 from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Console Connect Live 2015. Sponsored by Console. There's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program. Where we go out to the events and extract the similar noise. We are here at the Apple event. I mean, oops, Council Connect event. Oh! We're at the founder, one of the co-founders, Bill Norton, formerly IIX Now, Console Inc. Welcome to theCUBE. I'm here with Jeff Frick. Great to see you again. Just kidding, Apple event's going on. But that's big news. Apple event is a consumer event. Yep. This is the engine room of innovation. Yeah, there's some event going on down the street. I was really sure what that was all about. A small fruit company, I guess. What's going on with Council Connect? Tell the folks what it's about. I mean, you know each other. We've been following your career, founder of Equinix, been an entrepreneur, your total networking geek, done a bunch of podcasts, a lot of transformation, a re-platforming of the internet going on. That's right. That's right. Well, fundamentally, the problem on the internet today is that there are issues that are disrupting the quality of service from many two points across the internet. Now, maybe the internet works fine for you for 99.99% of the time, but that still leaves about eight hours of downtime that could impact you during a critical update or a critical service time. It could be during the time when your customers are calling your customer support center and if they don't have direct access to their cloud services, they're kind of in trouble. They're people that twiddling their thumbs. So fundamentally, the problem is that the value of the data for many of these enterprises is far greater than the cost of getting those bits onto the wire. So Moore's Law, if you will, all this talk about small or fast or cheaper is applying to transit cost packets. But everyone knows that you can spoof a packet. You saw a lot of examples of, certainly with China, stuff going run through China, people are like, wait a minute, why is stuff going through a router in China easily hacked, DDoS attacks? These are daily occurrences today. That's right. Why now the changeover? What is changing that? What's fundamentally the new opportunity to get rid of that baggage? Yeah, the entire day today, you're going to hear people from major companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Dropbox and LinkedIn and all these guys will be talking about some of the challenges that they've seen trying to operate the business over the commodity internet. For many of these companies, they want the best possible end user experience for their cloud service. And the way to do that is to be directly connected to bypass the shenanigans that are happening across the public internet. And if they're directly connected, then they are in effect immune from the side effects of all that stuff going on. I love talking with you because you've been there from the beginning. You know, YouTube, Netflix, Yahoo, Google, a lot of these companies built from the ground up their own stuff. And that's well-known DevOps, what do you want to call it? Sure. But now we're seeing a whole nother generation of things going on. You're seeing opportunities. So I was talking with Lou Tucker at Cisco who has been around for, actually has a computer in the computer history museum. Now it's Cisco, formerly his son. And we're talking about multiple clouds as a new model. So inter-clouding is the term we kind of kicked around, which is like internet working. So that's kind of fundamentally what we see happening. Can you explain that phenomenon? Because now that the grownups are like the YouTube's of the world, the web scalers, the networking needs to be refreshed, if you will. So what is this inter-clouding transport and connections mean? Mean for business, mean for performance, quality? Sure. There's a fundamental problem going on right now, as we speak. You've got the adoption of cloud services where folks used to do all this stuff in-house. The adoption of cloud services means that the enterprise is increasingly dependent on access to those cloud services. At the same time, you have the other force coming into play, which is the denial of service attacks. These are 100 gigabit per second attacks, non-stop flowing at a target that they want to take offline. And unfortunately, all of our traffic is intermingled at the router level along the path. So if your traffic happens to traverse the same path as the attack traffic, you're going to be subject to latency, maybe packet loss, at least jitter, the variance of latency between packets. And that presents a fundamental problem for folks. Again, it may not happen all the time. It may just happen a part of the time, small percentage of the time. But for companies that count on that traffic actually being delivered, that really matters. So what we're seeing happening and what we're talking about here today is about how the internet is fine for best effort commodity traffic, but there is a time when you want to amend that to also include direct connections to those mission critical destinations. But what's different now, Bill, because people have always had the ability to do a direct connection, right? They can get together, let's do a direct connection. That's in our best interest. What's different now? The problem with doing direct connect yourself is that there's a lot of complexity, a lot of manual work. And as you all know, the first time you do something, you make a mistake or two. Second time you maybe make different mistakes. The third time you're getting better at it and maybe you make fewer mistakes, but you find some new ways of doing things. Everyone goes through that learning curve. And unfortunately, during that learning curve, you're wasting an awful lot of time, a lot of energy. You almost need to have a network engineering team just to do one of those direct connects. So the alternative to that has been to hire a company to provide consulting services to get that set up for you and that those professional services might be very expensive. What we've done with console is we've collected an ecosystem of partners who all want to have this direct connect ecosystem in place so they can get the best performance for their customers, right? So we've collected them together and we've made it as easy as a click of a button. So if you want to connect a Dropbox, click. You want to connect a box, click. Everything is done using clicks. There's no need for professional services. It's fast, it's secure. So the alternative to that is to buy your own, build your own, hire some high-end services firm. Or if you have a networking team, if you're a big enough company to do yourself, Google and Yahoo, these guys can, they have plenty of network engineering expertise to do this stuff themselves. But we've had this conversation last year, I think it's the last year's event of like build your own carrier model, kind of people are rolling their own. What are some of the trade-offs there and what are some of the risks that people may or may not know about? Because most networking guys, as you know, I'm going to build my own. They like to build stuff, they're engineers. So what are the opportunities but what are the risks as well? Yeah, I guess the biggest risk is that when you want to contact a large cloud company and say you want to direct connect, they're kind of sizing you up. How long is this going to take me to get that direct connect set up with John Furrier? Does he know his stuff or is he going to waste a lot of my time? Do I need to hold his hand? And they may not even return the phone call. Yeah. But if they did return the phone call and they did start talking with you about getting that set up, you then have to order the transport circuit between the two points. You need to configure your router. You need to configure your router on your side. We might get on the phone to see, okay, are you seeing packets? Are you seeing light? Those kinds of conversations. It's a very long process. And if you don't have the never- It's not trivial because you need end-to-end expertise. So they have to assume that the other guy on the other side knows his stuff and has staff to manage it. And any inkling that this is going to be a pain, they're going to put you on the side and hope that maybe one of the junior guys will take that activity because I want to just deal with the big guys getting those direct connects. But like I said, with us, if you use console, a click of a button is instantaneous and everything's automatically configured. All the fat-fingered configuration errors that have happened that led to things like traffic going to Pakistan instead of to the destination. That's all eliminated by the automated configuration. So you guys have a ton of announcements here. Netelligent, online tech, Rack 59 scale, Matrix, T5, Azure, Erking, Electric, Metro Optics, Summit IG, VeloCloud, on and on and on, all partnering up with you. Is that part of the ecosystem design? I think they found the Masonic mouse. That's the cowbell, that's the thing, it's innovation here. It's really a nuanced event, like I said, they use the cowbell rather than the bell. The partnerships. Yes. This is an ecosystem, is that part of your strategy? Is that the industry coming together? What is that about, because that's really, everyone's kind of all in saying, hey, we have now fully blown out network to do this. It's been kind of a hybrid. Some of this has grown organically. The data centers want to have a console in their building. So anyone that sees that aqua marine rack in that building knows they can get a cross-connect over to that and get access directly to any cloud provider that they want to get access to. So those are the guys who are actively promoting and using us as a lure to get people into that data center. Some of the partners are just some of the biggest cloud providers in the world. And those are also a gravitational pull to connect to the console device. You're in charge of research. What does that mean? What are you researching? Prices on the transit cost? Are you looking at research in terms of customer deployments, architectures, reference architectures, can you share some of the things you're working on? Absolutely. You know what I love doing, John? I love talking to people and finding out why things happen a certain way. What are the motivations? What are the motivations for direct connect? So I worked on a research paper called The Business Case for Direct Connect. I haven't released it yet, but part of the process is to talk people through what the previous people have said about their motivations to direct connect. You know, what are the pros and cons for connecting over the internet? What are the pros and cons for connecting directly? And what's the math? What do the finances look like? Because people will ultimately do that, which is rational. So I want to get into the head. I want to understand the mindset of the cloud companies, of the enterprises, of the content providers, of the access networks, and really understand how these pieces fit together. And what I've learned is actually you can connect directly and have it cost even less than access to those cloud services over the internet. Which is really kind of a shocking thing for the same cost or less, you get better performance, better security, better reliability, better control, and better visibility, because you're directly connected to the destination. And this seems to resonate with the folks I've been speaking with. So I got to ask you as a doctor. Dr. Peering is your famous book. He started a blog called DrPeering.net, DrPeering, where you was peer review at the time. You started that. I remember when you were chatting with you about that. I think in the sidewalks, walking into elementary school with our kids, was a time where there's not a lot of information around some of the peering dynamics. That's right. And that was the beginning, the genesis of where this all is now, right? In a way. So talk about what you've learned in your journey of Dr. Peering, talking to folks, and then there's a book now on Amazon. How does that relate vis-a-vis what's happening with console? Yeah. So in 2008, I retired from Equinix and cashed out all my stock options and spent time trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And one of the things I did while I was at Equinix, I wrote all these white papers. Again, the process is I want to learn something when I talk to some experts. So I'll say, John, I'm interested in talking about peering, how does peering work in your organization? And over beers and drinks at socials. We high five each other all the time. A lot of handshakes. Yeah. But I would document what I learned in the field in the form of a white paper. And I would make that freely available to anyone who wanted the white paper. And that got me invited to speak at conferences. So I'd do a gig and share what I learned. And then I'd use that as a launching point for my next white paper. In 2008, when I retired from Equinix, I decided to rewrite all those white papers into a cohesive and coherent form and put it out. Now, internet interconnections are a fairly narrow niche topic. But for those who are interested in how interconnection works on the internet, what's the nature of the business relationships at the core? This book is really interesting to them. And I've got a lot of engagements working with various companies all over the world. There's not a big market segment in the long tail, if you will. But it's a lot of the big players need interconnect. Like I mentioned, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, you name it. They're all powering massive traffic. Absolutely. And our big part of that. And care about things like bad guys intermingled in the packet stream. Oh yeah. And they're all kinds of games that get played on the internet. And for those of us who are in this sector, our neurons in our brain kind of fire as these clever tricks and manipulations come forward. So the book has tons of stories of these creative tactics for manipulating things so you get peering where you otherwise would not be able to get peering. Anyway, the book is about yay thick. It's a heavy book. And it really describes peering one dot oh. This is the manual way of getting connected up. What we're doing here is what we call interconnection two dot oh. Where everything is automated. You don't need to go to all these events to meet people, to exchange cards and schedule calls to review peering policies and that kind of stuff. We've automated everything. We've made it simple and easy to with a click of a button get access to destinations. So I was going to say, so it sounds like there's really three cores. There's one is the automation, right? Which is always good to make things automated. Less errors. Two is really the ecosystem that's really coming together. And we see ecosystems as such a powerful force. Oh yeah. Whether we were at VMworld last week or an open stack the week before, right? Ecosystems are hugely powerful. And then the third really sounds like being able to push, because of the automation and the ease, being able to push that capability down into a marketplace that maybe just didn't have the opportunity to participate. You got it. That's absolutely what we're doing. The, there are smaller content providers and there are medium to smaller enterprises that really haven't looked at direct connection. And they won't until they have enough problems across the commodity internet that they say, you know what, we count on this service. I don't care about the rest of this stuff, but we really need to have access to the payment processing system. Whatever system that is, we need to be directly connected to that. That's how they're going to prioritize how and where they're going to interconnect their networks with other folks. And before that, the commodity internet is going to be good enough. But there's going to be a trigger point. I think one of the researchers will be saying, he estimates that by 2018, this is going to be the common way for people to use the internet. Use the commodity internet for most stuff, but then directly connect to whatever mission critical destination they need to be directly connected to. So we have, this is the start of it. I think in a couple of years, we'll be back here, we'll be talking about the, I don't know, the 20,000th connection to the system. We pride ourselves at Silicon Angle on the Cube, going in new areas that people are like, why are they kind of off the beaten path? And I think you guys are onto something really huge. I think there's going to be a re-platforming of interconnect that's going to change and create an opportunity for other entrepreneurs in a whole level, another level of quality of service. I mean, it's clear in my mind, the vision, I think you guys have a great vision. But I want to ask you one of the final question here, to tie it back to DevOps, because the big range right now at VMworld is cloud-native applications. And so let's just kind of go there, huge tsunami of people building new applications. So as they look down, they want programmable infrastructure. They want infrastructure as code. And so you guys are really part of that equation. So being in the engine room at the lowest level, the network level, what does infrastructure as code mean to you? And how do you serve all those millions of new developers that are going to be hitting the market? That's one of the key buzzwords you hear in the industry is software-defined networking. We've coined the term software-defined interconnects because our platform has an API that will allow companies to integrate the system into their own systems. So data centers, for example, might want to have our system be part of their provisioning system. So on their portal, they can say, we'd like to be able to provision connectivity from one point to the next for one of our customers. And for them to be able to do that via an API is immensely powerful as opposed to the traditional path of calling a salesperson, saying, I want circuit from point A to point B, and they schedule the delivery, and then they turn it up and test it. All that kind of stuff is enormously time-intensive. And that enables the DevOps piece. That's right. The software-defined interconnect and the APIs to do that, we believe will be incredibly powerful for those who like that. So you're saying end-to-end networks, so if I want SD, software-defined networking, virtualization, network virtualization, whatever version of that is, they need to have an end-to-end secure link. That helps them. Absolutely. Security is enormously important to the enterprise customers. Security, when I did that, the white paper on the business case for Direct Connect, the number one reason for doing Direct Connect was security. I thought it was going to be performance, or maybe the reliability. The other two answers, they come up very commonly. But no, security is the number one thing. They wanted to make sure that traffic got there and went across the simplest, most direct path. The other one that came up was control invisibility. There's a cowbell again. Yeah, control invisibility. When I did the white paper walk-throughs, a number of folks said you didn't mention control invisibility. And the problem the enterprise and the cloud company sees is traffic from point A to point B, on average, traverses four ASs, four networks. And each of those four networks has public-facing nodes that could be attacked. This is what these security guys call a large attack surface. And part of the problem is you don't have visibility into that connectivity between those intermediary networks. That means that if there's a problem there, you can't see it and you can't control it. You can't even call those guys and say, hey, there's a problem between these two points. So for those guys, the cloud companies and the enterprise. It's a feeding ground for the bad guys, the internet. It's a wonderful attack surface if you want to hit things. Bill Norton here, entrepreneur. Great season, entrepreneur. Congratulations on your new venture and your research here. It was theCUBE Live at Console Connect here in San Francisco. We'll be right back more after this short break.