(techy music playing) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBEConversation. I'm here with Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa, from our beautiful Palo Alto theCUBE Studios, and we're talking a bit about some of the trends and most importantly, some of the real business value reasons behind some of the new network virtualization technologies, but before we get there, Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself, how did you get here? >> Okay, thank you, Peter, thanks for having me in today. I am CEO of Pensa, I've been there for about six months, company's about three years old, so I joined them when a lot of the engineering work had already been done and I've been around the tech industry, mostly on the enterprise side, for a long time. I worked with Hewlett-Packard in a number of different roles, I worked at Dell, I worked at EMC and a number of startups. So, I've been through, you know, a lot of different transitions in tech, as you have, over the years, and got excited about this because I think we're on the cusp of a number of big transitions with some of the things that are coming down the road that make a company like Pensa really interesting and have a lot of potential. So, it's been a tremendous amount of fun working in startup land again. >> So, what does Pensa do? >> So, Pensa is a software company and again, we're based here in Mountain View. Most of our operations are here. We also have an engineering team over in India, and they're all people that are focused on networking technology. They have a long history there and what we do is help primarily service providers, you can think the classic telecommunications industry, but also other modern service providers, build modern networks. We're very focused on network functions, virtualization technology or NFE, which is about building network services that are highly flexible in software that you can deploy on industry standard server technologies, you know, kind of cloud native network service development as opposed to, you know, what many folks have done with hardware-based and siloed networking technologies in that industry for a really long time. So, what we help them do is use intelligent automation to make it easy to build those things in incredible combinations with a lot of complexity, but do it fast, do it correctly every time, and deliver those network services in a way that they can actually transform their businesses and develop new apps a lot faster than they could do otherwise. >> So, Tom, I got to tell you, I'm an analyst, I've been around for a long time and every so often someone comes along and says, "Yeah, the tel-cos are finally going to "break out of their malaise and do something different," yet they always don't quite get there. What is it about this transition that makes it more likely that they succeed at becoming more than just a hauler of data to actual digital services provider? >> Yeah, I mean, it's an excellent question. Frankly, you know, it's one that I face all the time. You know, as you traffic around Silicon Valley people are focused on certain hot topics, and you know, getting folks to understand that, you know, we are at a cusp point where this industry's going to fundamentally change and there's a huge amount of money that's actually being spent and a lot more coming. You know, a lot of folks don't necessarily, who don't spend their time there everyday, realize what's happening in these communications service providers, which you know, we used to call tel-cos, because what's happened, and I think, you know, I'm interested in your perspective on this, over time you see long periods in that industry of things don't change and then everything changes at once. >> Yeah. >> We've seen that many, many times, you know, and the disruptions in that industry, which were very public, you know, 15 years ago and then another 10 years before that, those were trigger points when the industry had to change, and we strongly believe that we're at that point right now where if you look at the rest of, like, enterprise IT where I've spent most of my career, we've gone through 15 years of going from hardware-based, proprietary, siloed to software-based, industry standard servers, cloud, and cloud native. >> Peter: And service-based. >> And service-based, right, and the formerly known as tel-co business is late to the party, you know. So, it's almost like that industry is the last domino to fall in this transition to new technology, and right now they're under enormous pressure. They have been for a while, I mean, I think if you look at the industry it's a trillion dollar plus business that touches basically every business and every person in the world, and every business and every person has gone to wireless and data from wire-line and the old way of doing things, and these service providers have pretty much squeezed as much as they can possibly get out of the old technology model and doing a great job of adapting to wireless and delivering new services, but now there's a whole new wave of growth coming and there's new technologies coming that the old model won't adapt to, and so frankly, the industry's been trying to figure this out for about five years through standards and cooperation and investment and open-source stuff, and it's kind of only at the point now where a lot of these technologies work, but our job is to come in and figure out how do we make them, you know, work in production. How do we make it scalable, and so you know, that's why we're focused there is because there's an enormous amount of money that gets spent here, there are real problems. It's not crowded with startups, you know. We have kind of a free shot on goal to actually do something big, and that's why I'm excited about being part of this company. >> Well, the network industry is always, unlike the server and storage industries, always been a series of step functions, and it's largely because of exactly what you said, that the tel-cos, which I'll still call them tel-cos, but those network service providers historically have tied their services and their rates back to capital investments. >> Tom: You're right, yeah. >> And so they'd wait and they'd wait and they'd wait before they pulled the trigger on that capital investment-- >> Tom: Mm-hm. >> Because there was no smooth way of doing it. >> Tom: Right, yeah. >> And so as a consequence you've got these horrible step functions, and customers, enterprises like a more smooth set of transitions, >> Tom: Yeah. and so it's not surprising that more of the money's been going to the server and the storage guys and the traditional networking types of technologies. >> Mm-hm, yeah. >> But this raises an interested question. Does some of the technology that you're providing make it possible for the tel-co or the network service provider. >> Tom: Yeah, yeah. >> To say, "You know what, I can use NFV "as a way of smoothing out my investments "and enter into markets faster with a little bit "more agility so that I can make my customers "happy by showing a smoother program forward." You know, make my rates, adjust my rates accordingly, but ultimately be more likely to be successful because I don't have to put two or three or $10 billion behind a new service. I can put just what's needed and use NFV to help me scale that. >> That's exactly right, I mean, we're really bringing software programmability and devops kinds of capabilities to this industry, us and other folks that are involved in this, you know, this transition, which we think is enormous. I mean, it's probably one of the biggest transitions that's left to happen in tech, and the old model of set it and forget it. I put in my hardware based router, my switch, build out my, make a big investment, that step function you talked about, and depreciate it over a long period of time doesn't work it anymore, because during that long period of time new opportunities emerge, and these communication service providers haven't gotten all the growth because other people have jumped into those opportunities, the over-the-top people, the Netflixes, probably increasingly cloud players and saying we're going to take that growth, and so if you're one of these... You know, there's a few hundred large communication service providers throughout the world. This is an existential problem for them. They have to figure out how to adapt, so when the next thing comes along they can reprogram that network. You know, if there's an opportunity to drop a server in a remote branch and offer a whole range of services on it, they want to be able to continually reprogram that, update those, and you know, we've seen the first signs of that, we saw-- >> And let me stop-- >> Right, as an example of that. >> But not just take a hardware approach to adding new services and improving the quality of the experience that the customers have. >> That's exactly right, they want to have software programmability. They want to behave like everybody else in the world now-- >> Right. >> And take advantage, frankly, of a lot of things that have been proven to work in other spheres. >> So, the fundamental value proposition that you guys are providing to them is bring some of these new software disciplines to your traditional way of building out your infrastructure so that you can add new services more smoothly, grow them in a way that's natural and organic, establish rates that don't require a 30-year visibility in what your capital expenses are. >> That's right, I mean, so one of our, you know, our flagship customers is Nokia. Nokia you can think about as kind of a classic network equipment supplier to many of those service providers, but they also provide software based services through things like Nuage that they own and some things they got from Alcatel-Lucent, and they do system integration and they've been kind of on the leading edge in using our technology to help with that of saying, "Look, let's deliver you "industry standard, intel-based servers, "running network functions in software," and what we help them do is actually design, validate, build those capabilities that they ship to their customers, and you know, without something like Pensa... Somebody has to go in and code it up. Somebody has to really understand how to make these different parts work together. I've got a router from one place. I've got a virtual network function from someplace else. Interoperability is a challenge. We automate all of that. >> Peter: Right. >> And we're using intelligence to do it, so you can kind of go much faster than you otherwise could. >> Which means that you're bringing value to them and at the same time essentially fitting their operating model of how they operate. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So, you're not forcing dramatic change in how they think about their assets, but there are some real serious changes on the horizon. 5G, net neutrality and what that means and whether or not these service providers are going to be able to enter into new markets, so it does seem like there's a triple witching hour here of the need for new capital investment because those new services are going to have to be required, and there's new competitors that are coming after them. We like to think that, or we think in many respects the companies that are really in AWS's crosshairs are the tel-cos, and you guys are trying to give them approach so that they can introduce new agility or be more agile, introduce some services, and break that bond of rate-based, capital investment-based innovation. >> Yeah, exactly right, and also, frankly, break the bond of having to buy everything from the same tel-co equipment provider they've done for the last 20 years in extraordinary margins. People want to have flexibility to combine things in different combinations as these changes hit. You know, 5G, you mentioned, is probably the biggest one, you know, and I'd say even a year ago it was clearly on the horizon but way out in the distance, and now almost every day you're seeing production deployments in certain areas, and it is going to fundamentally change how the relationship works between businesses and consumers and the service providers and the cloud people. All of a sudden you have the ability to slice up a network, you have the ability to program it remotely, you have the ability to deliver all kinds of new video-based apps and there's a whole bunch of stuff we can't even conceive of. The key thing is you need to be able to program it in software and change it when change is required, and they don't have that with technology like this. >> That's right, and 5G provides that density of services that can actually truly be provided in a wireless way. >> Exactly. >> All right, but so this raises an issue. Look, we're talking about big problems here. These are big, big, big problems, and no company, let alone Pensa, has unlimited resources. >> Tom: Hm. >> So, where are you driving your engineers and your team to place their design and engineering bets? >> Yeah, I mean, look, there's clearly a set of problems that need to be solved, and then there's some things that we do particularly well. We have some technology that we think is actually unique in a couple of areas. Probably the heart of it is intelligently validating that the network you designed works. So, let's say you are a person in a service provider or you're an SI providing a solution to a service provider, you make choices based on the requirements, because you're a network engineer, that I'm going to use this router, I'm going to use a Palo Alto Networks firewall, I'm going to use Nginx, I'm going to use Nuage, whatever that combination is, so I've got my network service. Very often they don't have a way to figure out that it's going to work when they deploy it. >> Peter: Hm. >> And we build, effectively, models for every single element and understand the relationships of how they work together. So, we can, you know, pretty much on-the-fly validate that a new network service is going to work. The next thing we do is go match that to the hardware that's required. I mean, servers, you know, they're not all the same and configurations matter. I mean, we know that obviously from the enterprise space and we can make sure that what you're actually intending to deploy you have a server configuration or underlying network infrastructure that can support it. So, our goal is to say, you know, we do everything, frankly, from import network services or onboard them from different vendors and test them from an interoperability standpoint, help you do the design, but the real heart of what we do is in that validation area. I think the key design choice that we are making, and frankly, have had to make is to be integratable and interoperable, and what that means is, you know, these service providers are working with multiple different other vendors. They might have two different orchestration software platforms. They might have some old stuff they want to work with. What we're going to do is kind of be integratable with all of the major players out there. We're not going to come in and force, you know, our orchestrator down your throat. We're going to work with all of the major open-source ones that are there and be integratable with them. You know, we believe strongly in kind of an API economy where we've got to make our APIs available and be integratable because, as you said, it's a big problem. We're not going to solve it all ourselves. We've got to work with other choices that one of these customers makes. >> So, we like to say at Wikibon that in many respects the goal of some of these technologies, the NFV software defined networking technologies, needs to be to move away from the device being the primary citizen to truly the API being the primary citizen. >> Mm-hm. >> People talk about the network economy without actually explaining what it means. Well, in many respects what it really means is networks of APIs. >> Tom: Yes. >> Is that kind of the direction that you see your product going and how are you going to rely on the open-source community, or not, to get there, because there's a lot of ancillary activity going on in creating new inventive and innovative capabilities. >> Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a really big question and to kind of tackle the key parts of it in my mind... You know, open-source is extremely valuable, and if you were a communication service provider you may want to use open-source because it gives you the ability to innovate. You can have your programmers go in and make changes and do something other folks might not do, but the other side of the coin for these service providers is they need it to be bullet-proof. >> Peter: Right. >> They can't have networks that go down, and that's the value of validation and proving that it works, but they also need commercial software companies to be able to work with the major open-source components and bring them together in a way that when they deploy it they know it's going to work, and so we've joined the Linux Foundation. We're one of the founding members of Linux Foundation networking, which now has open NFV, and has ONAP, and a number of other critical programs, and we're working with them. We've also joined OSM, which is part of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, which is another big standards organization. I'm not aware of another company in our space or related to NFV that's working with both, and so we feel positively about open-source but we think that there's a role for commercial software companies to help make it bullet-proof for that buyer and make... If you are a very large service provider you want somebody that you can work with that will stand behind it and support it, and that's what we intend to do. >> Well, as you said, your fundamental value proposition sounds like yeah, you're doing network virtualization, you're doing the, you're adding the elements required for interoperability and integration, but also you're adding that layer of operational affinity to how tel-cos, or how service providers actually work. >> Tom: Mm-hm. >> That is a tough computing model. I don't know that open-source is going to do that. There's always going to be a need to try to ensure that all these technologies can fit into the way a business actually works. >> Tom: Yeah. >> And that's going to be a software, an enterprise software approach, whoever the target customer is, do you agree? >> Yeah, we use a great partnership between the open-source community, commercial software companies like us, and the service providers-- >> Peter: Right. >> To build this thing, and we've seen that happen in enterprise. Devops was that kind of a phenomenon. You have winning commercial software providers, you have a lot of open-source, and you have the users themselves, and we think a lot of those concepts are going into this service provider space, and you know, for us it's all about at the end of the day we want to have the ability to get people to do their job faster. You know, if things change in the industry, a service provider using Pensa or an SI using Pensa can design, validate, build and run that next thing and blow it out to their network faster than anybody else. >> Peter: Time to value. So, it's time to value. >> Right, time to value. >> And certainty that it'll work. >> And in many respects, at the end of the day we all want to be big, digital businesses, but if you don't have a network that supports your digital business you don't have a digital business. >> That is correct. >> All right, so last question. >> Tom: Yes. >> Pensa two years from now... >> Tom: Hm. >> What does it look like? >> Yeah, I think we're, our goal right now is to line up with some of the leading industry players here. You know, folks that service those large service providers and help them build these solutions and do it faster. I think our goal over the next two years is to become a control point before service providers and again, folks like SIs that work for them and sometimes help run their networks for them. Give them a control point to adapt to new opportunities and respond to new threats by being able to rapidly change and modify and roll out new network services for new opportunities. You know, the thing we learned in the whole mobile transition is you really can't conceive of what's next. What's next two years from now in this space, who knows? You know, if your model is buy a bunch of hardware and depreciate it over five years you won't be able to adapt. We want to be-- >> You do know that. >> We know that, you know, we want to be one of those control points-- >> Peter: Right. >> That helps you do that quickly without having to go wade into the code. You know, so our goal is to allow... You know, our whole tagline is think faster, which means use intelligent technology to drive your business faster, and that's what we intend to be in two years. >> Excellent, Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> And for all of you, this is Peter Burris. Once again, another great CUBEConversation from our Palo Alto Studios. Look forward to seeing you on another CUBEConversation. (techy music playing)

[Music] hi I'm Peter Bergson welcome to this Q conversation I'm being joined today by pensa who's a leader in the network virtualization world and specifically from our Palo Alto studios we've got a settler who's the CTO and founder and Steve died choose a VP and general manager at pensa now guys we're gonna talk today about this notion network virtualization tying it back to what's happening within business wise is becoming a crucial technology to invest in and how it literally becomes an essential element of a digital business but let's start with little context so if we think about what businesses are trying to do today is they go to a world that is more dependent upon digital technology and digital transformation they're literally trying to apply their data in new and different ways which requires that they connect data as an asset with people with customers with other business entities much more successful now in the past we kind of knew where the asset was we knew where the application was we knew where the person was mobile made a little bit more difficult but now we're talking about literally absolutely requiring a flexibility in how our network is set up if we're going to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented by digital business in real time as well as attend to some of the threats whether it be secure or otherwise take us through that why don't we start with you and take us through where you think this has started where it seems to be going yeah absolutely thank you Peter for having us on here so as you spend you know the the world is changing the way people interact with each other is changing the way people acquire things is changing the way people sell things are changing the way people view things are changed so essentially consumption models are just being turned on their head right so that really has a tremendous impact on the underlying infrastructure not just the network essentially how compute works for storage works and fundamentally how network works networks are very very critical right they're essentially the circulatory system of the system of the of the beast right and in order arteries and veins and you can't have a fixed system that you know essentially was put together 3040 years ago and that can be is expected to meet the demands of how things are being done today so fundamentally things have to change not only from a business point of view from the carrier's have to change because they cannot be just a dumb pipe anymore they have to get in on the action of who's producing things and who's consuming things so there's a lot of business drivers and there's a lot of technical drivers as well so Steve let's pick up where we were just talking about and describe some of the challenges of the carrier's in particular face so it used to be you negotiate for a circuit you'd pull the circuit you'd implement the circuit and it would just be there for an extended period of time but now we're talking about something that requires a lot more flexibility a lot more agility a lot more plasticity we like to talk about plastic infrastructure it's capable both scaling and accommodating new workloads and workflows much more faster how are the carrier's trying to adjust to this and how is that catalyzing demand for new types of technologies right so if you go back to what ul was saying about the changes in the external environment what you were mentioning whether you're a business or a consumer consumption models are changing the fickle nature of individuals is changing digital transformation of corporations is driving new ways of thinking from a business model perspective which leads to IT needing to be an enabler not only supporting the business but driving the business and that puts a lot of pressure on traditional suppliers of services that including the the communication service providers or the telcos or the carriers the carriers have a number of challenges and this is not new this is not new by any stretch of the imagination they're under enormous pressure based on that fickle nature based on the speed of of speed of business the speed of innovation or the need for speed of innovation cost optimization and etc and they're saying massive demand from an apps perspective for mobility perspective from data consumption perspective couple that with enhanced competition and this has been going on for a while including the over the top players the Google the Facebook's the Twitter's the snapchats anybody developing content is a competitor now and then add to that the traditional environment or the infrastructure that ooze wall references is highly rigid it's traditionally been a very rigid siloed proprietary type of infrastructure that the carrier's utilize to implement the services that they deliver to a consumer or an enterprise in today's world where it's all about agility flexibility and speed and cost optimization a rigid siloed infrastructure is not going to get you where you need to go and it also is gets prohibitively expensive because solutely you want that flexibility and your deals and your pricing and whatnots to move traffic where it needs to yeah in many respects it's it's obvious that the telecommunications companies are still reeling from the 1990s losses of data comms as a major major center of IT organizations when we all went to IP that led to some very very different approaches to doing things take us from that moment if you will of well suddenly communications went all to IP voice over IP etc how have we progressed to the point where now we're really in a in us in a situation where we can completely virtualize the network whose wall want you to give us some background on that sure you know the as I said the service providers got a bit of a knockin back in the 90s and early 2000s at a big telco bust of early 2001 I mean a lot of people got caught up in that world has moved to IP but it's still very much in you know the assets are being locked or the potential is being locked into no physical assets that cannot be moved like routers switches load balancers firewalls all sorts of stuff right that are it's critical in a proper functioning of an application at the end of the day infrastructure exists to serve an application right the demands by an application on its underlying infrastructure is constantly changing now the application architectures are evolving microservices architectures are being finalized a lot of so they essentially have completely different demands on what infrastructure needs to provide them so now that we have virtualization technologies that initially came to compute and then storage and now and I like to say that networking came a little late to the virtualization party but it is there now that there are technologies now that are available that are being developed it's still you know work in progress but you can finally transition from a fixed physical asset base to a more fluid as a base right now it's office office right you call it plasticity right actually it's an excellent term right and we call it dynamic city right and you things are moving around so the line between applications and infrastructure now is that it's blurring right what is the virtual load balancer or auto virtual gateway it's an application running on commodity Hardware right so it is you cannot think of it in you know the old terms of here's an app and here's infrastructure you really have to intimately tie them together and that's what the world needs to go well I want to pick up on what you said about we've been able to virtualize storage virtualized servers for a while and network you said it's late to the party but let's explore why network is late to the party and why network function virtualization hole an iffy thing is so essential the network is what connects all these stacks and so it's but almost by definition it's a presumption that I'm not taking the common set of storage from a single place and putting it together like and then virtualizing it it is literally I got network assets all over the place but how am I going to commonly virtualize this thing to improve the flexibility of digitally and again the plasticity of my business so what types of challenges does this decision breaker think as they have to go through as they think about what it really means to do sign envision a more virtualized Network because it's not like designing or virtualizing a set of boxes it literally is virtualizing something that's quite different absolutely you hit it on the head nail on the head there you know which lies in computing storage while extremely challenging is not quite as challenging as having to virtualize the network because network is the one that actually computer connects all of these things together so if you make one change over here it'll have a ripple effect somewhere else in the system right so the challenge is that a designer would face now is I can't do it all in one go right I can't throw out what I have that I built up and that that I quote unquote perfected over the past 30 40 years and then start from scratch again I have to pick and choose my battles where do I go where do I start virtual icing how do I connect that to my existing physical infrastructure so how do I do this in it right the manner that allows me to do this in a you know in a transition that is not very bumpy right that allows me to start virtualizing parts of the network you know the coral likely not get virtualized any time soon but it'll start at the edge right the other set of challenges now is things that have been challenges even in the physical world but there's a lot of maturity there let's call it that right performance security right resiliency those things have been beaten on for decades in the physical world and but you'd really literally have to go back to the drawing board when you as you're doing this transition from physical networks to NFV know where are my packets going how do i D bug fundamental questions like how do I trace my packet right which packet killed my virtual load balancer if my world virtual load balancer is being co-hosted on a commodity hardware that is running something else how will the chatty neighbor issue affect my load shonali neighbor issue is is chatty neighbor issue is something that I don't even control right well it's basically concerns as you said that when you start putting networks together right this device or this thing is going to affect that thing absolutely this thing starts chatting it's gonna have a potential impact on how that circuit or that device behaves in a broad network context exactly so not only who do you have to revisit challenges that you are result in over the past 30 40 years a new set of challenges have emerged as well right you know challenges that you know virtualization is not a simple thing there are there's a lot of complexity involved a lot of new technologies a lot of new protocols and all of these standards are being written right so you not only so you have to not only direct replicate and evolve your networking function and your networking services you can't lose anything in that transition but you also have to make it programmable elastic in all the goodness that virtualization is promising you so there's a whole set of challenges looking at interface so Steve that means that an organization that wants to undertake this challenge has to think differently but also has to do differently mm-hmm so historically we've had a group that did network and we had a group that would network administration server administration storage administration and now we're talking increasingly about these groups coming together and having two common practices sometimes different tools but nonetheless presume a degree of convergence that we didn't have to deal with before the storage servers guys are still having problems with that yeah what are the network guys have to do differently to truly take advantage of some of these things well you know I I think the challenge is not unlike what we're seeing philosophically of when companies try to move to the cloud and the technology piece of moving to the cloud is probably the least critical I would agree with that honestly it's a three I look at it like a triangle there's the technology there's the people and there's the processes and one of the fundamental elements of the cloud or anything we're working in to to gain greater as usual mentioned the complexity to deal with it is automation you can't you can't throw bodies at this anymore the network is way too complex the IT infrastructure is way too complex so when you look off the technology and look at the processes what's the one thing you need to do before you start looking at automating a process you've got to standardize it and your points you can't standardize a process unless you have all the groups on board thinking the same way approaching a problem the same way and trying to solve the problem the same way and a governance or interaction that aligns to this new process and very importantly presumes that that is an asset that is worth governing correct correct which it may not be but you have a tremendous amount of legacy infrastructure we never want any when this we're buying hardware is pretty obvious but now that we're doing things and software people sometimes go I don't know is that really an asset it becomes an even more important asset to the business and therefore the governance of that becomes even more it becomes and then if you take it to the third prong of the triangle people this is a different this is the exactly the same mental exercise that companies are going to as you move to a hybrid cloud on-prem off pram and the look at do I have the right skill sets to be able to do this do i retrain do I hire from outside understanding that these individuals are very hard to come by there are shortages and they're extremely expensive those same challenges probably multiplied by decades of legacy inertia within a carrier creates a set of challenges that they have to new that they have to deal with and they have to deal with it urgently because there are things on the horizon right now that a huge wall was alluding to that make what we're talking about here around network virtualization or the virtualization of network services mandatory this is not an option anymore if you looked back a decade or two of the way the telcos are the carriers were evolving their business model and their technology we've come to a point now where questions about where it's going aren't really necessary anymore it's we now need to move or we have an existential threat I want to build on that because I think one of the reasons why it becomes so absolutely essential is unlike twenty years ago where you could get it right and then plan for how it was going to change over time in today's world getting it right on day one in a way that isn't flexible is guaranteed to be wrong on day five and I think that's one of the reasons why this whole notion of virtualization becomes so important another thing I want to mention very quickly is we've done some research to wiki bond on what we call the Iron Triangle problem which is that you've got to lenders hardware vendors administrators and automation all having different ways of doing things and that's a hard thing to break especially as you start thinking about going to the cloud so talk to us just briefly about how network virtualization technologies facilitate that journey to the cloud yeah let me let me take a first stab at in the more honored as well so as we talked about the infrastructure today from a telecom carrier is basically very rigid its siloed there are siloed to us deliver a specific function or service firewall router switch intrusion protection systems pack a gateway etc etc as the need as the business model pressure or the business transformation pressure comes down in order to be more flexible agile innovate with commercial models engage in new types of business the current network infrastructure can't handle that it can't flex you have to basically it's the typical procurement model to go out and get when you want to launch if you want to launch a new service based on the old model it could take you a year that's in hire only inspects inexpensive takes you a long time and it's inherently risky who knows what's gonna happen a year from now is you're trying to launch something so we want to diminish the likelihood that we have to make a change at the hardware level correct you basically want to have the flexibility to actually fail well not at the hardware fail but you want to be able to make this valley to be wrong correct so keep so that the hardware can be stable but we're introducing a degree of flexibility above that so we can make the changes that the business needs in software correct without having to renegotiate a whole bunch of stuff correct so what you're doing with network virtualization is you're taking that siloed model which is a tightly coupled software function a router on top of proprietary hardware and we're decoupling the software from the hardware and we're transitioning that we're either rewriting it we're lifting it we're manipulating it maybe it's now cloud native and we're putting it on a virtualized environment on top of industry standard hardware which gives you agility flexibility cost savings down the road more likely from an operational perspective as well but so invoking the stuff that we know works is already in place we don't have to replace the whole thing correct now you've got a software horizontal platform as opposed to vertical silos where you can quickly instantiate services and if they fail or from a business perspective I can remove them and utilize that platform for another service and very very simply the operating model that is suggested by that software orientation is the operating model that is associated with cloud and cloud services and by doing this kind of thing in the network it provides a very very simple onboard to the cloud absolutely I mean it's essentially the same thing right I mean something has to run it so hard when it's necessary so it's very very critical right to the equation but the logic let's say in the network that the switching logic the routing logic the the security logic in the network doesn't have to reside in hardware that can be implemented in software that needs to be implemented in software now right applications have different needs what happens what will happen if a new face book comes out tomorrow right it has it'll have very different networking needs from what you have today if if the requirement is there to go replumb a physical set of infrastructure it'll fail right so you need to be able to layer on you require infrastructure yes the commonality of the hardware will mean it'll provide you certain set of capabilities but the but the logic the business logic of the infrastructure it will be implemented in software and that could be layered or not entirely so we talked about a lot of different things here we talked about digital business and how it's driving the need for greater agility will I call plasticity in the infrastructure how a software approach software driven infrastructure approach is crucial and now is available in the network but every company has to make some decisions about how its product or its set of capabilities are gonna map to the priorities it's a highly dynamic transformative environment I start leaders in this industry what races did you make when you were designing your product and what are customers getting from those choices as they think about who to work with and how this is going to impact their business yeah I mean one of the first things that we looked at was that we ourselves need it to be clonaid of our architecture what we do need it to be you know micro-services based you know how we deli what that is a different issue but the fundamental architecture has had to be closed native so that no we are in the business of helping nfe technologies to get to market and so that apps can get into service quicker right so we are those need to be aligned to that right the other you know things that we looked at is okay do we which part of the market do we want to address know where do we want to start so we want to look at segments in the network that are more mature for virtualization than others right you know as I said earlier the core will likely not get virtualized any time soon but the edge at the edge there's number of use cases at the edge that we want just one or two I mean use cases could be no the sd1 is where you scales are at an Fe and there's virtual CPE for mobility packet road which is actually a fundamental requirement for 5g architecture being rolled out in the next five years right so those in some of the engagements that we have right now are actually focused heavily on the mobility aspects of it which you'll see PE is another you know architecture you know so those are all unusual I think the the the the choices made by Penson particular both from an architectural perspective and where the use case are it was also important to identify the areas where we could make an impact we could create differentiation and solve some pretty tough problems that everybody recognizes is a problem in a very chaotic evolving market where standardization is still in its infancy so if you look at what whose wall was saying at the end of the what we're trying to do is it's quite challenging with everything that we've talked about to bring a network service a virtual network service to market design it test it validate it build it deploy it what we've focused our attention on is a lot of that good stuff right in the middle of helping people along with intelligent automation and modeling of helping software vendors service providers s eyes network equipment providers whoever is developing porting migrating a network function into the virtual world for deployment in an end of the environment we've helped them along that whole value chain of building on to make it simpler accelerate it and ensure that it's correct and Mister was time make it cheaper absolutely all right guys this has been a great conversation and talking about the evolving world of network virtualization with pensa specifically we've been here with whose wall settlor who's a CTO and founder steve dyke who's a vice president general manager once again this has been a cube conversation from our beautiful studios in palo alto california talking to pensa about network virtualization thanks for joining us thank you Peter thanks [Music] you you

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's Flychip Production of theCUBE. We're here at CloudNativeCon and KubeCon here in Austin, Texas. Happy to welcome back to the program, a many-time alum Tom Joyce, who is now the CEO of Pensa. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you too. >> Alright, so Tom, we've had you on, so many different ecosystems, so many different waves of technology. Talk about Pensa, how it fits into this whole cloud native space that we're looking at this channel. >> Great, yeah, and like you said, you and I we've known each other a long time, we've seen a lot of revolutions in technology, and we're in the middle a number of them right now, and at this event you've got the Cloud-native folks and you've got the folks that are tackling connectainers and Kubernetes orchestration. You know, it's interesting, this crowd here is so young, and so creative. The last few days, I was at the Gartner Data Center Infrastructure show, and-- >> Stu: Not so young there? >> Not so young, but the same problems, right? Two different communities trying to solve the same problems. Which are how do we deal with insane complexity? How do we deal with an environment that's now not just three public clouds and some hybrid clouds, but a growing list of specialty clouds. How do we manage all of that? And what Pensa is trying to do, is be a part of solving that problem, using intelligent automation technology. Especially in managing the underlay complexity, the infrastructure layer. It's kind of funny we've gone through a period of time when the whole discussion has been, hey, containers are going to be at Pensa, and infrastructure doesn't matter, and infrastructure is going away. I think there's some truth to how that is evolving, but it still matters especially when you get down to having to deliver services to customers. >> Tom first of all, Dan Cone got on stage from the CNCF, and he said, "It is exciting times for boring infrastructure." >> Tom: Yeah. >> Maybe too exciting. I love that line, because every wave comes out, it was like, Tom you remember, virtualization, I'm not going to have to worry about things like that. >> It's been the biggest revolution, and it is the biggest wave of infrastructure ever. >> We spent a decade fixing that. Containers came out, oh, once again we're extracted away and it's going to take that. So, what do you see as that role, between the infrastructure layer and that cloud native? What are the big challenges? What are your customers seeing, and how Pensa have an effect? >> Well, I think what we're seeing, in my opinion, is we're going from operations running everything to DevOps, to now their starting to talk about NoOps. How do we get to a point where-- >> Ah, we might have argued over the terminology. We need Ops, obviously. >> Here's what I think, I think it's going to be less Ops and more architecture. I think the challenge becomes around, how do you do the design, how do you architect these systems so that they'll work and not fail. It's a lot like one metaphor I heard somebody use and I'm going to steal is we went from drafting on a sketch pad, using CAD technology, to using 3D CAD technology, to automated CAD technology, to now servers providing it. Right? And what happened? Everybody got smarter about architecture being the important part, not the actual physical plugging together. I think the role of the architect, in a cloud native environment, in a Kubernetes environment, in a VM environment, is frankly more important than ever. Somebody needs to know how the tools work, to make sure the the service levels actually deliver. I have sat in a lot of these meetings where people say, "Look, just put your old app in a container "and you can run it anywhere, it'll be fine." Somebody needs to think about the architecture. We want to provide intelligent technology that helps them do that. Like AutoCAD and like some of these things that came along in that ecosystem. >> One of the things I've been poking at, you know, most of this year and coming into this show especially, is people say, "Ah, it's too complicated." The response really is, "Well apologizes, it's never going to get simple." What we need is, I need proper tooling, things like automation to be able to help because humans alone will not be able to fix that. I really need to have the combination of the tooling, proper architecture, as you said. What are you seeing, how's that playing out in the customer environment? >> I think what we're seeing is folks figuring out that number one it's cross domain and cross cloud. So whatever you design needs to work in multiple different environments that are going to end up having different capabilities. Nobody really has deep expertise and everything about networking, everything about containers, everything about compute and storage, but all those things still matter. What folks are asking for is a layer of technology that kind of arbitrates between the underlying infrastructure and the upper level applications, they're actually trying to deliver. And that's where this automation layer, that's submerging comes in. Part of that orchestration, and part of it's what we do. What we're focusing on is design, validate complex designs, build them and deploy them, using tools that help people do that a lot faster and get it right every time. So mistakes don't transpire. >> Yeah, Tom, I want you to help explain to our audience this whole SDN wave, kind of it played out, and sure Vmware NSX and Cisco ACI, they're doing okay, but for a lot of the industry, SDN equals still does nothing. Yet networking critically important, heavily involved in both the container and all this cloud native discussion. How are we fixing networking, how is it being set up for this type of environment versus what we we're trying to do with SDN? >> I think this is a good point, I think you've got SDN and the enterprise. You also have network functions virtualization and the service providers and often overlook that in the enterprise you're going through cloud native and DevOps transitions. And surge providers are going through a revolution of their own. Going from being telcos, becoming digital service providers. The problems are similar that technologies are different. My observation is this, is the hype cycle's real. We've gone through five years of talking about SDN, talking about open stack, talking about network functions virtualization. All of a sudden now, what I've seen in this job is that there's real money getting spent and the technology's being used. NSX's being used in a whole variety of ways that people didn't anticipate. We're seeing in everyone of these service providers, whether they're a classic telcos, they're wired, or they're wireless, or they're cloud. They're investing in technologies to revolutionize how that core of that network works, and how the edged network works. I think the first signs of that are really NSX and SDN. SDN has now gone mainstream because customers have seen that there's a real used case for it. That's kind of your first broadly applicable network function. And I think through the next couple of years, it will be one after another. Those problems are going to get knocked down. Frankly in our business, we started focusing on a lot of these enterprise problems with NSX and VSAN and software defined data center technologies around VMware. We're working on containers, but frankly the biggest area of growth for us is probably going to be these large service providers. It's like a trillion dollar business and it's going to be revolutionized over five years. We're getting involved in a lot of these network functions virtualization conversations. I wouldn't say it does nothing, it does a lot, but getting there, it's been a really hard technology to figure out. >> It took a little bit while to mature. The other thing you've got some strong background on, the management monitoring in this type of environment. What's new? How does that change in the networking space, when we have all microservices and all of these various pieces there? What are you seeing there? >> The short answer is I have a little bit of a controversial view on that. It's not unique but I think-- >> John Ferrer would say, we love controversy here on theCUBE. >> I think monitoring goes away. Monitoring the way it's been done for the last 30 years goes away. I think when we had mainframes, we had client servers, we had internet, and now we have this set of technologies we're working with in virtualization. Every time that transition has happened, there's been a whole bunch of monitoring companies. I think classic monitoring is eventually going to go away. Ultimately, there is a lot of complexity, and the machine needs to manage it, right? The machines going to need to manage it. The eyeballs watching the problem and remediating it to a greater and greater extent, are going to be automation technologies. Versus throwing out more and more alerts in front of a human that says, "I'm just going to turn them off "because I don't know what this means." I think automation technologies are going to replace classic monitoring. Again, you go around this event here, the folks that are doing cloud native, they don't want to have a bunch of monitoring alerts. They're not going to tolerate that. They just want to deliver an application service. They don't want to deal with operations, they don't want to deal with monitoring, they don't want to deal with problems, they want the problems to take care of themselves. That's hard, but I think that's coming. >> Tom, the end users whether it be enterprise, service providers, there's a lot of technology out there, there's a lot of things happening out there. When do they know to call Pensa? Give us some of the big value problems that they should knowing that say, "Oh hey", "Yes that makes sense to me, I need to give you guys a call" >> You can boil it down very simply, we deal with two kinds of people, and they're really the architects. Think about that CAD analogy. We're dealing with people that are doing complex designs in two areas. One is typically software defined data center. So people that are bringing all of these technologies together and need to deliver a working system, maybe a really complex proof of concept or big systems where they're using VMwear, as an example. We help them get that job done, do it fast. That's what the automation systems we provide do. The other is, in large scale service providers. Folks that are dealing with onboarding VNF's, building complex networks and have been grappling with that, with open stack in some of these early technologies for a number of years. We have a revolutionary way to onboard those VNF's, validate designs, deliver designs and do it in a way that integrates with all the open source technologies people are using. To be honest with you, I don't which of those is going to be more important to us, but their two big areas, and our technology applies to both. >> Tom, you've been CEO at a couple of companies now. I want to get your view point, just being the CEO for a startup in today's landscape, what's it like? What advice do you give your peers? When you guys are grabbing a drink at the bar, what are some of the biggest challenges and biggest things that excite you? >> We are to tired to grab a drink at the bar. I'll tell you that I love this. It is a great mental challenge, because again I've been like you, I've been doing this for over 30 years. It forces you to learn and learn and learn and question what you know. And that's what I really like, the opportunity to engage with the leading edge of technology. Frankly all the folks here are young and creative and it's forced me to become better at what I do. There are a lot more unknowns than working for a big company. With a big company, a lot of what you have to do is laid out before you. In this job, I have to constantly force myself to question what I know, to listen to the customer, to learn new things, and it can be tiring, but it's a good kind of tiring. >> Alright, last question I have for you. What are you most proud, what you've done since you've joined Pensa? And give us a little bit of outlook for 2018, for those that are watching, what should we be looking for, kind of miles stone deliverables or other items. >> I think what I'm most proud of, this sounds like a silly statement, but I'm proud of what the team has accomplished. I didn't do anything, right? I don't write the code. We have a bunch of engineers that are actually delivering the product. I think we've been really fortunate to keep all those people and get them focused on some big problems. I'm proud of delivering Pensa Lab to market, and I'm proud of the customers we've signed up, since we launched that just at the beginning of October. I'm proud of what we're doing with Nokia on large scale networking in the NFP area. And frankly I'm proud of the ability of this team to constantly engage and learn and try new things and take risks and screw up and try again. It's that whole experience, it's good to work with good people that you like. >> Alright and 2018? >> 2018 I think is going to be surprising for the people in terms of the kind of the reemergence of open stack. I think open stack is coming back. >> Don't let them hear that Tom, the wolves will come out. Why? >> Well because I think it's reaching at a point where the economics of certain kinds of cloud models, and frankly the economics of the Mware are forcing people to reconsider. But it especially around digital service providers. These large companies have been grappling with "How do we revolutionize our poor networks" for five years dealing with open stack. And they kind of got a lot of the stuff to work now. I think that is another sort of controversial statement. When I got into this job, I was like "Yeah open stack is dead". I was involved with Helion at Hewlett-Packard, and I was like "That's never coming back". Well guess what, it's coming back. I think the other thing is, we're going to see a lot more money being spent on revolutionizing the core networks, and these telcos and digital service providers. That's what I think the big things going to be. >> Absolutely, we've been at the open stack show for any years. The networking component especially for the telco and service providers, absolutely a strong area of focus. Your average enterprise, might not be looking for open stack. >> There might be pockets. >> Internationally there's some pockets, but absolutely. Tom Joyce, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Looking forward to seeing you the next time. And well be back with lots more coverage here from theCUBE at KubeCon. In Austin Texas, you're watching theCUBE.

(futuristic music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, CA I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE and co-founder of Silicon Angle Media, Inc. I'm joined here with Tom Joyce, Cube alumni. Some big news, new role as the CEO of Pensa. Welcome back to the Cube. You've been freelancing out there as an entrepreneur in residence, CEO in residence, you've been on theCUBE commentating. Great to see you. >> Good to see you, too. Thanks for having me back. You know, fully employed. >> Congratulations. You know, finding where you land is really critical. I've talked to a lot of friends, and they want to get a good fit in a gig, they want to have a good team to work with it's a cultural issue, but also you want to sink your teeth into something good, so you found Pensa. You're the CEO now of the company and you've got some news which we'll get to in a minute, but what's going on? Why the change, why these guys? >> You know, last time we talked, last time I was in here, I was running a consulting business, and I did that for almost a year so that I could look at a lot of options and you know, kind of reset my understanding of where the industry is and where the problems are. And it was good to do that. These were some of the best people that I met, and I got interested in what they were doing. They're smart, technical people, I wanted to work with them It was a good fit in terms of skills because when I joined Pensa just a couple of months ago now they were all technical people, and they'd been heads-down developing core technology and some early product stuff for almost three years. So they needed somebody like me to come in and help them get to the next level and it was a really good fit. And the other thing is, frankly, in my last job I was running an IT shop and I also had a thousand people out there selling, and about 300 pre-sales people, and when I saw this, I saw a product that I could've used in both of those areas. So sometimes when you resonate with something like that you start to think well geeze, this is something that I could, that a lot of people are going to need. And so there are many aspects of the technology that are interesting, but ultimately, I saw that this is a useful thing that I could go make a big business out of. So that's why I did it. >> You've had a great career, you know we know each other going way back, EMC days, and certainly at HP, even during the corporate developments work that Meg Whitman was doing at HP but involved in a lot of M&A activities, so you seen the landscape, you are talking about all the VCs, and all the conversations we've talked about in the past on other interviews you can check it out on YouTube, Tom Joyce, if you're interested in checking those conversations out. Worth looking at. So you landed at Pensa. What do they do? What was the itch for you? What was the, why are they relavant? What do they doing? >> Well, the first thing is, the company was founded about three years ago by people that had hardcore experience in big networking and virtualization environments. And they've been tackling some of the hardest problems in virtual infrastructure as you move from the hardware to everything being virtualized on multiple clouds. These guys were tackling the scale problem. And they'd also drilled down into how to make this work in the largest network environments in the world. So they had gotten business out of one of the largest service providers in the world as their first customer. So you look at that, and you say, alright these are smart people. And they're focusing on hard problems and there's a lot of, a lot of longevity in the technology that they're going out and building. And basically, what they're trying to do is help customers go to the next level with all software-based or software-defined, if you will, infrastructure, so that you can take technology from a whole bunch of different sources. It's going to be VMware, OpenStack, DevOps, the DevOps Stack as well as the whole constellation of people in the security industry. How do you make all those software parts work together at scale, with the people that you have? Rather than going out an hiring a whole new IT staff to plug all this stuff together and hope it works, these guys wanted to solve that. So it's without a lot of expertise, this product can go design, validate that it works, build and deploy complete software-defined environments, and it can do it faster than you could do it any other way that I'm aware of, and I've been around this industry for a long time. So that's what I saw when I said, geeze, I could have used this before, I could have used it in my own IT where our exposures were things like we had all this old software that we needed to update and we're scared to touch any of it, right? You look at things like Equifax. I was exposed in the Equifax breach, and that was exactly that scenario. >> Yeah, and they had four months in there playing around. Who knows what they got? >> To be honest with you, in my business we were doing the same thing because we weren't comfortable with upgrading our software cause we couldn't validate that it worked. How do you move from the old stuff to VMware six-dot-five and make sure nothing else breaks? We're kind of in the era of needing machine learning, intelligent technologies, autonomous kinds of ways to deploy this stuff, cause you can't hire enough smart people to go do it. And that's what I saw. >> Well, we'll do a breakdown or a tear-down, however you want to look at it, of the company in a second, but you guys have some news. Let's get to the news. What's the big news that you're sharing today? >> Okay, great. Well, there's a couple of key parts of it. First, we're formally launching the company. We've been heads down in development and I've been there for a few months, but the company hasn't been launched. So we're doing that, we're introducing Pensa to the world and the new website is Pensa.ai. The second thing is we've completed our Series A financing so we've got the financing under our belt. Third thing is we've been hiring a team. We've brought in certainly me, I've brought in a fella named Jim Chapel as the VP of marketing, long-time industry guy in both large and small software companies. And we're rolling out the first product. So the technology is called-- >> In terms of shipping? >> Yeah, it's going to be shipping as a SaaS offering and it's available now. It's built on our technology which is called Maestro, which is this smart machine, and the first offering is called Pensa Lab. And I can describe to you what it's used for, but it's for helping people go figure out how do I design, build, run, try new scenarios, and roll out stuff that's actually going to work and do it a lot faster than people can do with traditional technologies. >> Congratulations for launching the company, congratulations on the new role, great job. I'm looking forward to seeing you, But let's get into company, Pensa. >> Alright. >> So let's just go in market you guys are targeting. Take a minute to go into the market. What's the market, what's going on in the market, what trends, what's the bet in the market for you guys? >> With a early company like this, there's always a lot of things you can do and the battle is figuring out what is the first thing we're going to do? So I think over time we're going to be relevant to a lot of people, the first customers we're going to be focusing on are people in IT that are trying to manage complex virtualized networks. So a lot of them are people using VMware today. >> So the category is virtualization cloud? What's the category? >> It's a SaaS product for design, build, run. So it's really designing autonomous IT systems that are built on software-defined environments. So it's VMware, OpenStack, DevOps stack, and being able to kind of bring all those parts together in a way that from an operational standpoint you can deploy quickly. In the first version of the product is going to be designed for test in depth. And next year, we intend to bring out production versions of it, but virtually every one of these folks has environments for test today to figure out alright, I want to go do my update, my upgrade, my change I want to try a different security policy, cause I've got a hack happening and I want to do that fast, we're going to go after that. The other side of it is folks in the vendor community. Almost anybody that's selling a solution, again, like me and the job that I used to have, has people out there doing proofs of concept, demos, building systems for customers. And what we can do is give you the ability to spin up complete working environments and do it (snaps finger) basically like that. If you got a call this afternoon to go show VMware NSX running with some customer application with some other technology from a third we can make that work for you, and then you can tear it down and do the next one at four o'clock in the afternoon. >> So that a VMware customer-based you're targeting, I mean, it sounds like, and clarify if I don't get this right, you don't really care if it's private cloud, or hybrid cloud, or public cloud. >> We don't care. No, we don't. And there's a lot of folks-- >> And VMware, is that a target market, VMware buyers? >> Absolutely. Yup. And frankly, we've had people inside of VMware working with us as a number of the beta testers on this and demonstrating that they can spin up their own environments faster, so that kind of proof point is what we're after. Then there's a lot of folks in DevOps, right? DevOps is one of the hot targets for our business and a lot of businesses and what we see is folks that are focusing on the app development side of DevOps and then they get to the point where they got to call IT and say alright, give me a platform to run my new application on and they get the old answers. So a lot of these folks are looking for the ability to spin up environments very very quickly, with a lot of flexibility where they don't need to be and expert in alright, how's the storage going to work and how do I build a network, right? >> So are you targeting IT and DevOps hybrid, or is it one of the other DevOps developers? >> It's both. >> Okay and you don't care which cloud so you're going to draft off the success that VMware's seeing right now with their cloud strategy with AWS >> Absolutely. I mean look, there's a lot of ways >> Software design is booming. >> We can help those customers figure out how do I do VSAN faster? How do I do NSX faster? How do I set up applications that I can move to AWS faster? It's kind of bringing-- >> So software-defined clouds, software-defined data center, all this is in your wheelhouse. >> Yes, that's exactly right. >> This is what you're targeting. >> And that's the opportunity and the challenge. Again when you're doing a small company, the world is your oyster but you have to kind of focus on the first thing first. So we're going to go in and try to help people that have, are dealing with alright, I need to kind of update my software so that I don't have an Equifax, or I need to fix my security policies, I need an environment like, today that I can use to test that. Or, I want to go from the old VMware to to the new VMware, I got to make sure it works. That's good for the customer, that's good for VMware, it's good for us. >> And the outcome is digital productivity for the developer. >> Absolutely. >> OK, so let's talk about the business, and the business model. So you guys raised some money, can you talk about the amount, or is that confidential? >> It's confidential at this point and we have some additional-- >> Is it bigger than 10 million? Less than 10 million? >> It's been less than 10 million. We're going to go lean and mean, but we're set up to make the run we need to run. >> OK, good I got that out of the way. Employees, how many people do you guys have? What's the strategy? >> Just over 20 now, and we have a few more folks that we're going to be adding. We're going to go fairly lean from here. >> Okay, in terms of business model, you said SaaS Can you just explain a little bit more about thee business model, and then some of the competition that you have? >> Yeah, this product was designed from day one to be a SaaS product, so we're not going to go on-premise software or old models, we're going with a SaaS model for everything we're doing now and everything we intend to do in the future, so the product sits in the cloud, and you can access it basically on demand. We're going to make it very easy for people to get in and give this a try. It's going to be simple pricing, starting at about 15 hundred dollars a month. >> So a little bit of low-cost entry, not freemium, so it's going to some cost to get in, right? Try before you buy, POC, however that goes, right? >> Yeah, it's see a demo, do a trial, give it a shot. I'll give you an example, right. When I was at my last job, I had 300 pre-sales people >> Where's this? >> This was at Dell Software. >> Dell Software, okay, got it. >> Now it's called Quest. They would go out and they'd use cloud-based resources to spin up their demo environment. Well, I'm going to give them, and I'm calling them, by the way, the ability to buy it for a very short amount of money and you're not committed to it forever, you can use it as much as you want. And get the ability to say alright, let's spin up VMware, let's spin up OpenStack, let's spin up F5 Palo Alto Networks whatever security I want, get my app running on that without being an expert in all those parts. >> You can stand up stuff pretty quickly, it's a DevOps ethos but it's about the app and the developer productivity. >> Right. And from a business model standpoint, it's how do I make this really, really easy? Because the more of those folks that use it in this phase, next year, when we get to say alright, let's punch that thing you built into production on your cloud, we'll be ready to go. Our goal is to grab space quickly. >> Talk about competition. >> I think the competition for this part of it this kind of dev test lab spin up scenario, the Pensa lab that I just described, the biggest competition is going to be people that build their own. So in the corner you've got your test environment running on your old hardware, right? So that doesn't come with this automated software capability. The other ones are going to be people like Skytap, as an example, that a lot of people use, and I've used in the past, that gives you a platform to run on, but again, a lot more cost and not the automated software capabilities. So there are a lot of scenarios like that that we can go after, and it's almost universal. Everybody's got a need to have some sort of a test or dev environment, right? And we are going to prove to them that the software is better. >> So not a lot of competition. It's not like there's a zillion players out there. >> No, it's a big target, but there's not a lot of players. And for the most part, you're going to go into scenarios where customers have something they've cobbled together that isn't working as well as they'd like. >> And Pensa AI hints a little bit of a automation piece which is really all our people know in the enterprise. Let's talk about the technology. What's under the hood, is there AI involved, also you've got the domain name .ai, which I love those domain names, by the way, but what's the tech? What's driving the innovation and story differentiation? >> To be honest with you, inside that's something you debate because that's what it is. If AI is a way to use technology, to do things as well or better than people used to do before, that's what it is. And if you take all the hype, and nonsense out of the conversation, you say it's not about SkyNet and computers taking over the world, it's really about doing stuff better than we can do and making people more effective, that's what we have. Now, under AI there's a bunch of different techniques and we're going to be focused on primarily modeling and the core IP of this is how we build the model for all of those components and how they interact and how they behave, and then machine learning. How do we apply techniques to actually-- >> So you're writing software that's innovating on technology and configuration, tying that together and then using that instrumentation to make changes and/or adaptive-like capabilities-- >> Exactly, but rather than go spend a month building the template that you're going to go deploy the system will build that for you. And that's where the smarts are. And we'll use machine learning techniques over time to make that model better. So that's kind of where we're digging, and frankly it's a big problem for people. >> So software you're main technology. >> It's 100% a software platform. >> Okay, well, Wikibon Research was going viral at VMworld and I'll make a note cause I think this is important cause automation is our and it's a key point of your thing is that Wikibon showed that about 1.5 billion dollars are going to be taken out of the market as automation takes non-differentiated labor out of the equation, which essentially is stacking servers and racking, stacking and racking. That plays right into your trend. >> That's exactly what we're doing. And what we want to do is-- >> By the way that value shifts, too, all the parts. >> Yeah, and I think we're trying to focus-- automation isn't new. It's not new in IT. Certainly there's been a lot of focus on it the last 10 years. The question is how do you make the automation smarter? So you don't have to do the design and say push play. Cause the problem with automation in these really complicated microservices, multi-- the problem is, if you automate it, if you build that template wrong, you can make the same mistake a thousand times in a row. And I've had products in the past where they've worked great as long as that template was correct. Well what if the template changes? What if I need to put new security policies in there, changes? Maestro is going to build it for you. That's what the story is all about. >> That's your product, that's your product name. >> Yep. >> Well, that's what DevOps is all about. Programming the infrastructure, and that's always going to change. So that's really the DevOps ethos. >> Yeah, and that's why if you expand out from the first play run, this test dev scenario, well, frankly, we'll learn a lot. We'll learn a ton about different patterns that we see, we'll learn a lot about the Interop environment that customers want, I want you to add this or add that, the system is going to get smarter to the point where when we punch it into production, it's going to know a lot more than it does today. >> Well congratulations on the launch. My final question for you is really the most important one which is, if I'm a customer, why do I care? What's in it for me? What's the value? Why should I pay attention to Pensa.ai? What's going on, what's the value to me, why should I care, why should I call you? Gimme that bottom line. >> It's about risk reduction. It's about making sure that the things you need to change you can actually do it without it blowing up in your face. And it's also, frankly, the other side of the AI-- >> What, the infrastructure blowing up in my face? Or just apps? >> If you make changes to your environment and you're not sure if they're going to work, but you know, again, take the Equifax thing. If they had made those changes and put them into their environment, it wouldn't be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Frankly, my information wouldn't have been hacked. >> What would you guys have done if I was Equifax and I knew that potentially I had to move fast? How could you guys solve that problem? >> If you have a problem, upgrade the software today. And what we would've done is give them the ability-- >> Do you think they knew they had a problem? >> Uh... I don't know if they did or not, but you can see this scenario over and over and over again in other companies, where they say, we know we need to do an update, but we're not doing it. We're going to wait for the six months-- >> Cause it breaks stuff. >> Cause we're scared. >> Scared, or that it breaks stuff, or both? >> It breaks stuff and we need to test it, right? So we're going to bring test velocity into that, we're going to bring intelligence to make sure the design is right, right? So that you can do it more quickly. In many different scenarios. >> It's interesting in the old days, it was like, patch management was a big thing, that was the on-premise software, but with DevOps, you need, essentially, test and dev all the time on? >> You do. If you're developing these applications with DevOps in the front end, and you're dropping new versions of 'em in hours, rather than quarters, the infrastructure in the back end has to kind of speed up to DevOps speed. And that's where we're going to focus our attention. >> Alright, here's the hard question for you and we'll end the segment, is when does a customer, your potential customer, know they need you? What's the environment look like? What's the pain points? What are the signals that they need to be calling Pensa.ai? What's the deal there? >> Yeah, I think we're going to talk to the DevOps people that are looking to get their applications out and get them built and deployed-- >> So, need for application pushing, that's one. >> That's one. The other ones are going to be folks inside any IT organization that need better velocity, need to be able to test one and take money, cost out of it, cause we're going to do it for a lot less than what it costs you to do now. And the third one is the vendor community. Folks out there selling software. VARs, pre-solicit people. >> So I guess the question is more specific. What is the signs inside the customer that make them want to call you? Stuff's breaking, upgrades not happening fast enough, I'm trying to get to the heart of it. If I'm a customer-- >> On the IT customer side, it's all about velocity. We need to push our apps faster, we need infrastructure faster, we need to test security policies faster, we're not going fast enough-- >> So basically if you're going slow, not getting the job done, they call you. >> Pretty much, that's our guys. >> Tom, congratulations on the launch, congratulations on the new CEO job, we'll be tracking you guys. Series A funding, congratulations, who's the VC involved? >> We have The Fabric, which was the seed funding source, and then March Capital has been very helpful to us in this A round. >> Great, well they got a great pro in you as CEO. We'll keep in touch. Cube alumni, good friend Tom Joyce here inside theCUBE Studios on the conversation around the launch of the company, Series A funding, new team members, and Pensa.ai. This is theCUBED. Cubed.net is our URL, check it out. Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com is where you can go check out our stuff. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (futuristic music)