(lively techno music) >> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer here in 2018. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest and first time company on the program, Dilip Advani, who's the vice president of marketing at Uila. Great to see you. >> Thank you Stu. Great to be here. >> All right, so Dilip, first, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to Uila. >> Yeah. So again, my background has been on the analysis side and the protocol analysis side. I have been, in the past, focused on the wireless aspects of the business. I have led teams on product strategies and product marketing in my past history. What I have done is, the reason I came to Uila, is because of the rich history, from the founders who have great experience on the deep packet inspection and the protocol analysis side. And they decided to bring this to the virtualization world and that's what got me very interested in Uila. >> Okay. So Uila itself, we've worked with a number of the team. Fluke Networks? Was that where... >> This was, yeah this was from the original AirMagnet Fluke Networks team as well. So this is the team that actually built the world's first analyzer product, which was Net XRay from Cinco Networks. >> Okay, great, tell us the why of Uila, why today, what's different, what's the big problem it's helping us solve. >> Yeah, so before I talk about what Uila does, and then, what role it plays in the industry, I wanted to address one question that people frequently ask us, "What does Uila actually mean?" The joke around the office is that, because the founders like to go to Hawaii, a lot, >> Stu: (laughs) >> That's why they came up with the Hawaiian name. It actually means "lightning in the cloud" in Hawaiian. But there's a deeper meaning to that. We, actually, we are the power and the guiding light behind some of the challenges that people have with their cloud environment. So what Uila, If you step back and talk about what Uila as a company does, we are a young and dynamic company based out of the Silicon Valley, and what we do is, we do application-centric infrastructure monitoring. We pinpoint the bottlenecks that may exist on your infrastructure, and we also help users on the hybrid cloud workload migration strategy. >> Yeah, I hear "application-centric," and there's been hardware companies that sometimes use that term, and it really more infrastructure-centric, that applications sit on. So, maybe tell us a little bit about where you sit and what you look at and how much is kind of tied to the application versus the infrastructure. >> Absolutely, right. At the end of the day, everything goes back to the application, all the business service. And obviously, the business service is running on the infrastructure. So we target the IT operations team. We want to make sure that they don't end up being the fall guy, or the team to be blamed for anything and everything that goes wrong with the network. Sometimes it is the infrastructure, but at times it could be the application itself, as well. So, that is where Uila plays a role, to help in that full stack monitoring, to avoid the finger-pointing discussion that takes place between the operations team as well as the application teams, or any other teams within the organization. >> I think that's a great point. It's interesting, when the dev ops wave, some people throw out that term "no ops," it's like, operations is real important. I interviewed Solomon Hykes from Docker, and he said, "The reason we did container wasn't to get away from the operator, it was actually to create tools to help the operator, and it enables the developer and the application side, but ops is still pretty critical." >> Absolutely, absolutely. That's where, I think, everything ends. So that's been our focus, to make sure that we provide a solution for that particular team, so that they can help solve any challenges that you may have in your data center. >> Okay, need to understand where this lives, because, today, customers, especially at an event like this, there's virtualization and there's cloud, and there's a huge spectrum of what cloud means to customer. Some of them, cloud is, I'm a small company, maybe it is mostly public cloud. Everybody's doing SaaS. Most companies have some in their on-premises, whatever you want to call that, and heck, there's even the edge stuff, is becoming majorly important, but it's the, everything, whether you call it multi-cloud or hybrid cloud, how do you put that all together? There's lots of challenges there, where do you fit in this overall puzzle? >> Absolutely. In terms of the private cloud, like I mentioned, our main goal is to help you solve the performance bottleneck, whether it's on the application side or the infrastructure side, and help you solve that problem. But what trends we are seeing, is, a majority of the customers, just like the industry in general, is looking towards the hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, or whatever you want to call that. We are seeing a lot of customers move towards that strategy, but again, they are struggling with defining that strategy. They're struggling with how you get going on this particular path of taking their applications or their business services, which, traditionally I've stated in the private data center and moving it to the public cloud as such. So that's where we've seen organizations struggle with understanding what their current scenario looks like, what their current applications look like, how they're dependent on each other. Again, documentation, obviously, as you know, is that last thing on IT people's minds. Or, if they have a document ready, it's outdated as soon as it's created. So that's where we've seen a lot of organizations struggle, with getting that visibility into what exists within their environment, as they plan about taking their applications to the hybrid cloud. >> Okay, so Dilip, I just want to make sure I understand. Things like performance management, do you look at both sides of a hybrid, both the public and the private, or is it primarily in the private? >> We look at both sides, on the private side as well as the public side. And on the private side, like I mentioned, not only do we help on the performance monitoring there, but we also help you define your migration strategy. >> Okay, when I think about all those things you were talking about, I'm surprised I haven't heard some mention of machine learning, artificial intelligence, 'cause things are growing, things are changing so fast, there's no way the administrator can do it themselves, what's the secret sauce, where's the software, where do you fit in, or do you just stay away from those buzzwords? >> No, no, no, again, I think everybody likes to use those buzzwords. >> Stu: (Laughs) >> We do the same as well. I think, when you think about artificial intelligence, or machine learning, at the end of the day, it goes back to the predictive analysis capabilities that organizations must have for their data centers, because at the end of the day, it's about being proactive, not just being reactive, to issues that could be occurring on your network. So, mining the data that's being collected on your current environment and using that, by artificial intelligence, or machine learning, to figure out what are the resources that will be needed as they expand their own capacities within their own environment and such. Or, being able to predict that they need to assign certain resources, or they're going to run into a certain issue, if they don't assign certain resources, or they don't do something, which could impact their business performance. >> Okay, Dilip, want to just step back for a second, give us a snapshot of the company. How many people, what can you share about funding, the state of the product, is it, actually GA? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like I mentioned, we are a young and dynamic company located in Silicon Valley. We are founded three or four years ago, we have a product that's shipping, we have lots of customers. In terms of funding, we have gone through Series A round of funding and such. And we have customers across different verticals. Whether it's healthcare, whether it's retail, and whether it's MSB type of customers as well. >> And you're 100 percent a software company, how do people engage? Is there like a free trial demo type thing, or how do people get started? >> Yeah. Again, we're a pure software company, so if you look at how Uila gets installed, we get installed as a guest VM, on top of the hypervisor. So this could be a Hyper-V environment, or it could be a VMware type of an environment. And then what we do is we do deep packet inspection to get the application and the network information. >> You mentioned VMware and Hyper-V, public clouds, which ones? >> Public clouds, AWS, Google cloud, so we are more agnostic on that side. >> Stu: Great. >> So we do deep packet inspection, to get those details, on the application and network side, and then we also talk to vCenter, to get all of the compute and storage statistics. So again, a pure software solution, we do have trials available, we have a 30-day trial available for our software, so in case anybody is interested, they can obviously go to our website, at Uila.com, and then request a trial. We work with the customer to install it, we train the person who's doing the trial, and then, after the trial, we even do data reviews, and show you what issues that may be existing in your network. So like a true performance assessment of your data center. >> Okay, and who's the typical administrator of this? Is this same person using vCenter admin, or doing their public cloud management? And I'm curious what dynamics you're seeing in the company, when they've got both sides of that, and how that plays? >> Yeah. So typically, we're seeing virtualization engineers, or IT architects, who are using the Uila solution. And the trend we are seeing between the private and the public cloud is that many of the people who had the responsibility on the private side, it's the same group of people who are still responsible for managing the environment on the public cloud side. So it's not only important to make sure the availability of the infrastructure continues, as you go from your private to your public cloud, but also the application and user experience continues, so that's why having the same group of people managing and monitoring is the trend that we are seeing with our customers. >> Okay. Dilip, want to give you the final word. What brings Uila to an event like this? >> Again, this is the first time we've come to VTUG, we have been doing many other community events, in other locations. Uila believes in working with the community, so that's why we've been engaged with the vExperts, as well as the community in general. And we think this is one of the premier events where the right people in the community, in terms of the technical professionals, hang out. So that's why we decided to come to the VTUG event. And I'm pretty sure I will be back for the Summer Slam as well. >> Well, Dilip Advani, really appreciate the updates, and telling our audience a little bit about Uila, it's lightning in the cloud. For some reason we haven't had the CUBE yet in Hawaii, maybe we need to re-change >> Instead of water, we'll have mai tais there. (laughing) >> Absolutely. Lots more coverage here, at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (energetic techno music)