 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special CUBE conversation here in SiliconANGLE Media's Palo Alto studio. I'm happy to bring back to the program Haseeb Badani, who last time I talked to Haseeb, he worked at a number of interesting startups, been a chief product officer, had many various roles. And today, he's a founder and CEO. So we always love to have back CUBE alums, especially doing interesting things, getting out with that entrepreneurial spirit. So Haseeb, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. The first time you and I met, the stage was not as nice as this. That was many, many, many years ago. Yeah, you know, we've been growing up a bit, just like the ecosystems around us. And so you and I talked about things like replication, what's changing with data and storage and everything else in various roles. So Rafa systems, tell us a little bit, what was the inspiration? Tell us a little bit about the founding team, the why of the company first. Sure. So as you know, right before Rafa systems, I started a company called SOHA. SOHA was acquired by Akamai 18 months ago. You know, I think we all, we learn by feeling. So there was one specific thing we did very poorly at SOHA, which was how we ran operations, how we thought about getting close to our users and so on, that once we left Akamai, so my co-founder from SOHA and I are doing this company again together, he was our VP Fincher in there, he's our VP Fincher in here. When we left Akamai after our send there, we spent time thinking about what kind of applications, when you kind of think in terms of an application stack, some microservices in an application stack are always going to need to be as close to the endpoint as possible, right? We were trying to figure out who has a problem and how do they solve it. So here's what we found. Many, many applications have this problem. Nobody knows how to solve it well, right? I mean, if you think Siri, there's an edge that Apple's running for that. If you think eBay, there's transactions happening in region and so on, or when you think in IoT, there are edges being created in the IoT world, and we wanted to kind of come up with a framework or a platform to solve these problems well for all these different application developers. So we came up with a concept that we call the programmable edge. The idea is that we want to help our customers run certain microservices, the ones that are latency sensitive, as close to their endpoints as possible, an endpoint could be a car, it could be a phone, it could be a sensor. It doesn't matter what it is, but we want to help them get their applications out as quickly as possible. Yeah, before we get into some of the technology, so RAFE systems, SOHA systems, where do the names for these come from? So, SOHA is my daughter's name. RAFE is my son's name. We have two kids. I don't know what I'm going to do after this. I need a job. I don't know what I'm going to do after this company. But actually, our VP marketing at SOHA, he was the one who wanted to kind of use his name. So when we started the previous company, I called it bubble wrap, because I thought we were wrapping apps in a bubble. I thought that was really cool. Everybody hated it. Yeah, there's too many puns on popping the bubble or things like that. It would be challenging. I thought it was, I still think it's awesome, but nobody liked it. So he was looking for a name and we had like, we had hired a new kind of agency that were ready to kind of roll out a new website. We didn't have a name. So in like a four-hour window, we had to come up with something. It says, that's a short enough name and looks like you own the domain anyway. Let's just use that. And of course, my kids love it. And then once we started the second company, it had to be named after my son. I don't know. Your daughter wasn't a little upset that, you know, sold off the company and now have nothing to do with it? It was a pretty healthy outcome. So I think she's fine. Excellent. So talking about, you know, microservices applications around the globe, I was at the AWS summit recently and you're right. It's a different, very different conversation than say CDNs in the past. But it's, you know, how many instances do I have? How do I manage that? What's their concern? You know, networking's always been one of those underlying challenges. I mean, think back to the failed XSPs in the 90s and when cloud started 10 plus years ago, it was like, oh, are we going to be able to handle that today? Think back to like Citrix and their, you know, Netscalar product is, you know, one of those secret sauce things in there that those of us in the networking space really understand it, but most people, oh, SaaS is going to be great and things will just work anywhere on any device and anywhere, but there's some real challenges there. So, you know, what's that kind of big gap in the market? And, you know, are there other companies that are trying to, you know, help solve this? So I used to work at Netscalar long time ago. I don't know if you brought it up because of that, but yeah, I think it's an incredibly amazing product that became the foundation of many things. So I think two things are happening in our industry that allow companies like ours to exist, from at least from an application's perspective. One is containers, the fact that we are now able to package things, you know, not as big, fat VMs, but it's smaller, essentially process level things. And then microservices, the fact that we have this notion of loose coupling between services, right, and you can have certain APIs that expose things to each other. And if you just kind of, at least thematically, think about it, if there's a loose coupling, it can extend them out so long as I get more value out of doing so. And that fundamentally is what we think is an interesting thing happening out there. The fact that there are loose couplings, the fact that applications are no longer monolithic, allows us to make better decisions about what needs to run where, right? The challenge is how do you make that happen? Right, and the example I always share with people is let's imagine for a second that you have access to 100,000 regions all around the world. You have edges everywhere, 100,000 locations where you can run your code. What do you do next? How do you decide which ones you need? Do you need 5,000? Do you need 80,000? That needs to be solved by the platform. We are at a point now, particularly when it comes to locations, that these are no longer decisions that an ops team can make, right? That has to be driven by the platform. And the platform that we are envisioning is going to help our customers basically, in terms of where the code goes, how they think about performance, et cetera. These are things that will be expressed as a policy to our platform and we help them determine what the location should be and so on. All right, so I think many of us lost too many hours fighting in the industry of what was cloud, what wasn't cloud, various definitions, is those ontological discussions. Academically, they make sense. Heck, when I talk to customers today, it's not like, well, I'm figuring them out, my public cloud strategy or this and that. They have a cloud strategy because there's various pieces in interconnect. Edge is one of those, I haven't heard that people don't like the term, but if I'll talk to seven different companies, Edge means a very different thing to all of them. You and I reconnected actually when we'd both written similar articles that said, well, Edge does not kill the public cloud. Peter Levine wrote a very interesting piece with that eye-catching title that was like, well, the Edge is going to have trillions of devices and there'll be more data at the Edge than anywhere else. And it's like, okay, yes, yes, yes, but that does not mean that public cloud evaporates tomorrow. Nice try Amazon, good luck on your next business. So, what, maybe give us a little bit your definition of Edge, but more importantly, who are the type of customers that you're talking to and what is the kind of the opportunity and challenges of that Edge environment? Yeah, so let's talk about what Edge means. I think we both agree that the word Edge is a misnomer, it depends. Look, there are many kinds of Edges, if you will. A car for Tesla, that's an Edge, because they're running compute jobs on the car and I use the Fritz device Edge to describe that thing. The car is a device Edge. You're also going to have the car talking to things out there somewhere. So if two cars are interacting with each other, you don't want that interaction or the rendezvous point for that interaction being very, very far away. You want to be somewhere close by. So I call that the infrastructure Edge. Now infrastructure Edge, and since you asked, I'm going to go down that rabbit hole. You could be running at the edge of the internet. So think Equinex or anybody who's got like massive peering presence and so on. So that's the internet Edge, as far as infrastructure is concerned. But if you talk to an AT&T, because you said, depending on who you talk to, their idea is different. In AT&T's mind or Verizon's mind, maybe the base station is the Edge. So I call that the wireless Edge. Again, infrastructure, right? So at a very high level, there's the device Edge, there's the infrastructure Edge, and then there's a cloud. Applications will span all of these things. It's not one or the other. That doesn't make any sense, right? Any application will have workloads that are best run in Amazon or, you know, of course now I think we use Amazon like Tivo, Amazon means public cloud. But Equinex, right? So some things will run in the core, and some things will run in the middle, and then some things will run at the Edge. Now in this kind of discussion, I didn't describe another kind of Edge, which is the IoT Edge, right? So within a factory or some, you know, some gas kind of location or, you know, some oil and gas facility out there where maybe you don't even have good connectivity back to the internet, right? They're going to probably have an Edge on-prem at the factory Edge. That too is a necessity, right? So you have lots of data being generated, they're going to prune it in that location. So we should kind of maybe stop thinking in terms of an Edge. It just depending on the application that you're targeting, that application's sub-components may need to run at different places. But that makes it so much harder. Equinex figured out how to run things in a single region in Amazon or two, right? People have trouble running across availability zones in Amazon. Now we're saying, hey, you're going to have four Edges or five Edges, and you're going to have 100 locations. How is this going to work? Right? And that is the challenge. And that's, of course, the opportunity as well, because, you know, there are applications out there, I talked about the car use case, which seems to be a real use case for many car companies, particularly the ones who are going autonomous with their fleets, right? They have this challenge. Lots of data being generated, and they need to process it as quickly as possible because there's lots of noise on the wire. This data problem, data's gravity, you want to, instead of moving data to a location where there's compute, you want to move compute to as close to the data as possible. That's kind of the trend I look for when we're looking for customers. Who has lots of data slash traffic being generated at the Edge? That could be a sensor company, congruent number of kind of IoT companies that are pushing data up. And it turns out that, you know, it's a lot of data or they have compliance challenges, they don't have PII come out of a region. So these are some of the use cases we've been looking at. But now these use cases are kind of new use cases. Even in older applications, there are needs that can be fulfilled with an Edge. And here's an example I tend to use to describe the problem, not that this is a specific use case. When I talk to a VC, when I'm trying to explain to them why an Edge matters, at least thematically, I ask the question, if you go to an e-commerce site, how much time do you spend buying versus browsing? What is your answer? Right, buying is a very small piece of it, but it's the most important part. 9% of the time is spent looking at read-only stuff, right? Why do you need to go back to the core if you're not buying? What if the inventory could be pushed to the Edge and you can just interact and look at the inventory and when you make a purchase decision, that goes to the core. That's what's possible with the Edge. In fact, I believe that some number of years down the line, that's how all applications are going to behave. The things that are read-only, state management, state validation, cookie validation, for example, for authentication, these are things that are going to happen at the edge of the internet or wherever the edge happens to be. And then actual purchase decisions or state change decisions will happen in the core. So, C, explain to us kind of where in the stack your solution fits. You mentioned everything from kind of the hyperscale clouds to equinex out to devices and cars and the like. So, where's your layer, where's your secret sauce? Sure, so we expect to sit at the internet edge or once the wireless edge is a real thing, 5G becomes kind of out there. We expect to sit somewhere there, somewhere between the internet edge. So the way we kind of think about this is there are aggregation points on the internet in the network where you have need to put compute so you can make decisions, aggregate decisions across multiple devices. That's where we are building our company. In terms of the stack, we are essentially helping our customers run their compute. So, think of us as a platform where customers can bring their code if you will. Because end of the day edge computing, yes it's about traffic and data but you just need to run compute somewhere. So we are helping our customers run that compute at the internet edge or the wireless edge. So, are your customers some of the Telcos, MSPs, cloud providers and the enterprise or how does that relationship work? So the ideal customers for us are SaaS companies who are running applications on the internet that generate money. They care about performance, right? And they will pay money if we can cut their performance by whatever factor it happens to be. Providers, service providers in our mind are partners for us. So we're engaged actually with the number of providers out there who are trying to figure out how to basically monetize their existing infrastructure investments better. And edge is a new concept that has been introduced to them and they, as you know, a lot of providers already have edge strategies and we're trying to getting involved with them to see how we can bring more SaaS companies to engage with service providers, which is a really hard thing today. It sounds like you solved problem for some Fortune 1000 customers too though. Is it so, did they get involved also? Yes, so look, the best way to build a startup is you come up with the thesis and very quickly go find four or five people who absolutely believe in the same thing and they work with you. So we've been fortunate enough to find a few folks who kind of say, look, this is a problem we've been thinking about for a while. Let's partner together to build a better solution. That's been going really well. Great, so just the company itself, I believe you just launched it a few months ago, so you know, where's the product? You know, what's the state of the funding? How many people do you have? How many customers? So we raised a seed round in November. Seed rounds have gotten larger as well these days. They're like the A's from 10 years ago. We are at a point now where we are demonstrating our platform to our early customers and by early summer we expect to have people on the platform. So things are moving fast, but I think this problem is becoming more and more clear to many people. Sometimes people don't call it edge computing. People have all kinds of phrases for it, but when it comes to helping customers get better performance out of their existing stacks, that is a very promising concept to many people running applications on the internet. So we're approaching it from that perspective. Edge happens to be the VAV solve the problem, so I guess we're an edge computing company, but at the end of the day we're trying to make applications run faster on the internet. Okay, last thing, give us a viewpoint kind of the next year or two out. What do you expect to see in this space and how should we be maturing success for your food firm? Sure, things always take longer than we think they will. And I never want to forget that lesson I learned many years ago. I think, look, it's still early days for edge computing. I think a lot of companies who have been bruised by the problem in that they've tried to build out pops or tried to get their logic as close to their end points as possible are going to be adopting it sooner than others. I think in terms of kind of broader option where any developer is T-zero thinking of core plus edge, that's a fiber out thing. And we should, I mean, that's just out there somewhere. But there's enough companies out there, there's enough new use cases out there in the next couple of years that allow a company like ours to exist. In fact, I am quite confident that there are probably five other smart people, smarter than me, doing this already. This is a real problem, it needs to be solved. All right, well, Hasid Badani, it's great to catch up. Thank you so much for helping us, you know, interact with our community, understand, you know, where these emerging trends and edge and everything that happens. You know, distributed architectures absolutely are, you know, biggest challenges of our time. And look forward to seeing where you and your customers go in the future. Absolutely, thank you so much, Joe. Appreciate your time. All right, and thank you for joining us. Of course, check out thecube.net for all of the videos. Check out wikibond.com where we're absolutely digging in deep to how edge is impacting architectures. Peter Burris, David Floyer, and the team, you know, digging in deep to understand that more and always love your feedback. So feel free to give us any comments back. I'm Stu Minnan, and thank you for watching theCUBE.