 Welcome back, everyone, to the live CUBE studios here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, extracting the signal from the noise. Day three of four days of live coverage, unpacking everything around what's going on Telcos, connected networks, future of AI, and of course, clustered systems as GPUs and TPUs and CPUs expand in, the new infrastructure and applications are on top of it. Got a great guest, former CUBE alumni, Alvin Sekira, who's the founder and CEO of Highway 9 Networks. We go way back, he and I go back in the 80s. Great to see you. Good to see you, John. So, your history is in Blue Lane, Seoul, sales to VMware around 2005, roughly? Correct. After finishing and taking a company public with Ralph Fongerman, we founded a company called Blue Lane, which was the world's first virtual security company, which got acquired by VMware back in 2008, right after Diane was leaving and Paul Merz was coming on board. And that's when VMware really became that kind of the cloud, virtualization obviously established. Then they went the full stack, big time cloud play, then obviously it just grew like crazy. Correct, correct. Bitters, we started with network insecurity, virtualization, led to software defined networking, software defined data centers, which became private clouds. Then we added the hybrid cloud, et cetera. That was our run. And you were from Pat Gelsinger at the end before you left. Correct, correct. Private cloud, hybrid cloud offering, I was part of Pat Gelsinger's e-staff. And when did you start Highway 9? So one of the last things we did at VMware was build a telco cloud, which DISH networks used to roll out 5G across the country. That's when COVID began. That's when I went to Pat and suggested leaving the company after 12 years with my management team. And that's how we founded Highway 9 networks. Why did you start the company? So when we were at VMware, we began to talk to all of our major customers. And as you know, VMware, all the Fortune 1000, we began to see this major trend where one of our top customers, MIT, told us that 97% of their users had gone mobile. And yet we all came from the world, we invented the LAN and things like that. Most of the networks on campus were optimized for the desktop, with the desktop network, the LAN, servers started moving to the cloud. What is remaining behind are all these mobile users on their iPads and on their smartphones. So we said there's a big opportunity coming here. Having just enabled DISH to create a 5G cloud, we said 5G is real, the technology is superior. Why not create a private 5G cloud for the enterprise so that we can pull together all of these mobile assets? And that was a genesis for Highway 9. And Pat said, yeah, take the team or do you invest? What was that conversation like? I can't say too much about that. I think Pat and I have had a great relationship six, seven years at the company and obviously not the happiest to see us go, but he let me go with the management. He knew you guys would be happier outside VMware. One of those classic cases probably where they're like, we are serial entrepreneurs and things like that. We're going to lose them anyway eventually. Well, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had a famous line that say, our job is to get people to think about doing their own startup. No, train them to be ready to do their own startup and their job is to keep them at HPE. Now HPE, but now that's what they try to do. It's funny you should mention that that is my first job out of school when Hewlett and Packard are actually in the building back in 1984. And it was always wonderful to see those entrepreneurs and they were the ones that caused this restless spirit, entrepreneurial spirit in me since the 84s. You know, they did theCUBE one year in their old office. It was preserved like a museum in Palo Alto. Remember that? Yeah, and to your point, I think that spirit is not well documented and it's one of the most historic Valley creation ethos of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship wise and that came from a big company. And I don't know if you remember the term management by walking around. Yeah, sure. Hewlett and Packard would walk around all the different cubicles in Hewlett Packard and that's what caused a lot of that management style, which I think still lives with me today. And then in fact, one of the things I was saying when NVIDIA had their big two trillion dollar earnings, I said they were a big company that actually did something entrepreneurial created wealth. If you were a janitor at NVIDIA 10 years ago, you're a millionaire now. Correct. Okay, so big companies can innovate, they can create that entrepreneurial spirit. Great story, I love how you brought that up. Let's get back to your story. Okay, you were stealth. So how long were you in stealth? Correct. You leave VMware, you go into stealth, you get some financing, tell us the story. So the story is, so we came, we founded the company like I mentioned, COVID had started and it was the weirdest time if you realize the first six months of COVID, no one even knew what that was all about. We were all running scared. So we were all in our houses. Last day at VMware was one of these things that someone had got COVID in the office. They sent everyone scurrying. We never saw the office back again. Meanwhile, on phone, I talked to Pat about leaving. We started the company and we said, you know what, let's find a company in stealth and why don't we assume that's the future of the world? Why do we need offices? We should be untethered. So we said let's find a company built on us all remaining in our homes. We had to form an engineering team with the funding we had with some level of perceived funding created. We had to hire engineers out of India to keep the cost down and we grew to about 20, 30 folks and we said the number one thing is let's build the product because one thing we learned all the three or $4 billion businesses we built whether it was network and security virtualization, public private cloud, hybrid cloud or the telco cloud, it all started with getting deep with one or two early customers and making sure the product really works and scale before pub end. That's what we set out to do. We had really great early customers. MIT used to be our first customer at VMware with the hybrid cloud. They were one of our first customers. They came to us and said we are done with the wifi at the end of this era. They were one of the first. They said it's showing its age. We need to completely, we moved all the workloads into the cloud. What remains are all our users. Can we get rid of the rest of the network so that it can be operated just like we operate the cloud, remove all the, and that's what we set out to do. Get all of their mobile users with their iPads, with their smartphones on this private network. And we chose to use 5G technologies because they were the superior technology. And the value you're bringing, the problem you're solving is you're taking away complexity, right? You're giving privacy, security. You describe the sort of business case. So the business case is pretty straightforward. Up to now, the way you run a 5G network is it can only be done primarily by the operator, outside in. And it's not really tied into IT by any means. It's an outside in, extend the signal, and that's how you give connectivity. We said, let's build a classic enterprise cloud, just like a Miraki cloud for wifi. But we took that 5G technology as the baseline set of APs. Don't build the radios ourselves. Choose best in class radios, but then assemble them. The thing about 5G is it's pretty sophisticated. There's a control plane. If you think about, you're driving on a highway at 80 miles an hour, and you're able to go from one tower to the other, and you don't even think twice about it. It just works. To get that happening, what happens is a control plane called packet core. And that's what we had to go and bring down into a very seamless offering, get it deployed, and have a cloud-based offering so that our customers do not have to worry about anything. Three GPP, which is the protocols under the 5G layer. Our customers didn't have to worry about that. We brought it all together into a cloud-based offering. One easy touch button, and you're off and running. Put a few radios, and you'll have your system up and running. What's the 5G constraints that you had to work through? Because, obviously, 5G is being deployed. I won't say it's being pulled back, but we know the enterprise demand's high, but yet, SLA's got to be there. So is an application market. Kilowrap is not yet emerged. Some say it has, and some say it has. Some say it's the internet, but what's your take on 5G's maturity level, and is that going to be a problem? I think the biggest case against 5G up to now has been it's a lot of complexity. You've got to manage the Sims, manage the spectrum, manage the radios, manage the edge, manage the packet cores, pull it all together. So typically, what's happened, this has been the purview of the Telco guys. They have big teams for each of the functions, and then they bring it all together. So similarly, the first wave of private 5G and all, managed service providers, bringing together a core and a radio, that ain't going to hunt. So we had to simplify that. So job number one is it just got to work seamlessly without having to worry how it works. Second big missing link in all the first generation, they were not tied into IT. The trick is making sure that you're offering just dovetails into IT, into their security policies, into their best practices, into networking, into MDM, into NAC, into all of those kind of good hygiene stuff that IT demands. And the third big piece is having the umbilical cord with the operators. So getting this deployed in a seamless fashion that dovetails into IT practices, yet is connected to the operators, that's the winning formula, which needs to come together. And that's what we believe we've achieved. Oh, and I got to say, I love that narrative. I will throw another complicated wrench into that by another dimension. First of all, good point. IT connecting into that. I see it. What about like 5G and enterprise infrastructure, like observability and cloud? Does that connect well? I mean, there's a lot of blind spots. Yes, yes. And you got the telcos got all the data. Yes. No, so. Is that a concern? How do you react to that? No, no, no, no. Funny you should mention that because we could have just advertised ourselves as a private 5G company, but we learned a lot in the last 10 years. That is not just about connectivity. It's about observability. It's about cloud efficiencies. It's about 360 degree day zero, day one, day two. And that's why we built a cloud. And the beauty of these radios that are now deployed in the enterprise for this, we call it a mobile cloud. So to make sure that it's not tied to just a 5G because you're already seeing 60 notions here and 5G is barely begun. So rather than do it that way, we built this mobile cloud where we have great visibility into every single, not just the radio, but into the gateways to IoT, into the gateways to Wi-Fi, into the radios, into the core, into the users. So that gives you a big 360 degree dashboard. One of our top customers, we can't mention the name, but it's a huge manufacturer. They chose our product because Wi-Fi was not working for AGVs, the auto guided vehicles, which go around the track as you assemble the car. It doesn't, Wi-Fi didn't work for indoor, outdoor, many such use cases. So we put this and what they were amazed about is they get 360 degree views, not just of the 5G componentry, but of all their zebras, their iPads, and all of these things that got assembled on this mobile cloud. You mentioned the importance of making it seamless for IT, which I think is obvious why. That could be a potential roadblock for a lot of companies. How do you, part of that what you're saying, you can accommodate the security edicts of the organization. How do you do that though? Because every organization has slightly different security edicts, they got different tooling, there's so much complexity in security. So explain how you connect seamlessly. Correct, correct. So this is a very, very, very important point. In fact, it's one of the critical reasons why MIT and the manufacturer chose this technology. First of all, 5G technology is intrinsically more secure. Why? Because all the way from your handsets, you're starting with SIM based authentication, you're encrypted all the way from here, all the way into the end of that secure channel. So it's highly encrypted. It's a person based authentication. And secondly, we have to dovetail into the IT security practices. Meaning we're sitting, so what happens if you create this mobile cloud? At the edge of the mobile cloud, we go into the DMZ, where you're running all the things you normally run, whether it's CrowdStrike, whether it's Palo Alto Networks, whether it's your network access control, and things like that. The combination of the intrinsically more secure, underlying 5G protocols, along with dovetailing and inserting yourself seamlessly into an IT security infrastructure, that's the trick to making sure that you have end to end security. And that was part of the development process that you guys did when you started out during COVID. Yes, it took us two, three years to build the system, and all of these are very interesting, because most folks who come from the 5G world, come from the telco world, are not used to the artifacts in the enterprise world, because in the 5G world, you have a certain definition, all the operators work on that definition, and it gets homogenized. You go into the enterprise world, it's an artifact of years and years and decades and decades of different generation of technology, as we've all seen. So what's about the product? What are you selling? Tell us what the product, what does it do? Correct. Is it only mobile traffic, no desktop traffic, or I mean, these are the kind of questions. Explain the product, how is it sold and consumed and it's all gone. All right, so to talk about the product, I talk about the three pain points. The first pain point, given that you now know that mobile users dominate in any given enterprise, job number one was coverage is broken. What enterprises want is 100% coverage across all of the campus for all three operators. If you don't have that, you have so many big gaps in it. So job number one is to get that complete coverage, which is what we do. Job number two is even when you're not interested in coverage, this mobile data needs an always-on model. Why? Because we just heard of a university that had a ransomware attack and they had to shut down the network and then the essential services are lost. So they want the mobile data, so because a lot of the essential workers are carrying these handsets. And number three, there's this whole emergence of SIM attached devices, whether they are 5G devices, AI-based devices, IoT sensors going through an aggregation point. So our job number one is to pull together and create a mobile cloud for all of these three use cases, everywhere coverage, always-on mobile data, and AI and automation readiness. And that's what we are selling today, a mobile cloud for the enterprise that's connected to the operator. You're not selling radios, you're selling a service and software and cloud. Yes, so that's a good point. So we sell the mobile cloud, we include the radios. We don't build the radios ourselves. We choose the best-in-class radios in the system. We sell the radios, we sell the edge that's deployed at the, it could be either in an Equinex Colo or a Amazon Outpost or it could be on-prem on VMware. So that's the edge, includes all of the software required. And then we provision from the cloud, zero touch provisioning, and you're up and running and you got a 5G cloud up and running. So you do the truck roll, so to speak, that's a truck roll, the enterprise campus. You install, do the service. Set up the network, use the backend cloud, and then go from there. It's all the actual operations and the setup of the radios are done by the same Wi-Fi staff who used to install your Wi-Fi radios. After that, it's all cloud-based, software-based, the right software is downloaded on-prem and you're up and running. And you're in market? We are in market, so last year we had our first millions of dollars of sales which led us to completing our series of funding. We've raised 25 to date. And now that we know the product works, we got great customers. The one I can talk about the most right now is MIT, the multiple buildings, they're going all in with us. In fact, if you look at our website, there's a conversation I have with Mark Silas, their CIO. And so we are in market, ready to rock and roll. So you feel like you've got product-market fit? We believe we have product-market fit. The need is manifest out there. We're getting word of mouth is spreading in higher ed, in manufacturing logistics and places like that. Hospitals are coming, they take a little longer and the commercial real estate where they need is, these are some of our first verticals. And so are you scaling go-to-market? Are you not quite there yet? We are beginning to scale go-to-market. So the first phase was about founding and funding and product and getting that right. Now we are putting in place a go-to-market team. I've hired and bought someone very strong, long-time Cisco person from the Mario Lookup Ram, days and all, Fayaz, who also was with the, associated with the IBM cloud, I don't know if you have met him yet or not. So we are going to build a really good go-to-market team, start in the US, but very quickly there after go-to-Europe and all. We are ready to take this show on the road. Congratulations and that's great news and looking forward to hearing more. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story and also the opportunity, 5G. People need blanket coverage, manufacturing, critical operations, need to have this wireless. All right, well, we got a minute left. Put a plug in for the company after your startup. Love to see that. What are you guys looking for? How much funding you got? How many employees you have? Who are you looking to hire? What are you working on? Give it a little plug. Yeah, so check us out on highway9.com. Connect with me, Alvin, at highway9.com. But again, this mobile cloud, we feel like this is an even bigger phenomenon than the private clouds and hybrid clouds. This is going to impact everything everywhere. We're kind of skating to where the puck is headed. So if you have use cases which require this mobile devices, if you have problems with latency with your MEC projects, if you have manufacturing, logistics, warehouse, connectivity issues, if you have coverage issues on campus, call us and consult with us. We'll walk you through the journey. Everybody has that problem. Alvin, thank you so much. Founder and CEO of highway9, The Cube. We're here in the Barcelona studios. I'm John Roy DeValante. We'll talk to the big companies, the startups, the innovations happening here inside The Cube. We'll be right back with more coverage here from Barcelona after the short break.