(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for our CUBE Conversation, taking a little break from the shows as we get ready, actually, for the winter break which will be a nice little break for us and the crews and the gear. This is different, exciting. It's a little bit more intimate. We're really excited to have our next guest. He's Sunil Khandekar. He's the founder and CEO of Nuage Networks which is part of Nokia, a CUBE alumni. I think we last saw you at DockerCon 2016. >> That's right. >> Jeff: So, great to see you. >> Good to see you again. >> Absolutely, so, been a little more than a year. >> Sunil: That's right. >> So, what do you see as the evolution since we last spoke at DockerCon? >> Sure, it's been great. I couldn't be more pleased with the momentum that we have garnered in the industry: more adoption of our solution, more validation, more events, more customers. >> Jeff: (chuckling) >> Which is great, that's all good stuff. And really, more specifically, in terms of adoption, large service providers across the globe like BT, Telefonica, TELUS, Exponential-e, they're all adopted and launched with our SDN solution. We have had breakthrough wins in terms of public cloud whether it's Fujitsu or whether it's an NTD Data like China Mobile. And of course, you know we continue to have a solid momentum in financial services companies, for private cloud automation, as well as to provide them security software to find security in addition to the private cloud automation. And we had another breakthrough win in China Pacific Insurance Company. So, that continues, and of course it's great always to receive some good validation. So we've won award at MEF on the best SDN solution recently. We won the Right Stuff Award, Innovation Award at ONUG for software-defined security. And every leading analyst firm, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, IHS Markit, ACG, and recently Global Data, they've all put us in the top two as the inventors for doing automation of networking end-to-end. >> Right, because automation in networking was the last piece of kind of the virtualization stack, right, in the automation. So, what is it that you think that you guys are doing special that's allowing you to win? >> Right, so if you remember when we talked, when we started Nuage, we started Nuage to automate networking end-to-end with a software-based approach at the heart of which is a declarative policy and analytics engine. And what that means is we were doing intent-based networking before it was even a thing. >> Jeff: Right. >> And we were doing software-defined networking but in a way that allowed us to do software-defined networking not only in the data center, between the data centers to the public cloud across the wide area and to the enterprise branches. What that means is you're not providing a siloed automation, but we are doing automation end-to-end because ultimately it's about connecting users to the applications. >> Right, right, you had a great quote. I picked it up in doing some research. You know, the metaproblem is you said, "Connect users everywhere to applications everywhere," a really simple kind of statement of purpose but not very simple to execute. >> Sunil: You got it. >> A lot of complexity behind that statement. >> That's right, that's right, incredible amount of complexity, but it's important to construct the metaproblem, look at what it is that enterprises have pain with. They have, let's look at it, right? They have users everywhere, and they want to connect to applications anywhere whether it's private or public cloud. How do they want to do it? Quickly, securely, in a self-service manner, but they want this agility without sacrificing safety and security. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So what you have is you've got to solve this network automation problem for brownfield or greenfield, because there is nothing like just greenfields. >> Right. >> And we are to do it in their private data centers. You've got to help them burst into the public cloud securely. And you've got to connect all their branch sites together. And what we've seen in the industry and our competitors, they are taking a very narrow view of the problem. So what they have is an automation for only the data centers and automation for just the wide area. And that's only solving half the problem. >> Right, right, and then you've got these pesky things that have just reestablished the expected behavior, the expected access, and oh, by the way, added significantly more attack surfaces and really changed the game in terms of what people want from their applications, what they expect from their applications. And it's tough for businesses to deliver to this level of promise. >> Indeed, and you know, the wall is about instant gratification. You want access to your data quickly, instantly wherever you are. >> Right. >> And what that means is, as consumers, we have everything at our fingertips. But as soon as you step into the business environment, that's completely not true. And so, it's all about consumerization of IT on how do you make IT that agile, how do you actually modernize IT. Because enterprises, their high-order problem is what? To innovate faster by having massive automation across all aspects of their business. What underpins that is a modern IT and cloud architecture. And what underpins modern IT and cloud architecture is three clear things that we are seeing in the industry: software-defined data centers, software-defined wide area network, and software-defined security. So, we like and our customers love that we've thought the problem end-to-end and provide all these three, which is absolutely unique in the industry. No one does this. >> So, I'm curious to get your perspective cause you've been doing this for awhile. >> Sunil: Yes. >> As the security landscape has changed. >> Sunil: That's right. >> Everyone is getting, we get reports every day, we're numb to it now. You know, basically everyone at Yahoo got hacked. >> Sunil: That's right. >> And Equifax got hacked, so everyone's getting hacked. So it's really not about the big wall anymore. There's no such thing as the big wall. >> Sunil: That's right. >> The wall's about crumbled. So it's evolving. We've also seen an increase in state-sponsored attacks as opposed to just kids having fun in the basement. >> Sunil: Yeah. >> How have you seen the evolution of the attacks change and how have you responded within your solutions over this period of time to kind of evolve to the modern security stance that you have to have? >> Look every CXO I meet, the absolute thing that's top of mind is how do you make us go from where we are, a traditional environment, to a higher edge automated environment but make it more secure than what we have. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And as you noted, the attack surface has increased thanks to the mobility. And you have a lot more surface area because you have applications in public cloud, you have applications in private cloud, you have more mobile users. So, the industry term that often gets used is microsegmentation. Now, what that means is, and that's in response to the fact that, as you noted again, that perimeter security just doesn't cut it anymore. And not only that, but it's also very complex and very manual. So what you've got to do is, while you're automating the data centers, while you're automating the wide area, you've got to bring the security along. You've got to make it as agile. And again, what we have done is we do microsegmentation from the branch all the way to where the application is for that particular user. So in other words, finance users can only access finance applications. And that's a microsegment end-to-end. No one in the industry does that today. What they do is they do microsegmentation only for the applications within the data center or they prevent just the users to communicate between each other but not users to the applications. So, that is very important for our customers to know that we have that capability. But then it's all about also understanding what's going on in the network. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that's where the rich analytics that we have just really help them understand who's talking to who at application level, and being able to then have that domain-wide view and be able to very quickly respond to CERT alerts. So, because today, when a CERT alert comes in, they don't know what to do. They take a brute force approach because they simply don't know where and how to react. But now, because you have this centralized intelligence and you have domain-wide view, and you're able to do microsegmentation end-to-end, you are able to push a button and be as course or as granular but be very surgical and take action very quickly. >> Alright, so, hard to believe that we're almost to the end of 2017 which I can't believe. So as we turn the calendar, what are some of your priorities for 2018? You've been doing this for awhile. What are you working on? What's kind of top of mind as we enter this new calendar year? >> Right, and what we are noticing is we're going from beachheads to mainstream. So, we are getting deployed. The solid deployments is not only as I noted in data centers, in public cloud, private cloud, but also in the wide area. We are collaborating with our customers to really make this mainstream because it is super-important in terms of not only providing that automation and agility but also the security. So that's what we are focused on. We continue to do that, not only for what we call the virtualized security services solution that we have and not only the telco clouds, but also the virtualized services, cloud services. We're going to cover the gamut and that's what we're after. We are really excited to be leading the charge here. >> Alright, well, Sunil, thanks for taking a few minutes. Hopefully it won't be 18 months before we sit down again. And we look forward to watching the progress. >> Great, thank you. Thank you for having me. >> It's a pleasure. He's Sunil. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's new inaugural DevNet Create event targeting the DevOps open source community as they put their toe in the water, their foray into a community approach to build on top of their success of their classic developer program, DevNet, which is only three years old. Shouldn't call it classics. It's actually emerging still and growing. Arnesc is our pitch, Joshipura GM, Network and Orchestration at the Linux Foundation. I'm also joined with my cohost Peter Burris. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you again, welcome back. Cube alumni. Obviously open networking. You guys are involved, you're having a great show, we cover it every year. Open Networking Summit, among other things. Huge demand for the technologies. An appetite for content in your area. Here at Cisco DevNet Create, you're seeing the emergence of Cisco taking their roots in networking and plumbing and operations, which, by the way, you know from the networking world. Sacred cows all over the place. Bringing it to the wild west, agile developer who wants infrastructure at Cisco is bringing that application meets infrastructure saying, we're going to bring programmable networking. That's music to the ears to the developers so we are getting infrastructure as code. That's your wheelhouse. What's going on in the Linux Foundation to continue this momentum? How do you guys look at this trend, give us the update on how the Linux Foundation is participating, supporting, getting involved with this programmable networking infrastructure as code trend. >> Sure. So first of all, let me baseline everybody. Linux Foundation is here to create the largest shared technology investment by building sustainable ecosystems. That's the mission in life. Within the Linux Foundation obviously the most successful open source project is Linux. But we're way beyond Linux. We host a whole set of open source projects starting from cloud native, CNCF, cloud foundry to blockchain projects like hyperledger, automotive grade Linux and a whole variety of Let's Encrypt, you name it. That we facilitate this shared technology investment. The area I own, which is networking, has several projects up and down the stack. All the way from data plane acceleration to orchestration, analytics and it's intended for carriers, enterprise, and cloud service providers including one of the most recent, highly successful and much in demand project called ONAP which is a full network automation stack. Open network automation platform. Which again, is an open source way to connect apps to infrastructure. This is the movement that you just mentioned and I'm really excited that the community's finally realizing the implications of the three letter acronym that started this whole thing called SDN. (laughing) >> SDN, SD when, a lot of stuff going on. Software defined, data center, obviously Cisco has a huge dominant preposition in the enterprise, data center in particular, but also they have a huge service provider business MSL. All that, they've been connecting networks on internet scale since the '90s. Really doing a great job. Now they got to really think about the future. What's your view there because I think Linux Foundation, you guys have been great stewards for sustainable ecosystems, but now Cisco has to put their toe into the new ecosystem. What's the meaning of that? What's the view, outlook? What's your take on where they're at? It looks good off the tee, middle of the fairway as we were saying earlier. Messaging's good, 90% of the content's community, agenda's relevant, looks good. >> I think our perspective is there's a major disruption happening. But it's not a technology disruption, it's an end user disruption. What I mean by that is the end users, whether it be carriers, whether it be enterprises whether it be cloud service providers, they are demanding that open source be part of the agenda. The reason for that is very simple. It's providing more agility, providing the access to the source code to allow for much faster feature development. They want to contribute, they want to develop the ecosystem to meet their requirements and everybody is unique as we all know. What is happening is, in this new environment, vendors, service providers, carriers, everybody is re-inventing themselves. They're re-inventing themselves with a new business model and the business model is essentially, how do I take a leadership role in developing this shared technology investment? It's not about a box. It's not about the fastest and the smallest and the largest switch routers, etc. It's about a software plan. >> It used to be about free software. Now, nothing's free because people are putting their company's name on the line. Their business models now are integrated to open source and they have people involved in other parts so technically it's free software but it's really, technically not free. But this is the new business model, this is what people are doing. >> I think you can-- >> It's tier one resource. >> If you look at the world's largest carriers today, whether it's in China, whether it's in US or in Europe, they have deployments that are built on open source. Open source networking specifically is becoming mainstream in terms of deployment. >> What's the hottest mainstream product right now? Is it SDN? What's the hottest in the-- >> SDN is a technology. SDN, NFV, network function virtualization. Those are technologies that enable the deployment of open source projects. We got projects like Open Daylight, ODL, OPNFV, ONAP, these are just names. Again as networking-- >> What's the hottest here, NFV or-- >> Right now ONAP is the hottest. As networking guys we always make these three or four letter acronyms so sorry to bug you. >> That's okay I don't mind. >> But that's how it is. >> So one of the observations at least we made at Wikibon and we made it here a couple times, is that open source has proven to be magnificently successful when the target is well defined. Other words, conventions of an operating system, there's no disagreement about what an operating system does. Hence open source could create a Linux that has just been wildly successful. Open source has not been as good at redefining the new use cases or where the technology might go. Therefore, a lot of times open source developers end up looking at each other and making each other's tools work. Which is, for example, in the big data universe, restricted the adoption of Aduke and the ability of Aduke for example. So getting value you out of it, but it's not as successful as it might be. That raises a question. I'm wondering what role you play in all this. Is there a need for a degree of open source leadership that can set the big picture, the longterm trends without undermining the innovative and inventive freedom of how developers have demonstrated they want to work together? What do you think? >> I think that's an excellent question. What happens is just by throwing software on say, Github, doesn't make you an open source project. I mean yeah, it does make you open source but that doesn't make you a successful open source project. You need a community behind it. You need a community of developers and a sustained ecosystem. One of the things we are championing, and I'm personally driving that agenda, which is thought leadership on how do these pieces fit together. As we are moving from components that were disagregated in networking to production ready software components, to production ready solutions, these all need to fit together and developed in its entirety. When you look at it holistically, from a solutions perspective, the most important thing that matters are use cases. So what we have done-- >> Totally agree. >> What we have done is for every project, strategically, when the requirements are laid down, I think of that as a requirements document. Or when the architecture is laid down. The end user use cases are explicitly defined for the community. The architecture is laid out. In that framework, the Linux Foundation facilitates the developments, the infrastructure the devOps, the agile model to come and co-create this technology in this area. >> So that's how you're doing the ideation. Are you then taking that and stepping up and also doing some of the design work? And it sounds like you are. >> We facilitate the community to do the design work, we give them architectural part leadership, we give them inter-project cross-leadership. For example, we have, in my group, in networking we have about 11 plus projects. There are multiple data plane acceleration projects. When you're putting a solution, you want portion of data plane acceleration to ride on a control plane, to ride on orchestration, to be tested end to end. Projects like OPNFV for example, they test all the pieces. They test things like FDIO, which is an acceleration project, they test open stack. Which again, it's not Linux Foundation but we do bring all the pieces together. Effectively the end user has it relatively easy to adopt and start installing. >> Congratulations, I saw that the Linux Foundation recently hired Sheryl Chamberlain as the Chief of Staff. Cube alumni been on many times, shout out for Cheryl. So you guys are growing. How are you guys handling the growth? I want to get your thoughts and you don't have to speak for the whole foundation but in general, for the folks not necessarily familiar with the inner workings of the Linux Foundation, like open source, you guys are always evolving and growing. How are you serving your stakeholders, your members and taking care and maintaining the sustainable ecosystems? >> The difference between a typical, throw the code up on GitHub versus actively managed, sustainable ecosystem is where Linux Foundation comes in. What we provide to projects in different capacity, is everything from IT as a service, marketing as a service, program management, thought leadership, executive directors, PR, media, and most importantly, events, global events to get the word out. All of that service, if you may, is what facilitates the community. Once the community is all coming together, things happen. I'll just give you an example, we just completed a developer summit on one of the projects called ONAP. Ran out of capacity, clearly. 200 people from world-wide, top-notch architects got in a room and they discussed how to merge almost 15 million lines of code. And they figured it out in four days. >> Over coffee. >> Not over coffee, it's like four days. >> I'm kidding (laughing). >> But they figured it out. I think that level of facilitation that we can provide, because you can't have it on a blank piece of paper. You need some framework, some governance, some model and some processes on how to do it. That's what Linux Foundation excels at. >> I want to move into the third area I want to discuss with you, us. You mentioned the three major customer and end users. Carriers, enterprises, cloud service providers. How do you guys relate and serve those customers when there's other stuff going on in the industry? We see Open Compute, Facebook's doing a lot of stuff, Google's throwing in a ton of open source. We have yet to see Amazon make their move with donating really good networking stuff. Certainly we've seen some machine learning out there, but, we're expecting to see an arm's race of presents coming in. It's like open bar at the hotel. More goodness is coming in from the big guys sponsoring great code. >> My mission is this year, at least, one of the things I've laid out at ONS this year was to harmonize the ecosystem. And harmonization doesn't mean merge it all so now we're one solution. Harmonization means understand where each other solutions interwork, inter-operate. If they overlap, we end up merging the projects, like what we did for ECOMP and OpenAL. That's one of the missions. Now in that process, we're looking, not just within the Linux Foundation and in my role, but also outside. That includes not just the software stacks, but also the hardware infrastructure layers. That would be OCP, that could be TIP, etc. And several others that are coming up. As well as harmonization with standards bodies. We believe that standards and open source coexist and there is a complimentary relationship there. We've been actively working with several of the standards. MEF, Team Forum, etc., etc. Trying to get a view. We just published a white paper on the Linux Foundation website on harmonizing standards on open source. There is a whole movement of ecosystem because at the end of the day, a carrier wants to solve a problem. They don't care how we solve it. I mean they do but not in a fragmented sense. And that problem is different from what an enterprise wants to solve and it's different from what a cloud. Now to your earlier question, the great news is cloud carriers and enterprises, they're looking and smelling the same as cloud native apps, cloud container networking and open source networking, they're all start combining, coming together. >> So I want to share with you a comment we had the other day. There's a story of the four wolves that were put into Yellowstone Park and changed the ecosystem cause Yellowstone had a river problem. So they injected four wolves into the ecosystem. Turns out, the deer went away, things started growing, and the whole ecosystem became so much more sustainable. Not that I'm trying to get at who's the wolves, but balancing and coexistence is the point here. You can live with wolves and not get eaten, unless you're their target. But there's a balancing act on ecosystems. And to have a good, sustainable ecosystem you need to have freshness, certainly standards and new blood, new ideas. What is your vision on coexistence because this is one of those things that we're seeing right now emerging, less about my project's better than your project. You're seeing a lot more collaboration going across communities. >> Correct. >> More than ever. >> A hundred percent agree. I think the fundamental problem has always been only the technical geeks understand the differences between the projects. And then the layer of abstraction in people, whether it's management or media, they start looking and feeling as if they are competing. I'll give you an example. In the data plane acceleration kit, we have projects like FDIO, DPDK, Iovisor, OVS, there's lots of projects there. And people like, oh my god, there's so many. Well, guess what? One of them is a kernel driven thing, other one is a set of libraries, third one builds on the libraries. So that level of understanding is missing. >> John: Interplay between all the projects. >> It's interplay. >> Peter Burris: And dependency. >> And dependencies. So that's one of the things that we want to highlight here, very significantly this year in terms of just sheer education. Because part of the coexistence is understanding each other. If we understand each other on what role each of the projects play, it's easy. Whether it's Linux Foundation or outside. So that's the first step. The second step is if they're complimentary, I want to take the next step and test them out for inter-operability. Because now you have put two pieces together. Remember, networking was a fully black box five years ago. >> Literally. >> We took it, blew it up, fragmented it, dis-segregated it, and now we got to pull... And we got tremendous innovation out of each of these layers. We were very successful on the whole disaggregation and SDN disruption. Not it's time to put it into a production ready solution. As we put those things in, we'll see that harmonization is going to play a big role. >> Arpit great to have you on here, sharing the insight. Always great to get the inner workings plus a great perspective on the industry trends and congratulations on your success and we'll continue to follow you and all your work in the networking area, all the projects Stu Miniman and team. We're going to continue to see you at the Open Networking Summit, among all the great shows. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on, live coverage here in San Francisco, as part of our exclusive two day coverage of the inaugural Cisco DevNet Create event. I'm John here with Peter Burris, we'll be back with more after this short break, stay with us. >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director

>> Host: Live, from Santa Clara, California, it's TheCUBE covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are coming to the end of day two at Open Networking Summit. We just got here today, it's a great show. Everyone who's talking everything about software-defined networking is here. And along with Scott Raynovich we're joined by Dave Ward, one of the luminaries doing panels, doing keynotes. >> Here we are in TheCUBE. >> And here we are. Dave is the CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect at Cisco Systems. So Dave, great to see you as always. >> Great to see you guys. >> So what's the buzz of the show, you've been here for a couple of days, any surprises? >> No real big surprises to be honest, always there's some great announcements and great launches going on. But really what I'm finding surprising is that this is the sixth year of this conference, can you believe that? So year six from where we started, and I may be the first person to say this, have you ever had anybody in theCUBE today talking about openflow? >> Jeff: No. >> Remember those days? >> Now, nothing against open flow that's not my point, but think about how far we've gone and so. >> Scott: Actually, yeah, Martin was talking about it. >> Course he did. Course he did. He's not going to let it go. (laughter) But love you Martin. But really my point is, look how far we've come in six years. Six years ago we had a protocol, small community, one group working on this stuff, really working in standards, there was no open-source associated with that at that time, now look where we are. Basically the place to do work is now in open-source and come together as a community. So, the buzz for me really is holy shit, this thing is real! There's a lot of people investing a lot of money and time and really trying to work together to improve and build the ecosystem around networking, around network functions, what services are being delivered and building a business off networking again, so networking is back. It's cool again. >> Jeff: Right. Great. And then there's this whole new thing coming down the pike in the form of 5G, and IoT that's just opening up a new opportunity kind of redefine, what are these standards, and how is this going to help push things along? >> Well, it's kind of interesting and so I'm just ripping for a second. When you take a look at where we've come over the last several years and it was SDN controllers and configuring the network. Then it was virtualizing the network. There was a lot of talk yesterday and today about analytics and creating a reactive network. All of that has been built in the those six years and come together in different open-source communities to build those pieces. We've got SDN controllers, projects like OpenDaylight, projects like FD.io, projects like PNDA, P-N-D-A-.io. That's the SDN virtualized network and data analytics piece, but when you get to 5G and IoT, one thing I'll be talking about tomorrow in my keynote, is that there're big blocks missing in the industry. So, let's dial it back to historically, remember when the HVAC contractor logged on to the network and that malware on that laptop stole 70 million credit cards, remember that? >> Yes. >> Still haven't solved that problem yet. And so the reason why I'm bringing this up is what's missing, identity. So we had this notion that networks controlled by IT operators that are going to go in and config and provision that network. Well, we're now to the point where we need to link people and things to be able to drive what that intent is on the network, and whether its buzz words, which is real functionality by the way, of micro-segmentation. HVAC contractor goes into a micro-segment, can't get to the point of sale, can't steal the credit cards. Basic bread and butter stuff we want from the network. This is what SDN is supposed to deliver, virtualized services like firewalls and other sporadic security, we'll just hold that for a second. But that linking of who the person is, what device they're on, where they are on campus, where they are in the world, etc., etc., time of day, whatever the case may be, are now the variables that need to go into the top of this system, into a policy engine that then drives that reactive network. We've made a couple of great strides in six years, but to get to 5G, and in particular to get to IoT, we have to have another couple of major blocks come into the industry to make that work well. Hopefully it's open-source where that's going to go, and it's not just a standards body and not just open-source, cuz we still need things to be manufactured and interoperable and the rest of it. So hopefully these things come together as we've seen the maturing of those two big groups. >> I was going to say, it kind of begs the question, what is the interplay between standards bodies versa or together with open-source projects? Cuz before you didn't really have open-sources standards really set. Set the regs. Now you've got these open-source projects, which have a main channel, they might start forking, there's all kinds of places that they can go, and how do the two kind of work together? >> Well there's been a ton of effort, and coming out of the SDN open-source movement around model-driven networking, and although it sounds kind of geeky, the main way of representing those models is through representation called YANG. The interesting thing about YANG is that's been not only adopted in SDN, as the main object and way of representing the models being converted to network and equipment computes, computers etc. But the IETF has taken that up and really driven a service approach through the IETF which is I want to deliver a VPN service, I want to deliver load engineering on the network versus what we did with SNMP, or what the industry did, which was I'm going to fully distribute this out to all the protocols and all the functions and everybody's going to write a NIB etc., etc. and we know how that turned out. So the craze for model-driven networking, the standards bodies picking this up, IETF, MEF, which is metro ethernet forum, broadband forum, BBF. All these organizations have now taken on that mantra that came out of open-source SDN of model-driven networking and are working towards creating those models so that way we will have a standardized way to program the network. But what's next is the telemetry coming out. Those objects need to be standardized so that way whether it's a Cisco device or somebody else's device, it's actually sending out the same data that can be collected and can be interpreted properly. Does it mean that it's a NIB? Does it mean that it's only going to go over one particular transport? I don't think anybody in the industry really cares whether it's JSON, Google RPC, Protobuffs, Netconf, or any of these pieces, they're all perfectly fine, they have different semantics associated with them, but nonetheless those common objects and common data models have been what has been the key to keeping the industry working together, the common architectural philosophy, and then the standards bodies have thankfully picked that up over the last couple of years. >> Yeah we were talking here earlier, I mean you just threw out a bunch of alphabet soup there and I understand 80% of it, but it does raise the issue we were talking about earlier about these standards development organizations and the IETF, the TM Forum, the MEF. Now we have open-source, so we have the Linux Foundation. We have a lot of these different organizations and I think while you would know better than I as a CTO, people are becoming challenged by tracking and following all this stuff, do you think we need some sort of consolidation of these standards or at least some more unification, we just saw ECOMP and Open-O merge so there seems to be some consolidation. What will we see going forward? What's going to help you as the CTO? >> There's no doubt if there's consolidation, that would be easier to track and easier place to develop, but in reality, Scott, it's 50 shades of YANG. (laughter) >> And the reason why I say that is each and every standards body has done their own specific function, again whether it's Metro Ethernet or its broadband access or its mobility, each one of those standards bodies is redefining themselves to be SDN capable. There's no doubt. If there's a one stop shop, it would be the most optimal way to get something done the fastest, but that's not the way the world works. So actually I think we are going to see a continuous increase of more folks working on this, more foundations being build, etc., etc. Although, what we have witnessed over the last couple days in the last year, is that the communities, the open-source communities in particular, are coming together and trying to integrate the pieces together versus just islands of cool technology that there's a few geeks interested in, no. Thankfully the operators and some enterprises have come in and said I need this stuff to work and I need this stuff to work together and that discipline is actually fundamentally new and different than the way either standards bodies worked or open-source worked in the past. So I'd love to say that there'd be even more consolidation. There's frankly a bit of fatigue over, not saying it's wack-a-mole but you have to chase, you have to really figure out and track where all this stuff is going on in the industry to really keep abreast and understand how wide and how deep it goes. >> It's interesting this trend lately where people are just donating ... The project is just being absorbed into Linux Foundation. So now there's at least kind of a consistency across all these various projects, in terms of the way things are managed, the shows, the communication, and them helping standardize a process to help those projects be more successful in their distribution and adoption in the company. >> Linux Foundation has done the industry a huge service. They understand governance. They've gone through a zillion different experiences of how to build communities. What works well when there's competing factions that need to come together and work, on board marketing team, on board legal team, able to build foundations as necessary, or what's been experimented with over the last couple of years is, if you remember when we started to number these, you need to have a 503C, you need to have a foundation, there was frankly a high cost associated with these. Now, open-source is being contributed there's no foundation, and there's no cost. And so there's a whole continuum of things that the industry, the networking industry I should say, is learning about how to build communities and although this sounds cliche, you may launch a product, but you don't launch a community, you actually have to build it. And it's not all one company that's doing the donating or doing the working and that will produce, that'll create the longevity of that particular project. And that is what the Linux Foundation knows how to do well or at least catalyzed people to come together to do that well. >> Now you mentioned one of the big questions that always comes up with open-source is well how do we make money, right? Cause it's all free. It's like, you know ... >> Are we on Jerry Maguire? What's going on? (laughter) >> Jeff: Free like a puppy. (laughing) >> Still my favorite. >> Free like a puppy, yeah, you guys still got to change the newspaper. So you were on a panel today there was a big discussion about the commercialization and how does, I mean obviously Cisco has to stare at this big puppy in the room if you will, you know. What's going to happen to our licensing model with all this open-source, what came out of that discussion, what came out of the panel about how do you make money in this open-source world? >> So a couple of things, one thing that was discussed was not only how to make money, is which comes first, cost reduction, total cost of ownership, or new service revenue. And really the outcome there, and AT&T, Comcast, and Lightspeed Ventures was also in the panel with me. Needless to say it's a combination of both. If you're coming in with a project and the project is please spend this money so you can save this money, we know how to do that math. We can add up the rows and columns and can understand whether or not money will be saved over time. But the new service revenue really certainly in an enterprise space, is really what's being discussed. In particular, can I get these new services, I need these new security functions, I want to manage all my branches from the cloud or whatever the case might be. So new service revenue is depending on which use case, which technology, which layer. Both of those two balance out and they both are required in the algorithm. Now, can people make money off of it? And the answer is, needless to say, Lightspeed Ventures colleague said, "Hey man, if there's a community "and there's a technology, "you can list off a zillion cases of where that community "is turned into a true company that can provide value-add "and additional IP and move forward." Now, let's move this from just startups to big companies like Cisco or AT&T and Comcast and not only do we all use open-source in our projects, all those companies are contributing to open-source. And in Cisco's case, we're contributing to open-source for a couple of key reasons, one is there are gaps in the industry, which were limiting the industry. So let me give an example. We open-sourced a virtual switch router, which you might think, okay it's Cisco they're going to do something in networking, but the reason why we open-sourced it, and it's a piece that we actually use in our products, was there was not a virtual switch or router that had the scale, performance, or features that enabled the industry to utilize all the capabilities of the hardware underneath, whether it's computer or networking or security. And so the industry literally would have stalled with a limited feature set versus being able to utilize decades of networking knowledge and experience in things that are key and necessary, encapsulations, features, filters, quality of service etc., etc. There's a zillion of these pieces. And so there's a couple different ways, how can somebody make money off of this really is the fundamental question. We contribute into open-source communities and use that open-source to build products as well. And we can do this across video, we can do this in networking, and we do this in NFV, we do this in orchestration in these pieces and we also catalyze an ecosystem around these projects and then potentially around our portfolio as well. And so we continuously expand our ecosystem into startups that are using this technology, advancing the technology, enabling the industry to move faster, and trying to fundamentally create those business outcomes that our customers want. >> I just love that you just innately understand the value of an active community and that really comes through, so but unfortunately the janitors have rolled in, the vacuums are going, the garbage cans are rolling, so before they unplug all of our gear, I want to give you the last word Dave. What are some of your top priorities for 2017? >> So top priorities for 2017 really comes down to working towards filling the gaps I mentioned, identity and policy, but additionally number one, make sure that the automation orchestration policy around networking in a containerized stack is created. So we live through a long era of hypervisors and what it was like to work with open stack and what it was like in open-source and have to invent all this technology. We learned a ton. But it doesn't exist in a containerized world. So for 2017, fill the big gaps in the industry and work towards orchestrating and automating networking, compute, storage, and security in a containerized world. >> Pretty simple. I think that's the answer. I was going to say 42 is usually the answer, but I think that was it Dave. (laughter) >> I love 42. (laughing) >> Thanks Dave, so he's Dave Ward, Scott Raynovich, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching TheCUBE from Open Networking Summit 2017. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) >> You're also an entrepreneur, right? You know the business, you've been in the business.