(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)

>> Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystems support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost this week, John Troyer, here at the OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome back to the program, Lee Doyle, who is Principal Analyst with Doyle Research. Lee, nice to see you. >> Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so networking's your main space. >> Lee: Absolutely >> We've talked about networking for a bunch of years here at the show. Last year: telecommunication, NFV. This year, it seem like half the people on the main stage worked for, you know, some big Telco, and NFV, buzz on the edge. Before we get into some of the initial pieces, what's your take on the OpenStack community, in general, and the show? We're gettin' towards the end so what's your take been this week? >> Always great to have the show in Boston, my hometown. OpenStack and telecom have been going together hand in hand since the beginning of OpenStack, really, and a lot of contributions and use to the big service providers who are here, AT&T, Verizon, some others. So OpenStack's really becoming a good platform for their NFV and virtualization modernization efforts. >> Before we get into some of the cool, new stuff. Core networking, I mean, Neutron's one of those things we've been banging on for years. It seems like it's matured to a bit, But always the one, I mean, networking's never done, right? We're always cranking on it, doing new things. What do you hear about the stability? What the community hears? Is the networking thriving good? Any feedback you've had. >> Sure, no, it was good question and always a question that I ask folks. I think we've seen significant maturity in Neutron. It's stable, it performs, it does a lot of things we expect networks to do, but there still are third party network solutions. If you look at Big Switch or Cumulus or others, say, you don't want to use Neutron or you want to enhance it, feel free to work with us to provide even better networking. >> In a broad trend, companies you mentioned, they're software companies. >> Lee: Absolutely. >> Networking is like boxes and cabling and things like that. How is that software-eating-the-world stack up when it comes to the network space? >> I think the majority of the value in networking, as in IT, is in software, right? The majority of the revenue is in boxes, which are hardware and software integrated. So, from a technology standpoint, it's very software driven. From a market standpoint, it's still box driven. We're in between those two and that's what makes this a very interesting point in time. >> Maybe you could tease apart for us a little bit, for people on the enterprise side, they're used to hearing the letters SDN, right? >> Lee: Right. >> Here, if you're talking to telecom NFV, slightly different takes on some similar problems about service, management, and delivery. >> Lee: Right. >> In OpenStack, are the same bits, is Neutron used by the enterprise for SDN in the same way it's used at the network core by the service providers or are these really two different planes that are developing? >> Right and it's a bit of a complex question. At Doyle Research, what I've done to simplify, is talking about software based networking. So that includes SDN, that includes NFV. Those things overlap and we'll get very hung up, like, what does SDN mean? It's separation control and data plane. What does network function virtualization mean? What's an Etsy telecom standard for taking boxes in the telecom network and turning them into software? So, I try to get away from that and move towards: ok, what is it we're trying to accomplish? Well, with OpenStack, we're trying to deliver networking. It's going to be in software. There still might be, and probably is, some form of Ethernet switch or other box that's moving the bits, right? So, the way I think about it is some of the SDN products that I mentioned, like Cumulus or Big Switch, would be enhancements to something that's a core function of OpenStack, which I wouldn't traditionally call SDN, but that's my view. >> Lee, speak to us, what have you heard about Edge? It was one of those things we heard, the buzz coming in. There's a couple different definitions. The telecommunication people have a very, you know: that's the edge of our network. When I talked to enterprise people, it's IoT and sensors. So what are you hearing about Edge? How's network play across all those? >> Right, well, Edge is very much how you define it or which environment you're talking about, right? Traditionally, in the telecom world, you've got your core of your network and you've got your edge of the network and how that's defined in between because you have network capabilities all throughout the environment. SD-WAN is by far been the hottest technology, not just in terms of buzz, but in terms of actual deployment both in enterprise and service provider. In the service provider space, that sort of blurs into what the vCPE offerings are. So you hear: Verizon, Telefonica just made an announcement, went with Nuage on that. So you can go through all the major service providers. Either they're incorporating SD-WAN functionality into their VCP or they're announcing SD-WAN functionality separately. >> Is there any connection between the SD-WAN stuff and OpenStack I hadn't heard or talked about. Of course, hot technology. We covered Riverbed's announcements. Last year, Viptela, been on The Cube a number of times, just acquired by Cisco. Where do you see SDN playing out? Is this the year that it just becomes a feature? Does it still stay as a distinct market segment? >> On the OpenStack question. OpenStack's traditionally sort of a cloud-based, the bigger data center thing. There are elements you can use and leverage from OpenStack at the edge. In terms of SD-WAN, we're at the hockey-stick phase. The market's going straight up, starting to see wide-scale deployments across a large number of verticals. Usually, the verticals that have lots of branches. So you look at financial services, you look at retail, but you can extend to government, and healthcare, and anywhere where you're trying to do a lot of connectivity between distributed environments. And the real change is that, previously, you do a hub-and-spoke network. You get MPLS, you take the information from the branch and you move it to your corporate data center or data centers. Well now, cloud, SaaS. The information doesn't need to go to the data center. In fact, if it goes to the data center, you add a lot of latency. So SD-WAN is adding the intelligence, the traffic-steering, the ability to manage multiple networks and to move away from MPLS and towards more cost-effective internet connectivity. So, there's still 25. Viptela was the biggest company taken out recently but there's still 24 other solutions and probably more being announced over the next six months. >> Stu: Wow, 24, huh? >> At least, yeah. >> I'm curious, we talk about hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud and networking's one of the things that sort of tie all of that together. How do thing like Kubernetes, and the public-to-private piece, how's that shaking out in the network space? >> Well, networks have to support multi-cloud environments. They need to support what's happening privately, publicly, VMware, Red Hat, OpenStack obviously, and soon to be containers. Each of those are little bit different. So can you have a network solution that spans all of that? One of the things that VMware is very public about talking about, at this show, is their ability to do the hybrid public-private. Red Hat talks about that and I spent a lot of time last week on that topic as well. >> As you're talking with network engineers, both in service providers and out at the enterprise. We've talked about all this change, we've hyped the cloud, we're now switching from a hardware-centric model to a more software defined, literally. Are you seeing new skillsets needed for these network engineers? Automation, you know, does the job change as we go forward? >> Absolutely, it changes. When you look at a traditional CCIE, which is Cisco certified, that's about Cisco APIs, Cisco boxes, in a world where there's a lot of other software elements and you've got to tie to different orchestration, different management, public-private cloud. There absolutely is different skillsets and there needs to be an evolution and it's on of the challenges of the networking industry because there simply aren't enough people who are familiar with building the new style, software-driven networks as there need to be. >> John: With all this exhilaration and change, how are you seeing people say at the management layer, the management layer of people, the CxO layer, how are they dealing with all this change? You know, new technologies, emerging technologies. Things are not slowing down. >> No and so AT&T has a large-scale, public training program that tries to get its people skilled up to the new technologies. I know a lot of the other Telcos, who have been less public about it, are doing the same. If you go to large network user groups like ONUG, they're talking about new skillsets and how to train there. There's also the organizations. Do you blend compute, storage, application, and networking folks all in the same team. And I know you guys have talked about that previously. How quickly do organizations do that or do they remain relatively traditional. The CIOs are thinking about that, they're reorganizing, but it's not going to be just snap your fingers and hey, everyone's ready for the new software-driven world. >> Yeah, it's a fascinating thing, of course. Networking industry tends to move a little-bit slow. Especially enterprise and we've been talking about fast and agile for a lot of things but that does not characterize that. That being said, feels like things do move faster. What's the general attitude you hear from customers? Are they still reticent to move forward? Others slow to move those processes? You kind of hear, things like security, tend to realize I need to update more, I need to move forward. What do you hear when you're talking to customers, today versus, lets say, only five years ago? >> Sure, we're five years in on NFV and Etsy and I think we're making significant progress. You hear a lot about us at the shows where the Telcos are wanting NFV, but it's still in the initial phases. We've been talking about SDN and the enterprise for about the same amount of time and, you know, mainstream enterprises. The hyper-scale guys, you know: Google, Amazon, Facebook. Yeah, they're already there and they're very innovative and people are following their example and leveraging that. But I just think we're still early in the truly software-driven networking game. >> One of the questions I always have is: What size company you are and what capability do you have? What do you do internally? Versus, do you just adopt a platform that's going to do all that stuff for you? You and I talked about this years ago about network-fabric type of topologies, all the different pieces that went out. There's certain sized organizations, you're going to just go to someone else that can do that. I hear some pieces, Kubernetes might be the same kind of things. Do you see that? People just saying it's not outsourcing anymore, but I'm going to be more strategic, focus on my business, my applications, and let somebody else handle the underlying stuff. >> If IT, or the network, or branch operations is not central to what you do, I think outsourcing makes perfect sense. And that may be outsourcing it to a reseller, or someone to manage it for you, it may still be on-prem. But more and more the workloads are going to the clouds. >> And the reason I move away from outsourcing, the old outsourcing was: my mess for less and this is a more strategic: what piece of the stack do I own or what do I run versus someone else. It's not: I told you this is the exact configuration in something you run. It's: I'm buying x-bandwidth, x-performance, things like that and it's something that's updated a little more frequently. They manage that piece and it's further down the stack than I care to look at. >> Lee: Sure, there's new, managed service providers who look at your WAN and networks, so that comes into play. The leading Telcos would certainly want to play a role here beyond just providing the pipe. They want to take care of your networking challenges for you. So there's a lot of new options for folks who don't want to build and buy and sweat there. >> Do you see a difference between what's going on inside the U.S. and then in the rest of the world in terms of the Telcos, and services they're rolling out, ambitions, and where they want to play? >> There are clearly geographic differences when you get into telecom but it's not as simple as saying: x-geography is doing. You almost have to go operator by operator, there. >> Anything that you've seen here at the show. This is your first summit. You've been following, obviously, the space for a very long time. Anything you've seen here, either sessions, or vendors, or users doing interesting things, or anything that's excited you recently in areas that you're following and are interested? >> Yeah, the passion here for OpenStack is undeniable. You've got a lot of people who are committed to the community, they're aware of the networking challenges, and the significant strides we've made with OpenStack networking, but also where we need to go in the future. So, it's exciting to be here and fun to see everyone. >> Last thing I want to ask, Lee. Is there anything that, advice you want to give the community? Things that you heard of from users or you observed where we should mature over the next iteration of the solution set? >> I think, as a technology-driven community, it's always incumbent on the community to really explain the business benefits and talk about how this technology is really solving real-world problems. And it is, but it's just making that translation, sometimes, is challenging. >> Alright, Lee Doyle, great to catch up with you and, like yourself, thrilled to be here in Boston for a technology show. Hope to have more of these here, as always. It's our second week, back-to-back, here in Boston amongst all the other shows we've been doing at SiliconANGLE Media so, stay tuned. John and I have a few more interviews left as we get to wrap up three days of programming here from the OpenStack summit. Thanks for watching The Cube. (electronic music)