>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with our leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. We've been digging into Pesando and the technology that there've been doing. Happy to welcome to the program. Steve Hershkowitz, he's the vice president of worldwide sales with Hewlett Packard enterprise, part of the HPC, HPE Pensando, relationship. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Stu. I'm really happy to be here. >> So, obviously, Pensando made a bit of a splash when they came out at the end of 2019. We were really excited to have the Cube Apple launch, had some big name guests there, including your CEO, Antonio Neri. HPE has an investment and as an OEM of Pensando, So, bring us in us to why this partnership, why this investment from HPE standpoint? >> Well, thanks Stu. So obviously there were a lot of reasons why HP would be interested in a partnership with an innovative company like Pensando standing the fact that you have the MPLS team that had developed, industry changing technologies, for their previous company at Cisco, and leveraging their expertise and their market leadership to bring new innovation to the market, which was very interesting to us. As well as, the partnership that was launched between, Pensando's chairman John Chambers and our CEO, Antonio Neri. And when you hear them speak, they talk about, being partners for life. And so I think what's unique and what's interesting to us is you'll hear our CEO, Antonio talk a lot about HP's evolution as a company and how we are absolutely the edge to Cloud Platform as a service company. And when you have a strategy that involves servicing and consumption, you have to follow the innovation engine and the market transitions up to be able to satisfy your customers and get out in front of some of the market trends. And so the technology and the innovation that Pensando brings to the market is unlike anything else that's available today that anybody else can do. And we saw this as a great opportunity for us to really serve our customers as they move more of their data to the edge and want to apply and distribute a lot of the services to the edge where the data is created and of course, where most of the data is consumed. So it's an exciting partnership for us. We also have a board seat in the company and we're very, very excited about the opportunity and our customers are really, really excited as well about the partnership. >> Yeah, it's interesting. Those of us that have watched the industry long enough, I remember back, John Chambers for many years at HP was one of Cisco's biggest partners, for a long time. It really interesting what you're talking about, some of the new opportunities, what's going on with edge. Bring us inside the partnership a little bit. How has it been going? You've got about six months since it's unveiled to the world. What can you tell us so far, now that it's seen the light of day? >> Well, so the partnership is very, very strong and I think if you ask some of the senior executives on the Pensando side, including some of the board members, they would tell you that the partnership with HPE is different than any other relationship that they have with any other company. And it is that way because we created a very unique bond through our global business unit that's responsible for bringing these products to market and defining the roadmap to a very, very unique go to market strategy that we've developed where we actually have myself leading a go to market engine of people that are helping with the enablement, with the training, with the customer interactions, qualifying opportunities, and really helping to make a market for this technology as we do have first mover advantage. So we work very closely with all aspects of the Pensando team. Our business units are aligned, our development teams are aligned, our sales teams are very, very closely aligned. Their chief revenue officer, Frank Paloma and I are tied at the hip as we bring this technology to market together with both of our sales teams. And then as we look at further innovating together, we are completely locked and aligned on the combined roadmap. So it's a unique partnership. It creates unprecedented opportunity for HPE through this partnership to gain architectural control and help our customers gain architectural control over these next generation data center networks and really make a leapfrog over any of the technologies that are available today. Really two focuses, right? One is in helping the cloud service providers that want to better compete with the 800 pound gorillas, with a much better technology, a faster technology and a technology that leapfrogs anything that they've built. And the other side of that is our ability to help enterprises as we sell more as a service offerings and more edge solutions, help our enterprises make their environments much less complex, much more secure, and really help him improve business application performance so that they can sustain competitive advantage and make their data center networks look a lot more like what the hyperscalers have built, but only a lot better and a lot faster and a lot more secure. >> Yeah. I tell you, Steve, one of the things that I've always been really admired about HP over the years is baking these solutions together. It's not just a bunch of pieces, get them at the customer site and figure it out. But, I worked on standards, I've worked on a lot of solutions over the years and HP and now HPE always makes sure when it gets to the customer, it's together, it works. The time from getting it to being able to use it, really is minimized and that focus on simplicity is something that I've seen time and again from HPE. When it comes to the Pensando solution, how does this fit in with the HPE products? Where is it fit in? What are those solutions look like today? >> It's a really, really good question, Stu. So, initially we're going to market on our ProLiant Rack Server platform and we will launch in June, general availability. These solutions, we've been offering them to customers, very select number of customers through a private skew that we've created, but it fits initially within our Rack Server portfolio. But over time you'll see us start to begin to integrate this across the entire compute portfolio, where it makes sense and where there's a market and where customers are asking for it in addition to some integration points with different business units, right? So we have this relationship is so exciting that almost every business unit within HPE is interested in figuring out what the leverage points are to help solve customer problems and create opportunities for customers. So everything from our blade servers through synergy, through our Aruba relationship, through our software, stack, we're going to be doing a lot more integration. So I think you look out for initially an opportunity to install this digital services platform where you have a lot of Rack Servers and you want to reduce the complexity and really distribute a lot of those network services that are provided today in a centralized fashion. Through a number of different black boxes with a number of different operating systems, a number of different service contracts, move those to the compute edge at the exhaust of an HPE server on a platform that's factory integrated. And that we stand behind them, we support and sell. And you made another comment about support and how HPE does a really good job at making sure that when we sell a solution, it's a tightly integrated solution that scales, that works together and their customers can count on and versus something that's loosely coupled than disjointed as you see a lot of partnerships, which we try and avoid. So one of the parts of this relationship that's unique is that HPE is actually going to be supporting and providing the L1, and the L2 support for this product on a global basis. So when our customers have an issue or they need help, they come to us and it really rounds out the relationship. So it's not just taking a portfolio or a solution and putting it into an HP server. It's a factory integrated, factory tested solution with a lot of different integrations that we stand behind, that we sell and it scales. It'll work just as well with a hundred DSPs and servers as it will with a hundred thousand. >> I'd love to drill in a little bit on, really the customer use cases there. When you talk about edge computing, first of all, there's a lot of misnomers out in the industry. Edge can be anything from the telco edge. I've seen lots of things like network function virtualization. I've talked to HPE about those network offerings in the past through down to kind of IOT devices and everything in between. You said you've got some customers that have been getting early access. Are there any patterns or anything you can tell us about what are those edge use cases that this solution is a good fit for? >> Sure Stu. I think, when we started this journey six months ago, we initially thought that the most common use case that customers would be interested, especially the large New York financial customers were the large financial customers in general would be security, right? And so we had a lot of conversations about things like East West firewall, 70, 80% of the traffic as we talk to customers nowadays, is East West, right? It's application to application traffic, where it used to be North, South and that East West traffic, especially in a virtualized world with virtualized networks and virtualized servers, has created a lot of complexity for customers. So we thought originally, security, micro-segmentation, East, West firewall encryption would be the use cases. But interestingly enough, as we started to talk to customers, what we found out pretty quickly was that many of these customers have lost track because of the sprawl in the growth of the data, in their data centers. It really lost track of which applications are talking to which applications, which people are talking to which people. And in fact, we had some customers tell us that if we were to put your system in and turn on firewall services from day one, we could potentially... it would bring our network to its knees because we've lost track of where everything is going. So, what that's led itself to is a lot of customers very interested in the first use case, which is around visibility, observability and telemetry, giving our customers the ability to really graph out and see their application patterns. Because what you can't see, you really can't secure. And then, and then what we believe will happen over time and we're starting to see this play out, is that those customers, once they have a handle on what their traffic flows are and they have some good telemetry. They have some good services on being able to get that visibility. Then they'll start to define security policy based upon those traffic patterns and use the centralized Pensando policy services manager to distribute that policy, whether it be micro-segmentation for managing and securing, virtualized traffic or East West firewall. And then later on encryption and in a future release. So that's what we're seeing. >> Excellent. I'm like, Oh, great customer data already. What you've been saying really resonates customers today know that pace of change and keeping track of things is really challenging. It's gone from something that people might be able to get a handle to with, to knowing I have to have the automation, the systems the intelligence baked into the system to be able to handle it. All right. So June, this month, you've GA the product, congratulations on getting that. So tell us what you expect to see, the Pensando HP relationship. Are there expansions in the product line? We should be looking forward through the rest of 2020 or any other pieces as look forward? >> Sure. So, we are excited about the June, launch. We're also excited about the fact that we have our large customer show coming up this year, HP discover and we're going to be profiling the new conceptual partnership at discover, giving customers, the ability to see the power of this technology and how it can really help them solve their most pressing business and technical priorities. But we have a full roadmap that we've built out jointly with our partners at Pensando that involves taking this platform across different parts of our portfolio. One of the things that we'll be doing as we launch almost immediately is we're going to be putting this on our flagship GreenLake offer, right? Which is our, as a service offering. And so customers will have the ability to purchase Pensando's solutions under GreenLake and then over time we'll enhance that to provide the detailed metering that our customers have come to know through that platform. So I think you'll see a big splash there. And then there's a lot of work being done to leverage the SDKs that Pensando was providing to provide better integration into some of our workflows and some of our tools. And again, as I mentioned to you earlier, Stu, almost every business unit in our company has got meetings going on with Pensando trying to figure out how they can leverage the power of this technology to help HPE, gain and sustain longterm competitive advantage as customers move from these old legacy, three tier networks that are very complicated to run and they have to stitch the lands together. They have to go through different service chaining to get simple things done. I think there's going to be a lot of work going on across all of our business units to keep Pensando front and center and help us deliver this platform jointly so that we're differentiated. One other thing I think is important too is that we're also building a whole host of differentiated services around this platform. So things like professional services, training services, security assessment services, right. We're gaining a lot of experience through the trial and proof of concept process that we're going through right now and we're building runbooks right? To be able to sort of document exactly what we've learned as we do these big implementations and these trials and be able to bring those to our customers in the form of services that they can use as they look to migrate and modernize these legacy networks. >> Excellent. Well Steve, sounds like just the GA is step one. You and your team have your hands full with a lot of pieces. As you go to market with this and expand that offering, really impressive. We're taking this. Want to give you the final word Pensando HPE and what customers should be looking for? >> Stu, I think our customers should look forward to the GA launch coming out towards the end of June. And this technology is very exciting because if I had to sum it up in basically, three statements it would be this solution combined with what HP has the ability to deliver and support will absolutely help our customers simplify their environments, reduce a lot of operational complexity there by reducing significant cost as they look to rearchitect and build their next generation data center networks. Secondarily, this solution, our combined solution together will help every customer, especially those in the financial industry or highly regulated industries really substantially improve their security posture and reduce the amount of risk that they have in their environments. And then lastly, and I think almost as equally as important, is the fact that this solution, because it's built on a highly programmable, customization, that's traditionally used in networking technology, not necessarily seen at the exhaust of a server, is going to give our customers the ability to exponentially improve their application performance so that when business applications run faster, it gives them opportunities to get to market faster with their own products and drive additional revenue to sustained longterm competitive advantage. So we're excited about the opportunities to... it's going to be a lot of fun. >> Excellent. Well, Steve Hershkowitz, thank you so much for the update. Congratulations on the launch and absolutely we'll be keeping track of the progress. >> Thank you for your time. Happy to be here. >> All right. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (smooth music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this special exclusive presentation from theCUBE. We're digging into Pensando and their Future Proof Your Enterprise event. To help kick things off, welcoming in a friend of the program, Scott Raynovich. He is the principal analyst at Futuriom coming to us from Montana. I believe first time we've had a guest on the program in the state of Montana, so Scott, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu, happy to be here. >> All right, so we're going to dig a lot into Pensando. They've got their announcement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Might help if we give a little bit of background, and definitely I want Scott and I to talk a little bit about where things are in the industry, especially what's happening in networking, and how some of the startups are helping to impact what's happening on the market. So for those that aren't familiar with Pensando, if you followed networking I'm sure you are familiar with the team that started them, so they are known, for those of us that watch the industry, as MPLS, which are four people, not to be confused with the protocol MPLS, but they had very successfully done multiple spin-ins for Cisco, Andiamo, Nuova and Insieme, which created Fibre Channel switches, the Cisco UCS, and the ACI product line, so multiple generations to the Nexus, and Pensando is their company. They talk about Future Proof Your Enterprise is the proof point that they have today talking about the new edge. John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco, is the chairman of Pensando. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is not only an investor, but also a customer in OEM piece of this solution, and so very interesting piece, and Scott, I want to pull you into the discussion. The waves of technology, I think, the last 10, 15 years in networking, a lot it has been can Cisco be disrupted? So software-defined networking was let's get away from hardware and drive towards more software. Lots of things happening. So I'd love your commentary. Just some of the macro trends you're seeing, Cisco's position in the marketplace, how the startups are impacting them. >> Sure, Stu. I think it's very exciting times right now in networking, because we're just at the point where we kind of have this long battle of software-defined networking, like you said, really pushed by the startups, and there's been a lot of skepticism along the way, but you're starting to see some success, and the way I describe it is we're really on the third generation of software-defined networking. You have the first generation, which was really one company, Nicira, which VMware bought and turned into their successful NSX product, which is a virtualized networking solution, if you will, and then you had another round of startups, people like Big Switch and Cumulus Networks, all of which were acquired in the last year. Big Switch went to Arista, and Cumulus just got purchased by... Who were they purchased by, Stu? >> Purchased by Nvidia, who interestingly enough, they just picked up Mellanox, so watching Nvidia build out their stack. >> Sorry, I was having a senior moment. It happens to us analysts. (chuckling) But yeah, so Nvidia's kind of rolling up these data center and networking plays, which is interesting because Nvidia is not a traditional networking hardware vendor. It's a chip company. So what you're seeing is kind of this vision of what they call in the industry disaggregation. Having the different components sold separately, and then of course Cisco announced the plan to roll out their own chip, and so that disaggregated from the network as well. When Cisco did that, they acknowledged that this is successful, basically. They acknowledged that disaggregation is happening. It was originally driven by the large public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon, which started the whole disaggregation trend by acquiring different components and then melding it all together with software. So it's definitely the future, and so there's a lot of startups in this area to watch. I'm watching many of them. They include ArcOS, which is a exciting new routing vendor. DriveNets, which is another virtualized routing vendor. This company Alkira, which is going to do routing fully in the cloud, multi-cloud networking. Aviatrix, which is doing multi-cloud networking. All these are basically software companies. They're not pitching hardware as part of their value add, or their integrated package, if you will. So it's a different business model, and it's going to be super interesting to watch, because I think the third generation is the one that's really going to break this all apart. >> Yeah, you brought up a lot of really interesting points there, Scott. That disaggregation, and some of the changing landscape. Of course that more than $1 billion acquisition of Nicira by VMware caused a lot of tension between VMware and Cisco. Interesting. I think back when to Cisco created the UCS platform it created a ripple effect in the networking world also. HP was a huge partner of Cisco's before UCS launched, and not long after UCS launched HP stopped selling Cisco gear. They got heavier into the networking component, and then here many years later we see who does the MPLS team partner with when they're no longer part of Cisco, and Chambers is no longer the CEO? Well, it's HPE front and center there. You're going to see John Chambers at HPE Discover, so it was a long relationship and change. And from the chip companies, Intel, of course, has built a sizeable networking business. We talked a bit about Mellanox and the acquisitions they've done. One you didn't mention but caused a huge impact in the industry, and something that Pensando's responding to is Amazon, but Annapurna Labs, and Annapurna Labs, a small Israeli company, and really driving a lot of the innovation when it comes to compute and networking at Amazon. The Graviton, Compute, and Nitro is what powers their Outposts solutions, so if you look at Amazon, they buy lots of pieces. It's that mixture of hardware and software. In early days people thought that they just bought kind of off-the-shelf white boxes and did it cheap, but really we see Amazon really hyper optimizes what they're doing. So Scott, let's talk a little bit about Pensando if we can. Amazon with the Nitro solutions built to Outposts, which is their hybrid solution, so the same stack that they put in Amazon they can now put in customers' data center. What Pensando's positioning is well, other cloud providers and enterprise, rather than having to buy something from Amazon, we're going to enable that. So what do you think about what you've seen and heard from Pensando, and what's that need in the market for these type of solutions? >> Yes, okay. So I'm glad you brought up Outposts, because I should've mentioned this next trend. We have, if you will, the disaggregated open software-based networking which is going on. It started in the public cloud, but then you have another trend taking hold, which is the so-called edge of the network, which is going to be driven by the emergence of 5G, and the technology called CBRS, and different wireless technologies that are emerging at the so-called edge of the network, and the purpose of the edge, remember, is to get closer to the customer, get larger bandwidth, and compute, and storage closer to the customer, and there's a lot of people excited about this, including the public cloud providers, Amazon's building out their Outposts, Microsoft has an Edge stack, the Azure Edge Stack that they've built. They've acquired a couple companies for $1 billion. They acquired Metaswitch, they acquired Affirmed Networks, and so all these public cloud providers are pushing their cloud out to the edge with this infrastructure, a combination of software and hardware, and that's the opportunity that Pensando is going after with this Outposts theme, and it's very interesting, Stu, because the coopetition is very tenuous. A lot of players are trying to occupy this edge. If you think about what Amazon did with public cloud, they sucked up all of this IT compute power and services applications, and everything moved from these enterprise private clouds to the public cloud, and Amazon's market cap exploded, right, because they were basically sucking up all the money for IT spending. So now if this moves to the edge, we have this arms race of people that want to be on the edge. The way to visualize it is a mini cloud. Whether this mini cloud is at the edge of Costco, so that when Stu's shopping at Costco there's AI that follows you in the store, knows everything you're going to do, and predicts you're going to buy this cereal and "We're going to give you a deal today. "Here's a coupon." This kind of big brother-ish AI tracking thing, which is happening whether you like it or not. Or autonomous vehicles that need to connect to the edge, and have self-driving, and have very low latency services very close to them, whether that's on the edge of the highway or wherever you're going in the car. You might not have time to go back to the public cloud to get the data, so it's about pushing these compute and data services closer to the customers at the edge, and having very low latency, and having lots of resources there, compute, storage, and networking. And that's the opportunity that Pensando's going after, and of course HPE is going after that, too, and HPE, as we know, is competing with its other big mega competitors, primarily Dell, the Dell/VMware combo, and the Cisco... The Cisco machine. At the same time, the service providers are interested as well. By the way, they have infrastructure. They have central offices all over the world, so they are thinking that can be an edge. Then you have the data center people, the Equinixes of the world, who also own real estate and data centers that are closer to the customers in the metro areas, so you really have this very interesting dynamic of all these big players going after this opportunity, putting in money, resources, and trying to acquire the right technology. Pensando is right in the middle of this. They're going after this opportunity using the P4 networking language, and a specialized ASIC, and a NIC that they think is going to accelerate processing and networking of the edge. >> Yeah, you've laid out a lot of really good pieces there, Scott. As you said, the first incarnation of this, it's a NIC, and boy, I think back to years ago. It's like, well, we tried to make the NIC really simple, or do we build intelligence in it? How much? The hardware versus software discussion. What I found interesting is if you look at this team, they were really good, they made a chip. It's a switch, it's an ASIC, it became compute, and if you look at the technology available now, they're building a lot of your networking just in a really small form factor. You talked about P4. It's highly programmable, so the theme of Future Proof Your Enterprise. With anything you say, "Ah, what is it?" It's a piece of hardware. Well, it's highly programmable, so today they position it for security, telemetry, observability, but if there's other services that I need to get to edge, so you laid out really well a couple of those edge use cases and if something comes up and I need that in the future, well, just like we've been talking about for years with software-defined networking, and network function virtualization, I don't want a dedicated appliance. It's going to be in software, and a form factor like Pensando does, I can put that in lots of places. They're positioning they have a cloud business, which they sell direct, and expect to have a couple of the cloud providers using this solution here in 2020, and then the enterprise business, and obviously a huge opportunity with HPE's position in the marketplace to take that to a broad customer base. So interesting opportunity, so many different pieces. Flexibility of software, as you relayed, Scott. It's a complicated coopetition out there, so I guess what would you want to see from the market, and what is success from Pensando and HPE, if they make this generally available this month, it's available on ProLiant, it's available on GreenLake. What would you want to be hearing from customers or from the market for you to say further down the road that this has been highly successful? >> Well, I want to see that it works, and I want to see that people are buying it. So it's not that complicated. I mean I'm being a little superficial there. It's hard sometimes to look in these technologies. They're very sophisticated, and sometimes it comes down to whether they perform, they deliver on the expectation, but I think there are also questions about the edge, the pace of investment. We're obviously in a recession, and we're in a very strange environment with the pandemic, which has accelerated spending in some areas, but also throttled back spending in other areas, and 5G is one of the areas that it appears to have been throttled back a little bit, this big explosion of technology at the edge. Nobody's quite sure how it's going to play out, when it's going to play out. Also who's going to buy this stuff? Personally, I think it's going to be big enterprises. It's going to start with the big box retailers, the Walmarts, the Costcos of the world. By the way, Walmart's in a big competition with Amazon, and I think one of the news items you've seen in the pandemic is all these online digital ecommerce sales have skyrocketed, obviously, because people are staying at home more. They need that intelligence at the edge. They need that infrastructure. And one of the things that I've heard is the thing that's held it back so far is the price. They don't know how much it's going to cost. We actually ran a survey recently targeting enterprises buying 5G, and that was one of the number one concerns. How much does this infrastructure cost? So I don't actually know how much Pensando costs, but they're going to have to deliver the right ROI. If it's a very expensive proprietary NIC, who pays for that, and does it deliver the ROI that they need? So we're going to have to see that in the marketplace, and by the way, Cisco's going to have the same challenge, and Dell's going to have the same challenge. They're all racing to supply this edge stack, if you will, packaged with hardware, but it's going to come down to how is it priced, what's the ROI, and are these customers going to justify the investment is the trick. >> Absolutely, Scott. Really good points there, too. Of course the HPE announcement, big move for Pensando. Doesn't mean that they can't work with the other server vendors. They absolutely are talking to all of them, and we will see if there are alternatives to Pensando that come up, or if they end up singing with them. All right, so what we have here is I've actually got quite a few interviews with the Pensando team, starting with I talked about MPLS. We have Prem, Jane, and Sony Giandoni, who are the P and the S in MPLS as part of it. Both co-founders, Prem is the CEO. We have Silvano Guy who, anybody that followed this group, you know writes the book on it. If you watched all the way this far and want to learn even more about it, I actually have a few copies of Silvano's book, so if you reach out to me, easiest way is on Twitter. Just hit me up at @Stu. I've got a few copies of the book about Pensando, which you can go through all those details about how it works, the programmability, what changes and everything like that. We've also, of course, got Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and while we don't have any customers for this segment, Scott mentioned many of the retail ones. Goldman Sachs is kind of the marquee early customer, so did talk with them. I have Randy Pond, who's the CFO, talking about they've actually seen an increase beyond what they expected at this point of being out of stealth, only a little over six months, even more, which is important considering that it's tough times for many startups coming out in the middle of a pandemic. So watch those interviews. Please hit us up with any other questions. Scott Raynovich, thank you so much for joining us to help talk about the industry, and this Pensando partnership extending with HPE. >> Thanks, Stu. Always a pleasure to join theCUBE team. >> All right, check out thecube.net for all the upcoming, as well as if you just search "Pensando" on there, you can see everything we had on there. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (smooth music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. We're digging in with Pensando. Talking about the technologies that they're using. And happy to welcome to the program, two of Pensando's technical leaders. We have Krishna Doddapaneni, he's the Vice President of Software. And we have here Pirabhu Raman, he's a Principal Engineer, both with Pensando. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right. >> Thank you for having us here >> Krishna, you run the Software Team. So let's start there and talk about really the mission and shortly obviously, bring us through a little bit of architecturally what Pensando was doing. >> To get started, Pensando we are building a platform, which can automate and manage the network storage and security services. So when we talk about software here, it's like the better software as you start from all the way from bootloader, to all the way it goes to microservices controller. So the fundamentally the company is building a domain specific processor called a DSP, that goes on the card called DSC. And that card goes into a server in a PCIe slot. Since we go into a server and we act as a NIC, we have to do drivers for Windows, all the OS' Windows, Linux, ESX and FreeBSD. And on the card itself, the chip itself, there are two fundamental pieces of the chip. One is the P4 pipelines, where we run all our applications, if you can think like in the firewalls, in the virtualization, all security applications. And then there's Arm SoC, which we have to bring up the platform and where we run the control plane and data and management plane so that's one piece of the software. The other big piece of software is called PSM. Which kind of, if you think about it in data center, you don't want to manage, one DSC at a time or one server at a time. We want to manage all thousands of servers, using a single management and control point. And that's where the test for the PSM comes from. >> Yeah, excellent. You talked about a pretty complex solution there. One of the big discussion points in the networking world and I think in general has been really the role of software. I think we all know, it got a little overblown. The discussion of software, does not mean that hardware goes away. I wrote a piece, many years ago, if you look at how hyperscalars do things, how they hyper optimize. They don't just buy the cheapest, most generic thing. they tend to configure things and they just roll it out in massive scale. So your team is well known for, really from a chip standpoint, I think about the three Cisco spin-ins. If you dug underneath the covers, yes there was software, but there was an Async there. So, when I look at what you're doing in Pensando, you've got software and there is a chip, at the end of the day. It looks, the first form factor of this looks like, a network card, the NIC that fits in there. So give us in there some of the some of the challenges of software and there's so much diversity in hardware these days. Everything getting ready for AI and GPUs. And you listed off a bunch of pieces when you were talking about the architecture. So give us that software/hardware dynamic, if you would. >> I mean, if you look at where the industry has been going towards, right, I mean, the Moore's law has been ending and Dennard scale is a big on Dennard scaling. So if you want to set all the network in certain security services on x86, you will be wasting a bunch of x86 cycles. The customer, why does he buy x86? He buys x86 to run his application. Not to run IO or do security for IO or policies for IO. So where we come in is basically, we do this domain specific processor, which will take away all the IO part of it, and the computer, just the compute of the application is left for x86. The rest is all offloaded to what we call Pensando. So NIC is kind of one part of what we do. NIC is how we connect to the server. But what we do inside the card is, firewalls, all the networking functions: SDNs, load balancing in all the storage functions, NVMe virtualization, and encryption of all the packets, data of data at rest and data of data in motion. All these services is what we do in this part. And you know, yes, it's an Async. But if you look at what we do inside, it's not a fixed Async. We did work on the previous spin-ins as you said, with Async, but there's a fundamental difference between that Async can this Async. In those Asyncs for example, there's a hard coded routing table or there's a hard coded ACL table. This Async is a completely programmable. It's more like it's a programmable software that we have domain specific language called P4. We use that P4 to program the Async. So the way I look at it, it's an Async, but it's mostly software driven completely. And from all the way from controllers, to what programs you run on the chip, is completely software driven. >> Excellent. Pirabhu of course, the big announcement here, HPE. You've now got the product. It's becoming generally available this month. We'd watch from the launch of Pensando, obviously, having HPE as not only an investor, but they're an OEM of the product. They've got a huge customer base. Maybe help explain, from the enterprise standpoint, if I'm buying ProLion, where now does, am I going to be thinking about Pensando? What specific use cases? How does this translate to the general and enterprise IP buyer? >> We cover of whole breadth of use cases, at the very basic level, if your use cases or if your company is not ready for all the different features, you could buy it as a basic NIC and start provisioning it, and you will get all the basic network functions. But at the same time in addition to the standard network functions, you will get always on telemetry. Like you will get rich set of metrics, you will get packet capture capabilities, which will help you very much in troubleshooting issues, when they happen, or you can leave them always on as well. So, you can do some of these tap kind of functionalities, which financial services do. And all these things you will get without any impact on the workload performance. Like the customers' application don't see any performance impact when any of these capabilities are turned on. So once this is as a standard network function, but beyond this when you are ready for enforcing policies at the edge or you're ready for enforcing stateful firewalls, distributed firewalling capabilities, connection tracking, some of the other things, like Krishna touched upon NVMe virtualization, there are all sorts of other features you can add on top of. >> Okay, so it sounds like what we're really democratizing some of those cloud services or cloud like services for the network, down to the end device, if I have this right. >> Exactly. >> Maybe if you could, networking, we know, our friends in network. We tend to get very acronym driven, to overlays and underlays and various layers of the stack there. When we talk about innovation, I'd love to hear from both of you, what are some of those kind of key innovations, if you were to highlight just one or two? Pirabhu, maybe you can go first and then Krishna would would love your follow up from that. >> Sure, there are many innovations, but just to highlight a few of them, right. Krishna touched upon P4, but even on the P4, P4 is very much focused on manipulating the packets, packets in and packets out, but we enhanced it so that we can address it in such a way that from memory in-packet out, packet in-memory out. Those kind of capabilities so that we can interface it with the host memory. So those innovations we are taking it to the standard and they are in the process of getting standardized as well. In addition to this, our software stack, we touched upon the always on telemetry capabilities. You could do flow based packet captures, NetFlow, you could get a lot of visibility and troubleshooting information. The management plane in itself, has some of the state of the art capabilities. Like it's distributed, highly available, and it makes it very easy for you to manage thousands of these servers. Krishna, do you want to add something more? >> Yes, the biggest thing of the platform is that when we did underlays and overlays, as you said there, everything was like fixed. So tomorrow, you wake up and come with a new protocol, or you may come up with a new way to do storage, right? Normally, in the hardware world, what happens is, Oh, you have to I have to sell you this new chip. That is not what we are doing. I mean, here, whatever we ship on this Async, you can continue to evolve and continue to innovate, irrespective of changing standards. If NVMe goes from one dot two to one dot three, or you come up with a new encapsulation of VXLAN, you do whatever encapsulations, whatever TLVs you would want to, you don't need to change the hardware. It's more about downloading new firmware, and upgrading the new firmware and you get the new feature. That is that's one of the key innovation. That's why most of the cloud providers like us, that we are not tied to hardware. It's more of software programmable processor that we can keep on adding features in the future. >> So one way to look at it, is like, you get the best of both worlds kind of a thing. You get power and performance of Async, but at the same time you get the flexibility of closer to that of a general purpose processor. >> Yeah, so Krishna, since you own the software piece of thing, help us understand architecturally, how you can deploy something today but be ready for whatever comes in the future. That's always been the challenge is, Gee, maybe if I wait another six months, there'll be another generation something, where I don't want to make sure that I miss some window of opportunity. >> Yeah, so it's a very good question. I mean, basically you can keep enhancing your features with the same performance and power and latency and throughput. But the other important thing is how you upgrade the software. I mean today whenever you have Async. When you have changed the Async, obviously, you have to pull the card out and you put the new card in. Here, when you're talking upgrading software, we can upgrade software while traffic is going through. With very minimal disruption, in the order of sub second. Right, so you can change your protocol, for example, tomorrow, we change from VXLAN to your own innovative protocol, you can upgrade that without disrupting any existing network or storage IO. I mean, that's where the power of the platform is very useful. And if you look at it today, where cloud providers are going right, and the cloud providers, you don't want to, because there are customers who are using that server, and they're deploying their application, they don't want to disturb that application, just because you decided to do some new innovative feature. The platform capability is that you could upgrade it, and you can change your mind sometime in the future. But whatever existing traffic is there, the traffic will continue to flow and not disrupt your app. >> All right, great. Well, you're talking about clouds one of the things we look at is multi cloud and multi vendor. Pirabhu, we've got the announcement with HPE now, ProLion and some of their other platforms. Tell us how much work will it be for you to support things like Dell servers or I think your team's quite familiar with the Cisco UCS platform. Two pieces on that number one: how easy or hard is it to do that integration? And from an architectural design? Does a customer need to be homogeneous from their environment or is whatever cloud or server platform they're on independent, and we should be able to work across those? >> Yeah, first off, I should start with thanking HPE. They have been a great partner and they have been quick to recognize the synergy and the potential of the synergy. And they have been very helpful towards this integration journey. And the way we see it, a lot of the work has already been done in terms of finding out the integration issues with HPE. And we will build upon this integration work that has been done so that we can quickly integrate with other manufacturers like Dell and Cisco. We definitely want to integrate with other server manufacturers as well, because that is in the interest of our customers, who want to consume Pensando in a heterogenous fashion, not just from one server manufacturer. >> Just want to add one thing to what Pirabhu's saying. Basically, the way we think about it is that, there's x86 and then the all the IO, the infrastructure services, right. So for us, as long as you get power from the server, and you can get packets and IO across the PCIe bus, we are kind of, we want to make it a uniform layer. So the Pensando, if you think about it, is a layer that can work across servers, and could work inside the public cloud and when we have, one of our customers using this in hybrid cloud. So we want to be the base where we can do all the storage network and security services, irrespective of the server and where the server is placed. Whether it's placed in the call log, it's placed in the enterprise data center, or it's placed in the public cloud. >> All right, so I guess Krishna, you said first x86. Down the road, is there opportunity to go beyond Intel processors? >> Yes. I mean, we already support AMD, which is another form of x86. But other architecture doesn't prevent us from any servers. As long as you follow the PCIe standard, we should, it's more of a testing matrix issue. It's not about support of any other OS, we should be able to support it. And initially, we also tested once on PowerPC. So any kind of CPU architecture, we should be able to support. >> Okay, so walk me up the application stack a little bit though. Things like virtualization, containerization. There's the question of does it work but does it optimize? Any of us live through those waves of, Oh, okay, well it kind of worked, but then there was a lot of time to make things like the origin networking work well in virtualization and then in containerization. So how about your solution? >> I mean you should look at, a good example is AWS, like what AWS does with Nitro. So on Nitro, you do EBS, you do security, and you do VPC. In all the services is effectively, we think about it, all of those can be encapsulated in one DSC card. And obviously, when it comes to this kind of implementation on one card, right, the first question you would ask what happens to the noisy neighbor? So we have the right QOS mechanisms to make sure all the services go through the same card, at the same time giving guarantees to the customer that (mumbles) especially in the multi-tenant environment, whatever you're doing on one VPC will not affect the other VPC. And the advantage of the platform that what we have is very highly scalable and highly performing. Scale will not be the issue. I mean, if you look at existing platforms, even if you look at the cloud, because when you're doing this product, obviously, we'll do benchmarking with the cloud and enterprises. With respect to scale, performance and latency, we did the measurements and we are order of magnitude compared to (sneezes) given the existing clouds and currently whatever enterprise customers have. >> Excellent, so Pirabhu, I'm curious, from the enterprise standpoint, are there certain applications, I think about like, from an analytic standpoint, Splunk is so heavily involved in data that might be a natural fit or other things where it might not be fully tested out with anything kind of that ISV world that we need to think about. >> So if we're talking in terms of partner ecosystems, our enterprise customers do use many of the other products as well. And we are trying to integrate with other products so that we can get the maximum value. So if you look at it, you could get rich metrics and visualization capabilities from our product, which can be very helpful for the partner products because they don't have to install an agent and they can get the same capability across bare metal virtual stack as well as containers. So we are integrating with various partners including some CMDB configuration management database products, as well as data analytics or network traffic analytics products. Krishna, do you want to add anything? >> Yeah, so I think it's just not the the analytics products. We're also integrating with VMware. Because right now VMware is a computer orchestrated and we want to be the network policy orchestrator. In the future, we want to integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift. So we want to add integration so that our platform capability can be easily consumable irrespective of what kind of workload you use or what kind of traffic analytics tool you use or what kind of data link that you use in your enterprise data center. >> Excellent, I think that's a good view forward as to where some of the work is going on the future integration. Krishna and Pirabhu, thank you so much for joining us. Great to catch up. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

(soothing music) >> Commentator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stuart Miniman, and welcome to this Pensando event. We're talking about how Pensando is helping the future proof for enterprise. Really happy to welcome back to the program. Prem Jain he is the CEO of Pensando. Prem, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, So we had the opportunity, Jeff Frick was at the launch when Pensando came out of stealth. Of course, we were all together there, New York City, beautiful views at the Goldman Sachs office in New York City. We had John Chambers there, Antonio Neary and really explaining to the world what your team is doing. And giving that out to the world. We're a little bit more than six months later. So, first just give us the update is how's your team doing? Obviously, when people come out of stealth or have any major things going on. You can't necessarily predict when things like a pandemic or global financial situations are happening, but how's the team doing and give us the updates since last year? >> Yeah sure, thank you. It was a great launch actually we had and that was in October. Since then, the company had made tremendous progress in all different areas of the company. So let me start with a number of people. We have grown to 250 plus people in the company, we filled up all our key positions in the company, and we are really making very good progress with the whole overall team. Product-wise, we continuously delivering since October last year. We have made multiple releases for the enterprise customers, we have made multiple releases for the cloud customers. And we also have done work with some other service provider customers. And the product is really doing very well in these environments. We have partners like you mentioned in the Discover show, HP is going to launch our cards into their server. This is the official launch, we are already shipping to some customers. And this particular thing is with all their servers as well as the GreenLake product. We continue to work with our cloud partners and they are also, we have done multiple releases to them and they will all go in production in next six months time frame. We also have a lot of interest, we are seeing it from the service product customers and we are working with a few of them. I cannot mention the name at this particular point but we will share with you, once that information becomes available. And they are very excited about the technologies which we have. And they think this innovation which we bringing into the market is really great for the edge market, in the cloud as well as edge of the service provider. >> Congratulations Prem on the progress there, of course, HPE was an investor and you know and expected to be an OEM. So, getting that, you know less than a year from when you've come out of stealth, to being generally available this month, great milestone there. And as you said, you've already got some early customers using it. >> Yes. >> Help us understand, when the company first launched, your team has a very storied pedigree. Everyone in the network knows what you've done before. when I was waiting to watch, when you were in stealth, it's like, okay, well, I know there's going to be a chip and, we'll see how all the software that happening in the world is going to change that. So very Much edge is one of the, key use cases that you talk about, that you're enabling but, help our audience understand a little bit. If I'm an HPE customer, and I'm looking at GreenLake, I'm looking at ProLiant. What are those things that I'm doing that says, Oh, hey, HPE is now going to offer this to me. >> Yeah, so I think what the customer is going to get in the very beginning is HPE is going to ship our DSC card into the server. And that makes the server a future proof. And the reason for that is because, initially they are just using the networking capabilities. But then going forward, they can enable security capabilities. We can do like distributed firewall. We can do distributed load balancing, we can provide the encryptions, we can provide the capability of making sure the system is highly secure. We have created a air gap between the host and the network itself. They can also making it sure that they can get the visibility on the networking side, as well, as the application is very close to the application edge. Security is the right place to be close to where the application is running on the server. And then we provide the capability with the policy and service manager, so that they can manage lifecycle of this particular products into all the servers which is installed, as well as making sure they can enable all the features and capabilities based upon the object model. >> Yeah, excellent. Absolutely security needs to be everywhere. So when we think about edge models, how do I get into those devices? So therefore, form factor of a card, that fits in seems to be well. We talked about it at the launch. Goldman Sachs was, a customer of yours. They're very well known in the enterprise space, Financial Services, needs to make sure securities there needs to understand that, maybe speak to that enterprise customer. And if there's anything specifically with how Goldman sees this rolling, that can help illustrate a little bit more what you're doing. >> Sure, so we start shipping to Goldman right after the launch, as we talked about in the launch itself. They have since then, they are now expanding it and rolling it out more servers and capabilities into their environment, particularly using distributed firewall, and other capabilities, which is, they wanted to make sure that it get deployed into their environment. And one of the things which is we are looking at it also, is that we want it to be for every future servers they buy, we want to be part of it and then they can enable all the services related to like I talked about before. Firewall, load balancing, micro-segmentation other capabilities, containers down the road. To make sure that we can provide storage also as a part of it. So we can enable them to deploy those services and that makes it also in their case of future proof once they deployed, roll out this particular capabilities. At the same time, we have more than 10 to 12 customers, which is we are doing a POC and these are all very large enterprise customers. And the POC so far has done... is going very well. And these customers again will deploy different capabilities of the product. Starting in Q3, Q4 this year. The POC is going very well and we are very excited about working with these customers and these are named brand customers. Once you will see it, once we will announce it, you will see it, this is really making a difference in their environment. >> You talk about the capabilities that customers are using today and then, the roadmap of services that they will be able to add on top of that. >> Obviously, you're talking about future proof, I shouldn't change the hardware. But, how do I think about it from a customer standpoint? Is it similar to kind of a SaaS model as to how things updated? Do do I purchase it? More as a subscription than as a feature card? How should I be thinking that from a consumption model or, the finance team, when you say, oh, there's all these wonderful things? What will that do to my cost over time? >> No absolutely, I think it's a very good point, the way the customer should think about it is that they're getting, one is a piece of the hardware which provides this capabilities. And then on top of it, the subscription model, which allows them to pay in three years, or if they want to buy it all in once, they can also do that. It's a very cost effective way of deploying these services. This is a new paradigm. This is a world of distributed services paradigm, and I think this will allow them to scale up, scale down whatever is needed because by the time you are discarding to a server, you're basically adding these capabilities in every server. And more servers you're going to add, you don't need to worry about, do I need to add this particular capabilities on the servers, you can enable whatever is necessary to enable in that server. And it's a very cost effective model. Once you enable these services, encryptions, compressions, firewall, load balancing, all the networking services and storage services, once you enable all those, it's very cost justifiable in terms of deploying these services. >> So Prem, when I think about HPE and their history, in the compute market very much they offer flexibility, they want things to be really simple when they go out the door. You've both partnered with them as well as created competing products with HP in the past so, give us a little bit more as to what Pensando plus HPE will deliver to the market place. >> Yeah, exciting, is a very good partnership so far, I think can we assume that this is going to continuously get better and better. The reason I think is very important, because instead of just selling a classic server, HPEs now have the ability to provide the security solutions, networking solutions, as well as storage solutions to their customers. And this one is really providing all the services, simplifying the design of the network, and also making sure that the customers can enable all these capabilities wherever they want. It's a model which is unprecedented in the sense of it's a totally distributed and the customers should be able to enable whatever the service they need there, even if they didn't plan it in the past. >> Yeah, excellent, we very much these days talk about, how important data is, and I need to be able to deliver services where the data is. So, very much a discussion of the cloud as well as the edge. So, it sounds like this is extending, the importance of that data and being able to bring those services, very much where the data is being created and service in real time. >> Correct. >> Okay, so, from the HPE relationship obviously gives you, a good chunk of the enterprise business, but down the road, should we be thinking about other partnerships and potentially even other OEM relationships? >> Yes, I think, like I said, we are working with the two or three major cloud vendors. And they will be rolling it out by the end of this year. And they see themselves like we said, we are going to democratize the Cloud based upon the fact that the only solution which is Amazon has based upon the Nitro, we are now providing the capabilities, to all the cloud vendors. And they can take this particular technologies and integrate in their environment, which is what we are providing the software stack. And they are integrating, and they will be going into the production and providing more capabilities, more features, and stuff like that. Then what the competition will provide. So this is a really excellent opportunity, both for us as well as for our cloud vendor partners. >> Yeah, one of the key things when you hear talk of what AWS is doing with Nitro, and the Outpost solution is they talk about, from a hardware standpoint and a software standpoint, they pull certain things off of the software layer to be able to have them be more performing, but also it's both in the cloud and in your location, whether that be an edge data center with Outpost, it's the same on both ends. So, it should I be thinking of this in a similar model that you need to... I guess, where is it that it would be an enterprise only play? And what considerations is it between enterprise and cloud when you'd be buying it from multiple vendors, if they're enabled by your solution? >> Absolutely, and I think for the enterprise, the people who wants to build their own cloud, I think this is provide a really excellent solution. Because all the capabilities which we have will provide all the features which you can get from the cloud vendors, in that particular sense. And if you are in the cloud, you can provide scale and capabilities to the cloud vendors. Now the combination is a very powerful solutions between, you can get the same services, whether you're in premise, or providing or leveraging the cloud. And that can give also hybrid opportunities. You can run, same capabilities, same features in the hybrid cloud model where you're running some on your premises and some running in the cloud itself. >> Excellent, all right. So, Prem you've got the solution coming out with HPE, you talked a little bit about some of the other, partnerships in the cloud. Partners there, give us a little bit of priorities for the second half of 2020. >> Yeah, so I think the first half we have done very well financially also, we are running almost close to 50% ahead of our forecast where we were at this particular point. Going forward, I think we need to make sure that we execute based upon, the current roadmap which we have, and making sure that we meet the customers expectations and our partners expectations. And also, I want to also give you another thing is that which is our plan is basically our second generation innovation. Also is going to come in very soon, and we will be able to take that into the production also on the first half of next year. So I think all for the second half, we have a pretty good opportunity to really capture with our solutions, as well as looking forward to win some more design wins, both with our current solutions as well as the new solutions, which we're going to take it today. >> All right, well Prem Jain let me just give you the final word as to how customers should be thinking about Pensando as they look the future proof their enterprise. >> Absolutely, I think based on the history, we are known as a innovation machine in the industry, and we continuously do better and better. So I think the people should think about us is providing really looking at this transition, which is happening in the enterprise cloud as well as in the service provider space. And we will provide the solution, which is really will meet their expectations, and the solution is consistent whether it's for VMs whether resources containers, whether it's for bare-metal services, and providing all these services in a very consistent manner. >> And well thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the continued steps along with HPE and definitely look forward to catching up with you and the team in the future. >> Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. And definitely we will talk six months from now and and again see how much progress we have made and what I told you and I will compare the notes and say, this is what we have done better. >> Alright, stay tuned. We have a lot of interviews with some of the Pensando teams as well as that partnership with HPE. I'm Stuart Miniman and check out theCUBE.net for all of the background on this. And thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in >>Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi. I'm stupid, man. And welcome to a cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guest on the program. Francis Mattis. He is the vice president of engineering at Pensando. Francis. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Good to be here. All >>right. So, Frances, you and I actually overlapped. Ah, you know, some of the companies who work with, you know, if anybody familiar with Pensando, you have worked with some of the mpls team over the years through some of those spin ins, but for our audience, give us a little bit about your background. You know, what brought you to help and be part of the team that you started pensando? >>Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I started my career with Advanced Micro Devices in the mid nineties, got out of school, really wanted to build micro processors. And so, Andy, being in Austin, Texas, and be going to ls you for undergrad was perfect sort of alignment. And so I got to say M. D and Austin built K five worked on that team or kind of team with K seven. And, uh, when I came out to California to help with K, and that brought me to California. And then we got into the dot com era and and being a A and B fighting intel, so to speak, seemed like a hard battle. And so, with the dot com era coming, I just saw this perfect opportunity to jump into the Internet. And so that's how we got into building Internet and data communications equipment, went to the show on systems. We talked a little bit about that earlier, and that got me into storage. From there, I got into a company called on GMO, which was building fibre channel sand equipment. So built chips there, and I got to know the Mpls team there. I always say they hired me off the street. And from that point on, while we've been together since Jews 1001 So 19 years, yeah. Yeah, and I've been building silicon with them and systems for almost 20 years now. So we had quite a journey. Yeah, it's been fun. Great >>stuff. Yeah, you know it's going back, you know, niche on talking about ice scuzzy. You know, in the networking world, you know, it's a little bit of a dark arts in general for most people, you know, understanding the networking protocols and all the various pieces and three and four letter acronyms aren't something that most people are familiar with. Pensando, I'm curious. You know what? You know, networking In general, you're like, I work on Internet stuff and we're the tubes that, you know, Things go around. So when when you describe pensando, you know how to explain that to the people that maybe aren't deep into East, west, south, over on under underlay protocols? >>Yeah, absolutely. So for me, pensando was kind of the sort of the culmination of all the things I've done in my career processing, you know, being able to build compute engines that have programmable, starting with microprocessors, being able to do storage and storage networking with Andy on no, we build a computer with druva and the virtualization layers around the Ethernet interfaces in the adapter with what was really our first smart nick, Um, in 6 4007 timeframe and then with STN in CNI, all of these elements kind of came together. These multiple different layers in the infrastructure stack, if you will, and so pensando for me. What was interesting was the explosion of scale in both space and time with the advent of, let's say, 25 gig 50 gig 100 gig to the server, the notion of very dense computing on in each rack and the need for very high scale After doing all of these technologies and seeing where silicon kind of started to fall in place, I was 16 centimeter. It seemed that bringing this kind of technology to the edge very low power with sort of an end to end security architecture and to end policy engine architecture, distributed services as we're doing all seem to naturally fit into place. And the cloud was already proving this morning when I say the cloud, I mean, the hyper scaler is like Amazon and Microsoft. We are already building these platforms. And so yeah, it dawned on me that, uh I didn't think this was possible unless you built the entire platform. We built the entire system. If you build any one piece, the market transition would take a lot longer. And I think this is true. In technology, history tends to repeat itself, starting with mainframes. When IBM built an entire computer and that built the entire computer, HP built these people. So these kinds of things, um, are important if you want to really push a market transition. And so pensando became this opportunity to take all of these things that I've done in my past life and bring them together in a way that would give a complete stack for the purposes of what I call the new computer, which is basically the data center. And so, um, you know, when my mom asks me, you know, what is it that you're doing? I said, Well, it's just imagine the computer you have right now and multiplying by thousands and thousands stacking in Iraq, and anyone can use it at any one time. And we provide the infrastructure and the mechanisms to be able to Teoh, orchestrate and control that very, very high speed layers. So I don't know if that was a long answer. >>No, no, no. It's fascinating stuff, and you know, when I look at the industry, you know cloud. Of course. Is that just make a wave? That changed the way a lot of people look at this. The way we architect things, there was this belief for a number of years. Well, you know, I'm going to go from this complicated mess that I had in my own data centers and cloud was going to be, you know, inexpensive and easy. And I don't think anybody thinks about inexpensive and easy when they look at cloud computing these days, then add edge into these environments. So I guess what I'm asking is, you know, today's environment, you know, we know I t always is additive. So I have various pieces that I need to put together. You talked about building platforms, and how can it be a complete stack? So companies like Oracle, you know, for many years said we can do everything from the silicon all the way up through your application. Amazon in many ways does the same thing they can. You can build everything on Amazon, but they built out their ecosystem. So how does Pensando fit into this? You know, multi cloud, multi dimensional multi vendor. >>So yeah, so that's a good question. so So one of the things we wanted to do is to be able to bring a systematic management layer two header Genius, beauty. And what I mean by that is in any enterprise data center, modern data center, you're gonna have multiple types of computing. You're gonna have virtual machines, you're gonna have their metal, and you're gonna have containers, or at least in the last, say, three or four years. Chances are you'll have some containers and moving there. And so what we wanted to do was be able to Brighton Infrastructure a management mechanism where all of these head Virginia's types of computing could be managed the same way with respect to policy. What I mean by policy is sort of this declarative or intent based model of I have declared what I'd like to see, whether that the network policy or and and security with data in motion and be able to plot apply it in a distributed manner. Across these different types of hetero genius elements, the cloud has the advantage that it's homogenous for the most part. I mean, they own the entire infrastructure and they can control everything on their now our systems will obviously manage the marginal systems as well, and in many ways that's easier. But bringing together these this notion of heterogeneity these types of computing with one management plane one type of interface for the operator, specifically the networking services operator, was fundamental. That and then the second thing is being able to bring the scale and speed to the edge. So a top of rack switch or something in the in the middle of the network is obviously very dense in terms of this Iot capability. So the silicon area that you spend building a high speed switch is really spent for the most part on the Iot, unless typically, 30 to 40% of the area will be Iot and the rest will be very much hardwired control protocols. We know that as we go to STN services and we want, uh, let's say software defined mechanisms in terms of what the policy looks like, what the protocols look like. The ability to change over time in the lifespan of the computer, which is 3 to 5 years, are you want that to be programmable, very difficult to apply a very dense scale in the core of the network. And so it was an obvious move to bring that to the edge where we could plug it into the server effectively, just like we did. Really? In the UCS system. Uh, no system. >>Yeah, some some really tough engineering challenges. You know, for the longest time, it was very predictable in the networking world, You know, you go from one gig to 10 gig. You know, there was a little discussion how we went the next step, whether, you know, 25 50 40 and 100 gig now. But you talk about containerized architectures. You talk about distributed systems with edge. Things change at a much smaller granular level and change much more frequently. So what are some of the design principles and challenges that you make sure that you're ready for what's happening today but also knowing that, you know, technology changes there always coming, and you need to be able to handle, You know, that next thing. Yeah, >>that's right. Yes. So, uh, I think part of the biggest challenges we have are around power with respect to design power. And then what is the usefulness of each transistor? So, um, when you you have sort of a scale of flexibility. See, views are the most flexible, obviously, but have probably the least performance in them. PG A's are pretty useful in terms of its flexibility, but not very dense in terms of its logic capability. And then you have hardwired a six, which are extremely dense, very much purpose built logic, but completely inflexible. And so the design challenge it was put in front of us is how do we find that sweet spot of extremely programmable, extremely flexible, but still having a cost profile that didn't look like an F PGA And God knows the benefits of the CPU. And and that's where this sort of this notion of domain specific processing came in, which is okay, well, if we're going to solve a few problems, we're going to solve them well. And those few problems are going to be we're gonna bring PC services. We're going to bring networking services. We're going to bring stories, services. We're gonna bring security services around the edge of the computer so that we can offload or let's say, partition correctly the computing problem in a data center. And to do that, we knew a core of sea views wasn't going to do a job that's basically borrowing from this guy to pay this other guy. Right? So what we wanted to do was bring this notion of domain specific processing, and that's where our design challenges came in, which is okay, So now we build around this language called P four, What is the most optimal way to pack? The most amount of threads are processing elements into the silicon while managing the memory bandwidth, which is obviously, you know, packet processing is it has been said to be embarrassingly parallel, which is true. However, the memory bandwidth is insane. And so how do we build a system that insurance that memory is not the bottleneck? Obviously, we're producing a lot of data or, uh, computing a lot of data. And so So these were some of our design challenges. All of that within a power envelope where this part of this device could sit at the edge inside of a computer within a typical power profiling by PC, a attached card in a modern computer. So that was a huge design challenge for us. >>Yeah, I'd love to hear, you know, it was a multi year journey toe solution. And I think of the old World. It was very much a hardware centric 18 to 24 months for design and all the tape out you need to do on this. Sounds like obviously there is still hardware, but it is more software driven. Then it would have been, you know, 10 years ago. So give us some of the ups and downs in that journey. Love to hear any. Any stories that you can share their Well, yeah, I >>think you know, good question. It's always there's always ups and downs in anything you do, especially in the start up. And I think one of the biggest challenges we we've faced is, uh, the exact hardware software boundary. So what is it that you want in hardware? What is it that you want in software And, uh, you know, one of the greatest assets and our company depends on who are the people. We have amazing software and hardware architects who work extremely well together because most of us have been together for so long. So, um, so that always helps when you start to partition the problem. We spent the first year of Pensando, which was basically 2017. The company was founded really thinking through this problem, would it for for all the problems, we wanted to solve the goals that were given to us and and security. Okay, so I want to be able to terminate TCP and initiate TLS connections. What's the right architecture for that? I want to be able to do storage off load and be able to provide encryption of data at rest data in motion. I want to be able to do compression these kinds of things. What's the right part of our software boundary for that? What do we what do we hardwire in silicon versus what we make it programmable and silicon, obviously, but still through a computing engine. And so we spent the first year of the company really thinking through those different partitioning problems, and that was definitely a challenge. And we spent a lot of time and and, uh, you helped me conference rooms and white boards figuring that out. And then 2018. The challenge there was now taking this architecture, this sort of technology substrate, if you will that we built and then executing on it, making sure that it was actually going to yield what we hope that would that we would be able to provide the services. When we talk about El four firewall at line rate, that's completely programmable. Uh, we achieved that. Can we do load balancing? And we do all of it with this before processing engine and the innovations we brought before satisfy all of these requirements we put for us. And so 2018 was really about execution. And there you always have. The challenge is in execution. In terms of, you know, things are going to go wrong. It's not. It's not. If it's when and then how do you deal with it? And so again, um, I would say the biggest challenge and execution is, uh, containing the changes. You know, it's so easy for things to change, especially when you're trying to really build a software platform right, because it's always easy to sort of kick the can and say we'll deal with that later and software. But we know that given what we're trying to do, which is build a system that is highly performance, um, you can't get that. Can you have to deal with it when it comes in. So we spend a lot of time doing performance analysis, making sure that all these applications we were building we're going t yield the right performance. And so that was quite a challenge. And then 2019 was kind of the year of shaping the product. Really lots of product design. Okay, now that we have this technology and it does these, he says that we wanted to do these pieces meaning services. What are all the different ways we can shake this product after talking to customers for, you know, months and months and months. You know, Sony is very much custom, customer driven customer centric. So we we were fortunate enough that we got to spend a lot of time with customers and then that brings us out of challenges, right? Because every customer has a unique problems and so I don't know how to reform this product around a solution that solves quite a bit of problems that really brings value. And so that was the those are the challenges in 2019 which we overcame. Now, obviously we have several releases that we've come out with already. We've got a six and the chips and the It's all there now. So now, 2020. Unfortunately, covitz here, But this is this is a year of growth. This is the year that we really bring it out into the world with our partners and our customers and show how this technology has been developed and benefit will benefit customers over over the next years. Two years. >>Frances really appreciate the insight there. Yeah, that that discussion of the hardware versus software brings back memories for May. Lots of heated debates. A CIO What? One of lines you know we've used on the Cube many times is you know, you know, software will eventually work. Hardware will eventually break. So those trade rto >>taught me something over time ago. He said that uh huh, hardware is hard to change. Software is hard to stop changing. So >>that that's a great one to All right, So you gave us through the last three years journey. Give us a little bit. Look, you know, on the next three years and where you expect pensando to be going >>Sure. Where I see pensando in the next three years as we go through this market transition is uh, both a market leader in a thought leader in terms of the next wave of data center edge computing, whether the, uh in the service provider space, whether it be in the enterprise space or whether it be in the cloud space, the hyper hyper scale of space. As I was mentioning in the beginning, we had when we were talking about, uh, the journey. Market transitions of this major really require understanding the entire stack. If you provide a piece and someone else provides a piece, you will eventually get there. But it's a matter of when, and by the time you get there, there's probably something new. So, you know, uh, time in and of itself is an innovation in this area, especially when you're dealing with the market transition like this. And so we've been fortunate enough that we're building the entire system when we go from the transistors to the rest of the FBI's way, have the entire staff. And so where I see us in three years is not only being a market leader in this space, but also being a thought leader in terms of what does domain specific processing look like at the edge. Um, you know, what are the tools? What are the techniques for? Really a z save? Democratizing the cloud bringing, bringing this technology to everyone. >>Excellent. Well, hey, Frances, That has been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the journey so far and I can't wait to see you. How? Thanks for going >>forward. Yeah, we're excited, and I appreciate it. Thank you for your time to. All >>right, check out the cube dot net. We've got lots of back catalogue with pensando. Also, I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Q. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hi, welcome back. I'm Stu middleman. And this is a cube conversation digging in with, talking about what they're doing to help people. Yeah. Really bringing some of the networking ideals to cloud native environment, both know in the cloud, in the data centers program, Krishna penny. He is the vice president of software. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for talking to me. Alright, so, so Krishna the pin Sandow team, uh, you know, very well known in the industry three, uh, you innovation. Yeah. Especially in the networking world. Give us a little bit about your background specifically, uh, how long you've been part of this team and, uh, you know, but, uh, you know, you and the team, you know? Yeah. >>And Sando. Yup. Um, so, uh, I'm VP of software in Sandow, um, before Penn Sarno, before founding concern, though, I worked in a few startups in CME networks, uh, newer systems and Greenfield networks, all those three startups have been acquired by Cisco. Um, um, my recent role before this, uh, uh, this, this company was a, it was VP of engineering and Cisco, uh, I was responsible for a product called ACA, which is course flagship SDN tonic. Mmm. So I mean, when, why did we find a phone, uh, Ben Sandoz? So when we were looking at the industry, uh, the last, uh, a few years, right? The few trends that are becoming clear. So obviously we have a lot of enterprise background. We were watching, you know, ECA being deployed in the enterprise data centers. One sore point for customers from operational point of view was installing service devices, network appliances, or storage appliances. >>So not only the operational complexity that this device is bringing, it's also, they don't give you the performance and bandwidth, uh, and PPS that you expect, but traffic, especially from East West. So that was one that was one major issue. And also, if you look at where the intelligence is going, has been, this has been the trend it's been going to the edge. The reason for that is the motors or switches or the devices in the middle. They cannot handle the scale. Yeah. I mean, the bandwidths are growing. The scale is growing. The stateful stuff is going in the network and the switches and the appliances not able to handle it. So you need something at the edge close to the application that can handle, uh, uh, this kind of, uh, services and bandwidth. And the third thing is obviously, you know, x86, okay. Even a few years back, you know, every two years, you know, you're getting more transistors. >>I mean, obviously the most lined it. And, uh, we know we know how that, that part is going. So the it's cycles are more valuable and we don't want to use them for this network services Mmm. Including SDN or firewalls or load balancer. So NBME, mutualization so looking at all these trends in the industry, you know, we thought there is a good, uh, good opportunity to do a domain specific processor for IO and build products around it. I mean, that's how we started Ben signed off. Yeah. So, so Krishna, it's always fascinating to watch. If you look at startups, they are often yeah. Okay. The time that they're in and the technologies that are available, you know, sometimes their ideas that, you know, cakes a few times and, you know, maturation of the technology and other times, you know, I'll hear teams and they're like, Oh, well we did this. >>And then, Oh, wow. There was this new innovation came out that I wish I had add that when I did this last time. So we do, a generation. Oh, wow. Talking about, you know, distributed architectures or, you know, well, over a decade spent a long time now, uh, in many ways I feel edge computing is just, you know, the latest discussion of this, but when it comes to, and you know, you've got software, uh, under, under your purview, um, what are some of the things that are available for that might not have been, you know, in your toolkit, you know, five years ago. Yeah. So the growth of open source software has been very helpful for us because we baked scale-out microservices. This controller, like the last time I don't, when we were building that, you know, we had to build our own consensus algorithm. >>We had to build our own dishwasher database for metrics and humans and logs. So right now, uh, we, I mean, we have, because of open source thing, we leverage CD elastic influx in all this open source technologies that you hear, uh, uh, since we want to leverage the Kubernetes ecosystem. No, that helped us a lot at the same time, if you think about it. Right. But even the software, which is not open source, close source thing, I'm maturing. Um, I mean, if you talk about SDN, you know, seven APS bank, it was like, you know, the end versions of doing off SDN, but now the industry standard is an ADPN, um, which is one of the core pieces of what we do we do as Dean solution with DVA. Um, so, you know, it's more of, you know, the industry's coming to a place where, you know, these are the standards and this is open source software that you could leverage and quickly innovate compared to building all of this from scratch, which will be a big effort for us stocked up, uh, to succeed and build it in time for your customer success. >>Yeah. And Krishna, I, you know, you talk about open forum, not only in the software, the hardware standards. Okay. Think about things, the open compute or the proliferation of, you know, GPS and, uh, everything along that, how was that impact? I did. So, I mean, it's a good thing you're talking about. For example, we were, we are looking in the future and OCP card, but I do know it's a good thing that SEP card goes into a HP server. It goes into a Dell software. Um, so pretty much, you know, we, we want to, I mean, see our goal is to enable this platform, uh, that what we built in, you know, all the use cases that customer could think of. Right. So in that way, hardware, standardization is a good thing for the industry. Um, and then same thing, if you go in how we program the AC, you know, we at about standards of this people, programming, it's an industry consortium led by a few people. >>Um, we want to make sure that, you know, we follow the standards for the customer who's coming in, uh, who wants to program it., it's good to have a standards based thing rather than doing something completely proprietary at the same time you're enabling innovations. And then those innovations here to push it back to the open source. That's what we trying to do with before. Yeah. Excellent. I've had some, some real good conversations about before. Um, and, and the way, uh, and Tondo is, is leveraging that, that may be a little bit differently. You know, you talk about standards and open source, oftentimes it's like, well, is there a differentiator there, there are certain parts of the ecosystem that you say, well, kind of been commodified. Mmm. Obviously you're taking a lot of different technologies, putting them together, uh, help, help share the uniqueness. Okay. And Tondo what differentiates, what you're doing from what was available in the market or that I couldn't just cobbled together, uh, you know, a bunch of open source hardware and software together. >>Yeah. I mean, if you look at a technologist, I think the networking that both of us are very familiar with that. If you want to build an SDN solution, or you can take a, well yes. Or you can use exhibit six and, you know, take some much in Silicon and cobble it together. But the problem is you will not get the performance and bandwidth that you're looking for. Okay. So let's say, you know, uh, if you want a high PPS solution or you want a high CPS solution, because the number of connections are going for your IOT use case or Fiji use case, right. If you, uh, to get that with an open source thing, without any assist, uh, from a domain specific processor, your performance will be low. So that is the, I mean, that's once an enterprise in the cloud use case state, as you know, you're trying to pack as many BMCs containers in one set of word, because, you know, you get charged. >>I mean, the customer, uh, the other customers make money based on that. Right? So you want to offload all of those things into a domain specific processor that what we've built, which we call the TSC, which will, um, which we'll, you know, do all the services at pretty much no cost to accept a six. I mean, it's to six, you'll be using zero cycles, a photo doing, you know, features like security groups or VPCs, or VPN, uh, or encryption or storage virtualization. Right. That's where that value comes in. I mean, if you count the TCO model using bunch of x86 codes or in a bunch of arm or AMD codes compared to what we do. Mmm. A TCO model works out great for our customers. I mean, that's why, you know, there's so much interest in a product. Excellent. I'm proud of you. Glad you brought up customers, Christina. >>One of the challenges I have seen over the years with networking is it tends to be, you know, a completely separate language that we speak there, you know, a lot of acronyms and protocols and, uh, you know, not necessarily passable to people outside of the silo of networking. I think back then, you know, SDN, uh, you know, people on the outside would be like, that stands for still does nothing, right? Like networking, uh, you know, mumbo jumbo there for people outside of networking. You know what I think about, you know, if I was going to the C suite of an enterprise customer, um, they don't necessarily care about those networking protocols. They care about the, you know, the business results and the product Liberty. How, how do you help explain what pen Sandow does to those that aren't, you know, steeped in the network, because the way I look at it, right? >>What is customer looking? But yeah, you're writing who doesn't need, what in cap you use customer is looking for is operational simplicity. And then he wants looking for security. They, it, you know, and if you look at it sometimes, you know, both like in orthogonal, if you make it very highly secure, but you make it like and does an operational procedure before you deploy a workload that doesn't work for the customer because in operational complexity increases tremendously. Right? So it, we are coming in, um, is that we want to simplify this for the customer. You know, this is a very simple way to deploy policies. There's a simple way to deploy your networking infrastructure. And in the way we do it is we don't care what your physical network is, uh, in some sense, right? So because we are close to the server, that's a very good advantage. >>We have, we have played the policies before, even the packet leaves the center, right? So in that way, he knows his fully secure environment and we, and you don't want to manage each one individually, we have this, okay, Rockwell PSM, which manages, you know, all this service from a central place. And it's easy to operationalize a fabric, whether you talk about upgrades or you talk about, you know, uh, deploying new services, it's all driven with rest API, and you can have a GUI, so you can do it a single place. And that's where, you know, a customer's value is rather than talking about, as you're talking about end caps or, you know, exactly the route to port. That is not the main thing that, I mean, they wake up every day, they wake up. Have you been thinking about it or do I have a security risk? >>And then how easy for me is to deploy new, uh, in a new services or bring up new data center. Right. Okay. Krishna, you're also spanning with your product, a few different worlds out. Yeah. You know, traditionally yeah. About, you know, an enterprise data center versus a hyperscale public cloud and ed sites, hi comes to mind very different skillset for management, you know, different types of okay. Appointments there. Mmm. You know, I understand right. You were going to, you know, play in all of those environments. So talk a little bit about that, please. How you do that and, you know, you know, where you sit in, in that overall discussion. Yes. So, I mean, a number one rule inside a company is we are driven by customers and obviously not customer success is our success. So, but given said that, right. What we try to do is that we try to build a platform that is kind of, you know, programmable obviously starting from, you know, before that we talked about earlier, but it's also from a software point of view, it's kind of plugable right. >>So when we build a software, for example, at cloud customers, and they use BSC, they use the same set of age KPI's or GSP CRS, TPS that DSC provides their controller. But when we ship the same, uh, platform, what enterprise customers, we built our own controller and we use the same DC APS. So the way we are trying to do is things is fully leverage yeah. In what we do for enterprise customers and cloud customers. Mmm. We don't try to reinvent the wheel. Uh, obviously at the same time, if you look at the highest level constructs from a network perspective, right. Uh, audience, for his perspective, what are you trying to do? You're trying to provide connectivity, but you're trying to avoid isolation and you're trying to provide security. Uh, so all these constructs we encapsulated in APA is a, which, you know, uh, in some, I, some, some mostly like cloud, like APS and those APIs are, are used, but cloud customers and enterprise customers, and the software is built in a way of it. >>Any layer is, can be removed on any layer. It can be hard, right? Because it's not interested. We don't want to be multiple different offers for different customers. Right. Then we will not scale. So the idea when we started the software architecture, is that how we make it pluggable and how will you make the program will that customer says, I don't want this piece of it. You can put them third party piece on it and still integrate, uh, at a, at a common layer with using. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, Krishna, you know, I have a little bit of appreciation where some of the hard work, what your team has been doing, you know, a couple of years in stealth, but, you know, really accelerating from, uh, you know, the announcement coming out of stealth, uh, at the end of 2019. Yeah. Just about half a year, your GA with a major OEM of HPE, definitely a lot of work that needs to be done. >>It brings us to, you know, what, what are you most proud about from the work that your team's doing? Uh, you know, we don't need to hear any, you know, major horror stories, but, you know, there always are some of them, you know, not holes or challenges that, uh, you know, often get hidden yeah. Behind the curtain. Okay. I mean, personally, I'm most proud of the team that we've made. Um, so, uh, you know, obviously, you know, uh, our executors have it good track record of disrupting the market multiple times, but I'm most proud of the team because the team is not just worried about that., uh, that, uh, even delegate is senior technologist and they're great leaders, but they're also worried about the customer problem, right? So it's always about, you know, getting the right mix, awfully not execution combined with technology is when you succeed, that is what I'm most proud of. >>You know, we have a team with, and Cletus running all these projects independently, um, and then releasing almost we have at least every week, if you look at all our customers, right. And then, you know, being a small company doing that is a, Hmm, it's pretty challenging in a way. But we did, we came up with methodologists where we fully believe in automation, everything is automated. And whenever we release software, we run through the full set of automation. So then we are confident that customer is getting good quality code. Uh, it's not like, you know, we cooked up something and that they should be ready and they need to upgrade to the software. That's I think that's the key part. If you want to succeed in this day and age, uh, developing the features at the velocity that you would want to develop and still support all these customers at the same time. >>Okay. Well, congratulations on that, Christian. All right. Final question. I have for you give us a little bit of guidance going forward, you know, often when we see a company out and we, you know, to try to say, Oh, well, this is what company does. You've got a very flexible architecture, lot of different types of solutions, what kind of markets or services might we be looking at a firm, uh, you know, download down the road a little ways. So I think we have a long journey. So we have a platform right now. We already, uh, I mean, we have a very baby, we are shipping. Mmm Mmm. The platforms are really shipping in a storage provider. Uh, we are integrating with the premier clouds, public clouds and, you know, enterprise market, you know, we already deployed a distributed firewall. Some of the customers divert is weird firewall. >>So, you know, uh, so if you take this platform, it can be extendable to add in all the services that you see in data centers on clubs, right. But primarily we are driven from a customer perspective and customer priority point of view. Mmm. So BMW will go is even try to add more ed services. We'll try to add more storage features. Mmm. And then we, we are also this initial interest in service provider market. What we can do for Fiji and IOT, uh, because we have the flexible platform. We have the, see, you know, how to apply this platform, this new application, that's where it probably will go into church. All right. Well, Krishna not a penny vice president of software with Ben Tondo. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, sir. It was great talking to you. All right. Be sure to check out the cube.net. You can find lots of interviews from Penn Sundo I'm Stu Miniman and thank you. We're watching the cute.

(bright music) >> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a Cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. And we're going to be digging into P4, which is, the programming protocol independent packet processors. And to help me with that, first time guest on the program, Mario Baldi, he is a distinguished technologist with Pensando. Mario, so nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting. >> Alright, so Mario, you have you have a very, you know, robust technical career, lot of patents, you've worked on, you know, many technologies, you know, deep in the networking and developer world, but give our audience a little bit of your background and what brought you to Pensando. >> Yeah, yes, absolutely. So I started my my professional life in academia, actually, I worked for many years in academia, about 15 years exclusively in academia, and I was focusing both my teaching in research on computer networking. And then I also worked in a number of startups and established companies, in the last about eight years almost exclusively in the industry. And before joining Pensando, I worked for a couple of years at Cisco on a P4 programmable switch and that's where I got in touch with P4 actually. For the occasion I wore a T shirt of one of the P4 workshops. Which reminds me a bit of those people when you ask them, whether they do any sports, they tell you they have a membership at the gym. So I don't just have membership, I didn't just show up at the workshop. I've really been involved in the community and so when I learned what pensando was doing, I immediately got very excited that the ASIC that Pensando has developed these is really extremely powerful and flexible because it's fully programmable, partly programmable, with P4 partly programmable differently. And Pensando is starting to deploy these ASIC at the edge and Haas. And I think such a powerful and flexible device, at the edge of the network really opens incredible opportunities to, on the one hand implement what we have been doing in a different way, on the other hand, implement completely different solution. So, you know, I've been working most of my career in innovation, and when when I saw these, I immediately got very excited and I realized that Pensando was really the right place for me to be. >> Excellent. Yeah, interesting, you know, many people in the industry, they talk about innovation coming out of the universities, you know, Stanford often gets mentioned, but the university that you, you know, attended and also were associate professor at in Italy, a lot of the networking team, your MPLS, you know, team at Pensando, many of them came from them. Silvano guy, you know, written many books, they're, you know, very storied career in that environment. P4, maybe step back for a second, you know, you're you're deep in this group, help us understand what that is, how long it's been around, you know, and who participates in it with P4? >> Yeah, yeah. So as you were saying before, one of the few P4 from whom I've heard saying it, because everyone calls it P4 and nobody says what it really means. So programming protocol, independent packet processor. So it's a programming language for packet processors. And it's protocol independent. So it doesn't start from assuming that we want to use certain protocols. So P4 first of all allows you to specify what packets look like. So what the headers look like, and how they can be parsed. And secondly, because P4 is specifically designed for packet processing, and it's based on the idea that you want to look up values in tables. So it allows you to define tables, in keys that are being used to look up those tables and find an entry in the table. And when you find an entry, that entry contains an action and parameters to be used for that action. So the idea is that the package descriptions that you have in the program, define how the package should be processed. Header fields should be parsed, values extracted from them, and those values are being used as keys to look up into tables. And when the appropriate entry in the table is found, an action is executed and that action is going to modify those header fields, and these happens a number of times, the program specifies a sequence of tables that are being looked up, header fields being modified. In the end, those modified header fields are used to construct new packets that are being sent out of the device. So this is the basic idea of a P4 program. You specify a bunch of tables that are being looked up using values extracted from packets. So this is very powerful for a number of reasons. So first of all, its input, which is always good as we know, especially in networking, and then it maps very well on what we need to do, when we do packet processing. So writing a packet processing program, is relatively easy and fast. Could be difficult to write a generic programming in P4, you could not, but the packet processing program, it's easy to write. And last but not least, P4 really maps well on hardware that was designed specifically to process packet. What we call domain specific processes, right. And those processes are, in fact designed to quickly look up tables that might have decamping side, they might have processes that are specialized in performing, in building keys and performing table lookup, and modifying those header fields. So when you have those processors that are usually organized in pipelines to achieve a good throughput, then you can very efficiently take a P4 program and compile it to execute it very high speed on those processors. And this way, you get the same performance of a fixed function ASIC, but it's fully programmable, nothing is fixed. Which means that you can develop your features much faster, you can add features and fix bugs, you know, with a very short cycle, not with a four or five year cycle of baking a new ASIC. And this is extremely powerful. This is the strong value proposition of P4. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that that resonates Mario, you know, I used to do presentations about the networking industry and you would draw timelines out there in decades. Because from the standard to get deployed for, you know, the the hardware to get baked, the customers to do the adoption, things take a really long time. You brought up, you know, edge computing, obviously, you know, we are, you know, it is really exciting, but it is changing really fast, and there's a lot of different, you know, capabilities out there. So if you could help us, you know, connect the dots between what P4 does and what the customers need. You know, we talked about multi-cloud and edge. What is it that you know, P4 in general, and what Pensando is doing with P4 specifically, enables this next generation architecture? >> Yeah, sure. So, Pensando has developed these card, which we call DSC distribute services card, that is built around an ASIC, that has a very very versatile architecture. It's a fully programmable. And it's fully programmable it's various levers, and one of them is in fact P4. Now this card and has a PCIE interface. So it can be installed in horse. And by the way, this is not the only way this powerful as you can be deployed. It's the first way Pensando has decided to use it. And so we have this card, it can be plugged into a host, it has two network interfaces. So it can be used as a network adapter. But in reality, because the card is fully programmable and it has several processors inside, it can be used to implement very sophisticated services. Things that you wouldn't even dream of doing with the typical network adapter, with a typical NIC. So in particular, this card, this ASIC contains a sizable amount of memory. Right now we have two sizes four, an eight gig but we are going to have versions of the card with even larger memory. Then it has some specialized hardware for specific functions like cryptographic functions, compression, computation of CRCs and if sophisticated queueing system with packet buffer with the queuing system to end the packets that have to go out to the interfaces or coming from the interfaces. Then it is several types of processors. It has generic processors, specifically arms, arm processors that can be programmed with general purpose languages. And then a set of processors that are specific for packet processing that are organized in a pipeline. In those, idea to be programmed with P4. We can very easily map a P4 program, on those pipeline of processor. So that's where Pensando is leveraging P4, is the language for programming those processes that allow us to process packets at the line rate of our 200 gigabit interfaces that we have in the card. >> Great. So Mario, what about from a customer viewpoint? Do they need to understand you know, how to program in P4, is this transparent to them? What's the customer interaction with it? >> Oh yeah, not at all. The Pensando platform, Pensando is offering a platform that is a completely turnkey solution. Basically the platform, first of all, the platform has a controller with which the user interacts, the user can configure policies on this controller. So using an intent based paradigm, the user defines policies that the controller is going to push those policies to the cards. So in your data center in your horse, in your data center, you can deploy thousands of those cards. Those cards implement distributed services. Let's say, just to give a very simple example, a distributed stateful firewall implemented on the all of those cards. The user writes a security policy, says this particular application can talk to these other particular application, and then translate it into configuration for those cards. It's transparently deployed on the cards that start in force the policies. So the user can use this system at this very high level. However, if the user has more specific needs, then the system, the platform offers several interfaces and several API's to program the platform through those interfaces. So the one at the highest level, is a REST API to the controller. So if the customer has an orchestrator, they can use that orchestrator to automatically send policies to the controller. Or if a customer already have their own controller, they can interact directly with the DSCs with the cards on the horse, with another API's that's fully open, is based on GRPC. And in this way, they can control the cards directly. If they need something even more specific, if they need a functionality that Pensando doesn't offer on those card, hasn't already ever written software for the cards, then customers can program the card, and the first level at which they can program it is the ARM processors. We have ARM processors, those are running in version of Linux, so customers can program it by writing C-code or Python. But if they have very specific needs, like when they write a software for the ARM processor, they can leverage the P4 code that we have already written for the card for those specialized packet processors. So they can leverage all of the protocols that our P4 program is already supported. And by the way because that's software, they can pick and choose in a Manga library of many different protocols and features we support, and decide to deploy them and then integrate them in their software running on the ARM processor. However, if they want to add their own proprietary protocols, if they want, if they need to execute some functionalities at very high performance, then they that's when they can write P4 code. And even in that case, we are going to make it very simple for them. Because they don't have to write everything from scratch. They don't have to worry about how to process AP packets, how to terminate TCP, we have to solve the P4 code for them. They can focus just on their own feature. And we are going to give them a development environment that allows them to focus on their own little feature and integrate it with the rest of our P4 program. Which by the way, is something that P4 is not designed for. P4 is not designed for having different programmers, write different pieces of the program and put them together. But we have the means to enable this. >> Okay, interesting. So, you know, maybe bring us inside a little bit, you know the P4 community, you're very active in it, when I look online, there's a large language consortium, many of, you know, all the hardware and software companies that I would expect in the networking space are on that list. So what's Pensando's participation in the community? And you were just teasing through, you know, what does P4 do and then what does Pensando, maybe enable, you know, above and beyond what, you know, P4 just does on its own? >> Yeah, so yes Pensando is very much involved in the community. There has been recently an event, online event that substituted the yearly P4 workshop. It was called the P4 expert round-table series. And Pensando had very strong participation. our CTO, Vipin Jain, had the keynote speech. Talking about how P4 can be extended beyond packet processing. P4, we said, has been designed for packet processing, but today, there are many applications that require message processing, which is more sophisticated then. And he gave a speech on how we can go towards that direction. Then we had a talk that was resulting from a submission that was reviewed and accepted on in fact, the architecture of our ASIC, and how it can be used to implement many interesting use cases. And finally, we participated into a panel in which we discussed how to use P4 in mix-ins Martin at the edge of the network. And there we argued with some use cases and example and code, how before it needs to be extended a little bit because NICs have different needs and open up different opportunities rather than switches. Now P4 was never really meant only for switches. But if we looked at what happened, the community has worked mostly on switches. For example it is defined that what is called the PSA, portable switch architecture. And we see that the NICs have an edge devices, have a little bit different requirements. So, one of the things we are doing within the communities working within one of the working groups, is called the architecture work group. And they are working in there to create the definition of a PNA, Portable NIC Architecture. Now, we didn't start this activity, this activity has started already in 2018. But it did slow down significantly, mostly because there wasn't so much of a push. So now Pensando coming on the market with this new architecture really gave new life to this activity. And we are contributing, actively we have proposed a candidate for a new architecture which has been discussed within the community. And, you know, just to give you an example, why do we need a new architecture? Because if you think of the switch, there are several reasons but one, it's very intuitive. If you think of a switch, you have packets coming in, they've been processed and packets go out. As we said before, there's the PMA then sorry, PSA architecture is meant for these kinds of operation. If you think of a NIC, it's a little bit different because yes, you have packets coming in, and yes, if you have multiple interfaces like our card, you might take those packets and send them out. But most likely what you want to do, you want to process those packets, and then not give the packets to the host. Otherwise the host CPU will have to process them again, to pass them again. You want to give some artifacts to the host, some pre-processed information. So you want to, I don't know take those packets for example, assemble many TCP messages and provide a stream of bytes coming out of this TCP connection. Now, these requires a completely different architecture, packets come in, something else goes out. And goes out, for example, through a PCI bus. So, you need the some different architecture and then you will need in the P4 language, different constructs to deal with the fact that you are modifying memory, you are moving data from the card to the host and vice versa. So again, back to your question, how are we involved in the workgroups? We are involved in the architecture workgroup right now to define the PNA, the Portable NIC Architecture. And also, I believe in the future we will be involved in the language group to propose some extensions to the language. >> Excellent. Well, Mario, thank you so much for giving us a deep dive into P4, where it is and you know some of the potential futures for where it will go in the future. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watching the Cube. (gentle music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome to a cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and we're gonna be talking about the networking giant. So, uh, joining me is the first time on the program some of the members been on and the cover launch of Pensando so vivid Jane, his CTO and co founder of Pensando Bipin thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. It was very nice talking to you. >>All right, so in a big theme we've been talking about for a number of years now is multi cloud. And, you know, I go back and think about you know, that the concept of cloud and even, you know, I've been around long enough You think about the and one of the challenges you look at is well, security is always a challenge. The other things network bandwidth is not infinite. The speed of light has not been solved, though you know, help us understand is you know the first I guess give our audience a little bit of your background. As I said, anybody in the networking world knows less team, though. Tell us, you know, have you been on the journey with them for all of that? Or And you know what brought you and Sandy? >>Yes. Yes. Um, I mean, I've been in the journey with the team since 2000 and six, so it's pretty long, I would say 14 years now, and it's been tremendous. Um uh, at heart, I'm an engineer who takes, you know, Brian brilliant things and taking upon challenges. And I've got multiple startups before this been in a new era, The more startups before that. And of course, you know, they were not experience more independent startups. And, you know, all through the course, I have gained appreciation for, like, you know, starting all the way from silicon to build a distributed systems and a u io all the way up to the fully consumable, you know, system. So I I totally understand the the angle I need to look at this time in a holistic manner. Having contributed to Cisco, UCS of and Nexus products on. Before joining pensando, I was, um I was contributing with my own open source container networking project, which is quite exciting to see How do you evangelize, You know, my own my own core, and that was fun. And that's where I come from, But, uh, but I I'm I'm a software engineer. To start off it started contributing to a six, then started going into the application world with containers trying to pull a container networking with, Ah, we did a server product with Cisco UCS and on and pretty much all over the stack with respect, participation. So that's my background. Um, but it's being exciting to consider what's next for me. And I was largely trying to see >>so, so definitive, actually, if I If I could jump in there, right, you know, I think back the UCS it was, You know, some of those ways I gather virtualization had been around for quite a number of years at that point. But, you know, how do you optimize it you're in. How do you transform infrastructure toe live for those environments, though? You know, UCS, You know, remember, people get back saying, you know, Cisco getting into services like Well, they are. They are because they're changing that compute model really caught that. You know, Cisco led that way. If the urge instructor, so many things you talked about that we'll get to later in the interview open for station. When I look out today, you know infrastructure's paint a lot and cloud obviously, is a huge impact, but also the application. So help us understand kind of the the waves that were writing together And, you know, what was it that you know in Santo decided to build in order to meet what you know, the customers of a require >>Um So I think, you know, going back to the UCS common that you had We started off thinking, for example, what are what were the challenges with respect is scaling out the deployment of servers and we quickly realized that manageability is number one challenge on. And of course, you know when we speak about manageability, it comes down to the underpinnings of what you're building. Are you Are you able to see the entire infrastructure together, or are you still seeing those big pieces? And that's when I think UCS was born to say that Look, we need to bring everything together that could be consumed in a holistic manner. And for that you have to have all those components there are There are somewhat independent to be consumed as a unified thing. And which is why I think it was a unified computing system. UCS. Um and then I think, you know, and Sanders a journey that takes it to probably not just that concept, but in general, the the challenges and the disruptions that we're seeing to the next level. So, I mean, just to summarize, I would say we started off looking at all the disruptions that are happening in the industry. And there are many of those I'm happy to talk about, which means we looked at, uh and then we looked at What are the consumption models that people are largely, you know, finding it very appealing these days because the days in which you're going to write a spirit to do something is still pretty old you want to be able to consume and most this after consumable way, How can we build, you know, how can you build systems that are programmable in the field? Those kind of things? The consumption model reliability software is the friendly factor there, and highly appealing to you guys and all their last one. You know, at least we also we also wanted to be really heard in the game, competitiveness wise. So those were like the the overarching set of things there that we started to think about, like, what descriptions are we going to solve, um, and how the consumption model needs to be for or ah, for the future of infrastructure. And how can we get that key, which is which is far ahead and better than anything that exists out there? So that's where we started to look at. Let's bring something which is bigger B sphere and and something. Even if we have the possibility of feeling it. Let's go ahead and they're doing their anything. >>Yeah, and absolutely. There's been so much discussion over the last decade or so about about software's eating the world and what's going on there yet you know, your your team mates. It's a lot of times it's been the chip set. There have been some huge ripples in the industry, you know, major acquisitions by some of the big, disruptive companies out there. Apple made a silicon acquisition, you know, everybody paid and that will have. You can't talk about disruption today without talking about Amazon. And, of course, when Amazon bought Annapurna Labs, you know, those of us looking at the Enterprise and the clouds base was like, Keep an eye on this. And absolutely, it's been something over the last year or so now, where we've seen Amazon roll things out and, of course, a critical component of what Amazon's doing from outposts. So with that as the stage there, you talked about wanting to be interesting leading, you know Amazon, you know, is really sick, and it's setting the bar that everyone is measured against. And when I look at the solution pensando, the kind of best comparable analogy that we've seen is, you know, look at what Nitro chip can do. This is an alternative for all of the other 1000 for customers that might not want to get them from Amazon. Is that a fair comparison? And how would you line up what founder is doing compared to what Amazon has done there? >>Um, so you know, what you've seen in the Amazon announcement really is possible. Amazon is a great benchmark to beat eso No make mistakes. We are very happy to say that, you know, we are We are doing by comfortably so But then, you know, Amazon is more than more than just the just the chips that are that they are building. I mean, what you consume is what they're building and underneath the engines are really part up by by the nicety off all these things that they're very, um, having said that, you know, And Sandra was consisting off both the you know, it's recognized us as a team which has been in traditionally building chips. But yet I think you know, the the Iot or the the previous venture from Mpls Team was somewhat of an eye opening as to how bringing things together is much more value in op, ex and and simplifying things is a huge, huge value compared to just putting performance and those things. So why this is important? That is another aspect which is important in trying to simplify things and make it consumable like software. And Sandra itself has probably, you know, I would say, Ah, good chunk, like about 60% of people in software team and not the, you know, basic harbor t This is not to say that, you know, we, you know, we are under emphasizing one versus the other. Software is a bigger beast when you start trying to build all those programs on a programmable and doing that here and start to roll out those applications on. So that's why I think the emphasis on software is there. Having said that, you know, it's the software that runs the data path pipeline. There's also a layer of software that we're building that can help manage all you know, all the product in a more cohesive manner and unified. >>Okay, that's Ah, thank you for laying that out. You mentioned you've got some background and open for definitely an area where, for a number of years, you know, Amazon has not exactly, uh, open source. Not exactly been a strength for AWS. They have put a lot of effort. They've done some president IRS over the last couple of years. >>And >>how do you see open source fitting into the space? What is I kind of the philosophy of pensando when it comes to open source. And where do you see it playing in the You know, this network piece of the multi cloud. >>Yeah, no, I think it's It's ah, it's a squared, relevant in a way that you know of the cloud native movement on how applications with very Onda normalization of AP eyes across multiple clouds. Israel, We are all seeing the benefits offered. And I think that that trend will continue and which is all driven through open source Ah, you know, community that exist in, you know, in the heart of the word. So personally for me, I think I learned a whole lot of things in the open source community. You know, the importance off evangelizing whatever you're working on, the reason to have convinced other people about contributing into what you're working on on. Frankly, I also learned how difficult it is to make revenues in an open source based part of that strategy. So I think you know that those were the things that I got away from it when I was doing my own open source project of container networking. Um, but at the same time, pensando, uh, you know, we have to make sure that we are 100% aligned with anything that's happening in open source. Never replicated, Um, anything that might be that might be happening in open source instead tried to make people use those things in the best possible way and in the most efficient way and the easiest possible way to use those. So our strategy largely is that, you know, embrace open source which exists are there from an infrastructure point of view, we are collaborating and communicating with less of the users are Hello. I think we're going to standardize most of things we're looking in before community. So our stands largely is that, you know, if we are building a programmable platform than the community is what is gonna driver and we are very much working towards a step by step, of course, trying to get through, you know, a stable state where we could we could not just empower people who are who are taking up the open source efforts which are going on. But at the same time, we can also contribute our program are programs into the open source community and defining the right abstractions into into the community. Um, because we came out of stealth pretty recently, you'll start seeing that and helping those activity as Well, >>excellent. Well, you know the launch of Pensando you had a phenomenal lineup. Not only you know, John Chambers obviously has the relationship with your theme, but you know, oh, am partners of Hewlett Packard, Enterprise and IBM, as well as the Marquis of Goldman Sachs. Things look a little bit different in the first half of 2020 and then they didn't end of 29 teams. So, you know, curious, You know that the global pandemic, the rippling financial implications, you know, what does that mean? The pensando. How has that impacted conversations that you're having with your >>Well, one thing I know at a broader level, let me cover, um, where things are heading. And in that sense, you know, I see that network and the infrastructure in general cloud infrastructure networking it's going to become. And we have realized it's this during during during recent early 20 twenties that that is going to be very important to have the have a new underpinning infrastructure that is not just working efficiently, securely, but is, you know, highly cost effective and very high performance, you know, ranging from people who are trying to connect from home to people who are trying to use videoconferencing and people who are going to be more and more use cloud based services even to order simple of the data being, you know, going to source for so network will become essential, you know, essential element for four things as we go forward. And we do see that being embraced by our customers and and things where we were trying to communicate that, you know, look, you will need performance and cost benefits are becoming more and more real Now. It's like, oh, things that we were having things in the pipeline for us. We need to work on that now. And the reason is because the things that we anticipated the demand increase, which is gonna happen over the fear of years, is happening literally in a few months. And so that is what we see. We are definitely, you know, very well poised to take advantage of their of their demand for sure. But also the fact that you know it needs to be done super efficiently. And so I think we are. You know, we are right. Well, I would say, you know, situated to be able to take advantage of start. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing you can't control as a company is you know what the global situation is when you come out of stealth and, you know, move through some of those early phases, you know, you've been part of You said a number of startups you've been part of been in give us a little bit of the inside baseball of, you know, being part of Rondo. You know, any stories on a little some of the ups and downs on the multi year journey to get where you are today? >>Definitely. I think. You know, um, minutes aren't good. They are largely an execution play. Relatively independent startup is is going to be about you know, how we cracked the overall market market fit and, ah, on execution, Of course, on deal with maybe in a competition in a different way, of course, like maybe big companies are our great partners. At the same time, you have to navigate that. So the overall the overall landscape in Spain and forces forces not is it's quite different. We can be much more border than we are independent company In trying to disrupt almost anything because we don't have any point of view to define per se. We do exactly, You know, what could be the most disruptive way, too, to potentially benefit the users on day? That's a big, you know, big change. I would say, um, we are being but paranoid as well at the same time, impractical to look at. You know how how we could navigate this situation in a very practical may. And the journey off, often independent startup is, you know, personally, for me, this is this is my fourth in different and start and best off. Off off, all independent. Once, I would stay largely because the kind of tradition that we're getting being an independent company is so huge. I'm just concerned about those things. But what We're really trying to trying to ensure that, you know, we can't get our stuff, but I want you and we started. >>Excellent. Guess what? One of the other things about being a startup is You know what you know adjustments You need to make along the way. So I'm curious. As you know, you've gone to some of your early customers. Any feedback or adjustments in some of the use cases or, you know, things that you've learned along the way that you can share. >>Um, fundamentally, at a base level, we haven't shifted from what we started off. We look at disruptions on on how consumption models are going to be changing, how speeds and feeds are gonna become important because, you know, because most law is going to be almost operating, how we how we deliver things into and containers are going to be a primary, you know, vehicle to deliver and build applications. So we recognize those disruptions, and we haven't changed, But normally from those disruptions that we wanted people after her. Uh, but at the same time, I think, you know, as we went and socialize our ideas and on architecture and designs with customers, we realized that that they are giving us lots more feedback on work all we could do and ah, and starting to become like we could take on different segments of market and not just one. So why stick ourselves to the data center power? Why not work on something on edge, blur wine or wine are real solutions for five G where latency and and performance is super crucial. Why don't take up on, you know, branch that use cases. So there are many things that are opening up. Um, and largely the you know, the shift. Or I would say the the inclination of what we should change versus not is happening with respect to where our customers are driving us. And and it is very important to make sure that you know the users of our lives Articulating all of the shift happens as opposed to, uh, you know, as opposed to anything else. We listen to them like super, super carefully, uh, and at the same time trying to make sure that we not only meet their means for you there their demands. So, um, definitely, you know, from the from the overall landscape of things, we are starting to get a lot more than what we are capture, which is good news For the same time, we're trying to also, uh, take on one part. I'm you know, >>all right, Vivienne, I can't let you off the hook as the cto without talking a little bit about that. You know, I think earlier in my career there was the old discussion and said you know, we should have started it, you know, a year or two ago. But, you know, we didn't. So we should start it today with changing pace of technology. You know, I've always said, you know, if I could I'd rather wait a year because I could take the next generation. I can take advantage of all these other things, but I can't wait, because then I'd never ship any things that I need to start now, Give us a little bit, you know, Look out in the future. How is your architecture designed to be able to take advantage of all the wonders coming with five G and everything there, Um, and anything that we should be looking at, You know, through the next kind of 12 18 months on the roadmap that you could share >>your Ah, yes. So, um, I would first of all say that we didn't build a part of, actually, what we build was a platform on which we can build multiple products. And we started we started off going there because we thought that, you know, the the platform that we're building is capable of capable of doing a lot more things than than one use case that we start off with. And so, to that point, I would say that yes. I mean, he started focusing on one product initially on the possibilities off. Trying to take it to multiple segments is is normally very much there. But we are already, you know, having those conversations to see what is the core set of use cases that we could we could get into for different segments. Besides the data center, you know, public Private Data center, you're looking at edge. We're looking by the looking at, Yeah, you mentioned this is as well as the, you know, storage and conversion infrastructure. So I would say that the food of all those things that we're starting to engage is going to start showing up in next 18 months. I could actually I think we are very well boys to take advantage of what we have. The hardware that we're shipping is going to be 100% compatible with four programs, but I don't those. So that is that is lot more possibilities are interesting. More use cases as people. The software's architecture that we have built is very extensible as well. Eh so we believe that. You know, uh, we believe that we can normally satisfy those use cases, but we're starting to you get into those things now, which will start to show up in and actually useful products of unusable for us with customer testimonials and then maybe 12 to 18 months from now. All >>right, well, thank you so much. It's great to catch up with. You really appreciate you coming on. >>Thank you to Because they're talking to you. And, you know, I appreciate your time. >>All right, I'm stew minimum. And be sure to check out the cube dot net for all the coverage. Go see the launch that we did. So in the second half of 2019. Thank you for watching you. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Stu: Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special Cube presentation. We're talking with Pensando, and their event is "Future Proof Your Enterprise", to help us really understand where the company is, and the partnerships, what they're hearing from customers. Really happy to welcome back to our program Randy Pond, he's the Chief Financial Officer at Pensando. Randy, thanks so much for joining us. >> Randy: My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> All right, well Randy, obviously today, we're talking to people everywhere, they're remote so, not quite as plush as the last time we talked to you at the Goldman-Sachs office, in New York City, beautiful view in the background. That was a great backdrop, when you talk about bringing a company out of stealth, John Chambers there, your chairman, Antonio Neri >> Yeah Neri. >> Talking about the investment in the partnership. And Goldman-Sachs, an excellent customer there, here we are little bit more than six months later and that partnership with HPE is taking the next step. You've got the general availability, this month, of the HPE Proliant with Pensando Solutions. Bring us up to speed a little bit though, we'll talk about HPE maybe in a second but, your customers, your progress, you had, I believe it was up to your C round of funding, when you came out of stealth so, give us your viewpoint as to where the company is today. >> So today, I think, we're sort of, divide the conversation between financial and a business perspective. So financially, we're in great shape, the C round came together very well, we were way over subscribed. We raised our limits to secure additional funding, which has worked out really well, getting where we are currently with the pandemic. So financially, we're in great shape, our case burn has held steady and we've done a good job of forecasting, that's why I thing the Bird's pleased. From a business perspective, we've done a really good job delivering on our real maximum product perspective. So, the team has released the cloud production, we released the cloud to customers about a month or two ago. We just did a release to the enterprise space, through HPE. We got another release coming up the end of this month. There's releases scheduled for Q3 and Q4 of this year. Our second ASIC will come back, I think, the 15th of June, so we're going to get access to our new design, I think that's great news. You know our cloud customers are excited about that 'cause it provides a little more capability than the current device does. And we had a great Q1 and we're off to a great start on Q2. We overachieved in Q1, we look like we're going to overachieve again in Q2, both in terms of units and dollars, so we're in a pretty good place. >> Yeah, I'd like to see if we could break down say kind of the financial and the business piece. On the financial side piece, you've worked with this team for quite a long time, there's got to be a different financial model that you put in place when you know that you've got, really, your exit built in, add from the three spin-ins before, proof the product, get it out there and then, well, I've got an in-house feed with a full panel there, as opposed today. Is the model we should be thinking, what percentage of that is OEM? You talk about there's the cloud model, and the enterprise model and, how do you structure things a little bit differently for that type of model versus, maybe, what the spin-ins were or a traditional start-up. >> Sure. >> that might have a different, a few different models to choose from? >> So, we're much closer aligned to a traditional start-up environment. Now, the one unique point is the HPE relationship because they've been my partner, they are my primary go to market partner in the enterprise space today but, they're also a strategic investor. So, the reality is, in the enterprise space we have to sell the product through the OEMs, the average enterprise customer doesn't have the capacity to install themself. But that is a very different model than it is in the cloud side. So, it's an indirect sales model, most likely through HPE and other server providers, like Dell, Cisco possibly, and Super Micro. Every customer has their sort of, requested server manufacturer. On the cloud side, individuals build their own so, that's a, I ship to them and they install it themselves, it's a different software model, it's a different manufacturing model as in, we have a more traditional direct sales model on that side, but we've got a partner middle model on the enterprise side today. We've set 'em up as both, HPE sort of serves like a quasi Cisco environment for us, because we're depending on their engine to find our leads, and it's worked out really really well. >> Excellent, maybe bring us inside a little bit, where you are with (away from microphone) about customer acquisition leading up to now and what's the expectation now that HPE is fully ready to roll. >> So, we, I'm going to start the conversation again. There's the cloud side, so on the cloud side we have three committed customers today. One is in production, the other two are going into production later part of this year, they need the release we're going to give them in September/October timeframe but they've committed to us from a design perspective. And then there's a follow-on generational product in '21 where they really ramp hard. I already have a bind contract with two, I'm working on the third. And, on the enterprise side, we're modeling ourselves after the top 200 HPE customers right now. They normally align themselves around financial services, pharmaceuticals, transportation, sled, we're working through those customers. We have active talks with many of them today, they're in our sales pipeline, we manage that relationship together. Generally, HPE opens the door, we explain the technology to the technical team, they say they can see a place for us and they let us stand up a plat, and then we go from there. >> Excellent, so Randy we referenced the global pandemic going on right now. It's been a bit of a bifurcated model in the tech world. Though it's been definitely a tailwind, somewhat, from the cloud standpoint, there's many infrastructure pieces that have seen an immediate acceleration, things like work from home technology. So, there's certain devices and certain deployments. And there's other things that, of course, we put a pause button trying, too much uncertainty out there. What are you seeing at the market and how's that impacting you, as a relatively new start-up? >> Yeah, so in general, your point is well taken. The cloud players are telling us their demand is up dramatically and therefore the signal they're sending us is, they want to accelerate deployment and it's likely it's going to be bigger than we originally had estimated so, that's been great news for us. In the enterprise space it's really very different, you know we're not selling a lot of product to Walmart, or Gap, or the retail space, they're struggling mightily, any hotels, motels, Carnival Lines is not buying our product today. But, if you look at the financials, if you look at the pharmas, their demand's up quite a bit, they're both buying ahead a little bit to hedge their bets in the supply chain, for the situation today, and they're actually seeing the real demand go up. And, the banks especially have seen it go up 'cause their work from home has gone through the roof. So, it's been a good opportunity for us to sort of seize the moment and demonstrate how we can be part of their new implementations, and bring new services to 'em. >> Yeah, Randy, wonder if you can actually give us, a little bit, that voice of the customer and what is the problem you're solving? Because, we talked about, there's certain immediate initiatives that accompany the era, absolutely like, today, security is more important than ever. When people are working from home, the bad actors actually are trying even harder to get involved there, we talked a little bit about cloud, so what is that itch that Pensando scratches and, therefore, how do you fit into the current landscape? >> Sure, you know, with our customers today there's similar problems and dissimilar problems, between the cloud and the enterprise. The similar problems is that Pensando quickly solves things, like East West security inside of their environments, their computer environments, which is difficult to do today, it's expensive and difficult to do today. We've provided pervasively and wire rate, and that's sort of an easy sell, initially. Another one that's been pretty easy for everyone to look at is observability and telemetry because of where we're positioned, in the computer space, we see every packet, which provides us with a lot of knowledge about what's going on in their environment. So, that's been a pretty easy initial sell. In the case of the enterprise customers, we can sell other pieces of their solution that are either expensive, or introduce latency or management problems. Whether it's firewall technology, or load balancing technology, or micro segmentation technology, all of which we can do inside of our blade. And today it's done either through appliances or through virtual machines consuming CPUs. In the cloud space, we do all of that, plus we allow them to download their own image into our devices today, which is pretty powerful, we have a lot of memory and we have a lot of capacity, from an Arm core perspective. And we allow them to pick and choose the features and functionalities they want, and then run everything at wire speeds, at much faster speeds. The enterprise is running 10/25, the cloud partners are running 25/50 going to 100, where we're even more compelling, we think. >> Randy, want to get back to talk a little bit more about HPE. You spent long time working at Cisco, for a good part of that HPE was one of your bigger partners on that. So, tell us what it's like working with HPE, any compare/contrast would be welcome. >> You know, it's interesting, so the cultural environment of HPE, under Antonio Neri, is very similar to what we saw at Cisco. And he and John have a phenomenal relationship, it's a very collegial environment, it's a very bright environment. They move quickly, for a big business. Where it's vastly different is they are much tougher on the numbers side because they're under much more margin pressure, and compounded pressures, that we never had (chuckles) at Cisco, just in all fairness to them. But, if we look through the organization, like the executive that was assigned to our account, from a sales perspective, used to work at Cisco. I think one or two of his guys used to work with Cisco. There's program management people that used to work with Cisco, there're people in engineering that came from Cisco so, it's an environment that's similar enough that it's easy enough for us to navigate. And, we're connected sort of on all levels, which has really been useful, and we have a weekly standing dialog across all the different functions. So, we're pretty deeply embedded with HPE right now and it's gone very very well. >> Yeah, you said that, even with the global pandemic right now, that Pensando is a bit ahead of where you expected shipments to be. I'm curious always, when I talk to a CFO, how do you see macroeconomic impact of what is going on there? Any concerns on your end about supply chain, either for yourselves or for partners, like HPE? How do you see what we're currently going through and the recovery future? >> So, it's an interesting question. You know, getting this pandemic sort of processed through the supply chains like a pig through a python, there's just no way to get around it. I mean, you know we had the first breakdown when they closed the country of Malaysia and I just couldn't build final product. They literally just shut the place down so, it took us about 10 days to get ourselves up and running, from a skeleton perspective. The government worked with us, they let a small crew come into our manufacturing partner to get some finished goods off for one of our OEM customers. As we've come back up, we've seen lead times extend on some of the custom parts, it's just a fact of life. I think there's a little bit of an artificial demand that's driving the supply chain a little bit crazy right now because now people are panicked that what happens if it comes back, will I get caught again, can I get enough inventory to buffer myself for, you know, two weeks to three or four months, depending on how aggressive you want to be, or conservative you want to be in that space. And then, I think, as the supply chain trickles back online, you end up discovering that yes, I can build final product, and I can get the Asics, and the memory, but now I want to buy some, you know, RS232 devices and it turns out that sure he's got 'em but the magnetic, that goes inside of it, that comes from Western China, they aren't quite up and running just yet. But we're seeing legacy problems, nothing catastrophic, nothing that's been painful. We've had to move some work around to get an incremental volume for ourselves, we've added fab vendors, and a few other things. So, it's really made us focus on second sourcing everywhere we can because we thought we were small enough, and the volume perspective wasn't that big a deal, we'll just get second sourcing once we get the product to market. That's heated back up and we're doing all that work now. So, I think, knock on wood, our recovery has gone very well we don't see any big problems in the supply chain. Now, I think, the bigger the player, like an HPE, and the longer the window they were shut down, the harder they pull when they turn the supply chain back on. But I think the big players, Cisco, HPE, and others it's going to take them a longer time, I think, to really see how this trickles all the way through, 'cause you can't really get good visibility how much safety stock or buffer stock does everybody have, at every level of the chain. So, everybody pulls at once, you run dry in a week, a month? Is it fast enough to recover, from a production perspective? All those things, I think, they're still not quite resolved yet. >> Just one other related aspect of the pandemic, that I would love your viewpoint on. You know, work from home, obviously, is what everyone is doing right now. I'm curious if you think that, what the recovery would look like from that standpoint, is there anything from Pensando that makes you shift where you think about hiring it? I've been to the Cisco headquarters and the long street, with a lot of buildings, and a lot of people. And everybody's wondering, will that headquarters, and centralized structure, that we had before, is that forever changed? >> You know that's a great question. So, it's for certain changed, I think, in terms of therapeutic, or a vaccine, for the current covid virus. So, that's just a fact of life and we've been comparing notes with a lot of other companies about what they're doing to bring the workers back, who want it, who are comfortable and want to come back to work. 'Cause, even inside of Pensando, I've got some folks who're like, "Listen, I'm not comfortable coming back, "I've got kids at home , I don't want to take the chance." That's fine, we don't have a problem with that. And, quite frankly, we can make a case that, in some of our functional areas, we're more productive than we were before the pandemic. In India specifically, this has been a boon for us because they're not getting on and off buses, they're not spending three or four hours trying to get back and forth to work, they're happy working from home, we're happy having them at home. The guy who runs India for us says productivity's up, and employee satisfaction couldn't be higher. Our plans now is, we have to bring a small team back into our headquarters, in Milpitas, to bring up our new Asic. But, that's going to be 15 to 20 people, and not all at one time, we're going to spread them out. We're already articulating what parts of the building can and can't be used , one way hallways, masking, temperature taking, everything you would expect. The next phase for us is some sort of rotational work where we'll say, "We're going to bring 25% of the people in, "30% of the people in, you work the week, you're off "for two, you work the week you're off two." And so we can get through the back of this thing, it's unlikely, it's almost impossible, in my mind, we would bring back 100% of our employees in the building. Now, does that change the view longterm? It's a great question because, I think what it's forced us to do is to get more comfortable with remote work, so that we can truly make it an option of any one employee, in specific areas. Like, the lab guys have to be in the lab, and the IT guys got to be in the computer room, but if you're a software developer, or if you're a marketing guy, do you really have to be in the building? And I think it's pushed us to really learn to manage them more effectively, with remoteness. And I think it provides us, at least, with options going forward. When I hire the next 100, do I have to put 'em in a building someplace or do I just deal with them where they are and bring them into the fold? We've brought on dozens of people, since the pandemic started, and quite honestly, we onboard 'em , we train 'em, and we mainstream 'em remotely and it's worked out great. >> Excellent, all right Randy let's bring it back to the HPE partnership for the final question. >> Sure! >> Tell us what we should be looking at, through the rest of this year, what the general availability of this means to your business and the impact you expect it to have on your customer. >> So, from an HPE perspective, I think this is going to be great innovation that they're bringing to the marketplace, to their customer set. It allows them, I think, to separate themselves from the market, at least for some period of time, until the other players get pulled along by the end users. Their product has a pretty steep ramp, their front half and the back half of the year, for us, are dramatically different, in terms of size and ramp. And it really sets us up for a very large, we hope, fiscal '22, which , for us, will end in January 31st of '22. But we're going to know, I mean we go GA in just a few weeks and we're going to get a sense if we can turn these POCs into end customers. And we're also going to see the ramp of the cloud customers in Q4. So, you know, I really feel like, both for us and for HPE, the next three four months, as we start getting back to some regularity of interacting with customers physically, not just remotely, and we see the early benefits and some of the early profit ownership analysis on deployment erect technology. This could be dramatic for us and for them, quite honestly. >> All right, well Randy Pond, CFO of Pensando, thanks so much, really a pleasure catching up with you and getting to discuss about how Pensando's helping to future proof your enterprise. >> Thank you much, my pleasure, have a great day. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, check out theCUBE.net for all our coverage, thank you for watching, thank you. (soft music)

>>from the Cube >>Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>I am stupid, man. And welcome to a cube conversation. Really? Please welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni, Sony, Ge and Donnie. She is a co founder and also the business off of pensando. Tony, thanks so much for joining us. >>I thank you for having me here. >>All right. So, Sonny, we've had you on the program a few times. You know, those that have watched the program or followed your career? You've had a story career. You know, I've worked with you as a partner back through some of the spinning disk. You're one of the mpls group. And now, of course, Pensando we helped launch towards the end of 2019. I just want to take a step back and, you know, understand, You know, how did you find yourself in the startup world? >>You know, I got involved with startup ventures as part of the Mpls team. This is going back now. Gosh, 20 years ago, in calendar year 2000 my first venture was with Andy ammo. It was a very unique situation that Mario look up on myself or part of a set up on a startup venture. But all four of us, the Mpls group, did not have any equity in it. Look, and I basically what asked to operate within the with that venture to ensure its ultimate success from a product execution on the go to market perspective? Ah, lot of those elements did not exist from a go to market perspective in Cisco at that time, and it was basically a ground up effort for look and me to not have any financial association with the outcome off the Andy, um, a venture, but at the same time, take on the responsibility from the execution perspective and building up the whole go to market. >>Yeah, so, you know, talking about that these startups, you've been apart of two things. First of all, you were part of and, ya know, you ova in CNI. So did you need to learn Italian to be part of these projects? But more importantly, how did how did you work on that? You know, product customer fit, understanding what the build and, you know, you talk about right How do you make some things that festival? It is super challenging. >>Yeah, well, first and foremost, I think I've been fortunate in that the group that we're all part off it is definitely Italian Indian. And some folks, like from Indiana, for example, like Randy Pond, who is part of this venture with us at Pensando. If I if I would go back and take a look at the simple formula, I mean Mario look, and from, ah, they're veterans in this industry. And they typically focused on the conceiving off the idea and the brought up, uh, and starting with a clean slate approach. Of course, I participate from a market validation development, competitive landscape on a business on all related aspects, bringing the product to market on how that maps into customers and partners what we have consistently focused on market disruption. Particularly for the last two decades, the biggest focus has been on what are the market transitions occurring both from a business and a technology perspective on that is ultimately what creates the opportunity to emerge on and drive these concepts into reality and what yourself, in a market leadership position, is to capture the transition at the right time. >>Yeah, I think back. You know, some of your previous ventures and understand, you know, some of the waves of technologies coming together sometimes the maturity of a technology or being able to take advantage of something new to talk specifically about. Pensando what are you know, those waves of change and the technology coming together that makes the opportunity that you're in today? >>Well, I mean, if you go back and you take a look at really what has been exciting about this pensando opportunity has been to look at the unique ability that have been coming upon us. You know, with this market transition where the cloud is moving to the edge, what is ultimately driving this movement to the edge has been the application. Uh, the applications is is you know, whether it's driven by technology trends like five G, for example. Ah, and and the fact that bulk off what the customer's data is being driven is going to be at the edge. That when when you look at the cloud moving to the edge and evolving that with the transitions occurring, ah, this will require deep innovation. Deep innovation in the areas of distributed network processing security, like encryption, full observe ability while you have turned on encryption, traffic engineering and doing it at very low, predictable agency at the speeds of 100 gig and above all, doing it on a small footprint. We were really the only guys and gals who could do this. And we have done it, >>Yeah, so certainly some really big challenges that they laid out there bring >>us inside >>a little bit. You know, customers. You know, I think about, you know, when I've been watching edge computing for the last three or four years. Uh, you know, it's still relatively early days for customers, but there's a lot of technical challenges there, So help us understand how much you know it was you had technology that could help solve something and how much it is driven by some of the customers that you've been talking to over the years >>Now. One of the key things that we learned and this was going back to the early days of Cisco is that everything we were doing, we had the customer at the center off and at the heart off what innovation we were building from an engineering perspective. You want to build things that can have the most impact in the marketplace and within your customer base. So, uh, one of the early times we went back, who do getting our customers involved in the innovations we were bringing to bear. I still have recollections off a blueprint that we had iterated upon, uh, and sitting in a room, whether it was with the likes of Josh Matthew at Goldman Sachs all whether it was with some of our early cloud customers like the Oracle Cloud, to better understand with these innovation and these blueprints, what were their burning problems? What were they used, cases that we could really go and tackle? So it is one thing to think about market destructions. It's another to bring it to life and having customers engaged with you during the early phases. Off as you are incubating, something is a very important item because it helps you focus your biggest energy on the areas so that you can put your arms around what problems are worth solving. And how can you bring that to life with with customers? Use case. And this is something we have done time and over again. So this is a constant refinement off what we have been doing now for now, to over two decades. As I said, >>Yeah, it's, you know, fascinating here. And when you've got the chief business officer idle, Sony, You know, one of the biggest changes, obviously, is if I look back in the spin ins, you kind of understood how to go to market was what was involved the, you know, the Cisco execution machine that the sales process that they had in plug in a product, that they would help. All right, what you're doing now, you've got some, you know, feel, William partnerships. You have relationship with customers, help us understand a little bit. You know the update on the go to market, how you have. I have a solution that fits for not only the end users, but through multiple different, uh, you know, go to market partners. >>So I think it's, you know, it's very important that as a startup we stay very close to our customers and apart, not just men. We are thinking about what the innovation is and how can it solve their problems. But I think in a world where the way we want to go solve for what? The customer where we want the customer, where our customers want us to be our partnerships is a core part of it. I mean, if you look at from the early days we secured successfully funding from our customers and our strategic partners and it is these customers and strategic partners that are shaping the roadmap on are shaping the routes to market on. What we're doing is we're successfully not only delivering the product, so these strategic customers and partners, but we're also then replicating it across the verticals. If you think about in the enterprise space, our focus has been the focus on regulated market markets where security is essential. Real time, observe ability that can increase your security posture is a very important element. So taking the blueprints that we're taking into global financial services customers, the healthcare industry, the the education market on the federal market, then those are the industries that really care about, and I in regulated markets where we can take the blueprint that we have already built on an amplify across those customers. So there again includes alignment and a partnership with HP. We're working very closely that, while recognizing that we will be doing strategic elements only with partners like HP, we're also on boarding and getting certifications done with Dell because most enterprises have at least dual source vendors from a server, so that that is one aspect. The other aspect is working in a high touch model with the cloud customers and having the opportunity to deliver to them Ah, and onboard them from a production worthy perspective while taking that same blueprint and applying it to other cloud customers and other service provider edge providers that can take advantage of the similar capability. >>Yeah, um, I'm curious. Sony, you know, obviously, the cloud is a space that has been going through a lot of change and accelerating. You know, I'd say much faster than traditional networking did. So you know, curious what you see what you're hearing from customers when they talk about you know, their needs for your solution, what they're doing with multi cloud environment. What is that? That landscape you. And I guess we would love to hear a little bit about how you would compare and contrast yourself. The other solutions out there the one that comes to mind, of course, is you know, eight of us what they're doing with the Annapurna chip in there nitro offering as part of their out. >>You know, as I mentioned earlier, I think the cloud is pushing to the edge. There's a high demand for a lot of packet processing needs with these New Age applications. Customers want to build on and give the you know, we want to be in a position to provide through the democratization and open availability off our products to multiple cloud providers, our technology and as they are experiencing tremendous growth, they're seeking to build cloud with more capacity, with greater degree off security and services functionality. And the ability to process a lot of data at the edge is with millions of simultaneous connections happening at a very small footprint. And that's where we come in. The value that we are essentially providing who not only the existing cloud strategic partners but additional cloud customers we're taking into production this year is that we are enabling them to leapfrog the nitro technology on multiple, whether it is the ability to ah have predictably low latency on and consistently low jitter in the nanoseconds. That is the eight times superior than what a nitro can do today, or the ability to pack their toe process up to nine times more backend processes in the millions of on the ability to do it in a power footprint, which is almost 1/3 that of what you would need on AWS nitro, where they need five times more nitro elements than then we can with a single device, Um, or whether it is the ability now to handle not just power and latency, but millions off flows that can run simultaneously on maintaining the state of all of those and the power of the end, the ability to run multiple services. Uh, with security turned on at the same time are all elements that really differentiate us on. This technology is now readily available to all of us. >>All right, so I understand some of the technical issue items that you're stating there. What I'm curious about is when I look at out both, most customers don't really think about the night. It's that Amazon's providing an extension of their solution into my environment, and they manage everything and so you know, you can't talk about multi cloud environment without talking about Amazon is every customer almost everything right? More than one cloud in one of them is almost always Amazon, though. How does your solution fit into that whole discussion? And then? >>So I think that, you know, one of the things that becomes very important is that if I put my customer enterprise customer hat on, I want to be an enabling my private cloud the private cloud that I build. You have the ability to not just have the option to the port and Amazon cloud, but I typically already and minimal child and barn. So while Outpost and Nitro Nitrogen really enabling, are supposed to deliver those services on our customer's premises, it's only allowing that customer to be locked into one way off dealing with one public cloud company. But if I had to go and think about as I build out my hybrid cloud strategy as an enterprise customer, I want to have the same building blocks on the same policy models that are consistent with all the with the entire dress off cloud vendors that I'm dealing with. The bulk of our customers are essentially telling us I don't want to be locked into a single public cloud company from a hybrid strategy. I want to have the ability to drive a public, private cloud architect that is cloud like from a policy delivery perspective. But at the same time, I want to have the flexibility off deploying a multi cloud and BART, and what we would provide them is the consistency off that same policy model that you would only find in a public cloud with the freedom to not have to buy themselves or lock themselves up into a single public cloud costs. >>So your team, you said, over two decades of experience, there have been some global impacts that have happened during that you got together in 2000. 2001 was right there in front of you that the 2008 you know, down in there, though you're in 2020 obviously the global endemic, as you know, broad financial ripples. How's this impacting Dondo? How's that impacting your discussions with your partners and your customers? >>Well, you know, honestly, I would say that we, like everyone else, have been affected by the pandemic, and we pray that everyone recovers soon with minimum lost to themselves and their families. And this is something very personal. This is here. I feel very passionate about hoping that everybody comes through with this on and their families are all OK. That's all the most important thing in my mind now for us, from a pandemic perspective. What this has done is it has made us more resolute to continue to execute remotely to the best of our ability to meet our customers. Expectations. The advice that I would give to other startups is Keep your head down. Focus on the 80 20 rule, execute on 20% of the things that need to be done, that we'll have 80% of the impact to your business, including undeterred product execution. Stay close to your customers and your partners. Spend your cash judiciously. You know, be very careful on where you're spending your money to make it last. As long as you can ride this pandemic out and double down on being close to your partners and customers. Fortify your sales plans. Meet your customers where they are not where you thought they were, but where they really are and partner with them on this journey and partner with your supply chain. You're going to need that. So this is your time to really be a partner to them, as opposed to see how can you change them? No, no. The really partner with your supply chain Because you're gonna need that. >>Yeah, that's a very sound advice there, Sony. While we're talking advice that, you know, you're very successful career, I'm wondering what advice you would give the other women look at pursuing careers. In fact, specifically, if you know they wanted, you know, start a startup, be a founder, whether that in Silicon Valley or outside, what advice would >>you know? My advice would be to have an undeterred focus. Focus is extremely important. Look, I used to always remind me, Sony, when you're focused on two things, you're d focus. So focus on data. Focus, be driven. Believe in the vision that you have set out for yourself and your team on and keep your eye on the customer. I think in customers successful on your success. That's the message I would give. I would give that same message. My female and the male colleagues. >>Alright, well, we know that you and your team. Sony are very focused, so I'll give you the final word. Gives a little look forward if we go forward. You know, 18 to 24 months. What should we be expecting to see from PENSANDO and your solution? >>Well, in the next 18 to 24 months, we would like to meet and hopefully also exceed our customer's expectation in terms of product execution and the ramp off course. Profitability will be a very important aspect that we're going to keep a very close eye. I think it's too early to be thinking of an ideal, and our focus remains to be on customer success. We have been in the market for a little over. I was a little less than six months. Ah, with the product, September 2019 October 2019 is really when we launched the company on and, uh, the customer always is at the center of everything we do. So that's where we're gonna be focusing on product execution and ramp ramp off product, ramp off estimates. >>Well, so needy. And Dani, it's a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you so much in the state. >>Thank you. You too. >>Alright. Be sure to check out the cube dot net for all the interviews, you can go see the launch videos that did at go back office in New York City from 2019. If you go to the cube dot net and many more interviews from Sony and her team, I'm stew Minimum. And thank you for watching you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to this CUBE conversation, I'm Stu Min and I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, we've been digging in with the Pensando team, understand how they're fitting into the cloud, multi-cloud, edge discussion, really thrilled to welcome to the program, first time guest, Silvano Gai, he's a fellow with Pensando. Silvano, really nice to see you again, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Stuart, it's so nice to see you, we used to work together many years ago and that was really good and is really nice to come to you from Oregon, from Bend, Oregon. A beautiful town in the high desert of Oregon. >> I do love the Pacific North West, I miss the planes and the hotels, I should say, I don't miss the planes and the hotels, but going to see some of the beautiful places is something I do miss and getting to see people in the industry I do like. As you mentioned, you and I crossed paths back through some of the spin-ins, back when I was working for a very large storage company, you were working for SISCO, you were known for writing the book, you were a professor in Italy, many of the people that worked on some of those technologies were your students. But Silvano, my understanding is you retired so, maybe share for our audience, what brought you out of that retirement and into working once again with some of your former colleagues and on the Pensando opportunity. >> I did retire for a while, I retired in 2011 from Cisco if I remember correctly. But at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017, some old friend that you may remember and know called me to discuss some interesting idea, which was basically the seed idea that is behind the Pensando product and their idea were interesting, what we built, of course, is not exactly the original idea because you know product evolve over time, but I think we have something interesting that is adequate and probably superb for the new way to design the data center network, both for enterprise and cloud. >> All right, and Silvano, I mentioned that you've written a number of books, really the authoritative look on when some new products had been released before. So, you've got a new book, "Building a Future-Proof Cloud Infrastructure," and look at you, you've got the physical copy, I've only gotten the soft version. The title, really interesting. Help us understand how Pensando's platform is meeting that future-proof cloud infrastructure that you discuss. >> Well, network have evolved dramatically in the data center and in the cloud. You know, now the speed of classical server in enterprise is probably 25 gigabits, in the cloud we are talking of 100 gigabit of speed for a server, going to 200 gigabit. Now, the backbone are ridiculously fast. We no longer use Spanning Tree and all the stuff, we no longer use access code aggregation. We switched to closed network, and with closed network, we have huge enormous amount of bandwidth and that is good but it also imply that is not easy to do services in a centralized fashion. If you want to do a service in a centralized fashion, what you end up doing is creating a giant bottleneck. You basically, there is this word that is being used, that is trombone or tromboning. You try to funnel all this traffic through the bottleneck and this is not really going to work. The only place that you can really do services is at the edge, and this is not an invention, I mean, even all the principles of cloud is move everything to the edge and maintain the network as simple as possible. So, we approach services with the same general philosophy. We try to move services to the edge, as close as possible to the server and basically at the border between the sever and the network. And when I mean services I mean three main categories of services. The networking services of course, there is the basic layer, two-layer, three stuff, plus the bonding, you know VAMlog and what is needed to connect a server to a network. But then there is the overlay, overlay like the xLAN or Geneva, very very important, basically to build a cloud infrastructure, and that are basically the network service. We can have others but that, sort of is the core of a network service. Some people want to run BGP layers, some people don't want to run BGP. There may be a VPN or kind of things like that but that is the core of a network service. Then of course, and we go back to the time we worked together, there are storage services. At that time, we were discussing mostly about fiber tunnel, now the BUS world is clearly NVMe, but it's not just the BUS world, it's really a new way of doing storage, and is very very interesting. So, NVMe kind of service are very important and NVMe as a version that is called NVMeOF, over fiber. Which is basically, sort of remote version of NVMe. And then the third, least but not last, most important category probably, is security. And when I say that security is very very important, you know, the fact that security is very important is clear to everybody in our day, and I think security has two main branches in terms of services. There is the classical firewall and micro-segmentation, in which you basically try to enforce the fact that only who is allowed to access something can access something. But you don't, at that point, care too much about the privacy of the data. Then there is the other branch that encryption, in which you are not trying to enforce to decide who can access or not access the resource, but you are basically caring about the privacy of the data, encrypting the data so that if it is hijacked, snooped or whatever, it cannot be decoded. >> Eccellent, so Silvano, absolutely the edge is a huge opportunity. When someone looks at the overall solution and say you're putting something in the edge, you know, they could just say, "This really looks like a NIC." You talked about some of the previous engagement we'd worked on, host bus adapters, smart NICs and the like. There were some things we could build in but there were limits that we had, so, what differentiates the Pensando solution from what we would traditionally think of as an adapter card in the past? >> Well, the Pensando solution has two main, multiple pieces but in term of hardware, has two main pieces, there is an ASIC that we call copper internally. That ASIC is not strictly related to be used only in an adapter form, you can deploy it also in other form factors in another part of the network in other embodiment, et cetera. And then there is a card, the card has a PCI-E interface and sit in a PCI-E slot. So yes, in that sense, somebody can can call it a NIC and since it's a pretty good NIC, somebody can call it a smart NIC. We don't really like that two terms, we prefer to call it DSC, domain specific card, but the real term that I like to use is domain specific hardware, and I like to use domain specific hardware because it's the same term that Hennessy and Patterson use in a beautiful piece of literature that is the Turing Award lecture. It's on the internet, it's public, I really ask everybody to go and try to find it and listen to that beautiful piece of literature, modern literature on computer architecture. The Turing Award lecture of Hennessy and Patterson. And they have introduced the concept of domain specific hardware, and they explain also the justification for why now is important to look at domain specific hardware. And the justification is basically in a nutshell and we can go more deep if you're interested, but in a nutshell is that the specing, that is the single tried performer's measurement of a CPU, is not growing fast at all, is only growing nowadays like a few point percent a year, maybe 4% per year. And with this slow grow, over specing performance of a core, you know the core need to be really used for user application, for customer application, and all what is known as Sentian can be moved to some domain specific hardware that can do that in a much better fashion, and by no mean I imply that the DSC is the best example of domain specific hardware. The best example of domain specific hardware is in front of all of us, and are GPUs. And not GPUs for graphic processing which are also important, but GPU used basically for artificial intelligence, machine learning inference. You know, that is a piece of hardware that has shown that something can be done with performance that the purpose processor can do. >> Yeah, it's interesting right. If you term back the clock 10 or 15 years ago, I used to be in arguments, and you say, "Do you build an offload, "or do you let it happen is software." And I was always like, "Oh, well Moore's law with mean that, "you know, the software solution will always win, "because if you bake it in hardware, it's too slow." It's a very different world today, you talk about how fast things speed up. From your customer standpoint though, often some of those architectural things are something that I've looked for my suppliers to take care of that. Speak to the use case, what does this all mean from a customer stand point, what are some of those early use cases that you're looking at? >> Well, as always, you get a bit surprised by the use cases, in the sense that you start to design a product thinking that some of the most cool thing will be the dominant use cases, and then you discover that something that you have never really fought have the most interesting use case. One that we have fought about since day one, but it's really becoming super interesting is telemetry. Basically, measuring everything in the network, and understanding what is happening in the network. I was speaking with a friend the other day, and the friend was asking me, "Oh, but we have SNMP for many many years, "which is the difference between SNMP and telemetry?" And the difference is to me, the real difference is in SNMP or in many of these management protocol, you involve a management plan, you involve a control plan, and then you go to read something that is in the data plan. But the process is so inefficient that you cannot really get a huge volume of data, and you cannot get it practically enough, with enough performance. Doing telemetry means thinking a data path, building a data path that is capable of not only measuring everything realtime, but also sending out that measurement without involving anything else, without involving the control path and the management path so that the measurement becomes really very efficient and the data that you stream out becomes really usable data, actionable data in realtime. So telemetry is clearly the first one, is important. One that you honestly, we had built but we weren't thinking this was going to have so much success is what we call Bidirectional ERSPAN. And basically, is just the capability of copying data. And sending data that the card see to a station. And that is very very useful for replacing what are called TAP network, Which is just network, but many customer put in parallel to the real network just to observe the real network and to be able to troubleshoot and diagnose problem in the real network. So, this two feature telemetry and ERSPAN that are basically troubleshooting feature are the two features that are beginning are getting more traction. >> You're talking about realtime things like telemetry. You know, the applications and the integrations that you need to deal with are so important, back in some of the previous start-ups that you done was getting ready for, say how do we optimize for virtualization, today you talk cloud-native architectures, streaming, very popular, very modular, often container based solutions and things change constantly. You look at some of these architectures, it's not a single thing that goes on for a long period of time, but it's lots of things that happen over shorter periods of time. So, what integrations do you need to do, and what architecturally, how do you build things to make them as you talk, future-proof for these kind of cloud architectures? >> Yeah, what I mentioned were just the two low hanging fruit, if you want the first two low hanging fruit of this architecture. But basically, the two that come immediately after and where there is a huge amount of radio are distributor's state for firewall, with micro-segmentation support. That is a huge topic in itself. So important nowadays that is absolutely fundamental to be able to build a cloud. That is very important, and the second one is wire rate encryption. There is so much demand for privacy, and so much demand to encrypt the data. Not only between data center but now also inside the data center. And when you look at a large bank for example. A large bank is no longer a single organization. A large bank is multiple organizations that are compartmentalized by law. That need to keep things separate by law, by regulation, by FCC regulation. And if you don't have encryption, and if you don't have distributed firewall, is really very difficult to achieve that. And then you know, there are other applications, we mentioned storage NVME, and is a very nice application, and then we have even more, if you go to look at load balance in between server, doing compression for storage and other possible applications. But I sort of lost your real question. >> So, just part of the pieces, when you look at integrations that Pensando needs to do, for maybe some of the applications that you would tie in to any of those that come to mind? >> Yeah, well for sure. It depends, I see two main branches again. One is the cloud provider, and one are the enterprise. In the cloud provider, basically this cloud provider have a huge management infrastructure that is already built and they want just the card to adapt to this, to be controllable by this huge management infrastructure. They already know which rule they want to send to the card, they already know which feature they want to enable on the card. They already have all that, they just want the card to provide the data plan performers for that particular feature. So they're going to build something particular that is specific for that particular cloud provider that adapt to that cloud provider architecture. We want the flexibility of having an API on the card that is like a rest API or a gRPC which they can easily program, monitor and control that card. When you look at the enterprise, the situation is different. Enterprise is looking to at two things. Two or three things. The first thing is a complete solution. They don't want to, they don't have the management infrastructure that they have built like a cloud provider. They want a complete solution that has the card and the management station and there's all what is required to make from day one, a working solution, which is absolutely correct in an enterprise environment. They also want integration, and integration is the tool that they already have. If you look at main enterprise, one of a dominant presence is clearly VMware virtualization in terms of ESX and vSphere and NSX. And so most of the customer are asking us to integrate with VMware, which is a very reasonable demand. And then of course, there are other player, not so much in the virtualization's space, but for example, in the data collections space, and the data analysis space, and for sure Pensando doesn't want to reinvent the wheel there, doesn't want to build a data collector or data analysis engine and whatever, there is a lot of work, and there are a lot out there, so integration with things like Splunk for example are kind of natural for Pensando. >> Eccellent, so wait, you talked about some of the places where Pensando doesn't need to reinvent the wheel, you talk through a lot of the different technology pieces. If I had to have you pull out one, what would you say is the biggest innovation that Pensando has built into the platform. >> Well, the biggest innovation is this P4 architecture. And the P4 architecture was a sort of gift that was given us in the sense that it was not invented for what we use it. P4 was basically invented to have programmable switches. The first big P4 company was clearly Barefoot that then was acquired by Intel and Barefoot built a programmable switch. But if you look at the reality of today, the network, most of the people want the network to be super easy. They don't want to program anything into the network. They want to program everything at the edge, they want to put all the intelligence and the programmability of the edge, so we borrowed the P4 architecture, which is fantastic programmable architecture and we implemented that yet. It's also easier because the bandwidth is clearly more limited at the edge compared to being in the core of a network. And that P4 architecture give us a huge advantage. If you, tomorrow come up with the Stuart Encapsulation Super Duper Technology, I can implement in the copper The Stuart, whatever it was called, Super Duper Encapsulation Technology, even when I design the ASIC I didn't know that encapsulation exists. Is the data plan programmability, is the capability to program the data plan and programming the data plan while maintaining wire-speed performance, which I think is the biggest benefit of Pensando. >> All right, well Silvano, thank you so much for sharing, your journey with Pensando so far, really interesting to dig into it and absolutely look forward to following progress as it goes. >> Stuart, it's been really a pleasure to talk with you, I hope to talk with you again in the near future. Thank you so much. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The theme is Data as Code; The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics. This is the season two, episode two of the ongoing series of covering the exciting startups in the AWS ecosystem around data analytics and cloud computing. I'm your host, John Furrier. Today we're joined by great guests here. Three guests. Wen Phan, who's a Director of Product Management at Ahana, Satyam Krishna, Engineering Manager at Blinkit, and we have Akshay Agarwal, Senior Engineer at Blinkit as well. We're going to get into the relationship there. Let's get into. We're going to talk about how Blinkit's using open data lake, data house with Presto on AWS. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're going to get into the deep dive on the open data lake, but I want to just quickly get your thoughts on what it is for the folks out there. Set the table. What is the open data lakehouse? Why it is important? What's in it for the customers? Why are we seeing adoption around this because this is a big story. >> Sure. Yeah, the open data lakehouse is really being able to run a gamut of analytics, whether it be BI, SQL, machine learning, data science, on top of the data lake, which is based on inexpensive, low cost, scalable storage. And more importantly, it's also on top of open formats. And this to the end customer really offers a tremendous range of flexibility. They can run a bunch of use cases on the same storage and great price performance. >> You guys have any other thoughts on what's your reaction to the lakehouse? What is your experience with it? What's going on with Blinkit? >> No, I think for us also, it has been the primary driver of how as a company we have shifted our completely delivery model from us delivering in one day to someone who is delivering in 10 minutes, right? And a lot of this was made possible by having this kind of architecture in place, which helps us to be more open-source, more... where the tools are open-source, we have an open table format which helps us be very modular in nature, meaning we can pick solutions which works best for us, right? And that is the kind of architecture that we want to be in. >> Awesome. Wen, you know last time we chat with Ahana, we had a great conversation around Presto, data. The theme of this episode is Data as Code, which is interesting because in all the conversations in these episodes all around developers, which administrators are turning into developers, there's a developer vibe with data. And with opensource, it's software. Now you've got data taking a similar trajectory as how software development was with code, but the people running data they're not developers, they're administrators, they're operators. Now they're turning into DataOps. So it's kind of a similar vibe going on with branches and taking stuff out of and putting it back in, and testing it. Datasets becoming much more stable, iterating on machine learning algorithm. This is a movement. What's your guys reaction before we get into the relationships here with you guys. But, what's your reaction to this Data as Code movement? >> Yeah, so I think the folks at Blinkit are doing a great job there. I mean, they have a pretty compact data engineering team and they have some pretty stringent SLAs, as well as in terms of time to value and reliability. And what that ultimately translates for them is not only flexibility but reliability. So they've done some very fantastic work on a lot of automation, a lot of integration with code, and their data pipelines. And I'm sure they can give the details on that. >> Yes. Satyam and Akshay, you guys are engineers' software, but this is becoming a whole another paradigm where the frontline coding and or work or engineer data engineering is implementing the operations as well. It's kind of like DevOps for data. >> For sure. Right. And I think whenever you're working, even as a software engineer, the understanding of business is equally important. You cannot be working on something and be away from business, right? And that's where, like I mentioned earlier, when we realized that we have to completely move our stack and start giving analytics at 10 minutes, right. Because when you're delivering in 10 minutes, your leaders want to take decisions in your real-time. That means you need to move with them. You need to move with business. And when you do that, the kind of flexibility these softwares give is what enables the businesses at the end of the day. >> Awesome. This is the really kind of like, is there going to be a book called agile data warehouses? I don't think so. >> I think so. (laughing) >> The agile cloud data. This is cool. So let's get into what you guys do. What is Blinkit up to? What do you guys do? Can you take a minute to explain the company and your product? >> Sure. I'll take that. So Blinkit is India's biggest 10 minute delivery platform. It pioneered the delivery model in the country with over 10 million Indian shopping on our platform, ranging from everything: grocery staples, vegetables, emergency services, electronics, and much more, right. It currently delivers over 200,000 orders every day, and is in a hurry to bring the future of farmers to everyone in India. >> What's the relationship with Ahana and Blinkit? Wen, what's the tie in? >> Yeah, so Blinkit had a pretty well formed stack. They needed a little bit more flexibility and control. They thought a managed service was the way to go. And here at Ahana, we provide a SaaS managed service for Presto. So they engaged us and they evaluated our offering. And more importantly, we're able to partner. As a early stage startup, we really rely on very strong partners with great use cases that are willing to collaborate. And the folks at Blinkit have been really great in helping us push our product, develop our product. And we've been very happy about the value that we've been able to deliver to them as well. >> Okay. So let's unpack the open data lakehouse. What is it? What's under the covers? Let's get into it. >> Sure. So if bring up a slide. Like I said before, it's really a paradigm on being able to run a gamut of analytics on top of the open data lake. So what does that mean? How did it come about? So on the left hand side of the slide, we are coming out of this world where for the last several decades, the primary workhorse for SQL based processing and reporting and dashboarding use cases was really the data warehouse. And what we're seeing is a shift due to the trends in inexpensive scalable storage, cloud storage. The proliferation of open formats to facilitate using this storage to get certain amounts of reliability and performance, and the adoption of frameworks that can operate on top of this cloud data lake. So while here at Ahana, we're primarily focused on SQL workloads and Presto, this architecture really allows for other types of frameworks. And you see the ML and AI side. And like to Satyam's point earlier, offers a great amount of flexibility modularity for many use cases in the cloud. So really, that's really the lakehouse, and people like it for the performance, the openness, and the price performance. >> How's the open-source open side of it playing in the open-source? It's kind of open formats. What is the open-source angle on this because there's a lot of different approaches. I'm hearing open formats. You know, you have data stores which are a big part of seeing that. You got SQL, you mentioned SQL. There's got a mishmash of opportunities. Is it all coexisting? Is it one tool to rule the world or is it interchangeable? What's the open-source angle? >> There's multiple angles and I'll let definitely Satyam add to what I'm saying. This was definitely a big piece for Blinkit. So on one hand, you have the open formats. And what really the open formats enable is multiple compute engines to work on that data. And that's very huge. 'Cause it's open, you're not locked in. I think the other part of open that is important and I think it was important to Blinkit was the governance around that. So in particular Presto is governed by the Linux Foundation. And so, as a customer of open-source technology, they want some assurances for things like how's it governed? Is the license going to change? So there's that aspect of openness that I think is very important. >> Yeah. Blinkit, what's the data strategy here with lakehouse and you guys? Why are you adopting this type of architecture? >> So adding to what... Yeah, I think adding to Wen said, right. When we are thinking in terms of all these OpenStacks, you have got these open table formats, everything which is deployed over cloud, the primary reason there is modularity. It's as simple as that, right. You can plug and play so many different table formats from one thing to another based on the use case that you're trying to serve, so that you get the most value out of data. Right? I'll give you a very simple example. So for us we use... not even use one single table format. It's not that one thing solves for everything, right? We use both Hudi and Iceberg to solve for different use cases. One is good for when you're working for a certain data site. Icebergs works well when you're in the SQL kind of interface, right. Hudi's still trying to reach there. It's going to go there very soon. So having the ability to plug and play different formats based on the use case helps you to grow faster, helps you to take decisions faster because you now you're not stuck on one thing. They will have to implement it. Right. So I think that's what it is great about this data lake strategy. Keeping yourself cost effective. Yeah, please. >> So the enablement is basically use case driven. You don't have to be rearchitecturing for use cases. You can simply plug can play based on what you need for the use case. >> Yeah. You can... and again, you can focus on your business use case. You can figure out what your business users need and not worry about these things because that's where Presto comes in, helps you stitch that data together with multiple data formats, give you the performance that you need and it works out the best there. And that's something that you don't get to with traditional warehouse these days. Right? The kind of thing that we need, you don't get that. >> I do want to add. This is just to riff on what Satyam said. I think it's pretty interesting. So, it really allowed him to take the best-of-breed of what he was seeing in the community, right? So in the case of table formats, you've got Delta, you've got Hudi, you've got Iceberg, and they all have got their own roadmap and it's kind of organic of how these different communities want to evolve, and I think that's great, but you have these end consumers like Blinkit who have different maybe use cases overlapping, and they're not forced to pick one. When you have an open architecture, they can really put together best-of-breed. And as these projects evolve, they can continue to monitor it and then make decisions and continue to remain agile based on the landscape and how it's evolving. >> So the agility is a key point. Flexibility and agility, and time to valuing with your data. >> Yeah. >> All right. Wen, I got to get in to why the Presto is important here. Where does that fit in? Why is Presto important? >> Yeah. For me, it all comes down to the use cases and the needs. And reporting and dashboarding is not going to go away anytime soon. It's a very common use case. Many of our customers like Blinkit come to us for that use case. The difference now is today, people want to do that particular use case on top of the modern data lake, on top of scalable, inexpensive, low cost storage. Right? In addition to that, there's a need for this low latency interactive ability to engage with the data. This is often arises when you need to do things in a ad hoc basis or you're in the developmental phase of building things up. So if that's what your need is. And latency's important and getting your arms around the problems, very important. You have a certain SLA, I need to deliver something. That puts some requirements in the technology. And Presto is a perfect for that ideal use case. It's ideal for that use case. It's distributed, it's scalable, it's in memory. And so it's able to really provide that. I think the other benefit for Presto and why we're bidding on Presto is it works well on the data lakes, but you have to think about how are these organizations maturing with this technology. So it's not necessarily an all or nothing. You have organizations that have maybe the data lake and it's augmented with other analytical data stores like Snowflake or Redshift. So Presto also... a core aspect is its ability to federate or connect and query across different data sources. So this can be a permanent thing. This could also be a transitionary thing. We have some customers that are moving and slowly shifting their data portfolio from maybe all data warehouse into 80% data lake. But it gives that optionality, it gives that ability to transition over a timeframe. But for all those reasons, the latency, the scalability, the federation, is why Presto for this particular use case. >> And you can connect with other databases. It can be purpose built database, could be whatever. Right? >> Sure. Yes, yes. Presto has a very pluggable architecture. >> Okay. Here's the question for the Blinkit team? Why did you choose Presto and what led you to Ahana? >> So I'll take this better, over this what Presto sits well in that reach is, is how it is designed. Like basically, Presto decouples your storage with the compute. Basically like, people can use any storage and Presto just works as a query engine for them. So basically, it has a constant connectors where you can connect with a real-time databases like Pinot or a Druid, along with your warehouses like Redshift, along with your data lake that's like based on Hudi or Iceberg. So it's like a very landscape that you can use with the Presto. And consumers like the analytics doesn't need to learn the SQL or different paradigms of the querying for different sources. They just need to learn a single source. And, they get a single place to consume from. They get a single consumer on their single destination to write on also. So, it's a homologous architecture, which allows you to put a central security like which Presto integrates. So it's also based on open architecture, that's Apache engine. And it has also certain innovative features that you can see based on caching, which reduces a lot of the cost. And since you have further decoupled your storage with the compute, you can further reduce your cost, because now the biggest part of our tradition warehouse is a storage. And the cost goes massively upwards with the amount of data that you've added. Like basically, each time that you add more data, you require more storage, and warehouses ask you to write the data in their own format. Over here since we have decoupled that, the storage cost have gone down. It's literally that your cost that you are writing, and you just pay for the compute, and you can scale in scale out based on the requirements. If you have high traffic, you scale out. If you have low traffic, you scale in. So all those. >> So huge cost savings. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Cost effectiveness, for sure. >> Cost effectiveness and you get a very good price value out of it. Like for each query, you can estimate what's the cost for you based on that tracking and all those things. >> I mean, if you think about the other classic Iceberg and what's under the water you don't know, it's the hidden cost. You think about the tooling, right, and also, time it takes to do stuff. So if you have flexibility on choice, when we were riffing on this last time we chatted with you guys and you brought it up earlier around, you can have the open formats to have different use cases in different tools or different platforms to work on it. Redshift, you can use Redshift here, or use something over there. You don't have to get locking >> Absolutely. >> Satyam & Akshay: Yeah. >> Locking is a huge problem. How do you guys see that 'cause sounds like here there's not a lot of locking. You got the open formats, and you got choice. >> Yeah. So you get best of the both worlds. Like you get with Ahana or with the Presto, you can get the best of the both worlds. Since it's cloud native, you can easily deploy your clusters very easily within like five minutes. Your cluster is up, you can start working on it. You can deploy multiple clusters for multiple teams. You get also flexibility of adding new connectors since it's open and further it's also much more secure since it's based on cloud native. So basically, you can control your security endpoints very well. So all those things comes in together with this architecture. So you can definitely go more on the lakehouse architecture than warehousing when you want to deliver data value faster. And basically, you get the much more high value out of your data in a sorted template. >> So Satyam, it sounds like the old warehousing was like the application person, not a lot of usage, old, a lot of latency. Okay. Here and there. But now you got more speed to deploy clusters, scale up scale down. Application developers are as everyone. It's not one person. It's not one group. It's whenever you want. So, you got speed. You got more diversity in the data opportunities, and your coding. >> Yeah. I think data warehouses are a way to start for every organization who is getting into data. I don't think data warehousing is still a solution and will be a solution for a lot of teams which are still getting into data. But as soon as you start scaling, as you start seeing the cost going up, as you start seeing the number of use cases adding up, having an open format definitely helps. So, I would say that's where we are also heading into and that's how our journey as well started with Presto as well, why we even thought about Ahana, right. >> (John chuckles) >> So, like you mentioned, one of the things that happened was as we were moving to the lakehouse and the open table format, I think Ahana is one of the first ones in the market to have Hudi as a first class citizen completely supported with all the things which are not even present at the time of... even with Presto, right. So we see Ahana working behind the scenes, improving even some of the things already over the open-source ecosystem. And that's where we get the most value out of Ahana as well. >> This is the convergence of open-source magic and commercialization. Wen, because you think about Data as Code, reminds me, I hear, "Data warehouse, it's not going to go away." But you got cloud scale or scale. It reminds me of the old, "Oh yeah, I have a data center." Well, here comes the cloud. So, doesn't really kill the data center, although Amazon would say that the data center's going to be eliminated. No, you just use it for whatever you need it for. You use it for specific use cases, but everyone, all the action goes to the cloud for scale. The same things happen with data, and look at the open-source community. It's kind of coming together. Data as Code is coming together. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> I do want to again to connect on another dot in terms of cost and that. You know, we've been talking a little bit about price performance, but there's an implicit cost, and I think this was also very important to Blinkit, and also why we're offering a managed service. So one piece of it. And it really revolves around the people, right? So outside of the technology, the performance. One thing that Akshay brought up and it's another important piece that I should have highlighted a little bit more is, Presto exposes the ability to interact your data in a widely adopted way, which is basically ANSI SQL. So the ability for your practitioners to use this technology is huge. That's just regular Presto. In terms of a managed service, the guys at Blinkit are a great high performing team, but they have to be very efficient with their time and what they manage. And what we're trying to do is provide leverage for them. So take a lot of the heavy lifting away, but at the same time, figuring out the right things to expose so that they have that same flexibility. And that's been the balancing point that we've been trying to balance at Ahana, but that goes back to cost. How do I total cost of ownership? And that not doesn't include just the actual querying processing time, but the ability for the organization to go ahead and absorb the solution. And what does it cost in terms of the people involved? >> Yeah. Great conversation. I mean, this brings up the question of back in the data center, the cloud days, you had the concept of an SRE, which is now popular, site reliability engineer. One person does all the clusters and manages all the scale. Is the data engineer the new SRE for data? Are we seeing a similar trajectory? Just want to get your reaction. What do you guys think? >> Yes, so I would say, definitely. It depends on the teams and the sizes of that. We are high performing team so each automation takes bits on the pieces of the architecture, like where they want to invest in. And it comes out with the value of the engineer's time and basically like how much they can invest in, how much they need to configure the architecture, and how much time it'll take to time to market. So basically like, this is what I would also highlight as an engineer. I found Ahana like the... I would say as a Presto in a cloud native environment, or I think so there's the one in the market that seamlessly scales and then scales out. And further, with a team of us, I would say our team size like three to four engineers managing cluster day in day out, conferring, tuning and all those things takes a lot of time. And Ahana came in and takes it off our plate and the hands in a solution which works out of box. So that's where this comes in. Ahana it's also based on open-source community. >> So the time of the engineer's time is so valuable. >> Yeah. >> My take on it really in terms of the data engineering being the SRE. I think that can work, it depends on the actual person, and we definitely try to make the process as easy as possible. I think in Blinkit's case, you guys are... There are data platform owners, but they definitely are aware of the pipelines. >> John: Yeah. >> So they have very intimate knowledge of what data engineers do, but I think in their case, you guys, you're managing a ton of systems. So it's not just even Presto. They have a ton of systems and surfacing that interface so they can cater to all the data engineers across their data systems, I think is the big need for them. I know you guys you want to chime in. I mean, we've seen the architecture and things like that. I think you guys did an amazing job there. >> So, and to adding to Wen's point, right. Like I generally think what DevOps is to the tech team. I think, what is data engineer or the data teams are to the data organization, right? Like they play a very similar role that you have to act as a guardrail to ensure that everyone has access to the data so the democratizing and everything is there, but that has to also come with security, right? And when you do that, there are (indistinct) a lot of points where someone can interact with data. We have... And again, there's a mixed match of open-source tools that works well, as well. And there are some paid tools as well. So for us like for visualization, we use Redash for our ad hoc analysis. And we use Tableau as well whenever we want to give a very concise reporting. We have Jupyter notebooks in place and we have EMRs as well. So we always have a mixed batch of things where people can interact with data. And most of our time is spent in acting as that guardrail to ensure that everyone should have access to data, but it shouldn't be exploited, right. And I think that's where we spend most of our time in. >> Yeah. And I think the time is valuable, but that your point about the democratization aspect of it, there seems to be a bigger step function value that you're enabling and needs to be talked out. The 10x engineer, it's more like 50x, right? If you get it done right, the enablement downstream at the scale that we're seeing with this new trend is significant. It's not just, oh yeah, visualization and get some data quicker, there's actually real advantages on a multiple with that engineering. So, and we saw that with DevOps, right? Like, you do this right and then magic happens on the edges. So, yeah, it's interesting. You guys, congratulations. Great environment. Thanks for sharing the insight Blinkit. Wen, great to see you. Ahana again with Presto, congratulations. The open-source meets data engineering. Thanks so much. >> Thanks, John. >> Appreciate it. >> Okay. >> Thanks John. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> This season two, episode two of our ongoing series. This one is Data as Code. This is theCUBE. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. This is Data as Code, The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics. This is also season two, episode two of our ongoing series with exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem who are here to talk with us about data and analytics. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Two guests join me, one, a cube alumni. Venkat Venkataramani is here CEO & Co-Founder of Rockset. Good to see you again. And Doug Moore, VP of cloud platforms at Command Alkon. You're here to talk to me about how Command Alkon implemented real time analytics in just days with Rockset. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Doug, give us a little bit of a overview of Command Alkon, what type of business you are? what your mission is? That good stuff. >> Yeah, great. I'll pref it by saying I've been in this industry for only three years. The 30 years prior I was in financial services. So this was really exciting and eye opening. It actually plays into the story of how we met Rockset. So that's why I wanted to preface that. But Command Alkon is in the business, is in the what's called The Heavy Building Materials Industry. And I had never heard of it until I got here. But if you think about large projects like building buildings, cities, roads anything that requires concrete asphalt or just really big trucks, full of bulky materials that's the heavy building materials industry. So for over 40 years Command Alkon has been the north American leader in providing software to quarries and production facilities to help mine and load these materials and to produce them and then get them to the job site. So that's what our supply chain is, is from the quarry through the development of these materials, then out to the to a heavy building material job site. >> Got it, and now how historically in the past has the movement of construction materials been coordinated? What was that like before you guys came on the scene? >> You'll love this answer. So 'cause, again, it's like a step back in time. When I got here the people told me that we're trying to come up with the platform that there are 27 industries studied globally. And our industry is second to last in terms of automation which meant that literally everything is still being done with paper and a lot of paper. So when one of those, let's say material is developed, concrete asphalt is produced and then needs to get to the job site. They start by creating a five part printed ticket or delivery description that then goes to multiple parties. It ends up getting touched physically over 50 times for every delivery. And to give you some idea what kind of scale it is there are over 330 million of these type deliveries in north America every year. So it's really a lot of favor and a lot of manual work. So that was the state of really where we were. And obviously there are compelling reasons certainly today but even 3, 4, 5 years ago to automate that and digitize it. >> Wow, tremendous potential to go nowhere but up with the amount of paper, the lack of, of automation. So, you guys Command Alkon built a platform, a cloud software construction software platform. Talk to me of about that. Why you built it, what was the compelling event? I mean, I think you've kind of already explained the compelling event of all the paper but give us a little bit more context. >> Yeah. That was the original. And then we'll get into what happened two years ago which has made it even more compelling but essentially with everything on premises there's really in a huge amount of inefficiency. So, people have heard the enormous numbers that it takes to build up a highway or a really large construction project. And a lot of that is tied up in these inefficiencies. So we felt like with our significant presence in this market, that if we could figure out how to automate getting this data into the cloud so that at least the partners in the supply chain could begin sharing information. That's not on paper a little bit closer to real time that we could make has an impact on everything from the timing it takes to do a project to even the amount of carbon dioxide that's admitted, for example from trucks running around and being delayed and not being coordinated well. >> So you built the connect platform you started on Amazon DynamoDB and ran into some performance challenges. Talk to us about the, some of those performance bottlenecks and how you found Venkat and Rockset. >> So from the beginning, we were fortunate, if you start building a cloud three years ago you're you have a lot of opportunity to use some of the what we call more fully managed or serverless offerings from Amazon and all the cloud vendors have them but Amazon is the one we're most familiar with throughout the past 10 years. So we went head first into saying, we're going to do everything we can to not manage infrastructure ourselves. So we can really focus on solving this problem efficiently. And it paid off great. And so we chose dynamo as our primary database and it still was a great decision. We have obviously hundreds of millions of billions of these data points in dynamo. And it's great from a transactional perspective, but at some point you need to get the data back out. And what plays into the story of the beginning when I came here with no background basically in this industry, is that, and as did most of the other people on my team, we weren't really sure what questions were going to be asked of the data. And that's super, super important with a NoSQL database like dynamo. You sort of have to know in advance what those usage patterns are going to be and what people are going to want to get back out of it. And that's what really began to strain us on both performance and just availability of information. >> Got it. Venkat, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Doug articulated the, is industry with such little automation so much paper. Are you finding that still out there for in quite a few industries that really have nowhere to go but up? >> I think that's a very good point. We talk about digital transformation 2.0 as like this abstract thing. And then you meet like disruptors and innovators like Doug, and you realize how much impact, it has on the real world. But now it's not just about disrupting, and digitizing all of these records but doing it at a faster pace than ever before, right. I think this is really what digital transformation in the cloud really enable tools you do that, a small team in a, with a very very big mission and responsibility like what Doug team have been, shepherding here. They're able to move very, very, very fast, to be able to kind of accelerate this. And, they're not only on the forefront of digitizing and transforming a very big, paper-heavy kind of process, but real-time analytics and real time reporting is a requirement, right? Nobody's wondering where is my supply chain three days ago? Are my, one of the most important thing in heavy construction is to keep running on a schedule. If you fall behind, there's no way to catch up because there's so many things that falls apart. Now, how do you make sure you don't fall behind, realtime analytics and realtime reporting on how many trucks are supposed to be delivered today? Halfway through the day, are they on track? Are they getting behind? And all of those things is not just able to manage the data but also be able to get reporting and analytics on that is a extremely important aspect of this. So this is like a combination of digital transformation happening in the cloud in realtime and realtime analytics being in the forefront of it. And so we are very, very happy to partner with digital disruptors like Doug and his team to be part of this movement. >> Doug, as Venkat mentioned, access to real time data is a requirement that is just simple truth these days. I'm just curious, compelling event wise was COVID and accelerator? 'Cause we all know of the supply chain challenges that we're all facing in one way or the other, was that part of the compelling event that had you guys go and say, we want to do DynamoDB plus Rockset? >> Yeah, that is a fantastic question. In fact, more so than you can imagine. So anytime you come into an industry and you're going to try to completely change or revolutionize the way it operates it takes a long time to get the message out. Sometimes years, I remember in insurance it took almost 10 years really to get that message out and get great adoption and then COVID came along. And when COVID came along, we all of a sudden had a situation where drivers and the foreman on the job site didn't want to exchange the paperwork. I heard one story of a driver taping the ticket for signature to the foreman on a broomstick and putting it out his windows so that he didn't get too close. It really was that dramatic. And again, this is the early days and no one really has any idea what's happening and we're all working from home. So we launched, we saw that as an opportunity to really help people solve that problem and understand more what this transformation would mean in the long term. So we launched internally what we called Project Lemonade obviously from, make lemonade out of lemons, that's the situation that we were in and we immediately made some enhancements to a mobile app and then launched that to the field. So that basically there's now a digital acceptance capability where the driver can just stay in the vehicle and the foreman can be anywhere, look at the material say it's acceptable for delivery and go from there. So yeah, it made a, it actually immediately caused many of our customers hundreds to begin, to want to push their data to the cloud for that reason just to take advantage of that one capability >> Project lemonade, sounds like it's made a lot of lemonade out of a lot of lemons. Can you comment Doug on kind of the larger trend of real time analytics and logistics? >> Yeah, obviously, and this is something I didn't think about much either not knowing anything about concrete other than it was in my driveway before I got here. And that it's a perishable product and you've got that basically no more than about an hour and a half from the time you mix it, put it in the drum and get it to the job site and pour it. And then the next one has to come behind it. And I remember I, the trend is that we can't really do that on paper anymore and stay on top of what has to be done we'll get into the field. So a foreman, I recall saying that when you're in the field waiting on delivery, that you have people standing around and preparing the site ready to make a pour that two minutes is an eternity. And so, working a real time is all always a controversial word because it means something different to anyone, but that gave it real, a real clarity to mean, what it really meant to have real time analytics and how we are doing and where are my vehicles and how is this job performing today? And I think that a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to do that. And fortunately, we found a great tool set that's allowing us to do that at scale. Thankfully, for Rockset primarily. >> Venkat talk about it from your perspective the larger trend of real time analytics not just in logistics, but in other key industries. >> Yeah. I think we're seeing this across the board. I think, whether, even we see a huge trend even within an enterprise different teams from the marketing team to the support teams to more and more business operations team to the security team, really moving more and more of their use cases from real time. So we see this, the industries that are the innovators and the pioneers here are the ones for whom real times that requirement like Doug and his team here or where, if it is all news, it's no news, it's useless, right? But I think even within, across all industries, whether it is, gaming whether it is, FinTech, Bino related companies, e-learning platforms, so across, ed tech and so many different platforms, there is always this need for business operations. Some, certain aspects certain teams within large organizations to, have to tell me how to win the game and not like, play Monday morning quarterback after the game is over. >> Right, Doug, let's go back at you, I'm curious with connects, have you been able to scale the platform since you integrated with Rockset? Talk to us about some of the outcomes that you've achieved so far? >> Yeah, we have, and of course we knew and we made our database selection with dynamo that it really doesn't have a top end in terms of how much information that we can throw at it. But that's very, very challenging when it comes to using that information from reporting. But we've found the same thing as we've scaled the analytics side with Rockset indexing and searching of that database. So the scale in terms of the number of customers and the amount of data we've been able to take on has been, not been a problem. And honestly, for the first time in my career, I can say that we've always had to add people every time we add a certain number of customers. And that has absolutely not been the case with this platform. >> Well, and I imagine the team that you do have is far more, sorry Venkat, far more strategic and able to focus on bigger projects. >> It, is, and, you've amazed at, I mean Venkat hit on a couple of points that it's in terms of the adoption of analytics. What we found is that we are as big a customer of this analytic engine as our customers are because our marketing team and our sales team are always coming to us. Well how many customers are doing this? How many partners are connected in this way? Which feature flags are turned on the platform? And the way this works is all data that we push into the platform is automatically just indexed and ready for reporting analytics. So we really it's no additional ad of work, to answer these questions, which is really been phenomenal. >> I think the thing I want to add here is the speed at which they were able to build a scalable solution and also how little, operational and administrative overhead that it has cost of their teams, right. I think, this is again, realtime analytics. If you go and ask hundred people, do you want fast analytics on realtime data or slow analytics on scale data, people, no one would say give me slow and scale. So, I think it goes back to again our fundamental pieces that you have to remove all the cost and complexity barriers for realtime analytics to be the new default, right? Today companies try to get away with batch and the pioneers and the innovators are forced to solve, I know, kind of like address some of these realtime analytics challenges. I think with the platforms like the realtime analytics platform, like Rockset, we want to completely flip it on its head. You can do everything in real time. And there may be some extreme situations where you're dealing with like, hundreds of petabytes of data and you just need an analyst to generate like, quarterly reports out of that, go ahead and use some really, really good batch base system but you should be able to get anything, and everything you want without additional cost or complexity, in real time. That is really the vision. That is what we are really enabling here. >> Venkat, I want to also get your perspective and Doug I'd like your perspective on this as well but that is the role of cloud native and serverless technologies in digital disruption. And what do you see there? >> Yeah, I think it's huge. I think, again and again, every customer, and we meet, Command Alkon and Doug and his team is a great example of this where they really want to spend as much time and energies and calories that they have to, help their business, right? Like what, are we accomplishing trying to accomplish as a business? How do we enable, how do we build better products? How do we grow revenue? How do we eliminate risk that is inherent in the business? And that is really where they want to spend all of their energy not trying to like, install some backend software, administer build IDL pipelines and so on and so forth. And so, doing serverless on the compute side of that things like AWS lambda does and what have you. And, it's a very important innovation but that isn't, complete the story or your data stack also have to become serverless. And, that is really the vision with Rockset that your entire realtime analytics stack can be operating and managing. It could be as simple as managing a serverless stack for your compute environments like your APS servers and what have you. And so I think that is going to be a that is for here to stay. This is a path towards simplicity and simplicity scales really, really well, right? Complexity will always be the killer that'll limit, how far you can use this solution and how many problems can you solve with that solution? So, simplicity is a very, very important aspect here. And serverless helps you, deliver that. >> And Doug your thoughts on cloud native and serverless in terms of digital disruption >> Great point, and there are two parts to the scalability part. The second one is the one that's more subtle unless you're in charge of the budget. And that is, with enough effort and enough money that you can make almost any technology scale whether it's multiple copies of it, it may take a long time to get there but you can get there with most technologies but what is least scalable, at least that I as I see that this industry is the people, everybody knows we have a talent shortage and these other ways of getting the real time analytics and scaling infrastructure for compute and database storage, it really takes a highly skilled set of resources. And the more your company grows, the more of those you need. And that is what we really can't find. And that's actually what drove our team in our last industry to even go this way we reached a point where our growth was limited by the people we could find. And so we really wanted to break out of that. So now we had the best of both scalable people because we don't have to scale them and scalable technology. >> Excellent. The best of both worlds. Isn't it great when those two things come together? Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me on "theCUBE" today. Talking about what Rockset and Command Alkon are doing together better together what you're enabling from a supply chain digitization perspective. We appreciate your insights. >> Great. Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For Doug Moore and Venkat Venkatramani, I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here for more coverage of "theCUBE", your leader in high tech event coverage. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering >>space and cybersecurity. Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly >>Over On Welcome to this Special virtual conference. The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly with support from the Cube. I'm John for your host and master of ceremonies. Got a great topic today in this session. Really? The intersection of space and cybersecurity. This topic and this conversation is the cybersecurity workforce development through public and private partnerships. And we've got a great lineup. We have Jeff Armstrong's the president of California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly Jeffrey. Thanks for jumping on and Bang. Go ahead. The second director of C four s R Division. And he's joining us from the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for the acquisition Sustainment Department of Defense, D O D. And, of course, Steve Jake's executive director, founder, National Security Space Association and managing partner at Bello's. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this session. We got an hour conversation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>So we got a virtual event here. We've got an hour, have a great conversation and love for you guys do? In opening statement on how you see the development through public and private partnerships around cybersecurity in space, Jeff will start with you. >>Well, thanks very much, John. It's great to be on with all of you. Uh, on behalf Cal Poly Welcome, everyone. Educating the workforce of tomorrow is our mission to Cal Poly. Whether that means traditional undergraduates, master students are increasingly mid career professionals looking toe up, skill or re skill. Our signature pedagogy is learn by doing, which means that our graduates arrive at employers ready Day one with practical skills and experience. We have long thought of ourselves is lucky to be on California's beautiful central Coast. But in recent years, as we have developed closer relationships with Vandenberg Air Force Base, hopefully the future permanent headquarters of the United States Space Command with Vandenberg and other regional partners, we have discovered that our location is even more advantages than we thought. We're just 50 miles away from Vandenberg, a little closer than u C. Santa Barbara, and the base represents the southern border of what we have come to think of as the central coast region. Cal Poly and Vandenberg Air force base have partner to support regional economic development to encourage the development of a commercial spaceport toe advocate for the space Command headquarters coming to Vandenberg and other ventures. These partnerships have been possible because because both parties stand to benefit Vandenberg by securing new streams of revenue, workforce and local supply chain and Cal Poly by helping to grow local jobs for graduates, internship opportunities for students, and research and entrepreneurship opportunities for faculty and staff. Crucially, what's good for Vandenberg Air Force Base and for Cal Poly is also good for the Central Coast and the US, creating new head of household jobs, infrastructure and opportunity. Our goal is that these new jobs bring more diversity and sustainability for the region. This regional economic development has taken on a life of its own, spawning a new nonprofit called Reach, which coordinates development efforts from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the South to camp to Camp Roberts in the North. Another factor that is facilitated our relationship with Vandenberg Air Force Base is that we have some of the same friends. For example, Northrop Grumman has has long been an important defense contractor, an important partner to Cal poly funding scholarships and facilities that have allowed us to stay current with technology in it to attract highly qualified students for whom Cal Poly's costs would otherwise be prohibitive. For almost 20 years north of grimness funded scholarships for Cal Poly students this year, their funding 64 scholarships, some directly in our College of Engineering and most through our Cal Poly Scholars program, Cal Poly Scholars, a support both incoming freshman is transfer students. These air especially important because it allows us to provide additional support and opportunities to a group of students who are mostly first generation, low income and underrepresented and who otherwise might not choose to attend Cal Poly. They also allow us to recruit from partner high schools with large populations of underrepresented minority students, including the Fortune High School in Elk Grove, which we developed a deep and lasting connection. We know that the best work is done by balanced teams that include multiple and diverse perspectives. These scholarships help us achieve that goal, and I'm sure you know Northrop Grumman was recently awarded a very large contract to modernized the U. S. I. C B M Armory with some of the work being done at Vandenberg Air Force Base, thus supporting the local economy and protecting protecting our efforts in space requires partnerships in the digital realm. How Polly is partnered with many private companies, such as AWS. Our partnerships with Amazon Web services has enabled us to train our students with next generation cloud engineering skills, in part through our jointly created digital transformation hub. Another partnership example is among Cal Poly's California Cybersecurity Institute, College of Engineering and the California National Guard. This partnership is focused on preparing a cyber ready workforce by providing faculty and students with a hands on research and learning environment, side by side with military, law enforcement professionals and cyber experts. We also have a long standing partnership with PG and E, most recently focused on workforce development and redevelopment. Many of our graduates do indeed go on to careers in aerospace and defense industry as a rough approximation. More than 4500 Cal Poly graduates list aerospace and defense as their employment sector on linked in, and it's not just our engineers and computer sciences. When I was speaking to our fellow Panelists not too long ago, >>are >>speaking to bang, we learned that Rachel sins, one of our liberal arts arts majors, is working in his office. So shout out to you, Rachel. And then finally, of course, some of our graduates sword extraordinary heights such as Commander Victor Glover, who will be heading to the International space station later this year as I close. All of which is to say that we're deeply committed the workforce, development and redevelopment that we understand the value of public private partnerships and that were eager to find new ways in which to benefit everyone from this further cooperation. So we're committed to the region, the state in the nation and our past efforts in space, cybersecurity and links to our partners at as I indicated, aerospace industry and governmental partners provides a unique position for us to move forward in the interface of space and cybersecurity. Thank you so much, John. >>President, I'm sure thank you very much for the comments and congratulations to Cal Poly for being on the forefront of innovation and really taking a unique progressive. You and wanna tip your hat to you guys over there. Thank you very much for those comments. Appreciate it. Bahng. Department of Defense. Exciting you gotta defend the nation spaces Global. Your opening statement. >>Yes, sir. Thanks, John. Appreciate that day. Thank you, everybody. I'm honored to be this panel along with President Armstrong, Cal Poly in my long longtime friend and colleague Steve Jakes of the National Security Space Association, to discuss a very important topic of cybersecurity workforce development, as President Armstrong alluded to, I'll tell you both of these organizations, Cal Poly and the N S. A have done and continue to do an exceptional job at finding talent, recruiting them in training current and future leaders and technical professionals that we vitally need for our nation's growing space programs. A swell Asare collective National security Earlier today, during Session three high, along with my colleague Chris Hansen discussed space, cyber Security and how the space domain is changing the landscape of future conflicts. I discussed the rapid emergence of commercial space with the proliferations of hundreds, if not thousands, of satellites providing a variety of services, including communications allowing for global Internet connectivity. S one example within the O. D. We continue to look at how we can leverage this opportunity. I'll tell you one of the enabling technologies eyes the use of small satellites, which are inherently cheaper and perhaps more flexible than the traditional bigger systems that we have historically used unemployed for the U. D. Certainly not lost on Me is the fact that Cal Poly Pioneer Cube SATs 2020 some years ago, and they set the standard for the use of these systems today. So they saw the valiant benefit gained way ahead of everybody else, it seems, and Cal Poly's focus on training and education is commendable. I especially impressed by the efforts of another of Steve's I colleague, current CEO Mr Bill Britain, with his high energy push to attract the next generation of innovators. Uh, earlier this year, I had planned on participating in this year's Cyber Innovation Challenge. In June works Cal Poly host California Mill and high school students and challenge them with situations to test their cyber knowledge. I tell you, I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was a kid. Unfortunately, the pandemic change the plan. Why I truly look forward. Thio feature events such as these Thio participating. Now I want to recognize my good friend Steve Jakes, whom I've known for perhaps too long of a time here over two decades or so, who was in acknowledge space expert and personally, I truly applaud him for having the foresight of years back to form the National Security Space Association to help the entire space enterprise navigate through not only technology but Polly policy issues and challenges and paved the way for operational izing space. Space is our newest horrifying domain. That's not a secret anymore. Uh, and while it is a unique area, it shares a lot of common traits with the other domains such as land, air and sea, obviously all of strategically important to the defense of the United States. In conflict they will need to be. They will all be contested and therefore they all need to be defended. One domain alone will not win future conflicts in a joint operation. We must succeed. All to defending space is critical as critical is defending our other operational domains. Funny space is no longer the sanctuary available only to the government. Increasingly, as I discussed in the previous session, commercial space is taking the lead a lot of different areas, including R and D, A so called new space, so cyber security threat is even more demanding and even more challenging. Three US considers and federal access to and freedom to operate in space vital to advancing security, economic prosperity, prosperity and scientific knowledge of the country. That's making cyberspace an inseparable component. America's financial, social government and political life. We stood up US Space force ah, year ago or so as the newest military service is like the other services. Its mission is to organize, train and equip space forces in order to protect us and allied interest in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Imagine combining that US space force with the U. S. Cyber Command to unify the direction of space and cyberspace operation strengthened U D capabilities and integrate and bolster d o d cyber experience. Now, of course, to enable all of this requires had trained and professional cadre of cyber security experts, combining a good mix of policy as well as high technical skill set much like we're seeing in stem, we need to attract more people to this growing field. Now the D. O. D. Is recognized the importance of the cybersecurity workforce, and we have implemented policies to encourage his growth Back in 2013 the deputy secretary of defense signed the D. O d cyberspace workforce strategy to create a comprehensive, well equipped cyber security team to respond to national security concerns. Now this strategy also created a program that encourages collaboration between the D. O. D and private sector employees. We call this the Cyber Information Technology Exchange program or site up. It's an exchange programs, which is very interesting, in which a private sector employees can naturally work for the D. O. D. In a cyber security position that spans across multiple mission critical areas are important to the d. O. D. A key responsibility of cybersecurity community is military leaders on the related threats and cyber security actions we need to have to defeat these threats. We talk about rapid that position, agile business processes and practices to speed up innovation. Likewise, cybersecurity must keep up with this challenge to cyber security. Needs to be right there with the challenges and changes, and this requires exceptional personnel. We need to attract talent investing the people now to grow a robust cybersecurity, workforce, streets, future. I look forward to the panel discussion, John. Thank you. >>Thank you so much bomb for those comments and you know, new challenges and new opportunities and new possibilities and free freedom Operating space. Critical. Thank you for those comments. Looking forward. Toa chatting further. Steve Jakes, executive director of N. S. S. A Europe opening statement. >>Thank you, John. And echoing bangs thanks to Cal Poly for pulling these this important event together and frankly, for allowing the National Security Space Association be a part of it. Likewise, we on behalf the association delighted and honored Thio be on this panel with President Armstrong along with my friend and colleague Bonneau Glue Mahad Something for you all to know about Bomb. He spent the 1st 20 years of his career in the Air Force doing space programs. He then went into industry for several years and then came back into government to serve. Very few people do that. So bang on behalf of the space community, we thank you for your long life long devotion to service to our nation. We really appreciate that and I also echo a bang shot out to that guy Bill Britain, who has been a long time co conspirator of ours for a long time and you're doing great work there in the cyber program at Cal Poly Bill, keep it up. But professor arms trying to keep a close eye on him. Uh, I would like to offer a little extra context to the great comments made by by President Armstrong and bahng. Uh, in our view, the timing of this conference really could not be any better. Um, we all recently reflected again on that tragic 9 11 surprise attack on our homeland. And it's an appropriate time, we think, to take pause while the percentage of you in the audience here weren't even born or babies then For the most of us, it still feels like yesterday. And moreover, a tragedy like 9 11 has taught us a lot to include to be more vigilant, always keep our collective eyes and ears open to include those quote eyes and ears from space, making sure nothing like this ever happens again. So this conference is a key aspect. Protecting our nation requires we work in a cybersecurity environment at all times. But, you know, the fascinating thing about space systems is we can't see him. No, sir, We see Space launches man there's nothing more invigorating than that. But after launch, they become invisible. So what are they really doing up there? What are they doing to enable our quality of life in the United States and in the world? Well, to illustrate, I'd like to paraphrase elements of an article in Forbes magazine by Bonds and my good friend Chuck Beans. Chuck. It's a space guy, actually had Bonds job a fuse in the Pentagon. He is now chairman and chief strategy officer at York Space Systems, and in his spare time he's chairman of the small satellites. Chuck speaks in words that everyone can understand. So I'd like to give you some of his words out of his article. Uh, they're afraid somewhat. So these are Chuck's words. Let's talk about average Joe and playing Jane. Before heading to the airport for a business trip to New York City, Joe checks the weather forecast informed by Noah's weather satellites to see what pack for the trip. He then calls an uber that space app. Everybody uses it matches riders with drivers via GPS to take into the airport, So Joe has lunch of the airport. Unbeknownst to him, his organic lunch is made with the help of precision farming made possible through optimized irrigation and fertilization, with remote spectral sensing coming from space and GPS on the plane, the pilot navigates around weather, aided by GPS and nose weather satellites. And Joe makes his meeting on time to join his New York colleagues in a video call with a key customer in Singapore made possible by telecommunication satellites. Around to his next meeting, Joe receives notice changing the location of the meeting to another to the other side of town. So he calmly tells Syria to adjust the destination, and his satellite guided Google maps redirects him to the new location. That evening, Joe watches the news broadcast via satellite. The report details a meeting among world leaders discussing the developing crisis in Syria. As it turns out, various forms of quote remotely sensed. Information collected from satellites indicate that yet another band, chemical weapon, may have been used on its own people. Before going to bed, Joe decides to call his parents and congratulate them for their wedding anniversary as they cruise across the Atlantic, made possible again by communications satellites and Joe's parents can enjoy the call without even wondering how it happened the next morning. Back home, Joe's wife, Jane, is involved in a car accident. Her vehicle skids off the road. She's knocked unconscious, but because of her satellite equipped on star system, the crash is detected immediately and first responders show up on the scene. In time, Joe receives the news books. An early trip home sends flowers to his wife as he orders another uber to the airport. Over that 24 hours, Joe and Jane used space system applications for nearly every part of their day. Imagine the consequences if at any point they were somehow denied these services, whether they be by natural causes or a foreign hostility. And each of these satellite applications used in this case were initially developed for military purposes and continue to be, but also have remarkable application on our way of life. Just many people just don't know that. So, ladies and gentlemen, now you know, thanks to chuck beans, well, the United States has a proud heritage being the world's leading space faring nation, dating back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Today we have mature and robust systems operating from space, providing overhead reconnaissance to quote, wash and listen, provide missile warning, communications, positioning, navigation and timing from our GPS system. Much of what you heard in Lieutenant General J. T. Thompson earlier speech. These systems are not only integral to our national security, but also our also to our quality of life is Chuck told us. We simply no longer could live without these systems as a nation and for that matter, as a world. But over the years, adversary like adversaries like China, Russia and other countries have come to realize the value of space systems and are aggressively playing ketchup while also pursuing capabilities that will challenge our systems. As many of you know, in 2000 and seven, China demonstrated it's a set system by actually shooting down is one of its own satellites and has been aggressively developing counter space systems to disrupt hours. So in a heavily congested space environment, our systems are now being contested like never before and will continue to bay well as Bond mentioned, the United States has responded to these changing threats. In addition to adding ways to protect our system, the administration and in Congress recently created the United States Space Force and the operational you United States Space Command, the latter of which you heard President Armstrong and other Californians hope is going to be located. Vandenberg Air Force Base Combined with our intelligence community today, we have focused military and civilian leadership now in space. And that's a very, very good thing. Commence, really. On the industry side, we did create the National Security Space Association devoted solely to supporting the national security Space Enterprise. We're based here in the D C area, but we have arms and legs across the country, and we are loaded with extraordinary talent. In scores of Forman, former government executives, So S s a is joined at the hip with our government customers to serve and to support. We're busy with a multitude of activities underway ranging from a number of thought provoking policy. Papers are recurring space time Webcast supporting Congress's Space Power Caucus and other main serious efforts. Check us out at NSS. A space dot org's One of our strategic priorities in central to today's events is to actively promote and nurture the workforce development. Just like cow calling. We will work with our U. S. Government customers, industry leaders and academia to attract and recruit students to join the space world, whether in government or industry and two assistant mentoring and training as their careers. Progress on that point, we're delighted. Be delighted to be working with Cal Poly as we hopefully will undertake a new pilot program with him very soon. So students stay tuned something I can tell you Space is really cool. While our nation's satellite systems are technical and complex, our nation's government and industry work force is highly diverse, with a combination of engineers, physicists, method and mathematicians, but also with a large non technical expertise as well. Think about how government gets things thes systems designed, manufactured, launching into orbit and operating. They do this via contracts with our aerospace industry, requiring talents across the board from cost estimating cost analysis, budgeting, procurement, legal and many other support. Tasker Integral to the mission. Many thousands of people work in the space workforce tens of billions of dollars every year. This is really cool stuff, no matter what your education background, a great career to be part of. When summary as bang had mentioned Aziz, well, there is a great deal of exciting challenges ahead we will see a new renaissance in space in the years ahead, and in some cases it's already begun. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sir Richard Richard Branson are in the game, stimulating new ideas in business models, other private investors and start up companies. Space companies are now coming in from all angles. The exponential advancement of technology and microelectronics now allows the potential for a plethora of small SAT systems to possibly replace older satellites the size of a Greyhound bus. It's getting better by the day and central to this conference, cybersecurity is paramount to our nation's critical infrastructure in space. So once again, thanks very much, and I look forward to the further conversation. >>Steve, thank you very much. Space is cool. It's relevant. But it's important, as you pointed out, and you're awesome story about how it impacts our life every day. So I really appreciate that great story. I'm glad you took the time Thio share that you forgot the part about the drone coming over in the crime scene and, you know, mapping it out for you. But that would add that to the story later. Great stuff. My first question is let's get into the conversations because I think this is super important. President Armstrong like you to talk about some of the points that was teased out by Bang and Steve. One in particular is the comment around how military research was important in developing all these capabilities, which is impacting all of our lives. Through that story. It was the military research that has enabled a generation and generation of value for consumers. This is kind of this workforce conversation. There are opportunities now with with research and grants, and this is, ah, funding of innovation that it's highly accelerate. It's happening very quickly. Can you comment on how research and the partnerships to get that funding into the universities is critical? >>Yeah, I really appreciate that And appreciate the comments of my colleagues on it really boils down to me to partnerships, public private partnerships. You mentioned Northrop Grumman, but we have partnerships with Lockie Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Space six JPL, also member of organization called Business Higher Education Forum, which brings together university presidents and CEOs of companies. There's been focused on cybersecurity and data science, and I hope that we can spill into cybersecurity in space but those partnerships in the past have really brought a lot forward at Cal Poly Aziz mentioned we've been involved with Cube set. Uh, we've have some secure work and we want to plan to do more of that in the future. Uh, those partnerships are essential not only for getting the r and d done, but also the students, the faculty, whether masters or undergraduate, can be involved with that work. Uh, they get that real life experience, whether it's on campus or virtually now during Covic or at the location with the partner, whether it may be governmental or our industry. Uh, and then they're even better equipped, uh, to hit the ground running. And of course, we'd love to see even more of our students graduate with clearance so that they could do some of that a secure work as well. So these partnerships are absolutely critical, and it's also in the context of trying to bring the best and the brightest and all demographics of California and the US into this field, uh, to really be successful. So these partnerships are essential, and our goal is to grow them just like I know other colleagues and C. S u and the U C are planning to dio, >>you know, just as my age I've seen I grew up in the eighties, in college and during that systems generation and that the generation before me, they really kind of pioneered the space that spawned the computer revolution. I mean, you look at these key inflection points in our lives. They were really funded through these kinds of real deep research. Bond talk about that because, you know, we're living in an age of cloud. And Bezos was mentioned. Elon Musk. Sir Richard Branson. You got new ideas coming in from the outside. You have an accelerated clock now on terms of the innovation cycles, and so you got to react differently. You guys have programs to go outside >>of >>the Defense Department. How important is this? Because the workforce that air in schools and our folks re skilling are out there and you've been on both sides of the table. So share your thoughts. >>No, thanks, John. Thanks for the opportunity responded. And that's what you hit on the notes back in the eighties, R and D in space especially, was dominated by my government funding. Uh, contracts and so on. But things have changed. As Steve pointed out, A lot of these commercial entities funded by billionaires are coming out of the woodwork funding R and D. So they're taking the lead. So what we can do within the deal, the in government is truly take advantage of the work they've done on. Uh, since they're they're, you know, paving the way to new new approaches and new way of doing things. And I think we can We could certainly learn from that. And leverage off of that saves us money from an R and D standpoint while benefiting from from the product that they deliver, you know, within the O D Talking about workforce development Way have prioritized we have policies now to attract and retain talent. We need I I had the folks do some research and and looks like from a cybersecurity workforce standpoint. A recent study done, I think, last year in 2019 found that the cybersecurity workforce gap in the U. S. Is nearing half a million people, even though it is a growing industry. So the pipeline needs to be strengthened off getting people through, you know, starting young and through college, like assess a professor Armstrong indicated, because we're gonna need them to be in place. Uh, you know, in a period of about maybe a decade or so, Uh, on top of that, of course, is the continuing issue we have with the gap with with stamps students, we can't afford not to have expertise in place to support all the things we're doing within the with the not only deal with the but the commercial side as well. Thank you. >>How's the gap? Get? Get filled. I mean, this is the this is again. You got cybersecurity. I mean, with space. It's a whole another kind of surface area, if you will, in early surface area. But it is. It is an I o t. Device if you think about it. But it does have the same challenges. That's kind of current and and progressive with cybersecurity. Where's the gap Get filled, Steve Or President Armstrong? I mean, how do you solve the problem and address this gap in the workforce? What is some solutions and what approaches do we need to put in place? >>Steve, go ahead. I'll follow up. >>Okay. Thanks. I'll let you correct. May, uh, it's a really good question, and it's the way I would. The way I would approach it is to focus on it holistically and to acknowledge it up front. And it comes with our teaching, etcetera across the board and from from an industry perspective, I mean, we see it. We've gotta have secure systems with everything we do and promoting this and getting students at early ages and mentoring them and throwing internships at them. Eyes is so paramount to the whole the whole cycle, and and that's kind of and it really takes focused attention. And we continue to use the word focus from an NSS, a perspective. We know the challenges that are out there. There are such talented people in the workforce on the government side, but not nearly enough of them. And likewise on industry side. We could use Maura's well, but when you get down to it, you know we can connect dots. You know that the the aspect That's a Professor Armstrong talked about earlier toe where you continue to work partnerships as much as you possibly can. We hope to be a part of that. That network at that ecosystem the will of taking common objectives and working together to kind of make these things happen and to bring the power not just of one or two companies, but our our entire membership to help out >>President >>Trump. Yeah, I would. I would also add it again. It's back to partnerships that I talked about earlier. One of our partners is high schools and schools fortune Margaret Fortune, who worked in a couple of, uh, administrations in California across party lines and education. Their fifth graders all visit Cal Poly and visit our learned by doing lab and you, you've got to get students interested in stem at a early age. We also need the partnerships, the scholarships, the financial aid so the students can graduate with minimal to no debt to really hit the ground running. And that's exacerbated and really stress. Now, with this covert induced recession, California supports higher education at a higher rate than most states in the nation. But that is that has dropped this year or reasons. We all understand, uh, due to Kobe, and so our partnerships, our creativity on making sure that we help those that need the most help financially uh, that's really key, because the gaps air huge eyes. My colleagues indicated, you know, half of half a million jobs and you need to look at the the students that are in the pipeline. We've got to enhance that. Uh, it's the in the placement rates are amazing. Once the students get to a place like Cal Poly or some of our other amazing CSU and UC campuses, uh, placement rates are like 94%. >>Many of our >>engineers, they have jobs lined up a year before they graduate. So it's just gonna take key partnerships working together. Uh, and that continued partnership with government, local, of course, our state of CSU on partners like we have here today, both Stephen Bang So partnerships the thing >>e could add, you know, the collaboration with universities one that we, uh, put a lot of emphasis, and it may not be well known fact, but as an example of national security agencies, uh, National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber, the Fast works with over 270 colleges and universities across the United States to educate its 45 future cyber first responders as an example, so that Zatz vibrant and healthy and something that we ought Teoh Teik, banjo >>off. Well, I got the brain trust here on this topic. I want to get your thoughts on this one point. I'd like to define what is a public private partnership because the theme that's coming out of the symposium is the script has been flipped. It's a modern error. Things air accelerated get you got security. So you get all these things kind of happen is a modern approach and you're seeing a digital transformation play out all over the world in business. Andi in the public sector. So >>what is what >>is a modern public private partnership? What does it look like today? Because people are learning differently, Covert has pointed out, which was that we're seeing right now. How people the progressions of knowledge and learning truth. It's all changing. How do you guys view the modern version of public private partnership and some some examples and improve points? Can you can you guys share that? We'll start with the Professor Armstrong. >>Yeah. A zai indicated earlier. We've had on guy could give other examples, but Northup Grumman, uh, they helped us with cyber lab. Many years ago. That is maintained, uh, directly the software, the connection outside its its own unit so that students can learn the hack, they can learn to penetrate defenses, and I know that that has already had some considerations of space. But that's a benefit to both parties. So a good public private partnership has benefits to both entities. Uh, in the common factor for universities with a lot of these partnerships is the is the talent, the talent that is, that is needed, what we've been working on for years of the, you know, that undergraduate or master's or PhD programs. But now it's also spilling into Skilling and re Skilling. As you know, Jobs. Uh, you know, folks were in jobs today that didn't exist two years, three years, five years ago. But it also spills into other aspects that can expand even mawr. We're very fortunate. We have land, there's opportunities. We have one tech part project. We're expanding our tech park. I think we'll see opportunities for that, and it'll it'll be adjusted thio, due to the virtual world that we're all learning more and more about it, which we were in before Cove it. But I also think that that person to person is going to be important. Um, I wanna make sure that I'm driving across the bridge. Or or that that satellites being launched by the engineer that's had at least some in person training, uh, to do that and that experience, especially as a first time freshman coming on a campus, getting that experience expanding and as adult. And we're gonna need those public private partnerships in order to continue to fund those at a level that is at the excellence we need for these stem and engineering fields. >>It's interesting People in technology can work together in these partnerships in a new way. Bank Steve Reaction Thio the modern version of what a public, successful private partnership looks like. >>If I could jump in John, I think, you know, historically, Dodi's has have had, ah, high bar thio, uh, to overcome, if you will, in terms of getting rapid pulling in your company. This is the fault, if you will and not rely heavily in are the usual suspects of vendors and like and I think the deal is done a good job over the last couple of years off trying to reduce the burden on working with us. You know, the Air Force. I think they're pioneering this idea around pitch days where companies come in, do a two hour pitch and immediately notified of a wooden award without having to wait a long time. Thio get feedback on on the quality of the product and so on. So I think we're trying to do our best. Thio strengthen that partnership with companies outside the main group of people that we typically use. >>Steve, any reaction? Comment to add? >>Yeah, I would add a couple of these air. Very excellent thoughts. Uh, it zits about taking a little gamble by coming out of your comfort zone. You know, the world that Bond and Bond lives in and I used to live in in the past has been quite structured. It's really about we know what the threat is. We need to go fix it, will design it says we go make it happen, we'll fly it. Um, life is so much more complicated than that. And so it's it's really to me. I mean, you take you take an example of the pitch days of bond talks about I think I think taking a gamble by attempting to just do a lot of pilot programs, uh, work the trust factor between government folks and the industry folks in academia. Because we are all in this together in a lot of ways, for example. I mean, we just sent the paper to the White House of their requests about, you know, what would we do from a workforce development perspective? And we hope Thio embellish on this over time once the the initiative matures. But we have a piece of it, for example, is the thing we call clear for success getting back Thio Uh, President Armstrong's comments at the collegiate level. You know, high, high, high quality folks are in high demand. So why don't we put together a program they grabbed kids in their their underclass years identifies folks that are interested in doing something like this. Get them scholarships. Um, um, I have a job waiting for them that their contract ID for before they graduate, and when they graduate, they walk with S C I clearance. We believe that could be done so, and that's an example of ways in which the public private partnerships can happen to where you now have a talented kid ready to go on Day one. We think those kind of things can happen. It just gets back down to being focused on specific initiatives, give them giving them a chance and run as many pilot programs as you can like these days. >>That's a great point, E. President. >>I just want to jump in and echo both the bank and Steve's comments. But Steve, that you know your point of, you know, our graduates. We consider them ready Day one. Well, they need to be ready Day one and ready to go secure. We totally support that and and love to follow up offline with you on that. That's that's exciting, uh, and needed very much needed mawr of it. Some of it's happening, but way certainly have been thinking a lot about that and making some plans, >>and that's a great example of good Segway. My next question. This kind of reimagining sees work flows, eyes kind of breaking down the old the old way and bringing in kind of a new way accelerated all kind of new things. There are creative ways to address this workforce issue, and this is the next topic. How can we employ new creative solutions? Because, let's face it, you know, it's not the days of get your engineering degree and and go interview for a job and then get slotted in and get the intern. You know the programs you get you particularly through the system. This is this is multiple disciplines. Cybersecurity points at that. You could be smart and math and have, ah, degree in anthropology and even the best cyber talents on the planet. So this is a new new world. What are some creative approaches that >>you know, we're >>in the workforce >>is quite good, John. One of the things I think that za challenge to us is you know, we got somehow we got me working for with the government, sexy, right? The part of the challenge we have is attracting the right right level of skill sets and personnel. But, you know, we're competing oftentimes with the commercial side, the gaming industry as examples of a big deal. And those are the same talents. We need to support a lot of programs we have in the U. D. So somehow we have to do a better job to Steve's point off, making the work within the U. D within the government something that they would be interested early on. So I tracked him early. I kind of talked about Cal Poly's, uh, challenge program that they were gonna have in June inviting high school kid. We're excited about the whole idea of space and cyber security, and so on those air something. So I think we have to do it. Continue to do what were the course the next several years. >>Awesome. Any other creative approaches that you guys see working or might be on idea, or just a kind of stoked the ideation out their internship. So obviously internships are known, but like there's gotta be new ways. >>I think you can take what Steve was talking about earlier getting students in high school, uh, and aligning them sometimes. Uh, that intern first internship, not just between the freshman sophomore year, but before they inter cal poly per se. And they're they're involved s So I think that's, uh, absolutely key. Getting them involved many other ways. Um, we have an example of of up Skilling a redeveloped work redevelopment here in the Central Coast. PG and e Diablo nuclear plant as going to decommission in around 2020 24. And so we have a ongoing partnership toe work on reposition those employees for for the future. So that's, you know, engineering and beyond. Uh, but think about that just in the manner that you were talking about. So the up skilling and re Skilling uh, on I think that's where you know, we were talking about that Purdue University. Other California universities have been dealing with online programs before cove it and now with co vid uh, so many more faculty or were pushed into that area. There's going to be much more going and talk about workforce development and up Skilling and Re Skilling The amount of training and education of our faculty across the country, uh, in in virtual, uh, and delivery has been huge. So there's always a silver linings in the cloud. >>I want to get your guys thoughts on one final question as we in the in the segment. And we've seen on the commercial side with cloud computing on these highly accelerated environments where you know, SAS business model subscription. That's on the business side. But >>one of The >>things that's clear in this trend is technology, and people work together and technology augments the people components. So I'd love to get your thoughts as we look at the world now we're living in co vid um, Cal Poly. You guys have remote learning Right now. It's a infancy. It's a whole new disruption, if you will, but also an opportunity to enable new ways to collaborate, Right? So if you look at people and technology, can you guys share your view and vision on how communities can be developed? How these digital technologies and people can work together faster to get to the truth or make a discovery higher to build the workforce? These air opportunities? How do you guys view this new digital transformation? >>Well, I think there's there's a huge opportunities and just what we're doing with this symposium. We're filming this on one day, and it's going to stream live, and then the three of us, the four of us, can participate and chat with participants while it's going on. That's amazing. And I appreciate you, John, you bringing that to this this symposium, I think there's more and more that we can do from a Cal poly perspective with our pedagogy. So you know, linked to learn by doing in person will always be important to us. But we see virtual. We see partnerships like this can expand and enhance our ability and minimize the in person time, decrease the time to degree enhanced graduation rate, eliminate opportunity gaps or students that don't have the same advantages. S so I think the technological aspect of this is tremendous. Then on the up Skilling and Re Skilling, where employees air all over, they can be reached virtually then maybe they come to a location or really advanced technology allows them to get hands on virtually, or they come to that location and get it in a hybrid format. Eso I'm I'm very excited about the future and what we can do, and it's gonna be different with every university with every partnership. It's one. Size does not fit all. >>It's so many possibilities. Bond. I could almost imagine a social network that has a verified, you know, secure clearance. I can jump in, have a little cloak of secrecy and collaborate with the d o. D. Possibly in the future. But >>these are the >>kind of kind of crazy ideas that are needed. Are your thoughts on this whole digital transformation cross policy? >>I think technology is gonna be revolutionary here, John. You know, we're focusing lately on what we call digital engineering to quicken the pace off, delivering capability to warfighter. As an example, I think a I machine language all that's gonna have a major play and how we operate in the future. We're embracing five G technologies writing ability Thio zero latency or I o t More automation off the supply chain. That sort of thing, I think, uh, the future ahead of us is is very encouraging. Thing is gonna do a lot for for national defense on certainly the security of the country. >>Steve, your final thoughts. Space systems are systems, and they're connected to other systems that are connected to people. Your thoughts on this digital transformation opportunity >>Such a great question in such a fun, great challenge ahead of us. Um echoing are my colleague's sentiments. I would add to it. You know, a lot of this has I think we should do some focusing on campaigning so that people can feel comfortable to include the Congress to do things a little bit differently. Um, you know, we're not attuned to doing things fast. Uh, but the dramatic You know, the way technology is just going like crazy right now. I think it ties back Thio hoping Thio, convince some of our senior leaders on what I call both sides of the Potomac River that it's worth taking these gamble. We do need to take some of these things very way. And I'm very confident, confident and excited and comfortable. They're just gonna be a great time ahead and all for the better. >>You know, e talk about D. C. Because I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not a political person, but I always say less lawyers, more techies in Congress and Senate. So I was getting job when I say that. Sorry. Presidential. Go ahead. >>Yeah, I know. Just one other point. Uh, and and Steve's alluded to this in bonded as well. I mean, we've got to be less risk averse in these partnerships. That doesn't mean reckless, but we have to be less risk averse. And I would also I have a zoo. You talk about technology. I have to reflect on something that happened in, uh, you both talked a bit about Bill Britton and his impact on Cal Poly and what we're doing. But we were faced a few years ago of replacing a traditional data a data warehouse, data storage data center, and we partner with a W S. And thank goodness we had that in progress on it enhanced our bandwidth on our campus before Cove. It hit on with this partnership with the digital transformation hub. So there is a great example where, uh, we we had that going. That's not something we could have started. Oh, covitz hit. Let's flip that switch. And so we have to be proactive on. We also have thio not be risk averse and do some things differently. Eyes that that is really salvage the experience for for students. Right now, as things are flowing, well, we only have about 12% of our courses in person. Uh, those essential courses, uh, and just grateful for those partnerships that have talked about today. >>Yeah, and it's a shining example of how being agile, continuous operations, these air themes that expand into space and the next workforce needs to be built. Gentlemen, thank you. very much for sharing your insights. I know. Bang, You're gonna go into the defense side of space and your other sessions. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time for great session. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. >>I'm John Furry with the Cube here in Palo Alto, California Covering and hosting with Cal Poly The Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020 brought to you by Commvault. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm joined by David Vellante here. Of course, we just had the keynote for Commvault Future Ready, Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO. Dave, he's been there a little bit over a year. We've been watching the transformation of Commvault as they are trying to go much deeper in the cloud. Of course, the space, data protection overall, backup and recovery, been a super hot one. Especially, if you talk about everybody accelerating what they're doing with the cloud, Dave, from an end user standpoint, as well as for Commvault. So why don't we start with the company first, as I said, the move to subscription, the move to cloud, a lot of change needed, and that's one of the reasons they brought Sanjay into the company. Of course, he'd been at Puppet before that, he was the CIO of EMC before that. So Dave, tell us your thoughts lately on Commvault. >> Okay, so Commvault, obviously Stu, has been around for a long, long time, and it's kind of a diversified player in the data protection space. I've always felt like they've had a more diversified sort of vision and portfolio. Sanjay took over, what was it February last year, right? So he kind of came in and inherited a company in transition. And transitioning from what has largely been a legacy sort of on-prem, perpetual software licensed business to now one that's transferring into a subscription based model, obviously a large maintenance base. I think about 60% of their revenues comes from services, and most of that is maintenance, okay? So he's inherited that, and then they're going into a subscription model. So that's going to hit the income statement, and then boom COVID hits. So Sanjay is getting it all from all sides, but Commvault is a 670, roughly, million dollar company on a trailing 12 month basis. And the market cap's in the 1.7, 1.8 range, so they trade at about 2.7 times revenue. So that's much better than a hardware company, but it should be better than that as a software company. So the challenge that he has is, okay, how do we get the company growing again? How do we transition to that subscription based model? The good news on Commvault is their balance sheet is tremendous. I mean, they have no debt, no debt. I mean, several hundred million dollars in cash, over 300 million and zero debt, which kind of interesting to me, Stu. Because many companies during this COVID pandemic have tapped the credit markets, Commvault has chosen not to. Maybe they should right now with such low interest rates, and maybe that can help get the growth engine going. But I think they're very conservative in that standpoint and obviously very proud of their balance sheet, but with the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik, and I know we're going to talk about that pouring money into the market, trying to attack them, and we'll talk more about their position relative to those guys, you might like to see 'em raise a little bit of money or take on some debt and really go after some of those opportunities that you referred to upfront, it is a hot market. >> Yeah, well, Dave, you talk about some of the newer entrants raised just insane amounts of money when you talk about that space. Not only Cohesity and Rubrik, but also talked about Veem. Of course, we've watched Veem go from a change in ownership and how much money they have. And from a revenue standpoint, Veem actually might be bigger than Commvault at this point, I believe, right? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're billion dollar bookings, they say. I mean, I believe it, but they're a privately held company. Commvault, we can tell actually what their numbers are. Guaranteed Cohesity and Rubrik are losing money. So their cost of acquiring a customer is huge. Commvault is, let's face it, it's servicing its install base, and it's mining that. And that's why it's, it's cashflow positive. I mean, it's a very healthy company financially. The challenge that, again, Sanjay has is how do you get growth? They're a company, as I said earlier, in transition. Let me share with you, if I may, some data from our friends at ETR. What we're showing here is the fundamental methodology of ETR, which is that net score, Stu. We talk about that all the time, ETR is, as I say, our data partner, Enterprise Technology Research. Every quarter, they go out and they say, "Based for each company and their various segments, "are you adopting new?" That's the lime green, that's the 2%. "Are you increasing spending?" That's the 30%, and this is from the July survey so this is relative to the first half. "Are you flat?" You can see that fat middle 56%, and then you can see decrease is 7% and that's in the pink, and then 5% replacing. So good news here is more people are spending more, more customers spending more, than are spending less. Net score's the red subtracted from the green, so it comes out at roughly 20%, which is that's certainly not terrible. It's a legacy company that's been around a long time. So you would see a company that's a newbie, that's hot. We'd always talked about UI path automation anywhere, Snowflake, they're in the 70% range, but they're much, much smaller companies but they're growing very, very rapidly. So this is respectable and very common for a company that has been around as long as Commvault. >> Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that data, Dave. Of course, as you said, huge customer base, they've been around for awhile. I remember when we first did Commvault GO two years ago, very excited, very engaged user base. There was a good strategy discussion and an understanding for what Commvault needed to do to get to the cloud, but there was an understanding that they couldn't keep doing with the same team what had brought them to the place before. You always say, Dave, what got you to where you were isn't going to get you to where you need to go. Talk a little bit about the keynote. Last year at Commvault there were a couple of big pieces. Number one, is they really had their first SaaS offering with Metallic. And what the momentum has been on Metallic is, first of all, they made a big partnership announcement with Microsoft ahead of this event. Multi-year, Metallic has a few different solutions. One of them, of course, is to work on Office 365, so when we go to SaaS and we go to the cloud, we understand that data protection isn't something that just comes inherently. Some people thought, "Oh hey, I did it "in my own data center, but once I go to the cloud, well, "I'm sure it just takes care of things "like data protection and security." The answer is I still need to think about it, and the ecosystem has helped filling that gap. So Metallic was the first step and what we saw, Dave, really looks like a holistic refresh of the product line. Commvault back in recovery, Commvault disaster recovery, Commvault complete data protection, all aligning themselves to be more to what you were talking about, going to that full ratable model, and the other piece was Hedvig. So Hedvig software company, helping them to be in more cloud-native environments. And they launched a Hedvig X, so it's the full integration of that solution. Less than a year from the acquisition to fully integrating it and making it an offering that's ready for what they're doing. >> Is that they're cloud play? Actually Hedvig is sort of in that space, right? As with cloud you think subscription, but also Commvault is basically putting its stack in the cloud, right? And taking advantage of cloud services, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Metallic, specifically is built for the cloud. >> So let's talk a little bit about cloud, I have some other data here. And the cloud, if you pull up that next slide, the cloud has been eating away at on-prem vendors. We know it's been growing at 2000, 3000 basis points higher than the on-prem business. But what this slide shows is that same net score methodology that we talked about before, but it's filtering, you can see in the left hand side here, it's filtering on AWS, Google and Microsoft. So there's 585, AWS, Google and Microsoft customers in the ETR dataset. There's like about 1200 in the overall survey this quarter. And this shows the over time the net score of Commvault in those accounts, so you can see, as I was saying, go back to 2018, you can see prior to Sanjay taking over this thing was dipping and dipping, losing momentum coming into kind of the April survey and then July survey of 2019, and it's kind of bouncing off the bottom now. So it seems like they're making some progress there, and what we want to see is that momentum continue to grow. Again, net score is a measure of spending velocity. So what you want to see is as that transition occurs more sort of a net score increases over each quarter. >> Yeah, well, Dave as you mentioned earlier, there absolutely are some headwinds potentially there, but it looks like Sanjay, at least, has stopped some of the bleeding on this and, stated goal of course, to return to growth. And so we would want to see that go from just up one or 2% to be able to track with the cloud. Probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the competition, Dave, because if you talk just in cloud markets, are you tracking along with the cloud? So the hyperscales themselves, of course, growing at very huge percent. A company that's been around as long as Veritas isn't necessarily going to be doing 35 to 70% growth as you would see from AWS or Azure. But what do you see out there for some of the competition in general, who were some of the key players that we need to look at? >> Yeah, so I mean, think about the backup guys. I mean, the traditional space, you've mentioned Veritas. Veritas, by the way, in the ETR survey data is not playing well, they're in the red. They've been losing share, the share donors, as they say, you've got some big players, Dell EMC, obviously, kind of living off the data domain base. Remember Dell EMC fell behind, prior to the Dell acquisition, they weren't investing heavily in the data protection business. They were kind of living milking off that data domain base. Back when you were there, they had the networker and they had Avamar, and so there was a bifurcated thing. Frank Slootman came and he tried to clean some of that up, but then he was onto his next big thing, of course, it was ServiceNow. And so, you know, Dell is a big footprint, obviously, but they're very hardware centric, as you know, so they have a big hardware agenda. IBM with Spectrum Protect, Veem was hurting them. They did the deal with Catalogic to kind of stop the bleeding, he kind of did. Again, big install base, and then you got the sort of newcomers. Veem is not really a newcomer anymore. I think they've been around for 15 years, big acquisition. Decent momentum in the market, especially started the Microsoft base, and they're kind of everywhere, so you see them. And of course you see Cohesity and Rubrik spend a lot of money, as you said. And it's interesting, let me pull up this next data point. In the ETR data set this past quarter you saw Cohesity actually overtake Rubrik. Rubrik was very, very strong earlier on. They're kind of neck and neck in this chart, what this chart shows is not net score, it's now market share. Now market shares, not real market shares, Stu. I have to be cautious here because it's not like IDC tracks market share. What it is is pervasiveness in the dataset. So in other words, within this segment, the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the total mentions in the segment, okay? So it's really pervasiveness or presence in the data set. And what this shows is you can see we've got 65 Commvault customers in the survey, and it shows the impact of Veem, Rubrik and Cohesity in the Commvault base. And you can see up through, let's see, that's the recent surveys is you see the increases up to the increasing red line is Veem, and then you got the Rubrik line and then the Cohesity line, but they're all recently, since the October 19th survey, down, trending down. So that says to me that Commvault is holding serve within its own base and actually doing better as these guys are declining in this base. You can see the comment that ETR made, "Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam are all seeing "market share declines in shared accounts with Commvault," so that's good news. I think this is very important, Stu, and here's why. Is Commvault has got to hunker down and maintain those customers. It does not want to be a share donor much in the same way that Veritas has been. So that's a quick scan of the competitive marketplace. And again, from my standpoint, I'd like to see Sanjay maybe get a little bit more aggressive. I liked the acquisitions. Hedvig, it's great, deal with actually some more subscription, but I'd like to see them go hard after a cloud native. I have to dig into that, maybe you can comment, but really cloud native and multicloud across clouds being able to have that same experience on-prem as I do in the clouds at very high performance, very low latency. >> Yeah. Well, Dave, first of all, one thing, talk about the competitive win rate. That's something you always look at is how are you doing against the competitors? Not only did Sanjay come in, but you saw changes along how the channel chief, I believe, and the salespeople. So definitely reinvigorating that piece of it, as well as, Dave we saw, in the keynote. So the portfolio is updated, an aggressive engineering investment, some through acquisition, some through changing the code and moving in these environments, leveraging partnerships, great to see the Microsoft one, love to see something along the lines of Google. We understand Amazon, you play in that ecosystem, it is challenging to necessarily partner deeply with AWS, unless you're one of a few strong players in the marketplace, but working closer in cloud. And Dave, one thing I'd point out, last year, one of the things that really impressed me at Commvault GO is they did have some good developer actions. So when you talk about cloud native, of course, enabling developers is one of the key things. Like many companies out there, inside the company you've got developers, so how are you unleashing that? So Hedvig, a good acquisition along those lines, but you know, in the middle of the show floor, they had people that you set up with whiteboards and just go at it. So, you know, reminds me of days past when you used to have these engineering-driven shows where you could go in and really understand that. So helping to developers, enable them, backup and recovery just needs to tie into all my DevOps and IT Ops and all my other environments to make things just more automated because also you talk cloud native, Dave, automation has to be a big piece of it. And to your point, we actually have really good guests coming on the program. Not only will we have Sanjay, relatively fresh off the keynote, I've got a panel with the product people to really dig in and understand that. We'll poke and prod at some of the cloud native pieces and understand where that's going, got their head of strategy also on the program. >> Yes, I think you're making a great point about automation. Just speaking about M&A for a moment, I like M&A, I like growth through M&A, I'm comfortable with that as long as it fits into the portfolio. Your point about automation, I see opportunities there for M&A, things like visibility, observability, obviously hot analytics, automated operations, IT Ops, anything that sort of removes labor and complexity and gives me visibility across clouds. That I think is something that could be interesting, again, as long as it fits into the portfolio. I'll say this, I mean, Sanjay was at EMC and knows M&A because I've no doubt they were bringing all their M&A candidates to Sanjay and saying, "Okay, what do you think of this tech, do you use it?" Probably kick the tires a little bit, so he, I'm sure, was a part of those. I'm sure he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. You were there, EMC was pretty good at acquisitions, but then it got a little out of control. >> And Dave, talk automation, Sanjay came from Puppet. Puppet was one of the early companies along helping people move along from those manual tasks to how can we automate those? So, absolutely, Sanjay now a little over a year in there, starting to see from the product standpoint, and expect to see some of the trailing results as to how that moves forward. >> And then again, blending that, if it's a tuck in or whatever, maybe there's some big chess move out there. I would just suspect given Commvault's conservative nature you wouldn't see that. Although, they could do it. I mean, at their revenue level, their balance sheet would allow them to raise some debt, if they wanted to do that now would be the time to do it. But it's interesting, everybody's doing it and they're not. So I kind of liked the contrarian play. Given the opportunity in the market, given the TAM expansion through, beyond backup into data management, and it's a cloud and multicloud, I do think there's maybe an opportunity for them to be a little bit more aggressive. >> All right, well, Dave, thanks so much for helping us dig in and kick off our coverage. >> You're welcome, Stu. >> All right, stay with us. We have a bunch of interviews here for Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)