 Everyone, welcome to a special CUBE conversation. We are here in Palo Alto, California, the CUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We're here at Dominic Wilde, the CEO of SnapRoute DOM. Great to see you. How you doing? I'm great, thanks. So you guys are launching SnapRoute. What is the company? What are you guys launching? Tell us. Well, quite simply stated, we're delivering a new class of network operating system for the cloud native era. And really what that does is it delivers on the promise of time to service for applications, always on security assurance and compliance, and greater operational efficiency, which is really one of the things that's been plaguing organizations to date. How long has the company been around? This is the first public launch of the solution. Talk about the history real quick. So the company was founded in 2015 by some former operators from Apple. They built and ran Apple's sort of biggest public facing data centers from the networking perspective. And we've been working diligently on this sort of new class of operating system that was really inspired by their time building out those data centers. And if you kind of look back, networking's not really had any major disruptive innovation in the last 25, 30 years. But back in sort of 2006 with the advent of AWS and the new sort of big hyperscalers, those guys started to realize that the network was something that was kind of getting in the way of their operational efficiency of being able to automate and drive the network at scale. And so our founders went through that whole sort of discovery process and things when they were at Apple. And the hyperscalers drove the advent of this kind of white box disaggregated networking, separating the software operating system from the hardware. And the reason behind that was really around gaining greater control because sort of legacy networking vendors were not delivering what was needed and they needed to get more control. And so our founders just really saw the opportunity to say, look, we think that there's a way of solving what an operator really needs and what an organization needs. And one of the big challenges there is how do networking operations teams collaborate with DevOps teams? Because the DevOps teams are responsible for time to service the application and that's really the value of the organization. And so they set out to solve that problem to say, well, how can we build a network operating system? And what they realized was that what DevOps had done is embrace sort of cloud native principles, containerization, virtualization, microservices. And so what we've done is we've built a, from the ground up, a newly architected network operating system that is a fully containerized microservices architecture that embeds Kubernetes and allows the networking for this first time to be brought natively into the DevOps tool chain. So NetOps teams can still sort of control and deploy the network and define policy and things, but now they don't have to worry about those sort of annoying day-to-day tasks where a DevOps engineer is trying to get an application on the network and they have to just do sort of some pretty trivial moves, ads, changes and things. And so in doing that, what we also figured out was we could solve problems, not just around the operational efficiencies and the time to service, but also a lot of security issues as well. So a lot of development going public with the product. You mentioned Kubernetes, talk about cloud. What are the big shifts in the industry that you guys are riding on? Because you have tailwinds, you got the cloud. What's the wave that you're on? Can you take a minute to explain some of the big shifts in the industry that's going to help you guys? Yeah, well I think there's several things. I think one of the biggest is that every single organization out there is looking nervously over its shoulder because we live in an age of very, very rapid disruption. It's kind of what we call the Amazon effect. There's big, established companies who've been around for many, many years who are being disrupted by adjacent companies who are in adjacent spaces or new startups coming in. So everybody now realizes they need to use technology to their advantage and they have to disrupt themselves before they're disrupted. So that's one of the big drivers. And so time to service, speed, efficiency are all sort of paramount when you're in any C-suite discussion. Those are things that come up all the time. From a technology perspective, we're seeing things changing significantly in how we use technology. And so everything is mobile. We have the advent of IoT coming in so lots of services are moving to the edge and so the data centers that were traditionally completely centralized are now sort of starting to distribute a little bit as well. So you have this idea of sort of edge data centers and edge compute. So there's a lot of things changing and happening and there's a lot of opportunity for us to deliver some strong value in there. So obviously the cloud native trend that you mentioned is big. That's driving the application market. DevOps you mentioned earlier, huge. We've seen years now and years of evidence of growth on DevOps. Okay, so now it's coming down into the network. How are companies solving challenges for application developers that are in a DevOps world? Because that seems to be the growth. That seems where the pressure is coming from is more requirements coming from the applications to the network. How are companies solving this problem? So I think from the compute and storage side things have moved along pretty swiftly. So as an application engineer, what you want is you want the infrastructure to service you. You just want it to do what the application needs. Unfortunately, traditionally infrastructure has been the other way around. You deploy the infrastructure and you say, okay, well this is what the application can do within the constraints of the infrastructure and networking has just continued that idea. And so what you want to do is you want to take this idea of we've talked before about infrastructure as code. How do you make it so is when an application engineer writes an application, he can actually regard the infrastructure as almost like a code library. And that's something that a lot of legacy vendors have talked about and marketed to for some time. But the reality is- It makes a lot of sense. It does, it makes a ton of sense. But the reality is that all they could do was offer up some proprietary APIs and programmatic interfaces. And the big challenge was the actual architecture of a network operating system was not designed in a way to actually enable that infrastructure to react in the proper way. By developing this containerized microservices architecture and by embedding Kubernetes and putting native DevOps tool chains inside the operating system, we actually can deliver on the promise of infrastructure as code. And this is what everyone wants. I've got to ask you, if everyone wants this and we're hearing it all around the queue and all the events we go to, clearly a requirement, it's becoming table stakes. But what's been preventing people from doing this? Well, it's the architecture. I mean, if you look at, and I call them legacy network architectures, but- Network architectures. Yeah, the network operating system itself, the actual, the operating system that exists on the physical switch, that is where the problem starts because that is designed as one big blob of code. So all of the features are in there. They're all in the same place. They all sort of interact with each other and it gives you reliability problems. It gives you innovation problems because every time you change something, it has a knock on effect. If there's a bug and you have to fix that bug, you have to replace the entire blob. If you replace the entire blob, you have to down the switch or do some kind of complex patching. If there's a security vulnerability, you have to either defer, like actually fixing that and become non-compliant or you have to down the switch. And we live in an age, as I said, where everything is on all the time. Everything is mobile. Everybody wants their services right here, right now. And the very existence of a business depends on being able to deliver those applications all the time. So you can't bring networks down. So when we've taken this microservices approach and we've containerized the actual infrastructure and the protocols and everything else, everything exists in its own container, now if there's a security vulnerability, we can replace just that container. If you're not using certain services on the operating system, you can kill those containers and in the process, you reduce the threat surface of the operating system and the switch. Whereas in a legacy world with this monolithic blob, you can just, you can turn off the features, but the code's still there. The threat surface is huge and you're still vulnerable. So what's the solution to this and how to snap route, fix this? What's the operational benefits? How do you guys play into fixing the problems that have been holding everyone back? Well, I think collaboration, I think, is one of the big benefits. Quite frankly, I think there's been sort of tension in organizations. I think unfairly network operations teams have been treated as holding things back or non-responsive or whatever. I think that's completely unfair because actually the problem is with the vendor community. We haven't been delivering the tools that enable them to deliver the services they need. And so with our approach, with this cloud-native approach, we're actually able to sort of bring the net ops world closer to DevOps, allow this collaboration to happen and give you the benefit of a more sort of coordinated approach to delivering the application. And the application is the value that the business delivers and if your application stops working, I mean, you know, this in your personal life, right? You know, we use our phones and our devices. You try using an application and it's not working. You're going to go and find a competitor. You're just going to go and say, oh, well, you know, I'll use our download something else from the app store. And so availability is a huge thing for businesses today. And the network has been one of the most vulnerable pieces in terms of availability, not because, not necessarily because people are attacking it, but because it's so complex and brittle that anytime you change anything, things fall to pieces. And that's why people don't want to touch the network. And that is why we had the rise of the whole SDN movement. The SDN movement was an approach that said, we need to make the network more dynamic. And so rather than addressing the actual operating system, put overlays over the top, create overlays and allow DevOps teams to do what they need to do to deploy applications over the top of this fairly dumb plumbing. What we're saying is, look, we're going to simplify and collapse that. You don't need translation layers and APIs. You don't need overlays. You don't need all of that stuff. We're now re-architecting the operating system itself. So you can natively address that and directly control the policy that you need to deploy an application. John, this is about modern infrastructure. It's about the cloud is modernizing all parts of the value chain from how people buy, consume, deploy, provide value to application owners. You guys are part of that. How do people engage with SnapRoute? So I say, okay, this is some direction I'm going. I'm in cloud native. I'm doing Kubernetes. I got containers. I'm using microservices. I'm betting my company's future on this direction. And a lot of people are. How do I engage with you guys and how do you fit into the equation? Right, so first of all, initial engagement, website, LinkedIn, Facebook, we're on all of those things. We're in customer trials right now in betas right now. We're obviously launching the product. So we'll be shipping our first commercial deployments. But as far as how and where are the good opportunities to deploy us, obviously there are new high growth companies who we're talking to who want to build off us as a base to start with. But if you already have a large investment into deployed legacy equipment, we can fit in quite nicely and we can still add a ton of value because one of the big problem areas is actually the top of rack switch. The top of rack switch is actually where dev ops and net ops come together. It's the first place where compute and the application touch the network. And this is where usually a net ops engineer spends a lot of time doing fairly sort of trivial tasks to help applications get onto the network. And it's a big waste of time. Just a conversion point, you're playing at the top of rack switch with the software. That is a good place for somebody to start to get a tremendous amount of value out of our product. You don't need to replace the entire network. You don't have to have us end to end. You don't have to have us in the core. If you deploy us at the top of rack switch. So take a white box device, deploy our operating system on top. It's very, very simple to do. The network engineer can very simply get that device up and running it'll auto configure itself. And then the dev ops engineers can come in and say, I want to deploy an application and I need the network to do the following things. And the device will configure itself in that way. This is really two worlds coming together. Network operations and developer operations coming together. How do you see that coming together and meshing together? Obviously the top of rack switch you mentioned is a key area where your code will work. But as those cultural communities come together, network operations and dev, they're seeing benefits with each other. How are those worlds colliding? What's the benefit? What's it going to look like? And what's the opportunity? Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I think that there's this misconception that these two, you know, these two types of organizations don't want to collaborate. And I think that's a complete misconception. I mean, everybody wants to do the right thing. They want to, you know, their business is to grow. And as I said earlier, I mean, I think the problem is that, you know, the vendor community is not delivered as you know, a set of tools and products and capabilities that enable this collaboration. And, you know, that's what we're bringing to the table. But I do think, you know, that there's this sort of, you know, this cross-pollination, this ability to, you don't have to learn each other's area of expertise. You don't suddenly have to become a networking expert. You know, a DevOps engineer doesn't have to become a networking expert and vice versa. But there is this, you know, there's this point of, you know, collaboration and harmony that we can create where there was a lot of tension and, you know, in fact, there was a, you know, a lot of problems there. We can sort of harmonize that and allow these organizations to just, you know, move forward with what really counts, which is growing the business. Tom, thanks for coming in. I appreciate your time. Congratulations on the launch. Final question for you. Take a minute to explain your background, your previous roles in networking. We first met when you were at HPE, HPE, and then HPE. And then, why are you attracted to SnapRot as an opportunity? And what's... Yeah, so, you know, I've been in networking for over 30 years, God help me. And, you know, networking security, various roles, mostly in sort of product roles, product management. You know, prior to SnapRot, I was the general manager of the data center networking group at HPE. And, you know, I got to do some, you know, fabulous things at HPE. We have, you know, acquired a Rubber and other things there, which have been hugely successful. So it was a lot of fun. But I came to the point with my career there where I realized, you know, I'd done, you know, many of the things that I wanted to do and also, you know, most of the opportunities that were there in transforming and transitioning that company. And I wanted to get back to my startup roots. And, you know, the, you know, long conversation. You've got no data centers, these Apple guys. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and so I started talking to Snap Broughton and, you know, they were asking my advice and things. And one of the things that attracted me, as you say, was it's a company built by operators for operators. You know, it's, you know, I've never had the opportunity to be in a company founded by operators who just intrinsically know what the customer problem is. And because they've lived it. And I think you really do have to live it to truly understand. And so, you know, that was a huge plus for me. I was really attracted to that. Adam and Glenn are founders, you know, really interesting, great guys. But also, there's this inflection point. There's this inflection point in the market. And everything to do with, you know, startups and successful startups is not just having the right innovative technology, which I truly believe we do, but having the right innovative technology at the right time. And the timing here is perfect. I mean, cloud native, you know, Kubernetes, the movement behind Kubernetes is just a force unto itself. You know, DevOps is, you know, is really moving forward. There's a huge sort of ground swell within the networking community to, you know, to modernize and to, you know, to contribute more to the success of business. So we have a massive opportunity. And the trend of programmable networks, infrastructure as code, is happening now. People want it, rubber is hitting the road now. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's, you know, we'll go through the usual adoption curves of, you know, early adopters and mass market, et cetera. And so, you know, there's a journey ahead of us, but, but yeah, I know, I mean, people are doing this right now. Well, congratulations on your launch. Snaprout will be watching you. Real innovative moment right to the core of the devices with an operating system. No abstraction layers with Kubernetes. Interesting architecture. Looking forward to following it. Dominic Wild, CEO of Snaprout here inside theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.