(upbeat techno music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Another Cube alum joining me on the program next, Sanjay Uppal is here, the SVP and GM of Service Provider and Edge Business at VMware. Sanjay, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the program. >> Oh yeah. Thank you. Thanks Lisa. And thank you to theCube. >> It's great that we're covering VMworld. I can't wait til they're back in person. This is another event that is virtual for obvious reasons. But I wanted to dig into your role and have you really kind of unpack that for us. Your role is the senior vice president and general manager of the Service Provider and Edge Business. Talk to me about that. >> Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful, but really what we're doing here is recognizing that the world is shifting and a lot of the workloads are moving to the edge. So that's the edge part of my responsibility. And the other part is the service providers. Service provider of course, is the name for facilities based telecom operators, as they used to be called in the past, but simply called service providers today. So putting those two things together because service provider, 5G and the edge all go together. So I'm running that as a business for VMware. >> Got it. Let's get VMware's definition of the edge. I always like to do that because some companies have a slightly different spin on it. What is it to VMware? >> Yeah, so to VMware, the edge is distributed digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure of course, is the software stack that you need to run the applications on top, and it's for running workloads. Now, the important part here that we're defining is that the workloads can be in what's known as the underlay, which you can think of as the infrastructure that is needed to run 5G and fiber. But the workloads can also be in the overlay, which is where you find software defined RAN, secure access service edge. And the workloads can be at the edge application layer. These are the new class of applications that we'll talk about. So it's for running workloads. And the other important part of it is, it's across a number of locations. This is not just about being in a few handful of data centers. This is about being in hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of locations, which has its own quirks in terms of how that infrastructure should work. And the important point is that the edge is placed close to where the end points are either producing or consuming data. So that's what the edge is, as we define it at VMware. >> Got it. Talk to me about the strategy and the vision that VMware has for edge. >> That's, you know, we're at a very important inflection point in the industry, as far as the edge is concerned. And I just always link it back into what's happening, as an example, in music. So one of my favorite songs from Aerosmith is, "Living on the Edge," and that's literally where we are right now. We're living on the edge and what Aerosmith says is, "We're looking at the world in a different way because things are changing all the way around." Of course, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but our strategy at VMware is to take this living at the edge, which is happening across the board, and to capture it into infrastructure that we're building, come up with a common software stack that will support workloads that are running in the underlay, in the overlay or at the application layer, and support this entirely new class of applications that are coming in. And these applications, to contrast it with what has been happening before, these applications are being built for experiences. And I'll dig into this in a little bit, but really essentially VMware strategy is to come up with that common software stack that is going to be placed at all of these edge locations, sometimes millions of them, for different types of workloads, but the commonality of the stack is important because that is what the service providers and the enterprises use to derive the benefits. >> Being designed for experiences. It's so interesting, because that's what we expect in our personal lives, in our business lives. We want to have good experiences, whether we're ordering something on Amazon or we're trying to collaborate via Slack or something like that. Experience matters. It sounds silly to say, but it's absolutely true. Talk to me about some of the things, the edge being core to customer's future in any industry. >> Yeah. So, you know, from an industry standpoint, we always used to talk about, what are the features of your product and what are the benefits for customers? And then we started seeing an evolution from benefits into, what are the outcomes that the customers want? But now we are getting from outcomes to experiences. And you take, just an example of a retail chain that we're working with, what they want to do is not just simply sell a product to a customer, walks into the store. They want that person to have an excellent experience. And in order to get to that experience, as an example of what would happen is, this person walks into a store. They recognize who that person is, what they had purchased before, they look at what are the likelihood that they want to buy something today? Do I have that thing in my inventory? If I don't, can I manufacture it with my third generation printer that I have over here? The 3D printer that is sitting in the back room. And then, once that is produced in the next few minutes, can they have an experienced in playing a game with the sportsmen of their choice, on this massive screen that's in there? That's experience. That's not just walking into a store, buying a product and walking out. Another experience would be, when you look at healthcare, what's going on right now that when you have a symptom, you go to your doctor to get checked out. But what if your body tells you that there's something that you need to get done? So this entire new class of applications are coming in with sensors that have artificial intelligence in them that are metricating what is happening. And these sensors with that intelligence then get fed into the edge infrastructure, because this is voluminous amount of information. As you can imagine, the amount of metrics that your body needs to track, all this voluminous information needs to get correlated. And then you may need to make an inference about it. Again, that's an experience because you're completely changing the nature of health as this is going about. So in every vertical industry, we have these examples of experiences and what this requires is computation, networking and storage to be pushed all the way into the edge. It requires a network to get this done. It requires connectivity. And it requires, as I've spoken about before, this common software stack that VMware is bringing. >> So talk to me about what's being announced and unveiled at VMworld. >> So what we are announcing very simply is the VMware Edge. And what that VMware Edge is, it comprises three common software stacks at different layers of the stack. So the first thing that we're saying is that we are announcing the VMware Edge compute stack. So this is software that companies can use, ISV's can use, to develop Edge native applications. These are applications that are born at the edge. They're not applications that are necessarily being refactored from somewhere else. And this is stack that is available in very small form factors, all the way to large form factors, and it'S stack that's connected together. As I mentioned before, the numbers of locations are very important. So we are packaging this, we're making it available across the board next week. This is the first part of the announcement. The second part of the announcement is the expansion of our secure access service edge offering. And that expansion includes going from software defined RAN, which was the first and highly successful service to include secure access, cloud web security, and then to follow that on in a multi-services approach and add more services as we go along. And the third piece is to take our Telco cloud platform, we are announcing that that platform is being co-opted to now run at the edge. Now, one very important development in that part, is that we've had our ESXI product, which is very successful in running in the data center, we have an edge ready version for this product. We've made a 10X improvement in the overhead and latency of ESXI. So now it can be deployed in edge locations in very small form factors, and it is absolutely equivalent to bare metal overhead. So now when companies are looking at, is there overhead associated with the ESXI hypervisor? We're saying, no. It's equivalent to bare metal. And all the benefits that you get with deploying ESXI, will now accrue to benefits that you would have at the edge. >> Talk to me about how the events of the past 18 months, we've seen massive acceleration in digital transformation. We've seen, you mentioned the retailer, the retailer is having to be able to massively shift curbside delivery, e-commerce. How have the events of the last 18 months influenced or catalyzed VMware Edge? >> Absolutely. So if you take a step back and think what has happened due to the pandemic, all of us are working from locations that are not, we're not going to some centralized location to our offices. We're actually working from our home edges. We are literally living at the edge when we were working from home. And also when you go to do curbside pickup, you're making a decision right there. You're going to where that edge location is for that retail store. So really to me, what has happened with the pandemic, is emphasized the need for moving computation all the way to the edge. Now you take one use case, work from home itself. Work from home has gone up by, in some cases, 5X to 8X compared to what it was before. And we've seen the network come under tremendous strain because of work from home. We've seen that the user experience, if it's not good, then of course your productivity gets hampered. So work from home is one of those use cases that has been focused on, because of the pandemic, and we've come up with the solution that will help people when they're sitting in their home environment, the kids can do homework, someone can be watching, streaming movie, but the business users still continues to function with full productivity. So it's really emphasizing the need for moving computation all the way out to the edge. >> Yeah. The edge exploded in the last year and a half. I'm going to now rethink, instead of working from home or living at work, living on the edge. So thank you for giving me that idea. That definitely changes how I feel about this room right here. Talk to me about some of the customers, customer examples, customers in terms of their feedback, as VMware has been developing this. I know you're very much a customer centric organization, but what were some of the directions on the influences from the field? >> I think, as far as customers go, they're an integral part of our development process. It's not like we develop a product and then we go sell it to the customer. What we do is, we get the customer to be a part of that process. We figured out what are the issues that the customers are facing in their own business. As an example, when the pandemic hit, in the healthcare space we had one acute care hospital that came to us and said, "well, we can't get enough of the telemedicine done because the radiologists and all are not able to come into the office." Well, we came up with a solution So that radiologist sitting at home can still look at very high definition images as they're talking to their patients. Now, once we develop the first part of the solution, we actually brought the customer in, gave them a prototype. And then I tell my team that when the customer gives feedback, it's like they're handing us a flashlight and that flashlight illuminates the path ahead for us. And so we follow that path that the customer has set based on the technology that we've produced. Our responsibility is to iterate on that technology in a very fast cycle, so that as we get the flashlights, we illuminate the path and that gets to building the product. And then we get the product built and then we have a happy, successful customer with good outcomes and experiences. And in the end, VMware has done something positive, not just in terms of our business, but for the world at large. >> Right. I love that. Handing the customer a flashlight. Another one I'm going to steal from you, Sanjay. Thank you. You've given me two good ones today. And also a different look at Aerosmith, which I probably now won't be able to get that song out of my head. Some of the trends that we've seen, trends over the last 18 months, what are some of the things that you think we've had a lot of acceleration, but there's a lot of positivity that's come from that, that I don't think gets enough coverage. All of the capabilities that we now have. If you take even just the work from home use case that you mentioned, that's going to be persisting for quite some time, some amount of it's going to be permanent. But what are some of the trends that you're seeing now that you think are really going to help facilitate the edge and the compute and the network and customers being able to take advantage of that even faster? >> Yeah. I think that one of the really important changes that has come because of the pandemic is giving customers choice. And as a part of it, VMware is really focused on multicloud. So, the cloud has come in, we had a movement of workloads from the private data center into the public cloud, but now what customers are saying is, we want choice. We want to make sure that this infrastructure is always available to us. So we are focusing from a VMware standpoint on multicloud. Now, what does that mean? It means that it gives customers choice. They can go to different cloud providers, including the private data center and run their applications on top. And this, we think, is here to stay. This is a trend that we think is as important as what's happening in the future of work. Because previously it used to be, we used to think of work as a destination. It's not. It's a workspace right now. People could essentially be working from anywhere. And one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that, that actually does happen. Human beings, we are flexible enough that we can accommodate to these changes that are coming in. So the future of work is going to be distributed. It's going to be workspaces and not workplaces. And then multicloud and marrying those two things together is what we are focusing on at VMware. >> What are some of the tracks or sessions at VMware where folks can go to learn more about that use case in particular, as well as the VMware Edge and what you're announcing? >> Yeah, so we have some excellent tracks. We have a track about, of course, the distributed edge. We have a track about what's going on with cross-cloud services that we have come up with. We have tracks in terms of what's happening with networking and security, because security obviously goes hand in hand with everything. Zero trust is becoming fundamental in everything that we do. I was talking to one of my customers who owns gas stations, and he was saying, "Sanjay, I have gas stations in places that I would never visit. But there are people who would sit at these gas stations. I still need for them to come into the network, but I can't trust the devices that they're coming in on." So these would be a few of the tracks that I would recommend that people would go and watch. >> Excellent. Yeah. Speaking of zero trust and just the massive changes in the threat landscape in the last year and a half, the things that we've seen with massive rise in ransomware and DDoS attacks and attacks like this becoming a when, not if, kind of a scenario. So everybody needed to ensure that they have, they can trust the people and the devices on the network. Sanjay, thank you so much for joining me, talking to us about VMware Edge. You gave us some great analogies there that I'm going to take forward with me. And I look forward to seeing you, hopefully next year at VMworld, in person. Fingers crossed. >> In-person would be awesome. Thank you so much, Lisa. And thank you to theCube. >> Our pleasure. Sunjay Uppal. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube's coverage of VMworld 2021. (upbeat techno music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year covering the show. And of course, networking has been a big growth story. Four vm where for a number years, going back to the Neisseria acquisition for over billion dollars. Really leveraging all of the virtual networking and SD wins been another hot topic. A couple years ago, it was the Velo Cloud acquisition. And now happy to welcome to the program two of the Velo Cloud business executives. First of all, we have Sanjay you Paul. He is the senior vice president and general manager of that mentioned division of VM Ware. Enjoining him is Craig Connors, whose the vice president and chief technology officer for that same division he was the chief architect of fellow Cloud Craig Sanjay. Thank you for joining us. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Alright, So, Sanjay, first of all nice, you know, call outs and a lot of news that we're gonna get to dig into in the morning Keynote you know Pat Sanjay the team. Uh, you know, a couple of years ago, Pat talked about, you know, the next billion dollar businesses networking your team helping toe add to that. And, ah, a new term thrown out that we're gonna get to talk a little bit about. Our friends at Gartner termed it sassy. So I'll let you, you know, explain a little bit the news that this wonderful new four letter acronym that the Gartner spots that us. Um, why don't you start us there? >>Yeah. I couldn't be more excited to be here at VM World announcing this expansion of what's going on in Ste. Van. So I see Van was all about bringing branch office users to their applications and doing that in a really efficient manner, throwing out all those complex hardware appliances and simplifying everything with software, increasing the quality of experience for the user. But now what has happened is, you know they want security to be dealt off in the same way. Same simplicity and automation, same great user experience. And at the same time, you know, blocking all these attacks that are coming in from various places and covert has just driven that even more meaning that you need to get to networking and network security to be brought together in this simple and automated way while keeping the end user experience be great on while giving I t what they need, which is high security and good manageability. So this acronym sassy, secure access Service edge It really is the bringing together off net networking and network security both as a service. That service angle is really important. And the exciting part about what we're announcing at the at we'd be involved. Here is the expansion off the S, Stephen Pops and Gateways into becoming Sassy pops. And now customers can get a whole slew of services both networking and network security services from the anyway. So that's the announcement. >>Wonderful, Craig. You know, since since since you've helped with so much of the architecture here, I wanna kick out a little bit. When? When it comes to the security stuff that Sandy was talking about. I remember dealing back with land optimization solutions, trying to remember. Okay, wait. When can I compress? When can I encrypt? You know what do I lay on top of it? Um, SD when you know fits into this story, help us understand. What does you Novello Cloud do? What is it from the partner ecosystem? You know, So you know there's there's some good partners that you have helping us. Help us understand. You know what exactly we mean because security is such a broad term. >>Yeah, thanks. So there's four components in the sassy pop that we're bringing together. Obviously, VM Ware Ston is one of those Sanjay mentioned the changing workforce. We have off net users that aren't coming from behind Stu and Branch Mawr and Mawr today. So we also have secure access powered by our workspace. One solution that's bringing those remote users into the sassy pop and then two different security solutions. Secure Web gateway functionality. And that is the next generation secure Web gateway that includes things like DLP and remote browser isolation. And as you saw in the news today that's powered through ROM agreement with Menlo Security. And then we have next Gen firewall ing for securing corporate traffic. And that's powered by our own VM Ware NSX firewall, which has been recently augmented with our last line acquisition. So those are the four key components coming together within our sassy pop. And of course, we also have our continued partnership with the scaler for our our large joint via Mersey Scaler customer base to facilitate that security solution as well. >>Yeah. So, Sanjay, maybe it would make sense. As you said, you've got ah, portfolio now in this market, Uh, got v d I You've got edge walk us. Or if you could, some of the most important use cases for your business. >>Yeah. So you know the use case that has taken off in the last several years since the advent of SD. When is to get sites? So these would be branch offices and a branch office could be an agricultural field. It could be a plane. It could be an oil rig. You know, it could be any one of these. This is a branch office. So these sites how to get them connected to the applications that they need to get access to so telemedicine example. So how do you get doctors, diagnosticians and all that that are sitting in their clinics and hospitals? You get great access to the applications on the applications can be anywhere they don't have to be back in your data centers. You know, after data center consolidation happened, some of the apse you know, we're in the data centers. But then, after the cloud advent came, then the apse were everywhere there in the public cloud, both in I s as well as in SAS. And then now they're moving back towards the edge because of the advent of edge computing. So that's really the primary use case that s Stephen has been all about. And that's where you know, we have staked a claim to be the leader in that space. Now, with Covic, the use cases are expanding and obviously with work from home, you take the same telemedicine example. The doctors and diagnosticians who used to work from hospitals and clinics now have to get it done when they're working from the home. And, of course, this is a business critical app. And so what do you do? How do you get these folks who are at home to get the same quality of experience, the same security, the same manageability, but at the same time, you cannot disturb the other people who are working from home because that is an entire ecosystem. You serve the business user, but you also serve the needs off the home users keeping privacy in mind. So these two cases branch access and then remote access, which great talked about these are the primary use cases, and then they break down by vertical. So depending on whether it's health or it's federal or its manufacturing or its finance, then you have sub use cases underneath that. But this is how we from a from a V C n standpoint, you know, claimed to have 17,000 customers that have deployed our networking solutions. Ah, large fraction of those being our stu and solutions today. >>Yeah. Okay, Craig, one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in the industry iss scale. I look at certain parts of the market, you know, say kubernetes kubernetes was about, you know, bringing together lots of sites. But now we're spending a lot of time talking about edge, which is a whole different scale. Same thing if you talk about devices and I o t can you speak to us a little bit about, you know, fundamentally, You know that branch architecture, I think, set you up well, but when I start thinking about EJ, it probably is. You know, uh, you know, larger number and some different challenges. So So maybe maybe some differences that happen to happen in the code to make that happen? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you know, we've been fortunate in the success that we've had in RST ran deployments. More than 280,000 branches deployed with RST ran solution. So scale is something that's been near and dear to our heart from the beginning. How do you build a multi tenant service in the cloud? How do you build cloud scale? And we brought that aspect into all of these components through container ization, as you mentioned through horizontal scalability, bringing them into our own dedicated pops. Where we control the hardware we control the hyper visor, obviously built on top of the m r E. S s. I that allows us to deliver scale in a way that other competitors may not be able to achieve. >>Yeah, son Sanjay, it's been a couple of years since the acquisition by VM Ware. Give us a little bit of an update, if you would as to, you know, what I'm sure. Obviously, customer reach on adoption greatly increased by by the channel and go to market. But, you know, directionally And you know, any difference in use cases that that you've seen now being part of the M R. >>Yeah, absolutely. No. There's there's been an expansion in the use cases, which is why this fit was very good, meaning Vela Cloud being a part of VM way. So if you look at it, what the wider network does, where the place where you know ties, we tie it all together and tie walk together. If you look at the end User computing, which Greg was mentioning, the clients are digital workspace, workspace. One client. Well, those clients now will connect to our sassy pop. So that's one tie in that obviously we couldn't have and we were an independent company. The other side of it, when you go from the sassy pop into the data center, then we tie into NSX. Not just that the Cloud firewall, but in the data center itself so we can extend micro segmentation. So that's another kid use case that is becoming prevalent. Then the third aspect of this is really when you run inside telecom operators and VM Ware has a very robust business as it goes after telcos with the software stack and so running our gateways running our sassy pops at the telco environment, then gets us to integrate with what's going on with our telecom business unit. We also have what we're doing on our visibility and Tellem entry perspective. So we had acquired a company called Neons A, which were crafting into on edge network intelligence product that then fits into VM Ware's overall. For in the space we have, ah, product suite called We Realize Network Insight. And so that network inside, combined with what we're doing from from a business unit standpoint, gives customers an end to end view from from an individual client through the cloud, even up to an individual container. And so we call this client to cloud to container. All of this is possible because we're part of VM Ware. In the last piece of this is something that's gonna happen. We believe next year, which is edge computing when edge computing comes in. You know, I jokingly say to my team this acronym of Sassy, which is s a s e you gotta insert of sea in the middle. So it becomes s a CSE and out of that pronounced that says sacks E. So I know it sounds a little bit awkward, but that c stands for the compute. So as you put compute in the computer is going to run in the edge, the computer that's going to run in the pop and the sassy is gonna become, you know, sexy. And who better to give that to you than VM Ware? Because, you know, we have that management stack that controls compute for customers today. >>Well, definitely. I think you're you're you're drawing from the Elon Musk school of You know how to name acronyms in products Do so sometimes It's really interesting. Uh, Craig, talk us a little a little bit about that vision to get there, you know? What do we need to do as an industry? How's the product mature? Give us a little bit of that. That that roadmap forward, if you would >>Yeah, I think you know Sassy is really the convergence of five key things. One is this distributed pop architecture. Er So how do you deliver this? Compute and these services near to the customers premise. And that's something that companies like us have have had years of experience and building out. And then the four key components of sassy that we have, you know, zero trust access S t u N next generation firewall ing and secure Web Gateway. We're fortunate, as Sanjay said, to be part of the M where where we don't have to invent some of these components because we already have a works based one and we already have the NSX distributed firewall. And we already have the m r s d when and so ah, lot of companies you'll see are trying to to put all of these parts together. We already had them in house. We're putting them under one umbrella, the one place where we didn't have a technology within VM Ware. That's where we're leveraging these partnerships with memo and see scaler to get it done. >>Sanjay e think the telco use case that you talked about is really important One we've definitely seen, you know, really good adoption from from VM Ware working in those spaces. One place I I wanna understand, though, if you look at vcf and how that moves. Thio ws toe Azure, even toe Oracle's talked about in the keynote this morning. How does SD win fit into just that kind of traditional hybrid cloud deployment we've been talking about for the last couple of years? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, when you look at Ste Van, that name can notes software defined, but it doesn't. It's not specific to branch office access at all. And when you look at DCF, what VCF is doing is really modernizing your compute stack. And now you can run this modern compute stack of your own data centers. You can run it in the private cloud. You can run it on the public cloud as well, right? So you can put these tax on Amazon, azure, Google and and then run them. So what an STV in architecture allows you to do is not just get your branch and secure users to access the applications that are running on those computes tax. But you can also intermediate between them. So when customers come in and they say that they want simplified networking and security between two public cloud providers, this is the multi cloud use case, then getting that networking toe work in a seamless fashion with high security can be done by an S Stephen architectures. And our sassy pop is perfectly situated to do that. And all you would need to do is add virtual services at the sassy pop. An enterprise customer would come in and they say they want some peanuts here and some VP CS there they want to look at them in an automated fashion. They want to set it up, you know, with the point and click architectures and not have to do all this manual work, and we can get that done. So there's a there's a really good fit between Sassy s Stephen and where VCF is going to solve the multi cloud problem that people are having right now. >>Excellent. I really appreciate that. That that explanation last thing, I guess I'll ask is, you know, here at VM World, I'm sure you've got a lot of breakouts. You've probably got some good customers sharing some of their stories. So anonymous if it has to be. But we would love if you've got either views of some examples, uh, to help bring home that the value that your solutions are delivering. >>Great. When I start with one and then creek and fill in the other one, eso let me start off with the telemedicine example. So we have, you know, customer called M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. And these are the folks in in Texas, and they provide a really, really important service. And that service is, you know, providing patients who are critically ill to give them all the kinds of services, whether they come into the clinic or whether they're across a network connection. And they're radiologists and doctors air sitting at home. So I think it's very important use case and, you know, we started off by deploying in the hospitals and the clinics. But when Cove, it hit there to send a lot of these folks to work from home, and then when they work from home, it's really this device that goes in which you can see here. This is our Belo cloud edge. And this, um, has said in one of the my my favorite song says, There's nothing this box can't do. All right, so this box goes home into the, you know, doctors home, and then they are talking to their patient, getting telemedicine done because it solves the problem off performance. Um, you know that some of those folks have literally said that this thing was a God sent. That's not very often that networking people, you know, have been told that their products are like godsend. So I'll take that to the limit of grain of salt. But we are solving a very important problems increasing the performance were also this is a secure device, so it's not gonna be hacked into and then makes things much more manageable from a nightie standpoint. So this is one of those use cases, and there's plenty of them. But Craig has his favorites all turn it over to him. >>There's so many I could bore you. I think you know one really interesting. One is a new investment banking company that we have is a customer, and they used to go work in the office five days a week, and everything that they did was on their computer in the office and with this pivot to work from home post Kobe, did they think their future is a flexible work workforce where sometimes there in the office and sometimes they're remote. And when the remote there are deep peeing into their desktop, that is sting in their office and with their like to remote access VPN solution, they had to connect, Say, I'm a user sitting in Southern California. I'm connecting my VPN to Chicago to then come across the network back to Los Angeles to get to my desktop so that I can work from home. And now with Sassy, my secure access client from workspace one connects to the closest asi pop I get to my desktop in my office. Tremendously lower, Leighton see tremendously higher quality to experience for the users, whether they're, you know, at home, on the road anywhere they need to access that device. >>Craig Sanjay, thank you so much. Love the customer example. Sanjay. Good job bringing out the box. Uh, show people It's a software world. But the sassy hardware is still needed at times, too. Thanks for joining us. All >>right. Thank you, Stew. Thanks. Great. Cheers. All >>right. Stay with us for more coverage of VM World 2020. I'm still minimum. Thanks. As always for watching the cube

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020 hard to believe our 11th year covering the event. Of course, the first year it is a global virtual event. So happy to welcome to the program. We're going to be talking about some of the multicloud networking. So first from Equinix, Bill Long, he's the senior vice president of product management and joining him the founder of VeloCloud Sanjay Uppal, he's the senior vice president and general manager for a VeloCloud. Now part of VMware, Bill and Sanjay thanks, thank you so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here. >> All right so Bill, we had Sanjay on the program last year, hard to believe, you know, Sanjay and I were talking, it's been over two years since the acquisition of VeloCloud, of course, SD-WAN has been real growth. Equinix has gone through, you know, changes, you have an acquisition I want to talk about a little bit later, but since we're at VMworld, Bill, want to start with that partnership, of course every, I think most people know Equinix. You've got data centers around the globe you've got direct connects into the big public clouds and obviously a long partnership with VMware. So bring us up to date. >> Yeah, so obviously with our data centers, there's tons of virtual machines running, running in our data centers today but as we, you know, Equinix is a bit special because our specialty is, is the place where networks connect to each other. So as people are moving more to a distributed hybrid multicloud type of architecture, especially even with the work from home, with COVID, they wanted to be able to get their infrastructure deployed out further, closer to their users. I mean previously to do that they had to actually physically deploy hardware. So the exciting sort of evolution, the partnership with VMware is what we're doing with VeloCloud, where you can actually deploy the SD-WAN infrastructure on a virtualized basis, spin up the VeloCloud infrastructure and have your SD-WAN solution without actually having to ship physical equipment. So what it's doing for our customers, it's allowing them to really move to that distributed hybrid multicloud architecture without a lot of the requirements that were previously there for shipping and appliance, installing appliance, wiring it up. So we've sort of predeployed all of that and made the buying experience much more fluid, which was super fortuitous timing given sort of the environment that we're all in today, where you can't just hop on a plane and put it, ship an appliance somewhere and install it. So it's a longterm relationship and we're super thrilled to have him on the network edge platform today so that it can be enabled virtually not just physical. >> Yeah, so Sanjay. I want to follow up on what Bill was just talking about there, of course, being acquired by VMware, being a software solution makes a lot of sense in that vision that we've had for SDN for NFV was I want to get rid of the physical appliances. We want to make it much easier to be able to deliver those services. So, you know, I'd love to hear a little bit, especially here in 2020, the architecture of your service just makes it easy to deploy, easy to help customers do what they need to do. >> Yes Stu and Bill and it's all about the simplicity and automation. This whole thing about software defined WAN or SD-WAN came about because customers found it really difficult to have stacks of these physical appliances that they had to deploy at every endpoint in their network and then in a hub and spoke model where the hubs were there to deploy another set of appliances. So the software defined part of this, right from the get go for VeloCloud now at VMware was to make this really be simple and automated and how do you get simplicity and automation? Well, you take most of the complexity out. And the way that we took the complexity out was to collapse all of that hardware at the end point and make it one very simple, easy to deploy appliance and then the other end, which is the one that Bill was just talking about for the collocated entities, where we had our software defined, ran gateways, there was physical infrastructure that was required and Equinix has been a partner, right from 2013 to get those gateways deployed at the SD-WAN points of presence. The great thing now, and you've heard the announcements at VMworld. The great thing now is that you don't have to deploy all that hardware at the hub end points. All you do is use Equinix's network edge. You get our SD-WAN gateways deploy them as software, and now you can also scale it out and get your SASE or secure access service edge deployed in exactly the same way. >> Bill there's often just discussion of hybrid and multi-cloud, and sometimes it's a little hard to wrap our brains around what customers are doing. I know when I tour a data center, like one of yours, it really, you can understand what's happening. what I'm curious about is, in some of your data centers connecting between clouds could just be, I'm connecting a cable over a couple of rows, or I've got an interconnect to AWS to Azure, or the light. Does SD-WAN fit into those environments where we're connecting close is where does, and maybe, maybe there's some areas that SD-WAN doesn't fit in. 'Cause we know SD-WAN has been really that interconnected fabric, helping customers do their multicloud. I'm just curious in your world kind of the parameters. >> Yeah, I think we, as Sanjay did a great job of describing it as the hub and spoke where you have the hub that might be like a branch office location, where you want to bring that traffic in to the spoke would be the end officer in the hub. You want to bring that hub in and then that traffic might want to go out to a cloud as you were talking about the use case you just described, but what's important is you want that hub to be the place where the most ISPs or internet service providers are such that you're aggregating that traffic efficiently locally and then you want to make sure you're getting that traffic over to a cloud as efficiently as possible. So luckily Equinix, you know, locations, what's so special about those is not just, it's not just a data center It's, who's in the data centers that are with you. So in the locations where we have the VeloCloud gateway and the network edge solution, they're all located together. So you have, it's a local place where the ISP networks terminate so you can originate that traffic from a home office worker or any kind of branch office location. You can then get it into the VeloCloud edge and since, and then out to the cloud and most of the time those cloud edge nodes are actually physically in an Equinix data center. So if you look for solution, has the least amount of hops can have the least amount of latency, highest performance, fewest amounts of points of failure. It's really a very efficient architecture to be there and of course, with less sort of networks to traverse, it's also a pretty cost effective as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, as, as Bill pointed out, SD-WAN solves two problems. So it is, it used to start off as a branch office solution, but it's the name doesn't connote anything that is specific only to branch offices when you get to multi-cloud and you have information that needs to go, let's say from one of the public cloud providers, Amazon to another one Azure Equinix is a perfect location to do that because both those cloud providers and others meet at Equinix, and then also the network providers meet at Equinix. Now we are the software layer that directs the traffic and that steers it between cloud providers, from branches to cloud providers, from remote users to cloud providers and that Equinix is the perfect meeting point. We are that SD-WAN software layer. That's kind of like the traffic cop, that steers the traffic around. >> Wonderful well, Bill, Sanjay was talking earlier about the secure access service edge, SASE. I keep having to go through my head. It's not a self addressed stamped envelope anymore, but Bill help us understand, you know, what Equinix, how Equinix helps deliver this environment. We know you've got a great footprint on not only the cloud partnerships, but really locations that help us get to the, you know, the customer's edge. >> Yeah, it's very similar to what we're talking about earlier, where if you're looking for an efficient way to basically originate traffic closest to the user, such as the highest performance being, the fact that we're in over 200 data centers spread out around the world means that we can be local to where the actual traffic wants to be. So, and we're connected to all the ISPs that are local so you bring that traffic in and then you can provide a security perimeter around that today. Like what the edge instance and what the Velocloud solution has but then also when you want to connect that out to the rest of your infrastructure, whether that's one of the, 10,000 enterprise customers that happens to live within Equinix today, or if you need to connect to your MPLS provider, that's all there as well. So it really acts as that hub for bringing you in to be able to efficiently originate that traffic into one of these SASE platforms, and then, do the types of things that Sanjay was talking about with the software layer on top to be able to secure it and really do special routing with the traffic, such that it has the highest performance and is more secure. So making sure that it's distributed, efficient, aggregation of local traffic, but then also having the option to be able to connect out to whoever you want to connect out to. Some of the ways that we've seen that evolve as Sanjay will talk about the, it works not only for branch offices, but from work from home users as well. The fact that people were local in our data center and as traffic we saw earlier this year, as much as a 40% increase in some locations in traffic, in order to scale that it was a matter of just setting up a couple of cross connects instead of having to procure multiple hundred gig circuits from a network service provider. So having all of those pieces co-resident in a single location really helps unlock the potential of the SASE architecture. >> Sanjay one of the items that caught everybody's attention in the keynote is project Monterey. We went the cloud native with project Pacific last year now really going deep with Monterey for AI and edge. There's some similarities between the branch technology that you said we started with with VeloCloud. Does SD-WAN fit into this Monterey discussion when we talk about edge? And then Bill, I expect this as somewhere where packet fits in. So definitely want to hear your commentary on it too. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think the bigger picture here is traffic comes from all these locations. So whether it is remote users, branch office users, campus users, and those are the entry points into the network. Then they come and they meet at the meeting point. One of the best meeting points is Equinix and then at that meeting point you can analyze the traffic. Obviously you want to keep privacy and security in mind, you can add additional security services as you go, which is the whole idea behind SASE. If you're going to aggregate this traffic and bring it to those meeting points, the meeting points are the perfect places to add the additional security, whether it is web-based security, or it is firewall security, you add that there and then the traffic goes on to its final destination as Bill was talking about and that final destination may be a cloud provider. It may be through another carrier, an MPLS provider, or maybe just back to the enterprise's data center. Now the whole idea here is as you collect the traffic, you can also analyze parts of it again, keeping privacy in mind and this is where AI comes in because you can have specific algorithms going in and figure it out when something goes wrong in the network, how to recognize that and how to self-heal. So self-healing is one of those areas that we are working on, but the infrastructure that we're putting in place between Equinix and us is a necessary building block to be able to get to that self-healing end state that we're all looking forward to. >> Great, Bill on the edge piece. Am I right that this is something that packet's going to help with? >> Absolutely. So I mentioned earlier where the model forever, the value of Equinix has been, as Sanjay was highlighting the ability to connect to the ecosystems you want to care about, but that, as I mentioned, it previously required, even if you want to have VMs, you still had to have physical servers that those VMs had to be on and that was, sort of a barrier to people adopting the hybrid multicloud architecture. So what we've done with the acquisition of packet is we're basically predeploying infrastructure that you can then load whatever VMs you want on top of that, such that you can use a SASE type of architecture to originate and secure your traffic and then connect that directly into a set of predeployed infrastructure and Equinix but to be very clear, what we're trying to do is we're still sort of the place that you put your workloads, but instead of having to ship physical equipment, we're just predeploying the infrastructure for you. So our goal is to really have infrastructure at software speed, but we still will continue to stop really at the software layer. So what that, the packet acquisition was really about was removing one of those barriers of having to physically deploy equipment, such that people can, deploy their infrastructure much more quickly and without the constraints and time and Capex requirements of actually having to put, to deploy physical equipment. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely and that's why, you know, I've heard quite a bit about packet at the Amazon shows the last couple of years, so exciting and it seems like a solid fit, not only for Equinix, but to expand the VMware partnership. Bill I'm wondering, you know, long partnership, any specific customer examples that you might be able to share, even if it's anonymized, as you know, how SD-WAN is really helping customers along with their business challenges. >> Yeah. we've got a couple of great proofs of concept coming along. Right now there's a manufacturing company that we're working with who needs to be able to localize traffic from one of their, both their headquarters and a couple of their factories and so they're looking to be able to, aggregate that traffic locally and then connect it to their, to their infrastructure that's actually physically in Equinix. So this is a, this is a GA solution. We've got a couple of great proofs of concepts going, and this is it's ready to scale. >> Wonderful. Sanjay I want to give you and Bill final words, final takeaways you want people to have with regarding the partnership and VMworld 2020. >> Yeah, sure. So, you know, we've been partners, like I said, since 2013, and we really value this relationship. It started off by us saying right in the beginning, the cloud is the network. That was our mantra, right from the get go. Now the cloud being the network, one of the buffet meeting places for the cloud was Equinix. So we located our SD-WAN gateways there. It did require hardware infrastructure to be put in, but of course people would much rather have a beer or drink a latte instead of rolling out hardware and so Bill came along and said, Hey, I have this perfectly good thing called network edge. Doesn't require to put all your hardware in. You can get your SD-WAN software deployed and so we made that gateway into a virtual edge on the context of a specific enterprise and now literally at the click of a button, you can deploy a virtual edges at Equinix locations, don't have to roll out any specific hardware and from that meeting point, you can get to any cloud provider, you know, many of the MPLS providers and then get access in low latency. Latency is now the criteria everybody's looking at and so between what Bill is doing and what we are doing, it is solving that enterprise's problem, using the latency, getting all their entry points at this meeting place. So thank you Bill. >> And thank you, Sanjay. I think you summed it up really well. I think, as Sanjay highlighted the value has been there for a long time of what it means to have a great SD-WAN solution in the right place and I think now with what we've done together, making that available on a point and click, we really have the easy button and so I know from customer conversations that I've had, I get requested for VeloCloud being available network edge. Now that it's there, I'm confident there's going to be a lot of unlock now that we have the easy button. So I think it's a great combination of a value made easy and I think the partnership is going to get stronger from here. >> Well, definitely lowering the latency to be able to deploy those solutions faster is what customers need. Sanjay, Bill thank you so much for joining us, congrats on the progress and look forward to hear more in the future. >> Thanks Stu. >> Stick with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. 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>> Announcer: Live from San Fransciso, celebrating 10 years of hi-tech coverage, it's the theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its eco-system partners. >> Welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage at VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Dave, 10 years doing theCUBE at VMworld, what a transformation, lot of technologies coming back into the center of all the action. SD-WAN's one of them, we got two great guests, two entrepreneurs, the co-founders of VeloCloud. Sanjay Uppal who's the VP and GM of VeloCloud Business Unit part of VMware, VMware bought on December 2017, Steve Woo, Senior Director of VeloCloud Business Unit. Also co-founder, you guys both strong in networking, entrepreneurs, congratulations on. >> Thank you. >> That was two years ago. Okay, so, we were reminiscing about 10 years, 2010, when we first started doing theCUBE to now, but more than ever SD-WAN, just over the past 24 months, 36 months, a lot's changing as cloud has become more obvious. Certainly public cloud, no debate, but we start talking about cloud 2.0. Enterprise requirements are much unique and different that just, you know, being born in the cloud at least like the startups are. So, whole different challenges. This is a kind of difficult, it's a networking challenge. Networking and security are the two biggest, hottest areas right now in tech as clouds scale, the enterprise comes in. What's the vision, Sanjay? >> So what's going on here as you were rightly pointing out, cloud is changing. It's no longer people just want to get from private to public, it's a multi-cloud world and it's a hybrid cloud world. Now, that's talking at it from the compute standpoint. But, other services are also moving to the cloud, security services are moving to the cloud, so when you look at it from that standpoint, our customers want to get from the clients, which could be a user, it could be a thing, it could be a machine, all the way to the container which has the application. So we're looking at SD-WAN as being that fabric that connects from the client to the cloud to the container. And as you're rightly pointing out, networking and security is the hot area right now. So how does security and networking impact this client to cloud to container world is where SD-WAN is headed toady. >> And Pat Gelsinger who just came fresh off the keynote, he'll be on tomorrow, I'm going to ask him this question directly but, we've always been saying public cloud is such a great resource, I mean, who doesn't want all that massive compute, massive storage, if you can use it? But when you start getting into hybrid, right? I said the data center's an edge. And he's talking about a thin edge and a big edge and a thick edge, so when you're a networking packet, when you're in networking you move stuff around, you're an edge and you're a center, you're a core. These are networking concepts, this is not new, I mean, this is not new. >> Yes, this is not new. And I think the concept of the edge, as he was pointing out, there's different edges everywhere and you have to really look at it from, as you're crossing the boundary, how do you get the packets from point A to point B? Making sure that the performances are short, so you get the application layer performance, but yet not increasing your attack surface from a security standpoint. And so, the facilities that Steve and myself and other folks at VeloCloud have constructed is really reducing the attack surface by segmentation. But making sure that the conversation from the client to the cloud to the container has that assured performance, particularly for real time applications. Which are actually not easy to get right because the underlying transport may not actually help in any great way. >> So, John, you said it's not really new for you networking guys, it's really not. At the same time, Pat talked about choice versus complexity so it's a much more complex world. So you've had to change the way in which, you approach from a technology standpoint I presume? The roadmap has probably shifted, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> So, absolutely. So the discussion about moving to the cloud has been about the compute, but then you have to also actually look at the network, right? They forecast that 30 to 50% of the enterprise traffic is going to go to the cloud, right? But the network in the past was built for applications going to the on premise data center. So what we've had is inequality where you've had a full enterprise grade network going to the enterprise data center, but actually your cloud access was a second grade citizen. As Sanjay was saying, I still want performance, I still want security, and then in fact, as people actually expand to the cloud but actually put more and more workloads in the cloud, they start to realize, gee, where's my automation? Where's my scaling? So that still has to be done at the branch that the remote sites that need access to the cloud, and they need this automated, secure, high performing access to all the cloud workloads. Especially even that it's now moved to multi-cloud, right? So you went from on premise, a little bit in the hybrid, private cloud, now many more instances and now multi-cloud, becomes more and more complex and that's where cloud delivered SD-WAN really addresses that problem. >> So Steve, lay out the architecture, so let's just all roleplay for a second here. I'm a CCO, CIO, I'm progressive, got my hands in all the top things, certainly security's number one concern I have. And I'm building my own stack, I love the cloud, I don't want to make it a second class citizen, I really want to re-architect this. What the playbook, what do I do, what's your recommendation? >> Alright, so the playbook is, and this is advice from the cloud compute centers as well, right? Go direct to the cloud, don't back haul it through the enterprise data center and introduce latency so you now need Internet Breakout at more locations, not just the central data center. But I still need the security, so how do I have cloud security for traffic going straight to the cloud versus going back to the east west, to the data center? So really, the advantage that the SD-WAN solution has is it's actually a hybrid that has a footprint on premise but also has a cloud footprint. So Sanjay and I and VeloCloud, we have this big network of cloud gateways so you have the footprint on prem and in the cloud to have distributed security. >> So, Sanjay, talk about, back to your original bumper sticker, client, cloud, containers. So, I see that security piece. How important has the container piece become? And what is that role of the container in the future? Is it going to be a wrapper for legacy apps, is it going to be primary for new apps? Because Kubernetes clearly is orchestrating a bunch of containers and other services so the role of the container's certainly super valuable. How does that impact some of the efficiencies that's needed for networking and to ensure security? >> Yeah, great question. You know, the networking folks, and networking was always relegated to being the underlay or the plumbing. Now what's becoming important is that the applications are making their intent aware to the network. And the intent is becoming aware. As the intent becomes aware, we networking people know what to do in the SD-WAN layer, which then shields all the intricacies of what needs to get done in the underlay. So to put it in very simple terms, the container's what really drives the need and what we're doing is we're building the outcome to satisfy that need. Now containers are critical because as Pat was saying, all of the new digital applications are going to be built with containers in mind. So the reason we call it client to cloud to container is because the containers can literally be anywhere. You know, we're talking about them being in the private cloud and then the public cloud, they could be right next to where the client is because of the edge cloud. They could be in the telco network which is the telco cloud. So between these four clouds, you literally have a network of these containers and the underlying infrastructure that we are doing is to provide that SD-WAN layer that'll get the containers to talk to one another as well as to talk to the clients that are getting access to those applications. >> You know, sometimes it takes a history lesson to figure out the future. I was talking with Steve Herrod and I want to get your reaction to a comment he made to me when we were talking about the impact of VMware back in the old days, you know, virtualization. Virtualization kind of came out as an application and then it became what it did in the server world, just changed the game. But one key thing that we talked about and he mentioned was, the key was that virtualization allowed for massive efficiencies. Not just on price and consolidation of service and efficiency on price, but it enabled more efficiencies in performance without any code changes to the application. So the question is, is that, okay, containers I buy 100%, we agree, since Docker and early days to now with the Kubernetes, containers are going to be a game changer. What's that dynamic that's going to come next? Is there a view from your perspective on that step up function of value without a lot of application rewrites or network changes? I mean, I'm just trying to figure out how that fits together what's your view on that? >> Yeah, let me drag this first and then maybe Steve can comment as well, so. The first thing is that SD-WAN, just like server virtualization did, we're doing what server virtualization was for the network. So you don't require any changes to your underlay, meaning that you don't require changes to your broadband, you don't require changes to your LTE and even 5G, as well as the NPLS network so you don't have to twiddle with those bits, we manage it all in the overlay, this is exactly similar to what VMs did when it came to server virtualization. Now, when containers come in, because we get the visibility of what the container wants, we can both in real time, as well as a priori, figure out how the network should be configured. And that is a game changer because a container could be right next to you, it could be in the cloud, far edge, thin edge, it's not just a destination, it's literally everywhere. And that underlying fabric, if the underlying fabric of the network doesn't work, your digital transformation project for containers is not going to work either. You there's a key building block over there. >> So if I get this right, you're saying is that because you have that underlay visibility without any changes, by making efficiencies there, you then can understand what the container wants so you're bringing intelligence to the container and vice versa? >> Yes, so that containers tells us what do they need to run, I mean the application tells us, which is built with containers. And what we do is we dynamically measure how the network is performing, and we adapt to what the container wants. We call this outcome driven. We know what the outcome is and we adapt the networking to deliver that outcome. >> So I want to ask you guys, so Pat talked today about 8% better improvement relative to bare metal, but it's really about the entire system, the entire network. And I'm curious as to how you guys are evolving. You know, John and I talk about cloud 2.0, how you're evolving to support that. Because it's really about application performance in total, what the user sees, not what I can measure in some on prem data center, I'm not saying Pat was doing that, but my guess to deduce the numbers for the keynote they probably did do that. So, how is your infrastructure and architecture evolving to support application performance across the network? >> Right, right. So, to add to what Sanjay was saying in terms of just being aware of the requirements of the containers and optimizing and having visibility but actually, leverage the container and virtual machine technology in the SD-WAN platform itself. So in terms of solving the network problem, it's not just about us virtualizing the network resources and then choosing the best path across the network to the applications, but actually hosting some applications that deserve to be moved out to the edge to help solve the performance problem as well. A good example is IOT, where you just have a lot of data, a lot of real time data that needs real time control response instead of necessarily going over the most efficient path to an existing cloud data center on premise, perhaps do some of the analytics actually in the SD-WAN network edge, and we can do that with containers. >> So what about the real time aspect? Because I think that's a key point, you mentioned that, Sanjay, earlier. Because, I remember, not the date myself, but I remember back in the days when policy was a revolution, oh my God, we can do policy based stuff! And provisional stuff, that was an, oh my God, static network, though, I mean everything was provisioned, buttoned up nicely, you're not dealing with a static network when you're dealing with services. So you're moving up the stack, we're talking containers now, at the application level, assuming you have the fabric down here. There's going to be a lot of stuff being turned on, turned off, things provisioning, unprovisioning, so a lot of dynamic nature going on. So, if I see this right, policy is key and enables some intelligence, it's got to have an impact on the real time so talk about what real time means, some of the challenges, is it just a transactional issue? Is it latency? And is that where the container magic happens? Just unpack that a little bit. >> So there's really four classes of real time applications that we see. Voice, video, VDI and IOT. Now, there's of course, other applications that are built from these building blocks or these types of application, sub-applications. Now, each of these has a latency requirement, but it also has a requirement in terms of dynamism, so as you know, video can change dramatically from one moment to the other, variable portrayed video, right? Voice doesn't change as dramatically but has very stringent requirements in terms of when that packet should show up. So when we look at these, and you put them on a best effort network that only says that they're going to get the packet from point A to point B, these real time applications may not work. So what we have constructed is an overlay that supports realtime applications even on best effort networks. And this is actually a fairly significant shift in the industry, like if you look at running, you know, all of us have done a voice call, on a broadband and you hear these artifacts and rubberbanding and you can't hear the other person, right? But with VeloCloud, we're able to provide guarantees running on best effort networks. And I think that is a game changer. That is going to be a game changer also as the applications get much more dynamic. I mean, you bring in containers, one of the issues is where should that application run? That can be decided in real time. VMware invented this whole vMotion idea, well how about vMotioning the container? And how are you going to vMotion it and how are you going to decide where that container should be? So all of this is really what a networking infrastructure can provide for you in real time. >> And you've got this overlay, and without performance degradation or dramatic performance degradation, right? So what's the secret sauce behind that? >> So, the secret sauce in our solution is something we call dynamic multi-path optimization. So just like virtualization was done for the data center, first continuously monitor the resource's performance, capacity of the different underlay resources and then in real time, recognizing the business priority of the different applications, instantly put the workload, or in this case, the network WAN traffic on the right resource and actually have the flexibility to move it as conditions change, as capacity changes. And further than that, if you can't stare around the problems that we may see in the network, we can actually remediate the actual traffic streams and since we're on both ends we can have a lot of optimization tricks and actually make sure that real time data applications work perfectly. >> So it's a data analysis and a math problem to solve? >> Yeah, so we use that for real time optimization, and then the other benefit is we have this huge, in the cloud, of course, huge data lake of information that we continue to share more and more with the users so they can see the overlay, so that the entire underlay environment of the WAN, where it's going in the different hybrid cloud, and also the overlay performance. There's going to be huge value in that in terms of solving network problems. >> Are the telcos a bottleneck to the future or is 5G going to solve all that, or? >> Telcos are a partner, and more than 50% of our business is done with the telco. So it's us working with the telco and then going eventually to the enterprise. >> And they're moving at the speed that you want em to move? They're saddled with pressures on costs and network function virtualization, and it's a complicated problem. >> Right, as you heard Pat say in the morning, the telcos are going through a dramatic change. Because they're shifting away from this custom proprietary hardware infrastructure into a completely software driven world, right? And so the telco is a critical partner. They are virtualizing their own network, they are virtualizing the core of the network using VMware and other technologies, and as they're doing that, they're virtualizing what goes out to the enterprise customer. And the network virtualization piece, of course, is built on SD-WAN. One thing I wanted to add to what Steve said, is that we collect almost 10 billion flow records a day. From across all of our 150,000 sites, and this is a treasure trove of information. It is this information that allows us to develop the next generation algorithms. We're the only ones who have that much information that is collected, it's rich information, it's about how the network performs, how the applications are, where it is going, how the application workloads are. And using this we generate the next generation algorithms that'll optimize the networks and make them more secure. >> And that is the benefit of SaaS, the beautiful thing about having a SaaS platform, easy to stand up, the data becomes a really critical aspect for making the network smarter, to your point, this is all those data points. It's an operating, sounds like an operating system to me. >> It's a highly distributed network operating system. >> Guys, thanks for coming on, great insight. Final question to end the segment, as two co-founders and entrepreneurs, when you started VeloCloud, knowing what's going on today, explain in your entrepreneurial mind, where this is going, because this isn't your, as they say, grandfather's SD-WAN market anymore. It's really turning into, quite frankly, next generation networking, next generation software, you mentioned it's network operating system, it's one big distributed network. And all these new things are happening, what's the vision? Is this what you thought it would be when you guys started? >> Well, you know, the amazing this is many startups usually go through a pivot, right? They start off as one thing and maybe more than one pivot, in fact, I think it was a couple of years ago that we just for grins, looked at the first few slides that Steve has made when we had got started. For our seed investor, where we actually had absolutely nothing! And it was, actually is very true, the graphics were very very poor, other than that the idea of moving to the cloud and using the cloud as the network, even at that time we said the cloud is the network. That has not changed. And so, the enduring vision here is that regardless of where you are, you're on laptops right now, clients could be sensors, actuators, all of this is going to go through a network cloud. And that network cloud is going to be responsible for getting you to any final destination. Whether it's your nearby container or whether it's running in some public cloud. And so the vision is trust the network, it's going to make sure that it'll figure out whether you should be on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or LTE or 5G or whatever have you. You just say this application's important to me. The network is going to take care of the rest of it. >> Well you guys are certainly music to our ears, we love network effects, we think network effects is not just the way media is today but also technology, the network is all interconnected it's all instrumented, you can get the data. There's no blindspots, if you can instrument it, you can automate it. You guys are pioneers, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Good to have ya. >> Thank you. >> CUBE coverage here, 10 years covering VWworld, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)