 Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Boston with the CUBE's coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services. Reinforce there in all grill conference, getting into the security event business because the customers are here and it's growing like crazy. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We are two guests of a hot startup called Vellix, Vishal Jain, CEO, and Brian Lazier, chief product of Valtix. You guys just launched out of stealth, congratulations. Thank you. You guys got some good pedigree here in the company. Yeah. Welcome to the CUBE. Thank you so much. Okay, so first of all, before we get into the conference, which I think is very relevant, you guys are getting out there. What do you guys do? What is Valtix all about? What is the core problem you solve? Why start this company? What's the value proposition? Yeah, so Valtix is building the first cloud native network security platform. So before we start a company, you talk to a lot of customers and we talk to customers and we saw the cloud is real. You can see here, cloud is real and we saw that network security have challenges in how they scale in the cloud. And that's mainly because of three things. So look at that. Main thing is that the cloud is sprawling. The data center used to be like three and four. Now the customers, as we heard in the morning in the keynote, they have suddenly one than 10, 100 and 100 VPCs. It's a new logical perimeter you're seeing. Second thing we saw was that the apps are agile. And the third thing is, security is always falling behind DevOps. So if you want to make security to be scaled with the apps. So you're saying level up the security apps piece to the DevOps pace. So DevOps is kind of pushing things really fast. You mentioned cloud kind of the new way. I mean, I remember the conversations around software defined data center, Brian, that was the holy grail for the on-premises activity, we was going to put some software around the storage and we had virtualization, we're done. In comes the cloud, changed the game on the Hadoop ecosystem, changed the game on the on-premises ecosystem. So what has it actually done differently? Where's it going? Where's the game happening now for security? Because software is key to it. Where do you see it? Yeah, we definitely see that, I mean, DevOps is doing such a great job in the public cloud. I mean, DevOps is just, they're really doing a great job with the tooling, the teamwork, the automation aspects, and traditionally security has always had a little bit of a lag to that. And in the cloud, that distance is much greater than it ever has before. So the security teams, particularly what we do, which is network security, they are struggling. And so we focus on providing them a really good platform for that. And that platform includes a firewall. So we are building a cloud-based firewall that goes in the customer's premise and it's all structured around a controller. So we have a cloud-based controller that manages the firewall, gives them their central place to configure things. And also that controller is very aware of the applications. So we're keen on giving them that cloud-like experience with a vendor like us that comes over the top and it can provide that capability as they grow. And the status of the product is what? Shipping, service, it's a service? What's the explain the product? So last week we did launch, we announced our funding and we launched the availability of the product. And it is built as a SaaS. So the controller is a SaaS model. The customer does own the firewall, it's where software companies, so the software goes into their cloud premise and it has all the services that they need for protecting their network edge. So what are the finer aspects, what are the real differences of network security in the cloud relative to traditional network security? Yeah, so what we saw was that the enterprises tried to bring their on-prem vendor to the cloud, built as boxes. And as you said, a software-defined environment, you need to bring up something more. So what we do is we bring the whole lifecycle and three core elements of that is visibility. That we do the inventory of the apps across your accounts, across your regions, across the cloud even. And second thing is how to plumb yourself in the path and how to build a unified enforcement solution, which is what we call a firewall. So, and built on three principles, cloud native, unification and performance. And the purpose of the company, when was the origination? When would you get the idea? Was it like you started a company, what was the motivation? Yeah, the big motivation was that again, we talked to all of the customers and we saw the cloud is real but security is a big impediment to the public cloud adoption. And that's why we have this conference here as well. And then we noticed the network security is not scaling in the cloud. We liked the problem. We found a team, a team has the networking background, security background and the cloud background. And we liked the problem, we liked the team and we said, okay, let's attack this problem and go off to the market. So the blocker is scale, right? Scale and agility. Okay, so a company like Cisco is not solving this problem? Yeah, so what they did was they tried to bring the appliances to the cloud in a virtual form factor. But in this new world of the cloud, getting sprawled, agile, agile, you need kind of a centralized control model to secure this new logical perimeter. You can't bring appliance by appliance to secure the perimeter. You need to have a more realistic view. Can't proposes at it. Yeah. Right, whether it's physical or virtual. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, what Vishal's pointing out too, is that one aspect of what we do is that there's this super elegance to that day zero. You can just click a button and we deploy the gateway through the controller. And that gateway is your firewall. It's right there. I mean, it's almost instantaneous. So that even that level reflects the cloud native capabilities. And that really gets people excited because the alternative is they originally have to go and get the license and build it and build their functions to scale it and we handle all that. And I get why the hardware box model doesn't scale. Why doesn't the sort of software-defined virtual appliance scale? Yeah, yeah. Well, the background is that they, a lot of, we see a couple of competitors. We see the classic kind of NG firewall players and we see the cloud native capabilities. On the cloud native side, they made efforts to get into a virtual form factor, but it's still basically a box. It's a VM form factor. And it's the instrumentation for it in a cloud environment. It's not, it's subpar. And there's still a lot of kind of manual effort to get these things up and running, the plumbing, it's not, I mean, the user experience is very poor. So it's really bring your own box as opposed to here's those. Yeah, it happens to be a software form factor. So the network security, we heard yesterday at the partner event I attended. I heard the folks from Amazon up there and they're getting serious about this because they see the big enterprise opportunities. They're going channel marketing, all kinds of new things. But network security kind of has that same vibe that DevOps had, which was you're going to, you have different consumption mechanisms that customers are buying services. The pricing's different. The scale is different. You have policy, APIs. So it was very, very cloud native. Are customers ready for that? Or is your controller, Baltic's controller, the gateway drug to the cloud, so to speak? Or because certainly if all those things are changing, that means the old just can't be retrofitted to the new. You got to have something from scratch. And not a lot of people are lifting and shifting beyond infrastructure as a service. That's easy to kind of replicate in the cloud, but when you get into some of the nuances of like the apps that you're mentioning, these new dynamics have to be pure play features. Correct. Is your, are you a solution to that? Are you a gateway to that? No, yeah. It's the controller, it's the controller, right? Yeah, so we are a solution. So example, as I said, like we do the full life cycle. We, our controller will discover all your apps. So an enterprise can have apps across your accounts, across your cloud even, and we discover all the apps. Second thing is, once you discover the apps, how do you put yourself in the path of security? And we do that automatically. And third thing is enforcement. And for that, we have two core engines. As I said, a proprietary data plane, which we call a cloud firewall from Baltics. And second is a cloud controller, which sees everything. So it's a global view of the entire enterprise infrastructure. In your marketing documentation, you talk about the trade-offs that people have to make between security and agility. Yeah, that's always been a trade-off. Do you solve that problem? And if so, how? Yeah, so again, when we saw the customer to talk to, and when they bring their virtual plans or the appliances to the cloud, then the two choices they have. One is that apps are agile, but then you cannot secure using the appliance model. So you kind of insecure or naked, we call it. The other option is that you must have heard security slows me down. So you kind of become a secure and rigid. So every time you have a new app, a new VPC, you open a ticket and you install the new firewall. So what we are giving is a third option because both the options I gave possible today are bad choices. So we give you a third option, which is agile and secure. And that's what centralized controller and Baltics firewall give you that option. Vishal, Vishal and Brian, I want to get your thoughts on why you guys, so he's the devil's advocate. You guys are just a startup, although startups are actually doing well in the cloud environment, because I'm being a skeptic, I'm trying to shoot my own narrative here. But the reality is you guys are a young company. You want to get the attention of the enterprise or customers, what's the pitch? Why you guys, what's your backgrounds, pedigrees, the backgrounds you guys bring to the table, to the software, talk about why you guys, what's the differentiator? Yeah, so in terms of a team, I would say they are three core pillars, networking, security and cloud, right? So this team has built a billion dollar pipeline and deployed in thousands of enterprises. And there are two core expertise in the initial team was, building fast performance pipelines. Second thing is decoupling the control plane. I mentioned some of that. So those are some of the aspects. And then we built a team around network expertise, security expertise and cloud expertise. Has it done it before? Yes, multiple times. How big is the team? Team is right now 20 people. 20 people and you just raised 14 million over 14 million, right? Yeah, over 14 million we raised and we announced that last week. Yeah, great, congratulations. What are some of the backgrounds of the team members? Yeah, I mean, there's Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Google Cloud, 40 next thing, yeah, 40 next. It's kind of that bench strength of security, you know, networking and cloud. And then I think the other component to that is that we all come from a common denominator of building like hands-on building, shipping and marketing products that are transformative. And so that's also exciting. So we see this and say, this is clearly transformative for this, you know, big market opportunity to help customers and we're, we're like, you know, the cloud really get, and it sounds like to me, you guys have a real holistic systems view of the world. Because I mean, the cloud is essentially an operating system or, you know, large distributed computer and decentralized with crypto and blockchain. It's the system thinking that's interesting, right? You guys have like that, because to know the network, you got to know the system. Yeah. And you get into the apps, you got to understand that middle layer that's developing with Kubernetes and containers with cloud native, that's developing really fast. So to see that end to end is more of a systems kind of mindset. A lot of companies are lacking that because they've outsourced everything to global SIs and now they got to rebuild. Capital One CXC so said, we're investing everything building, we're building more. So that builders their systems guys, what's your reaction to that? Yeah, so basically we also noticed that a lot of the enterprise we talked to told that there are a lot of point products, what we're building the platform. So we're starting off with a few services, but it's a platform, so a holistic platform to do the full network security in the public cloud. And that's what we are working towards. What's the differentiator? Why are you guys, what's the main value proposition that you guys bring to the table? What's in it for the customer? Correct, the main value proposition is like as a team can build it. And second thing is we have taken a cloud native approach to this problem. We are building for the cloud and we are building using the cloud in the principles. So you just went through your race so all these answers to the questions are fresh in your mind. But Brian, you talked about a large market. I mean, help us understand that because the market is enormous. That's like a hundred billion dollars or whatever it is, but it's so fragmented, there's so many different segments. How do you guys look at the TAM and then the serve market for you guys that you can go after? Our goal is to protect their data center, this new data center, basically everything that going in and out of the data center on the network side, that's our focus. And we didn't mention some of these services, but in the product we're shipping right now, it does decryption of TLS traffic, it does firewall, it does intrusion prevention, it does WAF. So it has this and more. So there's this set of things that when we talk to the customers, they'll say my blueprint for the cloud is like the print. I have to stack all these things together. You know, risk and security says you have to emulate that environment. It's worked well here, make it happen out there. And so that's where you see people getting a little bit amped up. It's hard to do that. And so we have a platform that consolidates that really well and knows the system level things that John was mentioning. But it is covering a lot of space, but we are very optimistic. We're making good grounds with that. So there's a platform approach versus buying six products. Exactly, so that consolidation story connects really well. What's the most important story that needs to be told in the security industry today? In your opinion, what do you think is that customers should know about that the media and or the industry should be discussing? Yeah, the main thing is that we talked about DevOps. The DevOps is very agile. So one thing is they can't say security is slowing me down. Security has to be agile, especially network security. We have heard in the past, it slows you down. So that's in the cloud world. The main reason people are going to cloud is because of the agility. And network security should not stop that. And that's a lot of security is slowing down. Yeah, and we don't want that. It's picking on me the bottleneck for mass adoption. I mean, we're seeing that more and more. And that's, and that problem statement is it's, there's a lot of ops angles to this. It's understanding like multi-AZ deploys and the transit gateway, the new, you know, the new transit gateway from Amazon and how does this all work together? And we're on top of that from the network security perspective. What are you about the show here? Amazon's inaugural reinforced, it's not a summit. The summits are regional reinvents. This is its own name, it's just like reinvents different for the customers. Reinvent, this is reinforced. Pretty important, pretty strategic for Amazon web services. What do you guys think? Yeah, it's great. I mean, we have been using all the cloud natives, like transit, their multi-AZ support, the ST buckets. We use all the infrastructure they provide. So it's always good to know what they are doing because like in the rein when they're on transit gateway and being incorporated that in our product. So that's why we want to be ahead of what they're announcing and incorporate that and giving to our customers what they need as a whole solution. So Brian, you're running the product, Chief Product Officer, what's on the roadmap? Lots, lots of good stuff. Come on. We're very busy. These are your requests coming in. In their services, you can just bang them out. No big deal. Come on. You know, this is so easy. 2000 a year, Amazon does it. You could do a couple hundred a year, no problem. There's probably a couple of things. One is that we will continue to expand to other clouds because our customers want that. But it's also just about more capabilities. So they're seeing what we can do today. There's a lot it can do. And they're with us, they're on the journey with us and saying we want more help. And the show is an example of that. I mean, the cloud is becoming more than a thing and security is getting emphasized. Literally it's emphasized here and so we're happy to help our customers along. Well you guys are launched. What's the priority I see hiring? What kind of culture do you have? What are some of your needs? Share, we'll put a plug for the company in real quick. Yeah, so in terms of hiring, initially the most of the hiring was all engineering, building the product, because that's the core of the engine. But now we're expanding into the go-to market team. We have sales, marketing, and we're going to expand on both the sites like sell and build more and sell more. Yeah, get the revenue in, get it down. Congratulations, hot startup. Good job, well done. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much. Delta is launching a new product out of stealth with funding getting off the runway here at Amazon Webster's Reinvent Cube Coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break.