 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's flagship production of theCUBE. We're here at CloudNativeCon and KubeCon here in Austin, Texas. Happy to welcome back to the program a many time alum, Tom Joyce, who is now the CEO of PENSA. Tom, great to see you. Great to see you too. All right, so Tom, we've had you on so many different ecosystems, so many different waves of technology. Talk about PENSA, how it fits into this whole CloudNative space that we're looking at at this show. Okay, great, yeah, like you said, you and I, we've known each other a long time. We've seen a lot of revolutions in technology, and we're in the middle of a number of them right now, and at this event you've got the CloudNative folks and you've got the folks that are tackling containers and Kubernetes orchestration, and it's interesting, this crowd here is so young and so creative, and the last few days I was at the Gartner Data Center Infrastructure show and- Not so young there? Not so young, but the same problems, right? Two different communities trying to solve the same problems, which are how do we deal with insane complexity, how do we deal with an environment that's now not just three public clouds and some hybrid clouds, but a growing list of specialty clouds, how do we manage all of that? And what PENSA is trying to do is be a part of solving that problem using intelligent automation technology, especially in managing the underlay complexity, the infrastructure layer. And it's kind of funny, we've gone through a period of time when the whole discussion has been, hey, containers are going to be at Panacea and infrastructure doesn't matter and infrastructure's going away, and I think there's some truth to how that is evolving, but it still matters, especially when you get down to having to deliver services to customers, right? Tom, first of all, I mean, Dan Cohen got on stage from the CNCF and he said, it is exciting times for boring infrastructure that may be too exciting. I love that line because every wave comes out, it was like, Tom, you remember, virtualization? Oh, I'm not going to have to worry about things like networking and storage. And it's been the biggest revolution and it is the biggest wave of infrastructure ever. Containers came out, oh, once again, we're going to abstract it away and going to take that. So what do you see is that role between the infrastructure layer and that cloud native? What are the big challenges? What are your customers seeing and how is Panacea actually helping to fix? Well, I think what we're seeing, in my opinion, is we're going from operations running everything to dev ops, to now they're starting to talk about no ops, how do we get to a point where? We might argue over the terminology because we need ops, obviously. Here's what I think. I think it's going to be less ops and more architecture. I think the challenge becomes around how do you do the design? How do you architect these systems so that they will work and not fail? And it's a lot like, you know, one metaphor I would heard somebody use that I'm going to steal is we went from in drafting, we went from drafting on a sketch pad, using CAD technology to using 3D CAD technology to automated CAD technology to now service providing it, right? And what happened? Everybody got smarter about architecture being the important part, not the actual physical plugging together. I think the role of the architect in a cloud native environment, in a Kubernetes environment, in a VM environment is frankly more important than ever. Somebody needs to know how the tools work to make sure that the service level is actually delivered. You know, I have sat in a lot of these meetings where people say, look, just put your old app in a container and you don't have to, you can run it anywhere, it'll be fine. And it's just, somebody needs to think about the architecture and we want to provide intelligent technology that helps them do that. Like AutoCAD and like some of these things that came along in that ecosystem. Yeah, one of the things I've been poking at, you know, most of this year and coming into this show especially, is people say, oh, it's too complicated. And the response really is, well, apologies. It's never going to get simple. Yeah. What we need is, I need proper tooling, things like automation to be able to help because humans alone will not be able to fix that. I really need to have the combination of the tooling, proper architecture, as you said, what are you seeing? How's that playing out in customer environments? Well, I think what we're seeing is folks figuring out that, number one, it's cross domain and cross cloud. So whatever you design needs to work in multiple different environments that are going to end up having different capabilities. And nobody really has deep expertise in everything about networking, everything about containers, everything about compute and storage, but all those things still matter. So what folks are asking for is a layer of technology that kind of arbitrates between the underlying infrastructure and the upper level applications that they're actually trying to deliver. And that's where this automation layer that's emerging comes in. And part of that's orchestration and part of it's what we do. And what we're focusing on is design, validate, complex designs, build them and deploy them using tools that help people do that a lot faster and get it right every time. So mistakes don't transpire. Yeah, Tom, I want you to help explain to our audience this whole SDN wave, kind of it played out. And sure, VMware NSX and Cisco ACI, they're doing okay, but for a lot of the industry, SDN equals equals still does nothing, yet networking, critically important, heavily involved in kind of both the container and all this cloud native discussion. Why now is, how are we fixing networking? How is it being set up for this type of environments versus what we were trying to do with SDN? Yeah, I think it's a good point. I think you've got SDN in the enterprise and you also have network functions, virtualization in the service providers and often overlooked that in the enterprise, you're going through cloud native and DevOps transitions and service providers going through a revolution of their own from becoming, going from being telcos, becoming digital service providers. And the problems are similar. The technologies are different. You know, I think what my observation is this is the hype cycle is real. You know, we've gone through five years of talking about SDN, talking about OpenStack, talking about network functions, virtualization and all of a sudden now what I've seen in this job is that there's real money getting spent and the technology's being used. NSX is being used in a whole variety of ways that people didn't anticipate. And we're seeing in every one of these service providers whether they're a classic telcos, they're wired or they're wireless or they're a cloud, they're investing in technologies to revolutionize how the core of that network works and how the edge network works. Like the first signs of that are really NSX and SD-WAN. SD-WAN has now gone mainstream because customers have seen that there's a real use case for it. That's kind of your first broadly applicable network function. And I think though in the next couple of years there will be one after another those problems are going to get knocked down. And so frankly in our business we started focusing on a lot of these enterprise problems with NSX and VSAN and Software Defined Data Center technologies around VMware. We're working on containers. But frankly the biggest area of growth for us is probably going to be these large service providers. It's like a trillion dollar business and it's going to be revolutionized over five years. So we're getting involved in a lot of these network functions virtualization conversations. And so yeah, I wouldn't say does nothing. It does a lot, but getting there it's been a really hard technology to figure out. Yeah, right. It's kind of, it took a little bit wild and mature. The other thing you've got some strong background on. Look at kind of the management monitoring in this type of environment. What's new? How does that change in the networking space when we have it's all microservices and all these various pieces there. What are you seeing there? Yeah, the short answer is I have a little bit of a rebel controversial view on that. It's not unique, but I think not- John Furrier would say we love controversy here on theCUBE. I think monitoring goes away. Monitoring the way it's been done for the last 30 years goes away. And I think when we had mainframes, we had client server, we had internet and now we have the set of technologies we're working with in virtualization. Every time that transition has happened there's been a whole bunch of monitoring companies. But I think classic monitoring is eventually going to go away. Ultimately, there is a lot of complexity and the machine needs to manage it, right? The machine's going to need to manage it. So the eyeballs watching the problem and remediating it to a greater and greater extent are going to be automation technologies versus throwing up more and more alerts in front of a human that says, I'm just going to turn them off because I don't know what this means. So I think automation technologies are going to replace classic monitoring. And again, you go around this event here, the folks that are doing cloud native, they don't want to have a bunch of monitoring alerts. They're not going to tolerate that. They just want to deliver an application service. They don't want to deal with operations. They don't want to deal with monitoring. They don't want to deal with problems. They want the problems to take care of themselves. That's hard, but I think that's coming. Tom, the end users, whether it be enterprise, service providers, there's a lot of technology out there. There's a lot of things happening out there. When do they know to call Pensa? Give us some of the big value prop that they should be knowing that say, oh, hey, yes, that makes sense to me. I need to give you guys a call. I can boil it down very simply. We deal with two kinds of people and they're really the architects. So you think about that CAD analogy. We're dealing with people that are doing complex designs in two areas. One is typically software-defined data center. So people that are bringing all of these technologies together and need to deliver a working system, maybe a really complex proof of concept or big systems where they're using VMware as an example. So we help them get that job done and do it fast. That's what the automation systems we provide do. The other is and large-scale service providers, folks that are dealing with onboarding VNFs, building complex networks, and have been grappling with that with OpenStack and some of these early technologies for a number of years, we have a revolutionary way to onboard those VNFs, validate designs, deliver designs, and do it in a way that integrates with all the open-source technologies people are using. So to be honest with you, I don't know which of those is going to be more important to us, but they're two big areas and our technology applies to both. Yeah, Tom, you've been CEO at a couple of companies now. Want to get your viewpoint, just being a CEO for a startup in today's landscape, what's it like? What advice do you give your peers? You know, when you guys are grabbing a drink at the bar, you know, what are some of the kind of biggest challenges and biggest things that occur to you? We're too tired to grab a drink at the bar. I'll tell you that I love this. It is a great mental challenge because, again, I've been like you, I've been doing this for over 30 years and it forces you to learn and learn and question what you know. And that's why I really like the opportunity to engage with the leading edge of technology. Frankly, all the folks here are young and creative and it's forced me to become better at what I do. There are a lot more unknowns than working for a big company. With a big company, a lot of what you have to do is laid out before you. In this job, I have to constantly force myself to question what I know, to listen to the customer, to learn new things. And you know, it can be tiring, but it's a good kind of tiring. All right, last question I have for you. What are you most proud of, what you've done since you've joined Pensa, and give us a little bit of outlook, 2018, for those that are watching, what should we be looking for, kind of milestones, deliverables, or other items? Yeah, you know, I think what I'm most proud of is, I mean, this sounds like a silly statement, but I'm proud of what the team has accomplished. I didn't do anything, right? I don't write the code. We have a bunch of engineers that are actually delivering the product. I think we've been really fortunate to keep all those people and get them focused on some big problems. You know, I'm proud of delivering Pencilab to market. I'm proud of the customers we've signed up since we launched that just at the beginning of October. I'm proud of what we're doing with Nokia on large scale networking in the NFB area. And frankly, I'm proud of the ability of this team to constantly engage and learn and try new things and take risks and screw up and try again. So, you know, it's that whole experience. It's good to work with good people that you like. All right, in 2018? Yeah, 2018 I think is going to be surprising for the people in terms of kind of the reemergence of OpenStack. I think OpenStack is coming back. Don't let them hear that, Tom. I know. The wolves will come out. Why? Well, because I think it's reaching at a point where the economics of certain kinds of cloud models and frankly, the economics of VMware are forcing people to reconsider, but it's especially around digital service providers. You know, these large companies have been grappling with how do we revolutionize our core networks for five years dealing with OpenStack? And they kind of got a lot of the stuff to work now. I think that is another sort of controversial statement. You know, when I got into this job, I was like, you know, OpenStack is dead. I was involved with Healy and at Hewlett Packard. And I was like, that's never coming back. Well, guess what? It's coming back. I think the other thing is we're going to see a lot more money being spent on revolutionizing the core networks in these telcos and digital service providers. That's what I think the big thing is. Yeah, well, absolutely. We've been at the OpenStack show for many years. The networking component, especially for the telco and service providers, absolutely a strong area of focus. You know, your average enterprise, they might not be looking for OpenStack. There might be pockets. Yeah, but internationally there's some pockets, but absolutely. Tom Joyce, always a pleasure to catch up with you. We look forward to seeing you in the next time. And we'll be back with lots more coverage here from theCUBE at KubeCon in Austin, Texas. You're watching theCUBE.