 from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Console Connect Live 2015. Sponsored by Console, there's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in San Francisco for Console Connect Live 2015. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE Media Flagship Program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Jeff Frick, a dinner manager at CUBE Operations. Our next guest is Tyler Coates, director of Ethernet Product Management at Xeo Group. Welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, that's a mouthful. Love the title. Ethernet Product Management. We love more Ethernet. Ethernet's good. Exactly. Ethernet's a good thing. So tell us about what you guys do and why you're here. Yeah, absolutely. So the focus is just on my role, and I'll tell a little bit about Xeo as well. So Ethernet is essentially, it's a technology or protocol to move data or traffic from one endpoint to another. And Xeo is kind of a founder, not a founder, but was founded in 2007 to provide infrastructure services to businesses, right? So bandwidth infrastructure services. So we build a lot of fiber in the ground, and then we support, not only that, we support fiber to cell phone towers, and then we also operate kind of wavelengths and IP networks and Ethernet networks over the top of that fiber, right? Domestically and in Europe, and that's kind of the general idea of what Xeo does and what I do. So I manage our layer two portfolio for Xeo, and that's a lot of things, I wear a lot of hats. So what's the big bandwidth constraint right now in fiber and interconnection? You mentioned fiber to the tower or something that you guys provide. Yeah, absolutely. That's carriers, anyone who knows cell phones knows that LTE is faster than regular, they have different carries of different speeds and feeds. Some have more towers than others, but in the day it's still got to go across the internet. Yeah, I think there's a lot of historical trends, right? And historical trends where data was transmitted over electrical signals on copper wires, right? That has a finite ability to scale. And what the industry has moved on to is a fiber-based backbone and a fiber-based infrastructure. This is widespread, this is names you heard of, this is not only that, but it's content companies as well, right? So it's the Googles and the Apples, they're also building these networks to support this bandwidth growth. It comes at the hands of video, high resolution, high definition, high resolution, high definition kind of internet or websites or all the things that everybody's doing on their phone or at home streaming live TV through something like Sling. All of that is essentially where bandwidth demands are going and the old infrastructure doesn't support that, right? So that's where XEO and not to say that fiber's that new, right? It's not, it's 20 years old in terms of really big adoption, but it's becoming more and more available and accessible throughout the U.S. and even Europe and in the world. And I would imagine going further and further and further away from the backbone, getting closer and closer to the last mile is more and more the infrastructure's swapped out of copper and swapped in with the fiber. Yeah, that's a good point exactly, right? And you can build core networks on fiber, but where XEO is coming in is we're building the last mile, in particular to enterprise in and to kind of business relationships, right? That last mile hasn't quite made it to all of the consumers yet, but when it comes to cell phone towers and all of the upgrades that you had mentioned, John, and all of those things that we're doing, that's where fiber's coming in, is it's going to help build the scalability of networks and the scalability of bandwidth demands as more and more consumers want it. So talk about the dynamics of console. Why is that so hot right now? What do you like about it? You guys announced part of the partner program. What's going on? Yeah, so for me, console's a great opportunity for enterprises and businesses to access XEO's network in a very simplified means, right? And one of the resounding themes of today is it can be difficult to build networks. It can be manual. It can be an awful process, right? And a certain talent shortage out there too. Exactly, right? And definitely a certain talent shortage or certain kind of people who are capable of operating those networks and building and configuring them. So it's important that we take those things and we evolve into a measure that allows consumers and enterprises and businesses to all come together and approach and connect to each other. And that's where console comes into play. There's always going to be a physicality to networks and infrastructure. That's where XEO comes into play. But having the ability through software, through network kind of virtualization, you can actually kind of bridge that gap between the physicality of what XEO's doing and putting in the ground to what console's doing in building and bringing enterprises together, right? So that's what we're excited to be a part of and that's where we're going to take this to kind of the next steps with console. Good. Well, I mean, I'm thinking right now, what I hear is that the big constraint right now is network engineering. I mean, when I say network engineering, I'm like, interconnection is a big problem. There's not enough people out there. I mean, there's network engineers out there, as we get to large scale, high speed throughput, SLA, security, it's all kind of coming together. You just pure play network. You got DDoS attacks. You got low latency. And stuff's going more real-time than ever before. Yeah, well, and what we're seeing is, and we have products that align with this, but what we're seeing very much so is that public IP has limitations, right? It's not transparent. It is not scalable to the same levels as a fixed wire that you own or a fixed point end, right? It is scalable, but not at those same levels. And it's not as secure, right? So what happens when you see those BGP attacks or the DDoS attacks or anything that's affecting your network? That's where layer two and even layer one in dark fiber come into play is you own those, right? So Consul's taking all of those essentially risks of your business when you put things into the cloud or put things away from your own data center or your own firewall. When you move them outside of that, Consul's kind of taking a lot of that risk and saying, well, here's an easy way that you can still make those connections, but don't make them through the public internet. You're going to make them through a fixed line connection, if you will, right? So that's what we're really excited to be a part of. What's the biggest bottleneck? I mean, we always joke on the Cube about the network's the bottleneck. Got virtualization out there, all these new technologies happening, DevOps, it seems to be running over the top, software, applications, media. It's just across the board from apps to web consumption. But as you get down into the network, that seems to be the bottleneck. What's the bottleneck? I think there's a few things. And one is that it's not that simple, but from an engineering technical perspective, it's not that simple. The other is that there still is a physicality to these networks, right? And so you have to think through, how do you make those physical connections occur when you're looking at these essentially logical thoughts of putting something into the cloud, right? To a lot of consumers, the cloud is a mysterious thing, right, and to guys like me, you hear the word and it drives you crazy because it's a buzzword, right? And people who misuse it or misinterpret it, but the reality is, is that businesses are putting functions of their business, whether it's ERP systems or storage or DR or whatever it may be, they're putting these into the cloud. Or these are actually just resources that help enable their business, help them sell to consumers, help them support consumers, help manage that relationship. And as those become more and more critical and more and more what I'll say revenue impacting, it's important that we don't get held up by the physicality, the capital considerations, and we build the right bridges that enable those seamlessly and easily. It's an interesting comment because part of the whole promise of the cloud, right, is that it's flexible, right? And it can expand out when you need it and you can compress it back down to when you don't need it. And they seem to have gotten that pretty figured out in terms of compute. No, you spin up a bunch of servers at AWS so you can bring them down after your Super Bowl ad is finished running. But then as you say though, in the networking side, it is physical connection. So how's the industry kind of adapting to this really demand to be able to expand and contract kind of on demand based on whatever the kind of the workload demands are? That's actually a great question. And I'll give my small plug of why that's a great question is you're exactly right. And networks do not align with the cloud today, right? So cloud services are fully scalable. They are essentially available as and when needed. So consumers don't get caught holding these large capital bills and capital considerations to supply their 100% portfolio of when they have demand. They can actually supply it for the 20% that's the usual and then when they have those peak traffic demands they can scale up for holiday seasons or whatever it may be, right? Right, right. So what Zeo is doing on that front is we've built a product called Flex Connect. Flex Connect is essentially an as and when needed product. And the way that we're doing it is we understand there's a capital, there's a physicality, there's build in order to support flex, or support networks. But what we've done is we already have this great big expansive wonderful network, right? So we've chosen selectively what we believe are the highest criticality of destination. So these are enterprise data centers. These are cloud providers, right? So these are azures, AWSs. These are essentially any carrier hotels, right? So these are where we believe customers are taking their inner office materials, bringing it back to these data centers, right? So we've created a model that aligns with that scalability in that our customers can come in, put in ports at any of those locations for essentially no cost, very low cost. And then they can use bandwidth as needed on demand and we build them for usage. So if they don't use it, the only cost they have is a very, very small port fee and maybe a cross connect with their data center, right? So, and it's not term limited, right? So that's what we've built to kind of help bridge that gap in what we're doing in the market to help align with that scalability of cloud. What's the event like here for the folks watching who aren't here, it's intimate events, growing industry, but it's nuance. It's not like an Apple event where box news and CNBCs here. I mean, it's a bunch of networking guys who are thought leaders building on a new market segment. Absolutely. So what's the vibe here? What's some of the content? What can you share about this event that folks watching now and on demand? Yeah, you know, I think they've done a really nice job with the event, right? And as you stated, it's not an Apple launch event. It's not a $700 billion company. I don't know what it's at today, but around that range, right? But at the same time, I think the people in the industry who understand what console's trying to do, it's not the first time somebody's tried to do peer-to-peer relationships or any of these concepts, but what they've done is they've built it in the right software-defined environment and the right kind of enablement tool for end users and for customers. And so, you know, the attitude at the event, I believe, supports that. You know, a lot of the people backstage believe they've taken this further than anybody else. It's not a B2B exchange, remember we've seen those before, like app exchanges, dating exchanges. This is pure hardcore plumbing networking. Exactly, but the consequences are pretty important. For people who get it right, people who have large networks, their rewards are pretty significant. Can you quantify that? I don't know if I can just give some color to the magnitude. I mean, there's no Apple event without the network. It was exactly right. And what I would say is that every equipment vendor has a play in SDN or NFB, right? So every single equipment vendor has that play and is trying to get into this market. At the same time, you know, the carriers have to get on board to build all these networks and connections, but the enterprise space needs to also align with that. So from a quantification or quantity, I would say that it's, if and when it's successful, it will be very valuable to enterprises and businesses, carriers alike, because we're working on a project to bring everybody together in a simple way. Now, getting all of that on board is the hard part, and I think that's what this event's all about. Final question for you, Tyler. What is this going, what do you see this going? The console value coverage in the industry around open source, you know, open router project, human capital scaling with the kind of social component here, what's the big up? What's the big future look like for these guys? Yeah, I think the future is when and how it's, the future to me is instant gratification, right? It's being able to make connections through your locations seamlessly, efficiently, and live, right? So now doing that takes a lot of work and a lot of effort that console's been putting into. And they've taken this further than anybody else has. And the next step is, and the next evolution is to get buy-in and get consumers utilizing it and using it. And you could tell from the event today that the likes of Box and LinkedIn and Microsoft Azure, I mean, the big names in the industry that are doing these type of things and trying to make these relationships, they're here today, right? And they're having these discussions. They're serious, they want SLA based hardcore button down transport. Exactly, I mean, all of these things are going to improve. Your latency, your performance, your transparency, your security, all of those are going to improve when you build these Layer 2 networks and not have to do them manually, right? The way it works today is customer comes to us and says, I need to connect these three, four locations. We say, okay, we build it, we install it, and we provide them that link, right? In this instance, they have one connection to console. They come to Zeo. Zeo's already got all those other connections and they say, hey, just bring up those four locations. So I got to ask one more final, final questions. Kind of go back to the, you know, it's a good interview when we're back to two final questions. Stu Miniman at Wikibon are on our research team and Brian Gracie covering cloud and SDN pretty deep. We should try to get you connected with them because one, they'll love your title. Ethernet product management. That long-winded wordy title. Ethernet product management, that's a great title. We love it because there's all kinds of gigabit ethernet and all kinds of stuff going on in and around the ethernet segment. But this is really evolving into the cloud. I want to ask about the ecosystem. This is small right now. This console, this ecosystem of partners. You're one of them. I mean, it's our slew of press releases going out this morning. If you go on Google and search cloud, connect live, you'll see at least a dozen press releases from partners. They have an open source component. This is an early Docker-like phenomenon in my mind. You're seeing kind of a core community come together. What's your take on that? How do you view that? And what would you share to folks watching that said, hey, I'm looking for some collaboration. I'm looking for a vibe to connect into this new ecosystem. Well, there's something in being a thought leader and working through being the first to step out on the ledge and say, I'm interested and I want to do that, right? And that's something that I've been working through with console and something that we're very excited about is that this has the potential to really separate everything else that builds connectivity for end users, right? And we're excited to really be a part of that. And you know what? When you say there's a small niche group of people who are involved, at least day one, at the same time, bringing a company like Xeo or even a Google, the amount of options that we bring to the table from a network perspective, a connectivity perspective, we have over 500 data centers on net. We have over 17,000 buildings on net in our network, right? So bringing a company like Xeo, who has very dense big assets and being a part of console for us, gives us access as an early adopter into the enterprises that are going to buy in and start utilizing the service. Tyler, thanks for sharing your insight in theCUBE here. Appreciate it, we're live in San Francisco for console connect live 2015 to theCUBE. Be right back with more after this short break.