 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Open Systems. The future is crystal clear with security and SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're covering the Open Systems event, networking event. They're here as part of the two Gartner events here this week. On the heels of AWS re-invent, a lot of action going on in Las Vegas. Steve Garcin is here, he's a president and founder of SD-WAN Experts Consultancy in this space. Steve, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Glad to be here. So tell us a little bit more about your background. Okay, I've been in the networking space since about 2007. And initially, my company was called MPLS Experts when companies were migrating to MPLS and not understanding, well, what carrier should I use? And I helped companies re-engineer their WAN back then. And as that developed, then WAN optimization came into the scene, and I helped companies evaluate the right WAN optimization solution. And then I had the foresight to see the potential of SD-WAN. And I pivoted the business, called it SD-WAN Experts, and started writing for Network World and blogging in my own site and with a number of other websites. I've been helping enterprises worldwide re-engineer their network, make a WAN transformation that's secure and supports easy management and save a lot of money. So, awesome. So you have a practitioner's background, right? That's fair to say. Okay, good, so you know your stuff. Let's get into it. So let's talk trends. I mean, at a high level, we always talk at theCUBE about the cloud and how that's affecting network traffic. Going from north-south to east-west has a major impact on security and performance. What are the big trends in the market space that you see that are relevant? Well, we see consolidation, obviously. I mean, obviously, moving to the cloud is a big driver. The WAN has been designed for a data center with an MPLS network. And that's a hub-and-spoke architecture that really doesn't make sense anymore. Companies are moving to Office 365, to using salesforce.com, to using all kinds of software as a service. And that just doesn't work for the data center. So what companies have traditionally done is they have regional secure gateways and they're sending the traffic from an office to a secure gateway and now they're going to the internet and it just is convoluted. The traffic is tromboned and the latency is higher than it has to be and they're spending more money for these expensive circuits that ultimately they're going to the internet anyways. So there's a lot of technical debt out there. So how does a company go from point A to point B? Without spending a zillion dollars or bringing in a huge SIs to re-architect everything, is there a path that you can advise customers or is it just every situation's a snowflake? Most, you could probably define half dozen different basic situations that are snowflakes. But essentially, you're moving to, if you have an MPLS network, companies typically will need more bandwidth and instead of getting more MPLS bandwidth, they'll add internet connectivity and using SD-WAN, the route traffic over the internet that's supposed to go to the internet with things that are still required on their MPLS network will stay in play. When those MPLS contracts expire, then there's a question of, do I need MPLS? And that's a complicated question to answer. I will not say that you can eliminate MPLS. I'll always say it depends. It depends on the latency between pass on your network. I presented a paper at ONUG a few weeks ago in New York in which I analyzed with a lot of empirical data. Latency, packet loss, and standard deviation of that latency between pass, like from Tokyo to New York, you might have a 200 millisecond latency, but your standard deviation over the internet might be 200 milliseconds. So that means potentially if you're using only the internet, you might have 400 milliseconds latency. Can your application work appropriately? Yeah, if you need 200 guaranteed, you've got a problem. Right, exactly. In a situation like that, you might want to use MPLS or there's a new category of connectivity called SDCore, which is an MPLS network in the cloud that you access through an IPsec VPN to POPs that are typically within 20 milliseconds. So you get that stability, but you cut the cost dramatically. Now the edge just confuses us even further, right? IoT, the edge, I mean, certainly a trend everybody's talking about. From your standpoint, how real is it? Is it here today? Is it coming? And what is the effect going to be on all these trends? You mean the edge? Yeah, the edge, IoT. It's a complicated thing. I mean, the edge. The industrial internet. Yeah, I mean, when people talk about the edge today, the edge used to be their router, and SD-WAN devices are supplanting the router. And Gartner has indicated that by 2023, nobody's going to be buying routers. Everybody's going to be using an SD-WAN device which will route. Yeah, so Amazon, as I said, we were re-invent last week. They might even look at the data center as the edge, but I digress. Let's talk about the horses on the track. Layout sort of the competitive environment right now. We're here at the Open Systems event. Where do they fit in the market landscape? Open Systems is a very unique company where people will say, well, who's Open Systems competitor? And they really don't have a competitor because you're unique. Open Systems is a company that has a secure SD-WAN which means there's a full security stack with SD-WAN. So you have the benefits of SD-WAN, but instead of having to deal with all these different security applications like CASB and data loss prevention and IPS, IDS, authentication, VPN integration with active directory, they do all of that. And it's all managed. So it's a very unique offering. So the competition is do it yourself, right? The competition is do it yourself or use a managed service provider who probably doesn't have all the pieces that work together. And Open Systems been doing this for 25 years. So they have developed what the customers want. I went to one of their global customer meeting and they called a CAP meeting last year. And each year they get input from the customers as far as what kind of enhancements they want to see and they actually take that input and the following year, the customers, I was amazed, the customers just are thrilled that the company listens and the company implements what they ask. So again, I've mentioned a couple of Gartner shows going on this week. So it sounds like Open Systems really wouldn't fit cleanly into a magic quadrant. They don't, they don't because they're not an edge device. They're a complete edge security solution that's managed. We talked about this in theCUBE, John Furrier has brought up several times that the magic partners will have to evolve as these managed services, the cloud certainly affects that as more and more things get co-opted by the services economy. But your thoughts on magic quadrants, how customers are using them. My understanding is today you heard a talk from a Gartner analyst that was helping people understand the dos and the don'ts of a magic quadrant. Your thoughts. Yeah, well what Gartner was talking about today is how many people use the magic quadrant inappropriately. They think this tells us which companies we should look at. And really what it's telling you is how that customer strategy fits in with the marketplace but you really have to look at what your requirements are. You can't just say, okay, I'm going to look at quote the top three SD WAN vendors. You know, what are your requirements? So that's what my firm does as a consultant is we help companies figure out what the requirements are to find out what's the right solution. A story I love to tell is a company that spent a year evaluating SD WANs and they were about to make a decision and the CIO basically told the committee after a year of evaluations, hey, before we sign a contract, let's get an independent sanity check that we've made the right decision. And I met with the company, spent a couple weeks assessing their requirements and I know all the major technologies and I knew that what they selected wasn't correct but you can't tell a client that they made a mistake. So we set up a meeting with the vendor which was a carrier and their technology provider in the committee and I asked the hard questions that the vendor couldn't answer which made it really clear to the client that this was the wrong solution. They went a completely different direction. Say them a lot of money, I love those stories. What's your website? SD-WAN-experts.com. All right, Steve, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, sharing your knowledge. Awesome stuff, really appreciate it. Pleasure. Keep it right there, we'll be back from Las Vegas Cosmo Hotel Open Systems Networking Event watching theCUBE.