 Hey everyone, welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and John Furrier, live on the floor at VMware Explorer 2022. This is our third day of wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. But you know that, because you've been here the whole time. We're pleased to welcome a first-timer to theCUBE. Saeed Wiesal is here, the CEO and founder of Zedida. Saeed, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Talk to me a little bit about what Zedida does in Edge. Sure. So Zedida is a company purely focused on edge computing. I started a company about five years ago after Edge. So what we do is we help customers with orchestrating their edge, helping them to deploy, secure, monitor applications, services, and devices at the edge. What's the business model for you guys? We're going to get that out there. So the targeting the edge, which is everything from telco to whatever, what's the business model? Yeah, maybe before we go there, let's talk about Edge itself, because Edge is complex. There's a lot of companies that call them an edge company nowadays. If you're not a cloud company, you're probably an edge company at this point. So we are focusing something called the distributed edge. So distributed edge is when you start putting tiny servers in environments like factory floors, solar farms, wind farms, even inside machines or well sites, et cetera. And a question that people always ask me, like why would you want to put servers there? Aren't servers supposed to be in a data center, in the cloud? And the answer to the question actually is data gravity. So traditionally wherever the data gets created is where your applications live. But as we're connecting more and more devices to the edge of the network, basically customers now are required to push the applications to the edge because they can't get all that data to the cloud. So basically that's what we focus on. People call it the far edge as well. You know, that's the term we've heard in the past as well. And what we do and our business model is provide customers a software as a service solution where they can basically deploy and monitor these applications at these highly distributed environments. Data gravity comes up a lot. I want you to take a minute to explain the definition as it is today. And people have used that term, you know, with big data going back to 2010 Lisa when we covering the Hadoop wave which ended up becoming, you know, data bricks and snowflake now, but a lot's changed. But what does it mean to be data gravity? It means that staying local is just what's specifically described and defined what data gravity is? Yeah, so for me data gravity is where you need to process the data, right? It's where the data usually gets created. So if you think about a web app where does the data get created? Well, people click on buttons, they interface with it, they upload content to it, et cetera. So that's where the data gravity therefore is. Therefore, that's where you do your analytics, that's where you do your visualization, processing, machine learning and all of those pieces. So it's really where that data gets created is where the data gravity in my view sits. What are some of the challenges and opportunities that data gravity presents to customers? Well, obviously I think every enterprise in this day is trying to take data and make it a competitive advantage, like faster decisions, better decisions, out-compete your competition by being first with a product or being first with a product with a feature, et cetera. So I think if you're not a data-driven enterprise by now, then I think the future may be a little bit bleak. Okay, so you're targeting the market distributed edge, business model SaaS, technology, secret sauce, what's that piece? Yeah, so that's where the interesting part comes in. I think if you kind of look at the data center in the cloud, we've had these virtualization and orchestration stacks create. I mean, we're here in VMware Explorer as an example. But basically what we saw is that the edge is so unique and so different than what we've seen in the data center in the cloud that we needed to build a complete brand new purpose-built orchestration and virtualization solution. So that's really what we set off to do. So there's two components that we do. One is we built a purpose-built edge operating system for the edge and we actually open-sourced it. And the reason we open-sourced it, we said, hey, edge is so diverse, depending on the environment you're running in a machine or in a vehicle or in a well site, you have different hardware, different networks, different applications you need to enable. And we will never be able to support all of them ourselves. As a matter of fact, we actually think there's a need for standardization at the edge. We need to kind of cut through all these silos that have been created, traditionally from the embedded way of thinking. So we created basically an open-source project in the Linux Foundation in LF Edge, which is a sister organization to the CNCF. It's called Project EVE. And the idea is to create the Android of the edge. Basically what Android became for mobile computing, a common operating system. So you build one app, you can run on any phone in the world that runs Android, build an architecture, you build one app, you can run on any EVE powered node in the world. So distributed edge, you get the tech here, got the secret sauce, we'll get more into that in a second, but I want to just tie one quick point and get your clarification on. Edge is becoming much more about the physical side too. I mean, so when you talk about Android, you're making the reference of a phone, I get that metaphor to what you're doing at the edge. Wind farms, factories, alarms, light bulbs, buildings. I mean, that's what you're talking about, right? We're getting down to that. Very, very physical, dark, distributed locations. We're going to come back to the CISO CSO. We're going to come back to the CISO versus CSO question because is the CISO or CIO or who runs that? Anyway, so that's true. What's the important thing that's happening? Because that sounds like old OT world, like operating technology is not IT, information technology. Is there a complete reset of those worlds or is it a collision? It's a great question. So what we're seeing is, first of all, there is already compute in these environments. Industrial PCs have existed well beyond an industrial automation that has been done for many, many decades. The point is that data has been collected but never connected, right? So with edge computing, we're connecting now this data from an industrial machine and industrial process to the cloud, right? And one of the problems is, it's data that comes of that industrial process too much to upload to the cloud. So I got to analyze it locally. So one of the things we saw early on in edge is there's a lot of brownfield. Most of our customers today actually have applications running on Windows and they would love to make in Linux and containers and Kubernetes but it took them 20, 30 years to build those apps and they basically are the money makers of the enterprise. So they are in a transitionary phase and they need something that can take them from the brown to the green field. So to your point, you got to support all of these types of unique brownfield applications. So you're saying, I don't really care if this is a customer, how you get the data. You want to start new, start fresh. That's cool, but if you want to take your old data, you don't take that. You don't want to rebuild the whole machine, you just want to, yeah. And they can lifecycle it out on their own timetable. Yeah, so we had to learn, first of all, how do we take and lift and shift a Windows-based industrial application and make it run at the edge on our architecture, right? And then the second step is, how do we then siphon off that data that this application is generating and do we fuse it with cloud-native capabilities? Cloud-native capabilities. So your SaaS is your open source that you're giving to the Linux Foundation as part of that EVE project. That's available to everybody. They can look at the code, which is great, by the way. People want to do that. Your self-service, I'm assuming, is your hardened version with support? Well, we took what the open source companies did. Open source companies traditionally have sold basically a support model around the open source. We actually saw another problem customers has, like, okay, now I have this node running and I can do this data analytics, but what if I have 15 or 20,000 of these nodes? And they're all around the world in remote locations on satellite links or wireless connectivity. How do I orchestrate them? So we actually build an orchestration service for these nodes running this open source software. So that's a key secret sauce right there. That is the business model, that taking open source and allowing it to run. And you're taking your own code that you have, okay, got it, cool. And then the customer's customer piece is key, so that's the final piece, I guess. Who's using it? Yeah, well, and... And one of the business outcomes that they're achieving. Oh yeah, well, so maybe start with that first. I mean, we are deployed in customers in all in gas. For instance, helping them with the transition to renewable energy, right? So basically we have customers, for instance, that deploy us in how they drill wells is one use case and doing that better, faster and cheaper and less environmental impacting. But we also have customers that use us in wind farms. We have, and solar farms, one of the leading solar energy companies in the world is using us to bring down the cost of power by predicting failures ahead of time, for instance. And when you're working with customers to create the optimal solution of the distributed edge, who are you working with within an organization? Yeah, it's usually a mix of OT and IT people. So the OT people, typically they're- Arm wrestling? Or are they getting along? Actually, I think they're getting along very well. Okay, good. But they also agree that they have to have swim lanes. The IT folks, obviously their job is to make sure everything is secure, everything is according to the compliance, it's the best TCO on the infrastructure, those type of things. The OT guy, they care about the application, they care about the services, they care about the company business. So how can you create a model that too can coexist? And if you do that, they get along really well. You know, we had an event called SuperCloud and it's at the urlsupercloud.worlds, if you're watching, check it out. It's our version of what we think multi-cloud will merge into, including Edge, because Edge is just another node in the network, as far as we're concerned. Hybrid is the steady state. That's distributed computing. On-premise, private cloud, a public cloud. We know what that looks like. People love that, things are happening. Edge is like a whole other new area that's blossoming and with disruption. There's a lot of existing markets and incumbents that need to be disrupted and there's also new capabilities that are coming that we don't yet see. So we're seeing it with the SuperCloud idea that these new kinds of clouds are emerging. Like, there could be an Edge cloud. Why is there a security cloud? Where is the financial services cloud? Where is the insurance cloud? Where is the... So these become SuperClouds where the capex can be done by the Amazon, whatnot. You've been following that. Is Edge cloudable? Can you make that a cloud? Is that what you guys are trying to do? And if so, what does that look like? Because we're adding a new track to our SuperCloud site, I mentioned, on Edge, specifically. We're trying to figure out, and if you share your opinion, it'd be great, can Edge clouds exist and be run by companies? Or is that what you guys are trying to do? I mean, I think first of all, there is no Edge without cloud. So when I meet any customer who says, hey, we're going to do Edge without cloud, and I'm like, you're probably not going to do Edge. And the way we built the company and the way we think about it, it's about extending the cloud experience all the way into these embedded, distributed environments. That's really, I think, what customers are looking for because customers love the simplicity of the cloud, they love the ease of use, the agility, all of that greatness. And they're like, hey, I want that, but not in an Amazon or Azure data center. I want that in my factories. I want that in my well sites, in my vehicles. And that's really what I think the future is going to be. And how long have you guys been around? What's the history of the company? Because you might actually be that cloud. And are you on AWS or Azure? You're building your own? What's the... Yeah, so... Through the architecture, because you're a modern startup. I mean, and the Edge is you're going after, you got to be geared up. So the company's about five years old. So when we started focusing on Edge, people didn't necessarily talk as much about Edge. We kind of identified the... It's like, how do you find a black hole in the universe? Because you can't see it, but you sort of look around. That's where you read it. And so we were looking at it like, there's something going to happen here at the edge of the network because everybody's saying, we're connecting these vice upload the data to the cloud, it's never going to work. My background is networking. I worked at companies like Juniper and Ericson, ran several products there. So I know how the internet networks are built. And it was very evident to me it's not going to be possible. My co-founders come from open source, companies like Pivotal and Cloudera. My other co-founder was an engineer at Sun Microsystems, built the first network stack in the Solaris operating system. So a lot of experience that kind of came together to build this. Cloudera, it's a big day. That's where theCUBE started, by the way. Yeah, so we have, I think a good view on the stack, the cloud stack, and therefore a good view of what the ad stack needs to look like. And then I think, to answer your other question, our orchestration service runs in the cloud. We have, we actually are a multi-cloud company, so we offer customers choice where they want to orchestrate the nodes from. The nodes themselves never sit in a data center. They're always highly embedded. We have customers are putting machines or inside these factory lines, et cetera. Are you running your SaaS on Amazon web services or which cloud are you using? We are running it on several clouds, including Amazon. All of them, pretty much the cloud. Yeah, so some customers say, I'd prefer to be on the Amazon set. Another customer say, I want to be on Azure set. And you leverage their CapEx on that side. On behalf of the cloud. Yes, yes. But the majority of the customer data and all the data that the nodes process, the customer send it to their clouds. They don't send it to us. We don't get a copy of the camera feed analytics or the machine data. We actually decouple those still. So basically the IoT and production data go straight to the customers cloud and that's where they love us. And they choose that. They can control their own desk. They control that, yeah. So we separate the management plane from the data plane at the edge. That's a good call, actually. Yeah, that was another very important part of the architecture early on. Customers don't want us to see their highly confidential production data. And we don't want to have it either, so. We had a great chat with Chris Wolf who works with Kit Colbert about control plane data plane. So that seems to be the trend. Data plane customers want full management of that. Control plane maybe have multiple versions. So our cloud consumption, what the data we store is about the apps, their behavior, the networking, the security, all of that, that's what we store in our cloud. And then customers can access that and monitor that the actual machine data goes somewhere else. Here we are at VMware Explorer. Talk a little bit about the VMware relationship. You just had some big news the other day. Yeah, so two days ago, we actually made a big announcement with VMware. So we signed an OEM agreement with VMware. So we're part now of VMware's edge compute stack. So VMware customers, as they start using the recently announced edge compute stack 2.0 that was announced here. Basically, it's powered by Zdita technology. So it's a really exciting partnership. As part of this, we're actually building integrations with the VMware organization products. So that's basically now extending to more, you know, other groups inside VMware. So what's the value for VMware customers? Yeah, so I think the benefit of VMware customers, I think VMware customers want that multi-cloud, multi-edge orchestration experience. So they want to be able to deploy workloads in the cloud. They want to deploy the workloads in the data center and of course also at the edge. So by us integrating in that vision, customers now can have that unified experience from cloud to edge and anywhere in between. What's the big vision that you see happening at the edge? I mean, a lot of the VMware customers here, they're classic IT that have evolved into ops, now dev ops, now you got second data ops coming. The edge is going to right around the corner for them. They're dealing with it now. Probably just kicking the tires, telling the water kind of thing. Where do you see the vision going? Because now, no matter what happens with VMware with Broadcom, this wave is still here. You got AWS, got Azure, got Google Cloud, got Oracle, Alibaba internationally and the cloud native surges here. How do you see that disrupting the existing edge? Because let's face it, some of those OT players are a little bit old and antiquated, a little bit outdated. I mean, I was talking to a telco person and they puked at the word open source. I mean, these people are so dogmatic on their architecture, they're going to get disrupted, it's a matter of time. Where's the new guard come in? How do you see the configuration changing in the landscape? Because some people will cross over to the right side of the street here, some won't. Open source will dominate, cloud native will be key. Yeah, well, I mean, I think again, let's take an example of a vertical that's heavily disrupted now as the automotive market, right? So look at Tesla and look at all these companies. They built software first cars, right? Software first delivery of capabilities and everything else. And the incumbents, they have only two options, right? Either they try to respond by adopting open source, cloud native technologies like these new entrants have done and really compete with them at that level or they can become commodity, right? So, and I think that's the customers we're seeing. The smart customers go like, we need to compete with these guys, we need to figure out how to take this technology in and they need partners like us and partners like VMware for that. Do you see customers becoming cloud, super cloud players, if they continue to keep leveraging the capex of the clouds and focus all their operational capital on top line revenue generating activities? Yeah, so I think the capex model of the cloud is a great benefit of the cloud, but I think that is not what's the longer term future of the cloud. I think the cloud operating model is the future, like the agility, the ability, imagine embedded software that, you know, you do an over the air update to fix a bug, but it's very hard to make an embedded device smarter over time. And then imagine if you can run cloud native software and you can roll out every two weeks new features and make that thing smarter, intelligent and continue to help you in your business. That I think is what cloud did, ultimately. And I think that is what really these customers are going to need at their pitch. Well, we talked about the value within it for customers with the VMware partnership, but what are some of your expectations? Obviously, this is a pretty powerful partnership for you guys. What are some of the things that you're expecting that this is going to drive? Yeah, so we have always operated at the more OT layer, distributed organizations in retail, energy, industrial automotive, those are the verticals. So we've developed, I think, a lot of experience there. What we're seeing as we talk to those customers is they obviously have IT organizations. And the IT organizations, hey, it's great you're looking at computing, but how do we tie this into the existing investments we made with VMware and how do we kind of take that also to this new environment? And I think that's the expectation I have is that I think we will be able to talk to the IT folks and say, hey, you can actually talk to the OT person and both of you will speak the same language. You probably will both standardize on the same architecture and you'll be together deploying and enabling this new agility at the edge. What are some of the next things coming up for Zedita and the team? Well, so we've had a really amazing few quarters. We just closed a series B round. So we've raised, the company's raised over 55 million so far. We're growing very rapidly. We opened up new international offices. I would say the early customers that we started deploying with a while back, they're now going into mass scale deployment. So we have now deployments underway in the 10 to 100 thousands of nodes at certain customers and in amazing environments. And so for us, it's continuing to prove the product in more and more verticals. Our product is really built for the largest of the largest. So for the size of the company we are, we have a high concentration of Fortune 500, Global 500 customers. And some of them even invested in our rounds recently. So we've been really honored with that support. Well, congratulations. Good stuff, Edge is popping. All right, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us, talking about what you're doing in Distributed Edge, what's in it for customers, the VMware partnership. And by the way, congratulations on that too. Thank you, thank you so much. Nice to meet you. All right, nice to meet you as well. For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 22. John and I will be right back with our next guest.