 It's theCUBE. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground at Santa Clara Conviction Center at the Open Daylight Summit, their second show. It's all about software-defined networking and we're psyched for our next guest here, Gal Mainzer, engineering director from what used to be ConnectStream but recently acquired by HP. Welcome. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. So congratulations. Tell us a little bit about ConnectStream. Well, ConnectStream was founded around nine years ago by Sharon Barkayi, Nachman Chelef and Ariel Noy, an additional founder. We've been in the SDN field quite long from the beginning and well, we feel that we know the industry pretty well to start talking about telco grade controllers and what it takes to actually nail telco grade carrier solution. And now you're working for a friend, Sargolai, right over at HP. Sar's a great guy. Yeah, a lot of success. He had success with the cloud. They just make, keep putting him on new things to be, to go out and get it done. So congratulations working for Sar. So talk about what is network grade? What does that really mean? Well, telco grade actually means that you need to make your product more robust and more resilient and be able to upscale the solution and have it handle the distribution that requires by telco products. Telt? How much of that's kind of industry-driven versus regulatory-driven, right? Obviously there's some historical legacy there. Or is it just, is it really more just kind of the expected behavior by the customers? Well, the thing in telco that they have multi-site requirement. For example, in the US, you have telcos like Comcast or AT&T that has wide area solution distributed over the United States and you need to handle that. And with 50 or more sites, you need to have a solution that can handle this big distribution problem. Now, besides the distribution requirement, you have the resiliency requirement and the upscale requirement. Telco, big telco, tier one telco, has more than 100 million subscribers. Now, nowadays, you know that traffic that 100 million subscriber requires is a lot of pretty much- A lot of bits and bytes, right? Yeah, a lot of bits and bytes, exactly. Yeah, so how do you attack it? So, one, are you carrier grade? Are you guys making progress into that world? Or are you close to it? It's a tough thing to do. I mean, when you're trying to attack the controller requirement, it's not only to handle the features that a controller needs to do, but also to do it in a rough environment such as full resiliency. Anything that falls down need to be highly available and nothing should affect traffic because the basic essence in SDN is to separate between control and data plane. And it's still need to handle that basic requirement of not affecting anything in the traffic. So this is a big issue and very tough thing that requires handling in every aspect of software development, starting at the architecture of the solutions and even in the implementation itself. So the joke is right, how to eat elephant, right? One bite at a time. So when you're trying to go after something so big and complex, are there pieces that where you can start and bite off a small chunk? I mean, how do you kind of make progress into what is a really large and complex system? Well, it requires very talented architects and experienced engineers, I guess. It's not easy. It's not easy at all. I mean, we earlier heard from VP at AT&T that they have a lot of challenges as well. Everybody got a lot of challenges. The point here is how do you overcome those challenges while keeping in mind the requirement of a telco grade product. So then you said you've been at it for a long time. You've been at it for nine years. If not longer, right at a prior company, maybe. Went to Cisco and then came to Contextream seven years ago and been pretty much from the beginning. So talk about the impact of something like Open Daylight where you've got now kind of an industry, open source group that is putting together standards. How does that impact the ability to really eat this elephant a little bit faster? Well, from one hand, we really want to work with the Open Daylight and try to leverage the open source community and to contribute back. But from the other hand, it's a really big community with many big and small companies and everybody trying to take the open source to their own direction or maybe to the open source direction. So it's a bit challenging to try and work in that environment. We try to contribute as much as we can and to help the community grow but it takes a lot of effort. But is it working? Are you getting good contribution? Are you guys deriving the standards that are going to help the adoption accelerate? What do you think? Yeah, we're trying both in Open Daylight community and in Etsy and NVO3 to drive some standards and push the SDN forward to what we see as required by a telco grade. So if I come back next year, we meet again, what's kind of on your short list? What are you guys working on? What's the next big mountain that you're trying to take? Actually, after many PLCs this year, we're hoping to be in field trials and distribution and deployment, sorry. And have our product out there. Very exciting. That's what it's all about, right? At the end of the day, you want your baby out in the world. Exactly, yeah. All right, well, Gal, thanks for stopping by for a bit. Congratulations on your acquisition. Working for SAR as a great guy. Shout out to SAR, I'm sure he'll see it. And we're, he's Gal, I'm Jeff. We're on the ground at Open Daylight Summit. You're watching theCUBE. See you next time.