 And expect us to know as I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGEL, my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibond.com. Our next guest is Ramesh Prabhagaran, VP of products and partnerships at Viptella. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, we got to be here. So welcome back, just to be talking before we came on, Cisco and Apple announcing a partnership to make the fast lane. Again, wide area network carriers seeing a lot of stuff with Google doing fiber. There's a lot of stuff going on in transport, transit. Whatever you want to call it, wide area network, big part of the connected enterprises. That's right. What's going on with the WAN, the SDNOS we know is going on there. How's that translate to inter-office, inter-network? Am I constantly crossing carriers? Is there a one carrier fits all? I mean, what's going on WAN, why is it broken? Absolutely, so if you look at it from an enterprise standpoint, typically the predominant mode of connectivity has been you connect all your sites over one or two private networks, add a public network to the mix, and then you call it done, right? That's how traditionally it has been. Now if you look at it from the standpoint of a CIO that really cares about bandwidth growing 30% year over year and trying to keep the cost flat, they have an interesting challenge to deal with, right? So if you really look at it and nothing actually encapsulates the problem like what one of our CIOs mentioned to us, right? He said, why is it that I'm able to do two video streams, high def at my home, have my wife talk on FaceTime, and also have my kids play Xbox Live over a $50 circuit when I can't do any one of those things over a $500 circuit in my office, right? So, and if you really look at it, the- The civilization. Exactly, right? And if you really look at it, the applications are moving to different locations. It's no longer the case that your applications are exclusively inside the data center. Your content could be over the internet. It could be over a public cloud. So a lot of the transformation right now is around how do you optimize the network connectivity in order to access these services, right? So that's just one piece of it. It's the cost angle. The second big piece of it is really around time to capability, right? And in the data center virtualization world, it's all about agility. In the wide area networking world, you're not really talking about milliseconds. You're really talking about minutes to capability, right? And there you're looking at, how do I move from deploying, let's say two sites a month to maybe 20, 30 sites a month, for example, right? Or 20, 30 sites a day. And so that's the kind of agility you're looking for. How do I enforce policies? How do I upgrade my infrastructure? How do I implement change control over my network extremely quickly? So it's a combination of cost, time to capability, and then of course everybody cares about application performance, right? That resides on top of it, right? Now I need visibility into the applications that's going through my network. Is this traffic going to Dropbox versus Office 365 or says SFDC? And is this traffic going to Catvideos on YouTube, right? I know how do I identify that and make sure that I make that. Although Catvideos are very popular and drive a lot of traffic and costs. Exactly. Well, this brings up the question, the home thing is a great example. People relate to that. I got a great dynamic network at home, gaming, Netflix, enterprise. It seems to be static and like broken. Is that because the suppliers have an innovative? Is that because they're cost structures and what they pay for? Or both, is it technology or both? I think it's a combination of things, right? It's a combination of the amount of innovation that has traditionally been available for the wide area. And also the mirror side of it is also the availability of transport circuits, right? So if you look at the mentality from an enterprise standpoint, it's always been I build a five-nines available network and I say that's the next big thing, right? And it's always great that way. Now, if you look at the cost associated with maintaining and managing a five-nines available network, it's extremely, extremely high. And so what customers are gravitating towards is I have a portion of my network that gives me five-nines of availability. I have a portion that gives me maybe just two-nines of everybody and one that just gives me a lot of bandwidth and I don't really care about SLA there. Now, me as the enterprise can choose which traffic can go on what type of applications. So at the root of it, what I'm looking for is the ability to use multiple different transport circuits. I need to secure the infrastructure and I need to be able to also steer the applications in a certain way. But you're saying historically it's been a one-size-fits-all. That's right, exactly. Okay, and so by definition then I'm either under-provisioned or over-provisioned. That's right, exactly. So how do you solve that problem? So first thing is around the flexibility in using many different types of transport circuits. So if I have an MPLS circuit, I should be able to use that. And if you want to double your MPLS bandwidth, let's say every three years, it's not going to be economical for you. Now I start to look at, okay, what's really flowing inside my MPLS pipe? Maybe I have some mission-critical traffic that I want to keep over it. Maybe I have some other types of traffic that can go over a lesser SLA path, maybe over a broadband path. Now I start to mix and match different transport networks together. And that's what really gives you the economics. So it's almost a cap and grow in one type of the circuit infrastructure and then I have exponential growth in the other one. So that's obviously software in your secret sauce. Absolutely, exactly. And that's where real software innovation comes into the picture, right? Because I drop a device at the remote location and then I figure out, okay, what are all the components I need? I need, on one side, I need to be able to talk to the existing devices. And so there you bring in traditional protocols and whatnot that talk to it. And then on the other side, I need to be able to provide value-added services. And the value-added services always comes in the form of software innovation, right? And so that's where you choose a blaze platform, you provide all of the software capabilities, and then that gives you all the value associated. So your vision when you go and talk to a CIO is more than just consumer level experience. It's consumer level experience with all this granularity, with the security, with the resiliency, with the five nights. Talk more about that vision. Absolutely. So the vision is my network needs to behave the way I want, right? I mean, at the root of it. What that means is if cost is a factor, I need cost to be a factor, and I need to be able to build based on that. If security is a consideration, and absolutely every single enterprise CIO in the planet now cares about security, I need to be able to extend my security perimeter as well to wherever my network is, right? Why is it that I need to artificially place bounds within four walls and contain traffic that way and provide the security? Why can't I extend my security perimeter to wherever it is, right? And then around application, intelligence, application, visibility, how do I steer certain things in a certain direction? All of those things really come into the picture. And at the same time, if there were supposed to be, let's say there's a problem in the network, the first thing I want is I want to turn off all of those things. I just want basic connectivity, right? So a robust, underline secure infrastructure is stable stakes. And so that's why we actually innovated a lot in our technology to provide that robust, underline secure infrastructure first, and then build all the value-added services. So it's not a bolt-on, it says if you bolt-on security, you're going to have problems. So but what does that unpack that for us? What does that mean to fundamentally build security into your architecture? Yeah, I mean, get a little technical here, but let me keep it at a high level, right? So today when two devices have to talk to each other, what do you need to do? You need to basically make sure they can talk to each other, and then you build all the security policies around it, and then you build all the other policies around it, and so forth, right? Typically, the network team takes care of the network connectivity. The security team builds, the security policies are top, and the other guys come and put the policies. Now we have three different teams that don't talk to each other that often, that want to implement something that flows very well, right? So that's why we said, what we have to do is actually fundamentally integrate routing security and segmentation and policy together, so that if you make changes to one, or if you implement one, then it flows through exactly the same way. And to give you a compelling reason as to why this is important, when we go talk to the networking guys, we tell them security is built in standard, and so you don't have to worry about it. When we go and talk to the security teams, we say, you have been trying to influence your networking guys to build something, and this way you actually get it, and you just define your policies, and it automatically gets implemented, right? So the conversation now starts to become a lot more interesting for both the parties involved here. So how does what you do tie into this notion of virtualizing the data center? Absolutely. So if you look at the virtualization, there are literally three pillars, right? One is what happens inside the data center, the second piece of it is what happens in the wide area, which is the part that we address, and the third piece is all of the layer four through seven services are getting virtualized as well, right? So now there are two interesting challenges here. One is how do I provide enterprise connectivity so that all the sites can talk to each other over a virtualized van, and a virtualized van should have all the properties that we just spoke about, and how do I access a service as well at a remote point in the most effective way? I'll give you an example, a real example that we heard from one of our large financial customers. They said they have high-risk regions, and these are regions where they have a lot of political instability, and they wanted to implement a policy to take all the traffic coming from those sites, send that through a scrubbing location before it's allowed access into any of their crown assets and data center locations. They wanted to implement this change, and they looked up what it takes, they said it'll take about three months to do it, and the war broke out yesterday, right? And so they're looking for ways to implement these type of things. So in our technology, what we can do is actually you can connect any firewall, for example, connect that into our device, and we would advertise the fact that there is a device available at that location that provides these capabilities so that I can put a business policy that says any traffic from this high-risk region has to always go through a firewall before it goes anywhere else. Those types of things really took forever with the previous technologies, and we've actually brought that into our technology and we can deliver that in a matter of seconds, actually. Okay, so on, pretend I'm a CIO for a minute, I'm like, you know, I have all the troubles you mentioned. I saw your website, you're revolutionizing WAN. What does that mean? I mean, software-defined WAN, obviously software-based, I get that, at least I know SDN, all my guys. What does that mean? Give me the bottom line. So the bottom line is WAN is 10% to 12% of IT today, and we can actually bring that down 40% to 60%. Talk about the spend. Yeah, the spend, right? Now, if you... And performance maintains... And performance is maintained, you get a 10x improvement in bandwidth, you get a lot better user experience for your cloud applications, and you get a lot better security stance as well, right? So if I boil this down to numbers, it's 10% to 12% down to 4% of IT for your wide area, and then the rest of it is around the security and the application performance. Yeah, absolutely. So that's why... You guys have good success then on sales conversions? Yeah, absolutely. So actually we have a lot of Fortune 100, Fortune 500 production deployments right now. In fact, one of our largest customers actually rolling out a network that's about 1,000 plus sites, and this is something that they've actually entirely pledged over to the WebTeller technology because they saw the value that we bring to the table all the way from bringing up a site to implementing policies to reducing the cost, right? And we're able to deliver on the promise that I just spoke about to that customer. This is just a big example and take me through what does it take? I'm a 1,000 sites, I got a win, I got the cost, my bandwidth's going up, people are accessing apps, everything's going on, it's normal stuff. Absolutely. How fast am I up and running? Week, month, day, take me through the life cycle. Yeah, so what's the trigger point, right? The trigger point is I hit a pain with respect to bandwidth growth or my site growth and I'm not able to expand as quickly, right? So when you hear that type of a problem, you're usually willing to look at a new technology, spend some money in it as well, right? And so when we go in and we talk about the value, we can actually deliver the value that we're talking about instantaneously to two sites, right? And maybe you have 1,000 sites, maybe you want to trial the technology across just a pair of sites, right? That's exactly what we have done with some of the large enterprises. We said, we believe so much that this technology will work, that you can actually trial this across maybe two, five sites, whatever it is. Is it a box or is it software? So it's actually both. So the solution components is there is a box sitting at the location, it could be a branch data center ahead and whatnot. And there's also software components that sit in the cloud. Interestingly, our go-to-market has been either we can provide that as a hosted service for our customers and the customer is responsible for managing that infrastructure or through our carrier partners, we can actually offer that as a managed service as well. Interestingly, two of the large tier one carriers have actually taken our technology and have started to provide a managed service out of it in a matter of six months. And that's really a good place. So would they point their traffic in the managed service and then goes through their boxes? Yeah, so the carrier in that case would go to the customer and say, okay, I can give you MPLS and broadband and 4G and all of the diversity that you're looking for. I can also manage that infrastructure for you. And for you, it looks like what it was before. I have a circuit going in and I don't need to worry about anything else. So is it the problem I've seen? I mean, I've seen it before. The diversity issue, the cost that built silos and then okay, to bolt on another. Exactly. Silo cost more money. So it's kind of like a sprawl. Exactly, exactly. And especially it gets all the more tricky when you're talking about things like mergers and acquisitions. But one company buys another company. So I have my own network. I assume something else. And the larger the enterprise. And the people call the calling to their network. Exactly. Because they don't want to get fired. And we've seen some really, really, really broken networks out there. Can you talk about your product portfolio? You got an SDN controller? You got software? I mean, just lay it out for us. Absolutely. So there are two pieces to the overall solution. One is the device that would sit at the location of the customer. Think of it as a physical device that can go from 10 gigs to 1 gig to 100 meg of encrypted capacity. And there, really, we're talking about innovation on top of software. So hardware is hardware, but real innovation is on software. And then all of the intelligence when it comes to network-wide policies, network-wide information exchange, and whatnot, is actually implemented in a combination of the controller and also the management platform. So we give you also a single pane of glass that you can use to operationalize this whole network as well. So that point of control is the appliance, or it's actually the platform? It's a software. It's a software. And again, our go-to-market can be either we host that control cloud component for you, or if you're a managed service partner, you can actually host this for your customer as well. And how about the company? Give us where are you at with funding, headcount, growth? So the publicly available information be closed series A and series B, 33 and 1 half million, with a single investor that's in Koya Capital. I'm sure many of you have heard of it. Which partner is on the board? So Mike Gogan is the partner on the board and is available on the website as well for anyone to see. And ever since we have actually delivered our solution, we have also been able to deploy this across multiple customers. So we actually have production deployments, which means paying customers, which certainly helps a startup, as you can imagine. And so we are organically growing based on the footprint there. Overall, we're, I would say, approximately about 80 people right now as a company. And so a good mix of engineering and go-to-market. How about international offices, other areas? Yeah, so we do have two other international locations, one in Asia and also one in the Middle East, and mainly for support and sales as we start to expand into those markets as well. We do have customers outside the US. We have a few customers in Asia, some in Europe as well that we have deployed. Can you mention some of the use cases of where you guys are re-initiating? And M&A mergers and acquisitions seems to be a good one. What other areas of people who are watching out there, out there right now, saying, I have that problem. What are those things? What were the things that would tell the customer, potential customers, that they should be calling you guys up immediately? Sure, the trigger point is usually around some kind of a video application I need to roll to a remote site. Because at that time is when my two mixed skinny pipes really, really start to hurt. And another trigger point is really how do I onboard cloud-based applications? So we've had a disproportionate number of conversations in the recent past around onboarding things like Office 365 and Azure as well. As I start to subscribe to these IAS platforms and SaaS platforms, I need to architect my wide area for those. So really the trigger points around capacity, around cloud experience. What's the alternative to that? Just public internet, ACPAL? Yeah, you can subscribe to a public internet backbone but then there's no SLA, right? I mean, I don't get the user experience, I get the spinning wheel and nobody's happy. Yeah, it's spotty, it's great at one point and it's kind of like our office with Comcast. Exactly. For the small companies. That's right. So what size profile customers, small medium sized business, or is it large enterprises right now? So interestingly the solution that we have built actually scales to a really large number and this is multiple thousands, if not tens of thousands of locations. And as a result, where we have seen our initial penetration is in the really, really uber-large enterprise. And we have also seen- That's where the cost numbers are. And that's exactly. Right, and if you talk to somebody that has like a hundred million van budget and I say I can slash that down by 50, it starts to make absolute sense. You got my attention. You're on a plane. Exactly, so you do that as well. You took your glasses off and you started. Yeah, see you tomorrow. Come on, I have an opening, ironically. Yeah, first thing in the morning. And so that's where the problem is very acute and so we are actually seeing customers move very, very quickly as well. And being an early young company, that's your low hanging fruit. Exactly. But your managed service could be good for the SMB for the end of the carrier. Exactly. And that's where we really, there's a class of customers where we want to go and have those discussions because they have problems that are really, really complex and you need to be able to have a conversation with them to solve that problem. There are also a class of customers that can actually just benefit from this technology and roll that across 100 sites, 200 sites, 500 sites, whatever it is. So we have built our technology so that it can scale from the really small to the really large. And so we are using our partners to establish that right now. I just want to ask you, so this is our sixth year doing VMworld. So we've seen a total transformation. What do you make of VMwares moves into networking? Obviously the NYSERA acquisition, catalyzed all that. As a networking expert professional, what do you make of those moves? Absolutely. So I think even if you talk inside the data center, there's a large network component. And so it doesn't make sense to just do server virtualization or storage virtualization and call it done. You need to provide all of the agility with respect to network virtualization. Now the boundary for that is inside the data center. You need to be able to extend those concepts into the wide area. And you need to extend that as well into your whole NFV type L4 through L7 service virtualization as well. And so I'm interestingly seeing that the data center guys are really ahead in providing a solution that's virtualized for the data center. The wide area set of vendors, as included, are actually pushing our solution for the wide area. And the third piece that completes the puzzle in my opinion is really the service NFV type virtualization as well. Well, you have a great business model. Certainly when you lead in, I'm going to reduce your cost by 60%. That's a big deal. I got to ask you an industry-wide question that you're here. Cisco, Juniper, these guys have had huge market shares. We've seen the early days of routing, obviously, the Bay well fleet, the Bay and those mergers. It's hard to unseat an incumbent like a Cisco. They're so nested in there, Juniper as well, but they've had a little bit of their trials and tribulations lately. What though these guys struggling with right now? And why are you disrupting them? And what do you have as an edge over them? And are you afraid of those guys? Yeah, so let me take that in the same sequence. So first, what we have built is not a router. If I know and position my router versus another router, I'm just comparing capabilities, I'm not changing the conversation at all. So that's why we fundamentally changed the conversation by saying, okay, here's a solution, and here are all the values that you will get out of the solution. And a router happens to be a component in that, but that's not the near all end all type solution where I'm going and just comparing apples to apples. And so when you change the conversation of that type, you're not playing by the rules that have already been set aside. You're playing by the rules of something that's brand new, right? And so that's where we are seeing the most success. And there is a certain way to approach this market and we have done this in our previous lives at Juniper and all the other places where we've been able to go and displace the pretty large vendors as well. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if you provide enough value back to the customer, then technology is all on that. It's a focus issue, right? I mean, you've got Sequoia on the board. Those guys focus. But they also invested in a very successful called NetScreen. NetScreen ticked a space that was disruptible. Firewall. A hard place to compete, checkpoint, those guys. But they did it really, really well. Is that something that you guys see as similar strategy, not firewalls, but like picking a specific spot and nailing that? Absolutely. So the technology that we have built actually has lots of applicability. We have chosen the wide area as the place to go and have a foray because that's the place where you see the value show up the fastest, right? And we're talking about showing savings within the calendar year of deployment, right? And so that, to anybody's, it's a no-brainer, right? And so, absolutely. And as a start-up, we have to be focused. And so we have picked the wide area as the first point to start to disrupt. And then interestingly, our customers have pulled it into many use cases. And going back to your question, John, on what are the use cases, we started off actually a first series A, series B, deck if you look at it as like six use cases. Now we have over a dozen use cases because customers have said, hey, can I use it here? Can I use it here? And we start to expand on those conversations. So versatility in product. Exactly, right? So it's not a single product for a single point solution. It actually has a lot more applicability as well. All right, so you're the product guy. What's next on the product roadmap? So what's the next territory after WAN, revolutionizing the WAN and stuff we define? Yeah, so I mean, so cloud is another big area, right? And so we are looking at how you can start to expand your services into the cloud and that's an actual extension of what we do. There are a few other areas that our customers have provided input into as well. As with all things, one thing I've learned in a startup is focus and make sure that the customer on the other end, even before I ask our engineers to write a single line of code, right? And so we are doing that due diligence to make sure that, yes, we have identified three different areas, but I want to make sure I invest where I can immediately get returns as well. So we're going through that process as well. All right, well, quick question for you and enjoying the show here. Absolutely, I've been a big fan of this show and a technical marketing person, David mentioned that you guys are going to be here at VMware and I said, I absolutely want to come and talk. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing the insight and good luck with your venture. No brainer knocking down costs. That's a great way to enter the market with instant value. We'll be back more with more value here on theCUBE, more insights, sharing the data with you. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back at the SurePay. You're watching theCUBE live in San Francisco. We'll be right back.