 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello, and welcome to the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation. Where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. We all know it's going to be a multi-cloud world. How we get to that world is anybody's guess. Every enterprise is going to find themselves going on a distinct and original journey based on where they are and based on where they think they want to go. But one of the common elements that every enterprise is going to face is how to deal with the network that's going to make it easier or more difficult for them to utilize new services and place data in different places and assure security wherever the business needs to operate. SD-WAN is a technology that's been talked about for quite some time as a technology that could make that process easier, more certain. But there are a lot of options that are relatively new that don't feature a lot of customers and a lot of experience having been built into them. So that's one of the challenges that every enterprise faces is how to utilize SD-WAN to make their journey more simple, more economical, and more complete. And to have that conversation, we're joined by CEO today, Jeff Brown, who's the CEO of Open Systems. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, Peter. So Jeff, tell us a little bit about Open Systems. I know you've only been there for three weeks, but what's the starting point for you? Well, I think why do you come to a company like Open Systems? For me, there was a part of it that's about the people and liking the people that are there and I haven't met anyone I didn't like so far, which is always a great sign. But more importantly, I think it's how they treat their customers and how you see the benefits of what they're doing for their customer set out there. Companies have been in business, as you know, a long time over in Europe. And we have a very, very large customer base over there and they're fairly well known over there with a lot of very happy customers. And that was a big draw for me, which is now it's time to take the next step over in the US and other places and get the name known for what it really is, which is a very good solution. Well, SD-WAN has been a concept that's growing in appeal for quite some time, but Open Systems, as you said, has a base of customers in Europe that are actually doing it. So that gives you and Open Systems kind of an interesting visibility into the real nature of the problems of this. Tell us a little bit about what your customers are telling Open Systems about the need for SD-WAN and the evolution here. Sure, and I think about SD-WAN as sort of the on-ramp to the highway of the cloud and all the cloud can bring to that. One of the benefits I inherit here is 15 years or better of building a platform this designed for this. And before there was SD-WAN and before there was probably a lot of the cloud service and service as a service concept, these guys were really starting to build the underpinnings of that already. And it gives us a huge advantage because a lot of the things, the depth and the breadth of that platform is already built there that other people really still have to build. So I really like the position of the company from that standpoint. We've been able to take that to a lot of customers in the financial sector and manufacturing and a whole variety of others over in Europe and have these incredibly high NPS scores that people really resonate, the service resonates with them. So I like to say, when you think about this, most people don't operate an exchange server in their office anymore. It's all moving to the cloud. Well, your network has to move that direction as well. And SD-WAN is one of the key components of that. So you've seen the nature of the problem, which is that increasingly resources in the tech industry are being positioned as services. Your data is not necessarily going to move. The real goal is to try to bring those services to the data. That places a special and intense demand on the nature of networks. The data is going to not always be in the same place. The service may not always come from the same source. The network has to be able to respond to that. Tell us a little bit about how this class of solution is going to make it easier for businesses to sustain and maintain operations around this very increasingly flexible changing world of cloud services. Sure, and you mentioned in the intro about multi-cloud and some of those things. That's clearly a direction that a lot of this is going. We have customers today that are working across clouds. That's one of the things our platform can enable is multi-cloud solutions. And the way we think of this is you have pillars underneath your platform, but as I mentioned, sort of the on ramp to all this is SD-WAN. Then you've got security and various versions of security as far you want to go. Other services like a SOC and as a service concept. Security operations center. As a service concept across these different things. So there's lots of things that this begins to enable when you have that really strong base that's out there. And customers are more and more demanding those kind of services. You do have to think differently now. I mean, that's essentially it. The landscape is changing. Just like dial-up modems wouldn't work in today's digital environment, you know, you have to think about what's that next generation look like? So 15 years of working over in Europe, a fair number of customers that you're working with, getting a fair amount of feedback from them. You've mentioned it's a platform. You mentioned it's got SaaS elements to it. You're introducing new classes of services. But where in particular is open systems today that others are still trying to figure out how to get there? Well, you have, I think as a core here, the concept of as a service. So, you know, we've been doing this, as I said, for 15 years where we come in and said, you know, you don't have to do it the old way. You don't have to buy equipment, get your own connectivity, do all that kind of thing and put it together into it. We've been doing that. And we have all the underpinnings of that. And that's the difference right there. If you're a CIO, you want to be strategic, you need to be strategic, but you're dragged into the operational on a regular basis. And is that a waste of intellectual capital? Probably at a minimum, it's that. And so there's lots of things that we help with. And we've heard from our customers that there's a real financial benefit to being able to essentially move your network into the cloud along with your other services. So that's the concept. So the vision that you have is that the CIO and the business would think about the characteristics, the capabilities that are required of the network, and then it would use open systems to implement that so that it becomes a working operational platform over which data can move. Have I got that right? Absolutely, absolutely. You're spot on. And this is, again, a solution, end-to-end solution that we can put in place that takes all the guesswork out of it for them. They don't have to worry about technology decisions that may or may not be right. We're staying state-of-the-art along the way and handling all those other services. And we see this as really as a solution for the next generation network. Are we going to do everything? No, we'll have partners. We do have partners today. We're going to be acquiring people along the way to bring pieces of this into the puzzle as well. So there's lots of things that are going into that, but we know that that next generation looks a lot different than what's been there before. Well, given, let's build on that. So given that every CIO knows that we're in the midst of a transformative period, they're very concerned about making technology bets that might run out of runway sooner rather than later. They want to be open. They want to make it possible. They want those options. Given that Open Systems is at 15 years thinking about this, what are some of the areas that you think are particularly important for CIOs to worry about to ensure that they have that kind of open headroom? Well, one of the things is, as a service company, we get to have the luxury of controlling the entire environment. When you're building from a hardware and connectivity standpoint, you don't. And as a matter of fact, in a lot of places, they have mixed environments, so nothing quite works the way it should together. And I think our benefit over 15 years, as you and I both talked about, is the fact that we've thought it through a lot of this already. So the upgrades that have to happen, the changes in technology, we handle that for you, and we can implement that without a massive box upgrade path out there in the field. So a lot of that is just, as I said, a service that we offer then to take the guesswork out of that so that the CIO can spend his time trying to figure out what the strategic direction should be for is information or the company in general, rather than getting bogged down in operational details. So you've been strong in Europe, you're trying to expand your presence in Europe, here in the US, European companies have bought you to the US, they've bought you to Asia. That's got to be an exciting proposition for open systems, it's thinking about expanding with your customers. Tell us a little bit about some of the priorities that you have for the company. Well, so it's a very interesting time for us. I like to say we're the best kept secret in the US. We have a huge number of very happy customers, as I said, that's one of the things that attracted me to the business over in Europe, and we have a number that are starting here in the US. But whereas we're well known for this over in Europe, we haven't gotten the message here yet, which is part of the next stage of the company. We're doing business in 184 countries across the world with our customer base today, and now it's just to get the message out about what we can do, which I think is radically different than a lot of people. We're seeing some of the other people in the market try to go this direction, but as you know, it takes an awful long time to build that platform that's strong enough to hold up to the rigors that a big company puts a network through. And it's very difficult. I mean, there's so many SD-WAN options out there today, but one of the things that distinguishes you guys is you actually have a customer base. And having a customer base for technology that is as complex, ubiquitous, platform-like as SD-WAN provides an enormous advantage because you already got people using it, telling you what works, telling you what could be better, giving you visibility and where it should go for their business, that puts you guys in a special position. So if I think in say 2025, 2028, where do you think this SD-WAN thing goes? Is it just still SD-WAN, are we thinking differently about how these services are being bought to customers? Well, I think, as I said, I sort of view SD-WAN as, it's the on-ramp to the freeway, right? You get into the platform or the freeway or whatever you want to describe it with that tool, but there's awful lot of other things you have to have to make it really go. Security, obviously a big piece of that. But then things like analytics, how do I optimize my network? You know, a lot of our customers are huge multinationals that have everything from very small branch offices to big ones. How do you optimize your buy around that so that you're taking risk out, as well as performing at the best, obviously dollar-wise, the best performance for you? And we can help with that. So analytics, statistics, all those kind of things are packages that go on top of that that much like you get in your cloud services today are going to be the next generation, right? That's where you got to go. And our customers are driving us that direction saying, these are the kind of decisions we need to make, help us make them. Again, three weeks, you probably met with maybe half dozen to dozen customers. Give us some of the kind of excitements or the excitement that some of your customers are talking about where they want to go. Well, you know, one of them is, nothing ever works if there's not some sort of financial benefit to that. And one of the nice things that we've seen from our customer set is a very typically 25 to 30% almost immediate impact on the bottom line. They're saving money by doing this and bringing that to us. That and the fact that they no longer have to make technology or hardware bets anymore, that's gone from their thing. So they can actually focus on what the services should do and the best in class and those kind of things. So what I've heard from our customer set is they value the fact that we're taking away sort of the operational, what's not fun, the operational thing, making it work every day and the applications that have to go in that and they can then get more strategic on how do we make the next move with our data. Spending less for more, better options. If you could do that in Wall Street, you'd be a trillionaire, right? Yeah, yeah. Jeff Brown, CEO of Open Systems. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for joining us for another theCUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burr, see you next time.