 Hello, beautiful humans, and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, where we are combating the dry air of the desert and all giggling about the rasp of our voice at this stage. We're theCUBE, and we are live from AWS Reinvent. I am Savannah Peterson, joined by the fabulous Paul Gillen. Paul, how are you holding up? How are your feet doing? My feet are, I can't feel them anymore. We can't feel much after these weeks. Two miles just to get to the keynote this morning. Did you do your cross training to prepare for? Apparently not well enough, not well enough. Well, it's great to have you here, and I'm very excited for our next conversation. We've got Ramesh from Prasimo. Thank you. Welcome to the show. How's the show going for you? How's your voice? Oh my God, I woke up this morning and I could not hear my own voice. I'm like, this is not me. I think it's the dry air here. So if I cough, I apologize in advance, but no, the show has been great. It's been nonstop at the booth. It's wonderful to see all the customers in one place. So you don't have to schedule lots of meetings spread across three, four weeks. So you get like, yeah. So yesterday was like eight to six, nonstop. And it was awesome, right? Because you get to meet all these guys. The other important thing is the focus on the right layer. Like I loved the keynote from Adam. It was about applications, services, data. Nowhere in there was there like infrastructure. Like we are infrastructure, right? I actually love that because that's where the focus should be and that's what customers are caring about, right? So it's been great so far. Yeah, I'm so happy to hear your booth's packed. I know exactly what you mean. I mean, we're going to be talking about optimization. It's a theme, but we also optimize our time here on the show floor by getting to engage with our community. Brassimo has been around for three years just in case folks aren't familiar. Give us the pitch. Sure, we're in the cloud networking space solving for two problems. What happens within the cloud? As you bring up VPCs, VNets and workloads, how are they able to talk to each other, secure each other and how to use as access workloads? Those are the two problems that we solve for. It stemmed from really us seeing a complete diversion in what cloud wants versus what network really focuses on. Cloud has been always focused on applications and speed of operations. And network has always been about reliability, scalability and robust architecture. And we didn't really see these things come together. So that's when Brassimo was born. So what are some of the surprises newcomers to the cloud may encounter with cloud networking that was not a factor when they were fully on-prem? So the first thing is in the cloud, you can't deal with a workload the same way you did with in the data center. In the data center, you usually had pools of servers. They were all allocated some level of addressing. And it was not about the workload, it was more about the identity, IP addresses and so forth. In the cloud, those things have completely gotten demolished. You have to refer to S3 service as an S3 service. It's not an IP endpoint. IP endpoint comes and goes. And so you have to completely shift around that. Now this actually challenges almost 10 years, 20 years maybe of networking that we knew about. So that's why cloud networking is almost night and day difference compared to regular networking. And we're seeing that and that's what we're really helping customers with. What are some of the trends that you're seeing? Well, actually, let me ask you this question. Do you, is there an industry or vertical you work with specifically? I would imagine most people across the- Yeah, across. Yeah. Anybody that has workloads in the cloud. Yeah, right. That's- I mean, I can't imagine any companies that would have that. Exactly. What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I know we talk about time to value. We talk about cost optimization. Is that the top priority for your customers? Yeah, up until end of last year, a lot of the focus was about speed of operations. And so people would look at what are the type of workloads? How do I enable things? How do I empower my development team? So if I'm the cloud platform team responsible for connecting, securing, and making sure my applications can get deployed smooth and fast, that was the primary focus. Fast forward to this year, we started to see this a little bit at the beginning of the year. Now it's in full force. It's about cost control, right? It's about egress charges coming out of the cloud. Suddenly the cloud bill and every single line item on the cloud bill is in focus, right? And so that has a direct impact on what does this mean for networking. Cloud networking for many might not be familiar. It's about 14% of the cloud bill. And so anything that materially moves the needle on the cloud networking cost can actually have a big impact, right? And so we have seen the focus on the speed of operations is still there, but cloud cost control has become... So where are the excesses? I mean, it's a big part of the bill. Where do companies typically waste money in networking costs? So if you bring a person who understands networking and networking architecture really, really well, they'll come build a solid architecture, but they'll not focus on operations and automation. If you bring a 25-year-old, they will automate the heck out of it. They know Python, Dane, and they're out, and so they'll automate the heck out of it, but it will not be with a robust architecture, right? And so on one hand you end up wasting because you do things very suboptimally. It's a solid architecture. It's a really good design, but it's really bad for operations. On the other hand, you push off a button, you can get anything done, but underneath the covers, underneath the hood, if you look at it, it's a mess, right? And so you have more confidence than necessary. And so what customers want is really a best of both. You need solid architecture that has all the right principles, but also you need the automation so that you don't employ four or five people and a whole toolkit in order to make things work, right? And that's where we see most of the efficiencies come. You said you were super busy at your booth. Do customers understand that this is a problem now? So more so now than I would say last year. So last reinvent when we had a session. We had to educate a lot of people on, these are the requirements for cloud networking. Thanks to Gartner, thanks to many of the sessions you guys have been doing as well. The focus and the education for what cloud networking requires has started to come about. Now, this is where the saviness of the customer is important, right? Like there are customers in different stages of their journey. Those that have been operating in the cloud for three years plus know that they've caused that initial phase, right? Like you have basic hygiene. You have certain things. I'm moving from hundreds of VPCs and VNH to maybe about 1,000, right? And so at that time, the set of challenges I need to work with are very, very different, right? So now increasingly we are seeing at the booth the challenges are, hey, I know how to operate in the cloud, right? Like don't talk to me about that, right? But how do I get from 100 to 1,000? Because I have a gun to my head. My CIO has said I need to decommission my data centers in the next couple of years and I need to go all in on cloud. Help me with that, right? And so it's the, I wouldn't call it like massive scale. It's the scale from kind of the trivial to the next stage that's actually causing a lot of these problems to surface. It's that layer of transformation. It's when you've made the commitment and now we've got to catch everything up across the company locations and probably a variety of different silos doing different things. Exactly, yeah. Super complex. So how do folks get started with you? Yeah, so typically we start with like, even if the customer says, here's what my blueprint looks like. We say bring two regions. That's it. Two regions, a few workloads. We'll help you set up the connectivity, set up the secure access required, set up the foundational things on a certain level of automation, right? Let's get to that point because governance is different. The cloud privileges are different. So let's work through all of that, right? Usually this takes about a week or so. The actual proof of concept, proof of value can be done in a day but getting permissions and whatnot takes about a week, right? And once you show two regions, then it's actually game on, right? Then you go from 10 VPCs to 100 to 1000 and it's just like one thing after another. So that's usually how we see customers get started. We have a full stack that covers kind of what does this mean for the network, to application services, to kind of layer seven and so forth. We tell the customer, as much as we want you to focus on the entire stack let's start with one, right? Let's start baby steps, let's start with one because for many cloud itself is, I wouldn't say new, but they are in a region that's not comfortable, right? So you don't want to throw too much at them. So we help them kind of progressively move towards different types of one. Yeah. And you have a multi-cloud story as well. That's correct. So when companies begin to cross clouds with workloads, move them between clouds, what kinds of issues emerge then? Yeah, so there are two parts to this, right? There is the AWS and data center. And then there is the AWS plus other clouds, two different set of problems actually. The AWS plus connectivity back into my data center almost every single enterprise. We deal with kind of the global 2000, every single one of them has that, right? And so we kind of we go through a series of steps, come up with an architecture deploy a solution. After that it's, hey I have BigQuery in Google that needs to talk back to an S3 bucket out here. No networking solution can help you with that. Like you need like cloud native principles in order to come into the picture. So increasingly we are seeing requests for, hey I have a distributed workload. It's not that one single application is spread across multiple clouds, but I have these islands of workloads that all need to talk to each other. And what I don't want to do is actually build highways that actually connect all these things together because that's a waste of time. I actually want to make sure that only these applications that care about the talking to each other are allowed to talk to each other. So that's kind of one foundational thing that we see. A few others are around compliance and governance. So we say, hey if I'm a retailer, I need to have some workloads in Azure, some in the GCP and so forth. So it depends on kind of the industry compliance regulatory requirements and so forth. So many different needs for so many different types of companies, but also creating that efficiency is so great. And especially that time to value tune, cost reduction, doing a lot of great things for your customers. There's a note on my run sheet here that you've seen some success with Topgolf. And I suspect we have some golfers in the audience. John even used to be a caddy. We had a caddy segment with someone who was a pro caddy, Drew, and we were at KubeCon. Tell us about that story. So it was a really wild idea. We said, okay people are going to be walking around 22,000 steps, right? And so, and they're going to be talking to people, listening to sessions. So we said, let's, what do most others do? You set up some time in a restaurant, you come, you have a social time and what not. We said, let's give people something different. So we reserved the Topgolf here and we opened it up. We initially paid for a certain number of things. It's actually gone three X of that right now. So we had in the, hey Topgolf, can you give us like the entire thing? I think people just want to go do something different. And of course, the topic is important, but equally important is like, I just want to have a good time, right? And hit a few, hit a few, and then. It doesn't have to relate back to network. Yeah, exactly, right? And so. Well, it's all about building community. Exactly. And especially right now, we all, we're stronger together. We're entering a unique time. We're coming out of a unique time. Exactly. And no, I think that's great. And we actually do a swag segment here on the Kube. Differentiating on the show floor. I mean, it's clear because of how thoughtful you are. There's a reason that your booth is so busy. That's right. So what's next? What can you give us a little sneak preview? What's going on? Yeah, so I'm sensitive and sympathetic to all the macroeconomic conditions that are happening, but there's been, we have not skipped a beat. So our business is growing really well, thanks to all the things that are happening in the cloud. Increasingly, folks are looking at, how do I move in mass into the cloud? And so a few themes have come about as a result. One, certainly around cost control. How do I make, how do we make sure that we help our customers in that journey, right? So we have a few things around those lines. Modernization, especially after you go through the first few workloads, the next few that come about are invariably modern workloads. And modern workloads is this sensitive thing where I think the ultra savvy developers know what to do, but the infrastructure guys don't know what to do in order to serve, right? And so we have actually developed a set of capabilities to help with that kind of modernization, right? Because it's not enough if your apps are modernized, your infrastructure that serves the apps also need to be modernized. And so those are the things. And certainly getting our customers to less than us, we want to get our customers to talk. And so you'll see quite a bit of that as well. I want to ask you about a statement that was in the notes that we were reading running up to this interview. Zero Trust Network Access is the next solution that will be disrupted. What do you mean by that? So when we started the company about three years ago, Zero Trust Network Access was there. It was about maybe two, three years old at that time. And so we said, it needs to be done differently in the cloud. Why? Because you're a user. You're trying to access an application in the cloud. Do you care what's in the middle? You really don't. You just want to be able to open up your laptop, go to www.something.com and you should be able to access, right? But that's not how the experience is today. There's invariably something that comes, a middle-mile solution that comes in the middle, right? And then the guy needs to operationalize all of that. And that passes on to you. You need to launch an agent on your thing, connect into something. You just brings a lot of complexity, right? So we looked at that problem and we said, cloud has done really, really, a few things really, really well, right? It's literally at your doorstep. Cloud presence is literally at your doorstep. So as you open up your browser, connect from your home, I don't need anything in the middle. I am jumping straight into the cloud. And so when you do that, then you actually have the luxury of bringing a few capabilities to the entry point of the cloud so that security can be done better, posture control can be done better, and so on and so forth, right? So we developed those capabilities almost three years ago. We have quite a few large enterprises that have deployed this and we fundamentally believe on building on top of the hyperscaler. Because billions of, tens of billions of dollars go into the investment here and we want to be building a layer of value on top, right? And so we've been working closely with our AWS buddies here and actually built capabilities so that the infrastructure presence, the massive reach, and also the underlying capabilities for Zero Trust have provided, but what the customer gains in terms of value is through our platform, right? And so we'll see a whole lot more innovation along these lines. Probably bad news for the middle-mile providers who sit in the middle because AWS is literally at your doorstep, so you have to rethink your strategy. It's going to be a lot of agility. Yes, absolutely. In a very different context than we normally use it in Nerdland. No, I think that's great. So we have an exciting time for you as a company. We have a new challenge here at Reinvent on theCUBE. I know you're a venerable alumni. You have been on theCUBE multiple times with multiple companies, which is very impressive, which says a lot about you, although given how fun this interview's been, I'm not surprised. Give us your 30-second Instagram reel highlight soundbite on the biggest or most important theme or takeaway from this year's show. From this show, yeah. So if you look across the keynotes in all the sessions, the focus is on data, services, and the applications. So the biggest takeaway I would offer anybody is focus on that first, because that's where the outcome needs to shine. The rest of the stuff is a means to an end. I am an infrastructure guy through and through. I have been for the last 20 years. It hurts me to say infrastructure is a means to an end, but it is, right? Let the people dealing with the infrastructure, deal with the infrastructure. If you are a customer or a client of the service, focus on the outcome, focus on the apps, focus on the services, focus on the data. That would be the biggest takeaway. I appreciate your transparency. Yeah, no, exactly. Where it's wisdom, I'm very honest, where it's wisdom. Really great to talk to you about intelligent infrastructure. Thank you so much for being on the show. Pleasure, thank you. It's been awesome. Paul, it's always a pleasure. Thank you all for tuning in today, here live from the show floor at AWS Reinvent in a beautiful sin city in the high desert and the high-end dry desert. With Paul Gillan, my name is Savannah Peterson, and you're watching theCube, the leader in high-tech coverage.