(upbeat music) >> Tech people love tech. Consumers love to benefit of tech. No consumer opens up their iphone and says, "Oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my iphone". >> What's it been like being on the Shark Tank? >> You know filming is fun. And hanging out is fun, and it's fun to be a celebratory at first. Your head gets really big and you can get tables at restaurants. >> Who says tech isn't got a little pizazz? (laughing) >> Announcer: More skin in the game. In charge of his destiny. >> I mean you guys are exciting? >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec, is Cube Alumni. (upbeat music) Live from Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering Google Cloud Next' 17. >> Welcome back to the Cube, we're doing two days of live coverage here of the Google Cloud Next' 2017 here in the center of Silicon Valley from our 4500 sq foot Palo Alto studio. Happy to bring back to the program a multi time guest, but first time in his new role Praveen Akkiraju now the CEO of Viptela. Thank you for joining us. >> Thanks Stu real pleasure to be here. >> Praveen we were joking, it's like you first came on the Cube back in 2012, you've been on the program at many of our shows, but now you're at our place here, we've got the nice studio, so happy. >> Yes it's really impressive. It's a, you guys have come a long way and it's been an awesome show when I was at VC and I'm really excited to be back here with you. >> Awesome, thank you so much. Why don't you give our audience why Vipetla? What was exiting o you about the opportunity? We've has the opportunity of interviewing some of your folks over the last couple of years at shows like the Emerald and alike? >> Absolutely, I think it's interesting, when you think about sort of what's happening in the IT industry as a whole. There's a revolution going on in the cloud. You know the show that you guys are covering as well as what's been happening over the past couple of years. Applications are basically migrating out of the data center, whether it's into the public cloud into into PaaS platforms, SaaS platforms and such like, similarly at the edge right, users have been migrating away from their desktops right, mobility has unleashed the user to be wherever they need to be and be able to still be productive. In addition to that, you have a whole bunch of things happening in the edge in terms of devices and things coming onboard. Now if you think about these two worlds and the revolution that's happening there, the actual connectivity between those two has been frozen in time right. Majority of the enterprises today are still connected using MPLE, VPN technology which is invented 20 years ago to solve the problem of ATM like emulation or IP. So I think what was really interesting to me about Viptela is it's truly about redefining the network connectivity between users and applications for the could era. And that's really what our mission is and that's what we're really excited about. >> Yeah Praveen it reminds me a lot of you know, what we saw in the data centers when it came to networking. There was that big shift for a number of years in saying, "Well it was the client to server "and then that machine to machine". Everything that happened with virtualization. We went from north south traffic to east west traffic. We talked about forever. Now as cloud pulls in those connectivity. Reinventing what's happening in WAN. >> And absolutely and think about it, if you're a user, you might be accessing your applications in the data center, But you might need to access a something on a SaaS platform well if you're sitting at a branch office do you want to go back to the data center and then head out to the Cloud? Or do you want to be able to take the best path out? Most branches today, have internet connections that our faster than anything MPLS can provide. In fact, there's a data point, one of our customers gave us. The per megabit cost for MPLS VPN is about $200. The per megabit cost for internet is about $2. And you think about the speed as symmetry and obviously the SLA's are different right. So you want to be able to make sure that you can leverage the best connectivity, but also make sure the applications are mapped to the appropriate SLA's transport. So, what we do is essentially, we think about ourselves as the next generation overlay. So we can, the Viptela fabric essentially encompasses MPLS, VPN, internet, LTE connectivity, and we're able to understand what happens in the underlay. But enterprises can just focus on how they want their users to connect to their applications without having to understand what's happening underneath. So that's truly the power of the software refined world if you will right. >> Yeah so, we've been talking for a few years. That whole SDN wave that came out, Google talks about themselves as the largest SDN company out there. But most of the discussion seems to have moved beyond SDN. You're area of SD WAN is definitely one of the hot conversations. Where are customers in kind of understanding this transition and where do things fit? >> Yeah it's a great point, I mean the first wave of software defined networking was essentially was about solving the data center connectivity problem. So how you connect machines more dynamically. How you connect do you connect capacity more dynamically. So application can migrate, you know this notion of sort of machine to machine communication in a dynamic fashion. And being able to potentially even stripe it out to the could. But the first wave did not address hard users connect to their applications. So we think of ourselves from an SDN perspective, kind of leading that second wave of software defined networking, which truly is about user experience an application experience. Connecting users wherever they are to applications wherever they are right. In a scalable secure and dynamic fashion. >> Very different discussion from what I think of. The guys from Nicira that turned into the NXS, that seemed very tied into how VMware talks about hybrid environment. When you talk about, when VMware on AWS goes in. I need that NXS in there. You know you worked at Cisco for a number of years, what they're doing with ACI now is talking more about that as opposed to the client the application layer. >> Exactly right. And I think that at the end of the day. We optimized how applications can migrate and move. And how they can get the best capacity. But the whole purpose is to really deliver those applications to the users. And the WAN has been kind of this, it's frozen in time for 20 years, primarily because it's hard right. It's really hard to be able to figure out what the underlay actually looks like. I mean some of these, some of our customers are global. I mean we have sights in Vietnam. In India, in the US obviously, But it's a global or it's a global footprint and being able to overlay something on top that still give you the predictable performance and be is secure, is something that's been a hard problem to solve. And that's what's really exiting about what we're doing at Viptela. >> It's really interesting stuff. Talk about how you guys partner with, interact with the public cloud environments? >> Yeah you know so we, we're obviously most of our controller are hosted in AWS as well as Verzion which is another, which is a key partner. These are the two big two big sort of partners for us in our in terms of our controllers. But we think about, we partner with AWS, we partner with Microsoft from a Open from an Office 365 perspective. And there a lot of our customer who want to have a much more predictable, high, low leniency access to Office 365. A lot of our customer have workloads in AWS. So we're able to actually spin up a version of our device to front end VPC's and AWS so you can then terminate. Essentially, we treat the cloud as a node in the fabric right. So it helps all the policies, it helps all the securities. Security aspects of it day one. So it's really super simple to set up. We don't treat the cloud separatetly, we just say,"well here's another branch "or a head end". Let's just, can I connect it in. And let the customer define the policies that they see fit. >> That's great so AWS and Office 365 leaders in their categories, got the Google Show going on this week. What do you hear from your customers when it comes to G Suite and Google Cloud? >> Yeah I mean there's a lot of customers who use the G Suite. Mainly Googe Docs particularity. In the context of sort of some of the small medium business that we work with. So again, our job is to really bring users to the applications with the lowest leniency of having the best experience possible. So lot of the could providers essentially don't necessarily worry about how customers get there. They just assume the customer shows up the the door but is a SasS platform or infrastructure is a service platform. So our partnerships with a lot of these providers are about insuring that you know we can collectively guarantee that their users get the best path forward. And that creates more stickiness for them. In terms of their service. >> Okay Praveen, let's talk about Viptela for a second, What's on your plate this year? Those industry watchers? What should we be expecting to see from you coming forward? >> Yeah what's interesting about Viptela is I mean we talk about obviously software define WAN as a category. And clearly as I mentioned, there's a huge leitant requirement to evolve the WAN connectiveness. And I would think that what Viptela does is sort of the next generation overlay. And we talked about sort of the different forms of connectivity which we give the control back to the enterprise. To say, "All you need to worry about Mr. Customer is "to say how can I define the segment or policy per user, "per application". So that's been sort of the focus of our initial use case for our fabric. And we've been tremendously successful, you know most of what we focus primarily on the global fortune 1000 type customers. So we have pretty much every verticals represented in our customer base. Large financials, industrial companies, car companies, retailers, health care and such like. But we think about this fabric as essentially solving the problem of connectivity so you now the next phase of our solution is really about how do we make cloud connectivity really simple and secure? So we're going to launch something in that space, where we make connectivity to infrastructure, service, SaaS platforms really seamless as part of our platform. So if you're a user in a branch or at the edge, you should be able to connect to your data center at the same level of experience and security as you would go to your cloud. So we want to make that super seamless. So that's I think, we call that Cloud En ramps. That's something that we're going to be announcing pretty soon. When I think about the longer term plan, evolution of this because of the platform is fundamentally grounded in routing, in understanding how scale happens, we have taken the traditional routing stake and disaggregated it. There's a data plane that's onsite, there's a control plane which is essentially your routing, and a management organization plane that sits in the cloud. So this allows us to solve many problems. So you can extrapolate forward and say well there's a whole problem internet of things. What is the internet of things problem? It is a whole bunch of devices at the edge which need to be connected to end points whether it's a data center or a you know a collection point. Dynamically, dependent on the phase of their. So those are the kind of problems we think we can solve. So Viptela is interesting because it's not just about SDN it's really about the next generation overlay between the users and the cloud and being able to address multiple use cases. >> Okay, and there are a number of companies. Plenty of startups, some of the big guys there. In the market, what really differentiates you guys? What are your customers coming to you for that the other guys can't do? >> Yeah I think it's, I would say really, so we're all routing geeks. I pretty much spent 19 years at Cisco. Built every platform that Cisco ships today. And so are most of member of the teams. We have I think one of the strongest collection of networking talent in the industry. And what we're able to do with that is as I mentioned re-imagine what the network connectivity needs to look like. In the era of cloud, in the era of internet of things. Our architecture is fundamentally modular as I mentioned right. There's a data plane, there's a control plane, management organization plane. We are cloud managed and cloud delivered. So we solve for scale very elegantly. Because we inherently use the properties of routing that has allowed the internet to scale to what it is as part of the core of our solution. That's one thing that's unique. The second aspect of this is, for us security is a day zero thing. You know, when we bring up a box, zero touch provisioning, it comes up with an Ipsec tunnel encrypted. And we do it without having to exchange keys. So it's inherently secure right. So that is a very significant issue because if you're using the internet as your pipe for your mission critical traffic how do you assure yourself that you're not going to be hacked? And your traffic is not going to be intercepted. So that's you know, some of the largest financial institutions have been on our architecture. Because they trust that. So that's a second piece. The third piece is from an application and a policy perspective we have the ability with our controllers to push policies and create segmentations for different use cases on a dynamic basis. So I'll give you an example so if you have a user in a branch, and you have basically another user comes in they have a different set of requirements. You can dynamically switch up a tunnel from your cloud controller to enable that to happen without every having to touch or configure any of the end boxes. So our cloud platform gives us tremendous amount of scale and flexibility. So that's the way I think about it. Scalability, security, an application policy and the different use cases that we're able to bring to bear. >> So final question I have of you Praveen, the networking world is changing faster than it used to. But I think back to... >> Praveen: Finally. >> for many years I would do slides on networking, and we'd talk about decade scale. So it's like you know, here's how the standard comes, here's how it roles out, here's how it adoption. The enterprise is risk adverse. Slow to change. Not doing anything. Why are things so exciting now in the networking space? What's different? What's driving that move and our customers moving faster? >> Yeah it's a great question and you know I think to put it differently I think networking enjoyed architectural consistency and stability for almost two decades. Which is not the case when you think about the data center or some of the other environment where there's constant change. Now having said that, when we think about what's driving this change it's really that these two revolutions that are going on, one in the edge where users are evolving really rapidly whether it's connectivity or sort of devices and such like and one of the data center of the cloud where applications are fundamentally changing their ephemeral. They're able to migrate between locations. So that's putting a lot of pressure back onto the network. To say, "Hey we need the network to be a lot more dynamic". We need the network to be a lot more flexible. A lot more cost effective. And that is the fundamental driver which we see as driving the customers' willingness to say, "I need to re-look at the network". And the other aspect of this is, as I said we re-imagined networking ground up. Clean sheet of paper. Learned the lessons from the past. And say, "How do you make this painless for the customer"? The reason why the network particularly the WAN has been stagnant is because it is painful right. It involved multiple connectivities, multiple carriers, multiple policies, it's not something that most enterprises want to deal with. By abstracting all that complexity away. We allow customers to focus on what they care about. Is how do I connect? Enable user connectivity with applications. And we take care of the underlay right. So I think those are the key things. I mean it's essentially the last leg of the stool if you will. In terms of moving truly to the cloud era. >> Alright well Praveen Akkiraju thank you so much for joining us again. 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