 From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Escape 19. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE coverage here in New York City for the Escape Conference 19. This is the inaugural event for multi-cloud. I think it's the first industry event for really talking about multi-cloud and the impact to enterprises and public cloud. I'm my next guest is Steve Mulaney, President and CEO of ABA Tricks, Story, Career and Tech, been there, done that, seen many ways of innovation. Nassira, Palo Alto Networks, and now ABA Tricks. We were tired for a while, welcome back. I did, yeah, five years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. It's nice to have you on because I think you have a good perspective on multi-cloud because you've been in the industry since the 80s, both been broken at the same time, and we've seen the waves. This wave is bigger than I think most of the other waves combined because it brings together so many things, infrastructure, software, cloud scale, and a new modern application environment. And then you complicate everything by throwing IoT out there, edges being pushed to boundaries, securities equations changed. All this is going on right now, all at the same time. Yeah, yeah. No, and that's why I was basically kind of retired for five years and I was at Nassira. We got bought by VMware. I stayed there for a couple of years and I just said, okay, that's it, you know. I've had a good career, I'm done. And about a year ago, the world changed and it felt like on a Tuesday morning, just, I noticed enterprises really, we've been talking about cloud for 12 years. And five years ago, they said, we're coming in, we're gonna do it, but they didn't really mean it. But about a year ago, all on the same day, every enterprise said, no, now we actually mean it. And I don't know why. I don't know if it was just people retired or just five years of talking about it. They all decided we're coming in and enterprises all moved together. And this wave, as you said, is bigger than, I was around in 1992, in the early nineties in the movement from mainframe to client server. This is 10 times bigger than that. And more importantly, it's gonna happen 10,000 times faster because what's that? I just deployed 62 data centers around the world because if I can leverage the greatest infrastructure built, basic infrastructure of the hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, Oracle, you name it. It's unbelievable the velocity at which you can now start to play. You know, I think you're on to something big here. And I think this is why I'm here at this event and why I'm excited that a lot of the industry thought leaders and practitioners and leaders are doing this event. Small events, inaugural, but I think it has a lot of legs because there's a lot of tell signs that I like to look at. One is cloud. I've been covering Amazon since eight years now with theCUBE. I've known AWS since it started. I guess I've done many startups and launched, use AWS. But I've had many conversations with Andy Jassy, one-on-ones privately. I got an exclusive coming up for re-invent with him. I've gotten to know him. It started out. Everyone's moving to the cloud. Every data center is not gonna exist. Yeah. And then, you know. Oh, maybe not. Maybe now we'll do an output. So I challenged him last year. I said, look at, you know, Andy, like, come on, dude, like you was saying like a year ago. Yeah, it's all AWS or nothing. And he's like, John, look, I'm not, look, I just listened to customers. And I also interviewed when he did the VMware deal. And he's very, they're very customer focused. And when they make these moves with Outpost, and I think it's gonna be a hybrid message this year at re-invent, you know it's real. I think this validates your point. So I gotta ask you, what specifically do you see the formula being for multi-cloud? Because certainly everyone's recognized that there's a huge benefits for AWS for Azure. I mean, from a scale standpoint, so why not use that? What's going on on the enterprise on premise that's making this new thing work? So I think it all starts with architecture like anything else. I think right now enterprises have said, okay, we've burned a boat, right? Now we're not gonna get rid of our data centers, but in terms of our strategic investment, we are moving into the cloud. We are going to leverage the infrastructure of the hyperscalers. And whether that's just one hyperscaler or multiple. And I have not met an enterprise who thinks they're only gonna be one, right? Every single one of them. I don't think they're moving workloads across. I don't think that. I think it's, they see that I'm gonna use Google for AI. I'm gonna use AWS because I started there. I'm gonna use Azure for Office 365 and other different things. And everything in infrastructure is always multi. It's never homogeneous, right? It's always that. And so I think it's gonna happen. And I think what people are begging for right now is I wanna build an architecture that gives me the optionality to be able to deliver a common set of services, whether I'm on AWS or multiple clouds. And I want them to be my services. And I don't wanna have to understand the low level abstractions and constructs of each of those clouds because they're all different. One's metric, one's US, one's like some other weird thing. And I don't have the time that people with the resources to be able to do that. So give me a common set of services that are my services that I can deploy and abstract away the details of those public clouds. Yeah, it's an interesting point there. In fact, I called BS on multi-cloud last year when it started to kind of rear its head and like, come on, Michael, multi-cloud's bullshit. And I said that on theCUBE. And here's what I meant. Multi-cloud as an operating model is directionally correct, but the architecture hasn't shown where this true multi-cloud. Now, the fact of the matter is people have Amazon, people have Office 365. That's technically two clouds. If they get with Google, that's three clouds. So if they have three clouds, I guess they have multiple clouds. But you bring up an interesting point and going back as a student of the history of tech, industry, multi-vendor has been a big deal. It is a big deal. And like you said, there will be a multi-vendor world. That will happen. The question is how? How do you guys see it happening? Your company is attacking this. What's interesting is, so now you think about it from a customer perspective, which I do the same thing, same thing with AWS. It's always outside it. Okay, I'm thinking as an enterprise IT person, I'm making the move. Do you believe that your basic infrastructure will lever the hyperscalers, or will you build it on-prem? Everyone says, I believe that that is the way I'm gonna go. Great, how do I do that? So, I'm an IT architect. Who do I go to to help me? Do I go to Cisco? No, they're the shocking thing for me. In the six months I've been at Aviatrix, that word's never used. They're not, it's like it was DEC or IBM in the conversation when you were talking about client server. No, why would you? Cisco, Juniper, Aris, any of the networking people, not even in the conversation. VMware, not really in the conversation. So, I don't have any incumbent vendor that I can go to that I used to go to. Why aren't they in the conversation? Because of the commodity that's been extracted away? I think it's just because it's once it's the innovation it's the innovation of dilemma, right? Once you're selling a lot of stuff into on-prem to then go and say, I mean, you look at Palo Alto Networks, they're trying to make that transition, acquiring a bunch of companies, VMware, acquiring a bunch of companies. Why are they doing that? Because they know I gotta get off on-prem, everything's going in the cloud. So, it's a legacy. It's a legacy thing. And I think what happens is we, there's only one reason and one reason only an enterprise customer's not using Aviatrix. Because they never heard of us. That's why. That's the only reason. Once they hear about what they're doing, my God. Well, give the plug. Talk about the company. What are you guys doing? So we deliver, I mean, it sounds like I've made it up for this conference, but actually this conference was perfect for this. It's networking and security services for the multi-cloud enterprise. And we're building an architecture that people can deploy that will give them this common architecture across all the different clouds. So, whether you're just using one cloud or multiple, it doesn't matter. It's the same set of security and networking services. And we do that by embracing and extending the basic constructs that AWS, Google, Azure and Oracle and all the other clouds will give you and to deliver that real enterprise class. Because the other thing that we found is everyone thinks that the cloud gives you everything and anything you will ever need from networking and security. Let's say AWS, I could do everything I need. What the enterprises are figuring out is once they start going in, what they realize is it's created for the common, the low-level common basic constructs. And the enterprise starts saying, well, I need this BGP feature. Because guess what, the data center's not going away. And I need more than 100 route limitations. And all of a sudden there's 50 different limitations AWS will give me. Well, they didn't talk about that. Well, of course they're not going to talk about that. They're just going to go, check, check, check. We solve all your problems. As enterprises now move in with mission-critical applications, they're realizing I need the same level of networking and security services that I had on-prem. I can't get that with the native constructs. So where do I go? That's what we do. So we fill in, we embrace what we can of those constructs. We fill in holes where they're filling holes. And then we give you the mechanism to be able to orchestrate that across a little bit. So you operationalize the hyperscale clouds for the enterprise. That's basically what you do. Exactly, for the enterprise. Yeah, exactly. And the level that they need. So you get the benefits of the cloud, but all those nuances under the cover details like networking and other features, you have strapped that away and provide an operating model for- And the beautiful thing about it is the velocity at which we can deliver. We're over the top, effectively over the top. We're integrated into the clouds. We understand what cloud-native, we understand all the constructs of accounts and all the things that we need to do. But what we expose to the customer, to the enterprise, is a set of over-the-top services that just work. Okay, Steve, so I got to ask you, since we're at the multi-cloud conference, what is multi-cloud? I mean, how do you define, obviously, you laid out a pretty compelling architecture of what needs are, leveraging the cloud and for on-premise, which Aviatrix does. But what is the definition of how should people learn, understand what is multi-cloud? I think for us, for networking and security in that base, so we're basic infrastructure. And so we get out there first, right? So if you're going to build a city, you don't start putting people there first. The first thing, if you do it right, is you get sewers, you get electricity, gas, roads, all that, networking and security infrastructure is basic infrastructure, it goes out first. And you want to create an architecture that's going to live with you for 20 years. You don't want to have to rip up the roads and put the sewers in later. And that architecture needs to be multi-cloud because even though you think maybe most of our customers are 90% AWS right now. But every single one of them say, but I'm moving to Azure, I'm moving to Google, I've got retail customers that won't allow me to put my infrastructure on AWS or I have machine learning, AI type apps on Google. They all say that same thing. But what they all then say to us is you're going to be the mechanism upon which I'm going to be able to deploy this common set of services such that I don't need to know that. All right, give an example of a customer you guys have. If you have a name and name, we had some customer on stage here. So Jeffery, so Mark. It's a real use case. Yeah, so Jeffery's financial services institution, lots of requirements, Mark Leon soon is going to be on stage with me tomorrow. You know, we started working them about nine months ago and exactly the same thing. They said, okay, you know what? We need to start moving to the cloud. We've got to start leveraging the cloud. But it's too complicated, right? It's even AWS says go build. I don't want to go build. I want to consume services, but they don't have all the services that I needed. They're too low level. They have very high function, high enterprise requirements. So they start using us to orchestrate things, to provide transit networking, to provide egress filtering out to the internet. We have high performance encryption. You know, AWS only offer it one gig. We can offer it to 10, 20, 30, 40 gig. So they start deploying, they start realizing all the things we do. Then they go and say, I want to bring my Palo Alto network firewall into the cloud. When you start looking at that, because I guess what, all my policies, I want the same level that I have on-prem, I want it in the cloud. If I go try to bring in my VM series into AWS, the constructs that AWS give you they cause you limitations in performance, invisibility. It's integration hassles. It's integration hassles. It doesn't, it's performance, scalability, visibility issues. They force you to use SNAT. And there's all these issues that they go, oh my God, there's PANES. We solve all that for them. We basically cloudify the VM series for them. So all those limitations don't go away. And so then that's just another use case that they use. So now they start looking and they say, okay, now I'm going to start standing into other clouds and I want to use you as a common frame point, that common pain in class. Well, Steve, good luck on your venture. You're back on the saddle again. Another ride here. You feel good about it? This is going to be the best, the biggest that I've been. And I was at Palo Alto Networks in VMware in Nassirah and this one's going to be bigger than both of them. What's your vision for where this is going to be for you? Where do you see the company in a few years? What are some of the outcomes you expect to happen? Our opportunity, and I look at it as I say, someone's going to take this opportunity. And the reason I came back is why not us? Someone's going to take it. And the opportunity, honestly, is to become effectively what Cisco was in the early 90s, to define the architecture, the networking and the security infrastructure architecture for enterprise customers. They're begging for that right now. That's our opportunity right now. Cloud interoperability. Interoperability, yeah. And so there's so many things that we need to go and do. When you look at also the thing that people don't understand, the operations. So many people think I want it the same as it was on-prem. I think with actually the cloud and across multi-cloud, if you do it right with us, it's actually better because the visibility that you get is actually more than what you get on-prem. Well, and the thing that's interesting, that's different about this new world that we're talking about is that there's going to be constant improvements in new things, which means that the functionality game is going to increase, which means the agility is even more important because the apps are going to have more things to do. Yeah. I mean, in the end, why do you want to go to cloud? Because I want it to be self-service and I want agility, right? I want my developers, I want everybody to be able to do things quicker because all of a sudden they say, let's go roll this out and you want to be able to do it. Well, good luck on the new venture. AVH, check them out, hot multi-cloud startup growing. How many people do you have? Put the club in. 100. What are you guys looking for? Are you hiring? We just hired a new VP of worldwide sales, James Weimbrenner, who is the Viptel CEO. VP of sales in Cisco. Hiring a tremendous amount of sales guys right now We're closing out a $40 million series C round next week and we're hiring a lot of people. Good luck. We'll be following you, Steve. Thanks for coming on to sharing your insights. Again, multi-cloud. This is a shift that's happening. Multi-cloud is just another word for multi-vendor in a new modern era. This is what it has been in the tech industry but a whole new world. It's a cube coverage here in New York City. Escape, 19, I'm John Furrier. Thanks.