 Live from Mountain View, California, it's The Cube, an OpenStack Silicon Valley brought to you by headline sponsor, Mirantis. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back. This is The Cube. We go out to the events. Extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Jeff Frick. This is the OpenStack Silicon Valley event. OpenStack SV. You want to join our crowd chat. Go to crowdchat.net slash OpenStack SV. That's the hashtag. Log in and join the conversation. So it's a Twitter recorder, records all the conversations and also includes LinkedIn and Facebook. Our next guest is Avast Namat, who's the co-founder and CEO of Plumgrid here at the show. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you for inviting me, John. We really love to have entrepreneurs on The Cube because, one, it's really hard to start-ups. Two, it's a great opportunity in this growing marketplace of clouds. So you guys are not just a star if you've had through multiple rounds of funding, well-funded, tell the crowd out there what you guys do and why are you here and what's the opportunity for you guys within the OpenStack ecosystem? So let me give you, thanks for inviting me, John, and thanks for inviting me, Jeff, here. So let me just give you an overview of who we are as a company and what do we do over here. So a little bit on history. Plumgrid is a three and a half years old company. We started in 2011. We were venture-backed, raised around $29 million in financing, and we have customers who have deployed our solutions in production at this point in time, Swisscom being one of them. We provide networking solutions for cloud, right? So when you're trying to build a cloud, you run into issues. First issues that people are building OpenStack cloud today is they can't find enough trained resources. The second biggest issue, if you ask them, is networking. So we provide networking solution, software-only, that get deployed within an OpenStack environment, with Neutron, right? And provide all those services and features that are needed to make a cloud production great. So is it within the cloud or to the cloud when you talk about some networking? So when we talk about our customers, we actually sell to cloud builders. People who are building the cloud, right? Not to the cloud users, right? So we provide the capability whereby we get deployed within OpenStack distribution, right? So let's say take an example of, say, Red Hat, right? So Red Hat, OpenStack, 5.0, with RL7. When you deploy that, you build that cloud, you need to now start providing these networking services that Neutron provides, right? This is Neutron networking distributed switching, distributed load balancing with high availability, security scale. We deploy our solution within that environment, and that's where we provide these capability that we call virtual domains, right? The ability to create these logical data center network environments directly from the horizon console with the functionality and features above and beyond what Neutron offers. And what were they doing before you came along? Well, as you know, this OpenStack has been in a very rapid deployment phase, right? Some people had gone and deployed early releases, right? With basic OVS, base solutions with very, very simple services, right? And not necessarily with the high availability scale and the speed of automation that is now being demanded off OpenStack cloud, right? So many people did it DIY, do it yourself, right? Or quite a few customers who actually deployed it at scale used the VMware NSX, which is an ICRA acquisition prior to it getting acquired by VMware, right? So we run into quite a few customers who have scale deployments with NSX who are looking for solutions above and beyond the capabilities of what NSX offers today. Excellent. So why are you here? What's new here at OpenStack Silicon Valley? Oh, this is the show, this is the place, right? This is where all the action is, right? We have, we had an OpenStack company, right? We provide them one of the critical components within the OpenStack ecosystem, right? We have been in there for quite some time, right? We have our code upstream and contributed into the neutron. We have not been very visible in the past, right? And now I think after three and a half years with the referenceable customers and production deployments that people have done at very high performance levels and to a scale that CIOs are looking for, I think we have a role to play. That's why we are here to meet our customers and meet our partners. So talk about the challenges that you see out there that you're eyeing as an entrepreneur. I'll see now you've got big funding. Because how many employees do you have, 70? Yeah, around 70. Around 70. It's a big, big, comfortable growing company. The landscape is shifting. Obviously OpenStack is growing, growing pains. We've heard from Jonathan Bryce earlier. We were just at VMworlds, but we know the issues going on, the network layer. What's going on in networking? Is that really where the battleground is or is past still the next focus area? Because it's very clear from all the thought leaders, the building blocks are not yet all set. And that's where we are in the state of this evolution. So the way we see it is there is a layer, right? There are challenges in how you build a cloud, right? And then there are challenges in how you use a cloud, right? And then there's interrelationship between the two as to how do we actually go ahead and build a cloud versus how do you use the cloud? So when you look at OpenStack networking and you look at paths, say cloud foundry, right? It's a kind of a workload that runs on top of OpenStack. We have real customers who have actually gone ahead and put it in an internal limited deployment environment where they're running cloud foundry on top of OpenStack, right? But as soon as they try to do that, the networking broke down, right? Because the manner in which cloud foundry, Bosch would actually want to orchestrate the underlying infrastructure and services reachability through the network, right? It is not big into the blueprints, right? And that is where the capability of what's underneath the cloud comes into play. And those are the things that need to be solved. So I would say challenges are on both directions, one in the component side of things, as Jonathan pointed out, as to what are those components that are going to get used? And I think that's where a modular architecture works better, whereby each vendor that differentiates and can take care of a specific customer requirement can come in and provide that module better than the other and others who don't need that don't have to use it, right? But more importantly on the top, from the past standpoint, it gets used, there's interaction that needs to be figured out. So I'll talk about what you guys are offering in there, because obviously it's a very delicate landscape right now because there's a lot of innovation at the SDN. We were just talking about the telcos, NFV is hot. So, you know, all this stuff's happening there. What are you guys offering into that network area in terms of your process? What value and how do you talk to your customers when they say, whoa, I don't want to do anything, why should I do something now? It's all being settled. How do you answer to that? So we provide an open stack networking suite, right? This is a suite of, you know, software suite that gets deployed within and with a open stack distribution. So we also provide a, you know, certified integrations with commercially available open stack distributions today, right? For example, we are certified for Red Hat OpenStack 4.0 and you can use us, you can, you know, get it from there, from the Piston 3.0 and with the, you know, pretty soon with 3.5, you'd see that, you know, we are integrated, we are certified. But up leveling it to the application layer, right? Whereby, you know, we have now application blueprints, right? Whereby if you want to run, you know, Pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of, you know, Piston 3.0 with something with 3.5.x, if this particular blueprint is followed, right, then you can actually get your Cloud Foundry cloud up and running instead of a six-month-long project or a three-month-long project in three days, right? And you can get started using all those services that you really want to use the cloud for right out of the box versus figuring out who was networking, I need to call. What network hardware do I need to buy, right? Is it integrated or not, right? What are the issues that we are trying to run? So essentially, we're bringing the value proposition of don't waste six months to fund a project as to how to go build a cloud. Build a cloud in a very short amount of time and start using it right away. We take care of all the networking challenges in between. What do you see as the developer state of the union, if you will? Developers want code, infrastructure is code. The container trend has shown that Atomic and Docker both have massive traction with developers because app developers want infrastructure to just be dynamic. So how does that trend relate to your business? Is it disrupting you? Are you disrupting that? Are you complementary? Very important trend for us, extremely important. And Docker's is something that, and container is something which, where we see the future of virtualization, right? It's very complementary to us because networking services are provided to instances whether those instances happen to be a physical server that hosts a database, and that needs to be orchestrated with OpenStack, whether it happens to be a virtual machine that gets launched in the KVM hypervisor or gets launched within a AV sphere environment or if that happens to be a Docker container that gets launched, right? Within a, on top of a Linux operating system, right? There are going to be application assets. Some of them would live within contained dockers. Some of them would live within physical servers and AVM, we provide those services today. So we have support for Docker containers, we have support for LXC containers, we have support for VM, we have support for physical networking all within this infrastructure of OpenStack Clouds. So talk a little bit about the customer perspective. You mentioned you've got live customers in production, that number's growing. How are their attitudes changing? How's the adoption on the customer side and within their IT side starting to transform over the last couple of years? We've been covering this base for a couple of years now. Is it more accepting? Is it getting easier? Are they excited about it? Is it moving beyond POCs in the real production? Is it, are they so crawling? Are they walking and when will they start to run? So this is, I would say, you have to look at multiple silos within the industry, right? There are some thought silos that are on fire. Customers are, they're beyond POCs, they're in production, they're in second generation, third generation designs at this point in time and they're fully committed behind OpenStack, right? And who are those customers, are they a group, what the fines are? Give me, I'll give you three verticals, for example, right? First vertical is telco and cloud service providers, right? Pure play cloud service providers who wanted to build an IAS service, right? Moving on to building past services. Telcos, who are thinking of building infrastructure to deliver I2R application services out of it or NFV, which is networking or connectivity services out of it. Second segment I can give you is retail, for example. All those retail, retail, right? All the retail guys who are never going to host their online stores on top of Amazon web service because of competition reasons, right? They're building their own clouds, they're taking it to production, second or third generation, there's a long, full list of that. Third one is media and entertainment, right? They have digital assets, they want to monetize these assets through a infrastructure that they control at this point in time, right? And so on and so forth, right? Then there's traditional enterprises that actually are not necessarily spending money into the tune of tens of millions of dollars, but they're all dipping their toes in trying to figure out where does this all go and how can we use it for our internal IT and application consumption, okay? Voss, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. I'll give you the final word. Share with the folks out there, what is going on in your mind about OpenStack? Share with them to the folks that aren't deep in the community. They see the buzz, they see the conversations around OpenStack. Why is OpenStack important and why do you think it will be successful? So OpenStack have come a long way. OpenStack started almost four or five years ago when there used to be a lot of competition around in terms of how we do things. This has turned out to be the consensus project that everybody is behind. And this is something which becomes, has the potential to become the operating system live or the data center, right? We see it as something which is as an enterprise CIO, you have to take a look at it. You have to use it in future. It's something that is coming. Not just enterprise telcos. Even as telcos, right? Even software as a service. This is the base substrate layer upon which all the software as a service gets built, right? It provides the benefit for the agility, automation and the cost, the TCO objectives that an enterprise CIO have. But most importantly, most importantly, if you're looking for time to revenue, right? By building an infrastructure that is entirely in your control and you control your own destiny and you want to do it right and you do want to do it fast, OpenStack is the way to go. How does Cloud Foundry fit into OpenStack? I would say Cloud Foundry is an application. The way we view it that runs on top of OpenStack. The OpenStack provides it is all the infrastructure services that a Cloud Foundry has would require. And I think that's a nice, happy coordination point between the two. As a platform as a service. As a platform service that resides as an application on top of an infrastructure as a service provided by OpenStack. Breaking it down, that's why I love getting the entrepreneurs because they're close to the action. They got their companies to run, but also they're in a very fluid environment here. CEO Plumgrid here, co-founder, great opportunities but also a lot of shifting, a lot of shifting plates as they say, a lot of earthquakes going on that this market, certainly in California. We are live in Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.