(upbeat music) >> Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube, covering AWS reInforce, 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Boston with theCube's coverage of AWS, Amazon Web Services, reInforce their inaugural conference, getting into the security event business because the customers are here and it's growing like crazy. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We are two guests of a hot startup called Valtix, Vishal Jain CEO, and Brian Lazear, Chief Product Officer. Valtix, you guys just launched out of stealth, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> You guys got some good pedigree I here, in the company. >> Yeah. >> Welcome to the cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, so first of all, before we get to the conference, which I think is very relevant, you guys are are getting out there. What do you guys do? What is Valtix all about? What is the core problem you solve? Why start this company? What's the value proposition? >> Yeah, so Valtix is building the first cloud native network security platform. So before you start a company, you talk to lot of customers, and you talk to customers, and we saw the cloud is real. You can see here, cloud is real. And we saw that network security, have challenges in how to scale in the cloud, that mainly because of three things to look at that main thing is that the cloud is crawling. The data center used to be like three and four. Now the customer says is hard in the morning in the keynote, they have suddenly one than 10, hundred and 30 PCs. So the new logical perimeter you're seeing. Second thing we saw was that the apps are agile. And the third thing is security is always falling behind DevOps. So if you want to make security to be scaled with apps. >> So, you're saying level up the security apps piece to the DevOps pace. So DevOps is kind of pushing things really fast. You mentioned cloud come the new way. I mean, I remember the conversations around Software Defined data center, Brian, that was the holy grail for the on premises activity, was going to put some software on the storage and you got virtualization, we're done. In comes the cloud, changed the game on the Hadoop ecosystem, change the game on the on premises ecosystem. So what has it actually done differently? Where's it going? Where's the game happening now for security with kind of, because software is key to it? Where do you see it? >> Yeah, we definitely see that, I mean, DevOps is doing such a great job in the public cloud. I mean, DevOps is just, they're really doing a great job with the tooling, the teamwork, you know, automation aspects, and traditionally, security is always had a little bit of a lag to that. And in the cloud, that distance is much greater than ever has before so the security teams, particularly we do, which is network security, they are struggling. And so we focus on providing them a really good platform for that. And that platform includes the firewall. So we are building a cloud based firewall, that goes to the customer's premise, it's all structured around a controller, we have a cloud based controller that manages the firewall is in their central place to configure things. And also that controller is very aware of the applications. So we're keen on giving them that cloud-like experience with a vendor like us that comes over the top, and it can provide that capability as they grow. >> And the status of the product is what, shipping? It's a service? >> Yep. >> Explain the product. >> So last week, we did launch. We announced our funding, and we launched the the availability of the product, and it is built as a SAS. So the controller is a SAS model. The customer does own the firewall, we're a software company, so the software goes into their cloud premise, and it has all the services that they need for protecting their network edge. >> So what are the finer aspects, what are the real differences of network security in the cloud relative to traditional network security? >> Yeah, so what we saw was that the enterprises try to bring the our on prem vendor to the cloud, based as boxes, and as you said, a software defined environment, you need to bring up something more. So what we do is, we bring the whole lifecycle and three core elements of that is the visibility that we do the inventory of the apps, across your accounts, across your regions, across the cloud even. And second thing is how to plumb yours in the path and how to build an unified enforcement solution, which is what we call a firewall. So and built on three principles, cloud native, unification, and performance. >> And the the purpose of the company, when was the origination? When would you get the idea? Was it like, you decided to start a company? What was the motivation? >> Yeah, the big motivation was that, again, we talked to our customers, and we saw the cloud is real. But security is a big impediment to the public adoption and that's why we have this conference here, as well. And then we noticed the network security is not scaling the cloud. We like the problem, we found a team. Our team has the networking background, security background, and the cloud background. And we like the problem. We like a team and he said, okay, let's attack this problem and go after the market. >> So the blocker is scale, right? >> Scale and agility. Okay, so it's a company like Cisco is not solving this problem? Yeah, so what they did was they tried to bring the appliances to the cloud, in a virtual form factor. But in this new world of the cloud, getting sprawl. Agile's... You need kind of centralized control model to secure this new logical perimeter. You can't be appliance by appliance to secure the perimeter. You need to have a more data. >> You can't throw boxes at them. >> Yeah. >> Right, whether whether it's physical or virtual Yeah, exactly. I mean, what Vishal's pointing out too is that we want one aspect of what we do is that there's this super elegance to that day zero. You can just click a button and we deploy the gateway through the controller. That gateway is your firewall. Its right there. I mean, its almost instantaneous. So, even that level reflects the cloud native capabilities. That really gets people excited because the alternative is they grudgingly have to go and get the license and build it and build their functions to scale it and we handle all that. >> And I get why the hardware box model doesn't scale. Why doesn't the software defined virtual appliance scale? >> Yeah. Well, the background is that we see a couple competitors. We see the classic NG firewall players and we see the cloud native capabilities. On the cloud native side, they've made efforts to get into a virtual form factor, but its still basically a box. Its a VM form factor. The instrumentation for it, in a cloud environment, its sub-par and there's still a lot of manual effort to get these things up and running. The plumbing, its not... The user experience is very poor. >> So, its really bring your own box as opposed to here's a... >> Yeah and it has to be a solid form factor. >> So, network security, we heard yesterday at the partner event I attended, and I heard the folks from Amazon up there and they're getting serious about this cause they see the big enterprise opportunity. They want channel marketing, all kinds of new things. But, network security kind of has that same vibe that DevOps had. Which was, you have different consumption mechanisms, the customers are buying services, the pricing's different, the scale is different, you have policy, APIs too, its very cloud native. Are customers ready for that or is your controller, Valtix controller the gateway drug to the cloud so to speak cause, certainly if all those things are changing, that means the old just can be retrofitted for the new. You got to have something from scratch. And not a lot of people are lifting and shifting beyond infrastructure as a service. That's easy to replicate with the cloud, but when you get into some of the nuances with the apps that you're mentioning, these new dynamics have to be pure play features. >> Correct. >> Are you a solution to that? Or are you a gateway to that? Its the controller right? >> Yeah, we are a solution. For example, as I said, we do the full lifecycle. We have a controller will discover all your apps, so, an enterprise can have apps that cross your accounts and cross your cloud even and we discover all the apps. Second thing is once we discover the apps, put yourself in the path of security and we do that automatically. Third thing is enforcement. For that, we have two core engines, as I said. Provide re-development, which we call a cloud firewall from Valtix and secondly the cloud controller, which sees everything. So, its a global view of the entire enterprise infrastructure. >> In your marketing documentation, you talk about the trade-offs that people have to make between security and agility. That's always been a trade-off. Do you solve that problems and if so, how? >> So, again when we saw the customer we talked to and they bring their workshop appliances, or appliances to the cloud, then there are two choices they have. One is that are apps agile, but then you cannot secure using the client's model, so you kind of insecure, or naked we call it. The other option is that you must have heard, security slows me down. So you kind of become a secure and rigid. So every time you have a new app, a new EPC, you open a ticket and you install the new firewall. So, what we are giving a third option because both options I gave are bad choices, so we give a third option, which is agile and secure. That's what a centralized controller and a Valtix file will give you that option. >> Vishal and Brian, I want to get your thoughts on why you guys, so be the devil's advocate. You guys are just a startup, although your startups actually doing well in the cloud environment, I'm being a skeptic, I'm trying to shoot my own narrative here. But the reality is you guys are young company, you want to get the attention of the enterprise or customers, what's the pitch? Why you guys? What's your backgrounds, pedigrees, the backgrounds you guys bring to the table with software, talk about why you guys? What's the differentiator? >> In terms of the team, I would say, there are three core pillars, networking, security, and cloud, right? So, this team has built up billions of parkline and deployed in thousands of enterprises and there were two core expertise initially the team was, building fast performance by plans. Second thing is decoupling the control development. I mentioned some of that. So, those are some of the aspects and then you build your team around network expertise, security expertise, and a cloud expertise. >> Have they done it before? >> Yes, multiple times. >> How big's the team? >> The team is right now twenty people. >> Twenty people? And you just raised 14 million or over 14 million? >> Yeah, over 14 million we raised and we announced it last week. >> Yeah, great. Congratulations. >> What are some of the backgrounds of the team members? >> I mean they're Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Google Cloud... >> Fortinet. >> Yeah, Fortinet. Its kind of that bench strength of security in a networking cloud and then I think the other component to that is that we all come from a common denominator of building, hands on building, shipping and marketing products that are transformative. That's also exciting. So, we see this and say, this is clearly transformative or this big market opportunity to help customers and we're like, ecstatic. >> Yeah, the cloud really... It sounds like to me you guys have a real holistic systems view of the world. Because the cloud is essentially an operating system or large, distributed computer and decentralized with crypto and blockchain. Its the system thinking that's interesting. Right, you guys have that... To know the network, you got to know the system. And you get into the apps, you got to understand that middle layer that's developing with Kubernetes and containers. With cloud native, that's developing really fast. So, to see that end to end is more of a systems kind of mindset. A lot of companies are lacking that because they've outsourced everything to global SI's and now they got to rebuild. Capital One's Sie So said, we're investing everything building. We're building more. So, they're builders, they're systems guys. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, so basically we also know this, that all of the enterprise we talk to were told that a lot of wine products, what we're building the platform. So, we'll be starting off with the food services, but its a platform, so a wholistic platform could do the full network security in the public cloud. That's what we are working towards. >> What's the differentiator? Why you guys? What's the main value proposition that you guys bring to the table? What's in it for the customer? >> Correct, the main value proposition is the team can build it and second thing is taking a cloud related approach to this problem. We are building for the cloud and we are building using the cloud are the principles. >> So you just went through your raise, so all these answers to the questions are fresh in your mind. But, Brian you talked about a large market. Help us understand that because the market is enormous, its like a hundred billion dollars or whatever it is, but its so fragmented, there's so many different segments. How do you guys look at the TAM and then the served market for you guys, that you go after? >> Our goal is to protect their data center, this new data center, basically everything that's going in or out of the data center on the network side, that's our focus. We didn't mention some of these services, but in the product we're shipping right now, it does decryption of TLS traffic, it does firewall, it does intrusion prevention, it does WAF, so it has this, and more, so there's this set of things that when we talk to the customers, they'll say, my blueprint for the cloud is like the prep, I have to stack all these things together, risk in security says you have to emulate that environment, its worked well here, make it happen out there. And so that's where you see people getting a little bit amped up. Its hard to do that. We have a platform that can consolidates that really well and knows the system level things that John was mentioning, but it is covering a lot of space, but we are very optimistic. We're making good grounds with that. >> So its a platform approach versus five, six products? >> Exactly, so the consolidation story connects really well. >> What's the most important story that needs to be told in the security industry today in your opinion? What do you think that customers should know about, that the media and or the industry should be discussing? >> The main thing is that we talk about DevOps. DevOps is very agile. So one thing is the current security is slowing me down. Security has to be agile, especially network security, we have heard in the past, slows you down. So that's, in the cloud world, the main reason people are going to cloud is because of the agility and network security should not stop that. >> So, security's slowing down... >> Yeah and we don't want that. >> Its a deep bottleneck for mass adoption, we're seeing that more and more and that problem statement, there's a lot of Ops angles to this. Its understanding, like multi-AZ deploys and the Transit Gateway, the new Transit Gateway from Amazon and how does this all work together and we're on top of that in the network security perspective. >> What do you think about the show here? Amazon's inaugural re:Inforce. Its not a summit, summits are regional re-invents. This is its own name, just like re-invent's different for the customer. Re-invent isn't re:Inforce. Pretty important, pretty strategic for Amazon Web Services. What do you guys think? >> I think its great. I mean, we have been using all alternatives like Transit, their mutilated support, the ST bucket. We use all the infrastructure they provide. Its always good to know what they are doing because in the reinvent around Transit Gateway and we incorporate that into our product. So, we want to be ahead of what they announcing, incorporate that and giving our customer what they need as a whole solution. >> So, Brian you're running the product, Chief Product Officer. What's on the roadmap? (laughter) >> Lots of good stuff. >> C'mon! >> We're very busy. >> Feed your request coming in. Give you their services, you could just bang them out, no big deal. (talking over each other) >> Just so easy, 2,000 a year. Amazon does it, you could do a couple hundred a year, no problem. >> There's probably a couple things. One is that we will continue to expand to other clouds because our customers want that. But its also just about more capabilities. So, they're seeing what we could do today. There's a lot that it could do and they're with us, they're on the journey with us and saying we want more help and this show is an example of that. The cloud is becoming more than a thing and security's getting emphasized, literally, its emphasized here. So, we're happy to help our customers along. >> Well you guys are launched, what's the priority? You're obviously hiring, what kind of culture do you have? What are some of your needs here? Put a plug for the company real quick. >> In terms of hiring, initially I'm also hiring more engineering, building the product. They're the core of the engine. But, now we are expanding the go to market team, we have sales, marketing and we are going to expand on both the sides, like sell and build more and sell more. >> Yeah, get the revenue in. Congratulations, hot startup. Good job, well done. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks John. >> Valtix launching with new product out of stealth with funding, getting off the runway, here at Amazon Websters Re:Invent theCube coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)