 From the CUBE 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. Really pleased to welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumni. Sonya Jiandani, she is a co-founder and also the Chief Business Officer of Pensando. Sonya, thanks so much for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me here. All right, so Sonya, we've had you on the program a few times, those that have watched the program or followed your career, of course, you've had a story career. I've worked with you as a partner, back through some of the spin-ins. You're one of the MPLS group. And now of course, Pensando, we helped it launch towards the end of 2019. Just want to take a step back and understand, how did you find yourself in the startup world? Well, I got involved with the startup ventures as part of the MPLS team. This is going back now, gosh, 20 years ago in Calendia 2000. My first venture was with Andiamo. It was a very unique situation that Mario, Luca, Prem, myself, were part of a setup and a startup venture. But all four of us, the MPLS crew, did not have any equity in it. Luca and I basically were tasked to operate with that venture to ensure its ultimate success from a product execution and a go-to-market perspective. A lot of those elements did not exist from a go-to-market perspective in Cisco at that time. And it was basically a ground-up effort for Luca and me to not have any financial association with the outcome of the Andiamo venture, but at the same time take on the responsibility from the execution perspective and building up the whole go-to-market perspective. Yeah, so talking about these startups, you've been a part of two things. First of all, you were part of Andiamo, Duova, and NCME. So did you need to learn Italian to be part of these projects? But more importantly, how did you work on that product, customer fit, understanding what to build? And you talk about, right, how do you make something successful? It's super challenging. Yeah, well, first and foremost, I think I've been fortunate in the group that we are all part of. It is definitely Italian, Indian, and some folks like from Indiana, for example, like Randy Pond, who's part of this venture with us at Pensando. If I were to go back and take a look at the simple formula, I mean, Mario, Luca, and Prem, they're veterans in this industry and they typically focus on the conceiving of the idea and the products, and starting with a clean slate approach, of course. I participate from a market validation development, a competitive landscape, and a business, and all related aspects to bringing the product to market and how that maps into customers and partners. But we have consistently focused on market disruption, particularly for the last two decades. The biggest focus has been on what are the market transitions occurring, both from a business and a technology perspective, and that is ultimately what creates the opportunity to emerge and drive these concepts into reality and put yourself in a market leadership position is to capture the transition at the right time. Yeah, I think back to some of your previous ventures and understand some of the waves, technology's coming together. Sometimes it's maturity of a technology or being able to take advantage of something new. Let's talk specifically about Pensando. What are those waves of change and the technology coming together that makes the opportunity that your team sees today? Well, I mean, if you go back and you take a look at really what has been exciting about this Pensando opportunity has been to look at the unique ability that has been coming upon us with this market transition where the cloud is moving to the edge. What is ultimately driving this movement to the edge has been the application. The applications is, you know, whether it's driven by technology trends like 5G, for example, and the fact that bulk of what the customer's data is being driven is going to be at the edge. When you look at the cloud moving to the edge and evolving that with the transitions occurring, this will require deep innovation. Deep innovation in the areas of distributed network processing, security like encryption, full observability while you have turned on encryption, traffic engineering and doing it at very low predictable latency at the speeds of 100 gig and above all, doing it on a small power footprint. We were really the only guys and gals who could do this and we have done it. Yeah, Sony, some really big challenges that you laid out there. Bring us inside a little bit, you know, customers. You know, I think about, you know, when I've been watching edge computing for the last, you know, three or four years, you know, it's still relatively early days for customers, but there's a lot of technical challenges there. So help us understand how much, you know, it was you had technology that could help solve something and how much it is driven by some of the customers that you've been talking to over the years. Now, one of the key things that we learned, and this was going back to the early days of Cisco, is that everything we were doing, we had the customer at the center of another heart of what innovation we were building. From an engineering perspective, you want to build things that can have the most impact in the marketplace and within your customer base. So one of the early times we went back to getting our customers involved in the innovations we were bringing to bear. I still have recollections of a blueprint that we had iterated upon and sitting in a room, whether it was with the likes of Josh Matthew at Goldman Sachs, or whether it was with some of our early cloud customers, like the Oracle Cloud Team, to better understand with these innovation and these blueprints, what were their burning problems, what were their use cases that we could really go and tackle. So it is one thing to think about market disruptions, it's another to bring it to life and having customers engaged with you during the early phases of as you are incubating something is a very important item because it helps you focus your biggest energy on the areas so that you can put your arms around what problems are worth solving and how can you bring that to life with customers use cases? And this is something we have done time and over again. So this is a constant refinement of what we have been doing now for now two over two decades, as I said. Yeah, it's fascinating here and when you've got the Chief Business Officer, title Sony, one of the biggest changes obviously is if I look back at the spin-ins, you kind of understood how the go-to-market was involved, the Cisco execution machine, that the sales processes that they had, can plug in, if the product was successful, they would help accelerate what you're doing. Now you've got some POAM partnerships, you have relationships with customers, help us understand a little bit, the update on the go-to-market, how you have to have a solution that fits for not only the end users, but through multiple different go-to-market partners. So I think it's very important that as a startup, we stay very close to our customers and our partners. Not just when we are thinking about what the innovation is and how can it solve their problems, but I think in a world where we want to go solve for what the customer, where we want the customer, where our customers want us to be. Our partnerships is a core part of it. I mean, if you look at from the early days, we secured successfully funding from our customers and our strategic partners. And it is these customers and strategic partners that are shaping the roadmap and are shaping the routes to market. And what we are doing is we are successfully, not only delivering the product to these strategic customers and partners, but we are also then replicating it across the verticals. If you think about in the enterprise space, our focus has been to focus on regulated markets where security is quintessential. Real-time observability that can increase your security posture is a very important element. So taking the blueprints that we are taking into global financial services customers, the healthcare industry, the education market and the federal market, then those are the industries that really care about and our unregulated market where we can take the blueprint that we have already built and amplify it across those customers. So there again in close alignment and our partnership with HPE, we are working very closely there. While recognizing that we will be doing strategic elements only with partners like HPE, we're also onboarding and getting certifications done with Dell because most enterprises have at least dual source vendors from a server perspective. So that is one aspect. The other aspect clearly is working in a high-touch model with our cloud customers and having the opportunity to deliver to them and onboard them from a production-worthy perspective while taking that same blueprint and applying it to other cloud customers and other service provider, edge providers that can take advantage of the similar capability. Yeah, I'm curious, Sony, obviously that the cloud is a space that has been going through a lot of change and accelerating, I'd say much faster than traditional networking did. So curious what you see, what you're hearing from customers when they talk about their needs for your solution, what they're doing with multi-cloud environment. What is that landscape? And I guess we'd love to hear a little bit about how you would compare and contrast yourself to other solutions out there. The one that comes to mind, of course, is AWS, what they're doing with the Anapurna chip in their Nitro offering as part of their outpost. So as I mentioned earlier, I think the cloud is pushing to the end. There's a high demand for a lot of packet processing needs with these new age applications, customers want to build and give the, we want to be in a position to provide through the democratization and open availability of our products to multiple cloud providers, our technology, and as they are experiencing tremendous growth, they are seeking to build cloud with more capacity, with greater degree of security and services functionality, and the ability to process a lot of data at the edges with millions of simultaneous connections happening at a very small footprint. And that's where we come in. The value that we are essentially providing to not only the existing cloud strategic partners, but additional cloud customers we are taking into production this year is that we are enabling them to leapfrog the Nitro technology on multiple fronts, whether it is the ability to have predictably low latency and consistently low jitter in the nanoseconds. That is eight times superior than what a Nitro can do today or the ability to pack, to process up to nine times more packets per second in the millions of packets per second. And the ability to do it in a power footprint, which is almost one third that of what you would need on an AWS Nitro where they need five times more Nitro elements than we can with a single device, or whether it is the ability now to handle not just power and latency, but millions of flows that can run simultaneously and maintaining the state of all of those and the power of the end, the ability to run multiple services, which security turned on at the same time are all elements that really differentiate us. And this technology is now readily available to all cloud customers. All right, so I understand some of the technical items that you're stating there. What I'm curious about is when I look at Outpost, most customers don't really think about the Nitro chip. It's that Amazon's providing an extension of their solution into my environment and they manage everything and so, you can't talk about multi-cloud environments without talking about Amazon because every customer, almost every customer I talk to have more than one cloud and one of them is almost always Amazon. So how does your solution fit into that whole discussion then? So I think that, you know, one of the things that becomes very important is that if I put my enterprise customer hat on, I want to be enabling my private cloud, the private cloud that I build to have the ability to not just have the option to support an Amazon cloud, but I typically already am in a multi-cloud environment. So while Outpost and Nitro, Nitro is really enabling Outpost to deliver those services on a customer's premises, it's only allowing that customer to be locked into one way of dealing with one public cloud company. But if I had to go and think about, as I build out my hybrid cloud strategy as an enterprise customer, I want to have the same building blocks and the same policy models that are consistent with the entire breadth of cloud vendors that I'm dealing with. So bulk of our customers are essentially telling us, I don't want to be locked into a single public cloud company from a hybrid strategy. I want to have the ability to drive a public, a private cloud architecture that is cloud-like from a policy delivery perspective, but at the same time, I want to have the flexibility of deploying a multi-cloud environment. And what we would provide them is the consistency of that same policy model that you would only find in a public cloud with the freedom to not have to tie themselves or lock themselves up into a single public cloud customer. So, Tony, your team, you said over two decades of experience, there have been some global impacts that have happened during that time. You said you got together in 2000, well, 2001 was right there in front of you, the 2008 downturn there. So here in 2020, obviously the global pandemic has broad financial ripples. How's this impacting to Nostando? How's it impacting your discussions with your partners and your customers? Well, honestly, I would say that we, like everyone else, have been affected by the pandemic and we pray that everyone recovers soon with minimum loss to themselves and their families. And this is something very personal. This is, I feel very passionate about hoping that everybody comes through with this and their families are all okay. That's the most important thing in my mind. Now for us from a pandemic perspective, what this has done is it has made us more resolute to continue to execute remotely to the best of our ability to meet our customer's expectations. The advice that I would give to other startups is keep your head down, focus on the 80-20 rule, execute on 20% of the things that need to be done that will have 80% of the impact to your business, including undeterred product execution, stay close to your customers and your partners, spend your cash, logistically, be very careful on where you're spending your money to make it last as long as you can to ride this pandemic out and double down on being close to your partners and customers, fortify your sales plans, meet your customers where they are and not where you thought they were, but where they really are and partner with them on this journey and partner with your supply chain. You're going to need them. So this is your time to really be a partner to them as opposed to seeing how can you shortchange them? No, no, really partner with your supply chain because you're going to need them. Yeah, there's some very sound advice there. Sony, while we're talking advice, you're a very successful career. I'm wondering what advice you would give to other women looking at pursuing careers in tech? Specifically, if they wanted to start a startup, be a founder, whether that's in Silicon Valley or outside, what advice would you give them? You know, my advice would be to have an undeterred focus, focus is extremely important. Luke, I used to always remind me, Sony, when you're focused on two things, you're de-focused. So focus, undeterred focus, be driven, believe in the vision that you have set out for yourself and your team and keep your eye on the customer. I think in customer success will lie your success. That's the message I would give. I would give that same message to my female and the male colleague. All right, well, we know that you and your team, Sony, are very focused. So I'll give you the final word. Give us a little look forward. If we go forward, you know, 18 to 24 months, what should we be expecting to see from Pensando and your solution? Well, in the next 18 to 24 months, we would like to meet and hopefully also exceed our customer's expectation in terms of product execution and the ramp. Of course, profitability will be a very important aspect that we're going to keep a very close eye to. I think it's too early to be thinking of an IPO and our focus remains to be on customer success. We have been in the market for a little over, I would say a little less than six months with the product, September, 2019. October, 2019 is really when we launch the company. And the customer always is at the center of everything we do. So that's where we're going to be focusing on. Product execution and ramp, ramp of product, ramp of customer. Well, Sony, Jeanne, Donnie, it's a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you so much and please stay safe. Thank you, you too. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the interviews. You can go see the launch videos that we did at Goldback office in New York City from 2019. If you go to thecube.net and many more interviews from Sony and her team. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.