 Hi, from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE's broadcast of AWS re-invent 2016 here in Las Vegas. Getting towards the end of our, I guess it's day two. It was the keynote for day one. But happy to welcome to the program. First of all, we've got a practitioner on the program which I'm always super excited about, especially, near and dear to my heart, a networking guy. Keith Schaffer is a network architect with a redacted Fortune 500 national food distributor. Keith, thanks for joining us. Well, thank you for being here. And we've got Ramesh Prageran, who's VP of product management and marketing with Viptella, thanks for joining us. Absolutely, thanks for having us back. Keith, at start, I know you kind of talk about, too much about your company, but just tell us a little bit about kind of the scope of your role, what you do and how that cloud thing fits into your world. We've got sites all over the country. And as we try to get out of our data center and into the cloud, we had to struggle with how do we connect all of our sites to that without the single point of failure, without that choke point. With Viptella at a branch, we can then extend that into a Viptella router in the cloud and have that kind of connectivity, just like we would have with the data center. So we're definitely going to get into the Viptella stuff, but first of all, some of your statement there, are you talking about closing down data centers and moving more to the public cloud, or how does that work? It's new functionality. It's value add. It's new marketing, new sales, new markets that we're getting into. So it's increasing the role of the company, increasing the footprint. Yeah, so did you get to hear the keynote this morning? I did not. Okay, so let me put the premise in front of you and see how it resonates. So Amazon says, going forward, we're going to be having less data centers. We're going to putting less gear. Nobody wants to buy hardware anymore. You know, welcome embrace, welcome to AWS. You know, how does that resonate with your business? It's exactly the direction we're going. Yeah, we're going in that direction. We want to create the environment to scale. We want to be able to be agile, flexible. We want to be able to move wherever the market is. And we're not going to be able to do that with a data center. We need Amazon for that. All right, so Ramesh, I want to pull you into this. So, you know, we've had the opportunity to talk to Viptela a couple of times. That other show that was actually in Vegas this year, we can mention it was VMworld. So, you know, big ecosystem, but boy, this one's pretty impressive too. Explain to us how, you know, Viptela fits with AWS. Absolutely. So, if you look at the SD-WAN space itself, initially it was all about cost arbitrage. How can I take private circuits, public circuits, wireless, mix them together and have ubiquitous connectivity? Over the last year or so, we have seen a tremendous shift in that model. Cloud is becoming a centerpiece of that discussion, right? And especially with infrastructure as a service like AWS, as Keith was pointing, lots of customers moving in that direction. And so naturally, the question is, how do I extend my wide area into the cloud, right? Today, there are lots of sub-optimalities in how do you access from a user sitting inside a remote site or a branch. Traffic gets back all the way up to a data center and the cloud is a part of the data center. Now, customers have said, hey, that's very inefficient. Why is it that I need to go from San Jose to Virginia to access an AWS site? That's sitting right across the street from me. And so naturally, unless you make the cloud part of the wide area and extend the wide area into the cloud, you won't be able to solve those problems. And that's really where we see the opportunity. We were really thinking about what is it that we will talk about at AWS and every single customer that we spoke to said, hey guys, this is a huge play for AWS in particular. Sorry. So Keith, you were starting to talk a little bit about Viptela, but why don't you bring us back to kind of the problem statement? You know, what was it that led you to look? What was it SD-WAN? Was that, you know, did you know that you wanted SD-WAN or was there something specific that you were looking for? It was a combination of things. We had a bandwidth issue. We had a scalability and growth issue with applications. We wanted to get into the cloud and get out of our data center. It's more cost effective. We can be more agile in terms of capital planning and we could deploy more in terms of what we were giving to our customers. We needed a solution on the network side that allowed all of that to work at once. We didn't want to make this one investment more than once. Yeah, I guess I'm trying to focus in on it. It's like, did you be like, oh, you know, I knew I had some way an issue. Maybe it's way in optimization. Maybe I could go to one of the big guys and they could solve it. But you know, what funneled you down to, you know, choose Viptela? Security, ease of deployment. And the fact that we have a partner in terms of support and ongoing growth that we simply couldn't get anywhere else. All right, is that pretty typical you find, is security kind of one of the things that's differentiating you in this space? Yeah, the trigger points are multiple, right? Invariably, there is a high bandwidth application that's driving the need for somebody to look beyond their status quo, right? So that's invariably number one. The second one, the larger the customer, the more acute the pain point is with respect to security. And the third piece of it is really cloud. And cloud here being both AWS-like infrastructure as a service and at the same time Office 365. The number of times we have heard customers say, oh, 365 breaks my van. I mean, if I had to count, I would be a millionaire, seriously. So it's really a very interesting topic that multiple customers are looking at because they need to get that deployment right, right? And so the trigger points are multiple, but it all kind of hones in on bandwidth, security, cloud, right? That's kind of where it all comes together. It's a tricky time. I mean, I look back in my career and one of the challenges for, I'm doing anything mobile, doing anything remote, go back to the XSPs in the 90s through, all of these things that have led to cloud is like networking is one of those choke points. Just getting enough bandwidth, really having the responsiveness has been a challenge. Are we getting to the point that we can actually solve these networking issues? I mean, we haven't solved the physics problems of making light go any faster. So, you know, is network a problem for you or is network an enabler for you now? With Viptella and the ability to have different kinds of transport brought in, network really has stopped being a pain point for us. We're able to do Office 365, Salesforce, and extend into Amazon for development, internal applications, and customer-facing applications, and do so without having to worry so much about the network. That piece has now been taken care of. All right, speak a little bit about just kind of your experience with Amazon. Do you use more than one public cloud or, you know, how deep is adoption if you can share? It's multi-region, multi-availability zones. We go pretty deep in terms of the security groups. We're US-based, so obviously we're not looking to go into global regions, but being able to have something on both coasts for high availability, be able to scale and grow. We're at the point right now where we realize how much we can't do with the data center that we can with an Amazon cloud. Yeah, and from the networking side, things like VPC or Direct Connect, do you, do you're leveraging those? VPC, but with security, and the Viptella add-on to that allows us to have a common set of control and protocols and an understanding from a support environment and from a security standpoint as well. The security team is familiar with what Viptella brings and extending that into Amazon allows us to trust Amazon that much better. Yeah, so Ramesh, networking came up a bunch, you know, this week, Amazon, everything. I don't know if you saw the James Hamilton presentation last night, but it's like they're doing their own chips. They're 25 gig, they're doing all this. Still, I mean, I don't see it as overlapping with what your company's doing. What do you think about networking in the Amazon ecosystem these days? Absolutely, so I think that's kind of the last pole or the last problem to solve in the ecosystem of things, right? So compute storage and then followed by the network. Now, the certainly AWS has done a phenomenal job at automating quite a few pieces with respect to the network, bringing in security groups, having communication across multiple regions and whatnot, right? The part that multiple customers, such as Keith, are trying to solve is how do I come from my site into AWS, right? Because AWS has done a phenomenal job at optimizing connectivity across multiple availability zones and so forth, but if I have a geographically spread out footprint, how do I access it from my location into AWS? And AWS is not one location, it's geographically spread out, right? So now you have to really optimize for connectivity. It goes back to the direct connect argument that you just brought up, right? Customers are looking at, can I go over internet over a VPN technology? Can I use direct connect? Can I exit out locally at my branch or my site? Can do I need to go to my DMZ? Do I need to go to my carrier neutral facility? So the choices are actually evolving very well, but the underlying guts to connect everything together is really what we're providing. Keith, the last thing I want to cover with you is, you know, sometimes these changes can be difficult on kind of the organization. It's really encouraging to hear, I mean, networking team and cloud looked like they go hand in hand. You know, how do those fit together? What lessons have you learned going along? You know, what would you say to your peers about how they should address these kind of things? I would tell them, don't go too fast, take your time and understand the organization and the data flow that goes into that cloud and how you're going to use that, how you're going to bring that back into your environment and what are the things that you concern the most about? Is it security? Is it just connectivity, you know? But take your time, make sure you get it right. Yeah, I want you to clarify something because I used to give presentations talking about networking and I would talk about how the networking and enterprise moves by the decade. You know, it's like, oh, we ratified 10 gig in 2002 and by 2012 we had, you know, reasonable adoption. So you say move slowly, you're not talking way to decade to do something, right? No, I'm not talking about years, I'm talking about months, talking about take some time, figure out how this takes, because it's not just about moving into the cloud, it's connecting that cloud back into your organization. Yeah, don't just swipe a credit card and go, you know, run off and do something, you know, actually plan, talk to some people. This is a piece that allows us to bring this, Amazon and our company together in a way that I don't think we could do anywhere else. All right, Ramesh, I want to give you the final words, the kind of big takeaway from the show that I think you want to leave us with. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are multiple solutions that AWS provides in order to optimally connect into AWS. And there are also complementary technologies that you need to use in order to connect from your site into AWS, right? And so in what I would leave people with is, you know, looking at that model, you kind of own need to own both of those endpoints, right, because it's not about just, do I have a pipe to get out there? If I have multiple paths, how do I choose the most optimal one, right? It could be based on loss, latency, trigger, a whole bunch of things. What we have done is actually we have moved the wide area into the cloud, which means we own an instance inside of a VPC that resides inside of AWS and we protect all the assets and all the applications residing inside of AWS, just like we would protect if it is inside a branch, right? And so we want customers to think like, hey, my AWS location is not an extension of my data center, it's actually an integral part of the wide area. And once that happens, then traffic starts to flow really, really freely and the possibilities are endless. Keith, really appreciate you sharing your journey of where you've gone and where you're going. Ramesh, thank you for giving the update and for bringing a great customer to talk with us and our audience. And stay with us. We'll be giving a few more interviews here as we have wall-to-wall coverage from AWS re-invent 2016 in Las Vegas. 32,000 people, you're watching theCUBE.