(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for our CUBE Conversation, taking a little break from the shows as we get ready, actually, for the winter break which will be a nice little break for us and the crews and the gear. This is different, exciting. It's a little bit more intimate. We're really excited to have our next guest. He's Sunil Khandekar. He's the founder and CEO of Nuage Networks which is part of Nokia, a CUBE alumni. I think we last saw you at DockerCon 2016. >> That's right. >> Jeff: So, great to see you. >> Good to see you again. >> Absolutely, so, been a little more than a year. >> Sunil: That's right. >> So, what do you see as the evolution since we last spoke at DockerCon? >> Sure, it's been great. I couldn't be more pleased with the momentum that we have garnered in the industry: more adoption of our solution, more validation, more events, more customers. >> Jeff: (chuckling) >> Which is great, that's all good stuff. And really, more specifically, in terms of adoption, large service providers across the globe like BT, Telefonica, TELUS, Exponential-e, they're all adopted and launched with our SDN solution. We have had breakthrough wins in terms of public cloud whether it's Fujitsu or whether it's an NTD Data like China Mobile. And of course, you know we continue to have a solid momentum in financial services companies, for private cloud automation, as well as to provide them security software to find security in addition to the private cloud automation. And we had another breakthrough win in China Pacific Insurance Company. So, that continues, and of course it's great always to receive some good validation. So we've won award at MEF on the best SDN solution recently. We won the Right Stuff Award, Innovation Award at ONUG for software-defined security. And every leading analyst firm, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, IHS Markit, ACG, and recently Global Data, they've all put us in the top two as the inventors for doing automation of networking end-to-end. >> Right, because automation in networking was the last piece of kind of the virtualization stack, right, in the automation. So, what is it that you think that you guys are doing special that's allowing you to win? >> Right, so if you remember when we talked, when we started Nuage, we started Nuage to automate networking end-to-end with a software-based approach at the heart of which is a declarative policy and analytics engine. And what that means is we were doing intent-based networking before it was even a thing. >> Jeff: Right. >> And we were doing software-defined networking but in a way that allowed us to do software-defined networking not only in the data center, between the data centers to the public cloud across the wide area and to the enterprise branches. What that means is you're not providing a siloed automation, but we are doing automation end-to-end because ultimately it's about connecting users to the applications. >> Right, right, you had a great quote. I picked it up in doing some research. You know, the metaproblem is you said, "Connect users everywhere to applications everywhere," a really simple kind of statement of purpose but not very simple to execute. >> Sunil: You got it. >> A lot of complexity behind that statement. >> That's right, that's right, incredible amount of complexity, but it's important to construct the metaproblem, look at what it is that enterprises have pain with. They have, let's look at it, right? They have users everywhere, and they want to connect to applications anywhere whether it's private or public cloud. How do they want to do it? Quickly, securely, in a self-service manner, but they want this agility without sacrificing safety and security. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So what you have is you've got to solve this network automation problem for brownfield or greenfield, because there is nothing like just greenfields. >> Right. >> And we are to do it in their private data centers. You've got to help them burst into the public cloud securely. And you've got to connect all their branch sites together. And what we've seen in the industry and our competitors, they are taking a very narrow view of the problem. So what they have is an automation for only the data centers and automation for just the wide area. And that's only solving half the problem. >> Right, right, and then you've got these pesky things that have just reestablished the expected behavior, the expected access, and oh, by the way, added significantly more attack surfaces and really changed the game in terms of what people want from their applications, what they expect from their applications. And it's tough for businesses to deliver to this level of promise. >> Indeed, and you know, the wall is about instant gratification. You want access to your data quickly, instantly wherever you are. >> Right. >> And what that means is, as consumers, we have everything at our fingertips. But as soon as you step into the business environment, that's completely not true. And so, it's all about consumerization of IT on how do you make IT that agile, how do you actually modernize IT. Because enterprises, their high-order problem is what? To innovate faster by having massive automation across all aspects of their business. What underpins that is a modern IT and cloud architecture. And what underpins modern IT and cloud architecture is three clear things that we are seeing in the industry: software-defined data centers, software-defined wide area network, and software-defined security. So, we like and our customers love that we've thought the problem end-to-end and provide all these three, which is absolutely unique in the industry. No one does this. >> So, I'm curious to get your perspective cause you've been doing this for awhile. >> Sunil: Yes. >> As the security landscape has changed. >> Sunil: That's right. >> Everyone is getting, we get reports every day, we're numb to it now. You know, basically everyone at Yahoo got hacked. >> Sunil: That's right. >> And Equifax got hacked, so everyone's getting hacked. So it's really not about the big wall anymore. There's no such thing as the big wall. >> Sunil: That's right. >> The wall's about crumbled. So it's evolving. We've also seen an increase in state-sponsored attacks as opposed to just kids having fun in the basement. >> Sunil: Yeah. >> How have you seen the evolution of the attacks change and how have you responded within your solutions over this period of time to kind of evolve to the modern security stance that you have to have? >> Look every CXO I meet, the absolute thing that's top of mind is how do you make us go from where we are, a traditional environment, to a higher edge automated environment but make it more secure than what we have. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And as you noted, the attack surface has increased thanks to the mobility. And you have a lot more surface area because you have applications in public cloud, you have applications in private cloud, you have more mobile users. So, the industry term that often gets used is microsegmentation. Now, what that means is, and that's in response to the fact that, as you noted again, that perimeter security just doesn't cut it anymore. And not only that, but it's also very complex and very manual. So what you've got to do is, while you're automating the data centers, while you're automating the wide area, you've got to bring the security along. You've got to make it as agile. And again, what we have done is we do microsegmentation from the branch all the way to where the application is for that particular user. So in other words, finance users can only access finance applications. And that's a microsegment end-to-end. No one in the industry does that today. What they do is they do microsegmentation only for the applications within the data center or they prevent just the users to communicate between each other but not users to the applications. So, that is very important for our customers to know that we have that capability. But then it's all about also understanding what's going on in the network. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that's where the rich analytics that we have just really help them understand who's talking to who at application level, and being able to then have that domain-wide view and be able to very quickly respond to CERT alerts. So, because today, when a CERT alert comes in, they don't know what to do. They take a brute force approach because they simply don't know where and how to react. But now, because you have this centralized intelligence and you have domain-wide view, and you're able to do microsegmentation end-to-end, you are able to push a button and be as course or as granular but be very surgical and take action very quickly. >> Alright, so, hard to believe that we're almost to the end of 2017 which I can't believe. So as we turn the calendar, what are some of your priorities for 2018? You've been doing this for awhile. What are you working on? What's kind of top of mind as we enter this new calendar year? >> Right, and what we are noticing is we're going from beachheads to mainstream. So, we are getting deployed. The solid deployments is not only as I noted in data centers, in public cloud, private cloud, but also in the wide area. We are collaborating with our customers to really make this mainstream because it is super-important in terms of not only providing that automation and agility but also the security. So that's what we are focused on. We continue to do that, not only for what we call the virtualized security services solution that we have and not only the telco clouds, but also the virtualized services, cloud services. We're going to cover the gamut and that's what we're after. We are really excited to be leading the charge here. >> Alright, well, Sunil, thanks for taking a few minutes. Hopefully it won't be 18 months before we sit down again. And we look forward to watching the progress. >> Great, thank you. Thank you for having me. >> It's a pleasure. He's Sunil. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

live from Seattle Washington it's the cube covering dr. Kahn 2060 brought to you by dr. now you're your host John furrier and Brian Grace Lee okay welcome back and we are here live in Seattle Washington for Doc archon 2016 this is SiliconANGLE media is the cubes our flagship program and go out to the events and extract the signal from noise I'm John fourth by coach Brian Grace Lee our next guests Emil khandekar was the CEO of nuage networks part of Nokia welcome to the cube thank you to see you right so my doctor madness is really exploding in the developer community certainly galvanizing the digital transformation at the end of the day we always say in the cube the network's a bottleneck you got it and it's really about what's under the hood we just had talked to head biggest startup about storage you see a lot of disruption certainly and how infrastructures being technology being developed and make it more programmable yeah where is the story with the network where's that fit in what's the updates there because this is the day that's a critical piece of the pie indeed absolutely for ultimately for apps to be deployed on the network on any infrastructure as you said network has to get out of the way to create that developer efficiency to allow for applications to be deployed very quickly and how do you make that happen because containers are really being talked about we are the conference 4,000 plus people fantastic however CIOs know that they have not only the container technology to deal with but they have virtual eyes were closed and have had those words will eyes were closed for a long time they have bare metal servers that are supporting applications that probably will never move for a while so you have these very changing very dynamic environment and you have to understand how the networking can tie those things together seamlessly that's where we come in as much networks because your networks is essentially Sdn venture of Nokia and what we have at large networks what we've done is it's a modern Network policy based automation platform that allows for any workload whether it's a virtualized workload weather is a container workload whether it's a bare-metal server all to come together and be stitched automatically to allow for that application to be deployed quickly how is that different from other Sdn cloud architectures right you guys are doing within Nokia right so first and foremost what we have is it's a platform that we've built it's a virtualized services automation platform it's not a point solution for only the data center assets to be automated or only the SD when as it's called branch to be automated what it is it's is declarative policy-based automation platform that allows for which is open by the way completely open incorporates open source technologies and allows for all types of workloads if it's in and across data centers so virtualized workloads bare-metal workloads existing were closed as well as incorporates different hypervisor and cloud management system technologies and allows for connection to the branch and to the white area so you're saying it was built for cloud in mind is that what it was very much built for cloud enablement in mind making sure that we didn't forget on the way the existing environment and what you're seeing in the difference really between us and other platforms that are out there is essentially some of the SDN platforms are mono if you will and very narrow sliver they're based only for the data center and work on it on only on a mono hypervisor technology or some platforms are only looking at the SD van branch platform then were meant is such that you want and the cios want automation platform that is consistent across private on-prem as well as public resources and works across multiple hypervisor technologies and the big deal there is because you say point technologies but that that's code word for the older older approaches which was you know back in the mini-computer land days internet internet working you stand up some networks have policies and certainly policy based in a packet management and that was it that's right and you manage it within the data center that's right and that was adequate at that time so a vertically integrated stack in that simplified environment was adequate now now have such a variety of use cases you have got to deal with the cloud native applications you go to deal with the older applications but you need a consistent platform because ultimately you're looking to align ID to business needs and how do you align idea to business needs you do that by getting the networking out of the way and creating automation but again delivering operational simplification getting network out of the way I love that I you know a lot of CIOs are CEOs are seeing startups get into their industry you know if you're in pure and automobiles there's people that are trying to disrupt you you're in hotels everybody knows about those would what what is that you know they go great i can go hire some application developers i want to go faster yeah somebody says gilts get the network out of the way who are who are you selling to them what who is that person that says that sounds great but i still got to figure out routing and i got to figure out security i got to make it highly available who's the decision-maker in your world these days great great question Brian so a couple of points one these days any large enterprise that is looking to IT to create differentiation for their core business and if that means almost every large enterprises rely on IT heavily for their requirements as well as to create a differentiation for their own for product whatever it might be but they saw tomato its farmers pharmaceutical its retail those are indeed the customer that we are talking to because what they have is their environment has shifted as John said earlier it's not very simply a simple environment the environment will become complicated and to do that the networking requirements have become a very sophisticated as in you need application isolation you need multi-tenancy you need the ability to deploy policy very very quickly you need effortless governance of your security policies and compliance you need to be able to stitch all these were close together and also have a strategy for private and public cloud what that means is you need the technologies that were available to the top of the if you will only tier one service providers and bring that to the enterprise's and that's what we have done what use can you what use cases specifically around containers and policy do you see out there okay you specific yeah absolutely so I'll give you an example of a customer that was in OpenStack betfair is online betting and we have my cubes yeah that's right you had richard i say i believe and and what they have is they have 100 million plus transactions in a day on their infrastructure dare use cases continuous integration anything that did that scale at that scale and and so they're using the wash to basically create that automation for all their workloads that's one use case the other use cases we have a very large fortune five company that is looking to use the watch for automation of their virtualized machines so they have a cloud stack and they have kvm based hypervisor with virtual as virtual machines and they're using containers with measles and watch is the only platform that's allowing them to stitch these environments together seamlessly apply the same policy and same so you guys are a platform for a cloud native like environment with existing infrastructure you bring those together we bring that together in a highly automated way and then we allow for security very important security as in we prevent you know spread of mile there we die very quickly being able to enforce the policies we provide multi-tenancy doctors a huge security nightmare because just as much the benefits can interoperate with I mean the applications can be put in containers so good viruses exactly a naked scale and that's what our job is to make sure that how do you do it it doesn't do that because by able to very quickly enforce policies and Quarantine the workload so upon detection of malware our system gets a notification based on that notification we are able to because we have full view of all the workloads whether they are in private data center of public data center or in the branch we can very quickly then quickly effectively and surgically quarantine that workload because we know exactly where that workload is and we know exactly the policy to enforce this also helps by the way this system also helps by you know you get a security threat alert today it's it's a brute-force approach you go down and shut down a segment now with this policy based automation you go to the policy and you say I want only this application to not be allowed to do use this protocol and instantly that policy is deployed yeah I'm sort of picking up on two things you talk about sort of end and the platform for everywhere a lot of that's because we don't have boundaries anymore you know mobile phone changes a boundary that its executive office people are moving around so you need to be you need to have that sort of end end visibility you don't have segmentation like you used to and you talk about policy you know I need to be able as a developer to go network team I need you to sort of give me a service and then I just want to call it I don't want to have to call you I might be working at two at night we might have to change something on the fly like that's why the policy piece is so important is that right you are absolutely correct Brian and that is so critical because ultimately what ID is struggling with is how do they enforce the governance the security governance when application needs to be deployed I teak generally gets in the way not because they want to because they want to enforce certain security certain compliance policies and until now it has always been that manual process now with the security policy based infrastructure what they are able to do is they are able to put the policy once and they're insured that that policy is deployed seamlessly across all their workloads and so they have to audit the policy once and it's guaranteed provisioning which is error-free provisioning so it's huge in terms of the ability for enterprises to react to problems but also any changes the agility this brings the system brings to the table because ultimately you know without the network there is really no cloud and this is why we're hearing people talk about sec ops and sec DevOps and really security integrated without automation consistently automatable same thing every single time absolutely we have a one customer which is again a very large financial base in New York and their issue was exactly that in terms of being able to when I'm talking their CSO and the chief security officer the biggest thing that they took away from our policy based automation was not only the ability to able to stitch all these environments together seamlessly but being able to provide compliance being able to provide the automated policy infrastructure for all their birth was being able to really provide that application isolation those are big deals yeah very big deals for the CX those and csos Sonia we gotta wrap but I want to get your final thoughts on nuage and Nokia like you spend a minute talk about the distinction between the branding of the sea of nuage honestly the name is different I'll see Nokia is big you guys are part of that yes I explain to the people watching what you guys are about size scope the kind of engagement revenue or and how that compares and contrasts to nokia which we're part of but integers so we had a wholly-owned SD inventor of nokia and what we are focusing on is this policy based automation network automation for the data centers wide area and the branches nokia provides us tremendous sponsorship they are very much behind cash is and they recognize the value in our ability to serve the largest of the largest enterprise customers but also because of nokia we are able to address and are involved in very large service Reuters of projects so that's what helps us be involved they have huge scale so the way we work is we focus on over RND the innovation we bring to the table the community that we serve but nokia provides us and the reach yeah reporting the resources but you're wholly-owned meaning you run and run independently if you will we are yes but we are fully owned by nokia we just operate and focus on this it allows us to number customers can you share some data yeah and if we completed two years in the market and in two years we have over 60 plus customers we have over 200 deployments that we have completed pilot trials and deployments but we have 60 Plus very large service droid our customers cloud service providers for huge integrations and also the very big very big enterprise customers i named a couple of Fortune five companies but we are in retail we are in high tech we are in health care the new fabric your new fabric in these big high scale infrastructures that have diverse needs and diverse workloads there and have the need to stitch all that together in a cohesive fashion to build that automated fabric for a poseable almost right composable yeah to ultimately bring agility and align ID to the business I love the word composable infrastructure it really treats the infrastructure is programmable which is the nirvana make it an invisible make it get out of the way get out of the way but yet make it effortless I leave highly performing too so indeed heuer high-performance invisible that's right that's infrastructure as code and Neil thanks for sharing your insight here and the cube really appreciate nuage networks the CEO here on the cube live at da Kirk on I'm John Foley Brian Grace Lee we write back you're watching the cube