(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, California, it's theCUBE covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by The Linux Foundation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in Santa Clara, California at the Open Networking Summit 2017. Really happy to be joined by my co-host for the next couple of days, Scott Raynovich. And we've been talking to a lot of providers and technical people, but now we want to talk to customers. We love talking to customers, and we're really excited to have Rashesh Jethi. He's the SVP, Head of R&D for the Americas for Amadeus, which is a big travel company. Welcome. >> Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you, Scott. >> So like I said, we'd love to talk to a practitioner. So you're out on the frontlines, you're seeing all this talk of software-defined and software-defined networking. From your point of view, how real is it, where are we on this journey? What do you see from your point of view? >> Super real. Have you searched for a flight lately? >> I have searched for a flight. >> Excellent. I'm proud to tell you that your flight search very likely was powered by Amadeus, and it's running on a software-defined data center completely. So this stuff is real. We are, I believe, one of the first companies who have actually taken this from what was a very strong academic kind of research project onto this start-up ecosystem, but we're actually out there deploying it, running real world business, using a very purposeful and deliberate software-defined strategy. >> And it's interesting because you said before we got on camera that you guys are actually very active participants in the open source movement and development of this stuff. You're not just kind of a participant waiting in the wings for this stuff to get developed. >> I mean absolutely, and to me, that's one of the reasons which if you're serious about open source, you have to use it. You can't just talk about it. You can't just say it looks like a nice idea. You have to get out there and get your hands dirty and do it. But the other thing also is you have to contribute back. I think that's a big tenet of the open source community. And we all and certainly the company, we grew up and we've seen tech evolve through the ages. And a big part, especially in the last 10 years or so, has been the open source movement, and it's contributing back. It's one of the reasons I'm here. It's one of the reasons the conference organizers invited me, is to actually talk about how we use open source and software-defined strategy for our technology. >> That's cool. So where do you run this software? You run it in private cloud, public cloud? Do you guys build your own data centers? How do you run it? >> Quick history lesson and our quick history-- >> Let's back up. First off, where is Amadeus today for people that aren't familiar with the company? >> We are actually a 30-year-old company. We are celebrating our 30th birthday this year. The company was started in the late '80s as a consortium between four leading European airlines, Lufthansa, Air France, Iberia, and Scandinavian. So we started off, which was very typical at that time, as a mainframe shop, and that's where a lot of our core systems were built. We're a big provider of technology in general to the travel industry even though we were founded by airlines. So to put it in perspective, we carry about 95% of the world's scheduled commercial seats, airline seats, on our platform. >> 95%. >> 95%, so we work with the world's-- >> Are available to purchase. Obviously, 95% of the purchases don't go through your system. >> Right. They are available. They are used by over 90,000 travel agents, retail travel agents, corporate travel, online travel. And we work with over, like I said, 700 airlines, work for their inventory. So chances are if you travel on an airplane, very good chances that our software was used to make the reservation. We also have airline ID systems and hotel ID systems, and we work with the airports. And this is where we do departure control, flight management, baggage reconciliation, a lot of the back end processes. And we started the company, essentially runs as we write our own software. We are offered as a service from day one, so we are one of the oldest software service providers in the industry. And obviously, when we got started to do that, you had to own your own infrastructure. So we are pretty good at it. We have very strong kind of technical chops. We have a large data center outside Munich Airport and a bunch of smaller data centers all over the world. And what we're doing now is really very deliberately making the journey towards a cloud, both our private cloud, so taking our own infrastructure, virtualizing it, and making it available as a service for our own applications, and then where it makes sense, to leverage public cloud infrastructures where they are available. >> So different apps in different clouds, is that-- >> Different apps in different clouds based on customer preferences. The core reservation booking engines, they are in our own private cloud because we do have a lot of regulatory security, privacy considerations. So that stuff, we keep kind of close where we can keep a very watchful eye on it, but there are a lot of transactions we are also talking about. The volume of searches has grown up, right? Obviously, Google has seen a lot of search volume. If you look at our business, it used to be when you wanted to book a flight, you'd go to a travel agent and be able to look at a bunch of flight options and you'd pick one. About 20 years ago, you call it the look to book ratios. You'd look at 10 to 20 options and you'd book one. You want to guess what it is today? >> The look to book ratio was 20 to one. That's got to be way higher. That's got to be 80 to one. >> It's more like 1,000 to one. >> 1,000 to one. >> 1,000 to one. It's partly people like you and I who have a spare moment and have a vacation in mind, and we are looking at options. But keep in mind, anything that you search, it has to come into our systems. We have to configure the journey. We have to price it. We have to make sure it's available before we offer it up to you, right? So it's very transaction and computing intensive even before it touches any of the back ends where we do core kind of booking and passenger processing. And so to handle that scale, those are the kind of very logical applications that make sense for the public cloud. And those are the ones that we've looked to move. Certainly, for customers, we are a global company. We have customers all over the world. Some customers want to have some of these systems closer to their geographic location. So we look at all use cases kind of. >> That's amazing to think of. These things have so changed behavior and the way that we interact. I assume that 20 to one was a function because you would sit down. Now you sit down at your desk, time to book that flight, and maybe you don't get it done that day. You come back two or three times. But as you said, now it's grabbing little bits of time throughout the day whenever we can. But do you get paid on a regular subscription, or do you get paid on the transaction? Has that just increased your overhead, whatever the ratio 20 to 1,000 is? >> Absolutely, no, our business model has been very consistent from day one. We get paid on the number of bookings we make and the number of people that board aircraft, I mean roughly speaking. There are smaller lines of businesses, but those are our two main revenue drivers. So we see a lot of transaction volume upfront, but it doesn't translate to a booking which logically, it won't. Yes, that's noise or revenue for us, but we still have to service that volume because that's eventually, the funnels just gotten wider. And so it makes sense to do that in the most cost efficient manner but without compromising quality, without compromising speed. I mean if you're like me, if you have to wait for more than two or three seconds, you're like, "Ah, I'm moving on." >> Oh, two seconds. It's milliseconds, isn't it? >> Absolutely. >> And by the way, I still don't always find the flight I want. So where are those extra flights? Can you provide those for your service? >> Jeff: That extra 5% those are under. >> That's very different. It's got nothing to do with open source and kind of what we're talking about here, but a lot of what you're doing in there from an engineering perspective is just looking at, for example, machine learning algorithms. And what you said is actually a very common complaint, is how do I find kind of the right sort of flights. And more importantly, if you have certain preferences with airports or airlines or loyalty programs or time of day, how do I provide you context-sensitive results? We are doing a lot of kind of core R&D work for that, but our customers are doing amazing work as well. KAYAK is one of our customers, very close to our offices in the Boston area, and they do pretty amazing work in terms of getting their context right and then applying machine learning technologies and artificial intelligence. It's very, very early days but very exciting, very promising. >> One of the cool features I like are these fare alerts. I don't know if you use them. It tells you, it predicts this is going to go up. You better book now, wait. Do you guys do that sort of thing too? >> Our customers do that. We have a very simple model. Our customers are travel agencies, online, American Express, Expedia, metasearches like KAYAK, Skyscanner, et cetera, the airlines themselves whose products we host in our system and we sell. So a lot of our engineering work is learning to offering kind of core innovation so that they can offer products for people like you and me, their customers, the best products out there. So we focus on enabling them. And then at an operational level, we try to do it in the most efficient manner and the most future proof that we can think of. >> What about security? I mean it sounds like a lot of sensitive data changing hands here, right, where are people going to sit on an airplane, where are they going. You must have incredible security demands on your data now. >> Yes. (Jeff and Scott laugh) I mean you understand, obviously, it's paramount to us. And the good news is, look, we've been in this business for 30 years. We have really deep domain expertise in that. And also, you'll understand why I wouldn't want to talk too much about what we do and how we do it, but absolutely, that's one of the-- >> Scott: You just lock it down. >> Prime drivers of everything we think all the way from application design to things like the infrastructure planning and design to the physical level. I mean everything you can think of and probably a couple of things you may not think of. >> Hopefully a few things we didn't think of. So where do you go next? It sounds like you're enabling a lot of the innovation on your partner's side. You just mentioned KAYAK and people writing some of the machine learning and AI algorithms to help the end traveler find what they're looking for. Where are you guys concentrating? You said you've been at it for 30 years. What are some of the next big hurdles that you're looking to take down? >> It's wonderful, I think, being close to our customers. And one of the reasons I'm in Boston, we are a European company. We are actually headquartered in Madrid. Our core engineering team, our central engineering team is in France. The reason I'm in Boston and my team is in Boston is we've started doing a lot of business here in North America, and we try to stay very close to our customers. And when you listen carefully, and that's why we have two ears and one mouth is to hopefully try to listen a lot, you do see their pain points, you do see where they are going with kind of their business. And it gives us a chance to have a front row seat in designing new products that they can use. So to me, it's kind of two pronged. One is we want to offer the best technology we can to our customers at the best price point we can. And obviously, by now, you've figured out it's mission critical stuff has to always be on. Keeping those kind of boundary conditions in mind, you want to be the best technology provider, and then we want to innovate. So one of the things I'm seeing at this conference, there's a lot of friends from the service providers who are talking about 5G technology. And so with connected cars, with virtual reality, I mean these are all trends that are going to impact us as travelers in a positive way. And so we have a dedicated innovation team across all our business lines. We do a lot of work with academic institutions, with ETH in Zurich, with MIT here, close to my office in Boston. And there's just a chockfull of possibilities in terms of what can be done. >> All right, I'll give you the last word, impressions on the show. What do you get out of a show like this? Why is it important for you to come? >> It's amazing. I mean this morning, Martin Casado was there. He's called kind of the grand daddy of software-defined networking (mumbles). >> He's not that old yet, but he's going to like seeing that clip. (laughs) >> It's true. I read that at The Guardian. It was on one of the newspapers. But the fact is we used NSX for virtualization in our entire data center, and we have close to 20,000 infrastructure devices. All our computers are virtualized, 100% of it, and it's all using NSX from VMware, right? Now this was a sort of brilliant idea by an extremely intelligent and persuasive graduate student at Stanford 15 years ago that is, as he announced this morning, is a billion-dollar business today, right? And we are actually using the technology, and it's very real, to process all of this. So it's great to be able to see what people like him, I mean from Google, he's a great partner of ours. We use Kubernetes for kind of the container deployment strategy for our cloud network. We hear him speak about what they're thinking about in terms of investments and how the network is going to essentially drive the movement of data analytics. It's just phenomenal to get the top leadership. I'm obviously very honored and privileged to be presenting to this audience and to share our thoughts and what we're doing and just to see a lot of the buzz around here and what wonderful ideas are happening in the Valley. There's so much action, as always, going on. >> Great, great, great summary. Well, glad you could take a few minutes to stop by theCUBE. >> Completely my pleasure. Thank you very much. Great meeting you, and have a great rest of the show. >> All right. He's Rashesh, he's Scott, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Open Networking Summit 2017 in Santa Clara. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec. >> People obviously know you from Shark Tank, but The Herjavec Group has been really laser focused on cybersecurity. >> I actually helped to bring upon Checkpoint to (mumbles) firewalls, URL filtering, that kind of stuff. >> But you're also...