 You got it, it's theCUBE. We are in Vegas. This is theCUBE's live coverage, day one of the full event coverage of AWS re-invent 22 from the Venetian Expo Center, Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We love being in Vegas, Dave. Well, you know, this is where SuperCloud sort of was born last year, just about a year ago. And Steve Bellani, CEO of AVIatrix, you know, kind of helped us think it through. Yes. And we got some fun stories around. It's happening, but. It is happening. We're going to be talking about SuperCloud. I guess I just did the intro. I'll do it again. Steve Bellani, the CEO of AVIatrix, joined us once again, one of our alumni. Steve, great to have you back on the phone now. Thanks for having me back. It's happening. It is happening. We talked about it a year ago. Nick Stereo was right there. Was that a year ago? That was a year ago. It was last year. Yeah, and leaned over and said it's happening. It's happening. You know what? The thing I noticed, what's happening now is the maturity of the cloud, right? So if you think about this whole journey to cloud that has been, what, AWS 12 years, but really over the last few years is when enterprises have really kind of joined that journey. And three or four years ago, and this is why I came out of retirement and went to AVIatrix, was they all said, okay, now we're going to do cloud. You fast forward now three, four years from now. All of a sudden, those five year plans of evacuating the data center, they got one year left, two year left, and they're going, oh crap. We don't have five years anymore. We're now, the maturity's starting to say we're starting to put more apps into the cloud. We're starting to put business critical apps, like SAP, into the cloud. This is not just like the low hanging fruit anymore. So what's happening now is the business criticality, the scale, the maturity, and they're all now starting to hit a lot of limits that have been put into the CSPs that you never used to hit when you didn't have business critical and you didn't have that scale. They were always there. The rocks were always there, just it was, you never hit them. People are starting to hit them now. So what's happening now is people are realizing I'm going to jump the gun. You asked me for my bumper sticker. The bumper sticker for Aviatrix is good enough, is no longer good enough. Now it's funny, it came in the keynote today, but what we see from our customers is it's time to upgrade the native constructs of networking and network security to be enterprise grade now. It's no longer good enough to just use the native constructs because of a lack of visibility, the lack of controls, the lack of troubleshooting capabilities, all these things, I now need enterprise grade network. Let me ask you a question because you've got a good historical perspective on the industry. When you think about when Maritz was running VMware, he was like, any app, he said basically we're building a software mainframe and they kind of did that, right? But then they hit the issue with scale, right? And they can't replicate the cloud. Are there things that we can draw from that experience and apply that to the cloud? What's the same, what's different? Oh yeah. So 1992, do you remember what happened in 1992? I do this weird German software company called SAP Announcement of Releases R3, which was their first three tier client server application of SAP. Before that it ran on mainframes, TCP IP. Remember that protocol war? Guess what happened post 1992? Everybody goes up like this, infrastructure completely changes. Cisco, EMC, you name it, builds out these PC client server architectures, the WAN changes, MPLS, the campus, everything's home running back to that data center running SAP. That was the last 30 years ago, great transformation of SAP. They did it again, called S4HANA. And now it's running and people are switching to S4HANA and they're moving to the cloud. It's just starting and that is going to alter how you build infrastructure. And so when you have that, being able to troubleshoot in hours versus minutes is a big deal. This is business critical, millions of dollars. This is not fun in games. So again, back to my what was good enough for the last three or four years for enterprise, is no longer good enough. Now I'm running business critical apps like SAP and it's going to completely change infrastructure. That's happening in the cloud right now. And that's obviously a significant seismic shift, but what are some of the barriers that customers have been able to eliminate in order to get there? Or is it just good enough? Is it good enough anymore? Barriers in terms of, well, I mean. The adoption. Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's all the things that they go to cloud is, you know, the complexity. Really it's the agility, right? So the barrier that they have to get over is, how do I keep the developer happy? Because the developer went to the cloud in the first place, why swipe the credit card? Because IT wasn't doing their job because every time I asked them for something, they said, no, so I went around them. We need that that's what they have to overcome in the move to the cloud. That is the obstacle is how do I deliver that visibility, that control, the enterprise grade functionality, but yet give the developer what they want because the minute I stop giving them that swipe the card operational model, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to go around me again. And the enterprise can't have that. That's a cultural shift. It's, that's the main barrier they've got to overcome. Let me ask you another question. Is what we think of as mission critical, the definition changing? I mean, you mentioned SAP, obviously that's mission critical for operations, but you're also seeing new applications being developed in the cloud. I would say anything that's, I call business critical the same thing, but it's business critical is internal to me, like SAP, but also anything customer facing. That's business critical to me. If that app goes down or it has a problem, I'm not collecting revenue. So, you know, back 30 years ago, we didn't have a lot of customer facing apps, right? It really was just SAP. I mean, there wasn't a heck of a lot of customers. There were customer facing things, but you didn't have all the digitization that we have now, like the digital economy where that's where the real explosion has come is you think about all the customer facing applications and now every enterprise is what? A technology digital company with a customer facing and you're trying to get closer and closer to who? The consumer. Yeah, self-service, right? Self-service, B to C, everybody wants to do that, get out of the middleman and those are business critical applications for people. So, what's needed under the covers to make all this happen? Give us a little double click on where you guys fit. You need consistent architecture, obviously not just for one cloud, but for any cloud, but even within one cloud. Forget multi-cloud, it gets words with multi-cloud. You need consistent architecture, right? That is automated, that is as code. I can't have the human involved. This is the API generation. You've got to be able to use automation, Terraform, and all the way from the application development platform, you know, through Jenkins and all the software through CI CD pipeline and Terraform, when that developer says I want infrastructure, it has to go build that infrastructure in real time. And then when it says I don't need it anymore, it's got to take it away. And you cannot have a human involved in that process. That's what's completely changed, and that's what's giving the agility, and that's kind of a cloud model, right? Use software. Well, okay, so isn't that what serverless does? Right? That's part of it, absolutely. But I might still want control sometimes over the runtime if I'm running those mission critical applications. I mean, you know, everything in enterprise is a heterogeneous thing. It's like people say, whoa, the people are going to repatriate back to on-prem. They are not repatriating back to on-prem. We're just talking about that. It's not going to happen. It's a myth. It's a myth. And there's things that maybe shouldn't have ever gone into the cloud, I get that. Look, do people still have mainframes? Of course. There's certain things that you just doesn't make sense to move to the new generation. There were things, certain applications that were very static, it weren't dynamic. You know what, keeping it on-prem is probably makes sense. So some of those things maybe will go back, but they never should have gone, but we are not repatriating ever. That's not going to happen. Yeah, I agree. I mean, you know, there was an interesting paper by Andreessen. Yeah, I was a little self-serving for some company that was funding. But it's just, look at the numbers. It tells the story. Yeah. It's just not happening. No. But it's, and the reason is, it's that agility, right? And so that's what people, I would say, that what you need to do is, in order to get that agility, you have to have that consistency. You have to have automation. You have to get these people out of the way. You have to use software, right? So it's that you have that swipe the cardman to operational model for the developers. They don't want to hear the word no. Right. What do you think's going to happen with AWS? Because we heard, I don't know if you heard Salipsky's keynote this morning, but you probably heard the hallway talk. Okay, you did. So, you know, connecting the dots, you know, doubling down on all the primitives, that we expected. We kind of expected more of the higher level stuff. We really didn't see much of that, a little bit. Yeah. So, you know, there's a whole thing about, okay, does the cloud get commoditized? Does it not? I think the secret weapon's the ecosystem, right? Because they're able to sell through with guys like you, make great margins on that. What are your thoughts on the future of AWS? I guess it's going to get commoditized. So this is the fallacy that a lot of the CSPs have is they thought that they were going to commoditize enterprise. It never happens that way. What's going to happen is, infrastructure as a service, the lower level, which is why you see all the CSPs talking about what? Prologal cloud, industry cloud, right? Like we got to get to the apps. We got to get to SAP. We got to get to all that because that's not going to get commoditized, right? But all the infrastructural service where AWS is king, that is going to get commoditized. Absolutely. Okay, so, but historically, you know Cisco's still got 60% plus gross margin. Sure. We always had good margin. How pure is the lone survivor and flash? They got 70% gross margins. So infrastructure actually has always been a pretty good business. Yeah, that's true. But it's a hell of a lot easier, particularly with people like Aviatrix and others that are building these common architectural things that create simplicity and abstract away the complexities of underneath, such that we allow your network to run on AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, whatever, exactly the same. So it makes it a hell of a lot easier. Super cloud. To go boo. But this is, but I want to tap your brain because you have a good perspective of this because servers used to be a great margin business too on-prem and now it's not. It's a low margin business because all the margin went to Intel. Yeah. But the cloud guys, you know, AWS in particular makes a ton of dough on servers so or compute. So it's going to be interesting to see over time if that gets commoditized. That's why they're going so hard after silicon. I think if they can, I think if you can capture the workload. So AWS and everyone else has another example of this SAP. They call that a gravity workload. You're a gravity workload is, it's a black hole. It drags everything else with it. If you get SAP or Oracle or mainframe app, it ain't going anywhere. And then what's going to happen is all your other apps are going to follow it. So that's what they're all going to fight for. It's a type of app. You said something earlier about, forget multi-cloud for a moment, but that idea of the super cloud, the subtraction layer. I mean, is that a real business value for customers other than I got all these clouds, I need them to work together? From your perspective, from Aviatrix's perspective, is it an opportunity for you to build on top of that? Or are you just looking at, look, I'm going to do really good work in AWS, in Azure, in Google, I'm going to make it the same experience. I hear this every single day from our customers is they look and they say, good enough isn't good enough. I've now hit the point. I'm hitting route limitations. I'm hitting, I'm doing things manually. And that's fine when I don't have that many applications or I don't have mission critical. The dogs are eating the dog food, we're going into the cloud and they're looking and they're saying, this is not an operational model for me. I've hit the point where I can't keep doing this. I can't throw bodies at this. I need software. And that's the opportunity for us is, they look and they say, I'm doing it in one cloud, but and there's zero chance I'm going to be able to figure that out in the two or three other clouds. Every enterprise I talk to says multi cloud is inevitable. Whether they're in it now, they all know they're going to go because it's the business units that demand it. It's not the IT teams that demand it. It's the line of business that says, I like GCP for this reason. The driver's functionality that they're getting. It's the app teams that say, I have this service and GCP is better at it than AWS. Yeah. So it's not so much a cost game or the end of coffee mug, right? No. Google does this better than Microsoft. Yeah. I mean, if you asked an IT person, they would rather not have multi cloud. They actually tried to fight it. No. Why would you want to support four clouds when you could support one? That's insane. Right. They didn't have a choice. And so the decision was made without them. And actually they weren't even notified until day before they said, oh, good news. We're going to GCP tomorrow. They're like, why wasn't I notified? Well, we're notifying you now. Yeah. You would have said no. This is a cloud model. Let's go. Super cloud again. Did you see the Berkeley paper, the sky computing? I think they call it. How did Berkeley? Yeah. Dave Lenticum from Deloitte. He's talking about, I think he calls it men a cloud. It's happening. Yeah. Yeah. It's happening. No, and because customers, customers want that. And talk about some customer example or two that you think really articulates the value of why it's happening and the outcomes that it's generating. I mean, I was just talking to a lamb Western last night. So we had a reception. Lamb Western, huge frozen potatoes. They serve like, I don't know, some ungodly percentage of all the french fries to all the fast food. Some believe in what they do. You know, they have special chemicals. They put on the french fries. So when you get your door dash, they stay crispy longer. They've invented that, patented. Anyway, it's all these businesses you've never heard of and they do all, and again, they're moving to SAP, or they're actually SAP in the cloud. They were one of the first ones. They did it through Accenture. They're pulling it back up from Accenture. They're not happy with the service they're getting. They're going to use us for their networking and network security because they're going to get that visibility and control back and they're going to repatriate it back from a managed service and bring it back and run it in-house. And the SAP Basis Engineers want it to happen because they see the visibility and control that the infrastructure guy's going to get because of us, which leads to, all they care about is uptime and performance. That's it. And they're going to say the infrastructure team's going to lead to better uptime and better performance if it's running on AV atrix. And business performance and uptime. And that is the business. That is the business. It is. So what are some of the things next coming down the pipe from AV atrix? So any secrets off you can share. A lot of secrets. So two secrets. One, the next thing people really want to do, embedded network security into the network. We've kind of talked about this. You're going to be seeing some things from us. Where does network security belong? In the network. Embedded in the fabric of the network, not as this dumb device called the Next Gen Firewall that you steer traffic to. It has to be into the fabric of what we do, what we call airspace. You're going to see us talk about that. And then the next thing, back to the maturity of the cloud, as they build out the core, guess what they're doing? It's this thing called Edge, Dave, right? And guess what they're going to do? It's not about connecting the edge to the cloud with dumb things like SD-WAN, right? Or Sassy. It's actually the other way around. Go into the cloud, turn around, look out at the edge and say, how do I extend the cloud out to the edge and make it look like a VPC? That's what people are doing. Yeah, I have. Why? Because I want the operational model. I want all the things that I can do in the cloud out at the edge. And everyone knows has been in networking. I've been in a network for 37 years. He who wins the core does what? Wins the edge. Because that's what happens. You do it first in the core and then you want one architecture, one common architecture, one consistent way of doing everything. And that's going to go out to the edge and it's going to look like a VPC from an operational model. And Amazon's going to support that. Yeah, I mean, and then it's just how do you want to go do that? And then also it's the networking and network security provider. We're getting dragged to the edge by our customers because you're my networking provider. And that means, and they're trying to drag us into on-prem too. Yeah. What's going on? You're going to have to come back because we're out of time. Because they're one networking vendor. But wait, and you say what? I say, we will never do, like switches and they're going to keep Aristan, Francisco and all that kind of stuff. But we will start sucking in NetFlow. We will start doing it from an operational perspective. We will integrate a lot of the things that are happening in on-prem into our co-pilot. No halfway house, no two architectures, but you'll take the data in. Yeah, totally right play. Amazing stuff. You're going to have to come back. And here you went to core. Guess what's more strategic to them? What's more strategic, on-prem or cloud? Cloud. It flipped three years ago. So he who wins in the clouds, going to win everywhere. Got it. We'll keep our eyes on that. Cause and effect. Thank you so much for joining us. We got your bumper sticker already. It's been a great pleasure having you on the program. You got to come back. Are you posting the bumper sticker somewhere? Is that with your Instagram? Oh, really? Okay. It's new for you guys. It is. Always coming up with new ideas. Raising the bomb. Re-advent, I mean, come on. I love it. All right. For our guest, Steve Mulaney and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.