 At VMworld 2012, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE. This is our flagship telecast. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise and share that with you. I'm Joe and Stu Miniman, my co-host for this segment and Martin Casado, the co-founder of Nasera. You guys are ranking number one on our trending tool that we built under networking. You guys have moved up to the top of the list because of VMworld. Company had spent a billion dollars for you guys. Jay Shree from Arista called you guys the Instagram of networking. Kind of tongue-in-cheek on the huge buyout. But hey, congratulations. Great wired story today, I saw it with you guys. Talking about the talent you have and you brought over to VMworld and you're the top story here. So congratulations. Thank you. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So take us through the logic and your emotion around past year, okay? Up until the buyout. What a roller coaster. So just share with us personally from your as an entrepreneur. What was it like? Give us some highlights of what happened. Well, I guess I've been very focused on changing networking, right? So for me, it's been largely a technical ride. And since we started the company five years ago, we've been focusing on developing core technology and we did that for the first three years. And then the last year to us was primarily about execution and customer engagement. And so we've spent a lot of time proving the technology, getting into production, doing the support and fixing out that model. And so it turned out as a very natural transition point when the acquisition happened because we had gotten traction. We had started to realize how difficult it is to address a market as large as this within a small startup. And so it was very welcome to come join a much larger company where we can kind of provide us at a much broader scale. So you guys have some big backers. Obviously, you know, they're all, it's all well documented in the Valley, but every entrepreneur has that moment. It's like, wait a minute, is this what I wanted? Is this the, but the dollars was so good. And VMware is an obviously growing company. What clicked for you? What made you go, is this the right thing? Take us through that decision. You know, absolutely. I mean, like, to me, business guides behavior. And at the end of the day, the goal is, is how do you change networking? And I have a very, very firm belief that the access layer to that network is moving from within the network towards the edge. And so we wanted to develop technologies that can use this position to reimplement networking and software. And so once you get the core technology done, once you prove it out with large customers, once you prove out the market, the question is, kind of, what is the best way to have the biggest impact? And I think in some respects, you can look at VMware as one of the largest networking companies in the world, just based on PortCount, right? The number of virtual ports that they control is as large as any large networking vendor. So this is the opportunity of a lifetime to change an industry. So like, I've been doing this now, you know, SDN, since I was doing my PhD at Stanford for, so going on 10 years now. And this is the opportunity of a lifetime to actually have broad, broad, like, planet scale impact. Well, congratulations. Certainly you disrupted the market, not only in the validation of the acquisition, but as you guys were moving out and talking about some of the deployments you guys were doing, it just came out of left field for most people. But in the inside baseball, I'm sure people knew what was going on in terms of like, how you guys were disrupting. So congratulations. Thank you. The area I want to talk about is obviously the messaging here at VMworld, very solid around software-defined data center. Sure. And that really kind of brings you into a whole nother beyond networking. So, you know, we've been covering converged infrastructure at SiliconANGLE Wikibon, you know, around storage servers and networking. So it's bigger now than just networking, right? So now you're taking it to a whole nother leg of the journey. So connect the dots out there for the folks between software virtualization and software-defined networking to the data center. Help them understand what's going to happen on that next leg of the journey. Yeah, of course. We're all familiar with compute virtualization, right? I mean, this is how VMware initially changed the world, where the time it takes to provision a workload went from weeks to literally minutes, like two minutes. However, IT isn't about single workloads. IT is about applications and all the network services that those applications require. For example, firewalling or security or monitoring debugging. And so even though we reduced the time it took to provision a workload from weeks to minutes, you still took days to do everything else that was required. So if we take a broad scope, if we take a broad look at IT, we still realize it still takes days to provision new applications and to provision new workloads. And so the only way to get past this, the next step that we want to take is to virtualize every aspect of infrastructure. And so there's three of those. There's compute, which is virtualized. There's storage, which we're making good progress on and there's network. And network really is a pivot piece, right? It's the one piece that touches everything, right? It is between the compute and the storage. It is between the different types of compute. And so if you look at large data centers, even cloud data centers, the long pole in the tent and provisioning is the network, so we must, must virtualize that. So the goal is the software to find data center. That's like everything's in software, everything's totally dynamic, you create it on demand, you can move it, it's liquid, it's like water, it'll go anywhere. But in order for this dream to be realized, we've got to get the network out of the way. And that's what this year does. We've been talking about, it's looking at in Wikibon, we just kicked off a whole kind of research section on what we're calling data infrastructure and really highlighting this modern era, right? And we kind of use a lot of sports analogies, but modern era meaning the new way, not the old way. So you're a classic example of disruption in a new way. So talk about the enablement that you see happening from a marketplace standpoint. Just open your mind and share the crowds and vision around what you will enable with this because networking has to be dynamic, it makes total sense, you guys have done it. What's going to happen next in your mind's eye in terms of what the possibilities are? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think ultimately this is where we want to get to. We want to build a platform that will recreate every network service and functionality in a virtualized manner in software from the edge. And that means that there can be any service available anywhere over any type of hardware at any scale that's needed. And it can be done all at virtualization time frame. So this is like you do an API call, you get a virtual network abstraction, you add a firewall to it, you configure ACLs to it. And so all of network configuration, all of network services, all of network operations becomes soft state, it becomes like a VM image and it's available anywhere that you want it to. And so that is the first step. So I believe these transformations and systems and this happened many times in the past, happened in two steps. The first one is you virtualize. And when you virtualize, you offer the same thing, but in a more flexible manner. Like when you virtualize compute, you offered an x86 CPU, but you did it in software. After you virtualize, you can actually change the operational paradigm. Like when they created compute virtualization, they didn't immediately get to migration or snapshot or rewind or all of these other kind of operational benefits. These came later. So the first step is any networking anywhere you want at any scale automatically. And then the second step is like drastically changing the operational paradigm. So you can do things like better security. So you can rewind configuration state. I mean, things that we can't even think about today because now we have this ultimate point of indirection that's virtualized, this virtualized layer. And who's the candidate for these developers? Just admins, net admins, all of the above? Is it going to be software programmatic? I mean, how does that, it takes DevOps to a level of functionality that is just mind boggling. So who's the new personnel? Yeah, who's life does this impact? Yeah, they're not been told the CCIE's out there. Well, I mean, it's a good question. Who's life does this impact? I mean, I mean, immediately anybody that's building out a data center like a cloud architect is going to have this primitive that they can use to architect better systems. Just like you gave them a virtual machine, they use that as a primitive for building better data centers. Now we're giving them virtual networks as a primitive to build virtual data centers. So the cloud architect's job gets easier. Application developers don't have to worry about the basics of, you know, the way networks work or network configuration. Operations will have a lot more flexibility and the virtual layer of where they can move things around. As far as the physical networking layer, the problem actually becomes quite a bit simpler, but you still have to focus on the problem of building a physical network. So for example, when server virtualization came around, you didn't like reduce the need for servers, you needed more servers. And just like the same thing will happen with network virtualization, which is you'll still need physical networks and they're going to probably have to be better physical networks. But the problem now is more of how do you build a physical network with high capacity that can support any workload and less about doing all the operational stuff you do today? How does it impact? We just had Chris Hoffman from Juniper who's now, he works at Juniper. He's been a big security buff, great guests for us, but we're just riffing on the security problems, right? So give us your perspective on how this new canvas of software-defined virtualization is going to impact security paradigms. Yeah, so I mean, I think there are a couple of answers. I actually think ultimately the security model's improved, honestly, so the original work was done with the intelligence community. Actually, the original funding from this here came from the intelligence community. My background, I used to work for the intelligence agencies. And when you move everything to software, we already have a fundamental security paradigm which is trust consolidation in the hypervisor, right? And with network virtualization, you follow the same paradigm, which is you entrust the hypervisor to enforce things like isolation and enforce the security. But now you've got a strongly authenticated endpoint there. You're not guessing about things. But it requires the security community to evolve with the virtualization community. So I think that there's much more of a socialization hurdle, more of a social hurdle than a technical hurdle. Like all of the technology is there to do good security in the cloud. I think getting the traditional vendors to evolve their tools and to evolve their thinking is much more difficult. So I've got one more thing to add. I actually think there's an opportunity to do security in entirely new ways once that, again, can transform the industry. So for example, with virtualization, you've got deep semantics into the workloads. I mean, you're in the hypervisor, you can look inside the VMs, you know who's using them, you know what applications they're using. Guy, you can even know what the documents are being sent or read or passed around. And because you have this information at the edge, if you virtualize the network as well, you can pass this context into the network. So now instead of looking at packets and kind of trying to guess what application there is, by looking at traffic, you can actually get passed like the ground truth information from the hypervisor. So I think we have the potential to drastically improve security. That's awesome. So, Martin, if you look at the networking industry, there's lots of companies that have tried to change it in the past. When you talk about innovation, standards have a lot of times slowed things down. You know, there's the legacy thoughts that, you know, great respect for CCIEs, but, you know, they have their install base and their way of doing things. So, you know, there's so many pieces that make up networking. And even the first time I saw your solution, there's multiple standards and open, you know, groups working on this. So, you know, how do you guys tease through and work through all of these issues? Yeah, so clearly a very complex and multifarious question. So I'm going to attack one piece of it and then we can go from there. Yeah. One of the primary benefits of actual virtualization, like actual virtualization, is that what you end up with should look like what you started with, right? So like if you're fundamentally changing an operational paradigm, you're probably not doing virtualization. So for example, in a network virtualization solution, the physical network is still a physical network and it needs to be managed like a physical network with physical networking tools. And in order to be fully virtualized, the virtual abstraction I give you, if I give you a virtual network, that should also look like the networks that you've kind of grown to love as a child, right? They should have all the counters, all the debugging, the ability to interpose services, right? And so from that standpoint, you're still preserving the interfaces that people are used to. It's just there's more of them. So like for example, when I talk to a network operator today, they're like, oh, this is confusing. I've got virtualization. I say, actually, instead of having one network that's really complicated, you've got n simple networks. Now you've got a very simple physical network and then you've got n virtual networks and they haul all of the same interfaces that you can use to manage it. However, there's one catch and that one catch is, there's an additional bit of information, which is how do you map this virtual world to the physical world? Which happened in compute virtualization as well. So like everybody understood a virtual machine, everybody understood the physical machine, but people weren't entirely sure how you debug the mapping between the two and that's incumbent as us, as software providers and solution providers to provide that, to provide the ability to map in this kind of like platonic virtual reality down to this kind of gritty physical reality. Okay, so from a standard standpoint, I mean, you guys helped invent OpenFlow. You guys created the OpenV switch. You're heavily involved in OpenStack. There's been a lot above since the acquisition about the involvement in OpenStack and you speak to kind of who you've got, how many people are working and what's your thoughts on it? Yeah, so let me also tease apart two things before I get to that one. So in networking, standards are really important and the way standards work is you get a bunch of people that kind of go and talk about things and they design things and they agree on them and that's actually quite different than open source, right? And they're different processes, different communities, different rules of engagement. So let me focus on the open source first and then we'll go back to the standards. Okay, thank you. Yeah, perfect. Just to give you a little bit of foreshadowing, like I hope the world goes open source, not open standards, so. We do too, we're working on that. So, but we'll get to it, right? So, as far as open source, yeah. So I wrote the first version of OpenFlow. I mean, it came out of my thesis, right? The first three employees of Nacera created the first draft of OpenFlow and it was just something that we wanted to use to control switches, right? I mean, we wrote the first reference implementation, the first OpenFlow controller, we seeded the Stanford stuff. Of course, I'm a consulting faculty at Stanford so I was involved there. We also are the primary developers behind OpenV-Switch. It's in the Linux kernel. You know, we've put many millions of dollars in developing that. It's used by competitors and partners alike. It's used in many clouds. And then we've heavily participated in OpenStack, in particular, you know, we're the lead on Quantum, which is the networking portion of OpenStack. We've done a lot of development there. So, as far as the merger is concerned, the acquisitions concerned, none of that will change. We are fully committed to OpenV-Switch. To OpenStack, we'll continue and even escalate our contribution there. Quick note on OpenStack, I was told that something for folks that actually entered some code into the OpenStack for storage. Just kind of curious about that. So, I mean, we've touched many areas of OpenStack and again, the networking piece touches everything. And you know, we do a lot of the development on Quantum and we run, actually, Nacera internally ran OpenStack Cloud for our internal Dev Cloud and we've got thousands of VMs on it that we use it. And so, we're heavily, we're like heavy users and contributors to both OpenStack and Linux. I mean, if you look in Linux, we've actually fixed a lot of the VLAN issues in the kernel, right? So, like, I mean, we're very, very involved in open source, but we're involved as users, right? Like, we don't sell, you know, Linux. We don't sell OpenStack, but we do believe to have a vibrant ecosystem is nice to have these tools out there. And as we use the tools, we fix them and we contribute it back. Okay, what about multi-hypervisor environments? Cause that was one of the things that really impressed me about like the OpenV switch is it really does enable kind of that multi-hypervisor, even more than kind of heterogeneous switches, it's the multi-hypervisor piece. Yeah, that's right. So, if you kind of zoom away, like I think we've had like a fairly myopic focus in the industry on servers over the last 10 years. And then, like, if you zoom away from the server to a data center, you end up in this realm of heterogeneous technologies, multiple cloud management systems, multiple hypervisors. And so, when we came up with our initial strategy of building a network virtualization layer, we knew networks touch everything, we must support all of those technologies. And so, it was like a fundamental tenant of the technology that we support all hypervisors and physical hardware switches as well, because there are workloads that are not virtualized. And so, you know, OpenV switch itself, which is the V switch that we use, it supports Zen, KVM, bare metal Linux, it's been ported to BSD, it's been ported to other operating systems, it's been ported to top-of-rack hardware switches so we can use all of them to do network virtualization. So, Martin, I want to ask you about the software-defined partnering strategy from a technical perspective. Obviously, we're really big believers in open source as well. We love that, we love it, I think it's great. And it's now a business model in the industry. So, it's great to see all that work. As VMware now, with you guys in the family there, go to other unifying clouds. So, they're talking multiple clouds at this point. So, you know, what would you bring to the table from Microsoft's Hyper-V environment and other big vendors, HP, Dell, Microsoft? What can you bring to the table in working with those guys? Or, are you out, are you talking to them? And if you were having those conversations, what would those conversations be? So, the product itself that we're developing and we do bring to market now and we will continue is a network virtualization platform that's multi-hypervisor, right? And so, the goal is to have something that you can deploy into any cloud environment regardless of what CMS are running and regardless of what hypervisors they're using. Now, we have many, many partners, whether they're system integrators or they're solution partners. And so, you know, we don't have any religion on the type of technologies in play. We want to provide the best virtual networking solution in the industry. And that's really our primary focus. Let me ask you about some trends in the tech community in academia and the research areas. Obviously, as an example, just randomly, low-level virtual machines. That kind of, those kinds of shifts are happening. Could you talk about just what you're tracking right now that you're, get your eye on in terms of what's going on in some of the top universities? Obviously, low-level virtual machines at the University of Illinois in Chicago. So what other areas can you share with us that you're monitoring? Listen, this is a great question to ask an academic and I'm going to totally disappoint you in that. You know, I'm on a lot of PCs and I follow a lot of research. I mean, you know, I submit papers, you know, all the time. I'm like, I've mostly lost faith in the academic process on the research side lately, which I... How about relevance though in terms of trends? No, but that's exactly the point. I think that there's enough vision to last for a century and like now it's time to do work. And if it were up to me, we would all be taking these ideas that we've come up with over the last 10 years. There's very few new ones in my opinion and we'd be executing like crazy. And so, well, again, while I'm on the PCs and while I do review the papers, I do submit the papers, I think we should all focus on like changing infrastructure into software, executing like hell and changing the world that way. And so, and I know I have a really bad attitude about this especially as a professor, but... This is a bad attitude on the cube. We say it, we hit it all hanging out. So final question for me and if she wants to get one more in and you can't say the acquisition as the answer. What is the biggest surprise that you fell out of your chair over the past 24 months around you in the industry in your entrepreneurial venture here and now with VMware? And it could be like a surprise as in this trend didn't happen, that happened, these are the things that happened. Could be good or bad. What's the biggest surprise that caught you off guard this year, the past 24 months? Yeah, that's a good question. I think the one that's actually been a little, the most shocking is how difficult, this is being just very honest, is how difficult to manage perception in the industry. And if you look at kind of social media and you look at a lot of the buzz and the rags, so much of it is generated by non-disinterested parties, so invested parties. And so I think it's possible to be a perfectly good citizen and then get painted in a very negative light or be a very negative citizen and be painted in a very good light. And it's been counter-intuitive to me how you manage this effectively. It's like almost a dynamic feedback system. So for example, this year has been an enormous contributor to open source. I think we've contributed more than anybody in our space by a factor of 10 or more. We contributed more to the core technologies and often people are like, well, but it's a proprietary solution. On the other hand, sometimes we're like, okay, this is a close source product. People are like, we should use NYSERA because it's the open solution. And so we've definitely felt on both sides, being both open source and close source sometimes it's worked for us and for the wrong reasons. Sometimes it's not worked for us for the right reasons. And so that dynamic has been the least intuitive to me. So I'm not sure I fell off my chair, but definitely it's been the most surprising. Yeah, and that's what we're trying to solve with SiliconANGLE as we say, we're agile media. And ultimately with social media, the whole media business is changing. So one of the things that we care about here at SiliconANGLE and that's why we have theCUBE is we just, this is raw data we want to share. Be provocative, be edgy. It's a data-driven world. And we believe the media business is absolutely screwed up beyond all recognition. So because of just lack of fact checking, just old techniques aren't working, but it's the same game, right? So things circulate, things get branded, and we've seen it time and time again. I've seen great people show up as like almost painted as criminals. So it's just a sad state of reporting and media. So we'd agree with you there. Okay. John, so if I can have that one last question. So Markine, the networking industry is a big community. When you talk about kind of the jobs that people are doing today, what's your recommendation to folks out there in the networking industry? What should they start to read or start playing with to kind of understand where things are going down the line? Honestly, I don't want to say a cliche, but I actually really believe this one. I think networks are evolving to become proper systems and proper systems in an end-to-end manner, meaning that there's a very well-defined hardware, software layer, they all work together. And I think the data center is becoming a large computer. And I think the most important thing is to view the industry in that lens, meaning I would get as much information as I could on how guys like Google or Amazon or Facebook build their data centers and you realize that if you do a cross-section of these things, like the capital savings, the operational savings, the flexibility of software, like that's changing the world. And if it's not changing the world directly by changing infrastructure, it's changing the world to the surfaces they deliver. And understanding that model in your bones, I think is the beacon going forward. So if it were me, the first thing I'd do is I'd really understand why they make those decisions, what the benefits are, and I'd use that to guide my learning going forward. Okay, Martin Hisato, the co-founder of Nacirah now. Do you have a title at VMware yet? Or do you, I mean... If I do, I don't remember. No, go ahead, Nacirah. Head honcho of Nacirah at VMware. Thanks for coming inside the Cube, really appreciate it. We'll be right back with our next guest and we're going to start to wrap up the day as they start to bond Joby Soundcheck here at VMworld2012. This is SiliconANGLE.com and wikibond.org. Continuous coverage at VMworld. Thank you.