(upbeat instrumental music) >> Presenter: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE, covering dot .NEXT Conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live production of Nutanix .NEXT Conference here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program, also fresh off the keynote stage, the founder, CEO and Chairman of the publicly traded, Nutanix. Dheeraj Pandey, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you for your time by the way. >> Dheeraj, it's always a pleasure. One of the things we say about theCUBE is we want to take those conversations that we're having at events in the industry and share them out, and we've had the opportunity to have many of them over the years. So to start off with, when you take us back, some of the keynote you say five years ago couldn't really predict what was going to happen now. Yet I talked in our open here, the first interview that we did with you back in 2012, talking about the challenges over time in distributed architectures, it's more real today than it was back in 2012. Cloud has matured and is a little bit more nuanced today. The application space is exploding and changing more than ever. I guess inside a little bit, when you talk about the vision that you had for Nutanix, any major learnings on things that have surprised you along the way? And what things have played out exactly like you thought they would? >> Well, let's start with the easy one, which is the way things have played out, what we wanted them to play out like. I think the idea of commoditization of hardware, the fact that things will become pure software, all these hardware devices should look like apps was one of our sort of big prognosis early on, like six, seven, eight years ago. And largely, everybody is talking about software-defined everything. And that's not to say that hardware doesn't play a role, it's just that it becomes more invisible in the sense that with software running on top, and the fact that you have economies of scale coming with standardization in hardware, a lot of things will move to pure software. That's really worked out well. Disaggregation has worked out well in our favor. The fact that you'd stop buying big things and you start small and pay zero. I think consumerization has really, I mean and this is a word that is a cliche in many senses but what does it mean to have consumer-grade experience of enterprise grade systems, which is a paradox in itself to say that if consumer-grade experience with enterprise grade systems, but I think that has turned out really well for us. And in the staying power of everything eventually is can you build reliable systems? Can you build highly available systems? I mean, because building trust with the enterprise is really hard, and there's lots of startups that has come and gone, that have over-promised and under-delivered, and I think that's one of the things that has really worked in our favor to be really methodical and robust with the way we build our systems, especially the backend systems. And it's showing up in the front end of the world. Surprise, surprise, I think the fact that it's mega distributed now, not just distributed because distributed over LAN is one thing, but distributed over WAN is a very different thing altogether and you need to really think about the basic tenets of computer science, about state and migration and caching. And a lot of this is coherency, consistency, availability, network partitioning, there's a lot of things you need to think about in a very different way than you used to think about on a LAN itself, so... >> Yeah, I want to drill into one of those things. The move to a software model, you and I talked since the early days and Nutanix, at its core, it's software that you do. Changing how people think and consume and boy, getting the financial arm of companies, your channel partners, your salespeople and your customers, that's a challenging piece there. There was one of the customers I've already talked to this week that said one of the things we always had was I buy stuff and you tend to over buy and you could never kind of shrink down. Now, I go to a software model, I have a certain piece of it that I really understand and then I buy, and I can even kind of dial back as needed. Maybe explain some of the nuances and some of those changes. You know, how's the field doing with this? How's the channel adopting to this, and any customer stories? >> Yeah, I think there's, especially for ambitious companies, there's always a Netflix moment, there's always an Adobe Omniture moment. Look at these companies 10 years ago, Adobe was a $3 billion company in 2007. But they said we need to dramatically look at consumption model as the big differentiator going forward actually. Even though they had digitized blockbuster and Hollywood videos and so on, they said it's not enough. We need to digitize even further. I mean, Apple had digitized music with $0.99 songs, but the music player itself needed digitization, and I think that's what happened with iPhone bringing a music player on as an app itself. Photographers digitized, you know because you could now do JPEG files back and forth in emails, but the camera itself made further digitization and the camera became an app. So I think there's multiple layers of digitization that needs to happen. I think as a company, we've digitized a lot of hardware devices. But as a company, we had to digitize ourselves even further. This is our digital transformation. The fact that you can consume Nutanix in ways that are even more invisible, the fact that you can try out Nutanix, kick the tires on Nutanix, run it in your favorite server that you want. And then after you like it, you call us. You know, all of a sudden, the sales funnel is warmer because whenyou look at sales funnel, you don't need people up there to really go do a POC and kick the tires and technology and so on. So software provides access, which is probably at the core of an operating system. If you don't have access, if you don't feel distributable, then you'll always stay at the mercy of the appliance gravity. Because appliance's gravity, it's hardware, you need to ship things as physical objects being shipped, there is logistics, there is capital expenditure, there's a lot things involved that really keeps you sort of anchored to the bottom. And the only way to unleash this is to really bring more digital delivery models, and software is one such thing. Now our sales teams like starting this quarter, are being paid on software only as opposed to on the hardware itself. And we're doing things in the channel that makes it really unique because the customer experience doesn't have to change. In some sense, we're really saying can we have the cake and eat it too? And that's what we're really doing so that the two north, which is customer experience, doesn't take any kind of hit while we can actually look at going and selling the value of software itself. And as you know about Xi, I mean, just doing software alone is just the first step towards digital transformation. And the further digitization is, when nothing is visible on-prem for Nutanix, everything is totally invisible and you can swipe a credit card, you can sign up in a matter of seconds, I think that is where the real epitome of digitalization will be for the company. >> So let's talk about the impact of becoming a software company. I love some of the stories that he says, the ability to download software and kick the tires. I've seen some really geeky stuff, people running prism on bare metal clouds, there's use cases that I didn't really consider. What are some of the more interesting things that your partners and customers are doing that you didn't expect? Like, what's the surprises? >> Well, it starts with the tinkerers. The most important thing about any good software company is tinkerers do things that you never imagined you could do. And it comes down to API, then it comes down to access. Like I have an app on my iPhone, it's called iBeer. Now Apple opened up its oscilloscope, its accelerometer, its compass, and now you can basically fill up beer in your iPhone and you can drink it and it burps for you as well. I don't think the company knew that when it opens up an API. You know, what other possibilities, what kind of apps people will build? I think community addition has been at the core of access for us. People can just download it on an Intel NUC and do things with it. In fact, the NUC is part of a drone now so you can actually have an entire data center in a drone, and the drones can replicate to each other and failover from each other. In fact, we're talking to a lot of very large oil and gas and remote vertical organizations, which are really looking for what does it mean to miniaturize a datacenter? And then at the same time, do very serious stuff in it, back it up, encrypt it, compress it, replicate it, all sorts of things, even put event processing. Like, how do you put a Casca bus on a mini PC-sized server, I think, palm-sized server? These are all the things that we hadn't imagined three, four or five years ago. But the fact that Nutanix can be shrunk wrapped into a palm-sized server, it takes this possibility to the edge, to the next level, actually. >> So the show floor is growing, you hit on API, critical part of building an ecosystem to becoming a true platform player. What are some of the more impressive parts of growth from (mumbles) ecosystem? >> I would bring it back to all the applications. We've done a tremendous job of applications on Nutanix. So if you look at north, south and east, west, I always look at things north, south, east, west, north, south is apps and hardware. So hardware platforms and apps on top of us. I think we've done a really good job with that. East, west, you know, look at data protection, business continuity, security. A lot of those companies are actually part of our overall ecosystem. And we still are not happy. I think we have to do an even better job. But what's the MuleSoft equivalent in infrastructure? Nobody thinks of integration in the operating system world today. It's mostly point-to-point. Okay, I am Nutanix, you're Arista, we'll do point-to-point. I am Nutanix, you are F5, we'll do point-to-point. What if there's a real event bus where you could just publish topics and you become a radio station? There's TiVo and because you can go back in time, look at three days ago what events happened and so on. There's a whole aspect of putting a multicast tree of events that becomes a real groundswell of integration between different kinds of appliances, virtual appliances, physical appliances, hardware below us, software above us. I think that has yet to happen in the industry. And a lot of our developers are now talking about like what's the MuleSoft for Nutanix? So I think there's a lot of innovation that infrastructure has not seen because we always think differently than apps. What if we thought like app companies? We'd do things like app companies. And you'd see us in the next couple of years do something really interesting with, build a system bus which are the pub/sub like model as opposed to a RESTful request/response-like model actually. >> Dheeraj, gives us a little more color on some of those partnerships. I've seen Google and IBM on stage in the past. You're now over a billion dollars in revenue, public company, so I have to imagine some of these companies treat you a little differently. And the ones I kind of initially want to hear of, but you're welcome to run with it is, the server players and the cloud players is, how you see, how much can it just be we do our thing and how much do they need to work with you? >> Yeah, absolutely. Well a billion is still a small number. We're more like VMware of '07. And VMware of '07 was still a test and dev company by the way. They hadn't done anything production at all. People are still tinkering with databases and Microsoft apps and so on in '07. So we are small, we're still not a very big company. I think there's a lot of headroom for us in the coming years. The thing is that we've taken the tougher route by the way. Tougher route being we didn't have to sell ourselves to EMC, which is what VMware did. If you think about it, that asset was worth 60 billion eventually. Was sold for 600 million. It was a 100x smaller price to EMC. Because they actually seeded the ground on go to market. (mumbles) It's really hard, we need EMC to go and really do the distribution in peace. And as a company, we said no, no, I think there is value in building go to market on our own. I mean, look at our cap table. Our cap table is clean, we have dual class, voting structure and things like that. The things that VMware would die for, looking at from a financial investor point of view that we have that they don't, because we took the tougher route to really come to build a business. Now if you talk about hardware companies below us, and when I said below, I don't mean pejoratively, but you know, the stuff that runs underneath us, >> Stu: Southbound. (chuckles) >> I think NX has been a great way to build a market because if you hadn't done supermicro, we wouldn't be here actually. I mean, this architecture would have been a child's play, a science project, foreign tinkerer, most of them what it has become over time because the server vendors took note. They said, oh you can actually come and displace me? I would rather work with you because there's a lot of value we can bring to the table as well. So in that vein I think what we've done with Dell, what we've done with Lenovo, what we are doing with IBM, Fujitsu, and what we're doing with HP's and Cisco's channel partners, there's a lot of regional love that's forming on the ground with HP's and Cisco's channel partners and sales people because sales people are less political than headquarters. And think about strategy tax that headquarter face versus what sales people do. Sales people, I just saw a tweet, I think you talked about an HPE sales guy saying, you've got to bring Nutanix to the table because they really respect market forces. For them, market forces are most powerful actually. And above us and in the cloud, I think definitely a lot of work that we're doing in Google GCP. But I think you know, as bare-metal opens up from these other providers, we probably would be very interested to see exactly how Nutanix Xi works in bare metals of these public cloud providers. >> So you guys disrupt yourself. There was NX, business was doing fine. You guys are starting to build a reputation to being able to support the large enterprise with NX, some of the logistic challenges that you had as a small organization you were starting to overcome, but you decided you know what, you're going to untether yourself, let's zoom out of the industry. If you looked at the industry and say you know what, the advantage that Nutanix has because we're willing to disrupt ourselves, what are the tethers that remain in the industry that you're happy to go before your customers and say you know what, Nutanix doesn't have these tethers and if we did, we'll easily disrupt ourselves again. What's the competitive advantage? >> Hmmm, I think it's a great question. In fact it is the competitive advantage to say that the glass is half-full and it's not a zero-sum game. Because there's two kinds of people in the world. There's the zero-sum mindsets people who actually always think that if somebody is winning, the other must lose. And then there's growth mindset people who actually feel like of course legacy will get disrupted, but the new guys will actually make further progress, future progress. So as a builder, there's a bias in me and many of us out there in Nutanix that you need to have a growth mindset. And then the growth mindset, just giving a software to an OEM partner doesn't mean that it will shrink yours. It's possible that there's going to be more word-of-mouth, and the market forces will actually appreciate that. I mean, eventually, if somebody had a great relationship with Dell, Lenovo or HP or Cisco or IBM, we'd love to do business with them. And we have to relax some constraints because at the end of the day, this is still not our cloud. Now in Xi we can do whatever we want. But when we're walking to the customer, saying we want to build a cloud with you, with you is an important work. It's not for you, it's with you. And with you would mean that we'll have to bend a little bit backwards to relax the constraints away. And that's exactly what we've done. No one else has done this. Same is true for hypervisors. I mean, look at VMware. We go in there and we don't start talking about VMware right away. Like you know what, let's talk about architecture, let's talk about migration, let's talk about security, automation, and some day we'll certainly talk about whether you need to pay for a hypervisor. I think we'll do the same things with data protection and other things we're doing networking and so on. We're not going to just come in and say this is us and nothing else matters. API is everything. I mean, think of consumer companies. They've always competed with their partners and they've done a good job at it. They're like, look, at the end of the day, Spotify, their competitor, Apple music competes with it, but I'm not going to not give them a level playing field. Google Maps, Apple Maps compete. Keynote, Number, Pages competes with Microsoft Office. And I think the best companies are very good at being comfortable. Amazon the retailer, they fulfill more than I would say half their things not from their warehouse but someone else's warehouse, and both parties make money, actually. It's the growth mindset that creates large companies. >> Dheeraj, you're a technical founder, have great success with the company. You know, it's still one of the things I've loved in our journey on theCUBE, is being able to document companies that we knew from the early days and got over 2,500 employees now. >> Dheeraj: Actually, more than 3,500. >> 3,500. Congratulations. As you talk to people in the Valley or your travels around the world, what advice do you give to potential future entrepreneurs, people that are sitting like you did in the early days and have a vision for the future? >> Well, I've gotten a little more philosophical about organizational building. At the core of companies that are building and growing over time, is how do you keep reducing friction? And it's not just friction with customers and partners, also friction within. Because orgs grow and you need to, if you look at organisms, you know we have mitosis where cells divide themselves and become smaller cells and even smaller cells and so on. There's a division of labor, there's specialization, there's all sorts of things that actually happen as organisms themselves. I think an org is like an organism. And over time, there's a lot of accumulated stress that develops. And if you don't really go and address it, you're not a company, you're basically a business that doesn't understand culture. So what I talked about with a lot of entrepreneurs is really fuzzy words like how do you become authentic in what you do? Like, I was in Bloomberg and I talked about the difficulties with Xi. At the end of the day, most people, maybe not the 10, 15, 20% impressionables, but most people appreciate authenticity. And we're like, that is vulnerable, and being vulnerable is the best way to build a relationship actually. So I talk about vulnerability and trust and organizational design and reducing friction and things of that nature because once you are so many people, it's all about reducing friction. >> All right, well Dheeraj, one of the things people I know love about this show is you bring speakers that get us thinking authenticity. Hopefully one of the reasons why you bring theCUBE to the event. So thank you so much for joining us again. Always a pleasure. >> Pleasure. >> All right, Keith Townsend and I, Stu Miniman, will be back with lots more coverage here of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2018 in New Orleans. You're watching theCUBE. (technorock music)

(light music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special CUBE Conversation here in SiliconANGLE Media's, Palo Alto Studio. Happy to bring back to the program Haseeb Budhani who, last time I talked to Haseeb, Haseeb worked at a number of interesting startups, been a Chief Product Officer, had many various roles, and today, is a founder and CEO. So, we always love to have back CUBE alums, especially doing interesting things, getting out there with that entrepreneurial spirit, so, Haseeb, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to see you and the first time you and I met, the stage was not as nice as this. That was many, many, many years ago. >> You know, we've been growing up a bit, just like the ecosystems around us. You and I talked about things like replication, changing with data and storage and everything else in various roles so, Rafay Systems, tell us a little bit. What was the inspiration? Tell us a little bit about the founding team, the why the company first. >> Sure. As you know, right before Rafay Systems, I started a company called Soha. Soha was acquired by Akamai 18 odd months ago. I think we all, we learn by failing. There was one specific thing we did very poorly at Soha, which was how we ran operations, how we thought about getting closer to our users and so on, that once we left Akamai, so my co-founder from Soha and I are doing this company again together, he was our VP of Attorney there, he's our VP of Attorney here. When we left Akamai after our stint there, we spent time thinking about what kind of applications have, when you kind of think in terms of an application stack, some microservices in an application stack are always going to need to be as close to the end point as possible. So we were trying to figure out who has that problem and how do they solve it. So, here's what we found. Many, many applications have this problem, nobody knows how to solve it well. I mean, if you think Siri, there's an edge that Apple is running for that. If you think eBay, there's transactions happening in region and so on. Or when you think IoT, there are edges being created in the IoT world, and we wanted to come up with a framework or a platform to solve these problems well for all these different application developers. So we came up with the concept that we call the Programmable Edge. The idea is that we want to help our customers run certain microservices, the ones that are latency sensitive, as close to their end points as possible. And an end point could be a car, it could be a phone, it could be a sensor, doesn't matter what it is, but we want to help them get their applications out as quickly as possible. >> Yeah. Before we get into some of the technology, Rafay Systems, Soha Systems, where did the names for these come from? >> Soha is my daughter's name. Rafay is my son's name. We have two kids. I don't know what I'm going to do after this. I need a job. I don't know what I'm going to do after this company. But, actually, our VP Marketing at Soha, he was the one who wanted to use his name. So when we started the previous company, I called it Bubble Wrap, because I thought we were wrapping apps in a bubble, I thought that was really cool. Everybody hated it. (laughs) >> Yeah, there are too many puns on popping the bubble or things like that, it would be challenging. >> I thought it was, I still think it's awesome, but nobody liked it. So, he was looking for a name and we had hired a new agency, they were ready to roll out a new website, we didn't have a name. So, in, like, a four hour window, we had to come up with something. He says, "That's a short enough name "and looks like you own the domain anyway, "let's just use that." Of course, my kids love it. Then once we started the second company, it had to be named after my son. >> Your daughter wasn't a little upset that you sold off the company and now have nothing to do with it? >> It was a pretty healthy outcome so I think she's fine. (both laughing) >> Excellent. Talking about microservices applications around the globe. I was at the Adobe Summit recently and, you're right, it's a very different conversation than, say, ZDNs in the past. But it's, "How many instances do I have? "How do I manage that? "What's their concern?" Networking's always been one of those underlying challenges. Think back to the failed XSPs in the 90s, (Haseeb laughs) and when Cloud started 10 plus years ago, it was like, "Oh, are we going to be able to handle that today?" Think back to Citrix and their NetScaler product is one of those secret sauce things in there that those of us in the networking space really understand it but most people, "Oh, SAS is going to be great "and things will just work anywhere on any device anywhere." But there's some real challenges there. >> Haseeb: Absolutely. >> What's that big gap in the market and are there other companies that are trying to help solve this? >> I used to work in NetScaler a long time ago. I don't know if you brought it up because of that, but I think it's an incredibly amazing product that became the foundation of many things. I think two things are happening in our industry that allow companies like ours to exist, at least from an applications perspective. One is containers, the fact that we are now able to package things not as big, fat VMs, but smaller, essentially, process level things. And then microservices, the fact that we have this notion of loose coupling between services and you can have certain APIs that expose things to each other. And if you at least thematically think about it, if there's a loose coupling it can extend them out so long as I get more value out of doing so. And that, fundamentally, is what we think is an interesting thing happening out there. The fact that there are loose couplings, the fact that applications are no longer monolithic allows us to make better decisions about what needs to run where. The challenge is how do you make that happen? The example I always share with people is, let's say, let's imagine for a second that you have access to 100,000 regions all around the world. You have edges everywhere, 100,000 locations where you can run your code. What do you do next? How do you decide which ones you need? Do you need 5,000? Do you need 80,000? That needs to be solved by the platform. We are at a point now, particularly when it comes to locations, that these are no longer decisions that an Ops Team can make. That has to be driven by the platform and the platform that we are envisioning is going to help our customers, basically, in terms of where the code goes, how they think about performance, et cetera. These are things that will be expressed as a policy to our platform and we help them determine where the location should be and so on. >> Alright. Haseeb, I think many of us lost too many hours fighting in the industry of, what was cloud, What wasn't cloud, various definitions, those ontological discussions, academically they make sense. Heck, when I talk to customers today it's not like, "Well, I'm figuring out my public cloud strategy," or this and that. They have a cloud strategy because there's various pieces in there to connect. Edge is one of those. I haven't heard that people don't like the term, but if I'll talk to seven different companies, Edge means a very different thing to all of them. You and I reconnected actually when we'd both written similar articles that said, "Well, Edge does not kill the public cloud." Peter Levine wrote a very interesting piece with that eye-catching title that was like, "Well, Edge is going to have trillions of devices "and there'll be more data at the Edge than anywhere else." And it's like, okay, yes, yes, yes, but that does not mean that public cloud evaporates tomorrow, right? Nice try, Amazon, good luck on your next business. (laughs) Maybe give us a little bit your definition of Edge, but, more importantly, who are the type of customers that you're talking to and what is the opportunity and challenges of that Edge environment? >> Sure. So let's talk about what Edge means. I think we both agree that the word edge is a misnomer and depends. There are many kinds of edges, if you will. A car for a Tesla, that's an edge, right? Because they are running compute jobs on the car. I use the phrase device edge to describe that thing, the car is a device edge. You're also going to have the car talking to things out there somewhere. If two cars are interacting with each other, you don't want that interaction or the rendezvous point for that interaction being very, very far away, you want to be somewhere close by. I call that the infrastructure edge. Now, infrastructure edge, since you asked, I'm going to go down that rabbit hole, you could be running at the edge of the internet. So think Equanex or Digital or anybody who's got massive pairing presence and so on. So that's the internet edge, as far as infrastructure is concerned. But if you talk to an AT&T, because you said depending on who you talk to their idea is different, in AT&T's mind or Verizon's mind, maybe the base station is the edge, so I call that the wireless edge. Again, infrastructure. So, at a very high level, there is the device edge, there is the infrastructure edge, and then there's a cloud. Applications will span all of these things. It's not one or the other, that doesn't make any sense. Any application will have workloads that are best run in Amazon or, of course, now I think we use Amazon like TiVo, Amazon means public cloud. >> Stu: Like Kleenex. (laughs) >> Like Kleenex. >> Exactly. >> Some things will run in the core, and some things will run in the middle, and then some things will run at the edge. Now in this kind of discussion, I didn't describe another kind of edge which is the IoT edge. Within a factory, or some gas location or some oil and gas facility out there where maybe you don't even have good connectivity back to the internet. They're going to probably have an edge on prem at the factory edge. That too is a necessity. So you have lots of data being generated, they're going to put it in that location. So we should maybe stop thinking in terms of an edge, it just depending on the application that you're targeting, that application's sub-components may need to run in different places, but that makes it so much harder. We couldn't even figure out how to run things in a single region in Amazon, or two, people still have trouble running across availability zones in Amazon. Now we're saying, "Hey, you're going to have four edges, "or five edges, and you're going to have 100 locations," how is this going to work? And that is the challenge. That's, of course, the opportunity as well, because there are applications out there, I talked about the car use case, which seems to be a real use case for many car companies, particularly the ones who are going autonomous with their fleets. They have this challenge. Lots of data being generated and they need to process it as quickly as possible because there's lots of noise on the wire. This data problem, data is gravity, you want to, instead of moving data to a location where there is compute, you want to move compute as close to the data as possible. That's the trend I look for when we're looking for customers. Who has lots of data/traffic being generated at the edge? That could be a sensor company, probably do a number of IoT companies that are pushing data up and it turns out that it's a lot of data or they have compliance challenges, they're going to have PAI come out of a region. So these are some of the use cases we were looking at. These use cases are new use cases, even in older applications, there are needs that can be fulfilled with an edge. Here's an example I tend to use to describe the problem, not that this is a use case. When I talk to OVC and I'm trying to explain to them why an edge matters, at least thematically, I ask the question; if you go to an e-commerce site, how much time do you spend buying versus browsing? What is your answer? >> The buying is a very small piece of it. >> Yeah. >> But it's the most important part. >> 99% of the time is spent looking at read-only stuff. Why do we need to go back to the core if you're not buying? What if the inventory could be pushed to the edge and you can just interact and look at the inventory, and when you make a purchase decision that goes to the core? That's what's possible with the edge. In fact, I believe that some number of years down the line, that's how all applications are going to behave. The things that are read-only, state management, state validation, cookie validation for example, for authentication, these are things that are going to happen at the edge of the internet or wherever the edge happens to be, and then actual purchase decisions or state change decisions will happen in the core. >> Alright. Haseeb, explain to us where in the stack your solution fits. You mentioned everything from the hyper-scale clouds to Equanex out to devices in cars and the like, so where is your layer? Where is your secret sauce? >> So we expect to sit at the internet edge, once the wireless edge is a real thing 5G becomes out there, we expect to sit somewhere there, somewhere between the internet edge. We are, the way we think about this is there are aggregation points, on the internet, in the network, where you have need to put compute so you can make aggregate decisions across multiple devices. That's where we are building our company. In terms of the stack, we are essentially helping our customers run their compute. Think of us as a platform where customers can bring their code, if you will. Because at the end of the day it's computing. Yes, it's about traffic and data but you still need to run compute somewhere, so we are helping our customers run that compute at the internet edge or the wireless edge. >> Okay. Are your customers some of the Telcos, MSPs cloud providers and the enterprise or how does that relationship work? >> The ideal customers for us are SAS companies who are running applications on the internet that generate money. They care about performance. And they will pay money if we can cut their performance by whatever factor it happens to be. Providers, service providers, in our mind, are partners for us. So we're engaged actually with a number of providers out there who are trying to figure out how to, basically, monetize their existing infrastructure investments better. And edge is a new concept that has been introduced to them and they, as you know, a lot of providers already have edge strategies and we're trying to getting involved with them to see how we can bring more SAS companies to engage with service providers. Which is a really hard thing today. >> It sounds like you solve problem for some Fortune 1,000 customers too, though? >> Yes. >> So do they get involved also? >> Yes, look, the best way to build a startup is you come up with a thesis and very quickly go find four or five people who absolutely believe in the same thing, and they work with you. So, we've been fortunate enough to find a few folks who say, "Look, this is a problem we've been thinking "about for a while, "let's partner together to build a better solution." That's been going really well. >> Great. So, the company itself, I believe you just launched a few months ago, so. >> Haseeb: We started a few months ago. >> Where is the product? What's the state of the funding? >> How many people do you have? >> Sure. >> How many customers? >> We raised a seed round in November. Seed rounds have gotten larger as well these days. They're like the ACE from 10 years ago. We are at a point now where we are demonstrating our platform to our early customers and by early summer we expect to have people on the platform. So, things are moving fast, but I think this problem is becoming more and more clear to many people. Sometimes people don't call it edge computing, people have all kinds of phrases for it, but when it comes to helping customers get better performance out of their existing stacks, that is a very promising concept to many people running applications on the internet. So we are approaching it from that perspective. Edge happens to be the way we solve the problem, so I guess we're an edge computing company, but end of the day we're trying to make applications run faster on the internet. >> Okay. Last thing, give us a viewpoint the next year or two out, what do you expect to see in this space and how should we be measuring success for your firm? >> Sure. Things always take longer than we think they will. I never want to forget that lesson I learned many years ago. I think, look, it's still early days for edge computing. I think a lot of companies who have been bruised by the problem, in that they've tried to build up pops, or tried to get their logic as close to their end points as possible, are going to be adopting it sooner than others. I think in terms of broader option where any developers tZero thinking of core plus edge, that's a five year out thing, and we should, I mean, that's just out there somewhere. But there's enough companies out there, there's enough new use cases out there in the next couple of years that allow company like ours to exist. In fact, I am quite confident that there are probably five other smart people, smarter than me doing this already. This is a real problem, it needs to be solved. >> Alright, well, Haseeb Budhani, it's great to catch up. Thank you so much for helping us interact with our community, understand where these emerging trends in Edge and everything that happens. Distributed architecture is absolutely our biggest challenges of our time, and I look forward to seeing where you and your customers go in the future. >> Absolutely. Thank you so much, Stu. Appreciate your time. >> Alright. And thank you for joining us. Of course, check out theCUBE.net for all of the videos. Check out wikibon.com where it is absolutely digging in deep to how edge is impacting architectures. Peter Burris, David Floyer and the team digging in deep to understand that more and always love your feedback so feel free to give us any comments back. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (light music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, It's the Cube covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We are live in Las Vegas, California at the convention center. At NAB 2017, 102,000 people, a lot of production people talking about everything that has to do with media and entertainment, and also technology. MET is actually the theme this year. Media, Entertainment and Technology. The three are linked together in a way that they've never been before, And we're really excited to have someone really with the content side and the tech side as our guest, it's Justin Simmons. He's the director of technology at the Sundance institute. Justin, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So everybody knows the Sundance Film Festival. There's a lot of press every year, a lot of cool movies and independent movies. But you're really on the IT side. I wonder if you could explain a little bit. People don't know probably there's kind of an IT story behind Sundance. >> Yeah, I mean when you've got an event that's as big as the Sundance Film Festival, and really the eyes of the world are on it for that period of time, there's so much preparation that goes into it, because you have one shot to get it right. So we really start planning as soon as the festival ends. Sometimes we have multi-year projects. And there is a lot of technology behind it, from websites, to big flash sales, to all the photos that are collected, and all the video that's collected during the event. Also, a lot of people don't know about the Sundance Institute is that we have a year-round program, so we have about 30 lab or educational events that happen year-round all over the world, and those are also generating more media, more files that need to be stored and saved and tracked. >> So what's interesting is back in the day when storage was so expensive, and media was so expensive, storage was actually a negative, it was a liability. Now everyone's finally figured out that data's an asset. You've got to store it, there's ways to store it, you need to get the metadata to make it accessible. So that's really changed the dynamic of the way that people look at keeping all these assets. >> Yeah, I mean we saw really unfortunately a lot of times people would say, don't record it because we don't know where to put it. And it was really frustrating from a technology perspective to hear things like that. Now it's, "Capture everything." >> Jeff: Right. >> And what's happening in such a compressed period of time like that, it is all about metadata and all about workflow to make it efficient. Because if you get behind, it just keeps growing and growing and growing. >> Right. There's a great quote from Sable, from NFL films from back in the day, and he said, "How did you know "to get that in slow motion, that shot?" And he said, "We shoot everything in slow motion, "because you just don't know when "that great play is going to be." So it's a very different mindset to capture everything. So I wonder if you can explain with that mindset, and now you have 4K and 8K and Ultra HD, and tremendous amounts of gear here. How do you attack it from your role? How do you put together a plan that you can capture and manage all this content? >> So for us the first step is really getting the digital asset management system, and incorporating that digital asset management system into the workflow as much as possible. Like I said, you can't be happening behind. If that work's happening behind, it's just never going to get done. So putting the digital asset management system in the center of the workflow was extremely important. And now that we've got a great digital asset management system, we're using Reach Engine by Levels Beyond. We're looking at ways that different things can plug into that and automate as much as possible, so that when the work's being done, when the scenes are being shot, that metadata's captured and it goes right into the system, and everything flows into storage, into archive, into preservation. >> So you're populating metadata in real time as stuff's being shot. You're not doing it kind of after the fact. >> Yeah, there's a couple of different things going on. One is with photos. Everyone's got badges around their necks, so we're shooting their badges at the festival, and then right at the ingest, those cards come back from the photographers, all the metadata gets tagged in it right then, and it all goes into the digital asset management system. They're selecting their target photos from that set, and then it's off to being posted on the website for press, it's being incorporated into video. And then for video we're using Prelude to tag things in real time that's going right into digital asset management system, and then using Adobe Premier, in conjunction with the digital asset management system, we're able to make sure all the metadata that's done during the editing process also stays with those assets, because we have 35 years of history at the organization, and we want to make sure that we're keeping that indefinitely. >> Jeff: Right. >> So there's no point we're like, well, we don't need the 1988 festival anymore. >> (laughs) And then how's cloud impacted your world, and added a new asset class. The knock on cloud before, one of the knocks, especially for film and video, the assets are so big, right? And the speed of light is just too damn slow, some would say, for moving this stuff around. That said, you can put a tremendous amount of capability and compute and store and power at the hands of anybody worldwide, consistent distribution. So how have you guys integrated a cloud strategy in what you do? >> So we went really aggressive on cloud about 2011, 2012. And we ran into the limitations really quickly. The speed, and the cost when you start going at scale. This started to impact us. But there was areas that cloud was really successful, like our frontend web servers, we could just scale them up, during that event, we really need this kind of extreme performance for just a couple days a year. So being able to spin up 30 instances of the web server, bunch of database, have a million people a day hit that. That's great. Where we've struggled is on the media and entertainment side, to make cloud cost-effective when you're going really big with storage, and then also getting the performance that we need. So we've pulled that back, more of the media storage from the cloud, but where we're going to continue to use it is on collaboration. So now I'm sure we're not unique in this, but we've got creators and collaborators that are everywhere. And the content's being created all over and everywhere, so we want to use the cloud to capture that content, and we also want to use the cloud to help collaborate with whatever editor, sound mixer that we're working with. I also think cloud has now become increasingly important to the independent film community. A lot of these productions have small budgets, and they're looking to be as effective as possible, so they are collaborating globally, and so they're going to cloud. And I think it's going to be really interesting over the next couple years to see what solutions come up really targeted towards the independent film community that make it accessible for these productions. They're going to be around for a year or two They need a solution to get back up. They need to collaborate, and it all needs to happen very quickly, and for a reasonable cost. >> Right. Right. And what about on the distribution side? So it used to be you went to the movies, and then you got it on Netflix, or you DVR'd it, or TiVo, but now there's so many ways that people are consuming media, whether it be a social media like Twitter or Snapchat or Instagram, versus YouTube and Vimeo, those types of platforms. How are you kind of addressing the multi distribution opportunities within the assets that you guys have? >> So we do a lot of livestream, we do a lot of YouTube, and we've been doing that for a long time. But what we've seen recently over the last couple years with the filmmakers themselves is a real shift toward using, doing electronic delivery for large digital cinema packages. So these DCP files can be 100 gigabytes plus, and we just started seeing people really adopt digital delivery for those in the last couple years. So the Sundance Film Festival comes in kind of at the beginning of a film's life. And what a lot of these filmmakers are hoping to do at the festival is get distribution. So from there, they're able to now take that DCP file, they're not shipping hard drives, they're not shipping film prints, and they're now taking that through the distribution path. And it's not something the institute's directly involved in, but we facilitate that where the industry comes to meet with these independent film and independent artists. >> Okay. So last question before I let you go, what are some of your priorities for 2017? >> So my priorities for 2017 is preservation. So we've been doing a lot of work around organizing our files and our media, but we didn't have a really effective way of preserving the content. So we had just a bunch of big file servers sitting out there, and we had a replicating thing between them, and so I needed a solution that would actually take those files that would be integrated into the workflow, and actually protect it. So that's where we're working with Western Digital as official provider to help us actually protect and preserve our digital media assets. So using our digital asset management system with Reach Engine as part of that workflow, we're going to have the files that are sitting on our production storage but then another copy is going to be put onto the HGST object storage. So, and there the preservation is at a level that I haven't seen on any other device. It's using erasure encoding and splitting the file into multiple parts, and now that file is far better protected than it has been in our current systems. So that's a big priority for us, to get that going and really get these assets protected and preserved. Because like I said, we're planning on keeping these indefinitely. >> Right. Right. It's so sad the stories you hear coming out of Hollywood of an earlier time when it was all on the film, the film wasn't properly protected, so many of these great films didn't survive, or only pieces of them survived, or they've got bits and pieces that they're trying to restore. I'm glad that era has passed. >> Yep. >> All right Justin, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I know you're busy, you're conference-hopping, and thanks for stopping by. >> Justin: Yeah, no problem. Thank you. >> All right. He's Justin Simmons, I'm Jeff Rick, You're watching the Cube from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (digital music)