 Welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We have a returning CUBE alumni, Ramesh Prabhagaran, who's the co-founder at CUBE, great to see you. Ramesh, thanks for coming in to our studio and all the new layout. Thanks for having me here, John, after a series of Zoom conversations. It's great to be live and in the flesh. Great to be in person. We also have a new stage for our SuperCloud event, which we've been opening up to the community, looking forward to getting your perspective on that soon as well. But I want to, this CUBE conversation is really about you guys. I want to get the story down. You guys came out of stealth, multi-cloud, SuperCloud is right in your wheelhouse. You've got to love the SuperCloud. Yeah, as I walked in, I saw SuperCloud all over the place and it just gives you a jolt of energy. Well, you guys are in the middle of the action. You're a company, and I want you to explain this in a minute, is in the middle of this next wave, because we had this structural change, I called Cloud One, Amazon use case, developers don't need to build a data center, all that goodness happens, higher level services abstractions are happening, and then Azure comes in more paths and then more install base, now they're nipping at the heels, so full-on, hyperscale, capex growth, great for everybody. Now comes new use cases. Correct. Cloud to cloud, app to app, data, you see Databricks, Snowflake, MongoDB, all doing extremely well, by leveraging the capex, now it's an ops problem. Exactly. Now ops and security. Yeah, it's speed of applications. How are you guys vectoring into that, explain what you guys do. Absolutely. Let me take kind of the customer pain point first, because it's always easier to explain that, and then we explain kind of what is it that we do. So it's no surprise, applications are moving into the cloud, or people are building apps in the cloud in masses. The infrastructure that's sitting in front of these applications, cutting across networking, security, the operational piece associated with that, does not move at the same speed. The apps sometimes get upgraded two, three times a day, the infrastructure gets touched one time a week, at best. And so increasingly the cloud platform teams, the developers are all like, hey, why, why, why? And so I thought things were supposed to move fast in the cloud, it doesn't. Now, if you double click on that, really it's two reasons. One, those that won't have consistency across the stack that they had in the data center, they bring a virtual form factor of that stack and line it up in the cloud. And before you know it, it's cost, it's operational complexity, there are multiple single panes of glass, all the fun stuff associated with that. Jack, real quick, it is fast in the cloud if you're a developer. Exactly. So it's kind of like, hurry up, slow down, wait. Correct. So the developers are shifting left, open source is booming, things are fine for developers right now. If you're a developer, things are good. But the guy's sitting in front of that. It's the hops guys, they got to deal with things like lock in, choice, security. Exactly. And those are really the key challenges, right? And so we've seen some that actually said, hey, you know what, I don't want to bring my data center stack into the cloud. So they go cloud native, right? And they start to build it up. 14 services from AWS, 15 from Azure, 14 more from GCP. Even if you're in a single cloud, let's just keep it to that, right? I need to know how to put this together, right? Because all these services are great, but how do I put this together? And enterprises don't have just one application. They have hundreds of these applications. So the requirements of a database is different than a service mesh, different than a serverless application, different than a web application. And before you know it, like how do I put all these things together, right? And so we looked at this problem and we said, okay, we subscribe to the fact that cloud native is the way to go, right? But something needs to be there to make this simple, right? And so first thing that we did was bring all these cloud native services together. We help orchestrate that. And we said, okay, you know what, Mr. Nanaprise, we got you covered, right? But now it doesn't stop there. That's like 10% of the value, right? What do you really need? What do you care about now? Because the apps are in the center of the universe and who's talking to it? It's another application sitting either in the same cloud or in a different cloud or it's a user connecting into the application. So now let's talk about what are the networking security operational requirements required for these apps to talk to each other or the user to talk to the application? That's really what we focus on. Yeah, and I think one of the things that's driving this opportunity for you and I want to get your reaction to this is that the modern application movement is all about cloud native. Okay, developers are doing great. Now the kind of the kumbaya moment in enterprise is that the security team and ops teams have to play ball on the friends with the developer and vice versa. So harmony is coming there. So the little harmony and to the businesses driving it. IT is transforming over. It's why the super cloud idea is interesting to Dave and I because when we coined that term it was multi-cloud was not a market. Everyone has multiple clouds because they have Microsoft Office that's now in the cloud. They got SQL server. I mean, it's really kind of like kind of Microsoft. Exactly. So you have a cloud. But do you have ops teams building on the stack? What about the network layer? Exactly. This is where the rubber meets the road. Absolutely, yeah. And if you look at the challenges there just if you just focus on just networking and security. When applications need to talk to each other you have a whole bunch of underlying services but somebody needs to put this thing on top because what you care about is can these group of users talk to these class of applications or these group of applications can they talk to each other, right? This whole notion of connectivity is just table stakes. Everybody just assumes it's there, right? It's the next layer up, right? Which is how do I bring zero trust access? How do I get the observability? And observability is not just a bunch of pretty donut charts. I have had people look to me in my previous company the startup and said, okay, give me all these nice donut charts but so what? What do you want me to do with this, right? And so you have to translate that into real actions, right? How do I bring zero trust capabilities? How do I bring the observability capabilities? How do I understand cloud networking and bring those things together so that you can help solve for the problem? It's interesting, one of the questions I had here to ask you is what does it mean to be cloud native and why now? And you brought up zero trust, trust and verify. These are security concepts. But if you look at what's going on at KubeCon and CNCF and Linux Foundation, software supply chains, a huge issue where trust is the issue. They want trust there. So you get zero trust here. What is it, zero trust or trust? I mean, what's there? Is one hardware-based, perimeter networking, that kind of perimeter's dead? The whole concept of zero trust is like, don't trust what is underlying. Just trust what you're talking to, right? So if you and I talking to each other, John, you need to trust me. I need to trust you and we are able to have the conversation. You've been verified. Exactly. But in the application world, if you talk about two apps that are talking to each other, let's say there is a web application in one AWS region talking to a database in a different region, right? Now, do you want to make sure that you are able to build that trust all the way from the application to the application? Or do you want to move the trust boundary to the two entities that are talking to each other so that irrespective of what they go on underneath the covers, you can be always sure that these two things are trusted, right? So, Ramesh, I was on LinkedIn yesterday. I wrote a comment, Dave Vellante wrote a post on super clouds, we're talking about it. And I wrote, cloud as a commodity question, not much of the stuff that we're going to talk about. And Keith Townsend jumped on that and got on Twitter, put a poll, is cloud commodity sourced me? I'm like, so it started a big thread. And it was interesting. The reaction was interesting. And my point was to be provocative on cloud isn't commodity, but this commodity elements. Correct. DC2 and S3, you can look at that and say, that's commodity IaaS, but Amazon web services has done an amazing job for higher level services. Correct, absolutely. Okay, so how does that translate into the use cases that you see that you guys are going after and solving? Because it's the same kind of concept. IaaS and SaaS have to work together to solve problems. Absolutely. But that's in an integrated environment, say, in a native cloud as a commodity. Exactly. How does that work across clouds? You bring up a great point, John. So, let's take the simple use case, right? Let's keep the user to think to the side. Let's just say two apps need to talk to each other, right? There are multiple ways in which you can solve this problem, right? You can build highways. This is what our customers call. I'll build highways. I don't care what goes on those highways. I'll just build highways. You bring any kind of application workload on it. I'll just make sure that the highways are good, right? That's kind of the lowest common denominator. It's the path to lease assistance. You can get stuff done, but it's not going to move the needle, right? Then you have really modern kind of service networking where, okay, I'm looking at every single HTTP, API, endpoint, whatnot, and I'm optimizing for that, right? Great if you know what you're doing, but if you have thousands of these applications, it's not going to be really feasible to do that. And so what we have seen customers do is actually employ a mixed approach, right? Where they say, I'm going to build these highways. The highways are going to make sure that I can go from one place to another and maybe within regions, across clouds, whatnot. But then I have specific requirements that my business needs that actually needs tweaking, right? And so I'm going to tweak those things. That's why what we call as like full-stack transit is exactly that, right? Which is, I'll build you the guts of it so that, hey, you know what? If somebody screams at you, hey, why is my application not accessible? You don't have that problem. It is always accessible, right? But then the requirements for performance, the requirements for zero transit, requirements for segmentation and all of that are things that you're going to be on top of. That's a hard problem to solve. And you guys are solving that? Absolutely, exactly. All right, so let me throw this at you. So, okay, I got that. And by the way, that's exactly what we're seeing. Dave and I were also talking and debating about multi-cloud as what it is. Now, the Nirvana definition was, I have a workload that's going to work the same and just magically just shift to Azure. Like, because there's better resources. There's no magic there. So, but this brings up the point of operations. Now, Databricks and Snowflake, they're building their software to run on multi-cloud seamlessly. Now, they can do that. That's their application. What is the multi-cloud use case? To be, that's the super cloud use case in your mind because right now it's not yet there. What is the super cloud use case that's going to allow this seamless management or workloads? What's your view? So, if you take enterprise, right? Large enterprise in particular, they invariably have some workloads that are on, let's say, if the primary cloud is AWS, there are some workloads in Azure, maybe they've acquired a new company, maybe a startup that uses GCP, whatnot. So, they have sprinkles of workloads in other clouds as well, right? So, that's- That's the brief kind of thing. That's the, yeah, exactly. That's not what causes anybody to wake up in the morning and say, I need to have a super cloud strategy. That's not the thing, right? But, now increasingly you're saying, pick the right cloud for the appropriate workload, right? That is going to change quite a bit because I have my infrastructure-heavy workloads in AWS. I have quite a bit of analytics and mining type of applications that are better on GCP. I have all of my packaged applications work well on Azure, right? How do I make sure all of this? And it's not just apps of this kind. Even simple things like VDI. VDI always used to be, I have this instance I run up and whatnot. Now, every single cloud provider is giving you their own flavor of virtual desktop. And so how do you make sure all of these things work together, right? And once again, what we have seen customers do is, hey, they settle on one cloud as their primary, but then you always have sprinkles of workloads across all other clouds. Now, you could also go down the path and you're increasingly seeing this. You could go down the path of, hey, I'm using cloud as backbone, right? Cloud providers have invested massive amounts of dollars to make sure that the infrastructure reaches there. Literally almost to the extent that every user in a metro city is 10 milliseconds from the public cloud, right? And so they've allowed for that. Now, you can actually use cloud backbones to get the availability, reliability and whatnot. So these are some new use cases that we have seen actually brew up in customers. I was just doing an interview and the topic was the innovators dilemma. And one of the panelists said, it's not the innovators dilemma, it's the integration, the integrator dilemma. Because if you have commodity and you have choices on, say, backbones and whatnot for transit, the integration is the key glue now. What's your reaction to that? Absolutely, no, and we have seen, we used to spend quite a bit of time in kind of what is the day zero problem, right? How do I put this together? Conversations are moved past that because there are multiple ways in which you can do that right now, right? The conversations are moved into kind of, this is more of an operational problem for me. It's not just operations in the, in form of, hey, I need to find out where the problem is, troubleshoot and so forth. But I need to make like really high quality decisions. And those decisions are going to be guided by data. We have enterprise customers that acquire new companies or they have a new site that they open up. Let's say it's a, it's a New York-based company, yeah, exactly, it's a New York-based company and they acquire a team out in Sydney, Australia, right? Does your cloud tell you today that you have new users or new applications that are in Sydney and naturally just extend? No, it doesn't. Somebody has to look at the macro problem, look at where are all my workloads, do a bunch of engineering in order to make that work, right? We took it upon ourselves to say, hey, you know what, 24 hours later, you're going to get a recommendation in the platform that says, okay, you have new set of applications or new set of users coming from Sydney, Australia. What have you done about it? Click a button and then you expand on it. It's kind of like how IT became the easy way to run the data center. Exactly. Before IT, you had to be a PhD and roll out. I mean, you know how it was, right? So, so you're kind of taking that same approach. Okay, well, Ramesh, great stuff. I want to do a follow-up certainly with you on this, because you're in the middle of where this wave is going, the structural change, and certainly can participate in that super cloud conversation. But for your company, what's going on there? Give us an update, customer activity, what's it like? You guys came out of stealth. What's been the reaction? Give a plug for the company, you're going to hire? Take a minute to plug in. Oh, wonderful, thank you. So, primary use cases are really around cloud networking, right? How do you go within the cloud and across clouds and to the cloud, right? So those are really the key use cases. We go after large enterprises predominantly, but any kind of mid-enterprise that is extremely cloud-oriented has a lot of workloads in the cloud, equally applicable there. So we have about 60 of the Fortune 500s that we're engaged in right now, right? Many of them are paying customers as well, and we... How are they buying service? Is it the cloud service? Yeah, so we provide software, we provide software that actually sits inside the customer's own administrative control, delivered as a service that they can use to go to cloud. On-premise hosting or in cloud? No, it's entirely in the cloud, delivered as a service, so they need to take care of the maintenance and whatnot, but they just consume it from the cloud directly, right? And so where we are right now is essentially have a bunch of repeatable use cases that many customers are employing us for. So again, building highways, many different ways to build highways. At the same time, take care of the segmentation, micro-segmentation requirements, and then importantly, this whole net devops, right? This whole net devops is a cultural shift that we have seen. So if you are a network engineer, net devops seems like it's a foreign term, right? But if you are an operational engineer, the net devops, you know exactly what to do. So bringing all those principles together, making sure that the networking teams are empowered to essentially embrace the cloud the right way, right? The single biggest thing that we have done, I would say done well, is we've built very well on top of the cloud provider. So we don't go against cloud-native services. They've done that really, really well, right? It makes no sense to go say, I have a better transit gateway than you know. Hands down, an AWS transit gateway, or an Azure Veevan, and whatnot are some of the best services that they have provided. But what does that mean? How do you make sure that- How do you go software into it? Exactly, right? And so how can you build a layer of software on top so that when you attach that into the applications, right? That you can actually get the experience required, you can get the security requirements, and so forth. So that's kind of where we are, right? We're also humbled by essentially some of the mega partners that have taken a bet on us, sometimes to the extent that we're a 70% company, and some of the partners that we're talking to actually are quite humbling, right? And so- They have a lot more resources. Exactly, yeah. And how many rounds of financing have you done? So we have done two rounds of financing. We've raised about 55 million in capital. Again, really great set of investors backing us up, and strong sense of conviction on kind of where we are going. Do you think you're early or not? Because that's always probably the biggest scary- It depends. Does that keep you up at night? So, yeah, exactly. I go through these phases internally in my head, right? The vision's right on the money, no doubt about it. So when you win an opportunity, and we have like a few dozen of these, right? When you win an opportunity, you're like, yes, absolutely, this is where it is, right? And you go for a week and you don't win something, you're like, hey, man, why are we not seeing this, and so you go through these cycles. But I'll tell you with conviction, the fact that customers are moving workloads into the public cloud, not in dozens, but in like the hundreds and the thousands, is essentially means that they need something like this, right? And the cloud native wave is driving big time change. Exactly, right? And so when the customer has a conversation with AWS Azure GCP, and they are privy to all these services, and we go in after that and talk about how do I put this together and help you focus on your outcomes that materially moves the most. It's a day zero opportunity. And you have head room beyond that. Exactly, so that's the positive side of it, right? And enterprises certainly are sometimes a little cautious about when they adopt new technologies and so forth, so it's a natural cycle. Fortunately, again, we are humbled by the fact that we have a few dozen of the pioneering customers that are using our platform that proves, that gives you the legitimacy for a startup, right? You got great pedigree on clients. Real quick, final question, 30 seconds. What's the pain point for people watching? When do they call you in? What's their environment look like? What are some of the things that give the signals that you guys got to get the call? If you have more than, let's say five or 10 VPCs in the cloud and you have not invested in building a networking platform that gives you the connectivity, the security, the observability and the performance requirements, you absolutely have to do that, right? Because we have seen many, many customers. It goes from five to 50 to 100 within a week and so you don't want to be caught, essentially, in the midst of that. So that's many problems. One more final, final question. Since you're a senior entrepreneur, you've been there, done that, previous times. What is this? We've all got scar tissue. We've been doing the queue for 12 years. We've seen a lot of stuff. What's the difference now in this market that's different than before? What's exciting you? What's the big change? What's, in your opinion, happening now that's really important that people should pay attention to? A lot of it is driven by the focus on the cloud itself, right? That's driving a sense of speed like never before because in the infrastructure world, yeah, you do it today, yeah, you do it six months from now. You had some leeway. Here, networking security teams are being yelled at almost every single day by the cloud guys saying, you know, guys are not moving fast enough, fast enough, fast enough. So that thing is different. So it helps kind of shrink the sales cycle for us. The second big one is nobody knows essentially the new set of use cases that are coming about. We are seeing patterns emerge in terms of new use cases almost every single day. Some days it's like completely on the other end of the spectrum, like I'm only serverless and service mesh. On the other end, it's like I have a package application I'm moving into the cloud, right? And so we're learning a lot as well. Also- And great time for super clouds. Exactly, that's right. Do the cloud really well, make it super, bring it to other use cases, stitch it all together, make it easy to use. Reduce the complexity, this is just evolution. Yeah, and our goal is essentially, enterprise customers should not be focused so much on building infrastructure this way, right? They should focus on users' application services. Let vendors like us like worry about the nitty-gritty underneath the course. Ramesh, thank you for this conversation. Absolutely. This great huge conversation. In the middle of all the action, super cloud, multi-cloud, the future is going to be very much cloud-based, IaaS, connecting environments. This is the cloud 2.0 super clouds and this is what people are going to be working on. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.