>> You don't know me, I watch theCUBE. I queue up your videos, I listen to 'em while I'm on the treadmill. It helps me learn. It expands my knowledge, thank you. So it's really an honor to be part of that community. This is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE, and for more information, just click here. (gentle techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, California, it's theCUBE, covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we are winding down at Open Networking Summit 2017, it's quite a conference. A lot of buzz about open-source as it goes into the networking space and continues to find traction. A lot of big companies donating projects to open-source, and then of course 5G and IoT, and the innovation never stops. So, Scott, really enjoying having Scott Raynovich cohost with us for these last couple days. Scott, what'd you think? >> Thanks again, Jeff. It's been a great show, lots of activity, some good news flow, actually announcements, and people opening up to us about open-source. As you said, lots of good stuff. >> Right. So I should've checked the tape from 2014, 'cus I think you actually co-hosted theCUBE at ONS in 2014, a long time ago. But clearly the narratives are changing quite significantly from there. >> Totally different world. >> You've been following this thing forever. So, before we get into some of the specifics, just kind of your general impressions of direction, and speed in that direction, as we continue to evolve. >> Sure, sure. Well, we talked a little bit about it with Martin, and that Martin kind of talked about in his keynote, how when he started Nicira, which for those of you who don't follow the SDN world, was kind of one of the first big open-networking startups, you know, let's have our code base be based on open-source, and have commodity hardware, run the software so anybody can swap in any hardware and run the software. That's the concept of open-networking and SDN. As Martin pointed out, when he started, it was like a speculative academic project. And he had no idea what it would become, and he pointed out it's now, after it was acquired by VMware, it's now a billion dollar business. And then we have other people, like AT&T, talking about in the keynote, John Donovan talking about how they're moving from 30% SDN open-networking last year, to more than 50%. So they're going to cross over, so that the majority of their network will be based on homegrown open-networking technology. Leveraging a lot of this open-source, that is the main topic of this show, which is run by the Linux foundation, which has become kind of the giant mega aggregator of networking open-source technologies. So, the main message is, we've gone from the academic speculative phase, to the actual let's get this stuff into production, let's run networks on it, and let's deliver your YouTube videos faster. >> Right, right. And as you look at the sponsor sheet behind us, right, a lot of startups, a lot of innovation, that comes with open-source. But you've still got Cisco, and Juniper, and the incumbents, and we had Dave Ward on from Cisco. So as you look at kind of the incumbent positionings, that benefited from a non open-source world, and dedicated, integrated boxes. >> Absolutely. >> How do you see them reacting and shifting in this new kind of market paradigm? >> Well, the first thing is, they all like to talk about software more than the hardware, right? 'Cause you notice that the discussion tends to focus on software these days. So they know that these hardware platforms are being commoditized, and you have these third-party manufacturers, that are coming out with these so-called "white boxes", which is the generic third-party hardware, that can run all the software. So, Juniper and Cisco are obviously, they have lots of software products, but you see from their acquisition strategies, they're focusing on buying software companies now, and they want to become known as software companies. And, I think, you know, they have a shot. They certainly haven't, lets not, say that Cisco hasn't stopped selling network gear, they're still a huge power in the space. >> Jeff Frick: There's a lot of it (laughs) >> And it's not like everybody is running out to buy commodity hardware, they're still looking for people to help them integrate, people to help provide service and support. The so-called, "throat to choke." >> One throat to choke, right, right. >> Yeah so, you know, that's kind of where they're moving. But obviously some of these companies are big oil tankers and you don't turn them around in a day. >> Right. And then we had Intel on, interesting conversation about 5G. Basically, the message being, 5G is now, you're saying, coming back from Mobile World Congress, it's not quite now. But really, the point was, we're preparing for it coming, which is why the preparation is now. So again, your prospective on 5G, interesting keynote this morning, you're talking about orders of magnitude of change, in the mobile network data capacity, over all these various iterations, and how it's really moving to, from, you know, voice to data, but now, not only from data, from people, but obviously things, internet of things. So, as you look at that kind of evolution, it's coming, right? It's coming in a big, big, big, way. >> Totally, totally. Yeah, I mean 5G is a, I mean, we could talk about 5G all day long. There's so many questions and debates about it. You know, Sandra Rivera, who we had on, from Intel, had some really good points, which is, if you're providing the fundamental technology like Intel, that the chips for the NFE Box, is the chips for the radio. The end to end solution in the semi-conductor space, you obviously have to invest now, and prepare for 5G. The standard won't be ratified or complete 'til, at least, well, they're saying possibly late 2018, but everybody really thinks it's 2019, 2020. But, the biq question is the applications, to your point. There's kind of this explosion of these new wireless WAN technologies, if you will, and internet of things is driving a lot of that. You know, you hear about the self-driving cars,right? >> Right, right. >> The trucks that are going to communicate back to HQ, and tell the boss where they are all the time, and how much fuel they're consuming, and how fast they're going, what their average. This Internet of Things market, self-driving cars, that's going to drive the need for more sophisticated mobile networks. But in industrial space, there's a different need, for very low power, low bandwidth, there's a WAN technology called LoRa, LoRa WAN, which is different from 5G. So, what people are trying to figure out with 5G, is the applications. Where does it fit in? What is, actually, 5G? Verizon has announced a point to point 5G pilot project. It's really "pre 5G", you know 'cause 5G isn't here, but they're kind of experimenting with, as a fiber replacement. Jeff needs faster broadband, he doesn't want to wait for the truck to come in and install. >> Jeff Frick: And dig the cable. >> The cable maybe will have 5G, as a new last mile solution, point to point, or point to point for businesses, you know, the big oil derrick, that needs a big pipe. There's many different applications that are being discussed. You know, for 5G. >> And is the timing of the standard, is it just kind of going through its natural stages? Or are there a couple of, you know, kind of key items that are still being hashed out, that they can't come to agreement, or is just kind of working its way. >> Oh, there's many, many items. I mean, I'm not technically sophisticated enough to dive into all the different. They'll argue about, you know, the protocols for authentication. Exactly how much bandwidth do we need? Are there different flavors of it? A lower bandwidth flavor versus a gigabit flavor. What are the chip sets going to look like? It's a very complex standard. But more importantly, on the business side, the carriers are asking, "How much money are we going to have to spend, to deliver 5G? "And we just spent all this money on LTE "and all the licenses." (Jeff chuckles) >> And does LTE go away, when 5G comes, or they run those in parallel? >> It'll definitely co-exist. >> Jeff Frick: It'll still be there, right? >> Well, that's what I'm saying, that's the question. Like you, Jeff Frick, do you really need 5G now? And what are you going to pay for it? You need to pay so your kids can watch YouTube faster? >> No, but I definitely want my autonomous vehicle to hit the brakes on time, before I hit the pedestrian, so. There's definitely application. >> I didn't realize you had an autonomous vehicle. >> Not yet, but, you know, I'm hoping. If more people watch theCUBE, I'll get one faster. >> So next year, when you acquire your autonomous Tesla. >> Jeff Frick: Right, right, my autonomous, which they just sent the software download, which is amazing. That's a whole different story. Shifting gears, edge, lot of conversation about edge. We do a lot of stuff with G, and IoT, and as you like to say IIoT, the Industrial Internet of Things, and kind of, this whole concept of, you can't get everything back to the cloud, 'cause the speed of light is just too damn slow. >> Scott Raynovich: That's right, that's right. >> And we talked to Ihab Tarazi, from Equinix, and we talk about the edge at the devices, as you said, low power, nasty conditions, yes, we're alive, they're banging plates over there. But then he really talked about the edge of all the clouds, and really the edge in the data center side. Because most of this stuff is traveling peer to peer, direct connect, and having that edge between your organization and then back into all these various clouds. >> That's right, that's right. >> Pretty interesting take, as that kind of back end sophistication and interconnectivity, just gets tighter and tighter and tighter. >> Totally, totally. Google also talked about that, building a new B2, they call it the B2 peering network. If people don't realize, how sophisticated theses networks have to be, right? You think that you, you know, you download a video, and it's just out there, right? It's actually going through a private network possibly, you know, a Netflix, has their own network, then it's peering with your local ISP, it's peering somewhere with your last mile provider, or if you're on a mobile network, it might be getting to you a different way, and so the discussion of where the edge goes is very important because as you pointed out, with IoT computing processing, it takes a long time, as we see with Siri all the time. Have you ever had that problem where Siri's not there? >> Google's always there. >> Yeah (laughs) >> Ok Google, no it works seemlessly, perfectly all the time. >> Okay, you're an Android guy, so yeah. >> Not quite. (laughs) >> So when you ask that question, to Siri or Google, it's going back all the way to the cloud and making that computation, back somewhere in the cloud. So the question is, where should that computation happen? When Jeff Frick needs his breaks, to avoid knocking over the (laughs) >> Unless it's a criminal, that's a different piece of software, you actually want to hit the criminal. >> You don't want that computation getting hung up in the cloud, right? So that's what the debate about the edge is. >> It's fascinating, it's why I love being in this business, it just continues to evolve and change over time. So last thing really, we are at the Open Networking Summit, it's a Linux Foundation show, Linux took this over a litle while ago, and as you said earlier, this huge move to move a lot of these open-source projects to the Linux Foundation, for them to really provide a home, if you will, and a set of resources, and a set of, everything from the 501(c)(3), and everything else you need. AT&T talked about delivering their project open-sourced, today. We heard earlier from Dell EMC, making a contribution. So as you look at the evolution of open-source, and Linux Foundation, as a subset, and how it impacts this networking and software-defined networking catching up to, software-defined compute and software-defined storage. How significant is that, as a driver of this adoption? >> Well, it's a big move. Most of the folks here at ONS are really, more in a telecom world, if you think of networking. What's happened to networking over the last decade, it's moved from enterprise, more to cloud and telecom, right? If you're in enterprise, you don't have to worry about building your network as much anymore, because most of your applications are heading to the cloud, right, with your service provider. So they are emulating what the cloud leaders did. The cloud leaders, such as, Google, were very aggressive with open-source. And the telecom players saw how fast they moved, by sharing code, and having more of a grassroots approach to building the code base. So that's, the reason why it's a big move, is that's a huge shift for telecom, right? 'Cause telecom has, for decades, built their proprietary network so. You want an LTE? Okay, we're going to do it our way, and we're going to work with a vendor, and take years to build this very specific proprietary network. And they've looked at cloud, and they want the speed. They want it to be able to move faster. So AT&T talked about how, when they deployed this new white box network, in production, they did it in three months. Which is, incredible. From the chip coming out of the foundry, to developing the box and the software and the service, it took them three to four months. Which is just an incredible change from the way these networks used to be built, it use to take years. >> Right, well the other really interesting plan, you teased it out, with the announcement with AT&T and this little company SnapRoute, some little startup, and we also heard it from Drew at Dell EMC, that, because of the open-source connection via the Linux Foundation, it exposes them and creates an ecosystem that they can now leverage all the smarts, and ingenuity, and innovation, coming out of a sea of startups, that they may or may not, have ever had a direct relationship with, and to leverage that internally. Pretty cool factor there. >> Exactly, it can all happen a lot faster, 'cause if its all based on open standards, you can, just plug it in, doesn't work the first day, but three months is a big change from, you know, two years. >> Donkey ears. Alright, so last word, you're launching a new thing. >> Oh, great! >> The new Scott Raynovich, so give us, what's the new name, where can people get information, and when do you actually launch? I know that's a little preview, but that's okay. >> It's called Futuriom. That's R-I-O-M. You know, 'cause, the names are running out on the internet, I don't know if you noticed that. (Jeff chuckles) And it launches in two weeks, and it's my hybrid blog research platform. So I'll have contributed information, we'll have big reports on industrial IoT. It's a premium service, but we'll also have free reports. So you can download free stuff, you can download premium reports you want to understand about all of these emerging technologies, and IoT, SD-WAN, cloud infrastructure, where it's going, Futuriom is really-- >> If you can't figure out the spelling, just tweet to Scott, and ask him, he'll send you a link. Yeah, it's at the lower third, so. Well very exciting. >> Thanks a lot. >> And we look forward to watching it grow. And thanks for sitting in with me, here at ONS. >> Thanks, I always love doing theCUBE, so I hope to be back here soon. >> Absolutely, alright, so he's Scott Raynovich, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are at ONS 2017 in Santa Clara. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. There's a busy schedule. Check SiliconANGLE.tv to see all the shows we're covering over the next several weeks. We'll be pretty much everywhere. So, we're out for now. Thanks, we'll catch you next time. Bye bye. (gentle techno)

>> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, California, it's The Cube. Covering open networking summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux foundation. >> Welcome back. We are live in Santa Clara at the open networking summit 2017. Been coming here for a couple years, it's a lot of open source going on in storage, for a long time, a lot of open source going on in compute for a long time, and you know, networking was kind of the last one, but we had Martin Casado on on earlier today. He says it's 10 years since he started Nicira. And now, it's a billion dollar revenue run raid inside vmware, so I think the software defined networking is pretty real. We're excited for this next segment, Scott Raynovich, been cohosting all day, good to see you again, Scott. But we're kind of shifting, we're going to add to open networking, we're going to add to open, not compute, but OpenStack, I get them all mixed up, we were just-- >> It's all infrastructure, it's all in the family. >> All right, so our next guest here, representing the OpenStack foundation, is Ildiko Vancsa, get that right? She is the ecosystem technical lead for OpenStack, welcome. And Lisa-Marie Namphy, she's now officially the OpenStack ambassador, which if you follow her on Twitter, you would have known that a long time ago. >> For the U.S. There's several others globally, but for the U.S., yeah. >> So first off, welcome. >> Thank you. >> And what is the OpenStack team doing here at open networking summit? >> So OpenStack itself is a multipurpose generated cloud platform, so we are not just looking into enterprise, IT use cases, but also trying to address the telecom and NFV space. And this is the conference where we are finding many of our ecosystem member companies represented, and we are also learning what's new in the networking space, what are the challenges of tomorrow and how we can start to address them today. >> Right, 'cause the telco is a very active space for OpenStack as well, correct, there's been a good market segment for you. >> Yes, it is an emerging area. I would say we have more and more telecommunications company around and they are also more and more involved in open source. Because I think it's kind of clear that they are also using open source for a while now, but using open source and participating in open source, those are two different things. So this kind of mindset change and transition towards participating In these communities and going out to the public field and do software development there and collaborate with each other and the enterprise IT segment as well, this is what is happening today and it is really great to see it. >> Host: Great, great. >> And you've seen more and more telco's participating in the OpenStack summits, there was an NFV day, I think, even going all the way back to the Atlanta summit. And certainly, in Barcelona, Ildiko was actually doing one of the main stage key notes, which was very focused on telco. And some of the main sponsors of this upcoming summit are telco's. So there's definitely a nice energy between telco and OpenStack. >> Now, why do you think the telco is just the one that's kind of getting ahead of the curve in terms of the adoption? >> Scalable low class clouds. (all laugh) >> Right, and we had John Donovan from AT&T said today that they're either rapidly approaching or going to hit, very soon, more than 50% of software defined networking within the AT&T network. So if there's any questions as to whether it's real or still in POC's, I think that pretty much says it's in production and running. >> I'm doing a lot more of that, so I also run the OpenStack user group for the San Francisco bay area and have been for the last three years, and if we're not talking about Kupernetes, or Docker and OpenStack, we're talking about networking. And tonight, actually, we're going to, the open contrail team is talking about some of the stuff they're doing with open contrail and containers and sort of just to piggyback off of this conference. And next week, as well, we're talking about the network functionality in Kupernetes at OpenStack, if you want to run in down to the OpenStack cloud. So it's a huge focus and the user group can't get enough of it. >> and your guys' show is coming up very, very soon. >> The OpenStack summit? >> Yes. >> Oh, absolutely, May 8th through 11th in Boston, Massachusetts. >> Host: Like right around the corner. >> Yeah. >> The incredible moving show, right? It keeps going and going and going. >> Yeah, yeah, there's going to be 6,000 plus people there. There was just some recent press releases about some of the keynotes that are happening there. There's a huge focus on, you know, I keep calling this the year of the user, the year of OpenStack adoption. And we're really, throughout the meetups, we're really doing a lot to try to showcase those use cases. So Google will be one that's onstage talking about some really cool stuff they're doing with OpenStack, some machine learning, just really intelligent stuff they're working on, and that's going to be a great keynote that we're looking forward to. Harvard will be up on there, you know, not just big name foundation members, but a lot of use cases that you'll see presented. >> So why do you think this is the year, what's kind of the breakthrough that it is the year of the user, would you say? >> Well, I think that just the reliability of OpenStack. I think enterprises are getting more comfortable. There are very large clouds running on OpenStack, more in Asia and in Europe and Ildiko can probably talk about it, particularly some of the telco related ones. But you know, the adoption is there and you see more stability around there, more integration with other, I don't know what to call it, emerging technologies like containers, like AI, like IOT. So there's a big push there, but I think enterprises have just, they have adopted it. And there's more expertise out there. We've focused a lot on the administrators. There's the COA, the certified administrator of, you know, OpenStack administrator exam you can take. So the operators have come a long way and they're really helping the customers out there get OpenStack clouds up and running. So I just think, you know, it's seven years now, into it, right, so we got to turn the corner. >> So there have been some growing pains with OpenStack, so what can you tell us about the metrics today versus, say, three or four years ago in terms of total installations, maybe breakdown of telecom versus enterprise, what kind of metrics do you have you there? >> I'll let you take that one. >> We are running, continuously running a user survey and we are seeing growing numbers in the telecom area. I'm not prepared with the numbers from the top of my head, but we are definitely seeing more and more adoption in the telecom space like how you mentioned AT&T, they are one of the largest telecom operators onboard in the community, and they are also very active, showing a pretty great example of how to adopt the software and how to participate in the community to make the software more and more NFV ready and ready for the telecom use cases. We also have, as Lisa-Marie just mentioned, the China area and Asia are coming up as well, like we have China Mobile and China Telecom onboard as well. Or Huawei, so we have telecom operators and telecom vendors as well, around the community. And we are also collaborating with other communities, so like who you see around OPNFV, OpenDaylight, and so forth. We are collaborating with them to see how we can integrate OpenStack into a larger environment as part of the full NFV stack. If you look into the ETSI NFV architectural framework, OpenStack is on the infrastructure layer. The NFV infrastructure and virtual infrastructure manager components are covered with OpenStack services mostly. So you also need to look into, then, how you can run on top of the hardware that the telecom industry is expecting in a data center and how to onboard the virtual network functions on top of that, how to put D management and orchestration components on top of OpenStack, and how the integration works out. So we are collaborating with these communities and what is really exciting about the Upcoming summit is that we are transforming the event a little bit. So this time, it will not be purely OpenStack focused, but it will be more like an open infrastructure, even. We are running open source days, so we will have representation from the communities I mentioned and we will also have Kubernetes onboard, for example, to show how we are collaborating with the representatives of the container technologies. We will also have Cloud Foundry and a few more communities around, so it will be a pretty interesting event and we are just trying to show the big picture that how OpenStack and all these other components of this large ecosystem are operating together. And that is going to be a super cool part of the summit, so the summit is May 8th through 11th and on May 9th, the CNCF, the Linux foundation, actually, behind this, the CNCF day, they're calling it Kupernetes day. And the whole day will be dedicated, there will be a whole track dedicated to Kupernetes, basically. And so they did another call for papers and it's like a little mini conference inside the conference. So that's kind of what I was saying about the adoption of other technologies. I'm sure the OpenStack foundation is putting those numbers together that you asked about and probably Jonathan or Bryce will stand onstage on the first day and talk about them. But what I think is more interesting and what I would encourage people to go, there's a Superuser magazine. Superuser does a great job telling the stories of what's happening out there, and some of these use cases, and who's adopting this technology and what they're doing with it. And those stories are more interesting than just, you know, the numbers. Because you can do anything with numbers and statistics, but these actual user stories are really cool so I encourage readers to go out to Superuser magazine and check that out. >> It's like, Lego uses it. >> There you go. >> I had to check real fast. >> Lot of information on there. They do a good job of that. >> Lego alligators. >> So you talked about this day with the Linux foundation, is there increasing amounts of cooperation between OpenStack and Linux foundation? Given all the projects that seem to be blossoming. >> Yeah, I don't even know that it needed to increase, there's always been nice energy between the two. There is, you know, Eileen Evans, who we know very well, was on the board of both, the first woman on both boards. She was my colleague for many years at Hewlett-Packard. She's still on the Linux foundation board and there's been a lot of synergy between those foundations. They've always worked closely together, especially things like the Cloud Foundry foundation that came out of the Linux foundation has always worked very closely with OpenStack, the OpenStack foundation, and the board members, and it's all one big happy family. We're all open source, yeah. >> And you talked about the enterprises being, you know, they've been using open source for a long time, Linux has been around forever. They're really more adopting kind of an open source ethos in terms of their own contributions back and participating back in. So you see just increased adoption, really, of using the open source vehicle as a way to do better innovation, better product development, and to get involved, get back to their engineers to get involved in something beyond just their day job. >> It is definitely a tendency that is happening, so it's not just AT&T, like, I can mention, for example, NTT DoCoMo, who now has engineers working on OpenStack code. They are a large operator in Japan. And it is really not something, I think, that a few years back, they would've imagined that they will just participate in an open source community. I've been involved with OPNFV for, I think, two years now, or two and a half. I'm an OPNFV ambassador as well, I'm trying to focus on the cross-community collaboration. And OPNFV is an environment where you can find many telecom operators and vendors. And it was a really interesting journey to see them, how they get to know open source more and more and how they learned how this is working and how working in public is like and what the benefits are. And I remember when a few people from, for example, DoCoMo came to OPNFV and they were, like, a little bit more shy, just exploring what's happening. And then like a half year later when they started to do OpenStack contributions, they had code batches merged into OpenStack, they added new functionalities, they kind of became advocates of open source. And they were like telling everywhere that open source is the way to go and this is what everyone should be doing and why it is so great to collaborate with other operators out in the public so you can address the common pain points together, rather than everyone is working on it behind closed doors and trying to invent the same wheel at the same time, separately. >> Right. >> So that was a really, really Interesting journey. And I think more and more companies are following this example. And not just coming and giving feedback, but also more and more participating and doing coding documentation work in the community. >> And I think if I can understand, what I think, also, the question you might have been asking, there wasn't a ton of python developers in the beginning and everybody's like how do we get these OpenStack developers in the company, you know, it was this huge shortage. And Linux was the little hanging fruit, it's like well, why do we just hire some Linux developers and then teach them python, and that's how a lot of OpenStack knowledge came into companies. So that was the trend. And I think enough companies, enough enterprises do see the value of something like OpenStack or Linux or Kupernetes or whatever the project has, Docker, to actually dedicate enough full time employees to be doing just that for as long as it makes sense and then maybe it's another technology. But we saw that for years, right, with OpenStack, huge companies. And there still are. Not always the same companies, depending on what a company needs and where they are, they absolutely find value in contributing back to this community. >> Okay, and you said you got a meetup tonight? >> I do, yeah. >> Give a plug for the meetup. >> Juniper, it's open contrail talking about open contrailing and containers. And it's at Juniper here in Sunnyville, so if you go to meetup.com/openstack, that's our user group. We're the first ones, we got that one. So meetup.com/openstack is the Silicon Valley, San Francisco bay area user group. And then next week, we're talking about networking and Kupernetes. >> All right, it's always good to be above the fold, that's for sure. All right, Ildiko, Lisa-Marie, great to see you again and thanks for stopping by, and we'll see you in Boston, if not before. >> Absolutely, we'll both be quite busy, we have four, both four presentations each, it's going to be a nutty week. So I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in Boston, always a pleasure, thanks for inviting us. >> Absolutely, all right, thanks for stopping by. With Scott Raynovich, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching The Cube from open networking summit 2017. We'll be back after this short break, thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara, California, it's The Cube. Covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought you to by the Linux Foundation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube, along with Scott Raynovich. We're at the Open Networking Summit 2017. Linux Foundation has taken over this show a couple years ago, it's a lot of excitement. A lot of people would say that the networking was kind of the last piece of the puzzle to get software defined, to get open. We're really excited to kick off the show with a really great representative of SDN and everything that it represents. Martin Casado, now with Andreessen Horowitz, Martin, great to see you. >> Hey, I'm super happy to be here. >> So, coming off your keynote, you said it was ten years ago almost to the day that you guys started the adventure called Nicira, which kind of put us where we are now. >> You know, you and I are growing old together here. It has been a decade. I've actually been on The Cube throughout, so I'm very happy to be here. Thanks so much for the intro. >> Absolutely. So, what were your takeaways, Scott, on that keynote? >> It was great, we had some great stuff this morning. Not only was Martin giving the history of Nicira and the origins of SDN and talking about how you made it successful after all these challenges but we also had AT&T unveiling a new incredible white box program, where they're running open networking on their entire network now, so, it was kind of a, I thought, a big day in general to show how far we've gone, right? And you talked a little about that. >> Yeah, listen having come over here since the inception of ONS, what strikes me is, it originally, it was so speculative, it was kind of like wouldn't it be nice and you had all these dreamers. It was largely academics or people from the CTO's office and if you compare those first meetings to now, we're in the industry proper now, right? If you come and you look around, there's huge representation from Telcos, from vendors, from customers, and academics. So, I think we've seen a massive maturation in general. >> I just think I could make a mash-up of all the times we've had you on the Cube table where it's coming! We're almost here! >> Martin: And we're like it's here! >> It's here! But now John Donovan said that their goal, I don't know if it's in the short term or the very near term, is to be over 50 percent software defined, so I guess that's a pretty good definition of being here. >> Yeah, I think so. I think that we're seeing, and I think that the AT&T talk was fantastic, but I think you're seeing this across the industry, which is large customers that have been traditionally conservative, have these targets, and they're actually implementing. I mean, it's one thing to have something on the roadmap. And it's one thing to have something planned. It's another thing to actually start seeing it roll out. >> Jeff: Right. >> Again, this is a process. A lot of my talk was like, how long does it take for an industry to mature? But now, there's many things you can point to that are very real, and I think that was one great example of it. >> Well, the other thing I thought was great in your talk is you mapped out the 10 year journey and you said it so discounts often the hardest part which is changing behavior of the market. That is much harder than the technology and some of the other pieces. >> Right, exactly. So, take this from a technologist standpoint. I basically made a career on making fun of hardware. I'm like, software is so much faster than hardware, and hardware is so slow. But now if I stand back and take a long view, yeah, fine hardware's slower than software, but it's nothing compared to changing organizational behavior or consumer behavior and so, for me it was actually pretty humbling going through this last decade, because you realize that even if you have product market fit, and even if you have a good technical solution, there is a natural law of market physics that you have to overcome a moment of inertia that takes probably a decade, certainly five or six years. >> And that's before things like vendor viability, when you're trying to enter the enterprise space, or legacy infrastructure which is just not getting ripped out, you know? So many hurdles. >> Strictly consumer behavior, right? Consumers are used to doing one thing. I always talk to new entrepreneurs and I say the following: You have two jobs as an entrepreneur. Job number one is you identify a constituency. That constituency wakes up, they think about everything in the world, but they don't think about your thing, so job number one is to get them to think about your thing. That's difficult. It's like Inception. It's like Leonardo DiCaprio Inception. You're putting an idea in somebody's head and then the second thing that you have to do is you have to attach a value to that. So, just because they have the idea doesn't mean that they actually value it. So, you actually have to say, listen, this is worth X amount of dollars. And it turns out that this takes a long time and that's why market category creation is such an effort. That's why it's so neat, we're standing here and we're seeing that this has actually happened, which is fantastic. >> You talked about Nicira, which today, correct me if I'm wrong, it's still the biggest success story in SDN in terms of a startup, you know, 1.3 billion. You talked about different iterations, I think you said, six or seven product iterations and being frustrated at many levels. Did you ever sit there one day and think, "uh, we're going to fail." >> Martin: (laughs) >> Was failure a common- >> Oh man, I don't think there wasn't a quarter when we're like "we're dead." (laughs) By the way, that's every startup. I mean, I'm on- >> Scott: That's just normal, right? >> There's six or seven boards right now, I mean every startup has this oscillator. When we started at Nicira, it was in 2007. And in 2008, the nuclear winter set in, if you remember. The whole economy collapsed, and I think that alone could've killed us. So absolutely, and all startups who do that. But one thing that I never lost faith in was that the problem was real. I wasn't sure we had the right solution or the right approach, and we iterated on that, but I knew there was a real problem here. And when that is kind of a guiding star and a guiding light, we just kept going towards that. I think that's why ultimately we ended up solving the problem we set out to, it was just we took a very crooked path to get there. >> What was the feedback mechanism? Was it like just talking to as many customers as possible or? You talked about the market fit versus the industry fit, how did you gather that information? >> I think in core technical infrastructure, the strategic leaders of a startup have to be piped into the nervous system of both the technology trends and the product market fit. Technology trends because, technology trends provide the momentum for what's going to get adopted and what it looks like. And the product market fit is what is the customer problems that need to be solved. And so I think it's really critical to be deeply into both of those things, which is why things like ONS are so important, because they do kind of find a convergence of both of that. What do customers need but also where's the technology going. >> And it's really neat, that's kind of like the platform versus the application. You're going down the new platform strategy, right? Which is the software-defined networking, but at the end of the day, people buy solutions to their problems that they need to get fixed today. No one's buying a new platform today. >> Yeah, so there's two issues, you're right. There's the technical directions and then the specific applications for that, and one thing I talked about and I really believe is we focus a little bit too much on the technology platform, how those are shifting, early on and less on what the customers need. I don't think you want to 100% flip that, you need to focus on both, but I think that they both should be even-handed. What do customers need and then what is the right technical approach to get there. >> And you also stuck on a couple of really interesting points about decisions. You're going to make a lot mistakes going down the road. But you said, you got to make two or three really good ones and that will make up for a whole lot of little missteps along the path. >> So in retrospect, and this was actually a big a-ha! for me and maybe it's obvious to other people, but this was a big a-ha! to me, even as I was putting together this talk. So, the way venture capital works is you make a lot of bets, but only one in ten will actually produce returns, so you're kind of swinging for the fences and almost all the returns comes from the Googles and the Facebooks and the Ubers and so forth. That's just how it is. Now, as a venture capitalist, you can have a portfolio, you can place ten of those bets in parallel. Going back through all of the slides and everything we've done, I hadn't realized before how similar doing a startup is, which is you make a lot of mistakes in startups, but a few key decisions really drive the strategy. Does that make sense? I always thought maybe you need to do 50/50, or maybe even 80/20, 80% correct and 20 wrong, but it's not that. There's a few key decisions that make it correct, and so the key is you're straddling these two pieces of human nature. On one side, you want to stick with something, you want to make sure that you're not sticking too long with something that isn't going to work, and then the other side you don't want to get rid of something before it's going to work. You want to be both honest with yourself when it's not working and you want to be patient. And if you do that long enough I think that you will find one of the critical decisions to drive the startup forward. >> Yeah, one interesting thing you said, you arrived at a conclusion that the products and individual applications were more important than the platform, and that kind of runs contrary to the meme that you have now where the Harvard Business Review is saying "build a platform, build the next Airbnb." And what you're saying is kind of contrary to that. >> Right, so I went into this with a path from Mindframe, if you look at our original slide deck, which I showed, it was a platform. Now, I think that there's two aspects for this, I think in SDN specifically, there is a reason technically why a platform doesn't work, and the reason for that is networking is about distributed state management, which is very specific to applications. So it's hard for a platform to register that, so technically, I think there's reason for that. From a startup perspective, customers don't buy platforms, customers buy products. I think if you focus on the product, you build a viable business, and then for stickiness you turn that into a platform. But most customers don't know what to do with a platform because that's still a value-add. Products before platforms, I think, is a pretty good adage to live by. >> But design your product with a platform point of view. That way so you can make that switch when that day comes and now you're just adding applications, applications. So, I want to shift gears a little bit just kind of about open source and ONS specifically. We hear time and time again about how open source is such an unbelievable driver of innovation. Think of how your story might have changed if there wasn't, and maybe there was, I wasn't there, something here and how does an open source foundation help drive the faster growth of this space? >> So, I actually think, and I'm probably in the minority of this, but I've always thought that open source does not tend to innovation. That's not like the value of open source is innovation. If you look at most successful open source projects, traditionally they've actually entered mature markets. Linux entered Unix, which is, so I'd say the innovation was Unix not Linux. I would say, Android went into Palm, and Blackberry, and iPhone. I would say MySQL went into Oracle. And so, I think the power and beauty of open source is more on the proliferation of technology and more on the customer adoption, and less on the innovation. But what it's doing is it's driving probably the biggest shift in buying that we've ever seen in IT. So, IT is a 4 trillion dollar market that's this massive market, and right now, in order to sell something, you pretty much have to make it open source or offer it as a service. And the people that buy open source, they do it very different than you traditionally do it. It allows them to get educated on it, it allows them to use it, they get a community as part of it. And that shift from a traditional direct vendor model to that model means a lot of new entrants can come in and offer new things. And so, I think it's very important to have open source, I think it's changing the way people buy things, I think building communities like this is a very critical thing to do, but I do think it's more about go-to-market and actually less about innovation. >> So what does it mean for all these proprietary networking vendors? I mean, are they dead now? >> No, here's actually another really interesting thing, which is I think customers these days like to buy things open source or as a service. Those are the two consumption models. Now, for shipping software, I think shipping closed source software, I think those days are over or they're coming to the end. Like, that's done. But, customers will view, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, an appliance as a service. So, let's say I create MartinHub. So, it's my online service, MartinHub, people like MartinHub. I can sell them that on-premise. Now, MartinHub could be totally closed source, right? Like, Amazon is totally closed source, right? But people still consume it. Because it's a service, they think it's open. And if they want something on-prem, I can deploy that and they still consume it as a service. So, I think the proprietary vendors need to move from shipping closed source software to offering a service, but I think that service can just be on-prem. And I think prem senior shift happens, so I don't think there's going to be like a massive changing of the guard. I do think we're going to see new entrants. I think we're going to see a shift in the market share, but this isn't like a thermonuclear detonation that's going to kill the dinosaurs. (laughs) >> I want to get your take, Martin, on the next big wave that we're seeing which is 5G, and really 5G as an enabler for IoT. So, you've been playing in this space for a while. As you see this next thing getting ready to crest, what are some of your thoughts, also sitting in a VC chair, you probably see all kinds of people looking to take advantage of this thing. >> That's funny. I'm actually going to answer a different question. (laughs) Which is, I-- >> Scott: That's cause 5G doesn't exist yet, right? >> No, I love the question, but it's like, this is really a space that's really near and dear to my heart, which is cellular. And I've actually started looking at it personally, and even in the United States alone, there are something like 20 million people that are under-connected. And I think the only practical way to connect them is to use cellular. And so I've been looking at this problem for about a year, I've actually created a non-profit in it that brings cellular connectivity to indigenous communities. Like, Native American tribes, and so forth. >> Jeff: As the ultimate last mile. >> As the ultimate last mile. Which is interesting, like 5G is fantastic, but if you look at the devices available to these people that have coverage, I think LTE is actually sufficient. So what I'm excited about, and I'm sorry about answering a different question, but it's such a critical point, what I'm excited about is, it used to be 150 thousand dollars to set up a cell tower. Using SDN, I can set up an LTE cell tower for about five thousand dollars and I can use existing fiber at schools as backhaul, so I think now we have these viable deployment models that are relatively cheap that we can actually connect the underprivileged with. And I don't think it's about the next new cellular technology, I think it's actually SDN's impact on the existing one. And that's an area of course that's very personal to me. >> All right, love it. It is as you said, it's repackaging stuff in a slightly different way leveraging the technology to do a new solution. >> And it's truly SDN. If you look at this, there's an LTE stack all in software running on proprietary hardware. I'm sorry, on general purpose hardware that's actually being controlled from Amazon. And again, a factor of ten reduction in the price to set up a cell tower. >> Jeff: Awesome. >> What about the opportunity with Internet of Things and connecting the things with networks' artificial intelligence? >> So, as a venture capitalist, when it comes to networking I'm interested in two areas. One area is networking moving from the machine connecting machines to connecting APIs. So, we're moving up a layer. So we've got microservices, now we need a network to connect those and there're different types of end points, and they require different types of connectivity. But I'm also interested in networks moving out. So, it used to be connecting a bunch of machines but now there's all these new problem domains, the Internet is moving out to interact with the physical world. It's driving cars. It's doing manufacturing, it's doing mining, it's doing forestry. As we reach out to these more mature industries, and different deployment environments, we have to rethink the type of networks to build. So, that's definitely an area that I'm looking at from the startup space. >> What kind of activity's there? I mean, you have guys coming in every day pitching new automated connect-the-car software. >> I think for me it's the most exciting time in IT, right? It's like, the last, say ten fifteen years of the Internet has been the World Wide Web. Which is kind of information processing, it's information in, information out. But because of recent advances in sensors due to the cellphone, the ubiquity of cellphones, the recent advances in AI, the recent advances in robotics, that Internet is now growing hands and eyes and ears. And it's manipulating the physical world. Any industry that's out there, whether it's driving, whether it's farming, is now being automated, so we see all the above. People are coming in, they're changing the way we eat food, they're changing the way we drive cars, they're changing the way we fly airplanes. So, it's almost like IT is the new control layer for the world. >> All right, Martin, thanks again for stopping by. Unfortunately we got to leave it there, we could go all day I'm sure. I'll come up with more good questions for you. >> All right, I really appreciate you taking the time. It's good to see both of you. Thanks very much. >> Absolutely, all right, he's Martin Casado from Andreessen Horowitz. I'm Jeff Frick, along with Scott Raynovich. You're watching The Cube from Open Networking Summit 2017. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (mellow music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec. >> Man: People obviously know you from Shark Tank, but the Herjavec group has been really laser fo--