 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in Las Vegas for AWS re-invent 2019. Our seventh year out of the eight years they've had it, we've seen the rise and dominance of Amazon continue to thunder away at the competition, span their lead, printing money. Stu Miniman, my co-host right here next to me, I'm John Furrier, extracting the sleep from the noise. Our next guest is Steve Mulaney, who's the president and CEO of AVatrix. Cube Alarm was on Tuesday, as part of our editorial segment, who his company or one of his employees coined the term. You take the T out of Cloud Native, it's Cloud Naive, which has been going viral. Kind of a meme. You can welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. All right, so let's get into the AVatrix value purpose. I want to get in and dig in more, but first explain what you guys do and what market you're targeting. So we do, I would say Cloud Native, not naive, Cloud Native networking that embraces and extends the basic constructs, the native constructs of the public clouds, not just AWS, but all the public clouds, and builds a multi-cloud architecture, networking and security architecture for enterprise customers that delivers the simplicity and the automation that people want from cloud. That's why they want it Cloud Native, but yet brings along the functionality, the performance and the visibility and control that they had on on-prem. So that kind of a tastes great, less filling, not one or the other both. I want the simplicity and automation of anything that I expect from the cloud, but I need that enterprise functionality, that control, the security, the performance that I used to have on-prem. Because I wasn't doing that for my own health, I need to bring that along. That's what we do. What main problem are you solving for customers? What's the big pain point? Is it, oh, what are you enabling? The big pain point is the center of gravity, as Andy Jassy has talked, is moving from on-prem into the cloud. So it's no longer, I mean, data centers aren't going away. They're going to still be there, but the investment architecture is in the cloud. And you're going to see the cloud start moving out with their announcements. You see everything, their outposts and everything else they're doing is taking that architecture and moving it out. The problem we solve is, AWS says to every enterprise customer, we will give you anything and everything you ever need from networking and security. You don't need anybody else. And so what ends up happening is as enterprises, so for an SMB, that's great. If you've got a few VPCs, life is good. Use all the native stuff from AWS. What happens though is your Qualcomm or your USAA or your, you name it, big 50 year old, 100 year old enterprise, you have complex networking and security demands. You go to the cloud, there's so many limitations of what the native constructs of all the clouds can do. You start realizing, okay, I need more. And so we are very complimentary to AWS. We sit on top of that. We leverage those basic constructs. We program those constructs and then we extend that functionality to deliver the functionality that they need. That's awesome Stu, and I want to dig into that. But I want to first get to the hard news. You guys have news here at Reinvent. What's the big news story that you guys are putting out there? Two announcements and that actually goes perfectly with the way the world's going and also with the embrace and extend of AWS. So the first is we introduce what we call Aviatrix Cloud WAN. So they announced a transit gateway network manager with accelerated VPN leveraging global accelerator as just a way to bring in, basically embrace branch offices into the cloud. So if you think of SD WAN in that market, if your center of gravity is on-prem in a data center and PLS is horrible, you needed a better way to do branch office connectivity, SD WAN is fantastic. And it's a great optimal way to get back to that data center. Well, as the center of gravity moves into the cloud, the data center's in the cloud. I just need to get better optimal access, performance and latency into AWS because that's the center of gravity. So AWS with the global accelerator allows you to get on one of their 250 pops around the world as quickly as possible. So if you're in Singapore, get on that pop, you VPN in and then you go across the global backbone of AWS all the way out to that VPC in Virginia. It's beautiful. Because guess what? That is the most optimal way to get there. Instead of VPC to VPC across the internet, right on the AWS backbone. Well, Steve, it's fascinating stuff because if you look at the traditional network, it was, I knew the knobs and how I needed to get everything to work, but the big challenge for most network people is most of the network that they're responsible for, they can't touch it, they can't adjust it. So are we recreating some of the environment or how do you, because cloud's supposed to be simple. Well, that's supposed to be easy, but it needs to meet the enterprise requirements so help that network administrator. They're sometimes going away to the cloud administrator, but you still, networking's tough. And therefore, how do we make that work? That's part of what we do is that's the other thing that we solve is people think they go to the cloud and they think, oh, go build. I don't want to build anything. I want to consume. It's still difficult. We come in and abstract away a lot of the details for them, such that we deliver that service. On the cloud way, and the other thing that we do, again, back to embracing and extending. What router is out in that branch office? 87% of the time, Cisco, right? I mean, of course it is. So the SD-WAN guys will go in and say, we'll rip that box out and put it in another little box. But like a 20,000 branches, I'm not ripping out anything, right? That's very painful. So with our cloud-WAN, we can orchestrate and reconfigure all of our engineers came from Cisco. So any Cisco iOS router out there, we can orchestrate and reconfigure to set up that VPN automatically through our orchestrator so that we don't have to rip and replace that router that's existing there. So now AWS loves it because that's the last piece of friction, they want no friction. And it's always in that physical to cloud transition that all the complexity is. And by enabling their network manager and accelerator VPN and global accelerator to use the existing Cisco router that's out there, no one else does that. Cisco doesn't do that, we're the only ones. So when you embrace a native construct, what's the native construct in the branch office? BGP and Cisco iOS, we embrace it and then enhance it and make it better. Are you only on Cisco or what about Juniper Swift? Right now it's Cisco, because Cisco's 87% of every branch of the cloud. So you're in a software abstraction. Software. Across, and you basically changed the game with SD-WAN a little bit. You modernized SD-WAN. SD-WAN is great for the old way of doing networking and look, for the next five years, you're still going to need SD-WAN. It's a bubble market, it's like WAN optimization. Go ask Riverbed if WAN optimization is a great market. It was for a while, just like SD-WAN. But that's kind of the old way, but more and more what you're going to find is where my branches need to connect to is in the cloud. And if you do that, you don't need SD-WAN, you just need better connectivity to AWS. That's what they're providing. I got to ask you the question about the cloud naive because there's a lot of old school IT people who still think there's food in the data center, there's still action there. And box makers are all on the vendor side supplying boxes. They still want to supply boxes. So as those old guys and gals do their thing, they're stuck in their ways. That's friction. Jassy talks about the transformation as new leadership. What has to change in that old world? What should those CIOs and CEOs tell their staff and what should the staff do themselves? I actually think the customers are there. I think the vendors are. The vendors are the ones that aren't. They're the ones who are cloud naive. They actually don't even know what they don't know. The customers are the ones that say, oh no. And this is the whole shift that Jassy's talking about, the business transformation, they understand and they are bringing along all their people and they have some people that are probably further along and experts in AWS. But the absolutely number one requirement for them is we've got to bring along the people. They don't want to leave them behind and say you get to work on the old data center and these guys are going to work in cloud. They're bringing them all in. Talk about your customers. Who's buying from you? What's it look like? What kind of scope do you have for customer base? It's funny. It's all the old networking guys. It's not developers signing any of that. It's old IT. Now they don't want to do it the old way. They want to do it the new cloud way. But these guys understand BGP. They understand networking and they're in charge now. And so it's like because it's gotten so serious for enterprises, this, the networking team, the security team, it is IT that is running this. So that's a big company, small companies. We get them all. All right Steve, I want to make sure I understand this. Because when I hear cloud native, I really think a lot about that application, mind shift, microservices architecture. And that's fine. For sure. Networking unfortunately for the most part, it's invites on going through the pipes and I haven't really thought about that. So it's not just because it's cloud, but cloud native and therefore things like your container and Dockerize things. This is what this world is built for that your solution is solving for, yes? So I'll give you a perfect example. So we actually helped AWS come out with TGW last year. Sherry I found was on stage with Dave Brown and the networking keynote, launching TGW and everything. Great. Of course, before that you were just doing VPC to VPC peering. It was a horrible mess. So you need a transit architecture. So they came out with TGW, fantastic. So we embrace and extend TGW. So the problem is they come out with TGW, but guess what AWS doesn't do? They don't propagate routes to spoke VPCs. Okay, so how do the routes get propagated? Well, you have a person, they need manual, if there's an update on the on-prem, you manually update the routes. Well, that might work if you've got three VPCs. Again, you're an SMB, but I'm an enterprise. I got 3,000 VPCs, that is not going to work. So cloud native, we are not just sitting on top of AWS. We are in the matrix. We are in, we understand natively. So our central controller will actually, like there's no BGP running at that layer, but our central controller will push routes and update routing tables everywhere it needs to be, learn the routes from on-prem, push it where it needs to be, and then everything automatically works. It reminds me, we had, more than a decade ago, we went from all the North-South traffic to the East-West propagated by VMs. This is in order of magnitude more challenging, and we know that this cloud environment, people can't do it. There's not enough people, I don't have enough man hours, because the machine learning and devices need to be involved. Here's another thing that's happening, guys, is there's 100% of people in the universe that no cloud. That number's growing, but there's a fixed set. Everybody's going after all those people. You've got the big cloud, they're all hiring like crazy. The vendors are probably hiring. You've got customers, they're stealing from each other. It's very difficult to keep a staff. And so they look and they say, I probably could figure this out, but there's no way I'm going to be able to operationalize it. There's just zero chance I can do that, and there's just so much change, and honestly they say it's a full-time job just keeping up with what Amazon is announcing. Forget implementing. And so that's where they look and they come to Austin, they say there's zero chance that I can deploy networking architecturally without aviators. On the networking guys, because you and I always say the networking guys have the keys to the kingdom. They always have. I mean, people have tried to move the center of power away from the networking guys, but now as the cloud gets to the center of gravity and some of the power, the networking guys got to step up their game. But they don't want to rip and replace anything because as you pointed out earlier, it's complex to even pull one or two out. So the concern that I might have, then I'll put the question to you is, Steve, great energy, but I'm really nervous that these routes are not going to be, there's going to be some coherency issues around updating routes, because that's my number one concern. How do you guys solve that? Well, the one thing I've always seen, who's the worst when most things happen, who's the culprit? A human, right? It's always a human that's something wrong. And so I would much rather trust some sort of automated software, because at least if you program it correctly, it's going to do the right thing. So we have not had, I mean, so. It's more mature, there's no issue there. Yeah, no, there's no issue. I mean, and what we do see sometimes are people say, because there's a lot of people that are very smart. They get into the cloud and they are do-it-yourselfers and they love to go build and they love the complexity and they want all that, they feel like there's job security and what we sometimes have to do is say, yeah, but think about day two, think about handing off to operations. You might get hit by a bus and then your company is screwed and you've got to almost get them enlightened to realize that they should be working on higher level things other than low level things. I'd say that's something that we kind of educate people. How's this, this is Amazon, they're one cloud of many, three, four, maybe one or two. Jassy said to me, you know, most of the primaries will be picked, probably Amazon, but in some cases Azure will be a primary, less than that AWS. So multi-cloud is the word that everyone's talking about and Amazon seems to be loosening up a bit on what it is, so they recognize it. What is multi-cloud? I mean, what is really going on with multi-cloud? I think if you're a small company, absolutely pick one cloud, like for sure, right? Like that doesn't make sense to go multiple clouds in your small, medium business. If your needs are not that complex, pick one cloud, right? And if it's AWS, AWS is the leader, stay with them. If it just happens to be, well, I got a bunch of credits in Azure, okay, maybe do them. I think to date, most people are picking AWS, they're the killer leader. But when you talk to the enterprise, the real enterprise, right, that are just now moving into the cloud, they're all multi-cloud, just had one today. Super large chip company down LA, San Diego area. Guess what, use it all three clouds. And I asked them, why? Well, because we started in AWS, we got some things there. We've got a bunch of stuff that runs in Azure with Office 365 and other things that they do. And Google for ML and that kind of stuff, it runs better there. Enterprises are going to pick where the workloads run best. And they're big, and so they're going to look they're going to elevate up and build an architecture that works across all of them. I don't think multi-cloud means I'm going to move this workload from here to here. That's never going to happen. Maybe in 20 years, but I doubt it. It's just that the workloads are destined, they run better on that, and they're going to focus on different parts. Workloads for the cloud that picked the right cloud for the right workload. Yeah, and I'm so big and I acquire different companies and I get acquired and you've got to think of the on-prem data centers as another cloud. That's a multi, and then I go into Europe and I have GDPR and I need another cloud. I mean, they're going to have four or five clouds. And I don't think it's going to be 20% across all five. Well, I think it'll be a power, I think it'll be more than one, three clouds that there's going to be specialty clouds. Stu and I riff on this all the time. Well, Steve, I want to thank you for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Give a quick plug for the company. How many employees are you looking to hire? What are some of your objectives? Yeah, growing fast, we've got over 400 customers and you asked one of our customers. We've got customers spending millions of dollars a year with us, all the way down to customers spending $5 a month, why? Because they're the wonderful thing of cloud. They can consume, we've got 400 customers all over the world and I don't even know who probably 300 of them are, right? Why? They go on the marketplace, they go like this, they download, maybe they come on Drift, ask one question, they launch. And they spend $5 a month, I don't even know what they're doing. And eventually we watch their MRR and it just grows and grows and grows and grows and eventually we're like, whoa, now you're spending 50 grand a year, we should talk. So it's kind of like how some companies used open source. That ends up being our funnel, a low friction, zero friction, high velocity, land and expand model. And then we have the traditional enterprises that you'd imagine. So everything in between. And you're hiring? We're hiring like crazy, hiring a whole bunch of sales organization all around the world. We just raised $40 million series C a month ago and we're going for it. Got you, fresh financing, Aviatrix, C Balani, CEO of Aviatrix here on theCUBE for re-invent 2019. Stay with us for more coverage. Day three of our three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets here, thanks to Intel for the being our headline sponsor without their supporting our mission which is bringing you the best content possible. We want to thank Intel and all of our sponsors. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.