 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and we're going to be talking about the networking giant. So joining me is a first time on the program. Some of his team members have been on and theCUBE covered the launch of Pensando. So Vipin Jain, he's the CTO and co-founder of Pensando. Vipin, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu, it was very nice talking to you. All right, so big theme we've been talking about for a number of years now is multi-cloud and I go back and think about the concepts of cloud and even I've been around long enough, you think about the extra. And one of the challenges you look at is, well, security is always a challenge. The other thing is network. Bandwidth is not infinite. The speed of light has not been solved. Help us understand, because first I guess, give our audience a little bit of your background. As I said, anybody in the networking world knows the LSTeam. So tell us, have you been on the journey with them for all of that or what brought you to Pensando? Yes, yes. I've been in the journey with the team since 2006. So it's pretty long, I would say 14 years now. And it's been tremendous. At heart, I'm an engineer who takes pride in building things and taking upon challenges. And I've worked in multiple startups before the spin-in at Nuova, three more startups before that. And of course, they were not spin-ins, some more independent startups. And all through the course, I have gained appreciation for starting all the way from Silicon to build a distributed systems and a UI all the way up to the fully consumable system. So I totally understand the angle that need to look at the system in a holistic manner, having contributed to Cisco UCS and Nexus products. And before joining Pensando, I was contributing with my own open source container networking project, which is quite exciting to see how to evangelize my own code, and that was fun. And that's where I come from. But I'm a software engineer to start off with, started contributing to A6, then started going into the application world with containers, trying to build container networking. We did a server product with Cisco UCS, and pretty much all over the stack with respect to orchestration. So that's my background, but it's been exciting to consider what's next for me. And I was largely trying to see. Yeah, so Vipin, actually, if I could jump in there, right, I think back to UCS, it was some of those waves coming together. Virtualization had been around for quite a number of years at that point, but how do you optimize an experience? How do you transform infrastructure to live for those environments? So UCS, remember people get back saying, is Cisco getting into servers? It's like, well, they are and they aren't, because they're changing that compute model, really caught that, Cisco led that wave of the purged infrastructure. So many things you talked about that we'll get to later in the interview, open source organization. When I look out today, infrastructure has changed a lot and cloud obviously has a huge impact, but also the applications are changing. So help us understand kind of the waves that are riding together and what was it that Pensando decided to build in order to meet what the customers of today require? So I think, going back to the UCS comment that you had, we started off thinking, for example, what are the challenges with respect to scaling out the deployment of servers? And we quickly realized that manageability is number one challenge. And of course, when we speak about manageability, it comes down to the underpinnings of what you're building. Are you able to see the entire infrastructure together or are you still seeing those distributed pieces? And that's when I think UCS was born to say that, look, we need to bring everything together that could be consumed in a holistic manner. And for that, you have to have all those components that are somewhat independent to be consumed as a unified thing. And which is why I think it was called unified computing system UCS. And then I think, you know, Pensando is a journey that takes it to probably not just that concept, but in general, the challenges and the disruptions that we were seeing to the next level. So I mean, just to summarize, I would say we started off with looking at all the disruptions that are happening in the industry and there are many of those. I'm happy to talk about which ones we looked at. And then we looked at what are the consumption models that people are largely, you know, finding it very appealing these days because the days in which you're going to write a script to do something is still pretty old. You want to be able to consume in a mostly software-consumable way. How can we build, you know, how can we build systems that are programmable in the field, those kind of things? So consumption model, programmability, software is the primary factor there and highly appealing to APIs and all that. For the last one, you know, not least we also, we also wanted to be really ahead in the game, competitiveness wise. So those were like the three overarching set of things that we started to think about, like what disruptions are we going to solve and how the consumption model needs to be for the future of infrastructure and how can we get that leap which is far ahead and better than anything that exists out there. So that's where we started to look at, let's build something which is bigger, be steer and something, even if we have the possibility of failing it, let's still go ahead and attempt doing that kind of thing. Yeah, and absolutely, there's been so much discussion over the last decade or so about how software is eating the world and what's going on there. Yet, you know, your teammates, it's a lot of times it's been the tip set. There have been some huge ripples in the industry, you know, major acquisitions by some of the big disruptive companies out there. Apple made a silicon acquisition, you know, everybody paid attention, that will happen, we'll go back. You can't talk about disruption today without talking about Amazon. And of course, when Amazon bought in a Pernel Labs, you know, those of us looking at the enterprise and the cloud space was like, oh, keep an eye on this. And absolutely, it's been something over the last year or so where we've seen Amazon roll things out. And of course, it's the critical component of what Amazon's doing from outposts. So with that as the stage there, you talk about wanting to be industry leading, you know, Amazon, you know, is really kind of setting the bar that everyone didn't measure it against. And when I look at the solution to Pensando, the kind of best comparable analogy that we've seen is, you know, look at what Nitrochip can do. This is an alternative for all of the other clouds and for customers that might not want to get them from Amazon. So is that a fair comparison and how would you line up what Pensando is doing compared to what Amazon has done there? So, you know, what you've seen in the Amazon announcement really is, first of all, Amazon is a great benchmark to beat. So no, make no mistakes. We are very happy to say that, you know, we are doing quite comfortably. So, but then, you know, Amazon is more than just the chips that they are building. I mean, what you consume is what they are building. And underneath the engines are really powered up, by the nicety of all those things that they have built. Having said that, you know, Pensando is consisting of both the, you know, it's recognized as a team, which has been in traditionally building chips, but yet I think, you know, the ACI or the previous venture from MPLS team was somewhat of an eye opener as to how bringing things together is much more value in OPEX and simplifying things is a huge, huge value compared to just putting performance and those things. So while this is important, there is another aspect which is important in trying to simplify things and make it consumable like software. Pensando itself has probably, you know, I would say a good chunk, like about 60% of the people in software team and not the, you know, ASIC and hardware team. This is not to say that, you know, we are under emphasizing one versus the other. But software is a bigger beast when you start trying to build all those programs on a programmable entity that you've created and start to roll out those applications. And so that's why I think the emphasis on software is there. Having said that, you know, it's a software that runs the data path pipeline. There's also a layer of software that we are building that can help manage all, you know, all the products in a more cohesive manner and unified way. Okay. That's, thank you for laying that out. You mentioned you've got some background in open source. It's definitely an area where for a number of years, you know, Amazon has not exactly, open source has not exactly been a strength for AWS. They have put a lot of effort. They've done some press of fires over the last couple of years. And how do you see open source spitting into the space? What is kind of the, you know, the philosophy of Pensando when it comes to open source and where do you see it playing in kind of the, you know, this network piece of the multicloud discussion? Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's quite relevant in a way that, you know, the cloud native movement on how applications will be built and the normalization of APIs across multiple clouds is real. We are all seeing the benefits of it. And I think that that trend will continue and which is all driven through an open source in a community that exists, you know, in the cloud native world. So personally for me, I think I learned a whole lot of things in the open source community, you know, the importance of evangelizing whatever you're working on, the reason to have convinced other people about contributing into whatever you're working on. And frankly, I also learned how difficult it is to make revenues in an open source based product and strategy. So I think, you know, those were the things that I got away from it when I was doing my own open source project for container networking. But at the same time, Pensando, you know, we have to make sure that we are 100% aligned with anything that's happening in open source, never replicate anything that might be, that might be happening in open source instead try to make people use those things in the best possible way and the most efficient way and the easiest possible way to use those. So our strategy largely is that, you know, embrace open source, which exists out there from infrastructure point of view. We are collaborating and communicating with rest of the user, hello, people, all that I think we are going to standardize most of the things we are working in P4 community. So our stance largely is that, you know, if we are building a programmable platform, then the community is what is going to drive it and we are very much working towards it, step by step, of course, trying to get to a stable state where we could not just empower people who are taking up the open source efforts which are going on, but at the same time, we can also contribute our programs into the open source community and define the right abstractions into the community. Because we came out as tell pretty recently, you will start seeing the ramp up in those activity as we go. Excellent, well, Vipin, you know, the launch of Pensando, you had a phenomenal lineup. Not only, you know, John Chambers obviously has the relationship with your team, but, you know, OEM partners of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM as well as, you know, a marquee customer of Goldman Sachs. Things look a little bit different in the first half of 2020 and then they did in the end of 2019. So, you know, curious, you know, the global pandemic, the rippling financial implications, you know, what does that mean to Pensando? How has that impacted conversations that you're having with your customers? Well, one thing I know at a broader level, let me cover where things are heading. And in that sense, you know, I see that network and the infrastructure, in general, cloud infrastructure, networking is going to become, and we have realized this during recent, you know, early 2020s that it is going to be very important to have an underpinning infrastructure that is not just working efficiently, securely, but is, you know, highly cost effective and very high performance, you know, ranging from people who are trying to connect from home to people who are trying to use video conferencing and people who are going to need more and more use cloud-based services even to order simple stuff that they've been, you know, going to source for. So network will become essential, you know, essential element for things as we go forward. And we do see that being embraced by our customers and things where we were trying to communicate that, you know, look, you will need performance and cost benefits are becoming more and more real now. It's like, oh, things that we were having things in the pipeline for us, we need to work on that now. And the reason is because the things that we anticipated, the demand increase, which was going to happen over the period of years is happening literally in a few months. And so that is what we see. We are definitely, you know, very well poised to take advantage of that demand for sure. But also the fact that, you know, it needs to be done super efficiently. And so I think we are, you know, we are quite, well, I would say, you know, situated to be able to take advantage of that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing you can't control as a company is, you know, what the global situation is when you come out of stealth and, you know, move through some of those early phases. You know, you've been part of, as you said, a number of startup, you've been part of spinning. Give us a little bit of the inside baseball of, you know, being part of Sando, you know, any stories on a little, some of the, you know, ups and downs along the kind of multi-year journey to get where you are today. Definitely, I think, you know, spinnets are good. They are largely an execution play. Relatively independent startup is going to be about, you know, how we crack the overall market product fit and execution, of course, and deal with maybe in a competition in a different way, of course, like maybe big companies are great partners. At the same time, you have to navigate that. So the overall landscape in spin-in versus not is quite different. We can be much more bolder when we are independent company in trying to disrupt almost anything because we don't have any point of view to defend, per se. We could do exactly, you know, what could be the most disruptive way to potentially benefit the users. And that's a big, you know, big change, I would say. We are being quite paranoid as well at the same time and practical to look at, you know, how we could navigate this situation in a very practical way and all that. So the journey of an independent startup is, you know, personally for me, this is my fourth independent startup and best of all independent ones, I would say largely because the kind of validation that we are getting being an independent company is so huge that I'm less concerned about those things. But more importantly, trying to ensure that, you know, we can be that disruptive that we wanted to be when we started. Excellent. Guess what, you know, one of the other things about being a startup is, you know, what, you know, adjustments you need to make along the way. So I'm curious as, you know, you've gone to some of your early customers, any feedback or adjustments in some of the use cases or, you know, things that you've learned along the way that you can share. Fundamentally at a base level, we haven't shifted from what we started off with. We look at disruptions on how consumption models are going to be changing, how speeds and feeds are going to become important because, you know, because Moore's law is going to be almost hydrating how we could, how we need to deliver things end to end, how containers are going to be a primary, you know, vehicle to deliver and build applications. So we recognize those disruptions and we haven't changed quite fundamentally from those disruptions that we wanted to go after. But at the same time, I think, you know, as we went and socialized our ideas and architecture and designs with customers, we realized that they are giving us a lot more feedback on what all we could do and starting to become like we could take on different segments of market and not just one. So why stick ourselves to the data center cloud? Why not work on something on Edge Cloud? Why not build solutions for 5G where latency and performance is super crucial? Why not take up on a, you know, branch type of use cases? So there are many things that are opening up and largely the, you know, the shift or I would say the inclination of what we should change versus not as happening with respect to where our customers are driving us. And it is very important to make sure that, you know, the users of our products are indicating how the shift happens as opposed to, you know, as opposed to anything else. So we listen to them like super, super carefully and at the same time trying to make sure that we not only meet their needs but meet their demands. So definitely, you know, from the overall landscape of things, we are starting to get a lot more than what we thought we could capture, which is good news, but at the same time we are trying to also take on one product at a time, you know. All right, so Vipin, I can't let you off the hook as the CTO without talking a little bit about the future. You know, I think earlier in my career, there was the old discussion and said, you know, we should have started it, you know, a year or two ago, but, you know, we didn't so we should start it today. With the changing pace of technology, you know, I've always said, you know, if I could, I'd rather wait a year or two because I can take the care of the next generation, I can take advantage of all these other things, but I can't wait because then I'd never ship anything, so I need to start now. Give us a little bit, you know, look out in the future. How is your architecture designed to be able to, you know, take advantage of all the wonders coming with 5G and everything there and anything that we should be looking at, you know, through the next kind of 12 to 18 months on the roadmap that you can share. Sure, yeah, Stu. So I would first of all say that we didn't build a product, actually, what we built was a platform on which we can build multiple products and we started off doing that because we thought that, you know, the platform that we're building is capable of doing a lot more things than one use case that we start off with. And so to that point, I would say that, yes, I mean, we start focusing on one product initially and the possibilities of trying to take it to multiple segments is not only very much there, but we are already, you know, having those conversations to see what is the first set of use cases that we could get into for different segments besides the data center, you know, public private data center, we are looking at Edge, we are looking at 5G, looking at events and so as well as the, you know, storage and converge infrastructure. So I would say that the fruit of all those things that we are starting to engage is going to start showing up in the next 18 months. Architecturally, I think we are very well poised to take advantage of what we have. The hardware that we are shipping is going to be 100% compatible with what programs we write on those. So there is a lot more possibility to start addressing more use cases as we go. The software architecture that we have built is very extensible as well. So we believe that, you know, we believe that we can normally satisfy those use cases but we are starting to get into those things now which will start to show up in actually useful products and usable products with customer testimonials in maybe 12 to 18 months from now. All right, well, Vipin, thank you so much. It was great to catch up with you, really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you Stu, it was good talking to you and I appreciate your time as well, thank you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage. You can go see the launch that we did with Sando in the second half of 2019 and thank you for watching The Cube.