 from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Console Connect Live 2015. Sponsored by Console. There's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone, live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. We are here at Console Connect 2015. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Jeff Furrier, Albergio CEO of IIX and Console Inc. Welcome back to theCUBE, congratulations, great event. Thank you, thank you, it's been awesome. So, you guys are holding this event, kind of we had Jay Adelson earlier on, revolution, you mentioned, and this is the first time in history, explain what's going on for the folks watching about the event and this new way to do connections for connectivity. I would definitely say it's an evolution of what's happened here with Enterprise Movement to the cloud, there's become a dependency on connectivity. And so with public internet, for example, people call it public internet, some people call it best efforts internet, and so forth. It's really, it's why we're all here. I mean, it's created new economies, it's created new opportunities, it's changed how we've communicated. It's also challenged business, and both in a good way and a bad way. And so as a result of that, as, you know, what's undeniable now is the Enterprise Movement to the cloud, we're using more cloud services, this is cloud infrastructure, this is SaaS applications, it's also important communication with business partners and so forth. And what we're realizing that as the internet is growing, as our concerns around security and performance and so forth. And so for the many use cases, it's great, but when something becomes business critical, for example, cloud services, there's been a movement around this sort of evolution of how one can connect. We've seen AWS with AWS Direct Connect, we've seen Microsoft with Azure Express Row, we've seen Google with Google Cloud Interconnect and others, the list isn't that extensive, and so there's a reason for that. But there's a movement to bring more visibility to alternatives, these companies acknowledging that hey, you can directly connect to these cloud services, but there's complexity with that. There's an expectation amongst enterprises now that are moving to the cloud that in many cases they need to become a network operator in order to be able to do all of the provisioning, all of that fun stuff. It's interesting, the whole consumerization trend hit IT first, now you're seeing the networkification where they have to become their own autonomous system as Jay was saying, so that is a big deal because again, the developers are writing these apps now and so you have a lot of APIs out there as a new model developing. For many it's a trivial thing. Some individuals, some experts have been doing this for years but as more enterprises are moving to the cloud for the first time and realizing that, hey, we now have to step outside of our organization to understand how things work and become familiar with things like BGP and ASN and all these acronyms, it just changes perspective. They start to realize that, well, the better mode of maybe connectivity is more complicated and maybe it's a little bit more expensive in terms of how it's evolved and so there's this purgatory that's happened with enterprises, right? We want to continue to see more cloud adoption and so we basically said, how could we help with cloud enablement and we focused on extracting complexity. Last year at the event, we kind of geeked out because we were, oh, interconnections, because it's really fascinating. We think about the big things that have gone on, Apple has an event showing the live streaming, MLB is spinning out its own separate company. So people in the media business know, the consumers know Netflix, they can see all this value. That's right. But one thing that's interesting about console this year that caught my attention was, it's not just the technology and what it can provide an enterprise, which is all great, people should check that out, but how hard it is on scale the people equation, right? So you mentioned, there's not a lot of people out that actually know how to do all this stuff. So talk about what you guys solved. I think that's fascinating, this whole social network. Sure, sure. Well, if we'd look at just sort of the history of how software has been created and used and so forth, it's among the things that it's done, it's extract complexity to make businesses more productivity to allow for more transactional activity and so on and so forth. This is done typically, it's occurred sort of higher up the stack. The analogy I referred to today was sort of FTP. Enterprises knew how to spell FTP, had an FTP client on their desktop or would have you and transferred files, but thanks to companies like Box, among many others now, collaboration, we don't need to know how to spell FTP anymore. They've helped support collaboration, they've extracted that complexity, but the enterprise in that case knew how to spell FTP and they still gravitated toward a simple UI and a better experience. With interconnection or direct connect, there's other acronyms comparable to that sort of FTP analogy. In this case, it's things like BGP and so on and so forth that in many cases, the enterprise have never heard of before or haven't heard of it in the sense of how we would need to be applied when directly connecting to somebody else. And so it's important stuff, but it lets you software to extract that complexity. I was thinking about who would buy you. Like when I look at companies, they're like, who would buy you guys? You guys are very valuable. And there's a lot of suspects out there that would be interested in what you guys are doing. One, VMware. It's talking to Sanjay Poonan last week and he was sharing some numbers on the huge success AirWatch has been for their acquisition. Business mobility, just little use cases are transforming functionality. And here with a direct connect, that kind of seems to be scaling that effort up, right? That's like, am I getting that right? No, absolutely. We've basically been focused on creating what we refer to as a non-discriminatory platform. Any organization can become part of the ecosystem. It's not like anything else that you see out there where it's sort of a one to many. There's one, let's say cloud company and then a static method of allowing others to connect to it. We focused on any organization really. It could be a cloud company, a SaaS company to be part of this platform. Connecting directly is social. The need for you and I to have a conversation and say, hey, you want to connect our businesses together. You may be busy. Maybe it's next week, we've got to find time. So we've looked at the fact that it's social and how social has evolved and how that can help, basically help revolutionize how organizations directly connect to one another. And so we applied that with those type of techniques and how we built a console as well. And so, obviously I'm biased, but I think it's safe to assume I believe what we've created here is very valuable. Was there a technical catalyst? Was it just kind of all these things kind of coming together? Was it critical mass of enterprise cloud application? You know, what got you here to kind of, with in retrospect, looking back, looks like a relatively simple concept, right? Make connecting easier, connect to people and the machines easier. But what was it that really got you here from people just doing direct connect or those other types of things? I appreciate the observation in that it seems simple, but that leads me to believe that we've done the right thing. But obviously it's not simple. It's very complicated in terms of what we've created. There's not necessarily one problem that needed to be solved. There was a few sort of solutions that needed to be created and have them work in unison. And so- There's some pain points out there, obvious pain points. Yeah, and so we basically had to build a team, right? Of individuals with expertise in various different areas, get that collaboration going internally and help our company evolve. These include individuals that have expertise, not just in a couple of years of experience, but in many cases- In Dr. Peering wrote the book. That's right, very well. Our CTO as well, Paul Gamp. It's funny when you hear sort of software defined networking, the two terms that sort of stand out are software and networking. And Paul has domain experience in both areas. Paul was part of the team that launched the first ISP in Japan. He then went to help go run APNIC, one of the five registries in the world. So if you want a public IP address or an AS number, if you're in the Asia-Pacific region, you'd go to APNIC, for example. And then from there, he started his 12-year career at Red Hat. He was Vice President of Worldwide Software Engineering. He knows open source. Yeah, absolutely. He's included a team to over 1,000 software developers worldwide. Today we have a lot of ex-Red Haters in our company among other organizations. And so, very proud of how we've been able to evolve. You've got a lot of wind at your back. What are the key mega trends? Obviously, again, last week, fresh off VMworld, we heard. And we've seen this at Oracle and other of the big whales out there. End-to-end systems are critical, certainly at the software department of cloud. But at the plumbing level, at the network level, I mean, this is serious business. End-to-end is your value. Is that one of the tailwinds you have? What other winds are at your back? DDoS, I was going to say security, share. There's definitely pain points that are not just staying static, but evolving and growing. From a technology perspective, we are big believers in open source. So, we've also helped support new open source projects like the Cloud Rather project, among others. And so, we believe in collaboration that's really helped us innovate and will help us continue to innovate. And so, as a result of that, that this working together with community has really helped our business get to where it is today. I took a look at the status of the company. Number of employees, funding round just did. What your goals are, growth? Sure, absolutely. So, we've had significant growth in our organizational headcount. We went from a year ago, two countries. We now, where we had offices, we're now five offices in four countries. We're about 100 people now in the company. So, significant growth in headcount will continue to grow there as well. Great growth in revenue, great growth in customer ecosystem. But, as they say, it's only the beginning. So, a lot more work ahead of us. And console, your expectations for this is what? Console Inc. We really, with console, the application, it's enterprise application that we've created that's focused around, among other things, fostering an ecosystem, much like other social platforms. So, our expectation is that with time, it will, for its relative market, target market, it will go viral. Well, Jay Adelson's looking at his chops. He's got his checkbook guys at VC now. He sees great innovation, very complimentary to what you guys are doing. So, I mean, he's pretty excited. Yeah, the other thing I think is interesting is it's always about market timing, right? Being too early is almost worse than being too late because then you look back later and you're like, ah, we had it there. Yeah, it's very sad. But it's interesting, we had Tim Nichols on earlier and he said that the demand is coming now from the customers, not necessarily the big customers that maybe already knew that they need to direct connect or their relationships or their traffic is so big that there was really no alternative, but he's really hearing kind of a groundswell of people looking for this type of service. So, it feels like your market timing is good. It's, I think so as well. I mean, we founded the company initially in 2011 and we've been witness, we've been focused but also witnessed to sort of an evolution of direct connect. And so, definitely believe that this is the right time we have under our belt many years of experience, not just by virtue of the company, but members of the team. And so, what we're seeing is that this is definitely the right time for us to be doing what we're doing. We have great customers, great partners, many of which are here today on stage with us being very supportive, believing in the same common, that same view that we have. And so, you obviously can't do this stuff on your own and we've been very fortunate to line the company with great individuals and other great organizations. Al, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight. We're psyched to be here. We pride ourselves on looking for the next innovation. We saw it at Big Data, started with Public Cloud. You're hitting on an area that is nuanced in the markets, not well known, not a lot of press are here, but it can explode, huge opportunity, certainly for companies of innovation. In DevOps, Opstead, whatever you want to call it. So, congratulations, final word for you. I'd like you to share for the folks watching live and then on demand. What's the show? Who couldn't make it here today? What is this show about? What's happening here? What's the vibe? There's a common view that more is needed for cloud enablement and we've been able to help unveil console today to help address what we believe is needed to help further cloud enablement, to helping businesses directly connect to business critical cloud applications, SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure, other partners, the ability to bypass the public internet regardless of where they're located. And it's really exciting for us. Thank you for being here as well. Appreciate it. And appreciate your time. Albert, your CEO of IAX and Consulting here at Consult Connect 2015, live in San Francisco. We'll be back after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back. Thank you.