 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Oh, welcome back, we are live here on theCUBE, which of course is the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE, and we're really immediate, and we're very glad to have here with us for the second of our three days of coverage here. Re-invent AWS, throwing quite a bash here at the Sands in Las Vegas, I'm with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and we're joined now by Amanan Shah, who was the director of product management, or eight director of product management. I'd say it's Cisco Systems. Are you used to hearing that yet at Cisco Systems? We are getting close to it. Primarily at Beppella before acquisition just three months ago, so things are going well for you. Things are going great. We're really excited to take the journey forward. It's been less than 90 days since we got acquired. We had a great ride at Viptela as a SDVAN company. We were the market leaders with the largest traction in the Fortune-Finded space, and Cisco was a natural fit, and now we are very excited to take this journey forward with Cisco's broader partner ecosystem and the customer base. So what's that all about? What brought the two of you together in your business? That's a very interesting question. You mean other than money? Yeah, well, yeah. Always the big driver. Absolutely. But when it comes down to doing business, what was it? Yeah, so if you look at Cisco and how they are transitioning, I'll talk about business and technology together. If you talk about business, Cisco as a company is all moving towards subscription-based business model. A large portion of Cisco's business today is very capex heavy, and Viptela was all about subscription business model, and so that was very attractive to Cisco. The other piece was we went head to head against Cisco in a lot of different Fortune-Finded accounts, and we had a lot of success. So they saw the solution that we brought to the table, and they saw the benefits of keeping it simple, yet sophisticated. That was the strength of Viptela solution, and that was very, very interesting to Cisco. The other piece was that this large deployments, a lot of customers are moving towards a cloud-first model, and one of the key value-pros of Viptela was everything was cloud-first, and 90% of our customers, we were hosting their control plane and management plane in a cloud. And so as customers move towards this cloud journey, they wanted to consume it as a service, and that was very attractive to Cisco also. So all of these together made it very attractive for Cisco to look at us as not just a competition, but something that they can build on the business. Couple of it, right. So the SD-WAN's been a hot space, and been a couple of acquisitions that happened. Cisco had one or two solutions already before the acquisition, depending on who you talked to, talked about that fit. Can you walk us through a little bit, kind of, you know, I'm sure you have to go through the portfolio stuff, how you position it, things like that. You think about the customers, but yeah, walk us through. So Cisco had Ivan solution, which was the legacy SD-WAN solution that Cisco had. Cisco also had Miraki as SD-WAN solution, and now with the acquisition, Cisco has Viptela-based SD-WAN. So the way we looked at it is, the way Viptela's SD-WAN solution was built is all of the intelligence was in the fabric. And the end nodes were what we call the edge routers that were connecting into the fabric and leveraging the intelligence that was there. Now the end nodes could be residing in a branch, residing in a data center, or in a cloud location like AWS. And so the way we are approaching is, the intelligence will all remain in the fabric, and rather than just having Viptela's routers as the end nodes, we will leverage the Cisco's broader portfolio as end nodes into that fabric. So if you look at Viptela's, it was all Ethernet-based products. Now if you wanted a T1-E1 interface, if you wanted a DSL interface, Viptela did not have it. Cisco already has it. So it naturally made sense to leverage all of the breadth of portfolio that Cisco had and build that into the fabric. And that is what we are moving towards. In the next few months, we will have a new software which will leverage all of those capabilities and have the full breadth of portfolio connected into that SD-WAN fabric. All right, can you connect the dots with us now, being here at AWS, how's that fit in? Networking, of course, critical component for cloud, but yeah. Absolutely, and this is the best time. I mean, if you look at what AWS did over the last few months, they actually had a third-party evaluate a lot of different SD-WAN vendors, and they published a paper that talked about intro to SD-WAN. Well, they listed all of the vendors and the capabilities, so they are acknowledging SD-WAN as a big movement going forward and a big market, and they want to be part of it. And we have seen a lot of customers as they move their workloads into cloud and into AWS, they want to extend the network fabric, continue to use the same tools that they've been using and automate the capability of extending the fabric into the cloud. So segmentation, so security, visibility, automation, those are some of the key value prop or key data point that customers are asking us, saying we want a single tool that will do that. And that is what we have done with the automation that we have built. Yeah, I've seen over the last, this is my fifth year at the show, about two years ago, networking seemed to really kind of pick up. If I'm correct, I saw more than one Cisco booth even, because I think there was another acquisition that Cisco have. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of kind of Cisco in the public cloud these days, you know? Yes, so Cisco has always embraced cloud and Cisco's overall strategy has been we will enable customers to take their workloads wherever they want to be. So whether it's the traditional data centers or AWS or any other cloud, Cisco always has this multi-cloud strategy and helping customers to build this fabric that would extend not only from branch to data center, but branch to cloud, branch to data center, data center to cloud, no matter where the applications are, no matter where the users are. It's all about connecting users to applications wherever they decide. So what's affecting that in terms of multicloud and my decision about where I'm going to put whatever workload? I mean, different capabilities, right? I've got different considerations. So what do you think is motivating people now or what's instigating people to make these decisions about what they're going to do where? So there's various evaluation criteria on how you adopt a cloud. So a lot of customers start with one cloud, get familiar with it, run some dev application, then run some production application. Once they get comfortable with it, then they want to expand to multicloud and less reliance on one particular cloud, but essentially leverage the best of what each cloud provider has to offer. And that is what we want to enable our customers to do. Connect applications wherever, whichever cloud they decide, and connect users to those applications. Yeah, when I think back, I've worked with Cisco for a lot of my career, you know, branch was something that was critically important. How much has changed moving to cloud? How much is the same kind of extending from branch to cloud? Yeah, that's a great point. If you look at how the branch and the van has not evolved for the last 20 years, it is all about MPLS and the connectivity and getting service from the providers. Well, with applications moving outside of data center into cloud, historically you take all of your branch traffic into your data center, get it serviced by the applications that are in the data center, and only about 5% would go out to the internet. But if the applications are in the cloud, why do I need to take all the traffic from branch to the data center? Why can't I just go from branch to the cloud, or data center to the cloud, or campus to the cloud? So, the fundamental design principles have changed, and as a result you have to evolve in terms of how you design the van, how you deploy it, and how you evolve your thought process around consumption model. The other aspect that has changed is because of internet and cellular and customers want to build the STVAN fabric that is transport-agnostic. You can leverage NPRS, you can leverage internet, you can leverage cellular. Why do I care about what connected it? I tie my applications to a certain SLA. As long as any path that meets that SLA, I'm okay as the solution takes, as long as it's secure. And that is what customers are looking for. The last piece that customers are looking for is the change in the consumption model. A lot of customers want to consume it as a service. Historically they would get everything from a MSP or a service provider. Now they are looking at, okay, how do I, instead of having everything in my prem, consume it as a service? And that's what we saw in the early days of IPELA, 90% of our customers consuming control plane and management plane from our hosted locations. Great, I want to understand, it's been three months since the acquisitions. I'd expect being part of Cisco, you get access to a lot more customers. What else has changed? What is coming to an event like this under the Cisco umbrella mean? Yeah, so there are a few other things the first and foremost, as you rightfully said, is access to a lot of Cisco customers. Cisco is a great brand and going against them, I've always faced that and now being part of Cisco, I am leveraging that. Cisco is a great brand and what customers want is that the product from Cisco that is solid and that works for years to come. The other aspect that has changed is with us being part of Cisco, we are not only leveraging the customer and the partner ecosystem, we are integrating with the broader product portfolio that Cisco has. I gave you the example of the routing portfolio that we are integrating in. In addition to that, Cisco has a great product portfolio on the security side. So we are integrating into Cisco's security portfolio as well to provide this end-to-end customer solution that leverages security, networking, and a whole bunch more. So, I don't know if it's a friction point, but I mean, you did things a certain way. Absolutely. You were a competitor. Yes. Cisco does things a certain way. Yes. They were a competitor. So I mean, how do you make that work? Because ultimately, there's got to be, I just assume, some difference of approach. And I would be very honest. It's inevitable, right? Yeah, it's inevitable and it's there. I mean, the way, the pace at which we were delivering, we want to continue to deliver at the same pace because we want to continue to know it at the pace that we were delivering as a startup. And that is one of the promises that Cisco has done. Cisco leadership has been very upfront about tell us what worked as a startup and we want to incorporate that. And that is one of the surprising things that when we're walking in, I was always cautious that, hey, would we be able to execute at the rate we want to execute? And that's one of the leadership promises that we have got is we are behind you. We fully trust the capabilities that you have. Go run with it. And we see that day in and day out across the entire leadership team. It's a great stamp to have, right? It is a great stamp to have. And now, when we were as a startup, a lot of customers, when we were trying to close the business, they will say, do I really want to do business with a startup? And there was always that financial and other contingencies that would come into table. All of those is off-table now. Now that we are part of Cisco, we have the Cisco brand that's backing us. And that's been a huge advantage. And it has increased our sales pipeline significantly. Your world's gone to this. Exactly. All right. Well, good for you. Congratulations on the acquisition. And look forward to maintaining the surveillance and the progress here. Absolutely. We are very excited. Thank you, Monon. Thank you. Good, Monon Shaw from Cisco Systems. Back with more. Stu and I will be here from Reinvent. We're at AWS here in Las Vegas and back in a bit.