 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. One of the challenges that any digital business or any business faces is how to more rapidly and simply configure their business so that it can take advantage of the opportunities and the challenges that their industry faces. That's very, very difficult in a world where a lot of the underlying network resources are hardwired. So as a consequence, every business is looking at new technologies and new options for how they can better software define how those network resources are set up and organized and operate, especially in the WAN area. So to have that conversation about how to bring a new approach to thinking about network facility and network ease, we've got Shashi Kiran, who's the CMO of Ariyaka here to talk to us. Shashi, welcome to the CUBE. Thank you, Peter. It's wonderful to be here. So let's start. What's the update on Ariyaka? Well, you caught me in a good day today because we're just coming off our Q3 results and we really had a good quarter. A lot of new logos coming in and new customers picking backing on the digital transformation that you talked about. As they go about transforming their organizations digitally, moving to the cloud, modernizing their application stacks, what they see is that underlying infrastructure sometimes has bottlenecks and impedes that global transformation efforts. So I think our contribution has been to really get rid of those speed bumps as part of that WAN transformation and accelerated. Well, let's talk a little bit about that WAN transformation. What is it in particular that customers are struggling with as they think about moving to more of an SD-WAN world? And I'll give you a little bit of a clue as far as I can see it, as they start to think more in terms of software-defined WAN, that doesn't necessarily mean that they should be thinking about installing a whole bunch of network operating systems. Have I got that right? I think that's spot on. First of all, WAN transformation, SD-WAN, these are all means to the end. And in many cases, depending on the type of customers, sometimes it's not really where their area of expertise is. They would rather focus on their business imperatives and say, hey, somebody else needs to figure this problem out. And it's less about network operating systems getting distributed, because that also leads to its own set of issues, configuring them, patching them, maintaining that is a huge issue. It's a very painful operational overhead. So what we do and who Ariyaka is is, we're perhaps the industries first, and I would like to say best managed SD-WAN solution, which means we kind of take care of the connectivity globally. We have our own POPs, points of presence, almost 35 of them globally, and they are set up that they are 20 to 30 milliseconds away from any new site that could be activated. And we have our own orchestration platform. We have our CPEs as well that we kind of lease out, or it's consumed as part of service. And we have our own security offering as well as VAN optimization offering. So it's really this whole platform architecture that we can mask the complexity off and offer a simple service for end customers to consume. And so that's really where they look at it as something that will help them be more agile, but also because we have our own network, it helps things to be a lot more predictable. Key triggers we see drivers for are application performance. Somebody is having issues, particularly in a distributed global environment. They come to us, move to the cloud. That's a big deal, particularly in a multi-cloud area. That's almost 50% of the inquiries that we receive in terms of us really acting as a gateway for their cloud globally. MPLS contracts expiring, and MPLS as you know has been a really good mainstay for the last couple of decades, but it's not really where the cloud world is. So we see a lot of that serving as a trigger. But more often than not, it's really aligned with the business imperatives and seeing could we be a partner for their transformation initiatives? Well, let's start, give me a sense of how SD-WAN should work optimally. I mean, what should an SD-WAN be for the business and how does it relate to business flexibility and different value propositions? So today if you look at the market, I would say there are two models for SD-WAN. And on one side you have these overlay SD-WAN providers who have been coming out in the last few years. In fact, there's a lot of clutter in the market with the overlay SD-WAN providers. And what they do is they have a box controller, gateway functionality, and it's really meant to be an overlay on somebody else's network with agility being the promise. And it leverages internet for the most part. So that's one approach which is good when somebody wants to get SD-WAN going in a regional area with a fast time to market. But there are predictability issues, there are issues in terms of scaling it globally. So that's where the second model comes in, which is sort of the operators of the world, the service providers and telcos of the world. And they say, look, we have the network and we will take the intellectual property of these SD-WAN software vendors and offer that as a managed SD-WAN solution. But it's there, it's somebody else's. It's somebody else's IP for the most part, right? And so the challenge with that is really the experience that gets out either for the end user or for the application. And in many cases, again, when you go down the path of a global network, they have SLA handoffs across multiple providers, last mile issues and things like that. So each has its pros and cons. And I think where we have focused our energies on is really something that's the best of both. As I said, we own the underlying network which allows us to give very predictable performance fully meshed and 99.99 plus percent availability. But we also have now looking at the last mile, procuring, managing that, so it's end to end connectivity. Many of our pops are co-located with the public cloud providers, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google. And so we have a direct connect and we're able to manage that cloud connectivity. And then each of these links are able to optimize those when really allow for bursting, look at each application, then give it the kind of priority that it deserves and the security aspect of it. So sort of bringing all of these things together and today I would say we can almost get up any new site globally up and running in a matter of a couple of days. And that is huge because what we have seen traditionally is it takes weeks to months just for site planning in case our MPL has activated. So if you're pulling up your answer. That's really where we see, can you bring this into a consumption model just like electricity or water? You want somebody to say. Or the cloud. Or the cloud, right? And that actually has helped a lot with the mindset because CIOs and a number of application architects they're now used to the cloud model. It's a consumption model. So the question is why can't the van be like that? Why does it need to be hardwired? Why does it need to be hop by hop across so many different providers? Can you make the cloud equivalent to the van as well and make the van consumable? So that's really where the energy, focus and the kind of customers that we are attracting are subscribing to that approach. So you're getting the flexibility of a service and the predictability of having your own IP being able to provide that service. Yes, so it's a flexibility but also speed. Agility is a very important driver for SD-WAN. So I remember some of these images floating around which says choose two. It's either fast or it's good or it's cheap and you don't have all three. And in a way we kind of bring all three together because fast it's good. And over a period of time because we continue to drive the cost down it ends up in a lower TCO offering as well. So that's the sweet spot in the center. So give us some sense of how customers are using you today. Is it, are they deploying you for specific applications, specific regions? Are they actually starting to use you as a general approach to managing wide, globally their wide area networks? It's a bit of both. See a lot of customers are expanding their footprint either through M&As or because they have a manufacturing facility somewhere there's a freight and logistic facility and it's a global world today. And the whole globalization phenomena has meant that how do you actually get a consistency in terms of your connectivity but more importantly your application experience and expertise as well. And so that is a key trigger. Can you normalize and have a democratic approach to all of your sites, not just your headquarters and make your employee pool that much more productive? So that's a key CIO CEO level conversation which is driving a lot of these decisions. In fact, today I just posted on my LinkedIn profile about a case study of customer called Element Solutions. So this company was formerly called PSP they're a chemical manufacturing company. And so they wanted to get off MPLS so they chose Ariyaka and they also wanted to go down the path with the management service offering. But what was very interesting to me personally was business happened, you know just as you say life happens, business happened. And what happened to them was they decided to divest almost half of their business which they spun off into a different company called Arista. And as they scoped it out it was very hard for them to actually take away half of the company including its infrastructure and carve it out and keep the lights running in both places. And so what we enabled them to do was kind of just do that in a non-disruptive way with zero downtime and they ended up being two successful companies out there. And this was for them kind of magic, right? And so you created a whole new set of options for them. Yes, yes. And you know, even before they were looking at the different options it was taking a two year period for them to just do the planning and the execution. And we kind of did that in about four to six months globally. And so that is when they are now willing to stand up on a platform on our behalf and say, hey, you know, this is what Ariaka did for us and they come and share that experience externally. And the good part for me as a CMO is I am about two and a half months into this company. And the first four weeks that I was here I was on a call with four to five different customers in those four or five weeks who were talking on our behalf to the media. And this for me, even while I was at companies like Cisco was a hard thing to accomplish because to get a customer to go speak on your back behalf to the media was a big issue. But here I see them being a bully and they're happy and they're happy to speak on our behalf to the media which is pleasantly surprising for a CMO. Hey, your customers are your best sellers, right? Absolutely. Shashi Curran, CMO of Ariaka. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you, Peter. I enjoyed being here. And once again, I'm Peter Burris and this has been another CUBE Conversation. Until next time.