enterprise can utilize. To have that conversation, we're joined today by a great guest, Amit Sinha is president and CTO at Zscaler. Amit, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So before we get into it, what's new at Zscaler? >> Well, at Zscaler our mission is to make the internet and cloud a secure place for businesses and as I engage with our global 2000 customers and prospects, they are going through some of the digital transformation challenges that you just alluded to. Specifically for security, what is happening is that they had a lot of applications that were sitting in a data center or in their headquarters and that center of gravity is now moving to the cloud. They probably adopt their Office 365, and Box, and Salesforce, and these applications have moved out. Now in addition, the users are everywhere. They're accessing those services, not just from offices but also from their mobile devices and home. So if your users have left the building, and your applications are no longer sitting in your data center, that begs that question: Where should the security stack be? You know, it cannot be your legacy security appliances that sat in your DMZ and your IT closets. So that's the challenge that we see out there, and Zscaler is helping these large global organizations transform their security and network for a more mobile and a cloud-first world. >> Distributed world? So let me make sure I got this right. So basically, cause I think I totally agree with you >> Right. >> Just to test it, that many regarded the cloud as a centralization strategy. >> Correct. >> What we really see happening, is we're seeing enterprises more distribute their data, more distribute their processing, but they have not updated how they think about security so the presumption is, "yeah we're going to put more processing data out closer to the action but we're going to backhaul a whole bunch back to our security model," and what I hear you saying is no, you need to push those security services out to where the data is, out to where the process, out to where the user is. Have I got that right? >> You have nailed it, right. Think of it this way, if I'm a large global 2000 organization, I might have thousands of branches. All of those branches, traditionally, have used a hub-and-spoke network model. I might have a branch here in Palo Alto but my headquarters is in New York. So now I have an MPLS circuit connecting this branch to New York. If my Exchange server and applications and SAP systems are all there, then that hub-and-spoke model made sense. I am in this office >> Right. >> I connect to those applications and all my security stack is also there. But fast forward to today, all of those applications are moving and they're not just in one cloud. You know, you might have adopted Salesforce.com for CRM, you might have adopted Workday, you might have adopted Office 365. So these are SaaS services. Now if I'm sitting here in Palo Alto, and if I have to access my email, it makes absolutely no sense for me to VPN back to New York only to exit to the internet right there. What users want is a fast, nimble user experience without security coming in the way. What organizations want is no compromise in their security stack. So what you really need is a security stack that follows the user wherever they are. >> And the data. >> And the data, so my data...you know Microsoft has a front-door service here in Redwood City and if if you are a user here and trying to access that, I should be able to go straight with my entire security stack right next to it. That's what Gartner is calling SASE these days. >> Well, let's get into that in a second. It almost sounds as though what you're suggesting is that the enterprise needs to look at security as a SaaS service itself. >> 100 percent. If your users are everywhere and if your applications are in the cloud, your security better be delivered as a consistent "as-a-service," right next to where the users are and hopefully co-located in the same data center as where the applications are present so the only way to have a pervasive security model is to have it delivered in the cloud, which is what Zscaler has been doing from day one. >> Now, a little spoiler alert for everybody, Zscaler's been talking about this for 10-plus years. >> Right. >> So where are we today in the market place starting to recognize and acknowledge this transformation in the basic security architecture and platform that we're going through? >> I'm very excited to see that the market is really adopting what Zscaler has been talking about for over a decade. In fact, recently, Gartner released a paper titled "SASE," it stands for Secure Access Service Edge and there are, I believe, four principal tenets of SASE. The first one, of course, is that compute and security services have to be right at the edge. And we talked about that. It makes sense. >> For where the service is being delivered. >> You can't backhaul traffic to your data center or you can't backhaul traffic to Google's central data center somewhere. You need to have compute capabilities with things like SSL Interception and all the security services running right at the edge, connecting users to applications in the shortest path, right? So that's sort of principle number one of SASE. The second principle that Gartner talks about, which again you know, has been fundamental to Zscaler's DNA, is to keep your devices and your branch offices light. Don't shove too much complexity from a security perspective on the user devices and your branches. Keep it simple. >> Or the people running those user devices >> Absolutely >> in the branches >> Yeah, so you know, keep your branch offices like a light router, that forwards traffic to the cloud, where the heavy-lifting is done. >> Right. >> The third principle they talk about is to deliver modern security, you need to have a proxy-based architecture and essentially what a proxy architecture allows you to do is to look at content, right? Gone are the days where you could just say, stop a website called "evil.com" and allow a website "good.com," right? It's not like that anymore. You have to look at content, you know. You might get malware from a Google Drive link. You can't block Google now, right? So looking at SSL-encrypted content is needed and firewalls just can't do it. You have to have a proxy architecture that can decrypt SSL connections, look at content, provide malware services, provide policy-based access control services, et cetera and that's kind of the third principle. And finally what Gartner talks about is SASE has to be cloud-native, it has to be, sort of, born and bred in the cloud, a true multitenant, cloud-first architecture. You can't take, sort of, legacy security appliances and shove it in third-party infrastructure like AWS and GCP and deliver a cloud service and the example I use often is, just because you had a great blu-ray player or a DVD player in your home theater, you can't take 100,000 of these and shove it into AWS and become a Netflix. You really need to build that service from the ground up. You know, in a multitenant fashion and that's what we have done for security as a service through the cloud. >> So we are now, the market seems to be kind of converging on some of the principles that Zscaler's been talking about for quite some time. >> Right. >> When we think about 2020, how do you anticipate enterprises are going to respond as a consequence of this convergence in acknowledging that the value proposition and the need are starting to come together? >> Absolutely, I think we see the momentum picking up in the market, we have lots of conversations with CIO's who are going through this digital transformation journey, you know transformation is hard. There's immune response in big organizations >> Sure. >> To change. Not much has changed from a security and network architecture perspective in the last two decades. But we're seeing more and more of that. In fact, over 400 of global 2000 organizations are 100 percent deployed on Zscaler. And so that momentum is picking up and we see a lot of traction with other prospects who are beginning to see the light, as we say it. >> Well as you start to imagine the relationship between security and data, between security and data, one of the things that I find interesting is many respects to cloud, especially as it becomes more distributed, is becoming better acknowledged almost as a network of services. >> Right. >> As opposed to AWS as a data center here and that makes it a cloud data center. >> Right. >> It really is this network of services, which can happen from a lot of different places, big cloud service providers, your own enterprise, partners providing services to you. How does the relationship between Zscaler and kind of an openness >> Hm-mm. >> Going to come together? Hm-mm. >> So that you can provide services from a foreign enterprise to the enterprise's partners, customers, and others that the enterprise needs to work with. >> That's a great question, Peter and I think one of the most important things I tell our customers and prospects is that if you look at a cloud-delivered security architecture, it better embrace some of the SASE principles. One of the first things we did when we built the Zscaler platform was to distribute it across 150 data centers. And why did we do that? We did that because when a user is going to destinations, they need to be able to access any destination. The destination could be on Azure, could be on AWS, could be Salesforce, so by definition, it has to be carrier-neutral, it has to be cloud-neutral. I can't build a service that is designed for all internet traffic in a GCP or AWS, right. So how did we do that? We went and looked at one of the world's best co-location facilities that provide maximum connectivity options in any given region. So in North America, we might be in an Equinix facility and we might use tier one ISPs like GTT and Zayo that provide excellent connectivity to our customers and the destinations they want to visit. When you go to China, there's no GCP there, right so we work with China Unicom and China Telecom. When we are in India, we might work with an Airtel or a Sify, when we are in Australia, we might be working with Telstra. So we work with, you know, world class tier one ISPs in best data centers that provide maximum connectivity options. We invested heavily in internet exchange connectivity. Why? Because once you come to Zscaler, you've solved the physics problem by building the data center close to you, the next thing is, you want quickly go to your application. You don't want security to be in the way >> Right. >> Of application access. So with internet exchange connectivity, we are peered in a settlement-free way or BGP with Microsoft, with Akamai, with Apple, with Yahoo, right. So we can quickly get you to the content while delivering the full security stack, right? So we had to really take no shortcuts, back to your point of the world is very diverse and you cannot operate in a walled garden of one provider anymore and if you really build a cloud platform that is embracing some of the SASE principles we talked about, you have to do it the hard way. By building this one data center at a time. >> Well, you don't want your servicers to fall down because you didn't put the partnerships in place >and hardend them Correct. >> As much as you've hardened some of the other traffic. So as we think about kind of, where this goes, what do you envision Zscaler's, kind of big customer story is going to be in 2020 and beyond? Obviously, the service is going to be everywhere, change the way you think about security, but how, for example, is the relationship between the definition of the edge and the definition of the secure service going to co-evolve? Are people going to think about the edge differently as they start to think more in terms of a secure edge or where the data resides and the secure data, what do you think? >> Let's start off with five years and go back, right? >> We're going forward. >> Work our way back. Well, five years from now, hopefully everyone is on a 5G phone, you know, with blazing-fast internet connections, on devices that you love, your applications are everywhere, so now think of it from an IT perspective. You know, my span of control is becoming thinner and thinner, right? my users are on devices that I barely control. My network is the internet that I really don't control. My applications have moved to the cloud or either hosted in third-party infrastructure or run as a SaaS application, which I really don't control. Now, in this world, how do I provide security? How do I provide user experience? Imagine if you are the CIO and your job is to make all of this work, where will you start, right? So those are some of the big problems that we are helping our customers with. So this-- >> Let me as you a question 'cause here's where I was going with the question. I would start with, if I can't control all these things, I'm going to apply my notion of security >> Hm-mm. >> And say I am going to control that which is within >> Right. >> my security boundaries, not at a perimeter level, not at a device level, but at a service level. >> Absolutely and that's really the crux of the Zscaler platform service. We build this Zero Trust architecture. Our goal is to allow users to quickly come to Zscaler and Zscaler becomes the policy engine that is securely connecting them to all the cloud services that they want to go to. Now in addition, we also allow the same users to connect to internal applications that might have required a traditional VPN. Now think of it this way, Peter. When you connect to Google today, do you VPN to Google's network? To access Gmail? No. Why should you have to VPN to access an internal application? I mean, you get a link on your mobile phone, you click on it and it didn't work because it required a separate form of network access. So with Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access, we are delivering a beautiful service that works across 150 data centers. Users connect to the service and the service becomes a policy engine that is securely connecting you to the destinations that you want. Now, in addition, you asked about what's going to happen in a couple of years. The same service can be extended for partners. I'm a business, I have hundreds of partners who want to connect to me. Why should I allow legacy VPN access or private circuits that expose me? I don't even know who's on the other end of the line, right? They come onto my network and you hear about the Target breaches because some HVAC contract that had unrestricted access, you hear about the Airbus breach because another contract that had access. So how do we build a true Zero Trust cloud platform that is securely allowing users, whether it's your employees, to connect to named applications that they should, or your partners that need access to certain applications, without putting them on the network. We're decoupling application access from network access. And there's one final important linchpin in this whole thing. Remember we talked about how powerless organizations >> Right. >> feel in this distributed model? Now imagine, your job is to also ensure that people are having a good user experience. How will you do that, right? What Zscaler is trying to do now is, we've been very successful in providing the secure and policy-based connectivity and our customers are asking us, hey, you're sitting in between all of this, you have visibility into what's happening on the user's device. Clearly you're sitting in the middle in the cloud and you see what's happening on the left-hand side, what's happening on the right-hand side. You know, you have the cloud effect, you can see there's a problem going on with Microsoft's network in the China region, right? Correlate all of that information and give me proactive intelligence around user experience and that's what we launched recently at Zenith Live. We call it Zscaler Digital Experience, >> Hmm. >> So overall the goal of the platform is to securely connect users and entities to named applications with Zero Trust principles. We never want security and user experience to be orthogonal requirements that has traditionally been the case. And we want to provide great user experience and visibility to our customers who've started adopting this platform. >> That's a great story. It's a great story. So, once again, I want to thank you very much for coming in and that's Amit Sinha, who is the president and CTO at Zscaler, focusing a lot on the R&D types of things that Zscaler's doing. Thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> It's my pleasure, Peter. Always enjoy talking to you. >> And thanks for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (funk music) (funk music)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here on the Cube, we continue our coverage. We're live in San Francisco. Mosconi, North Day to wrapping up Day two of our three days of coverage here, Veum. World 2019 day Volante. John Wall's glad to have you with us here on the Cube. And we're now joined by Kevin Schatz. Camera. Who's the Vice president of service provider Strategy and solutions. A deli. Um, See, Kevin. Good to see this afternoon. Thank you. You as well. And, uh, yeah, Tarazi, Who is the S v p and chief technical officer at Dell Technologies in the heart. Good to see you. Thanks for taking the time to be with us. A couple of telco guys and we've had a lot of telco on and talking about it in terms of progress that you made. This was an area that you got into with a major commitment, some probably three years ago. Kind of bitch market for me then for where you were there on on day one to where you are now today and the progress you've made and maybe the service is that you're about to provide. Yeah, >> sure. So I think if we look over the last three years, our opportunity that we defined early on telecommunications space was the virtual ization, and software to find everything was leaving the data center. And we would see the software to find architecture extend all the way from radio through the core network through the cloud over a period of time. And it started with technologies like network function virtualization. So if we flash back three years ago, where our entire strategy was built on the premise that relationships with the network equipment providers like Nokia and Ericsson, where our primary path to market our primary opportunity, I think what we've realized is we've emerged in this space to a greater detail is that our expertise, our expertise and experience in building I T Networks and Building Cloud has led to the first wave of conversations in the telecommunications industry directly not through the network equipment providers, but that carriers want to engage directly with Delhi emcee for the lessons learned and how did to play. I tr detectors. And now, as we extend towards the edge that they want to engage directly with Del Technologies in terms of how we build cloud architectures. We've had a number of big announcements. Over the last several years. We've announced partnerships and engagements with NTT. We've announced partnerships and engagements with China Unicom. Just in the last three months, we've announced partnerships with our rounds around network EJ out of France and then most recently with 18 C on the automation of EJ infrastructure related to their airship project. I think from a benchmark perspective, it's just been a continued growth opportunity for us and recognition that the more we engaged in, the more we contribute as a productive member of what is a very complex and changing and transforming industry, the more success in relationships that will build, and the more it will translate into opportunity to sell to >> when you think about you have the the modernization of N F. E. For example, as a former technologist inside a large telco, Um, what were some of the challenges? Is it? It's taken a long time. Obviously, when you talk to some of the telcos, they say, Well, you know it affects our infrastructure, but we still get this application mass. I mean, maybe you could add some color and describe for our audience why it's been so challenging. >> Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. Um, going back to my days at Telco on data centers, even S d n and the software defined tools were just beginning to show up. So the biggest challenges where you were basically having toe work with predefined operating system. But he defined hardware. The hardware was not exposed for for GAM ability, the ability to take advantage of it. And then you had to interrogate multiple players of technology in a way where it took significant time, too, not only for software development, but for product development and user experience. Since then, many of those walls have come down, and some of them have come down very hard. When you look at what we're doing, Adele here and we lead for the open networking. Not only do you have the choice of operating system were also pushing hard. Don't new open operating systems for networking like Sonic with Microsoft and bade calm. And then we're taking industry leading steps to expose the silicon chips themselves for four GAM ability. These are all the components that are critical. When you talk about five G, for example, do you really have to have those capabilities? I also would say that the software evolution have made it to infrastructure. The Dev ops and the modern applications we talk about here is also available for infrastructure, which means you really can develop a capability in weeks instead of years and months. Five people can do in amazing parkas. All of this was not possible before, >> so we talked to Shekhar about this in the earlier segment challenges in the telco business. I mean, the one hand you got these quasi monopolies in some cases real monopolies that just chug along and do pretty well. But the same time you got the cost for a bit dramatically coming down, you've got the data growth doing this. You got over the top providers taking advantage of the those those networks, and so new infrastructure allows them to be more more agile. But there's a workforce component to that, and there's a skill set, and that's how they got to transform. I wonder if you could maybe talk about that a little bit. Kevin. >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think when we work within this industry, it's not just a technology conversation. It's the ability to consume an operationalized technology. And I think that comes down to a number of different things, comes down to the processes that exist when it comes down to the skill sets that exists to be able to build these new processes around. And I think if we flash back several years ago, the model of how we build networks was that the team that operated it needed to understand networking. Right now, if you look at the team that needs to operate it, they need to understand networking. They need to understand, compute. They need to understand virtualization. They need to understand AP eyes. They need to be able to script and program. They need to understand some level of data science that they can close a loop in the operational models eventually with a I and machine learning technologies. So I think that the teams that are getting built look very different than the single soul capabilities that they've had in the past, right? These air smaller teams they're more agile teams that can develop and have their own more unique processes in each part of the network. Right? And even if we think about the organizational structures, we've always built vertical organizations. Right? When I had an appliance, that was an e p. C. I had an operations team that was focused on an e p. C. And I even broke that into an S gateway P Gateway and Emma, me et cetera. If we look at the world now, that s Gateway P Gateway. Mm E consists of a server consists of the networking that connects at server consists of a virtual ization layer. It consists of a stack of a software application, and all of those need to be automated, orchestrated program toe work as any PC does. So I think that the skill sets have just really expanded in terms of what's expected, >> and this is really important because the process is used to be pretty well known and hardened, so the infrastructure could be hard, and now it's of every every months, the more the market changes right. What kind of what kind of challenges is that bring to the telco provider? But also to the infrastructure provider. >> Yeah, I actually I have a really good way to describe what I think is happening. We heard it from a lot of our customers and not just tell cause but enterprises. I would say the last 5 to 10 years everybody's been dealing with Hybrid Cloud. The Move to Cloud Waas. The Big Challenge. While this remains a key challenge, a new challenge showed up, which is how to succeed in this new modern software development model. You know, are you able to do to move at that speed, which means you have full stack engineers? Can you develop the app beginning to end? It's not a nightie model anymore. Also, you no longer have an operations team. You really have to have saris who, able with software and also the customer service, changed to a softwood Devyn. So we're starting to hear from a lot of our customers. That's the next journey they really need help with. If you think of infrastructure, those challenges are even bigger, and this is where it's important to lean on technology partners who can help you with that, >> and you hit on five G a little bit ago. You have in your initial statement and we've kind of touched on the impact that it can have in terms of you understanding there. They're going to a transformative time, right? I mean, telcos are with new capabilities, and new opportunities in this whole edge is gonna be crazy. So you've got to you've got I would say some learning to do, but you have. You've got to get up to speed on what their new fundamentals are going to be, right? Yeah, I think that's >> true. I think where you know, we we've understood >> their fundamentals because it's the same transition that the IittIe world's gone through. And to a large degree, that cloud world has gone through. I think that the challenge we've we've been working to break through collectively as an industry is the paralysis at the rate of adoption of new technologies because they're so much change so quickly because we talk about virtualization. And then we're talking about kubernetes. We're talking about cloud native we're talking about Ah, bare Metal Service's. We continue to talk about Micro Micro Service's architectures. We see this progression of technology that's happening so fast in various segments of the industry. I think that the telecommunications industry has been somewhat paralyzed in terms of where do they jump in and which do they adopt and how fast they migrate between them. And which of them can be capable of being hardened to be telco grade and fit into their requirements. That they have for being able to offer regulated service >> is paralyzed because it's just too fast. It's too fast for a big amazed, a big decision to make for big. But but things are evolving too quickly. That's that's It's evolving >> too quickly. And they also sometimes have a concern that they get stuck on a dead end path, right, Because things change so quickly it's Do I jump here? Then here, then here, then here, Then here. Where do I follow a logical path and what we tend to find when we work with the telecommunications industry is that, yes, del technologies can define a strategy. Certainly VM wear and L E. M. C can define our individual strategies. Are operators can define their strategies. But there's just not one strategy for this industry. Reality is, is that when you get when you get together with an ecosystem of partners, and you work at a particular telecommunications company. That is a strategy, and you start from scratch when you go to the next right because they're their ability to consume technology. It's just so different the end game, maybe the same across the board. But the path to get there will look different, >> so every customer's different Get that. But clearly some patterns must be emerging. So my question is, where do you start your sitting down with What are you seeing in terms of common starting points and advice you'd give Thio? >> I think that to Maine has everybody starting with First of all, the physical infrastructure. Compute storage Networking is moving to X 86 model of some sort, which means many, many parts of their infrastructure today that is not based on X 86 needs to transition. So what? Seeing big art piece significant discussions of how you take compute and this new programmable networking and put it everywhere like in thousands of locations. So infrastructure wise, that is a known specific thing to be solved at early stages and given you know, that capability he's we've delivered toward enterprises. We have a lot of tools and capabilities to give them, and the 2nd 1 is that a lot of people are approaching this as a network issue. In reality, it's a cloud decision, not a network. You hurt Shaker, talk about it so the tools capabilities you need to build a cloud is completely different. This cloud may not be genetic cloud it needs to be. It needs to support the defense specific platforms under for they want Cloud, and they needed to support the specific capabilities. So that's the two. A year ago, nobody even could articulate. That was the challenge they were facing. But I would say that's what we are today. >> I would add to that that as we kind of think about the infrastructure and then that cloud decision that there's abstractions that exist between those right at the infrastructure layer, there is the need tohave, an automation system that has the ability to support multiple different cloud platforms that sit on top of it. And that's work that we're doing in the deli in seaside and then secondary to that at the cloud layer. It's the ability to support a multi virtualization environment. Virtual machines do exist and will continue to exist. Kubernetes and cloud native containerized applications do exist and will continue to exist. And the challenge becomes. How do I orchestrate an environment that allows those two exist simultaneously and be layered on top of a common building block of infrastructure? And I think that's really the power that the broader Del Technologies has is that we have all of these entities and capabilities in house. >> How long does this take? A telco toe transform is this decade. Is it? Is it Maur can Obviously certain parts can happen faster. But when when you sit down with with customers and they put together their plans, I mean, what what what's their time horizon? >> So I would argue that we define the first NFI standards and 2012. And if we look globally and even within the vast majority of the Indus story and carriers were somewhere in the 10 to 15% range, yeah, >> yeah, that too compelling. Uh, hey, is that enough? Maybe be a forcing function for making some of those decisions. Are the economics on moving toe X 86 are very compelling. It's 10 times the speed to deploy, and it's a massive order of magnitude and costs. Therefore, it's not something that you could wait on as you continue to build capacity. So that's is forcing the infrastructure decision. The second forcing function is that what five G's starting to look like is not network and wireless, independent from enterprise solutions, you really have to collapse. The single infrastructure you know to offer service is and why it lists embedded on That's another forcing function in terms of enterprises is starting to ask for those capabilities. >> You know, you mentioned X 86 couple times and when you think about the Telco Cloud generically what we're talking about here in the in the commercial cloud not to tell ghost no commercial but the mainstream cloud you're getting a lot of offload, you know, hardware offload alternative processing arm uh, GP use F p g a Z even, you know, custom, a six coming back. You've seen the same thing in the Telco club >> for sure, I think I think if if you look at what we've done over the last several years, we've seen this dramatic shift in almost a pendulum swing away from a six and proprietary hardware towards everything on X 86 I think what we've learned over the last several years at X 86 is a platform that has its value. But it's just not for every work with So we've seen things like network slicing and control, user plane separation and technologies that her first moving user playing very high Io applications back onto smart nicks and F PJs and eventually onto merchant silicon with programmable silicate in the network switches. But I think that even if you look at what's happening in in Public Cloud with things like GPU virtualization, they're still largely virtualized in the time domain, which means that they're used by a particular application for a period of time and then the next application scheduled it in the next application schedule. Is it that doesn't work for network workloads? So I think that what we're finding is we go to this Toko Cloud model, especially with offload in the virtual ization of Acceleration Technologies, is that it's an entire set of problems that just aren't solved in public cloud yet. >> Yeah, I would say, based on experience, the vast majority of network workloads have to be x 86 I definitely think arm cores and GPO offloads will play all at some point in the future. But they that's not the heavy duty that you need to offload those functions because most of these network applications were it. And for custom, a sick. That's very high performance that you know, it has high throughput. Security, built in ability to build service is directly into the silicon. So that kind of transition over time you'll feed. You see a lot of distributed applications, it and container formats all the way at the edge. But that transition to that kind of distributed model from what we are today is probably not possible. And I would argue you'll always have their mics off high performance, high throughput. I mean, think about it. If you're trying to activate 20,000 I ot devices instantly, you really need a high core density, you know, x 86 chip with significant memory. You really worry about the data plane and how much data you can put. So it's better >> we didn't even hit I ot dead. Wait, wait Another day, Another conversation. Hey, thanks for the time. We certainly appreciate it. Been a good show I for you all to write for, sir? Good. Good energy. Good vibes and good business. Thanks for the time We appreciate it. >> Thank you, guys. Thank >> you very much for your time. >> Watching the Cube live coverage Here it Veum World 2019 in San Francisco. Thank you.

(cheerful music) >> Voiceover: Live, from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back here when we're here live with theCUBE coverage of Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, our next guest is Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking the Linux Foundation. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you, nice to be here again. >> Always good to talk networking, as Stu and I always say networking is probably the most active audience in our community, because at the end of the day, everything rolls downhill to networking when the people complain. It's like "where the hell's my WiFi, "where's the patent latency," networking SDN was supposed to solve all that. Stu, we're still talking about networking. When are we going to fix the network? It's always in the network, but important. In all seriousness, a lot of action continues and innovation to networking. >> Absolutely. >> What's the update? >> Update is very exciting. So first of all, I can confidently say that open source networking, not just networking, but open source networking is now mainstream. And it's mainstream in the telcos, in the carriers, service providers, it's getting there in the enterprise. And Linux Foundation is really proud to host eight of the top 10 projects that are in open source networking. ONAP, ODL, OPNFV, Fido, you know, the list goes on. And we're really excited about each of these projects, so good momentum. >> We've been seeing and talking about it too, we all, joking aside, the intro there, but in all seriousness we've been saying, we get better the network, it's finally happening. Has it been a maturization of the network itself, has it been industry force and what have been the forces of innovations been? OpenStack has done some great work, they're not getting a lot of love these days with some people, but still we've seen a lot of production workflows at OpenStack, OpenStack's still there, rocking and rolling. New projects are onboarding, you see the telcos getting business models around digital. What's the drivers? Why is network mainstream now? >> I think it's a very simple answer to that, and that is before 5G and IoT hit the market, network better be automated. It's a very simple requirement. And the reason is very self-explanatory, right? You can't have an IoT device on the call on hold while you get your service up (laughs). So, it's IoT, right? And it is the same thing on 5G, a lot of new use cases around cars or around low latency apps. You need automation, and in order to have automation, a carrier or a solution provider goes through a simple journey. Am I virtualized? Yes or no? Am I using the building blocks of SDN and NFV? Yes or no? And the third, which is now reality, which is, am I using open source to do it? Yes, and I'm going to do it. And that's the driver right? I mean it's all- >> Automation, when you started throwing out a lot of TLAs, you talk about SDN and NFV, we've got a four-letter acronym that we need to talk about. The Open Network Automation Platform. Why don't you bring your audience up to speed, what that is, the news that you have this week. >> Absolutely, so ONAP was launched earlier in 2017. It's a combination of two open source projects, ECOMP and Open-O, and we wanted to bring the community together versus sort of fragmented, and because our end users are asking for a harmonized solution. So we brought it together. It was launched earlier this year as we talked about, but the most significant thing is it has received tremendous support from the member community. So at OSS today, we just announced that Vodafone has joined as a platinum member. They will be on our board, and as you know Vodafone is one of the top providers. So if you add up all the subscribers that are being influenced by ONAP, they come to 55%. So out of the 4.5 billion subscribers that exist, more than 55% will be influenced by ONAP and the work that happens. That includes China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, all of the China, Bell Canada, AT&T obviously who sort of was the founding member, Orange, Reliance Jio from India. So we've got, Comcast joined earlier in the quarter, so we've got cable companies, carriers, all joining. And to be very honest, I'll probably just give you the list of all the networking vendors that are participating here, and I've list Amdocs, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Hua Wei, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, VMware, ZTE, Juniper, you know, you name it. >> Arpit, I mean the long story short is-- >> Just cause they're involved does that mean they're actually working-- >> They're active. Active. >> we're not going to be critical on this. >> But come on, even Cisco's involved in the open source stuff, right? >> They've very active. >> We've had lots of guests on from Cisco, Lulu Tucker's been on many many times. We know the open source there, but it used to be, networking was very proprietary. Now, it wasn't SDNs going to totally change everything, it's lots of different pieces, lots of different projects. It kind of felt like the river slowly wearing down the mountain as to this transition from proprietary to open source. >> I think what happened is if you just look at four years back, it was proprietary. Not because people liked it, that was the only game in town. When the open source industry, especially in the networking, and this is a hundred year old industry, telecom right? When it came in in the desegregated manner, hardware and software separated, control plane separated from data plane, all of that happened, and what happened suddenly was each components started becoming mature. So they're production-ready components, and what ONAP and what Linux Foundation is intending to do this year is trying to bring all the components into a system solution. So that it's easy to deploy, and all you have to do is point, click a service, everything below it will all be automated and integrated. >> Well the telcos are under a lot of pressure. I mean this has been a decade run, over-the-top they've been struggling with that from years ago, decade ago or more. But now they're getting their act together. We're seeing some signs, even VMworld. Stu, Pat Gelsinger said 5G's the next big kahuna in networking the next 20 years, you can validate it. This is going to be a 20 year changeover, so as the Linux Foundation, which essentially is the organic growth engine for this community, what do you guys see in that 20 years? Cause I see 5G's going to create all these connection points. IoT is going to be massive. That's going to increase the surface area for potential attacks. We're seeing a networking paradigm that's moving from old guards Cisco, Juniper, and some of the names you mentioned. They got to make some changes. How are they adjusting? What's going on so the next 20 years we don't have more conflict and more identity politics. >> I'll tell you one thing, I come from a vendor community, right? So I really appreciate the work they're doing. Part of the reason you would have seen in the past a vendor dragging their feet is because of fragmentation in the community. You as a vendor do not know where to put your resources, people, and where you put your money. What we're doing at the Linux Foundation is starting to harmonize all that. And once you do that and you have enough of a scale and enough of a community, there is no shortage of people and developers that the vendors are contributing to. >> John: What's some of the proof points that you can share? >> Okay, so ONAP, from start to now, about 1100 Wiki members already. That means 1100 unique developers are joining the project. Over 50 members. We ran out of VMs, I mean it's like that has not happened in any project for over five years. We had to fire up people more. So you can see that... And this is not just, these are competitors, but if you step back and look at it, they're competitors from an end user perspective, but they're solving the common problem in which they don't get any money. They don't make any money. These are things that absolutely need to happen. The plumbing, the infrastructure, the orchestration, the control layer, the data plane layer, all of that need to just happen, it should just work. And let them differentiate on top. We are actively seeing almost everybody participating significantly. >> Stu, let's hear your thoughts on this. You guys are both, I view you guys both as experts and influencers in this networking ecosystem, so I got to ask you both a question. CNCF has gotten a lot of traction with funding, sponsorships are off the charts, you're seeing massive tractions, Stu, where you also see that KubeCon Cloud Native, but you have native clouds, I call them native clouds, in Amazon and then soon-to-be enterprises that want to run software-defined networking. So the question is do you see the same kind of support going for your group as CNCF's getting? Is it just fashionable at this point, CNCF? Why isn't the networking getting as much love at least from a sponsorship standpoint. >> Let's define love. So if you define love as the 2017 ONS, which is our largest networking summit, we grew that 10%, everything was off the charts. The feedback, the content-- >> John: The attendance growth or sponsorships? >> Attendance, sponsorships, CFPs were 5x oversubscribed. Call for papers, for submissions, 5x oversubscribed. So we had a hard time picking the best of the best. ONS 2018 is going to be here in LA, we've already started getting requests on, you know, so we're the same boat. >> So you feel good. >> We feel good. >> Not about this, like you're winning. >> No, but I tell you-- >> There'll be positive numbers we know from the hype scale horses, Stu, answer your question and then maybe you guys can comment. So is it a matter of that there's more buzz in positioning involved in the hype side of CNCF now, and there's just meat and potatoes being done in the networking world, Stu? Cause you and I both know, if no one has nothing to say, they've got to kind of market themselves. >> So John, think back to five years ago, how much hype and buzz there was around SDN. John, you and I interviewed like Martin Casado, he just bought for $1.4 billion, all these startups, lots of VC investment, so I think we're further down the maturity curve. Now networking's always-- >> John: People going to work, they're doing their job. >> It's real, it's in production-- >> It's funny-- >> It's not parb, I always say when you move from PowerPoint to production, real things happen. >> I always say, if there's going to be sizzle, I better see some steak on the grill, so what's happening is steak is cooking right now. >> And John, so one of the things we say, networking, no offense to all my friends in networking, networking is never sexy. >> Oh, come on Stu, networking is totally sexy. >> I always say it's cool again. >> Networking has never lost its edge. >> It absolutely is majorly important, but Arpit, take us in, you know, Kubernetes is hot, containers get a lot of buzz and everything. Networking, critical piece of making sure that this works, feels like, I think back to the virtualization days, it took us 10 years to kind of solve those things that that abstraction layer broke. It feels like networking is further ahead than it was, it's moving faster, we understand it's not something that's just kind of oh we'll let the networking guys get to it eventually. Networking and security, which often has that networking tie are front and center now. >> Very good point, and I think what you have to also sort of step back and look at is what are the problems that need to be solved from an end user perspective? So the hardest networking problems at the data plane control layers, check. Next big problem that remain to be solved was orchestration, data analytics, and things like that. Check, solve, with ONAP. Now the next problems that need to be solved are containerization of enterprise app, which is where Kubernetes and... and then how does containerization work with networking? That's all the C&I, the interfaces. I would say next year, you will start to see the interworking and the blend of these "hot projects" where they can all come together. >> Stu, you were there in 2010, I looked right in the camera and said to Dave Vellante, storage is not as sexy. And Dave called it snoreage, cause snoreage is boring. (Stu laughs) >> And at that time, the storage industry went on a run. And we well-documented that. Sexy is, networking is sexy. And I think that we-- >> I call it cool. >> And I just tweeted, 25g is a good indicator of a 20 year run, and networking is the big kahuna as Pat Gelsinger said in IoT, so I think, Stu, I think it's going to be very apparent, sexy. I just don't see a lot of amplifications, so you don't see a lot of people marketing the sizzle. I think, being done I would agree, but Stu, there's more buzz and hype on the CNCF side than networking. >> That's fair. I think it is always as you said, it's the initial phase of any project that gets a lot of clicks and a lot of interest, and people want to know about it. A lot of the buzz is around, just awareness. The classic marketing cycle, and I think we're past that. It was therefore ONAP in January, we're past that. >> Alright, so here's the question, final question. So the steak is coming off the grill in our metaphor here, what are people-- what is that product, what's happening, what is the big deliverable right now from a networking standpoint that people can bet on and know that they can cross the bridge into the future with it. >> You will see a visible difference, you as in an end user, an enterprise, or a residential consumer. You will see a significant difference in terms of how you get services. It's as simple as that. Why? Because it's all automated. Network on-demand, disaster recovery, video conference services. Why did over-the-top players, why were they so successful? If you need a Gmail ID, you go in, you get one. It's right there. Try getting a T1 line five years ago. That would be six weeks, six months. So with the automation in place, the models are converging. >> So provisionings are automatically happening-- >> Provisionings, service, and then the thing that you will not see but you will see in the services impact, is the closed loop automation that has all the analytics built in. Huge, huge. I mean, network is the richest source, and by the way, I'll come back next year and I'll tell you why we are cool again. Because all of a sudden, it's like oh my god look at that data and the analytics that the network is giving me. What can I do with it? You can do AI, you can do machine learning, you can do all these things. >> Well, we're looking forward to it, the eye of the storm is kind of happening now I think in networking, Stu and I always have debates about this, cause we see a lot of great action. Question is, let's see the proof points, you guys are doing some good work. Thanks for sharing, Arpit, really appreciate, General Manager of Networking at Linux Foundation. It's theCUBE, more live coverage from Los Angeles, the Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, be back with more live coverage after this short break. (techno music)