 from Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 17. Welcome back to theCUBE. We're doing two days of live coverage here of the Google Next 2017. Here, we're in the center of the Silicon Valley from our 4,500 square foot Palo Alto studio. Happy to bring back to the program a multi-time guest but first time in his new role, Praveen Akharaju. Now the CEO of Viptela, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Stu. Real pleasure to be here. Yeah, Praveen, we were joking. It's like, you first came on theCUBE back in 2012. You've been on the program at many of our shows but now you're at our place here. We've got the nice studio here so. Yeah, it's really impressive. You guys have come a long way and this has been like an awesome show when I was at VCE and really excited to be back here with you. Awesome, thank you so much. So why don't you give our audience, why Viptela, what was exciting to you about the opportunity? We've had the pleasure of interviewing some of your folks over the last couple of years that chose like VMworld and the like. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's interesting, right? When you think about sort of what's going on in the IT industry as a whole, there's a revolution going on in the cloud. The show that you guys are covering as well as what's been happening over the past couple of years. Applications are basically migrating out of the data center, whether it's into the public cloud, into Paz platforms, SAS platforms and such like. Similarly, at the edge, users have been migrating away from their desktops. Mobility is unleashed to essentially the user to be wherever they need to be and be able to still be productive. In addition to that, you have a whole bunch of things happening at the edge in terms of devices and things coming on board. Now, if you think about these two worlds and the revolution that's happening there, the actual connectivity between those two has been frozen in time. Majority of the enterprises today are still connected using MPLS VPN technology, which is invented 20 years ago to solve the problem of ATM-like emulation over IP. So I think what was really interesting to me about Viptela is it is truly about redefining the network connectivity between users and applications for the cloud era. And that's really what our mission is and that's what we're really excited about. Yeah, Praveen, it reminds me a lot of what we saw in the data centers when it came to networking. There was that big shift for a number of years in saying, well, it was the client to server and then that machine to machine, everything that happened with virtualization. We went from North-South traffic to East-West traffic. We talked forever now as cloud pulls in, those connectivity, we're reinventing what's happening in WAN. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, think of it, right? So if you're a user, you might be accessing your applications in a data center, but you might need to access something on a SaaS platform. Well, if you're sitting in a branch office, do you want to go back to the data center and then head out to the cloud or do you want to be able to take the best path out? Most branches today have internet connections that are faster than anything MPLS VP can provide. In fact, there's a data point one of our customers gave us. The per megabit cost for MPLS VPN is about $200, right? The per megabit cost for internet is about $2, right? And you think about the speed asymmetry, obviously the SLAs are different, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can leverage the best connectivity, but also make sure the applications are mapped to the appropriate SLA transport. So what we do is essentially, we think of ourselves as the next generation overlay, right? So we can, the Reptile of Fabric essentially encompasses MPLS VPN, internet, LTE connectivity, and we're able to understand what happens in the underlay, but enterprises can just focus on how they want their users to connect to their applications without having to understand what's happening underneath, so that's truly the power of the software defined world, if you will, right? Yeah, so we've been talking for a few years that whole SDN wave that came out, Google talks about themselves as the largest SDN company out there, but most of the discussion seems to have moved on beyond SDN, your area of SD-WAN is definitely one of the hot conversations. Where are customers in kind of understanding this transition and where the things fit? Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, the first wave of software defined networking was essentially sort of about solving the data center connectivity problem, right? So how do you connect machines more dynamically? How do you connect capacity more dynamically so applications can kind of migrate this notion of machine to machine communication in a dynamic fashion and being able to potentially even stripe it out to the cloud, right? But the first wave did not address how users connect to their applications. So we think of ourselves from an SD-WAN perspective as kind of leading that second wave of software defined networking, which truly is about user experience and application experience. Connecting users wherever they are to applications wherever they are, right? In a scalable, secure and dynamic fashion. Yeah, and very different discussion from what I think of the guys from my Sierra that turned into the NSX, that seems very tied into how VMware talks about that hybrid environment when you talk about when VMware on AWS goes in, you know, I need that NSX in there. You know, you worked at Cisco for a number of years, what they're doing with ACI now is talking more about that as opposed to you're at the client, the application layer. Exactly, right? And I think at the end of the day, we optimized how applications can migrate and move, right? And how they can get the best capacity. But the whole purpose is to really deliver those applications to the users. And the WAN has been kind of this, it's been frozen in time for 20 years, primarily because it's hard, right? It is really hard to be able to figure out what the underlay actually looks like. I mean, some of our customers are global. I mean, we have sites in Vietnam, right? In India, in the US, obviously, but it's a global footprint and being able to overlay something on top that still gives you the predictable performance and is secure is something that has been a hard problem to solve, right? And that's what's really exciting about what we're doing at Viptela. Yeah, that's really interesting stuff. Talk about how you guys partner with, interact with the public cloud environments. Yeah, so we're obviously, most of our controllers are hosted in AWS as well as Verizon, which is another, which is our key partner, right? These are the two big, two big sort of partners for us in terms of our controllers. But we partner with AWS, we've partnered with Microsoft from an open, from an Office 365 perspective. And there's a lot of our customers who wanna have a much more predictable, high, low latency access to Office 365, right? A lot of our customers have workloads in AWS. So we're able to actually spin up a version of our device to frontend VPCs in AWS so you can then terminate, essentially, we treat the cloud as a node in the fabric, right? So it inherits all the policies, inherits all the security aspects of it day one. So it's really super simple to set up, right? We don't treat the cloud separately, we just say, well, here's another branch or a head end and let's just kind of connect it in and let the customer define the policies that they see fit. That's great. So AWS and Office 365 leaders in their categories, we've got the Google show going on this week. What do you hear from your customers when it comes to G Suite and Google Cloud? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of customers who use the G Suite, I mean, Google Docs, particularly in the context of sort of some of the small and medium businesses that we work with. So again, our job is to really bring users to the applications with the lowest latency and the best experience possible, right? So a lot of the cloud providers, essentially, don't necessarily worry about how customers get there, they just assume the customer shows up at the door but it's a SaaS platform or infrastructure as a service platform. So our partnerships with a lot of these providers are about ensuring that we can collectively guarantee that their users get the best path forward and that creates more stickiness for them in terms of their service. Okay, Praveen, let's talk about Viptela for a second. What's on your plate this year, those industry watchers, what should we be expecting to see from you coming forward? I know what's interesting about Viptela is, I mean, we talk about, obviously, software-defined WAN as a category and clearly, as I mentioned, right, there's a huge latent requirement to evolve the WAN connectivity. And I would think of what Viptela does is sort of the next generation overlay. And we talk about sort of the different forms of connectivity which we give the control back to the enterprise to say, all you need to worry about, Mr. Customers, is to say, how can I define a segment or policy per user, per application? So that's been sort of the focus of our initial use case for our fabric and we've been tremendously successful. Most of what we focus primarily on the global fortune 1,000-type customers. So we have some pretty much every verticals represented in our customer base, large financials, industrial companies, car companies, retailers, healthcare and such like. But we think about this fabric as essentially solving the problem of connectivity. So the next phase of our solution is really about how do we make the cloud connectivity really simple and secure, right? So we're going to launch something in that space where we make connectivity to infrastructure. So it's SaaS platforms really seamless as part of our platform. So if you're a user in a branch or at the edge, you should be able to connect to your data center at the same level of experience and security as you would go to your cloud. So we want to make that super seamless. So that's, I think, we call that cloud on ramps and something that we're going to be in announcing pretty soon. When I think about the longer term evolution of this, because of the platform is fundamentally grounded in routing, in understanding how scale happens. What we've taken is we've taken the traditional routing stack and disaggregated it. There's a data plane that's on site, right? There's a control plane, which is essentially your routing and a management orchestration plane that sits in the cloud. So this allows us to solve many problems, right? So you can extrapolate forward and say, well, there's a whole problem of internet of things, right? What is the internet of things problem? It is a whole bunch of devices at the edge which need to be connected to end points, whether it's a data center or a collection point, dynamically, right, depending on the phase of theirs. So those are the kind of problems we think we can solve. So Viptela is interesting because it's not just about SD-WAN, it's really about the next generation overlay between the users and the cloud and being able to address multiple use cases. Okay, and there are a number of companies, plenty of startups, some of the big guys there in the market, what really differentiates you guys? What do your customers come to you for that the other guys can't do? Yeah, I think it's, I would say really, so we're all routing geeks, right? I pretty much spent 19 years at Cisco, built every platform that Cisco ships today, and so are most of the members and the teams. We have, I think, one of the strongest collection of networking talent in the industry. And what we're able to do with that is, as I mentioned, reimagine what the network connectivity needs to look like in the era of cloud, in the era of Internet of Things. So our architecture fundamentally is modular. As I mentioned, right, there's a data plane, there's a control plane, management orchestration plane. We are cloud managed and cloud delivered. So we solve for scale very elegantly because we inherently use the properties of routing that has allowed the internet to scale to what it is as part of the core of our solution, right? That's one thing that's unique. The second aspect of this is, for us, security is a day zero thing, right? When we bring up a box with zero touch provisioning, it comes up with an IP sector tunnel that's encrypted. And we do it without having to exchange keys, so it's inherently secure, right? So that is a very significant issue because if you're using the internet as your pipe for your mission critical traffic, how do you assure yourself that you're not going to be hacked, right? And your traffic's not going to be intercepted. So that's some of the largest financial institutions have bet on our architecture because they trust that, right? So that's the second piece. The third piece is from an application and a policy perspective, we have the ability with our controllers to be able to push policies and create segmentations for different use cases on a dynamic basis. So I'll give you an example. So if you have a user in a branch, right? And you have basically another user comes in, they have a different set of requirements. You can dynamically stitch up a tunnel from your cloud controller to enable that to happen without ever having to touch or configure any of the end boxes, right? So our cloud platform gives us tremendous amount of scale and flexibility. So that's the way I think about scalability, security, application policy and the different use cases that we're able to bring to bear. Right. So final question I have for you, Praveen. The networking world is changing faster than it used to. But I think back to, for many years, I would do slides on networking and we talk about decade scale. It's like, okay, here's how the standard comes, here's how it rolls out, here's how adoption. The enterprise is risk averse, slow to change, not doing anything. Why are things so exciting now in the networking space? What's different, what's driving that movement? Are customers moving faster? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think you put it differently. I think networking enjoyed architectural consistency and stability for almost two decades, which is not the case when you think about the data center or some of the other environments where there's constant change, right? Now having said that, when we think about what's driving this change, it's really that these two revolutions that are going on, one in the edge where users are evolving really rapidly, whether it's connectivity or devices and such like, and one in the data center in the cloud where applications are fundamentally changing. They're ephemeral, they're able to migrate between locations. So that's putting a lot of pressure back onto the network to say, hey, we need the network to be a lot more dynamic. We need the network to be a lot more flexible, a lot more cost effective. And that is the fundamental driver, right? Which we see as driving the customer's willingness to say, I need to re-look at the network. Now the other aspect of this is, as I said, we've re-imagined networking ground up. Clean sheet of paper, learn the lessons from the past and say, how do you make this painless for the customer? The reason why the network, particularly the WAN, has been stagnant is it is painful, right? I mean, it involves multiple connectivities, multiple carriers, multiple policies. It's not something that most enterprises want to deal with. By abstracting all that complexity away, right? We allow customers to focus on what they care about, is how do I connect, you know, enable user connectivity to applications and we take care of the underlay, right? So, I think that's, those are the key things. I mean, it's essentially the last leg of the stool, if you will, in terms of moving truly, moving to the cloud era. All right, well, Praveen Akharaju, thank you so much for joining us again. You're watching the worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage, The Cube.