 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California at theCUBE Studio. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE. We're at Sylvan Chop, who's the head of solution architecture at Open Systems, securing SD Win and a variety of other cloud 2.0-like capabilities, very successful 20 plus years operation. Sylvan was one of the first folks coming over to the U.S. to expand their operation from Europe into New York now here in Silicon Valley. Welcome to the CUBE Conversation. Thank you, John. So, institution trivia, you were part of the original team of three to move to the U.S. from Switzerland. You guys had phenomenal success in Europe. You've come to the U.S., having phenomenal success in the U.S. Now you move in West out here to California, you're on that team. You're opening things up, opening up the market. It's been a chance, like things kind of presented themselves step by step, and I jumped on the trains and it's been a good ride. Awesome, you guys have had great success. We interviewed your CEO and a variety of your top people. One of the things that's interesting story is that you guys have been around for a long time, been there, done that, riding this next wave of digital transformation, what we call cloud 2.0, but it really is about enterprise, about full cloud scale, securing it. You have a lot of organic growth with customers, great word of mouth, so that's not a lot of big marketing budgets, real success there. You guys now are in the U.S. doing the same thing here. What's been the key to success for Open Systems? Why such good customers? Why the success formula? Is it you guys are on the right wave? Is it the product, all the above? What's the secret formula? So, multiple things I'd say. And we started as a privately owned company, like brought banks to the internet, email, and so on back in the 90s. And yeah, we started to grow organically, as you said, word by mouth. And in the end, we put heavy focus on operations. So we wanted to make our customers happy and successful. And yeah, that's how we got there. Like, it was slow organic growth, but we always kind of kept the core. And we tried to be unconventional. We tried to do things differently than others do. And that's what it brought us to where we are today. And now, new capabilities being here in the valley opens up a lot of more doors. You guys got a nice office in Ribbon Sea. I saw the video. So props for that, congratulations. But the real, to me, the meat on the bone and the story is that, and I've been really ranting on this whole SD-WAN is changing. SD-WAN used to be around for a long, long time. It's a known industry. It's known market. It's got a total addressable market. But really what it really talks to is the cloud. The cloud is a wide area network. Wide area networks used to be locked down. You had the old way, premier based security. Now, everything is a wide area. It's a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. This is essentially networking. It's a networking paradigm. So it's not literally rocket science, technically. But the cloud 2.0 shift is about data. It's about applications, different architectures. You have everything kind of coming together which creates a security problem and an opportunity for new people to come in. That's what you guys are one of them. This is the big wave. Explain the new SD-WAN, the old way and the new way. What should people know about the new SD-WAN marketplace? Yeah, so let me start where the WAN has come from and how digital transformation has impacted that. So typically corporate wide area networks are centered around, typically a data center where all applications were hosted, storage and everything and all traffic was backhauled into the data center. Typically you have one single provider that brought you MPLS links and it was all good. You had a central location where you could manage it. You had all visibility. Security stack was there. So you had full control. Now, new requirements from digital transformation brought is users are on the road. They're on their phones, iPads, on the in restaurants and hotels, Starbucks, wherever. We have applications moved to the cloud. So they're accessed directly. You want to have or be as close as possible. Unify communications, IOT, it's all things that pose different requirements now in the network. And the traditional architecture didn't or wasn't able to respond to that. It's just that the links, they were filled up. You couldn't invest enough to blow up your MPLS links to handle the bandwidth. You lost visibility because users were on the road. You lost control and that's where new architectures had to be found. That's where SD-WAN stepped in and say, hey, look, now we're not centered around the headquarter anymore. We're centered around where the applications are. We're centered around where the data is and we need to find means to connect to that data as quickly as possible. And so you can use the internet. Internet has become commodity. It's become more performant, more stable. So we can leverage that. We can route traffic according to our policies. We can include the cloud. And that's where SD-WAN actually benefits from the cloud as much as the cloud benefits from SD-WAN because they go hand in hand. And that's also what we really drive to say, hey, look now the cloud can be directly brought into your network, no matter where data and where applications are. Yeah, and this is the thing. I mean, although I've been critical of SD-WAN, I still see it as the path of the future because it's networking. At the end of the day, networking is networking. You're moving packets from point A to point B and you're moving somebody to store it, you move it from point A to store it to point C. It's hard, and you brought this up about MPLS, it's hard to like rip and replace. You can't just do a wholesale change on the network because the networks are running businesses. So this is where the trick is, in my opinion. So I want to get your thoughts on how companies are dealing with this because I mean, if you want to move, change something in the network, it takes a huge task. How did you guys discover this new opportunity? How did you implement it? What was the, and how should customers think about not disrupting their operations at the same time, bringing in the new capabilities of this SD-WAN 2.0? Yeah, that's a perfect sweet spot because in the end, nobody starts at a green field. If you could start with a green field, it's easy. You just take on the new technology and you're happy. But customers that we look up, large enterprises, they have a brown field, they have an existing network, they have business critical applications running 24-7. And if you look at what options large enterprises have to implement and manage in SD-WAN is typically three approaches. They either do it themselves, meaning they need a major investment in onboarding people, having the talent, evaluating technology and making the project work. Or they look at a conventional managed service provider. In the end, that is just the same as do it yourself. It's just done by somebody else. And you have the challenge that those providers typically have a lot of portfolio that they manage and they do not have enough expertise in SD-WAN. And so you just end up with the same problems and a lot of service chaining. So even then, you do not get the expertise that you need. I think what's interesting about what you guys have done, I want to get your reaction to this is that the managed service piece of it makes it easier to get in without a lot of tinkering with existing infrastructure. And that's been one of the tailwinds for you guys and success-wise. Talk about that dynamic of why the managed service is a good approach. Because you put your toe in the water, so to speak, and you can kind of get involved, get as much as you need to go and go further. Talk about that dynamic and why that's important. Yeah, technology chain is very quickly. So you need people that are able to manage that. And Open Systems as a pure play provider, we purposely build our platform for SD-WAN. So we integrate feature sets, we know how to monitor it, how to configure it, how to manage it, life cycle management, technology risk, technology management, all this is purposely built into it. So we strongly believe that to be successful, you need people that are experts in what they do to help you so that you and your IT people can focus in enabling the business. And that's kind of our sweet spot where we then say we have experts, our experts operating the network for you as a customer. And therefore, our experts are your experts. And that's kind of where we believe that a managed service done the right way ends up in, yeah, the best customers. And I think the human capital piece is interesting and people can level up faster when you're not just deploying here, here's the software, load it. It's a little collaboration support in there. You guys done good there. All right, while you're on this topic, I want to get your thoughts since you're an expert. We've been really evaluating this Cloud 2.0 for lack of a better description. Cloud 2.0 implying that the Cloud 1.0 was Amazon. Amazon, the success of Amazon web services really shows DevOps in action, agility, the lean startup, all that stuff we've been reading about for the past 10 plus years. Great, compute, storage, at scale, amazing use of data. Like you said, Greenfield, why not use the cloud? Great. Now all the talk about hybrid cloud, even going back to 2013, we were at VMworld at that time, it's our 10th year there. Hybrid cloud was just introduced. Now it's mainstream, now multi-cloud is around the corner. This teases out Cloud 2.0. Enterprise cloud, enterprise scale, enterprise security, cloud security, monitoring 2.0 is observability, you got Kubernetes, all these new things are coming on. This is the new Cloud 2.0. What is your definition of Cloud 2.0 if you had to describe it to a customer or a friend? It is really a sum of hybrid cloud or multi-cloud as you wanna name it, because in the end, probably nobody can say, I just select one cloud and that's gonna make me successful. Because in the end, cloud is, it's not everywhere as we kind of used to believe in the beginning, but in the end, it's somebody else's computer in somebody else's data center. So the cloud is, you selectively pick the location where you wanna deploy your cloud instances and as the cloud service providers open up more locations that are closer to your users and your data, you actually can leverage more possibilities. So what we see emerging now is that while for a long time, everything has moved to the cloud, the cloud is again coming back to us at the edge. So a lot of compute stuff is done close to where data is generated. It's where the users are. I mean, data is generated with us, yeah, phones and touch and feel and vision and everything. So we can leverage these technologies to really compute closer to the data, but everything controlled out of central cloud instances. So this brings up a good point. You essentially kind of agreeing with cloud one, dot O being moved to the cloud. But now you're mentioning something that's really interesting around cloud 2.0, which is moving, having cloud, certainly public clouds, great, but now moving technology to the edge, edge being a data center, edge being industrial IoT and other things, wind farms, whatever, users running around, remote, as you mentioned. So the edge is now becomes a critical component of this cloud 2.0. Okay, so I got to ask the question, how does the networking and what's the complexity? And I'm just imagining massive complexity from this. What are some of the complexities and challenges and opportunities that will arise out of this new dynamic of cloud 2.0? So the traditional approaches just don't work anymore. So we need new ways to not only on the networking side, but obviously also on the security side. So we need to make sure that not only the network follows in the footsteps of the business of what it needs, but actually the network can drive business innovation and that the network is ready to handle those new leaps in technologies. And that's what we see is kind of being able to tightly integrate whatever pops up, being able to quickly connect to a SaaS provider, quickly integrate a new cloud location into your network and have the strong security posture there directly integrated is what you need. Because if you always have to think about wait, if I add this, it's going to break something else and I have to do changes here, then you lose all the speed that your business needs. I mean the ripple effect of, it's like throwing the stone in the lake and seeing the ripple effect with cloud 2.0, you mentioned a few of them, network and security, I want to get to that in a second. But doesn't it change every aspect of computing categories, backup, monitoring, I mean all the sectors that were traditional siloed on-premise that moved to the cloud are now being disrupted again for the third time. You agree with that? It's true, yeah, and I mean your cloud point 1.0, you say a lot of things will be seen as lift and shift and that still works, like there is a lot of workloads where it's not worth it to refactor everything. But then for your core applications, the business where the business makes money, you want to leverage the latest set of technologies to really drive your business there. I got to get your take on this, because you're the head of architecture solutions at Open Systems. There's a marketing tagline that I saw that you guys promote, which I want to get your thoughts on. It says, stop treating your network like a network. Little marketing, I love it, but it's kind of like stop treating your network like a network, implying that the network's changing, maybe inadequate, antiquated, needs to modernize, I'm kind of feeling the vibe there on that. What do you mean by that slogan? Stop treating your network like a network. What's the purpose behind that? Yeah, in the end, it should be a little thought provoking. But I mean, even SDVAN in its pure forms where you have a software controller that steers your traffic along different path, already for me as an engineer, I kind of lose my mind because I want to know where routing is going. I want to deterministically define my policy so I always have things under control. But now it's a software agent that takes care of it for me. So that already, I lose control in favor of more capabilities. And I think that's, cloud just kind of accelerates this. So you guys really put security kind of in between the network and application. Is that the way you're thinking about it? It used to be, network was at the bottom, you built the application, had security, now you're thinking differently. Explain the architectural thinking around this because this is a modern approach that you guys are taking and I want to get this on the record. Applications are serving users and machines, network delivers packets, and then you're saying securities wrapping up between them, explain. So when we go back again to the traditional model, central data center, you had a security stack, full rack of appliances that took care of your security, it was easy to manage. Now, if you want to go SDVAN, connect every branch side to the internet, you cannot replicate such an infrastructure to every branch location, it just doesn't scale. So what do you do? Either you say, I cannot benefit of this, or I use new methods. And that's where we say we integrate security directly into our networking stack. So to be able to not rely on the service chaining, but have everything compiled into one platform and be able to leverage that data is passing through our network device, but then why not apply the same security functions that we used to do in our headquarter directly at the edge. And therefore, every branch benefits of the same security posture that I typically or traditionally only had in my data center. You guys also win as a strategic infrastructure, critical infrastructure opponent, I would agree with that, that's obvious. But as we get into hybrid cloud and multi-cloud infrastructure as a service support, seamless integration is critical. This has become a topic that we'll certainly be talking about for the rest of the year at VMworld and re-invent and other conferences like Microsoft Ignite as well. This is the big challenge for customers. Do I invest in Azure, AWS, Google, and then another cloud? Who knows how many clouds are coming? That'd be another cloud potentially around the corner. I don't want to fork my development team. I don't want to create different code bases. This has become kind of like the challenge. How do you see this playing out? Because again, the applications want to run on the best cloud possible. I'm a big believer in that. I think that the cloud should dictate, the app should dictate which cloud runs. And that's why I'm a believer in the single cloud for the workload, not the single cloud for all workloads. So your thoughts? I think from an application point of view, as you say, the application guys have to determine what cloud is best for them. I think from a networking point of view as a network architect, we need to, we cannot work against this, but enable them and be able to find ways that the network can seamlessly connect to whatever cloud the business wants to use. And there is plenty of opportunity to do that today and to integrate or partner with other providers that actually have partnered with dozens of cloud providers. And as we now can architect, we have solutions to directly bring you as a customer within milliseconds to each cloud premise is a huge advantage. It takes a few clicks in a portal, you have a new cloud instance up and running and now you're connected. And the good thing is we have different ways to do that, either we spin up our virtual instance, virtual SD-WAN appliance in cloud environments so we can leverage the internet to go there, still all secured, all encrypted, or then we again use different cloud interconnections to access the clouds depending on the business requirements. You guys have been very successful with a lot of companies from financial services, the UN with NGOs, a variety of industries. So I want to get your thoughts on this. I've been, we've been covering the department of defenses joining, Jedi joint enterprise initiative, defense initiative where the debate was sole single purpose cloud. Now the reality is, and we've covered this on Silicon Angle that DOD is going multi-cloud as an organization because they're going to have Microsoft cloud for collaboration and other contracts that they're going to win an $8 billion account. So there's a variety of cloud opportunities but for the particular workload for the military, they have unique requirements. Their workload has chosen one cloud. That was the controversy. So I want to get your thoughts on this. Should the workloads dictate the cloud? And is that okay? And certainly multi-cloud is preferred in Arata instances, but is it okay to have a single cloud for a workload? Yeah, again, if the business is okay with that, that's fine. From our side of view, we see a lot of, a lot of business that have global presence. So they are spread across the globe. So for them, it's beneficial to then distribute workloads again across different regions. And it could still be the same provider but across different regions. And then already question is, how do you now route traffic between those workloads? Do you leverage your SD-WAN infrastructure or do you actually use, for example, the backbone that the cloud provider provides you? In case of Microsoft, they guarantee you that traffic between regions stay on their backbone. So it gives us whole new opportunities to leverage a large provider's backbone. And this is an interesting nuance point because multi-cloud doesn't have to be this workload spreading the workload across three different clouds. It's this workload works on, say, the Amazon, this workload works on Azure, this workload works on another cloud. That's multi-cloud from a reality standpoint today. So that implies that most every company will be multi-cloud. Yeah, for sure. But workloads might have a single cloud for either the routing and the transit security with the data stored, and that's okay too. Yeah, and keep in mind cloud is not only infrastructure or platform as a service, it's also software as a service. So as soon as we have Salesforce, Workday, Office 365, Dropbox or Box, then we are multi-cloud. So basically the clouds are fighting it out by the applications that they support and the infrastructure behind it. Exactly. All right, well, what's next for you? You're on the road. You guys doing a lot of customer activity. What's the coolest thing that you're seeing in the customer base from open system standpoint that you like to share with the audience? So again, it's just cool to see that customers realize that there's plenty of opportunities and just to see how we go through that evolution with our customers where initially they were a little concerned, but then eventually we see that actually the network change drives new business projects and customers are happy that they launch or collaborate with us. That's what makes me happy and makes me kind of continue on down the path. And securing it is a key win in this market, having security. Absolutely, yeah, have a peace of mind and not wake up at 2 a.m. full sweat because you're... Well, managed service is a preferred format. People like to consume and procure product in. So congratulations and congratulations on your Silicon Valley office. Looking forward to chatting more. I'm John Furrier here in the CUBE studios for CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching.