 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for Amazon re-invent. This is SiliconANGLES, the CUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier with Al Virgio, founder and chief strategy officer of Console Inc. formerly the founding CEO, fast-growing startup, doing pretty amazing things in an area that was once nuanced, now mainstream, as pointed out by James Hamilton on Tuesday night, laying out the secret sauce of Amazon success. Now that Amazon success will soon be available for customers through Console. I'm looking forward to this conversation, Al. Great to see you. Thanks for having me, John. So first of all, you guys had great success, had good funding. What's the funding traction now? What was the last round of funding you did? Yeah, it was last year with, led by Formation 8, NEA, among other tech visionaries as well. We're very fortunate to have their support and allow us to continue, accelerate our execution and growth strategy. We won't really the number, but big numbers. My question to you is, watching James Hamilton Tuesday night, lay out Amazon's secret sauce from Silicon, making their own Silicon, to really owning the route of the packet. He said something on his presentation Tuesday night, the key to success for Amazon internal to their internal cloud operation is to not let the packets touch, let anyone touch the packets, meaning that means they can control the packet end to end. Your business model is to do that for customers. Exactly. Validates your entire thesis as a founder. So that must make you feel good. So what does that mean? And how do you go? And what do you guys do specifically to provide that kind of benefit to customers? So, exactly how Hamilton had articulated it is, is exactly how we feel all enterprises should be thinking. Happy birthday, Mr. Furrier. Happy birthday, John. 25 dollar chips, it should be hundreds. Come on. Birthday. Okay, I'm now embarrassed on the cube. Is that edible? What the hell is this? Don't burn your speechless. Hey, Mary, she's not going to butter me up to get good articles for Amazon. Well, thanks to Mary Camarata, it's not going to sway my critical analysis of Andy Jassy when he comes on the cube. So, thanks, Mary. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it. All right, now, where were we? I'm sorry, you know, as I was saying. You were right on this, were you? Yeah. Were you in on this? No, well, yeah, they gave me the heads up. What a surprise. I really appreciate guys. Thanks so much, everyone out there and down the team. 51 years old, pretty old. Seen a lot in my day. Thanks for everything. Well, we hope you enjoy the cake, John. Thanks, Al, appreciate it. Bill, you guys are crazy. You guys are crazy. Hope that's 60. How about I make it to 61 if I don't drop dead doing a cube interview someday? Well, back to Amazon, my 51st birthday. Amazon's 10 years old, right? So, and they're young. Their birthday was 10 years this year. I talked to Andy Jassy about the next 10 years and it's all about customer satisfaction, customer success, iterating fast. It's always hard to do that, the network layer. But again, back to James Hamilton, they are optimizing down at a level. This is what you guys do. You guys are our network geeks. You guys saw a problem, Bill Norton was on earlier. You guys know how to do packets. That's right. What's the fundamental problem that you're solving? What are customers suffering through? Well, I mean, first and foremost, Amazon being on the forefront of innovation and really acknowledging the fact and putting out their key data points for enterprises to really take a chapter out of that playbook, and how they need to be thinking, how they need to be architecting and leveraging solutions like console, essentially. We are what Amazon, in effect, is doing internally. We provide that solution for an enterprise so that they can have. I say it through a use case. So I'm a customer, I'm an enterprise. I'm using the backbone to switch through the internet. I've got web services like box.com, Dropbox. Are you saying that you can provide an end-to-end situation where no one touches that packet? That's right. It doesn't touch the public internet. It's completely private, in effect, bypassing the public internet and directly connecting you to business-critical SaaS applications called infrastructure provider like AWS. And it's direct. You have control in effect of a path or direction of your data, and it's only you in that application on that highway. And it's, again, not accessible via the public internet. So it's providing a much higher level of privacy, security, and ultimately performance. So who's using you guys? What customers do you have? There's some that I could speak of. There's airlines that we have where we touch various different verticals. It's not one vertical, not one type of enterprise. This is some, there's a lot of data out there in terms of the average enterprise today using about 25 SaaS applications. I mean, it's SaaS, cloud is touching everybody today. So the customers you can't name, can you talk about the industry, how big they are? I mean, what are some of the use cases? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, direct connect to AWS, very classic use case. Needing that consistent throughput, that reliable connection that you typically can't come to expect on a consistent basis with the public internet. We're also seeing the rise of DDoS attacks and all of these things that are happening with public internet. Is IoT a big market for you guys? Is IoT certainly might be something? How do you do a direct connect for IoT? Do you do it through Amazon? How does a customer deal with an IoT problem? Well, to the extent that an enterprise wants to avoid certain IoT type issues, again, a console provides a solution for end to end private connectivity. And security obviously is top of mind for many CIOs. And with what we provide, it provides the ability to connect to this global ecosystem of their business critical partners. And the best part is that we've made it with a few clicks of a button. So what's the strategy? The chief strategy officer now, which is great by the way, loved one founder stay in the helm for the company, might not do the day to day CEOing, but most part it's turbulent waters for most people. Cloud is shifting. Now you have an advantage. The world is going where you are, so that's cool. But what's next? Is it a product innovation? Is it customer road? What's the plan? Well, first and foremost, it's about ecosystem. You know, we continue to grow our ecosystem of cloud infrastructure, SaaS providers that enterprises can directly connect to VR platform. You know, that first and foremost is core to our beliefs, our initial vision. And we today have one of the largest cloud-centric ecosystems out there. So I got to ask you a question to get a little geeky on you. I saw Bill Norton at an event. We did the cube at Bill Norton on your team, Guru, Dr. Peer, and he's called. We're in a code. Walk on around the show floor. DrPeering.com, I think it's the website. But he's a guru in pack. He understands routes, understands all these issues. He was telling me that the routes between clouds and inter-clouding are not all created equal. And so what you see and what you get are two different things. Does that play into any kind of fear of customers? How do you guys solve that problem? Do you solve it? Or is that an industry evolutionary issue? So on average, between the point of origination of data and destination of data, there's over four organizations in this public path. And you could really think of it as being in this crowded bus, this shared-fade vehicle, that your packets are bundled together with other organizations, you know? Not necessarily taking a direct path. So there's things that happen on a daily basis with public internet that maybe to the naked eye is unbeknownst to some. But when you start to analyze this data and you see the inconsistencies that have happened to that packet flow or lack thereof in some cases, and then compare it to being directly connected, you know, in many cases, the results are like night and day. So we are now done acuping the cake on the table before, so I'm kind of distracted. I'm thinking about, I'm hungry. Back to the customers. I mean, are you early adopter mode right now, or is this table stakes for security? I mean, it would seem to me that if I'm in enterprise, I need to do this right now. Is there an alternative? Are you guys the only game in town? So we definitely had a first mover advantage. You know, if we rewind the clock past over the past few years and we've taken advantage of that, you know, we took a phased approach. We wanted to seed our platform with key cloud, SaaS providers and so forth. Now it's all about our enterprise go to market. And the timing for that is, you know, from our point of view is perfect. It's well timed. I mean, this event itself is a testament to the growth we're seeing in cloud. I mean, last year was around 19,000, about 32,000 people attending this year. I mean, it's growing exponentially. And we today have built out our solution. It's global. It's over 170 global points of presence. Our solution's available across North America, Europe in the Amir region and now the Asia Pacific region. So we've really gotten it to a point where it's a global solution, you know, for enterprises. It's not- How easy it is to use. I mean, I'm an enterprise. To me, my mind is like, I don't have a mental model around it, but it seems super complex to implement. If I'm used to, you know, provisioning a circuit, that would take a shit load of long time to do, I mean, but how do you guys work? So if you look at what we call the one-dotto method, the manual method to do all of, to otherwise do what we do, it is really complex. Thanks, but however, you know, all of the hard work that our engineering teams have done and so forth, it's made it seem really simple. Customers log into our application, identify the organizations that they want to connect to, and click a button. It's kind of like a social experience if you're on LinkedIn, for example, and wanting to connect to another organization. You go on or individual. Are you finding a social network dynamic is kicking in? You know, connecting to another organization in effect has always been social. I can't just connect to you. Even if I wanted to do it the old fashioned way. And we took a two-dotto approach to that. We built additional functionality in our application so that collaboration can happen right within our platform. And so it still sucks though. It is a social network. There's trust involved. Yeah, it's plumbing. Absolutely. So I got to ask you a question. Is the internet turning plumbers into machinists? I mean, with the cloud, it's almost getting to the point where you're just pushing buttons. Is that where it's going to end up going? Less plumbers, more machinists? Well, easy analogy. You know, in terms of our focus as an organization, it is about making it as simple as possible for the enterprise, our enterprise customers. And we'll continue to invest in innovation to bring forth new products, new features so that they could spend time doing other things that are important to their business and not have to deal with the racking and stacking of network gear at a global scale. Our platform takes care of all of that. And you guys are funded by NEA. I was at their party last night. Pete Soncini was here, some of the other partners, and they're a tier one investor. I mean, those guys are really solid. They're one of the best, if not the best in there. What do they think about this? Are they like, double down, Al keep running hard? What do the investors think? We're very fortunate to have NEA as an investor. They were there from our A round, really saw and embraced the vision very early on and have been incredibly supportive. And with that, having that validation for us at such an early stage, it's really helped us get to where we are today. Yeah, and just to put a plug out for NEA, they're one of the best VCs. They stick by their entrepreneurs and most recently had a loss. One of their partners died suddenly. Harry Weller, I want to wish everyone at NEA an accessory to NEA. Our condolences on theCUBE, tragic death of a great partner, a great entrepreneur friend. So that's been kind of a bummer there. But great firm, if you're an entrepreneur or NEA, they stick with their founders and make things happen. So you got a great investor. Okay, what's next? Amazon is kicking ass and taking names, okay? Your thoughts on the show, observation besides the fact that it's 32,000 people, center of the universe. What's your take of Amazon's world, place in the world order right now? You know, it's hard to imagine a scenario where someone else could catch up. They are innovating, the product portfolio that they have here, it's just phenomenal. And I'm sure we'll continue to see more of the same come out of Amazon. Well, we're psyched to be four years with Amazon. We were following them before they were huge. Now they're big and now it's on a bandwagon, but legit reasons. The service is to lower the cost and architecture, James Hamilton is really onto something. And again, I congratulations to you guys at console because he is validating at that scale what you guys have been doing. And I know as an entrepreneur, you've probably had your moments where some people just don't get the vision. Now it's out there. Yeah, early days are concerned, are you too early? But we're very fortunate as an organization to be well-timed. Well, you guys got a great team. Congratulations, Albert, you're a great entrepreneur. Great venture. Turns out that he went to where the puck is coming. He's right there. Hopefully you can skate with the puck with the Amazons of the World. Congratulations. Thank you, John. Console Inc. Check it out. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Celebrate my 51st birthday in the cake. Thanks to the team. Guys, I'm speechless. Never speechless, but I'm humble. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mary. That's a wrap.