 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver with my co-host, John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Charles Furlin, who's the Vice President of Business Development at NewAge Networks. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so, the OpenStack show, we're always talking about the maturity of it, where customers are going with it. You're in business development, so one of the things we were discussing from the keynote this morning is the telcos and the service providers and who's doing what and who makes up that environment, so give us your viewpoint, what you're seeing as to where some of the real action is in this marketplace. Fair enough, we've been talking about NFV, for example, for many years, as you know, but I would say it's probably since the second half of 2016 that we've started to see some significant large deployment and the service provider paying attention to building up a telco cloud to host their NFV applications, right? So really from the second half of 2016, 2017, we've seen massive deployments of OpenStack with the service provider and a lot of them to host applications to serve their branch office customers. So that's another motivation for them to deploy this. Yeah, so Charles, we've talked to the AT&T Verizon, Deutsche Telecoms up there, all these big ones, but I look at it and say, is this an opportunity of 20 global telcos or do we go down to some of the MSPs, CSPs, however you want to call those service providers? The regional ones. So some of the regional ones that maybe aren't as much telcos or are they, where's that line, what do you see as kind of the TAM, if you will, for the space? Obviously the large service provider will have a piece there, but we see a lot of the regional customer consuming services from a local provider, right? They do have either for language reasons, for regulation and governance. So we see a lot of them consuming services from a local service provider. So an OpenStack sort of became the building block of these NFV infrastructure for the service provider. It's interesting, we actually just had an infrastructure as a service company from Australia on, and I said, you look at their website, it doesn't say OpenStack anywhere, they provide cloud offerings. So it's one of the things, there's all these telcos and service providers that use it, but it's not like they're like, we're your preferred distribution of OpenStack, it's just part of the plumbing underneath. The use cases that are addressed by OpenStack and served by OpenStack really fits well in a lot of the telcos space right now. So we've seen a lot of growth for virtual private cloud, we've seen a lot of growth for dynamically deploying application, having application residing in the data center or moving closer to the users at the edge, for example, and these are sort of the use cases that Nuage and OpenStack address pretty well. Well, that's an interesting pivot point, right? I understand as an enterprise technologist why software defined networking is important, right? And it's important in your stack, it's got to be important inside of an OpenStack, but can you talk a little bit about some of these use cases, like I hadn't really thought about SD-WAN and how that really, and what architectures and deployments would really kind of mean that you'd need to deploy that with some of the department. And that's a good point because really I think SD-WAN served as the catalyst for the service providers who start paying attention to deploying an NFV infrastructure. Before that, there was an interest, there was a motivation. However, SD-WAN's offered of dynamic, flexible, agile branch office connectivity that allows them to dynamically insert value-added services. So, yes, SD-WAN provide a connectivity between the branch office, but really what is the service provider are going after is offering application firewall, DDoS services or URL filtering in all of these applications residing in the data center. And all of a sudden, as I hold on, I cannot have an SD-WAN solution disjoint from my data center OpenStack deployment. And this is where the Nuage actually served as a connecting to both environment, but also this is what served as a catalyst, the SD-WAN deployment, sort of a catalyst for them to start deploying a dynamic infrastructure in the data center. Yeah, so Charles, just on the SD-WAN piece itself, we've seen a lot of activity, bunch of acquisitions in that market. What differentiates Nuage in this space? Well, fair enough, we've seen these acquisitions as a complement to the strategy that we have taken over the past five years paying off. We are, from the get-go started to have an end-to-end SDN solution. So it's not just about connecting branch office together, it's not about just connecting application in the data center, it's actually connecting the users in the branch office with the applications in the data center or in the public cloud. And what differentiates us the most is that we have the exact same platform, the same SDN solution end-to-end to connect branch office, programming branch routers, or programming virtual switches in the data center or bare metal physical service. So that is perhaps Nuage's single most, biggest differentiator is the capability to have that single policy, that single SDN framework from the users in the branch to the data center or public cloud. All right, you mentioned bare metal. I remember it was funny, when the project came out for bare metal, of course, it's called ironic because most people, when the open stack started, it was a given that it was virtualized environment. Of course today we've got containers starting to go up the stack with Kubernetes so we understand why bare metals there. What are you seeing in that space and what kind of, what are you hearing from your customers? So we have a lot of attraction with ironic, actually. It's ironic, but we do. And we did that actually in open stack Sunday in November, we did a co-presentation with Fujitsu who deployed our K5 infrastructure using Nuage networks and ironic integration. To roll out on top of that is flexible. You can put a platform as a service, they can do whatever they want on top of it, but the bare metal provisioning is somewhere we, we have a couple of large accounts that have deployed this globally, yeah. Okay, are you working with Akata containers that they have here and whether you are or not, would love to hear kind of the security story when we talk things, everything from bare metal and containers and what you're doing with open stack. And that's perhaps the other biggest differentiator that we have is because we're able to have the single networking policies from a container to or programming the network of a container or a KVM VM or Hyper-V or VMware, we have the single SDN platform and therefore we see all the traffic in the data path and we're able to index this into an elastic search database and create an index and set a lot of users to create some thresholds. And that is what is perhaps the newest thing at Nuage is the capability now to say, hey, once those thresholds are crossed, why don't we reprogram the network dynamically? So near real time, we're actually able to take an action to reprogram the network based on some live feed network information that we're receiving from the various element that we have programmed either in the branch office or in a container level. Okay, so today Cata Containers, not something that you're involved with or I didn't quite, Cata Containers from the new high-level project from the OpenStack Foundation. I don't know right now. Sorry about that, yeah. But your customers are using container technologies on top. We are using containers, we're working on Cata and various others, we have an integration with Kubernetes, so we provide a CNI that absolutely involved there and this is how a lot of our customers are using us right now. And the customers we're talking about, these would often be service providers, is that correct? In the context of containers and Kubernetes, it would mainly be on the enterprise. A lot of an agile type of development where they want to have, there's a lot of developer and they want to have the networking program and the same lifecycle as the application project is rolling out and having the micro segmentation, meaning that we are able to isolate each one of the project from one another. So if one gets contaminated, the other one doesn't. And so this is where a lot of the Kubernetes and deployment has been on the large enterprise, I would say. Okay, that makes sense, because I'm trying to, as a person outside the telecom industry, but following kind of the enterprise and OpenStack, it's interesting to see this vision of the service providers who are not dumb pipes, certainly, but through OpenStack and the NFE and the services they're able to provision with folks like Nuage, able to provide services. So just trying to figure out where the line, maybe you could draw us a picture of what the modern service provider will be able to provide versus what's still left then for the at the enterprise level. Depending on which market size analyst you're looking at. Always depends, yeah. The VPN connectivity will be, it varies between two to six to eight to 12, it's a relatively small market compared to the manage applications, right? Manage security, that's tenfold that market space. So really, as you said, the objective here of the service provider is not to become a dumb virtual pipe and the ability to dynamically insert some value-added services over the top. And this is what having an agile SD-WAN now gives them the capability to say, hold on a second, I can now start serving a value-added application because my dynamic network is available now. And this is what is fueling a lot of the OpenStack deployment right now in the data center. Charles, one of the discussions we've been looking at the last couple of years is there's OpenStack and then there's containers and Kubernetes and everything. How do you see those go together? What are you hearing from customers? How does new eyes see those in the world? I don't think they're mutually exclusive, to be honest. Well, that's the general discussion here, but I'd love to hear some real world. So, yeah. In the context of Ironic, as we just mentioned, a lot of the time the bare metal servers are actually deployed using OpenStack and what goes on top of it is actually Kubernetes, right? And this is very common and it gives that isolation or it's deploying a virtual machine running a past platform in there, right? So, actually we do see the OpenStack to be used often to deploy the infrastructure and program and provision, I should say, the infrastructure. And whatever goes on top, it could be Kubernetes, works just very nicely. Charles, you've been involved with OpenStack for many years, I guess. This is how many OpenStack summits? Well, probably eight or more, yeah. How are you seeing the OpenStack community evolve? I know you've just arrived, we're day one here at this summit in beautiful Vancouver, but in terms of the energy of the community, the people who are here, it's a little bit smaller this year, but I think other people here are actual users and actual deployers, so. Exactly. Yeah, any thoughts there? So this is perhaps the, well, we went through a marketing hike, which is great, however, what I would say, regardless of the event today, in general, the OpenStack community is a lot more mature. It's a lot more stable as well and the product, the technology, the community, is more focused around solving real use cases and real problem. Couple of years ago, there was a lot of interest, a lot of hype, you know, but it would have solved world hunger as well, right? Now I think it's very pointed, very precise, and actually, Nuage is quite proud to be participating and contributing in that community because we're starting to see the technology really addressing key problems here. Charles, last thing I wanted to ask is, the network sits in a very special place when you talk about really the multi-cloud world that customers are talking about. What are you seeing when it comes to that environment? You know, how do customers figure out where they put their applications? Are they moving, you know, things, or is it just kind of a heterogeneous but still complicated world? They're still figuring out as well, right? I mean, it's a very dynamic environment, but I would say if I had to draw a conclusion, most of the customers are deploying the application on-premise. They like to have either for storage, either for some of the governance, they do like to have applications on-premise. However, the multi-cloud scenario is often used in large banks to compute or in a large organization to compute on a burst capability, right? The capability to say, hey, I need to have X compute power available for X time is very appealing for them. And this is how most of the deployment of Nuage are used right now is having, doing the plumbing, the virtual plumbing inside a data center, and dynamically, based on demand, the capability to do the same networking policy, the same networking extension to one of the public cloud offering is very appealing because it's sporadic. It's a burst type of scenario. Yeah, especially to see a lot of those service providers have that direct connectivity capability, right? As well, correct, correct. And you're right, that it can become a little bit complex when you have, when you want to deploy the same networking policies across on-premise and multiple cloud provider. And if you have interim service provider, then it becomes a little bit complicated to orchestrate all of it. And this is where SDN gives them that hardware abstraction and maintain the same networking policy. All right, well, Charles Furlin, appreciate the update on Nuage and all of your viewpoints from the customers that you're seeing. My pleasure. Thank you very much. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.