 Hello and welcome to this Analyst Angle where we are going to explore how multi-cloud networking is continuing to become more and more important. Just this week we saw the acquisition of Nefeli by Cloudflare, a very big interesting acquisition as they grow in how they're providing networking in a more multi-cloud way. This comes on the heels of Cisco buying in December. As we take a look at the market from our friends at ETR, we see that Cloudflare has dropped from a very strong growth position, well over the 40% net score, a measure of spending momentum with a company, which means quick growth to 36% has given them a lot of spending momentum. In Provision, they've actually grown, so even though the momentum has slowed a bit, we still see that they show up quite often in the 1700 respondents, while Cisco has been bouncing around between 20 and the low 30s over the past couple of years. While multi-cloud networking and security are growth engines, we want to unpack this market and understand, is this really how these companies make their comeback? I'm Rob Streche, Managing Director with theCUBE Research. Today I'm joined by Chris McHenry, Head of Product at Aviatrix, the pioneer in multi-cloud networking, if you have to ask myself and Bob, and they also do security as well as part of that, so it's not just about the networking, you have to bring it together with the security, which is I think a big piece of this acquisition as well. We're also joined here by Bob LaLiberte, Principal Analyst with theCUBE Research. Welcome, Chris and Bob. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks, Rob. Great to be here. So, Chris, why don't we start with you? How do you see the landscape for multi-cloud networking changing as acquisitions are taking place? Yeah, I'll tell you, it's been a really exciting year in this space and in my opinion, just real validation of the market and the market position that we're in to some extent. I mean, you typically see with these big players in the market that they're a little bit late to the game, but they typically have a line of sight towards the things that are going to be the next growth engines for us. So, it's funny when I saw, obviously, Cisco, I spent a lot of time at Cisco, saw Cisco acquiring Isabel and saw Cloudflare acquiring Nefeli, it really to me is just validation. And we, to your point, I see us as the pioneers in this space. We've been doing multi-cloud networking for almost 10 years now. We've got a ton of experience, especially when it gets down into the practical real-world enterprise challenges that customers are facing over 500 enterprise customers. And so when I start to see some of these big players get into this space, for me, it's really exciting. It points enterprises in the direction that this is a valid place to be investing in and it's an acknowledgement of the real challenges that are in that space. Yeah, Chris, I think that really highlights a lot of what we're seeing as well. And I know from my personal experience, it's really, the environment has really matured over the last three to four years. And people have been talking about multi-cloud for a long time, but really what they were talking about is we've got multiple clouds, public clouds that we're using, and by multiple public clouds, I'm referring to infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, not SaaS. But what they were really doing was they had one primary and the others were just sort of secondary ones that they weren't using. What we've seen over the last couple years is a real surge in organizations having meaningful use of multiple public clouds. So they're deploying production apps on multiple different public clouds, and that's really driving the need to have this multi-cloud connectivity. One of the things that I wanted to broach with you and Rob brought it up at the beginning, it's one thing to have multi-cloud networking connectivity, but the other piece is has to be secure. And so there's a lot of pieces that go into ensuring that all this connectivity is inherently secure, especially the more distributed is the larger the attack surface. Perhaps you can talk about the need to have tightly integrated security in a multi-cloud networking solution. Yeah, in my opinion, they are one in the same, right? I mean, I think it's hard to argue, you can say that the most secure networks in the world are the ones that are not connected to anything else, right? I mean, the network to some extent inherently is the thing that is both a blessing and a curse. And historically, they have been kind of seen as two separate things. You've got things in the firewalling space, you've got things in the networking space. SDN in general has really allowed us to start to converge those things. And at the end of the day, what is it that enterprises really care about, right? They care about having two things on the network, two applications, a user an application, an application and some data. They care about being able to let those things talk to each other and to be able to block connections that they don't want talking to each other. They need to be able to see it. They need to be able to secure it. They need to connect things together in the network really, as we start to look at that convergence, like networking and network security, in my opinion, they really are becoming one thing. There's plenty of indicators in the industry to kind of show that trend in action. And it's fundamentally the way that we approach the development of our product, right? Security oftentimes is a complexity driver in enterprises as well. Like as soon as you start to distribute the network further, it's more and more important to think about how do we effectively and consistently secure it. Yeah. I completely agree. And I think, again, we're big believers in multi-cloud and networking and that the networking is the glue between a multi-cloud strategy. Having been over at AWS myself, I saw it in action because, you know, funny enough, I was part of what was called the hybrid cloud division over there. And when you started to look at that and understand it, organizations get to a point where they need to go beyond the tools from a hyperscaler. What is that? What is that like tipping point? And I'll throw that out both to you, Chris and to Bob as well. Yeah, I'll start just kind of extending what we were talking about beforehand. Security oftentimes is one of those big triggers. I think one thing that we've seen is as organizations have moved to the cloud, they've gone through several different phases of maturity. And phase one is typically led by the application teams. And, you know, for better or for worse, like people have different skill sets. And the reality is that application teams don't always come from a perspective of what is required to effectively secure an enterprise. And so as enterprise security teams come into the cloud and they try to, you know, say, okay, well, we need these standards and we have these compliance regulations, it introduces some complexity. And that's oftentimes one of the trigger points for customers are going to be looking at third-party solutions to help them. Now that gets even worse for many organizations as they start looking at multi-cloud because the tools are different. So now it's, how do I optimize skill sets? How do I implement security consistently? How do I ensure compliance? And so security oftentimes really is one of those big triggers. Yeah, and I would say from my side, Rob, you know, looking at it, what's a trigger? Anytime they once they've moved to that second cloud, right, that really is it when you're trying to figure out, I mean, especially from the networking perspective, where, you know, they don't want to be in a position of having to say no, they need to be able to respond to the business and say, hey, we want to spin up a new cloud, how long is it going to take us? And if it takes too long to do that, right, they're seen as the inhibitor. So I can speak for the customers that I have talked to that have a multi-cloud networking solutions and some of the avatrix customers as well. And what we've seen is that that these organizations who have adopted it, it empowers them to say yes, right, they now say, hey, I've got a seat at the table and I'm able to quickly connect to any cloud that I need to all using a consistent set of tools and a consistent set of policies. Yeah, no, I think that makes total sense. And I think, again, when you start to pull back the covers on multi-cloud networking, it was it's, it's very complex if you, you know, once you get above, you know, the fiber and start to look at all the VPCs and how you bring it all together and forget overlapping IP address ranges and things of that, which just, I mean, my networking time back there, I start to look at that. But it's, it's again, I think it's key that organizations also have security integrated in. And I think that to me is one of the keys. But the other key is that it can't just be about, you know, Kubernetes or about VMs, it has to really take into account all of the above. And is that what you're seeing out of your customers, Chris, is that they're really taking in all of the above strategy when they look at this? Yeah, I think I, well, you almost, you be made to the point to some extent, right? I mean, I think, I think one of the things that's really interesting is when you think about the fundamental things that are required to get applications to work in the, in the cloud, you've got things like you've got compute storage networking, right? And then, and then all the security components that go on top of that. And now you've add in things like automation and DevOps and some of those things, several of those areas have great standards already to help enable organizations to adopt multi-cloud strategies, right? Kubernetes has become a really solid standard in the space, you know, Terraform as an example, incredible standard for infrastructure as code. We've got consistent observability players, you know, networking is a critical part of this stack, right? And so it's one of those realizations that customers make when they're thinking about multi-cloud is, oh, I need to think across the different layers of the stack. How do I drive agility, consistency, and flexibility? And I'll tell you this too, one of the big challenges here is actually how do we operate efficiently, you know, in an environment that has a bit of a skill gap, right? Because every cloud is different. And so we see multi-cloud networking as a force multiplier for organizations that drives that agility. Absolutely. And I think that plays into that whole concept of creating a single platform. So you learn it once. And then there's what I always like to refer to as the principle of least astonishment. So as you're going to another cloud, you're using the same tools, the same policies, everything. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the platform approach that AV-atrix has taken to enable these organizations to drive that operational efficiency and that agility? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's the big thing, right? And even when you look at the cloud providers, there's so many disparate services that help contribute to networking and network security. And so one of our big goals is to, at AV-atrix, deliver a single secure cloud networking platform that allows you to drive consistent connectivity, consistent security, to do that without the trade-offs of performance versus security versus complexity. We want to be able to do it consistently across each of the different clouds. And we're taking a true platform-oriented approach. We're combining network security with connectivity, with network performance monitoring and diagnostics, with services that you would never have thought should be individual networking services before, like a NAT gateway and a VPN gateway. Those things all used to just be like routers or firewalls, right? And so how can we consolidate this and drive simplicity that allows organizations to really adopt the great services that each of these clouds are providing? And I mentioned beforehand, we see even more diversity in this space being driven by AIML, right? It's a huge differentiating application. And it's not just the three major providers that are competing in this space. We're seeing specialty clouds from NVIDIA, like the Lambda cloud, right? And you'll see AI is a business driver. So how do I say yes? How do I say yes? And that's really our mission. Excellent. That's fantastic. And so that actually speaks to one of the next things I wanted to talk to you about is that as we've talked to organizations and they're continually moving their applications to the cloud, obviously there's a need as you brought, I'm glad you brought up AI. We couldn't get through a conversation without it. But a lot of organizations are looking to how do we accelerate our adoption of AI? So maybe you could touch upon how having a multi-cloud networking solution can accelerate the adoption of moving those applications, of creating those AI environments across multiple different clouds. Yeah. Migration for a long time has been one of the key reasons why customers work with us. It allows us to quickly apply transferable skills. I think one of the things that's really important is I've been in the networking and network security space for a really long time. I'm incredibly passionate about this. I'm incredibly passionate about the people who are also passionate about this, oftentimes coming from kind of an on-prem background, from a data center oriented background. And we want to be able, the one piece of advice I have is embrace learning these new skills and let us help you get there. Because one thing that we can do is we can take the tools that you're familiar with and allow you to use those things inside of the cloud, but to do it in a way that's optimized for the cloud and brings the security along with you. So in the context of AI, in the context of migrations, nobody goes and moves to the cloud overnight. There are application drivers that get you there. AI is such a unique one because it's so data driven. And so when we think about use cases where you might have some data in one cloud and you need to do the AI, the ML workloads in another cloud, Aviatrix can quickly enable that secure connectivity to help you say yes to the business. If it lives in the data center, if it lives in Equinex, doesn't really matter. I mean, the solution is designed to help you leverage the best tool sets that these cloud providers are bringing to the table with the applications that they deliver. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's a key as we see it with our power law distribution of Gen AI and just even a small case of that. What we see is it starts to again, with the high, we have a lot of the training and development happening in those clouds. And then it's pushed out as you go down and you have more and more instances where it's being done for inference and many more deployments as you go along the long tail, which is not happening in the clouds. It's happening in Colo. It's happening out in edge locations. It's happening in the data center and bringing all of these things together. That must be something that you're seeing is that the complexity of this is also just increasing AI and every across the board, AI is not making things simpler. That's for sure. I think I can almost put that as a tagline, but are you seeing this within the customers that you're talking to? Yeah, I can tell you, I can tell you the network is not magic, right? We're not, it's not magic cloud networking, right? I don't know where we're getting that from. And I don't think that actually organizations needed to be magic. They needed to be powerful, right? They needed to be simple and powerful, right? And so, yes, absolutely. That increasing complexity only makes it more important to have something that can help you simplify it while not missing out on any of the capabilities that you need as an enterprise to support compliance, to support performance, and to support, you know, a lot of these applications have like hardcore latency requirements. You know, I think one of the things that are, you know, in our approach, in the way that we are differentiated, differentiate ourselves is we really want to embrace helping organizations leverage these amazing networks that the cloud providers have already built. And so, our simplicity is really delivered on top of those foundations, right? And I can't say the same thing for some of the approaches that I think our competitors are going to be taking here, right? I can't imagine that cloud players are going to say, oh, no, don't send the traffic to me. You can embrace the cloud provider networks, right? And that's really, I think that we're on the approach, right? We want to empower customers to use these, the amazing foundational services that the CSPs are building as well. That's why we build on top of that. Yeah, I think that's a great place to kind of, you know, leave it is, you know, empowering the customer and giving them choice of what network underlying fiber they're using there. And so I want to thank you both, you know, thanks, Chris, and thanks, Bob, for coming on board today. Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. And I'll tell you, Rob, I'm going to get you an Aviatrix sticker for the back of your laptop before we, before we get on the cloud together again. Well, if you send one over to Paris, I am sure I'll be there. And well, I know I'm going to be there. And, you know, I think there's a lot going on even though in the cloud native space. And again, that's just a whole nother kettle of fish to fry that really the complexity over there and gets into all the service mesh and what is the service mesh versus networking and all of that. And we'll park that for today. But, you know, and we'll pick that up in Paris, I'm sure. Sounds great. Yeah, thanks both. Thanks, Bob, you know, and thanks both to you. And thank you for tuning in. Stay tuned for more Analyst Angle on Multicloud Networking on theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise analysis and coverage.