(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage, our 10th year. We actually call this one the Valley set, over on the other side, it's in the middle of a meadow, and this was in the valley. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for this segment is, of course, John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And joining us, the quintessential Valley guest that we have, Jerry Chen. Long time participant in the program, climbing up the leaderboard here of theCUBE Times at VMworld. Jerry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu, John, thanks for having me back. >> All right, so we knew you back when you worked for VMware. >> Jerry: Right. >> You're now a partner at Greylock. We watched some of your amazing startups, we've had many of them on our program. Just a little bit going on in your world this day, maybe we'll start there. >> Sure, it amazes me, both being at VMworld 10 years since you guys started covering. For me, I joined VMware back in 2003. So I was at the first Vmworld, through every single one of them, and seeing this ecosystem reinvent itself, and juxtapose that with every other conference at Moscone. So Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, VMworld. And I would say five years ago, no one would have thought Dreamforce itself, or Salesforce as an ecosystem big enough for investors. But yes, now they can invest in startups. All they do is sell to the Salesforce ecosystem. You can always invest in a startup. All they sell to is the VMware ecosystem. And for sure, when, you and I, three of us go to Amazon or an event, that ecosystem just continues to grow exponentially year over year. >> And this some of the highlights of Datadog, we were talking before we came on camera. They always had a big booth, they bet on the AWS ecosystem, not a lot of Datadog here, but monitoring turns into observability, a key component, which basically was a white space. I mean, monitoring was boring. A little sector, but because of the nature of the data security auditing, this has become kind of a killer category. >> I think last week you saw SignalFX get acquired by Splunk, which is another huge enterprise company, and Datadog filed their S-1. No one thought monitoring would be a big enough market to support multiple billion plus companies, and what we've learned is making a bet on just cloud-native companies like Datadog did, purely in the Amazon Ecosystem, was a great bet because they've grown super fast, and that market turned out to be very big. In addition, it could be Splunk, and they could bet on logging for mostly on-premise companies. That turned out to be a large market. So I think five, 10 years ago, no one thought that these markets would be so big and so gigantic. The cloud itself, you can have a multi-billion dollar company like Datadog purely on a cloud-native application and cloud-native companies, if you will. >> You know, it's interesting, you're a VC and the enterprise specialist at Greylock. Consumer used to be all the rage in venture. "Oh, we're going to consumer against Facebook," Facebook breaks democracy, all kinds of problems. Being regulated. But enterprise became really hot with the cloud, and then you have an interesting dynamic. Now a thousand flowers are blooming on the startup side, so yes, there's a lot of action in startups, but the buyers of startups and the IPO markets is where the liquidity happens, which you care about, right? So now you have liquidity options for IPO for fast-growing flit scalers as you guys call it, and then the M and A market are buying the companies. So I got to ask you, with seeing Splunk as a great example, where they own the log market, log files, bring SignalFX in, former VMware guys and Facebook guys, comes in, they add some servability piece to it. Splunk's got more power now because of the acquisition. It's not just token acquisition. This is the market, product market slash M and A market. What's your thoughts on that? Because that's a key exit opportunity, and the numbers are pretty sizable when you think about it. >> I think just going back to the opportunity, the market's so big that you have multiple multi-billion dollar companies, so like Splunk's a huge company, great company. We're investors in a company called Sumo Logic. That's going to also be a successful company, and also a big-- >> John: And filed for IPO. >> And a big company that's OZA, Amazon, and Vmworld. So I think what you have here is each of these markets are monitoring, APM, the log, infrastructure, are turning out to be multi multi-billion, and larger than we anticipated. So I think before, to your analogy in the consumer, we always knew consumer markets had huge TAMs. Like how many billion in people are on Facebook? How many billion people are on Twitter? What we're learning now is the market and the TAM for these enterprise software companies, be it SAAS, be it LOG, be it Metrics, be it security, those TAMs are actually bigger than we thought beforehand as well. >> And the driver of that is what? Cloud, transformation, just replatforming, modernization? The businesses are businesses still. >> I think the move to cloud is accelerate, I think your last line, "businesses are businesses," is what's key. Like every business now is being touched by software. They all got to go cloud so I'm an investor in a company called Blend that does mortgage software. So the entire financial services industry, from mortgages to car loans and consumer lending, that's all going digital. That's all going online. Jobs that were like mortgage brokers are going to be an app on your phone now. So finance, retail, healthcare, construction, so all these markets now are going to the cloud, going digital, so these TAMs are expanding exponentially. >> Yeah, Jerry, want to get your take on the ecosystem. You know, we look at VMware, they built a big ecosystem, the end user computing space, you know. You've coined the term Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, from that environment there was an ecosystem around there. I see VMware at a lot of shows, and they have a good presence there, and there's some overlap between the public cloud space. Like when I go to this show, and I walk through the expo hall, oh my gosh. Data protection is everywhere, and all of those companies are at a all of the cloud environment, but do you see a transition from, you know, where VMware is in kind of the cloud-native space? Is there a lot of overlap, or what's your thinking on those kind of dynamics? >> I think all above. I think VMware at Vwworld, and like all these tech companies are constantly reinventing themselves and expanding. So you have, as a VC, say it's this company I'm looking at, when it's two individuals, and a dog, and PowerPoint. Is it a feature, is it a product, or is it a company? It's a feature, it's okay. You know, it's probably not worth the investment, but it's worthwhile. It'll get acquired for something. Is it a product? Some companies are just one killer product, right? And you can ride that product for the arc of the company. But then some startups turn out be companies, multi-product companies. And there always have one or two great products, and then you start adding new things as the market evolves, and VMware has done that. And so, as a result of adding server virtualization, desktop virtualization, Cloud Foundry which I helped build, out in the Kubernetes stuff. So they're adding multiple products to their company. I think the great companies can do that. Look at Amazon. They keep launching 10 new products every single month. Microsoft has done a great job reinventing themselves. So I think the great companies can reinvent, but not transform, they just add to what they have, and just to be a multi-product family. >> Stu: All right, so you mentioned Cloud Foundry. >> Yeah. >> Pivotal, of course, is now back in the mothership where it started there. When Cloud Foundry first started it was, "Well, we're not going to take the hypervisor "and put it all of these places." We needed a slightly different footprint. Well, five years later, we're talking about Kubernetes is going to be baked into Vsphere, and Vsphere is going to be a main piece of VMware's cloud-native strategy. Has the market changed or some of those technology pieces, you know, still a challenge? What's your take there? >> You know, it's a great question because I think what we're seeing is there's never ever in technology as you guys know, on platforms, it's a zero-sum game. It's never always going to all mainframe, all client server, all VMs, all microservers, all Serverless, right? And I think we're seeing is it's also never going to be all Amazon, it's never going to be all Google, it's never going to be all Azure, right? I think we talked about early days, it's not a winner take all. It may be, you know, what one-third, two-thirds, or something, 25-40% market share, but it's not going to be all or nothing. And so we're seeing companies now have architectures on multiple clouds, multiple technologies, and so just like 10 years ago, you had a mainframe team, you had a Windows team, you had a Solaris team. Remember Sun and Spark? And a Linux team. Now you have a Google team, and Azure team, an Amazon team, and an on-prem team. And so you just had these different stacks evolve, and I think what's interesting to see is like, we've kind of had this swing of momentum around Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Serverless, but at the same time you see a bunch of folks realize, okay, what's happening is I'm choosing how much I want to consume. Like an API, a container, or a whole VM, right? And people realizing, yes, maybe consuming the APIs is our right level of consumption, but quite frankly, Stu, John, buying whole VMs also what I want. So you see a bunch of companies say, I'm just going to build better monolithic applications around VMware, I'm going to build better microservices around Docker and Kubernetes, and then we'll use Serverless where I think I need to use Serverless. >> Yeah, that's a good point. One of the things we hear from customers we talk to, and there's two types of enterprise customers, at least in the enterprise infrastructure side, classic CIOs and then CISOs. Two different spectrums. CIOs, old, traditional, multi-vendor means a good thing, no lock in, I know how to deal with that world. CISOs, they want to build their own stacks, manage their own technology, then push APIs out to the suppliers, and rechange the supplier relationship because security is so important they're forced to the cutting edge. So I look at that a kind of canary in the coal mine, and want to get your thought on that, because we're seeing a trend where enterprises are building software. They're saying, hey, you know, I want a stack internally that we're going to do for a variety of different reasons, security or whatever, and that doesn't really blend well for the multi-cloud team approach, because not everyone can have three killer teams building stacks, so you're seeing some people saying, you know, I'm going to pick a cloud here and go all in on certain things, build the stack, and then have a backup cloud there. And then some CIOs say, hey, you know what? I want all the cloud guys in there negotiating their best price maybe, or whatever. >> I think it's great nuance you pointed out. Even just like we had a Windows team and a Linux team, you still had a single database team that ran across both, or storage teams are ran across both. So I think the nuance here is certain parts of the stack should be Azure, Amazon, VMware. Certain parts of the stack should be, I think that the ultimate expression is just an API with service errors. So one of the companies you guys are familiar with, Roxette, it's a search and Serverless analytics company. It's basically an API in the cloud, multi-cloud, to do search and analytics. And just like you had a database team that's independent across all these stacks, for certain parts of the architecture, you're going to want something like Roxette, that's going to be independent of the architecture stacks. And so it's not all isolated, it's not siloed, it's not all horizontal, depending on the part of the stack, you're going to either want a horizontal cross-cloud solution, or a team that's going to go deep on one. >> So it's really a contextual decision based on what the environment looks like, or business. >> And there's certain areas of technology that we know from history that lends themself to either full stacks versus horizontals. Just like I said, there was a storage team and a database team, right? That's Oracle, or something that ran across Windows and Linux and Sun, you're going to see someone like Roxette become this search and Serverless analytics team across multiple cloud stacks. >> This is why the investment is such a great opportunity for the enterprise VCs right now because, I mean, there's so many dimensions of opportunities for companies to grow and become pretty large, and the markets are shifting so the TAM is pretty big. Michael Dell was just on the other side, I interviewed him. He says, you know, he was getting kind of in Dave's grill saying, "Well, the TAM for enterprise is bigger than cloud TAM." I go, "Well that TAM is going to be replatformized, so like that's going away and moving, shifting, so the numbers are big but they're shifting so tons of opportunities. >> It depends if you're a big company like Dell versus a small startup. Oftentimes, this true that the TAM for enterprise is still much larger than cloud, but your point is what's shifting were the dollars growing fast. >> The TAM for horses was huge at one point, and then, you know, cars came along, right? So you know. >> Every startup, what you want to do, you want to attach to a growing budget. You don't want to attach to a flat to shrinking budget. And so right now, if you're a founder, and say, "Okay, where are the budget dollars flowing to?" Everyone's got a kind of a cloud strategy, just like they had a VMware virtualization strategy, so if I'm like a startup G, metrics, or data analytics, I'm going to try to attach to where the dollars are flowing. That's a cloud strategy, that's an AI application strategy, security strategy. >> So let me ask you one question. So if I'm going to start up, this is a hypothetical startup, startups got an opportunity. It's a SaaS-based startup, they say, "You know what? "This is a feature in the market "that's part of a bigger system, "but I'm going to innovate on that." I think that with the markets shifting, that could evolve into a large TAM to your point about Datadog. What's the strategy, from an investment standpoint, that you would take? Would you say go all in on the single product? Do you want to have one or two features? What's the makeup of that approach, because you want to have some maybe defensibility, is it go all in on the one thing and hope that you return into like a Salesforce, then you bolt stuff on, or do you go in and try to do a little platform play underneath? >> It depends where you are in the startup world. We're in lifecycle. Look, startups succeed because they do one thing better, right? And so focus, focus, focus. And you have to have something that's like 10 times faster, 10 times better, 10 times cheaper, or something different. Something the world hasn't seen before. But if you do that one thing well, either A, you're taking budget dollars from incumbents, or B, you're something net new, the world hasn't seen, people will come to you when they see utility. As an investor I like to see that focus, I like to see, you know, some founders you get say, hey, Stu, think bigger. Some founders like John think smaller. Like what's your wedge? What's that initial entry point to the customer you're going to hit? Because once you land that, you get the right to do the next product, the next feature. >> That's the land, adopt, expand, like Xoom did. Or they picked video, >> Correct, voice, et cetera. >> I mean who the hell thought that was going to be a big market? It's a legacy market but they innovated with the cloud. >> Absolutely. I have all these sayings that I try to say like, "You don't get to play the late innings, "if you don't make it out the early innings," right? You know, and so if you want and have this strategy for this large platform, that's great, and every VC wants to see a path there. But they want to see execute from we're going to land, and we're expand. Now, startups fail because either where they land, they picked incorrectly. Like you decided to storm the wrong beach, right? Or it's either to small, or it's too big. The initial landing spot is too big, and they can't hold that ground. And so part of the art of navigating from Point A to Point B, or where I say, Act one, Act two, Act three of a lifecycle is make sure that you land correctly, earn your keep, show a lot of value, win that first battle, if you will, Act one, and then they move to Act two, Act three, and you can see a company like VMware clearly on their second, third act, right? And they've done a nice job of owning one product category, server virtualization, desktop virtualization, now expanding to other adjacent categories, buying companies like Carbon Black, right? In terms of security. So it doesn't happen overnight. I mean, VMware started in 1998. I was there when there was about 200 employees. People forget Amazon's been, gosh 27, 1998, when Bezos started selling books. Now they're selling books, movies, food, groceries, video, right? >> When did you first use AWS? Was it when the EC2 launched? I mean, everyone kicked the tires on that puppy. >> We all kicked the tires. I was at VMware as a Product Manager, I think it was '06 when they launched, right? And we all kind of kicked the tires on it. And it was a classic innoverse dilemna. We saw this thing that you thought was small and a very narrow surface area. Amazon started with an EC2, >> Two building blocks, storage and EC2. >> S-3, right, that's it. And then they said, "Okay, we're going to give a focus, focus on basic compute and basic object storage," and people were like, "What can you do with S-3? "Nothing," right? It's not a Sand, it's an availability. It's going to fail all the time, but people just started innovating and working their way through it. >> All right, so Jerry, when you look at the overall marketscape out there today, it seems like you still feel pretty confident that it's a good time for startups. Would you say that's true? >> Absolutely. >> All right, I want to get your final word here. 10 years in theCUBE at Vmworld, you know, you've known John for a long time. Did you think we'd make it? Any big memories as to what you've seen as we've changed over the years. >> I've plenty, let's go back to, >> John: Okay, now you can embarrass us. >> 10 year anniversary of VMworld. For your first Vmworld 10 years ago, I was like a Product Manager, and John Furrier, I think I met at a Press dinner, and he's like, "Hey, Chen," walking by, "come here, sit down," and they turn the camera on, and we had no idea what was going on, and he just started asking a bunch of random questions. I'm like, sure, I haven't cleared this with marketing or anyone else, but why not? >> John: Hijack interview, we call that. >> Hijack interview, and then it's been amazing to watch the two of you, Dave, John, everybody, grow SiliconANGLE and theCUBE in particular, and to this, the immediate franchise, in terms of both having a presence at all these shows, like Amazon, Oracle World, DreamForce, Vmworld, etc. But also the content you guys have, right? So now you have 10 years of deep content, and embarrassingly enough, 10 years, I guess, of videos of yours truly, which is always painful to watch, like either what I was saying, or you know, what my hair looked like back then. >> Stu: Jerry, you still have hair though, so. (laughing) >> Well, the beautiful thing is that we can look at the reputation trajectory of what people say and what actually happens. You always had good picks, loved the post you did on MOATs. That turned out to be very timeless content, and yeah, sometimes you miss it, we sometimes cringe. >> We miss a bunch. >> I remember starting one time with no headset on. Lot of great memories, Jerry. Great to have you in the community. Thanks for all your contribution. >> I look forward to the next 10 years of theCUBE, so I got to be here for the 20th anniversary, and now if I walk away, come back on right away, do I get another notch on my CUBE attending list so I can go up and catch Hared in the best? >> If you come on the other set, that counts as another interview. >> Perfect, so I got to catch up with Steve and the rest of the guys. >> Steve just lost it to Eric Herzog just a minute ago. We had a ceremony. It was like a walk through the supermarket, the doors thing, and the confetti came down. 11th time so you got to get to 11 now. So 12 is the high water mark. >> Done, we need t-shirts. (laughing) >> Well Jerry, thanks so much for joining us again. For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman, and you can go to theCUBE.net, if you search for Jerry Chen, there's over 16 interviews on there. I know I've gone back and watched some of them. Some great discussions we've had over the years. Thanks so much, and stay tuned for lots more coverage here at Vmworld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> 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)