(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. from our Palo Alto studios. Now as we do with all CUBE Conversations, we want to have a great conversation about an interesting topic with a thought leader in the industry and that's exactly what we're doing today. The topic we're going to breach is why is it that networking remains so expensive. If we go back over the past 20 years of computing, we've seen dramatic price performance improvements in virtually every single sector of infrastructure, but networking persists as a relatively expensive technology arena despite the fact that we're moving into an era that is going to become increasingly depending upon networks and to better understand both what the nature of the problem is and how we're going to move forward with a solution, we've got Dominic Wilde with us today. Dominic is a CEO of SnapRoute. Dominic, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> So tell us, let's start. Tell us a little bit about SnapRoute. Tell us about yourself and SnapRoute and then we'll get into it. >> Sure, sure. So SnapRoute is delivering basically a new paradigm in network operating systems. We're delivering a cloud native network operating system that's designed from the ground up to integrate in this, into this new world of cloud architecturally. It's a fully containerized microservices architecture from the ground up. And what that does is it enables an operator to deliver fast time-to-service for applications, to always be secure and up-to-date with security compliance and also to drive significant operational efficiencies as well. So we believe that we have a really strong value proposition for the industry here, particularly in the age of cloud. But we're also marrying to that architectural innovation some economic innovation as well. An economic disruption and we believe that the time is really right here for networking to step up its game effective. >> Oh let's talk a bit about that 'cause if I'm a CIO, >> Yeah. >> every year for a variety of reasons, every other business comes to me and says, okay, you got to give me back 10%. We want you to do more. And more is law and other physical features of how computing work has been very kind to me. >> Right. >> I've been able to provide some of that back because I was able to get cheaper servers and then open source allowed me to get cheaper operating systems and even applications got cheaper and then SAS comes along and the cloud comes along. Networking is a hold out. Why has networking been the hold out? >> Yeah, well simply stated, I think it's because networking has not embraced or driven software economics, whereas compute has in many different aspects, if you look at the sort of timeline of what's happened in recent history in compute and so to parallel that with networking, compute got Linux. And that gave an architectural innovation, it gave greater control and the opportunity for operators to innovate on their own. But it also drove this big economic disruption. The prices really came down. Then came virtualization, of course there was the opportunity there to drive down that the prices again because I don't need five servers I only need one. And another great innovation in terms of operator control. And here we are now in the age of containers and cloud native and get much greater, sort of performance benefits of going containers on bare metal and so all of these things have happened where you have an architectural innovation married together with an economic innovation >> at the software level >> At the software level. And this has not happened in networking because in networking we've continued to really treat the network as an appliance. Its proprietary integrated packaged switches, routers, et cetera. And quite frankly, we got Linux. We got Linux in networking but the price has gone up because there was, APIs are introduced and programmability, and there's much greater value there so therefore were charged more. And then virtualization came along, and SDN, the SDN movement. And there was great hope, I think, in the industry that this would drive a real sort of economic revolution in networking. But what happened was that, rather than really addressing the actual network itself and the software issues with the network itself that make it brittle and very difficult to manage, we got overlays and we added overlays over the top and abstracted the underlying network and added more layers of complexity and expense. And then here we are in the container age and one of the things that we've done here at SnapRoute is we've said, look, you know, let's embrace containers fundamentally and let's build an operating system using that technology with DevOps principles to deliver an architecture that lends itself to the task at hand, which is the move to cloud and how can we enable organizations to move quickly to cloud. And let's face it. Cloud is a distributed architecture and so >> Very much so. >> by building a network operating system with an architecture that is essentially a distributed architecture, it gives us some advantages. But let's marry together that, let's put the economic, software economics in there as well. And quite frankly we tried this around about the time of virtualization, the sort of white box networking movement happened and again there was great hope that, hey this means I can get cheaper networking. >> But we'll explain that. White box, you mean, is that effectively you're able to get commodity hardware >> Yeah. >> and hopefully you could just drop your network operating system software on top of it and replace these full stack switches and these full stack riders that were supporting 50, 60% margins. >> That's right, exactly right. And I can go direct to an ODM. I can buy the hardware at the same, if I buy the volumes at the same cost that an OEM would buy them at, go find myself some software or software operating system and put it on top, up I go, it should be cheaper. The reality was that what happened in the industry is that the software that you could buy, the disaggregated software operating systems absorbed the savings that you got from a lower-cost hardware and so everything evened out and actually, quite frankly the white box has not delivered on its promise. It has for the hyperscale vendors who are buying a massive, massive volume and are building their own operating systems, built for purpose, but in the broader industry we haven't seen those advantages. And so what we did at SnapRoute is we took a big step back and we said, look, if you really need software economics here then as a software company we need to step up. We need to be >> You're a software company and not a networking company. >> We're a software company, I mean, at the end of the day, we're delivering a network operating system >> Got it. >> but we view it as it's an application >> Sure. >> And the architecture we've built is not a traditional monolithic Linux sort of blob as it were. We've really embraced the DevOps culture, the DevOps paradigms. We've been embraced all this sort of, the application and software developer paradigms of how you build a state-of-the-art cloud class application today. And that's what we've done with the network operating system. We've taken that approach to deliver what is effectively a distributed application. >> So let's build on that a little bit because the, as you said, the white box approach doesn't work that well in the networking world largely because some of these network operating systems companies were delivering these very large monolithic pieces of software >> Right. >> that really were just layers on top of the network that often people didn't need and generated a significant amount of lock-in so that was always questionable to begin with. The approach that you're taking, using containers, modern software techniques, cloud native approaches, allows, it seems to be two benefits, let me see if I got this right. >> Yeah, sure. >> Benefit number one is it looks like a set of programmable services to the DevOps world, which is good. >> Yeah. >> And number two because it doesn't have this monolithic footprint you can appropriately skinny it up so that it now does make sense >> Right. >> to think in terms of a new economic model. >> Yeah. >> because you can get access to the services you want, you don't have the security, you don't have the footprint associated with... >> Yeah. >> Talk about that. >> Yeah it's, I mean, it's if you look at it architecturally and you're spot on it but if you look at it architecturally and let's for a moment empathize with the net ops teams because their job has been to take something, take a network using tools and products that the industry have given them and try to live in a very dynamic world, the cloud world, the new class of enterprise. But what they've been given is a set of tools and a set of products that only enable them to build a very static and very brittle, distributed sort of, system, distributed network. And these are, they just haven't had the tools to work with. >> They're largely separate from the services that were running on the network. >> Very much so. The net ops has been siloed, the network is more siloed. Our founders came from Apple, where they ran Apple's biggest data centers and one of things they tell me is that the sort of peer pressure and stuff was that if there was a security vulnerability that had to be patched or something that the DevOps team would come in, the compute team would sort of say, okay, we can patch that in couple of hours, a couple of days at worst. And there's the networking team, they would sit there and in the corner of the room, very shy, sort of saying, well it will take us several weeks to get back to you with a plan for a plan and then we've got to wait for an outage window and we've got a, and it could take months. And so net ops has had this really, really difficult task of living in this dynamic world with everybody else. But the issue here is that if you can deliver the tools, the set of tools and that means an operating system that is designed to be dynamic in the first place, then you should also not only be able to reduce the operational costs overall because now you enable NetOps teams to move faster and stuff. But you have to be able to deliver an economic value in terms of Opex because otherwise there's no reason for anybody to move. It's probably safer to stay where you are. It's probably, Change, it always comes with some kind of cost and some kind of risk. And by the very nature NetOps teams have become risk-averse because any time they changed anything the network could break so they have had to start live in a world of no. Every time somebody comes to them and says, hey I have an application, I need you to do this, that and the other, the answer is no, because I don't want to change anything. I'm measured on uptime. That is the standard measure that networking teams are measured by. And if I'm measured by uptime then I don't want to change anything. >> Well, the server world we used to talk about how the cost of the change was underwritten by the improvements in price performance and in many respects what you're saying is by taking a new approach you are paying for the cost and risk of the change because you're jumping to a new economic model >> Right. >> that could fundamentally put you on a different vector not only for new economics but also creates new classes of options in the network that's much more cloud-like. >> Yes, exactly. I mean it's, And this is I believe a fundamental of the sort of cloud thinking, cloud mentality and the reason that we're all trying to get to cloud is exactly because it gives you, it gives you more flexibility at a lower cost. I mean, everybody's embracing the public cloud. Now what we've seen is some recent numbers that are coming out of Lyft that they've had to commit 300 million dollars through 2021 to the public cloud provider and those numbers are scary and terrifying for a lot of companies. So going all-in on the public cloud maybe is not the right way to go. But living in a hybrid world where you have some on-prem, you have some public cloud and working out which model is best for your company is the right way to go. And the network has been an inhibitor to that because if you have to have a different on-prem network model than is being used in the cloud and the public cloud or use the virtual services there well now you're adding a bunch of cost operationally 'cause you have to do two different things. You have to figure all this out >> And very importantly you're losing a lot of the options that the cloud provides you and the whole point is to get a better, get a better cost profile to be able to use new techniques and approaches >> Right. >> to building applications but also to be on a vector that provides new types of options in the future so that you don't have to worry about this network having these limits and that network having a different set of limits. And so >> Right. >> it brings a more unified approach to say, this is a common resource to the business that is these profiles, this physical characteristic, these software characteristics, and these economic characteristics. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, it's a service book mentality. It's like, hey I want to have us a set, a list of services that I subscribe to and I just pick and choose. Or innovate new ones and that's been very difficult in the legacy networking world. So yeah, we're, the approach is to come in with this, this architectural change that it enables the innovation, it enables that service mentality. It enables, it frees up the business to be more dynamic, to be more responsive and agile. But give the economic driver. Do it in software economics, allows you to kick-start that, allows you to gain the momentum within your organization to say hey we should try something new because there is enough savings here and there are significant savings here. So to give you an idea. What we deliver at the system level so if you take a white box, an ODM box and you take our software and put the two together. Install one on the other at the system level. We're about 50% the price of any of the legacy, incumbent vendors, so it's half the price now. Previously in white box what people have found is actually when they were trying to do stuff themselves the price is pretty much the same if not a little bit more expensive once you add in the operational costs. So we're really actually giving the opportunity to make white box successful. We're giving the opportunity to deliver control and the opportunity to innovate to operators, but most significantly when you're going to talk to your CFO or your CIO or anybody else we're driving the price down so significantly that >> Well I was doing quick calculation on my head, 50% savings on network and a sizable enterprise translates into about two-tenths of a margin point for the business. >> Yeah. >> Not bad. Dominic Wilde, CEO of SnapRoute. Thanks very much for talking to us on theCUBE today. >> Thanks, mate, thanks. >> And once again I'm Peter Burris and this has been another CUBE Conversation. Until next time. (dramatic music)

>> Everyone. Welcome to a special cube conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California Cube Studios. I'm John, four year host of the Q. We hear Atomic Wild, the CEO of Snapper out. Tom. Great to see you. You doing? I'm great. Thanks. You guys. You're launching Snapper. Snapper out. What is the company? What do you guys launching? Tell us. >> Well, quite simply stated were delivering a new class of network operating system for the cloud native era. Andrea Lee. What that does, is it. It delivers on the promise of time to service for applications. Always on security assurance and compliance. Andi greater operational efficiency, which is really one of the things that's been plaguing organizations tonight. >> How long is the company been around? This is the first public launch. A solution? Talk about the history real quick. >> So the company was founded in two thousand fifteen by some former operators from Apple. They built and ran Apple. Sort of biggest public facing data centers from the networking perspective on DH. You know, we've been working diligently on this. This is a new class of operating system that was really inspired by, you know, that their time building out those data centers on def. You, you kind of look back. NETWORKINGS not really had any major disruptive innovation in the last twenty five, thirty years. Ah, but back into the two thousand six, with the advent of a Ws and the and the new sort of big, hyper scaler tze, those guys started to realize that the network was something that was kind of getting in the way of their operational efficiency, of being able to automate and drive the network at scale on DSO. Our founders, you know, went through that whole sort of discovery process and things when when they were Apple on DH, you know, and the hyper scales drove the advent of this kind of white box disaggregated networking, separating the software operating system from the hardware and the reason behind that was really around game great gaining greater control because it's a legacy. Networking vendors were not delivering what was needed, and they needed to get more control on DSO. Are found us. You really saw the opportunity to say, Look, we think that there's a way of solving what an operator really needs and what an organization needs and one of the big challenges. There is howto networking operations. Teams collaborate with dev up stings because the devil teams are responsible for, you know, time to service for the application. And that's, you know, that's really the value of the organization. And so, you know, they set out to solve that problem to say, Well, hell, can we build a network operating system on what they realised was that you know what Deb Ops had done is embrace. It's a cloud. Native principles container ization, virtual ization, my crack services on DH. So what we've done is we've built from the ground up a newly architected network operating system that is a fully containerized micro services architecture that embeds coup Panetti's on DH allows the networking for this first time to be brought natively into the de bop store chain. Sonett ops teams can still sort of control and deploy the network and define policy and things. But now they don't have to worry about that is, you know, sort of annoying day today, tasks where, you know the Devil apps engineer is tryingto get an application on the network and, you know, they have to just do sort of some, you know, pretty trivial movies that changes things. And so, you know, in in doing that, what we also figured out was we could solve, you know, problems not just around the operational efficiencies and the time to service, but also a lot of security >> issues as well. So a lot of development going public with the product you mentioned. Cooper Netease, top of cloud. >> What are the >> big shifts in the industry that you guys air riding on because you have tail winds get cloud? Yeah, What is the way that you're on? Can you take a minute to explain some of the big shifts in the industry that's going, guys? >> Yeah, well, I I think there's several things. I think one of the biggest is that, you know, every single organization out there is looking nervously over its shoulder because we live in an age of very, very rapid disruption. It's kind of you know what call the Amazon affect. You know, those big, established companies who've been around for many, many years, who are being disrupted by, you know, Jason, you know, cos we're in adjacent spaces or new start ups coming in so everybody near realizes they need to use technology to their advantage, and they have to disrupt themselves Before, you know, they're they're disrupted. So? So that's one of the big drivers and And so time to service speed, efficiency are all sort of paramount. When you were in, you know, any C suite, you know, discussion, those air. Those are things that come up a ll the time from a technology perspective. We're seeing things, things changing significantly and how we use technology. And, you know, So everything is mobile. Ah, you know, we have the advent of I O t coming in, and so, you know, lots of services and moving to the edge. And so the data centers that were traditionally completely centralized and they'll sort of starting to distribute a little bit of well, eh? So you have this, you know, idea of sort of age data centers in H compute. So there's there's a lot of things, you know, changing and happening. And there's a lot of opportunity for us to deliver, you know, some strong value in this. >> So they obviously the cloud native trend you mentioned is big. That's driving the application market. De bobs you mentioned earlier huge we've seen years now in years of evidence of growth yet on dev ups. Okay, so now it's coming down into the network how? How our company's solving challenges for application developers that are in a devil's world because that seems to be the growth. And the sooner the pressure's coming from is that more requirements coming from the applications to the network. How are companies solving this problem? >> So, you know, So I think from the computer and storage side, things have moved along, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty swiftly eso, you know, as an application engineer. What? What you want is you want the infrastructure to service. You just You just want it to do what the application needs. Unfortunately, you know, traditionally, infrastructures has has been the other way around. You know, you deploy the infrastructure and you say, Okay, well, this is what the application could do within the constraints of the infrastructure and networking has, you know, just continued that idea. And so what you want to do is you want to take this idea of you we've talked before about infrastructure as code, you know. How do you make it? So is when an application engineer rights and application, he can actually regard the infrastructure as almost like a code library. And that's something that a lot of legacy vendors have talked about marketed to for some time. But the reality is-- >> It makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah, it does. It makes a ton of sense. But the reality is that all they could do was offer up some, you know, proprietary APIs and and programmatic interfaces. And the big challenge was the actual architecture of a network operating system was not designed in a way to actually enable that that infrastructure to react in the proper way by developing this containerized microservices architecture on by embedding communities and putting native DevOps tool chains you know inside the operating system. We actually can deliver on the promise of infrastructure as code. >> and this is what everyone wants. I gotta ask you, if everyone wants this and we hearing all around the Cuban all the events we go to clearly a requirement becoming table stakes. But what? What's been preventing people from doing this? >> Well, it's it's the architecture. I mean, if you look at, I call them Legacy Network architectures, but network architecture. Yeah, network operating system itself. The actual you know, the operating system that exists on the physical switch. That is where the problem starts, because that is designed as one big >> blob off >> coat. So all of the features Aaron there, they're all in the same place. They all sort of interact with each other, and it gives you reliability problems that give you innovation problems, because every time you change something, it has a knock on effect. If there's a bug and you have to fix that bug, you have to replace the entire blob. If you replace the entire blob, you have to down the switch or, you know, do some kind of complex patching. If there's a security vulnerability, you have to either differ like actually fixing their on DH, become non complaint or you have to down the switch. And you know we live in an age, As I said, where everything is on all the time, everything is mobile, you know, everybody wants their services right here right now. And the very you know, the very existence of a business depends on being able to deliver those applications all the time. So you can't bring network's down. So when when we've taken this micro services approach and we've containerized the actual infrastructure, you know, on the protocols and everything else, everything existed in its own container. Now, if there's a security vulnerability, we can replace just that container. If you're not using certain services on the operating system, you could kill those containers. And in the process, you reduce the threat surface off the the operating system in the switch. Where is in a legacy world with this monolithic blob, you can just you can turn off the features, but the code still there, the threat surfaces huge, and you're still vulnerable. So what's the >> solution to this and snap route? Fix this. What's the operational benefits? How do you guys play into fixing? The problems have been holding everyone back. >> Well, I think you know collaboration, I think is, you know, is one of the big benefits. You know, Quite frankly, I think there's, you know, there's there's been sort of tension in organizations. I think unfairly network operating operations teams have been, you know, treated as you know, holding things back or non responsive, whatever, anything that's completely unfair because actually, the problem is with the the vendor community. We haven't been delivering the tools that enable them to, you know, deliver the services they need. And so with you know, with our approach with this cloud native approach, we're actually able, sort of, you know, bring the net net tops world. You know, closer to Deb. Ops allow this Khun collaboration to happen on give you you know that the benefit ofthe I Abel sort of coordinated approach to delivering the application and the application is the value that the business delivers on. Biff, you know, if your application stops working, I mean, you know this in your personal life, right? You know, we use our phones and our devices. You try, use an application and it and it's not working. You're going to go and find a competitive. You're just going to go and say, Oh, well, you know, you saw download something else from the APP store on DH. So, you know, availability is a huge thing for businesses today on the network has been one of the most vulnerable pieces in terms of availability. Not because not necessarily because people are attacking it, but because it's so complex. And brittle that any time you change anything, things fall to pieces. And that's why people don't want to touch the network. And that is why we had the rise of the whole Sgn movement. The ESPN movement was on approach That said, we need to make the network more dynamic. And so, rather than addressing the actual operating system, put overlays over the top, create overlays and allow Deb ops teams to do what they need to do to deploy applications over the top of your fairly done plumbing. What we're saying is, look, we're going to simplify and claps. Thatyou don't need translation layers, and a PR is You don't need overlays. You don't need all of that stuff. We're now re architect in the operating system itself. So you, Khun Natively, address that and you know and directly, you know, control the policy that you need to deploy an application. >> Don, This is about modern infrastructure. It's what cloud is modernizing all parts of the value changing how people by consume, deploy, provide valued application known as you guys are part of that. How do people engage with snap route? So I say, Okay, this is the direction. I'm going. I'm going. I'm in cloud native and doing Cooper Netease. I got containing amusing microspheres betting my company's future on this direction. And a lot of people are. Yep. How doe I engage with you guys. And how do you fit into the equation? >> Right? So s so first of all, you know, initial engagement, you know, website linked in Facebook. You know, we're on all of those things. Weigh, You know, we're in customer trials right now. Invaders right now, you know, where was the launching the product? So you know where we'll be shipping off of your first commercial deployments. But as faras, you know how and where are the good? You know, the good opportunities to to deploy us on. Obviously, there are, you know, sort of new. Come, we're high growth companies who, you know, we're talking to who, you know, kind of wanna build off us as a base to start with. But if you already have ah, large investment in disorder deployed legacy equipment we can fit in quite nicely on. And we can still add a ton of value because one of the big problem areas, he's actually the top of rack, Switch the double racks, which is actually where Dev ops and Net ops come together. It's the first place where compute on the application touched the network on DH. This is where usually Annette, ops engineer, spends a lot of time doing, you know, fairly said of your trivial tasks to help applications, you get onto the network and you know, it's a big >> waste of conversion. You see, you think you're playing at the top Iraq switch, >> that is, that is a good place for for somebody to start to get a tremendous amount of value out of our product. You don't need to replace the entire network. You don't have to have us into end. You don't have to have us in the corps if you deploy us at the top of Rex, which so, you know, take a white box device. You know, deploy our operating system on top is very, very simple to do. The network engineer Khun very simply get that device up and running a little token. Figure itself. And then the Dev ops engineers can, you know, come in and say How would employ an application And I didn't need the network to do the following things, and the device will configure itself in that way. >> This is really two worlds coming together. Network operations and developer operations coming together. Yeah. How do you see that? Coming together and meshing together? Obviously, the top of Rex, which you mentioned? A key area where you get your kogel work. But as those cultural communities come together, you know, network operations and depth there, they're seeing benefits with each other. How are those worlds colliding? What's the benefit? What's it going to look like? And what's the opportunity? >> Yeah, well, I you know, I mean, first of all, I think that there's this misconception that these two over there, you know, these two types of organizations don't want to collaborate anything. That's a complete miss misconception. I mean, everybody wants to do the right thing they wanted, You know, their business is to grow ondas. I said earlier. I mean, I think the problem is that, you know, the vendor community is not delivered, as you know, a set of tools and products and capabilities that enable this collaboration. Andi, you know, that's what we're bringing to the table. But I do think you know that there's this This sort of, you know, this cross pollination, this this this ability to you don't have to learn each other's area of expertise. You don't suddenly have to become a networking expert. You know, the dead box engineer doesn't become a networking expert. Vice versa. But there is this, you know, there's there's this point of view, no collaboration and harmony that we can create where there was a lot of tension on DH, you know, and, you know, in fact, there was, you know, a lot of problems that way. Consider harmonize that and allow these organizations to just, you know, move forward with what really counts, which is growing the business. >> Tom, thanks for coming in. I appreciate your time. Original launch. Final question for you. Taking me displaying your background. Your previous roles in networking. We first met when you were at a PHP that he's being. Then why you attracted to snap Prada's as an opportunity on what's. >> Yeah, so, you know, I'm I've been in networking for over thirty years on and help me on DH. You know, network in security. Various roles, mostly in sort of product Rolls product management. You know, pride to snap her out. I was the general manager of the data center networking group HP on DH. You know, I got to do some, you know, fabulous things at HP. We have, you know, quite a ruber. And in other things there which have been hugely successful. So it was a lot of fun. But I came to the point with my career there, where I realized, you know, I I done, you know, many of the things that I wanted to do, and also, you know, most of the opportunities that were there in transforming and transitioning that company. And I wanted to get back to my start up roots on DH. You know, the, you know, long conversation. >> No data centers, these apple guys. >> Yeah, Andi, you know, And so I started talking Teo to snap Brown on, you know, they were asking my advice and things. And the one of the things that attracted me, as you say was it's a company built by operators for operators. You know, it's I, You know, I've never had the opportunity to be in a company founded by operators who just intrinsically know what the customer problem is on B because they've lived it. And And I think you really do have to live it to truly understand on DH. So, you know, that was a huge plus for me. I was really attracted, Teo, that Adam and Glenn, our founders, you know, really interesting great guys. But also there's this inflection point. There's this inflection point in the marking and market and everything to do with, you know, start ups and successful startups is not just having the right innovative technology, which I truly believe we do but having the right overthere innovative technology at the right time. And the timing here is perfect. I mean, child native, you know, Cuba netease, the movement behind Cuba. Netease is just a force unto itself. You know, Dev Ops is, you know, is really moving forward. There's a huge sort of groundswell within the networking team community to, you know, to modernize and to, you know, toe toe. Contribute more to the success of business s So we have a massive >> opportunity. And And the trend of programmable networks Infrastructure is code is happening now. He wanted rubber is hitting the road now? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know it's, you know, we'll go through the usual adoption curves of, you know, early adopters and mass market etcetera. And so, you know, there's a There's a journey ahead of us, but but yeah. No, I mean, you know, people are doing this right now. >> Well, congratulations on your launch net, right? We'll be watching you. Really innovative. Moving right to the core of the devices with an operating system. No abstraction. Layers with Cooper Netease. Interesting architecture. Looking forward to following it. Dominic Wild CEO Snapper out here inside the Cube studios and fellow Also, I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching.

>> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier host like you here in our Palo Alto studio here in Palo Alto. Here with Dominic Wilde, known as Dom, CEO of SnapRoute, a hot new startup. A great venture. Backers don. Welcome to skip conversation. So love having to start ups. And so talk about Snape route the company because you're doing something interesting that we've been covering your pretty aggressively the convergence between Dev Ops and Networking. We've known you for many, many years. You were a former Hewlett Packard than you woodpecker enterprise running the networking group over there. You know, networking. And you're an operator. Snap rows. Interesting, because, um, great names back behind it. Big venture backers. Lightspeed Norwest, among others. Yes. Take a minute. Explain what? A SnapRoute. >> So SnapRoute was founded to really address one of the big, big problems we see in infrastructure, which is that, you know, essentially the network gets in the way of the deployment the rapid and angel deployment of applications. And so in the modern environment that we're in, you know, the business environment, highly competitive environment of disruption, continuous disruption going on in our industry, every company out there is constantly looking over their shoulder is, you know, making sure that they're moving fast enough there innovating fast enough that they don't want to be disrupted. They don't want to be overrun by, you know, a new upstart. And in order to do that, you know the application is is actually the work product that you really want to deploy, that you you want to roll out, and you want to be able to do that on a continuous basis. You want to be really agile about how you do it. And, quite frankly, when it comes to infrastructure, networking has been fifteen years behind the rest of the infrastructure and enabling that it's, ah, it's a big roadblock. It's obviously, you know, some of the innovations and developments and networking of lag behind other areas on what we snap Brown set out to do was to say, You know, look, if we're if we're going to bring networking forward and we're going to try and solve some of these problems, how do we do that? In a way, architecturally, that will enable networking to become not just a part of Ah, you know a cloud native infrastructure but actually enable those those organizations to drive forward. And so what we did was we took all of our sort of devops principles and Dev ups tools, and we built a network operating system from the ground up using devops principles, devops architectures and devops tools. And so what we're delivering is a cloud native network operating system that is built entirely on containers and is delivered is a micro services architecture on the big...one of the big value propositions that we deliver is what we call see a CD for networking, which is your continuous integration. Continuous deployment is obviously, you know, Big devops principal there. But doing that for networking, allowing a network to be constantly up enabling network Teo adapt to immutable infrastructure principles. You know we're just replacing pieces that need to be replaced. Different pieces of the operating system can be replaced If there's a security vulnerability, for instance, or if there's ah, bugger and you feature needed so you know we can innovate quicker. We can enable the network to be more reliable, allow it to be more agile, more responsive to the needs of the organization on all of this, fundamentally means that your Operation shins model now becomes ah, lot more unified. A lot more simple. You. Now, we now enable the net ox teams to become a sort of more native part of the conversation with devils. Reduce the tension there, eliminate any conflicts and everything. And we do that through this. You know, this innovative offices. >> Classically, the infrastructure is code ethos. >> Yeah, exactly right. I mean, it's you know, a lot of people have been talking about infrastructure is code for a long, long time. But what we really do, I mean, if if you deploy our network operating system you employ onto the bare metal switching, then you really enable Dev ops to hang have, you know, I take control and to drive the network in the way they want using their native tool chains. So, you know, Cuba Netease, for instance, ears. You know that the big growing dev ops orchestration to all of the moment. In fact, we think it's more than of the moment. You know, I've never seen in the industry that sort of, you know, this kind of momentum behind on open source initiative like there is behind Cuba. Netease. And we've taken communities and baked it natively into the operating system. Such that now our network operating system that runs on a physical switch can be a native part off that communities and develops tool >> Dom, I want to get to the marketplace, dynamics. Kind of what's different. Why now? But I think what's interesting about SnapRoute you're the chief of is that it's a venture back with big names? Yeah. Lightspeed, Norwest, among others. It's a signal of a wave that we've been covering people are interested in. How do you make developers deploy faster, more agility at scale, on premises and in clouds. But I want you to before we get there, want to talk about the origin story of company? Yeah. Why does it exist? How did it come to bear you mentioned? Operation is a big part of cloud to cloud is about operating model so much a company. Yes. This is the big trend. That's the big way. But how did it all get started? What's the SnapRoute story? >> Yeah, it's an interesting story. Our founders were actually operators at at Apple back in the day, and they were responsible for building out some of Apple's biggest. You know, data centers for their sort of customer facing services, like, you know, like loud iTunes, all those good things and you know they would. They were tasked with, sort of, you know, sort of modernizing the operational model with with those data centers and, you know, and then they, like many other operators, do you know, had a sense of community and worked with their peers. You know, another big organizations, even you know, other hyper scale organizations and wanted to learn from what they did on DH. What they recognised was that, you know, cos like, you know, Google and Facebook and Microsoft is urine things. They had done some incredible things and some incredible innovations around infrastructure and particularly in networking, that enabled them to Dr Thie infrastructure from A from a Devil ops perspective and make it more native. But those words that if you know, fairly tailored for there, if you know, for their organizations and so what they saw was the opportunity to say, Well, you know, there's there's many other organizations who are delivering, you know, infrastructure is a service or SAS, or you know, who are just very large enterprises who are acting as these new cloud service providers. And they would have a need to, you know, to also have, you know, tools and capabilities, particularly in the network, to enable the network to be more responsive, more to the devil apps like. And so, you know, they they they founded SnapRoute on that principle that, you know, here's the problem that we know we can solve. It's been solved, you know, some degree, but it's an architectural problem, and it's not about taking, You know, all of the, you know, the last twenty five years of networking knowledge and just incrementally doing a sort of, you know, dot upgrade and, you know, trying to sort of say, Hey, we're just add on some AP eyes and things. You really needed to start from the ground up and rethink this entirely from an architectural perspective and design the network operating system as on with Dev ups, tools and principles. So they started the company, you know, been around just very late two thousand fifteen early two thousand sixteen. >> And how much money have you read >> The last around. We are Siri's, eh? We took in twenty five million. >> And who were the venture? >> It was Lightspeed Ventures on DH Norwest. And we also had some strategic investment from Microsoft Ventures and from teams >> from great name blue chips. What was their interest? What was their thesis? Well, and you mentioned the problem. What was the core problem that you're solving that they were attracted to? Why would that why was the thirst with such big name VCs? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it was, you know, a zip said, I think it's the the opportunity to change the operational more. And I think one of the big things that was very different about our company is and, you know, we like to say, you know, we're building for effort. Operators, by operators, you know, I've found is, as I said, well, more operators from Apple, they have lived and breathed what it is to be woken up at three. A. M. On Christmas Eve toe. You know, some outage and have to, you know, try and figure that out and fight your way through a legacy kind of network and figure out what's going on. So you know, so they empathize with what that means and having that DNA and our company is incredibly meaningful in terms of how we build that you know the product on how we engage with customers. We're not just a bunch of vendors who you know we're coming from, you know, previous spender backgrounds. Although I do, you know, I bring to the table the ability to, you know, to deliver a package and you know, So there's just a cloud scale its clouds, Gail. It's it's but it's It's enabling a bridge if you like. If you look at what the hyper scales have done, what they're achieving and the operational models they have, where a if you like a bridge to enable that capability for a much broader set of operators and C. S. P s and as a service companies and dry forward a an aggressive Angela innovation agenda for companies, >> businesses. You know, we always discussing the Cuban. Everyone who watches the Kiev knows I'm always ranting about how cloud providers make their market share numbers, and lot of people include sass, right? I think everyone will be in the SAS business, so I kind of look at the SAS numbers on, say, it's really infrastructures service platform to service Amazon, Google, Microsoft and then, you know, Ali Baba in China. Others. Then you got IBM or one of it's kind of in the big kind of cluster there top. That is a whole nother set of business requirements that sass driven this cloud based. Yeah, this seems to be a really growing market. Is that what you're targeting? And the question is, how do you relate Visa? Visa Cooper? Netease trend? Because communities and these abstraction layers, you're starting to hear things like service mesh, policy based state Full application states up. Is that you trying to that trend explain. >> We're very complimentary, Teo. Those trends, we're, you know, we're not looking to replace any of that, really. And and my big philosophy is, if you're not simplifying something, then you're not really adding back here, you know, what you're doing is complicating matters or adding another layer on top. So so yeah, I mean, we are of value to those companies who are looking at hybrid approaches or have some on prime asset. Our operating system will land on a physical, bare metal switch So you know what? What we do is when you look at it, you know, service most is your message measures and all the other, You know, technologies you talked about with very, very complimentary to those approaches because we're delivering the on underlying network infrastructure on network fabric. Whatever you'd like to call it, that can be managed natively with class native tools, squeezing the alliteration there. But but, you know, it means that you don't need toe add overlays. We don't need to sort of say, Hey, look, the network is this static, archaic thing that's really fragile. And And I mean, if we touch it, it's going to break. So let's just leave it alone and let's let's put some kind of overlay over the top of it on do you know, run over the top? What we're saying is you can collapse that down. Now what you can say, what you can do is you can say, Well, let's make the network dynamic responsive. Let's build a network operating system out of micro services so you can replace parts of it. You can, you know, fix bugs. You can fix security vulnerabilities and you can do all that on the fly without having to schedule outage windows, which is, you know, for a cloud native company or a sass or infrastructure service company. I mean, that's your business. You can't take outage windows. Your business depends on being available all the time. And so we were really changing that fundamentals of a principle of networking and saying, You know, networking is now dynamic, you know, in a very, very native way, but it also integrates very closely with Dev ops. Operational model >> is a lot of innovation that network. We're seeing that clearly around the industry. No doubt everyone sees late and see that comes into multi Cloud was saying that the trend moving the data to the compute coyote again that's a network issue network is now an innovation opportunity. So I gotta ask you, where do you guys see that happening? And I want to ask you specifically talking about the cloud architects out in the marketplace in these enterprises who were trying to figure out about the architecture of clowns. So they know on premises there, moving that into a cloud operations. We see Amazon, they see Google and Microsoft has clouds that might want to engage with have cloud native presence in a hybrid and multi cloud fashion for those cloud architects. What are the things that you like to see them doing? More of that relates to your value problems. In other words, if they're using containers or they're using micro services, is this good or bad? What? What you should enterprise to be working on that ties into your value proposition. >> So I think about this the other way around, actually, if I can kind of turn that turn that question. But on his head, I think what you know, enterprises, you know, organization C, S. P s. I think what they should be doing is focusing on their business and what their business needs. They shouldn't be looking at their infrastructure architecture and saying, you know, okay, how can we, you know, build all these pieces? And then you know what can the business and do on top of that infrastructure? You wanna look at it the other way around? I need to deploy applications rapidly. I need to innovate those applications. I need to, you know, upgrade, change whatever you need to do with those applications. And I need an infrastructure that can be responsive. I need an infrastructure that can be hybrid. I need infrastructure that can be, you know, orchestrated in the hybrid manner on DH. Therefore, I want to go and look for the building blocks out there of those those architectural and infrastructure building blocks out there that can service that application in the most appropriate way to enable the velocity of my business and the innovation from my business. Because at the end of the day, I mean, you know, when we talk to customers, the most important thing T customers, you know, is the velocity of their business. It is keeping ahead in the highly competitive environment and staying so far ahead that you're not going to be disrupted. And, you know, if any element of your infrastructure is holding you back and even you know, you know the most mild way it's a problem. It's something you should address. And we now have the capability to do that for, you know, for many, many years. In fact, you know, I would claim up to today without snap route that you know, you you do not have the ability to remove the network problem. The network is always going to be a boat anchor on your business. It introduces extra cycles. It introduces big security, of underplaying >> the problems of the network and the consequences that prior to snap her out that you guys saw. >> So I take the security issue right? I mean, everybody is very concerned about security today. One of the biggest attack vectors in the security world world today is the infrastructure. It's it's it's so vulnerable. A lot of infrastructure is is built on sort of proprietary software and operating systems. You know, it's very complex. There's a lot of, you know, operations, operational, moves out and change it. So there's there's a lot of opportunity for mistakes to be made. There's a lot of opportunity for, you know, for vulnerabilities to be exposed. And so what you want to do is you want to reduce the threat surface of, you know, your your infrastructure. So one of the things that we can do it SnapRoute that was never possible before is when you look at a traditional network operating system. Andreas, A traditional. I mean, any operating system is out there, other you know, Other >> than our own. >> It's basically a monolithic Lennox blob. It is one blob of code that contains all of the features. And it could be, you know, architect in in a way that it Sze chopped up nicely. But if you're not using certain features, they're still there. And that increases the threat surface with our sat proud plant native network operating system. Because it is a micro services are key picture. If you are not using certain services or features, you can destroy and remove the containers that contain those features and reduce the threat surface of the operating system. And then beyond that, if you do become aware ofthe vulnerability or a threat that you know is somewhere in there, you can replace it in seconds on the fly without taking the infrastructure. Damn, without having to completely replace that whole blob of software causing, you know, an outage window. So that's just one example of, you know, the things we can do. But even when it comes to simple things, like, you know, adding in new services or things because we're containerized service is a ll boot together. It's no, eh? You know it doesn't. It doesn't have a one after the other. It it's all in parallel. So you know this this operating system comes up faster. It's more reliable. It eliminates the risk factors, the security, you know, the issues that you have. It provides native automation capabilities. It natively integrates with, You know, your Dev Ops tool chain. It brings networking into the cloud. Native >> really, really isn't in frustrations. Code is an operating system, so it sounds like your solution is a cloud native operating system. That's correct. That's pretty much the solution. That's it. How do customers engage with you guys? And what do you say? That cloud architect this is Don't tell me what to do. What's the playbook, right? How you guys advice? Because I see this is a new solution. Talk about the solution and your recommendation to architects as they start thinking about building that elastic in that flexible environment. >> Yeah. I mean, I think you know, Ah, big recommendation is, you know, is to embrace, you know, that all the all of the cloud native principles and most of the companies that were talking to, you know, definitely doing that and moving very quickly. But, you know, my recommendation. You know, engaging with us is you should be looking for the network to in naval, your your goals and your you know your applications rather than limiting. I mean, that's that's the big difference that, you know, the people who really see the value in what we do recognize that, you know, the network should be Andi is an asset. It should be enabling new innovation, new capabilities in the business rather than looking at the network as necessary evil where we you know, where we have to get over its limitations or it's holding us back. And so, you know, for any organization that is, you know, is looking at deploying, you know, new switching infrastructure in any way, shape or form. I think, you know, you should be looking at Well, how am I going to integrate this into a dev ops? You know, world, how may going to integrate this into a cloud native world. So as my business moves forward, I'm actually servicing the application in enabling a faster time to service for the application for the business. At the end of the day, that's that's everybody's going, >> you know, we've been seeing in reporting this consistently, and it's even more mainstream now that cloud computing has opened up the aperture of the value and the economics and also the technical innovation around application developers coding faster having the kind of resource is. But it also created a CZ creating a renaissance and networking. So the value of networking and application development that collision is coming together very quickly. So the intersection you guys play. So I'm sure this will resonate well with customers Will as they try to figure out the role the network because against security number one analytics all the things that go into what Sadiq they care about share data, shared coat all this is kind of coming together. So if someone hears this story, they'll go, OK, love this snap around store. I gotta I gotta dig in. How do they engage you? What do you guys sell to them? What's the pitch? Give the quick plug for the company real >> quick. Engaging with us is, you know, is a simple issue. No, come to www snapper out dot com. And you know, you know contacts are up there. You know, we were currently obviously we're a small company. We sell direct, more engaged with, you know, our first customers and deploying our product, you know, right now, and it's going very, very well, and, you know, it's a PSE faras. You know how you know what and when to engage us. I would say you can engage us at any stage and and value whether or not your architect ing a whole new network deploying a new data center. Obviously. Which is, you know, it is an ideal is built from the ground up, but we add value to the >> data center preexisting data saying that wants >> the modernizing data centers. I mean, very want >> to modernize my data center, my candidate. >> So one of the biggest challenges in an existing data center in when one of the biggest areas of tension is at the top of rack switch the top of racks, which is where you connect in your you know, your your application assets, your servers are connected. You're connecting into the into the, you know, first leap into the network. One of the challenges there is. You know, Dev ops engineers, They want Teo, you know, deploy containers. They want to deploy virtual machines they wantto and stuff move stuff, change stuff and they need network engineers to help them to do that. For a network engineer, the least interesting part of the infrastructure is the top Arax. Which it is a constant barrage day in, day, out of request. Hey, can I have a villain? Can have an i p address. Can we move this? And it's not interesting. It just chews up time we alleviate that tension. What we enable you to do is network engineer can you know, deploy the network, get it up and running, and then control what needs to be controlled natively from their box from debits tool chains and allow the devil ups engineers to take control as infrastructure. So the >> Taelon is taking the stress out of the top of racks. Wedge, take the drama out of this. >> Take that arm around the network. Right. >> So okay, you have the soul from a customer. What am I buying? What do you guys offering? Is that a professional services package? Is it software? Is it a sad solution? Itself is the product. >> It is software, you know. We are. We're selling a network operating system. It lands on, you know, bare metal. He liked white box switching. Ah, nde. We offer that as both perpetual licenses or as a subscription. We also office, um, you know, the value and services around that as well. You know, Andre, right now that is, you know, that is our approach to market. You know, we may expand that, you know, two other services in the future, but that is what we're selling right now. It is a network operating >> system down. Thanks for coming and sharing this story of SnapRoute. Final question for you is you've been in this century. While we've had many conversations we'd love to talk about gear, speeds and feeds. I'll see softwares eating. The world was seeing that we're seeing cloud create massive amounts. Opportunity. You're in a big wave, right? What is this wave look like for the next couple of years? How do you see this? Playing out as Cloud continues to go global and you start to Seymour networking becoming much more innovative. Part of the equation with Mohr developers coming onboard. Faster, more scale. How do you see? It's all playing out in the industry. >> Yeah. So I think the next sort of, you know, big wave of things is really around the operational. But I mean, we've we've we've concentrated for many years in the networking industry on speeds and feeds. And then it was, you know, it's all about protocols and you know how protocol stacks of building stuff. That's all noise. It's really about How do you engage with the network? How do you how do you operate your network to service your business? Quite frankly, you know, you should not even know the network is there. If we're doing a really good job of network, you shouldn't even know about it. And that's where we need to get to is an industry. And you know that's that's my belief is where, where we can take >> it. Low latent. See programmable networks. Great stuff. SnapRoute Dominic. While no one is dominant industry friend of the Cube also keep alumni CEO of Snapper Out. Hot new start up with some big backers. Interesting signal. Programmable networks software Cloud Global all kind of big Party innovation equation. Here in Silicon Valley, I'm showing for with cube conversations. 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